In August, Dudley Nichols and Jo Swerling were brought in to reshape the story. By this time, their script was titled “Cooper Story.” Their revisions bring the story closer to that of the finished film. It opens in Bean's court, where a horse thief is being sentenced to hang. He turns out be Gary Cooper, whose character's name is not mentioned until the end of the script. Cooper hands Bean his watch, which contains a picture of Lillie Langtry (formerly Lydia Lyndow), and this stops Bean in his tracks. Cole Hardin then enters the bar. He works for McClosky—the rivalry between McClosky and Bean is still retained at this point but would eventually be dropped. According to Swerling and Nichols, McClosky represents “legal law,” which he has corrupted, while Bean represents “gun law,” devised out of necessity. The Cooper character recognizes Hardin as the man who sold him the stolen horse and demands his $100 back, but Hardin answers with an insult, whereupon Cooper punches him in the jaw, knocks him out, and takes back his money. When Hardin recovers, he pulls his gun on the unarmed Cooper, but Ella (who will become Jane-Ellen) shoots it away. Cooper tells Ella that he wants to go farther west, where there are no women, and buy a ranch there. Bean suggests that he go with Ella instead; she has a ranch but no stock since her father was killed by rustlers, most likely headed by McClosky. There follows a series of exciting cinematic action scenes, including one in which Cooper happens on Hardin and others herding stolen cattle. Flicking away a match, Cooper starts a fire that causes a stampede. Cooper then rounds up the cattle and drives them to Vinegarroon. After McClosky arrests Cooper in Jacktown, Bean organizes a posse to rescue him; a battle ensues, and Bean is wounded and captured. Meanwhile, Cooper has captured McClosky, and a prisoner exchange is arranged, over Bean's objections.
Lillie Langtry gives a performance in Vinegarroon. She meets Cooper backstage, and we learn that they knew each other in the East—Lake's backstory, however, has been eliminated. Lillie asks Cooper to join her for the rest of her tour and then return east with her. During the concert, McClosky's men attack, and Bean is wounded again. Belatedly learning that he has been appointed a district judge, he makes it his first and last order of business to reverse his ruling on Bingham Smith (Cooper's name); then he dies, surrounded by Cooper, Lillie, and Ella. Lillie, who has intuited that “Bingo” is in love with Ella, leaves to resume her tour.
Niven Busch replaced Dudley Nichols and, in a revision titled “Saddle Tramp,” produced a story that most closely resembles the finished film. Cooper's character is now named Cole Hardin, and the entire eastern backstory, along with his relationship with Lillie Langtry, has been dropped. Bean's relationship with Cole is brought to the fore, leaving the evolving love story between Cole and Jane-Ellen in the background. The writers included a humorous note in this script: as Bean is presiding over a greased pig contest (cut from the film), the directions read, “It is obviously impossible to describe in detail the progress of the contest, since not even Mr. Wyler can tell a greased pig what to do.”19 Busch also adds the final shoot-out at the Davis Opera House, where Bean buys all the tickets to Lillie's show and must confront Cole, who has been deputized to arrest him.
The changes in the final script were no doubt motivated by a memo from Edwin Knopf, a story editor for Goldwyn. He criticized Swerling, who, he advised, should be taken off the project for splitting the action between Jacktown and Vinegarroon. Knopf thought the film should take place entirely in Vinegarroon and its environs, stating, “It would tighten up the arena in which the play is performed and give you a concentration of action…[but] most importantly, it would emphasize the battle of Cooper versus Bean which to me is the essence of the drama.”20 Knopf's suggestions were echoed by Jock Lawrence, Goldwyn's head of publicity, who emphasized that the second most important element was the love story involving Cole Hardin and the girl; the major story line, however, was the relationship between Cole and Roy Bean.21
Realizing that the starring role belonged to Bean (Walter Brennan), Cooper wired Goldwyn that he did not approve of the material. “It looked like his [Brennan's] picture,” Cooper wrote. “A cowboy ultimately rode in and exchanged a few shots to the detriment of the judge, but that struck me as being incidental. I couldn't see that it needed Gary Cooper in the part.”22 Goldwyn, complaining that that “Goddamned Cooper is trying to kill me,” fired back a telegram: “While I appreciate the sincerity of your solicitude about the story I am sure that you must realize that the responsibility for the selection of stories is always mine and I have never had any desire to shift this responsibility to you or anyone else.”23
Over the next couple of weeks, Goldwyn assured Cooper that his part was being revised and expanded and that if he did not report to work, he would be sued for all expenses incurred on the film to date, amounting to $400,000. Cooper reported for work, but not before sending Goldwyn a strongly worded letter: “After careful and reasonable consideration I regret to advise you that the character Cole Hardin is still inadequate and unsatisfactory for me, in my opinion as is the story.” He went on to say that the script's weaknesses violated the spirit of their working agreement: “Like you, I have a position to uphold. My professional standing has been jeopardized from the beginning.” He concluded by writing, “The force and your strategy in throwing the blame on me is unprecedented…. I bow to your threats since normal reasoning and friendly relations mean little, if anything to you.”24 Goldwyn tried to placate his star, writing that he did not think “there is any justification for such feelings on your part.” He insisted that he had done everything he could to make Cooper happy and assured him that they could work together again, even mentioning three projects he was developing for Cooper: “Seventh Cavalry,” “Hans Christian Andersen,” and “Arrowsmith.”25
The film was budgeted for $1 million and filmed on location outside Tucson, where Goldwyn got the governor of Arizona to proclaim the location site Goldwyn City, Arizona—a publicity stunt that made headlines in the Hollywood Reporter.26 Goldwyn even built a replica of the Fort Grand Opera House, where Lillie Langtry once made an appearance. For the range war between the cattlemen and the homesteaders, local cowboys rounded up 7,000 head of cattle, the largest herd ever put onscreen up to that time.
Wyler wanted to cast his new bride—Margaret “Talli” Tallichet, whom he married in 1938—as Jane-Ellen Mathews, but Goldwyn would not hear of it. He wanted to use an unknown actress, Doris Davenport, whom Goldwyn thought was marvelous in a recent screen test Wyler had done. Though Wyler considered her sweet but untalented, he yielded to Goldwyn's demands. Davenport made no impression in the role, and she never appeared in another film.
The shoot was not easy. Wyler's assistant, Freda Rosenblatt, recalled, “We'd get up at six in the morning and drive eight miles out of town to the set. There would be snow and ice on the ground. By ten the sun would come out and we'd bake. We'd shoot till sundown…. Lots of times Willy would want a rewrite for the next day. The crew, including Willy didn't get much sleep.”27
Wyler finished filming The Westerner in November but did not complete postproduction work until January. One difficulty was Goldwyn's desire to print the film in a sepia tint, to which Wyler vigorously objected. He felt that sepia “tends to destroy realism which we are striving for in this picture.” He went on to point out that sepia gets tiresome after three or four reels and that it had ruined Of Mice and Men.28 Wyler was still arguing against the use of this technique as late as August, when he conceded that sepia might make the outdoor scenes more attractive but would ruin the realistic effect in the interior scenes.
Sepia printing was still an issue as late as August in part because Goldwyn had delayed the picture by asking Alfred Newman to redo Dmitri Tiomkin's score. The question of the music had been raised April, when Tiomkin urged Goldwyn not to be swayed by “some jealous hirelings about the merit of my score.”29 But Goldwyn was clearly dissatisfied, and he insisted that the picture be rescored. The Westerner was finally released in September 1940, just two months before The Letter, which
Wyler had begun filming for Warner Brothers in May.
The Westerner is an unusual, uneven, eccentric film. It has some of the elements that have come to be associated with classic westerns—particularly the subject of territorial expansion and the struggles between settler-landowners, who wanted to fence off their claims, and cattlemen, who wanted to keep the ranges open. In some important respects, it follows the pattern of what Richard Slotkin calls the “historical romance.” These films, Slotkin notes, are “relentlessly progressive: in their reading of history, celebrating all persons, tendencies, and crises that yield…more civilized forms of society.”30 Yet the film's center is what might be called the love story between Judge Roy Bean, a crude, hard-drinking tyrant who represents “the law west of the Pecos” in the wide-open, anarchic 1880s, and Cole Hardin, a laconic drifter who gets dragged into Bean's court on the charge of stealing a horse. Their relationship seems like the prototype for that between Judah Ben-Hur and Messala, which Wyler would direct twenty years later. The bond between the two is also the basis for a great deal of humor—despite the film's lofty thematic aims, the characters talk more than they act, and The Westerner is among the funniest westerns of the period. Indeed, Wyler was attracted primarily by the comic elements: “There was subtle comedy in there. It gave me the opportunity to do some improvising in the scenes between Cooper and Brennan,”31 which are the high points of the film.
The film opens, as do other historical films of the period, with a rolling title. The time frame is after the Civil War, the setting of many classic westerns. The title sequence also heralds a time of renewal: “After the Civil War, America in the throes of rebirth set its face West where the land was free.” The title then sets the stage for the conflict between the cattlemen and Judge Roy Bean, “who took the law into his own hands” but “left his impress on the history of Texas”—a “tribute to his greatness.” In the conflict between the small farmer and the more powerful cattleman who is represented by Judge Bean, there may be an allusion to the Depression era's Dust Bowl conflict between small farmers and banks.
The discrepancy between Bean's historical status and his portrayal in the film is one of the principal problems. Goldwyn, who wanted the film to be endorsed by some of Texas's prominent politicians, was sensitive to the need to depict the local hero in a favorable light. The opening title was no doubt added later, along with the map of Texas at the end, to gain their approval. These additions obviously satisfied the Texans, who allowed Goldwyn to premiere the film in Fort Worth and hold a parade down its main street.
The presentation of Bean was also a bone of contention among the film's contributors and studio executives. Oliver La Farge, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and western historian who was hired to advise on the script, felt that it would be a mistake to turn Bean into a comic figure and poke fun at his court. In fact, he wrote in his notes on the script, “As the original script correctly states, he never forgot his family's long tradition of service in the cause of justice. His court is irregular, rough, frontier, informal, but it must not be comic, and above all it must not give the impression that justice frequently miscarried in it.”32 But one of the first scenes in the film shows Bean condemning a homesteader to hang for mistakenly shooting a steer, and as depicted by Wyler, Bean's court is a place where justice is regularly “miscarried.”
In his notes on the Swerling-Busch script, Jock Lawrence echoes La Farge. He comments that Bean came as a pioneer to a lawless country: “No law officer or judge has dared come into this territory. Bean believes Texas’ future lies in cattle. He has had to take law into his own hands to put some order into this lawless country.”33 Lawrence believed that Hardin had to be torn between the validity of Bean's argument and that of the settlers, but the film never portrays this conflict as effectively as it should. Wyler's Bean is too comic and too indifferent to human life for an audience to sympathize with his pioneer values.34 Later in the film, Cole makes the case for Bean's values even better than Bean does. Bean's point of view is that he and his kind are responsible for transforming the wilderness into an economically viable open range. He argues for rugged individualism and the right to profit. Unfortunately, he cannot see beyond his own historical moment.35
This societal conflict is largely relegated to the background during the first half of the film; it comes to the fore in the second part only when the comedy disappears and the struggle between the cattlemen and the homesteaders turns violent. The film's main focus is three interlocking “love stories”: the evolving bond between Hardin and Bean; Hardin's love for Jane-Ellen Mathews, which draws him into the conflict between Bean's cattlemen and the homesteaders; and Bean's love for Lillie Langtry, a woman he worships but has never met and whose pictures adorn his bar and his bedroom.
Bean's adoration of Langtry is based on fact, and the real Bean did indeed see the real Langtry once—during an American tour in the spring of 1888 (the year the film is set), when Bean, dressed in his Prince Albert suit, bought a front-row seat for her appearance in San Antonio. The film, however, plays with the facts. In the movie, Bean sees Lillie during an American tour in the town of Fort Davis, where he buys out the house and is the only one in the audience, dressed in his Confederate Army uniform, complete with sword. He later changes the name of his town from Vinegarroon to Langtry. In fact, the historical Bean did preside over Vinegarroon in 1882, but he followed the railroad to the town of Langtry later. The judge claimed that he named the town after the girl of his dreams, but the railroad claimed it was named after one of its own officers.
Bean's infatuation with Langtry fits in with Wyler's other studies of men obsessed with women they cannot truly possess. Bean, however, goes beyond Wyler's other protagonists, falling in love, like Pygmalion, with an image, a dream of beauty and womanhood he can only imagine. His absurd obsession is manifested by her pictures plastered all over his walls and in the comic episodes as he attempts to get the lock of her hair that Cole tricks him into believing he has. It is because of Lillie that Bean develops his relationship with Cole, who claims to know her in an elaborate ruse to save himself from hanging. (In earlier drafts of the script, of course, he actually does know her.) Wyler's amusing portrait of Bean's “love” sometimes serves to take the edge off his abuse of the law. Bean's love of Lillie and of Cole humanizes him and complicates our reaction to his behavior, but Bean's world is a masculine one without real women—Wyler depicts the cattlemen as a male enclave of drinkers, gamblers, and killers. Bean's form of justice may have been a necessary step in the evolution of the West, but it must now make way for a society that includes families and schools. His infatuation with Lillie is perhaps a subconscious recognition of that need.36
Bean's fixation on a romantic ideal is also equated with death, for hanging alongside Lillie's pictures is his sword from the Civil War. An officer who fought in the battle of Chickamauga, he still clings to the myth of the Old South. As noted earlier, when he rides to Fort Davis to see Lillie, he wears his Confederate uniform and his sword, suggesting that he is victimized by nostalgia and illusion, trapped in the past and unable to face the future of a state and a nation he once helped nurture. In the film's final act, Cole shoots Bean in the theater, and he gets to see Lillie just before he dies. As he looks at her, her image fades to black in an instant. Illusion must give way to reality—the theater is both a perfect setting for Bean's illusory world and the appropriate place for him to die. Just as the past must give way to the future, men like Bean must yield to the progressive social forces represented by Cole.
The film's first image is of a lone rider, in shadow, on the open range. He is Cole Hardin, the “westerner” of the title who will help transform the wilderness into a garden. The gray, dark tinges in the sky give the film a twilight look, which Toland maintains through much of the outdoor shooting. He manipulates light and dark into shadings that visually place The Westerner in a transitional moment in American history. The evolution of the West was not pretty, and this weste
rn is not full of imposing, picturesque vistas. The outdoor scenes take place in dusty, empty, and largely uninviting landscapes that are more Depression-era Dust Bowl than grand, mythic frontier.
In the opening shots, Wyler's lone rider is followed by pictures of wagon trains of settlers heading west in the hope of finding free land where they can farm and raise their families. The director then cuts to shots of enormous herds of cattle being driven across the land. When their path is impeded by barbed wire, the cattlemen cut it. When the cattle roam onto the cornfields of the homesteaders, a gunfight ensues. When a farmer mistakenly shoots a steer, he is seized.
Wyler cuts to Vinegarroon, a ramshackle town with dirt roads that is dominated by Bean's bar/courtroom and a couple of other equally nondescript shacks. This is clearly an emerging town, but it has no restaurant, no hotel, and not even a sheriff. Bean, the town's leading citizen, is the sole interpreter of the law. Wyler's camera does not suggest that the town has any life other than what transpires in Bean's court. The only other establishment he lets us glimpse is that of the dentist/embalmer, whom Bean keeps busy because his “rulings” invariably involve hanging. Indeed, the town of Vinegarroon is mostly presented as the interior of Bean's establishment—as if Wyler has grown uncomfortable with anything but indoor settings.
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