That's the title of a laughably poor Kirk Douglass-Robert Mitchum vehicle we watched last night. Based on a Pulitzer-winning novel, it's the movie that introduced Sally Fields and tells the story of a wagon-train heading from Independence, MO to Oregon.
Over-written and under-acted (Mitchum is utterly miscast as a tough old scout. He seems more like a member of the Rat Pack than Jim Bridger --you keep expecting a chorus girl to fetch him another scotch), I'll comment on it nonetheless. As my high school English teacher, Sr. Sharon Kosich, used to say, "My Precious Punks, even if it's what not to do, you can always learn something from a book." Or a movie.
I have to pass along one refreshingly great line: goading the reluctant Mitchum character (a widower) into leading his wagon train, Douglas sneers:
Why you poor, miserable, female-haunted man. It's hard to believe that your grief has so corrupted your guts.
Pretty much the antithesis of our entire cultural aesthetic today, isn't it?
Even as I found myself not enjoying the movie, I was fascinated by its underlying Biblical structure. Not that it's a religious film at all; on the contrary, released in 1967, you can see from the sexual content (no nudity but "mature" themes) that the movie is striving to be "edgy." Nevertheless, the whole structure of the film is built on Israel's quest for the Promised Land. Douglas, a kind of anti-Moses, begins the quest by dreaming of founding a New Jerusalem in the Oregon Territory. After a treacherous river-crossing and days of hard-driving, the people stop to celebrate a new birth, and the men go up to the nearby stone mountain and chisel their sweethearts' names in the rock (just as the Israelites partied while Moses was up on the mountain receiving the 10 Commandments carved in stone). And "Moses" dies just before his people enter the promised land. There are more rough parallels.
It's interesting to reflect how recently the Bible was considered must-reading if you wanted to be considered literate, and how often the structure --if not the actual story-- of our novels and films was based on something Biblical. In fact, it strikes me that the American story --until relatively recently--has always been the tale of what Lincoln called an almost-chosen people coming to find freedom in first the New World, then a new country, then The West.
Now our underlying myth has changed; instead of noble sons of Adam taking dominion over a garden or a chosen people entering the promised land and civilizing it, our stories are reversed: Cain and his descendents come to spread small pox and hypocrisy over paradise, and we are left to feel heartsick or cynical about the spread of "civilization" or to hope for its defeat.
