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The presiding question is from Frost, "what to make of a diminished thing." Smudged divides are prevalent from the onset, the heroine goes over lines for her divorce hearing very much like Marilyn Monroe laboring to memorize a screenplay. The world beyond Reno, "it goes on forever," why then does it feel like it's shriveling with each passing day? A tentative new beginning among cowboys, "the last real men left... and about as reliable as jackrabbits." The grizzled rambler she shacks up with (Clark Gable) is relaxed masculinity personified, at least until he's deep in his cups and howling for his estranged children in the back of a truck. The rodeo rascal (Montgomery Clift) has a cerebellum scrambled by mommy issues and one too many tumbles. ("It's like that bull had the whole Milky Way in its hoof," he stammers, loopy from his latest bucking.) The widowed mechanic (Eli Wallach) keeps an unfinished desert abode, along with leaden wartime memories: "Boy, you know, droppin' a bomb is like tellin' a lie. Makes everything so quiet." Exiles one and all, huddled around the unmoored ex-stripper who's trying to convince herself she's an Earth Mother. "When you win, you lose," a John Huston stance if ever there was one. End of the Western dream, wrangled in parched plains and sold for dog food like so many mustangs. Arthur Miller's ode to Monroe turns out to be an autopsy of their marriage (cf. Ray's In a Lonely Place) and an incidental elegy for classical Hollywood, no better terrain for windy pronouncements than a dilapidated frontier that might as well be the surface of the moon. "If it weren't for the nervous people in this world, we'd all still be eating each other." Truculence and hypersensitivity jostle in a remarkably unsettled work, with consequences for Hud, Lonely Are the Brave, Junior Bonner, Fool for Love... Cinematography by Russell Metty. With Thelma Ritter, James Barton, Kevin McCarthy, and Estelle Winwood. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |