MOVIE CHRONICLE
195
as T. S. Eliot's statement that
Everyman
is the only play in English
that stays within the limitations of art. The truth is that the Westerner
comes into the field of serious art only when his moral code, without
ceasing to be compelling, is seen also to be imperfect. The Westerner
at his best exhibits a moral ambiguity which darkens his image and
saves him from absurdity; this ambiguity arises from the fact that, what–
ever his justifications, he is a killer of men.
In
The Virginian,
which is an archetypal Western movie as
Scarface
or
Little Caesar
are archetypal gangster movies, there is a lynching in
which the hero (Gary Cooper), as leader of a posse, must supervise the
hanging of his best friend for stealing cattle. With the growth of Ameri–
can "social consciousness," it is no longer possible to present a lynching
in the movies unless the point is the illegality and injustice of the lynch–
ing itself;
The Ox-Bow Incident,
made in 1943, explicitly puts forward
the newer point of view and can be regarded as a kind of "anti-Western."
But in 1929, when
Th e Virginian
was made, the present inhibition about
lynching was not yet in force; the justice, and therefore the necessity,
of the hanging is never questioned-except by the schoolteacher from
the East, whose refusal to understand serves as usual to set forth more
sharply the deeper seriousness of the West. The Virginian is thus in
a tragic dilemma where one moral absolute conflicts with another and
the choice of either must leave a moral stain.
If
he had chosen to save
his friend, he would have violated the image of himself that he had
made essential to his existence, and the movie would have had to end
with his death, for only by his death could the image have been restored.
Having chosen instead to sacrifice his friend to the higher demands of
the "code"-the only choice worthy of him, as even the friend under–
stands-he is none the less stained by the killing, but what is needed
now to set accounts straight is not his death but the death of the villain
Trampas, the leader of the cattle thieves, who had escaped the posse
and abandoned the Virginian's friend to his fate. Again the woman in–
tervenes: Why must there be
more
killing?
If
the hero really loved her,
he would leave town, r efusing Trampas's challenge. What good will it
be
if Trampas should kill him? But the Virginian does once more what
he "has to do," and in avenging his friend's death wipes out the stain
on his own honor. Yet his victory cannot be complete : no death can be
paid for and no stain truly wiped out; the movie is still a tragedy, for
though the hero escapes with his life, he has been forced to confront
the ultimate limits of his moral ideas.
This mature sense of limitation and unavoidable guilt is what gives
the Westerner a "right" to his melancholy. It is true that the gangster's
