A Film Canon

 

 

This is effectively a chamber western, detailing one night in a valley walled by steep cliffs, scrub and a dilapidated house. As such, it refrains from the heroics typical of the genre, replacing them with an interrogation of the revenge ethic, and a reduction of masculine honour to peer pressure; or, rather, to the attempt to enforce a fascist homogeneity on an ideologically heterogeneous townscape, here encapsulated in the posse deputised into the lynch mob around which the narrative hangs. Not only does this represent the entire spectrum of jurisprudential positions, from lynchers to legalists, but it provides a social corollary, extending from a fanatic, renegade Confederate general, to a 'mulatto' reverend. In this way, the drama becomes one of democracy, putting protagonist Gil Carter (Henry Fonda) in an unusual position, insofar as his 'outsider' status threatens to become a contradiction of American values, rather than a poetic reinforcement of them. Hence the final compromise between individualism and integration, as he rides off into a sunset that merely leads towards a wife and children to whom he has pledged his responsibility, as well as his delivery of - and identification with - a letter written by one of the posse victims, whose formal, logical, pragmatic tone ensures that, unlike most other instances of the genre, the film comes down firmly in favour of the letter, rather than the spirit, of the law.