These Thousand Hills (Richard Fleischer, 1958)

It is not really my favorite western, but it is certainly one of the ten I prefer; it is also the best film ever made by a persistently underrated director that I value more highly each day, without denying that his long career is somewhat uneven.

I will not say that it is a masterpiece, but I’m quite sure of thinking that for me it can be no other thing: since the first time I saw it, a very long time ago (in 1962, to be precise), until this day, after watching it fourteen times or so, it has always aroused in me a lasting enthusiasm, the same mixed and conflicting emotions, the same feeling of surprising freshness, ever renewed pleasure and an intense admiration, free of the influences of fame and prestige.

As a sample of the western genre it is simply exemplary. It provides wide spaces; a swiftly-growing community that becomes bourgeois and puritanical as it progresses in economic wealth and the civilization of “law and order” conquers the frontier plains; outlaws, landowners, naïve cowhands, saloon girls, embittered and aristocratic gamblers, cowherds, horses - only Indians seem already banished. But it also offers a lot of intelligence, of adult complexity, of narrative clarity and of a much missed sense of justice - and its necessary complement, scandal before injustice - in its subtle examination of a changing society and the development, not always for the best, of all the characters involved. These Thousand Hills has no heroes; I’d bet it is extremely realistic and that it escapes from the temptation of mystifying anything, of creating people of mythical dimensions. It is also, as so many westerns, a tale of learning and initiation, but in more than one ground (friendship, loyalty, sex, love, ambition, treason, violence) and in different, sometimes dramatically diverging directions.

Its cast is quite unusual in its seldom equalled perfection, reuniting some of the best and most obscure supporting actors of its time: Richard Egan and Stuart Whitman, the always pathetic Royal Dano, the reliable Harold J. Stone. Don Murray and Lee Remick were in the best moment of their respective careers (loosely, 1956-1962 for both). The photography in Color by De Luxe (at the height of its physical presence and definition, the latter soon to be lost) and CinemaScope by Charles G. Clarke is among the best I’ve ever seen: I have never found before or afterwards such a sensuous capture of the cool of dawn, the sweat of effort, the roughness of wooden fences, the shining hide of horses, the fatigue of bodies, the pain of beating and being beaten, the water of a river, the snow, the pastures, the mud.

It has also a title song which has damned me to search unsuccessfully for records by Randy Sparks, and a score that manages to be unobtrusive, functional and beautiful.

Either in interior settings or on landscape locations, in close two-shots of a couple of actors as well as in large frames of hundreds of cows or the thousand hills of Montana alluded to by the Biblical quotation of its title, the use of the wide screen ratio is magnificent, as usual in Fleischer since 1954, and one of the most distinguishing traits of his economical, precise and very unassuming style, miles apart from any attempt at attracting attention to itself.

Its lack of pretentiousness, pedantry and significant dialogue may help to explain why amateurs of “psychological” westerns did not pay any attention to this truly mature, critical and intelligent movie, ultimately closer and even parallel to Bernardo Bertolucci’s Prima della rivoluzione than to most standard westerns, lucid like Elia Kazan’s Wild River, tragic like Robert Rossen’s The Hustler and Richard Brooks’ Sweet Bird of Youth, stoical in its lyricism as Robert Parrish’s The Wonderful Country and Nicholas Ray’s misappreciated Run for Cover. A perfect illustration of the many virtues of American classicism at the height of its splendor and maturity, only a few years before the downturn started. It is a great film about ambition, the lure of success and its power of corruption, about how society works by discriminating some people while integrating those which conform to its values; about friendship, temptation, generosity, ungratefulness, treason and shame. Ethic questions of universal value about which there are no lectures - there is no preaching, we are free to judge or not - but which are enmeshed in the flesh and blood dramas lived by a group of characters which we get to know and understand like seldom in the cinema, through a linear story told keeping to its bare essentials, with order and serenity, with rage and modesty, with tension and tenderness, with delicacy and latent or suggested violence. There is in These Thousand Hills an exhilarating feeling of harmony and plenitude, that we fear won’t last, an unstable balance which suddenly breaks, often painfully and even brutally, under the combined weight of its inner contradictions and the pressure of imposed choices, the malaise provoked by the conflict between freedom and convenience. There is also that tragic impression of time eroding everything, and the realization that you don’t get any thing without relinquishing another, and that such a dilemma has no escape whatsoever.

One should not forget the screenplay by Alfred Hayes, the man who wrote Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night and Human Desire, nor the A. B. Guthrie, Jr. novel on which it was based, but the basic worth of Fleischer’s film lies his directing the actors in a style which by now has been completely forgotten: to recall what a pair of eyes, a jawbone, the shoulders or a way of walking can express, you need to have seen Callie (Lee Remick) when she returns downstairs after making herself up and finds that Lat (Don Murray), in a sudden surge of timidity and fear, is gone, leaving the music box playing; and Lat, after drinking to give himself courage in the company of an old drunkard in a stable, stumbling towards Callie’s house. Or, later, the jealous Yehu (Richard Egan) wiping out with a knife the dedication to Lat on the birthday cake Callie has cooked for him. Or the spite and disappointment of Tom (Stuart Whitman), when he reproaches Lat for forsaking his friends. Or Lat confessing to his poor wife Joyce (Patricia Owens) his past relationship with Callie and how much he owes her, and telling her she’ll have to trust him. Or Lat again, drawing aside a curtain and discovering Callie’s face disfigured by Yehu’s blows. Or Lat finally risking his social respectability, his economic future and his marriage by facing at last the truth and savagely fighting for Callie with Yehu, partly to forgive himself for not having had the courage and the power to stop the hanging of Tom - after having humiliated him with his haughty refusal to be his wedding godfather, when he sacrificed all his earliest friends to make for himself a place in the sun and let his new respectable acquaintances carry him to the Senate.

Texto ligeramente modificado y traducido al inglés por el propio Marías del artículo publicado en el nº 4 de Nickel Odeon (otoño de 1996)