D. Otto Preminger
B&W
The moon is high and yet it’s still an eerily dark night.
The prairie plain seems desolate, what we would now liken to a moonscape. Only
the odd cactus leads you to acknowledge there is any life whatsoever, and even
then it doesn’t look comforting. There’s no sound (apart from the distant whirr
of the projector) and that’s incredibly spooky as well; so much so that you’d
welcome even the howl of a distant jackal, but none comes. Even though it’s
just an image projected on a screen you can see that it’s a cold place, so
freezing and airless in the darkness that even your bones start to shiver. This
is a place of death, a vision of what hell must look like, and you are all
alone within it – no comfort in sight. But wait, there’s movement. From
somewhere deep in the prairie plain a figure is appearing, shambling and
stumbling forward as if not fully in control of its limbs. You look closer and
see that it’s a man, a cowboy dressed in full garb, but looking so bruised and
beaten. He almost seems like a dead cowboy. He stumbles towards the camera, his
head down, as if weeping or needing every ounce of strength to make one foot
move in front of the other. His arm is wounded and there is blood on his shirt,
but still he keeps coming – staggering his way towards you. And then as he is
almost upon the camera he finally raises his head to let you see his dazed
eyes, and – oh my god! – is that John Wayne?
And so begins one of the strangest movies The Duke ever
participated in. His only horror and one of the few horror westerns I’ve found.
Clearly influenced by the likes of Jacques Tournier’s ‘The Cat People’, this is
a master class of dark shadows, suspense and things not being quite what they
should be. Wayne plays Ellis Bob, a widower with a sick child. We join him out
in the desert, mid-way through his quest to find the strange voodoo princess
who lives just beyond the mountains. This voodoo lady, when he finds her, sets
him several quests. She is arch, she seems foreign; she is the unmistakably
exotic and dazzling form of Marlene Dietrich.
A virtual two hander, Dietrich purrs her lines and sets
Wayne his challenge of fire, ice, air and earth and when he succeeds in each
task gives him a bit more of the information he’ll need to save his son’s life.
It is spooky, it is atmospheric. It’s dark and claustrophobic and also
terrifying. Okay, with her accent it’s difficult to really believe that
Dietrich grew up from a small child practicing New Orleans voodoo (although to
be fair, she doesn’t even try to make a haphazard stab at the Louisiana
accent), but her presence is so alien and exotic that you end up believing
virtually everything of her. While Wayne is great at playing not too
intelligent, superb as a slow and dutiful father who can only believe the
evidence of his own eyes. It’s a great pairing, and the scenes between them are
a hungry and smiling cat playing with a dim-witted toy mouse. This is a taut
and claustrophobic western horror, which is definitely worth traipsing across a
bleak landscape for.
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