Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  Yet the Red Pony's picture of childhood is complicated by nostalgia. Jarring shifts between the serious and the comic, between the violent and the pastoral, create the occasional impression that what we see on the screen is somehow clouded by the passing of time—an adult's memory of past innocence. Arguably, this stance exists from the very beginning of the film, when the opening credits emerge as if from the pages of a child's picture book, which has appeared inexplicably on the Tiflins' front porch. Like Grandfather's anecdotes about crossing the plains, this is a story that can be told again and again, but only to an audience with childlike qualities. Confronted with Fred's angry indifference, Grandfather proclaims: “It was a job for men. Now only little boys want to hear about it.” His words capture the intergenerational conflict within the Tiflin family, but he also speaks of the forces that transformed The Red Pony into a “kiddy western.”

  THE GREAT CROSSING

  Tom does not play “cowboys and Indians,” and at first glance his fantasies appear far removed from his western surroundings. Nonetheless his parade with the knights on horseback has many parallels to his Grandfather's experience as “Leader of the People,” and his circus dream shows him firmly in command of animals (white horses, in fact), practicing postures that he will soon assume in real life as he trains the red pony. A screenplay housed at the Library of Congress further suggests that Steinbeck might not have meant to exclude Indians from the ranks of Tom's imaginary friends and adversaries; this document (presumably an early version since it identifies the protagonist both as “Paddy” and as “Tom”) refers to a “wild Indian cry,” which startles Tom out of his “circus dream” and alerts him to his Grandfather's approach.16 This scene is substantially shorter in the film, and no Indian connotations remain to color Grandfather's piercing call. Shortly after his arrival, however, the old man compares the boy's plans for a “mouse hunt” in the haystack to the latter years of the Indian wars, when soldiers stooped to killing children and burning tepees.

  More than Copland's other projects, The Red Pony tackles the complexities of westward expansion overtly, through Grandfather's reminiscences and Tom's reactions to them. Although Copland had disclaimed any “epic” pretensions in his letter to Irving and Verna Fine, both his score and Steinbeck's screenplay carry moderately epic overtones from the start. As the camera pans across the Californian landscape, a narrative voice-over situates the Tiflin ranch geographically and makes sure we are aware of regional history: “In central California many small ranches sit in the hollows of the skirts of the Coast Range Mountains. Some, the remnants of old and gradually disintegrating homesteads; some the remains of Spanish grants. To one of them in the foothills to the west of Salinas Valley, the dawn comes, as it comes to a thousand others.”17 Prefacing this narration, Copland's main title music features aggressive upward leaps, rhythmic unisons, and the brassy timbres of a fanfare. Perfect fourths and fifths in the melody and a strong harmonic emphasis on C within the ostensible framework of F major lend the score an open-air quality that makes its woodwind birdsong seem right at home.18

  After this opening fanfare, however, Copland's background music becomes unobtrusive; instead our attention is arrested by the overloud crowing of roosters heralding the dawn. Other sounds from the natural world intrude on the pleasant background music. An owl hoots and we see a rabbit run for cover. The owl swoops down upon its prey (politely hidden from view), the rabbit screams, and we see the family dog react to its death cry. It is typical to see the dissonance between the rabbit's shriek and Copland's cheerful score as an illustration of Steinbeck's message about the interdependence of life and death. While this interpretation may be correct, the disjunction between the “live” sounds and the underscoring also raises questions about the function of Copland's music. The harsh sounds of the natural world are the more potent reflection of the violent “reality” unfolding before our eyes; we observe their effect on the animals. At these moments, the composed score seems somehow “unreal,” something added, imagined, or remembered. What better way to symbolize this stance than that picture book on the Tiflins' front porch? It frames the events we are about to witness as often told or distantly remembered. This is not an unusual choice in the context of forties filmmaking, but it carries special meaning in a movie so desperately concerned with storytelling and recollection.

  At the heart of The Red Pony's engagement with storytelling are Grandfather's incessant reminiscences about his long-lost role on the front lines of westward expansion. All the adult characters find them irritating, and when Fred's bitter complaints about the garrulous old man are overheard, the tension among the dysfunctional Tiflins reaches its peak. After Fred's awkward exit, young Tom insists that he is always ready to listen to the old man's stories of the “Great Crossing” to the Pacific. At first, Grandfather remains unmoved, but he eventually opens up to his grandson in one of Hollywood's most remarkable reflections on Manifest Destiny:

  I tell those old stories, but they're not what I want to tell. I only know how I want people to feel when I tell them. It wasn't Indians that were important, nor adventures, nor even getting out here. It was a whole bunch of people made into one big crawling beast. And I was the head. It was westering and westering. Every man wanted something for himself, but the big beast that was all of them wanted only westering. I was the leader, but if I hadn't been there, someone else would have been the head. The thing had to have a head.19

  Steinbeck abridged Grandfather's narrative from “Leader of the People” only slightly when writing his screenplay, leaving it open to the same charge that many critics leveled at the literary original: that the speech is merely propaganda for Steinbeck's so-called phalanx theory of human behavior, which holds that “a group is a living entity with desires, hungers, and strivings of its own.”20 Applying the “phalanx theory” to American pioneering calls attention to westward expansion's potential to unify across social or class lines. Yet for the Tiflin family, the repeated recounting of western history actually becomes a divisive force, bringing their divergent perspectives into sharp relief—differences between the impatient, cosmopolitan Fred and the ranch-born Alice, and the generational conflicts between Grandfather, young Tom, and the adult characters. Although westward expansion gave the Tiflins their ranch, the tensions involved in remembering it threaten to break up their home.

  Perhaps this gulf between memory and experience explains why Grandfather's heroic narration seems in so many ways to fall flat. He speaks with melancholy fervor: “We carried life out here and set it down and planted it the way ants carry eggs, and I was the leader. The westering was big as God, and the slow steps that made the movement piled up and piled up until the continent was crossed. Then we come down to the sea, and it was done.” But ten-year-old Tom is the only visible audience, and for him Grandfather's tales of adventure are precisely as real as his own fantasies about leading knights in shining armor or showing off the white horses of his circus dream. Though he may comprehend that Grandfather's glory days have passed away forever, he has a harder time accepting that no pioneering role remains for him:

  Tom: Maybe I could lead the people someday.

  Grandfather: No, there's no place to go. There's the ocean to stop you. And there's a line of old men along the shore hating the ocean because it stopped them.

  Tom: In boats I might, sir.

  Grandfather: No, Thomas, there's no place to go. Everyplace is taken. But that isn't the worst—no, that isn't the worst. Westering has died out of the people. Westering isn't a hunger any more. It's finished. Your father's right. It's all done.

  Tom quickly scampers off to join Billy Buck in the barn, but listening to Grandfather's stories brings the boy closer to understanding his own place in the West. As much as he might like to try, Tom cannot continue westward expansion's legacy of conquest. With the Christlike proclamation “It's finished,” Grandfather has closed a chapter on western history, and when Tom tries to reopen the book, it has become a children's
story—“an impossible world of Indians and buffaloes, a world that had ceased to be forever.”21

  An ambivalence about narration, a complicated perspective on the “progress” of westward expansion, and a feeling of irretrievable nostalgia—remarkably, Copland manages to capture all these things in the music he wrote for “Grandfather's Story.” First, a chorale-like texture of strings, clarinets, and pensive English horn plods with sentimental calm (example 51). Compared with other passages in the film score, it is wrenchingly slow, without the jocular saunter of the “Walk to the Bunkhouse” or the shimmer of “The Gift.” Moreover, Copland's score must vie with the old man's words and copious natural noises for our attention, making the action of narration far more complicated on screen than it is in print. A change in orchestral register marks the camera's move from the interior of the Tiflin home to the bright sunlight of the front porch. The camera settles on Grandfather in his rocking chair, stretching his tired hands and looking out toward the horizon. As soon as we begin to associate the poignant underscoring with his bittersweet reflections, two hawks interrupt his reverie with harsh cries as they fight over a moth. He looks up distracted, the camera follows his gaze, and Tom, too, looks upward to witness one of the film's thematic life-and-death encounters. By comparison, Grandfather's memories are distant indeed. Again there is a palpable tension between the sounds we hear and the sounds that impact the characters in the film, making the underscoring less a mirror of their emotions than a reminder of our own.

  As the truly narrative portion of Grandfather's speech begins (“It wasn't the Indians that were important…”), Copland responds with suitably narrative music (example 52). This passage is unusual in the context of the film, for it reflects neither the characters' emotions nor the on-screen action. Instead, it depicts the unrepeatable progress of westward expansion. The cluster chords of imagined Indians and desolate landscapes gain shape and direction in a rhythmic ostinato while muted trumpets evoke space in dissonant antiphony. Although the trumpets' music might be called a fanfare, it is a fanfare wholly denatured by its subdued tone color and clashing counterpoint. Even the underlying ostinato is distorted with the strings playing “at the frog” to achieve Copland's expressive (or antiexpressive) marking “thud like.” Yet both ostinato and fanfare are nearly drowned out by twittering songbirds as Grandfather's narration nears its close, again allowing the natural world of the present to take precedence over the past.

  EXAMPLE 51. The Red Pony, film suite, “Grandfather's Story,” mm. 1-8 (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1951)

  Like Tom's “Dream March,” Grandfather's westward processional gradually builds to a climax over its obsessive figuration. While we could see the boy's daydream vividly, no such Technicolor assistance attends the old man's memories. On the contrary, everything seems calculated to enhance the remoteness of a spectacle that we can neither see nor hope to experience. Though far closer in time and space than any knight in shining armor, the vision of Grandfather on his white horse marshaling the people is just as unattainable. When Grandfather speaks of times past, we are not allowed to forget that the story he tells is over—and has been over for some time: “Westering has died out of the people.”

  Grandfather's narrative is indeed a lonely one. In Steinbeck's and Copland's hands, it evokes an emptiness that can sound unsatisfying. Virgil Thomson seems to have felt this way, for he argued that this movement might be cut from the orchestral suite because it appeared “less intensely conceived” than the others.22 But like the flatness of the western landscape, the old man's isolation bears the traces of many meanings. Although Grandfather is the sole representative of his generation in the movie, this need not have been the case. When Steinbeck excised his third short story (“The Great Mountains”) from the screenplay, he also lost the old Chicano laborer, Gitano, who returns, ghostlike, to the Tiflin ranch in order to die on the land where he was born. His absence is palpable. The disembodied narrator mentions Spanish land grants during the main title music, and Grandfather has instilled in the family a serious preoccupation with Indians. But apart from that, at least to the casual observer, The Red Pony's West appears to be a white West.

  EXAMPLE 52. The Red Pony, film suite, “Grandfather's Story,” mm. 29-46, woodwinds, trumpet, and strings

  Living as he does at the end of the frontier, Tom cannot cross the plains. He need not cross the Pacific. But in the “Walk to the Bunkhouse,” he does make a crossing of his own, one that bears its own more modest associations with personal maturity and western history. After the atmospheric “Morning on the Ranch” music fades away, the first specifically action-oriented cue underscores young Tom and Billy on their way to retrieve a newspaper clipping that documents Billy's rodeo-riding days. According to Copland's program note for the suite, “Billy Buck ‘was a fine hand with horses,' and [Tom's] admiration knew no bounds. This is a scene of the two pals on their walk to the bunkhouse.” The horsemanship to which Tom aspires is already integral to Billy's character and to the jaunty musical language that accompanies him. The first four measures of the orchestral suite set up a jaunty rhythmic vamp based on the simplest of harmonic progressions (I, IV6, IV, V, I) and a regular alternation between 3/4 and 2/4.

  As soon as this rhythmic vamp is in place, the violins enter with a sweetly meandering melody that Pollack has aptly called “bow-legged” (HP, 431). The falling contour of its single leisurely phrase gives it an air of relaxation that is reinforced by its utter disregard for the rhythmic precision of the accompaniment (example 53). Its second note stretches easily beyond the five beats of the first note, tumbling comfortably out of sync with the underlying two-bar unit; the subsequent string of half notes and quarter notes further disrupts the phrase structure suggested by Copland's bar lines and eventually causes a momentary hiccup in the regular pattern of the vamp. A picture of relaxed assuredness, Billy's melody could hardly be more different from Fred's anxious silence or formal speech.

  EXAMPLE 53. The Red Pony, film suite, “Walk to the Bunkhouse,” mm. 1-12

  As the scene reaches its close, Copland calls attention to another, more pointed difference between the two men: Fred's romantic repression is upstaged by Billy's more obvious sexuality. In the film, when Billy puts an end to Tom's questions about his pinups by swiftly shutting his trunk, gaps in the background music ensure that his thinly veiled spoken allusions to his romantic life can be clearly heard. In the orchestral suite, Copland preserves the space originally left for dialogue but fills it in with clarinet figuration. Though retaining the original phrase structure was surely convenient, the decision to replace the spoken dialogue with a cartoonish cascade for solo clarinet is a significant one. Grace notes, non-harmonic tones, and improvisatory flourishes give the impression that this particular clarinet has wandered in from a jazz band to make a guest appearance. Here, however, connotations of sexual freedom trump any urban associations. A few “nights on the town” are not enough to compromise Billy's rural status. His heterosexual prowess does not result in inconvenient progeny or the potentially emasculating responsibilities of domestic life. Like so many western heroes, he remains both sexually active and permanently unattached.

  If the soundtrack for the “Walk to the Bunkhouse” suggests something about male sexuality in the West, it has even more to say about the “progress” of westward expansion. Though they traverse only the distance from breakfast table to bunkhouse, Billy and Tom together enact Manifest Destiny's characteristic conflation of the modern and the nostalgic, and at least some of its troubling erasure of ethnic diversity. Given Copland's prior experiences, the distinctive rhythmic and timbral profile of Billy Buck's barnyard walk has a genealogy bearing further investigation. Many scholars have noted that syncopation, layered textures, and jazz harmonies are unifying elements in Copland's oeuvre—evidence of his thorough absorption of African American materials or his lingering debt to Stravinsky. The 3+3+2+2 gait of the “Walk to the Bunkhouse” resembles the syncopation of Copland's Piano Conc
erto and his later Four Piano Blues (especially the third), and it reflects his understanding of jazz's rhythmic language as essentially additive.23 It is not surprising to find syncopation in a western setting laden with roping, riding, and laid-back humor. But recognizing possible connections between African Americans and the West—links so often obscured by the absence of black characters in western Americana—makes audible a facet of westward expansion that American culture has been more than willing to ignore.

  More precisely in tune with The Red Pony's California setting are the Hispanic elements of Billy Buck's ranch walk. Its asymmetrical meter and folkloric melodies for solo trumpet link it to traditional Mexican music, to the topoi of El Salón México, and to passages from Billy the Kid (examples 54a and 54b). El Salón México made no secret of its national origin. And in Billy the Kid, these musical elements were associated with the jarabe of the Mexican women visible on stage, dancing in a potent spectacle of interaction between races. In The Red Pony, such stylistic allusions serve a different purpose. Although they stop short of transforming the American ranch back into a Spanish “rancho,” they solidify Billy's identification with the land and (perhaps inadvertently) with its changing meanings during western history. In this way, Billy's walk across the barnyard has a more accurate soundtrack for Manifest Destiny than Grandfather's recollections of the Great Crossing to the Pacific.