River Of No Return (1954)

OK, so, yes, as a first impact, it’s a cinephile’s love-snuggle. The opening scenes to Otto Preminger’s classic Western are a glorious extravagance of background activity soaked up in magisterial camera sweeps. One far from soon forgets that first sequence with a cocky tracking shot through a vibrantly recreated tent town at night, ostentatiously packed with a parade of bustling events going on in the middle distance as Robert Mitchum strides through this world. I especially like the puckish insouciance of staging a whole minor drama with sumptuously gowned ladies being helped off a carriage stuck in the water, which goes unacknowledged by Mitchum and the other character he’s speaking to. There’s colour splashed all over Preminger’s compositions like an abstract expressionist, like when Marilyn Monroe talks backstage with her boyfriend and the screen becomes a casually glowing pattern of vivid dabs here and there. 

A lot of this fades away when we leave town and head out to the farm, leaving us with more of an action-Western and a battle against nature, but it’s still a masterclass, maxing out the edges of the Cinemascope’s massively widescreen format to squeeze the frame for all its worth, and laced with clever moments like the scene where we’re tricked into not noticing a gun is missing. And of course, the ravishingly majestic vistas of Idaho, so romantic in themselves, so stirring just to look at in their unmistakeable and genuine beauty, that for a moment we feel the real substance to the myth of America as a frontier land founded on outrageous heroism and the highest aspirations of man’s courageous will to strive, to succeed for himself, in this great and over-awing new land of promise. I mean, of course we don’t, but they look amazing. These vistas were actually filmed in the Canadian Rockies, which are in fact in Canada, never mind though.  

Against this, we have a trashy intrusive score, kitschy rosy-cheeked wholesomeness, rubbish special effects, and a dubious story. Probably you’ll hear the white nationalism and romanticised sexual assault cited as other downsides, but that’s just PC stuff that people don’t care about (“people”). The reason to watch this is to see Preminger take cinema out for a spin, taking it to the limits of 1950s technique much as Hitchcock was doing in his own different way. But the limitations feel imposed rather than embraced here. Watching Monroe and Mitchum see-saw on a raft in a studio while stage-hands chuck buckets of water on them to simulate the rapids no longer carries the thrill it once did, and the “raging waters” back-projection, like the genocidal racism, is touchingly blatant. 

The entire story hinges on being driven off a farm by evil Indians but even that gets a wonky presentation. The high point of the film, when it's discharging its office as an action movie rather than a love-story, is when they’re on this raft, and the Indians show up on the cliffs around them and start shooting arrows at them, while Mitchum picks the brutes off with only a mere bolt-action hunting rifle for defence. Now it seems to me that if you’re on a cliff-edge with bows and arrows, and you get shot at with a rifle, the thing to do is just stand away from the edge a bit, and let fly in a massive volley, since arrows can fall in an arc and bullets can’t. But the scary Indians are too dumb to know how their arrows work so fortunately the white folk stay safe. I feel an extraordinary ending was foregone. 

Other nagging doubts about the film keep encroaching on our starry-eyed raptures towards its technical cleverness. On an incidental level, finding Marilyn Monroe hot or even fun to watch has been slightly inhibited since we found out her life was like a Hubert Selby novel, but that isn’t really where the trouble comes this time. It’s more the whole attitude of the thing. At the end of the film, Kay goes back to being a bar-room singer (outstanding work again from Preminger in this scene). She has spent the whole film saying she wants to leave this life behind and now she sings as sadly as she looks. Then, hurray, a happy ending, the hero comes into the bar, throws her over his shoulder despite her protests and takes her away. This is after the hero’s nine-year-old son, who has a crush on her, has killed her lover (to save his dad, of course), clearing the path for her to become his new mommy. So she is giving up a life of being sexy and glamorous to go and be a farm-wife with the man who first expressed his feelings for her by a rape and then said he “didn’t mean it”, and we’re assumed to be OK with the idea that this is an improvement. This actually seems like a recipe for incestuous disaster in a few years time and a life of pathological repression while she’s waiting.

Yet another opportunity for a better ending was missed here. Assuming she's prepared to let the rape slide, the entire film would be immeasurably improved by having her and the cowboy both realise that her life as a barroom sex-bomb is in fact completely awesome, and that he should absolutely fuck the farm off and live like a normal person, and then they could really have a happy ending. Mitchum: “You’re right! What the fuck was I thinking?” Marilyn: "No, you big lug... what the fuck were WE thinking?" They laugh and embrace. The End.

Westerns never do this, though. The rowdy party town is always bad, the lifeless drudgery in the middle of Jackshit, Assville nowhere is always paradise. White America is such a seething pit of freakish unresolved mental issues. I mean, probably black America is too, I’m not being racist. It’s complicated, let’s not get into it now. The point is, Marilyn’s very, very, very pretty indeed and we’re not going to let her being a battered pill-junkie with PTSD spoil it for us.