Just because the movie was made in 1946 doesn't make it a masterpiece.

er, I jump on the opportunity : what does mean the word "camp" exactly ?
(no luck with my old webster issue :(
ej

I agree Bosox. Here's an extract of one of my last post on the topic on the western board. The book referred too and analyzed is a work of intriguing matter, but the analysis states that geographical openness is a markup for quixotic tales. I think the reference to Pearl origins is the equivalent for that element.

"Considering the ending, I'd say the story doesn't advertise racism. On the contrary.
No one says there is a connection between Pearl's libido and her mixed parentage. Her lover's not interested in her history when he sees her on her arrival. He calls her a pretty "tamale". The character is a glutton -shrinks would say he's on the oral stage- when her "vanity" makes her susceptible, like eve, to the flattery of the devil, in the words of the Sinkiller. When the mother states that her son Lewt has been raised wild, which amount to cultural "half-breeding"-him being as much heated than the girl is-, the way Jesse's interested in Pearl shows that education has nothing to do with it. And both men are caucasian. It shows better in the book than in the screen though.
The bigotry of the senator is a faked one, has the story shows that his prejudice against pearl is grounded in his own personal history, not the girl's. Lewton's bigotry is not his own, but his father's, as anything else as long as the man cannot come up with his personal shortcomings and get free.

Pearl is disturbed and disturbing, as any of the other characters in the story. The girl clearly acts as a psychopat, on impulse without feelings. Her affair with Lewt is grounded on lust and duty (and he's not so dim he cannot know it) - As a matter of fact, the man will be the only one who tells of love.
It is disturbing to see a disturbed girl getting to her ironic fate, the way she is vulnerable to the seducing lover she falls for elicit sympathy at once, but it's just an especially apparent way she can be said to have inherited her human fallen nature to stage her as the daughter of an unfaithfull alien mother.

I don't know who are the "people" whom prejudices are appealed to according to you.

The modern litterary work I would compare the movie to is Daniel De Foe MOLL FLANDERS, and that's not a book about racism.
I quote here a comment about "Moll Flanders", (Penguin Classic p. 21)" The question as to wheter or not Moll Flanders is a work of irony, is (...)ultimately a debate over form. If we see the work as ironic, we recognize that the disrepancy between the surface of the novel, the episodic variety of Moll's life, and the underlying meaning, based upon the ultimate justice of divine providence, is intentional. Related to this is the question of the picaresque nature of Moll Flanders, that is, wether it is or not a genuine example of the picaresque" (One can translates "picaresque" with "western" as it comes to the movie)
"The picaresque narrative (origins...)emerged as a realistic account of the life of an unconscionable rogue (picaro, in spanish), who, by his wits survives through a series of rather loosely connected adventures and who often by words and actions satirizes the society around him or those more fortunate than himself. Prototype LAZARILLO DE TORMES-1553 though the better-known GIL BLAS(1715) by the frenchman Lesage is often cited as the prototype of the genre.
Moll Flanders clearly posess many of the features of the picaresque narrative, including the low-born protagonist, (...), a sense of the random uncertainty of life exemplified in a series of adventures, sexual freedom, the opting of survival over personal integrity, and social and SPACIAL MOBLITITY .
(Here I remark that mixed parentage is an issue of that kind of mobility in the mind of the limited ones who identifies themselves in their group fixed unity, for example as the antic greeks who opposed "hybris" in the flesh and in the mind, the citizen being one listed with the "deme", the place of his birth and of his exercise of political freedom...In answer to that accusation of the movie being 'racist'.)
(...Novak against Starr...Picaresque over spiritual autobigraphy)
It must be said, however, that while the picaresque DEFLATES ROMANTIC CONVENTIONS Moll Flanders posess elements of romance, such as the child stolen by gypsies who finds her true parents, the longing for gentility [...] and the incest theme. Arguably, the occurence of these features in a picaresque tale is only an instance of the way in which literary form may absorb the convention they ridicule.
(Here I observe that Duel is often seen as a remake of Gone whith the wind, that movie being strictly a romance. But the characters have different attitudes to quite similar situations...)
A more telling objection to calling MF picaresque is Robert Alter's argument that the novel is fundamentally religious, something picaresque fiction never is. Professor Alter's term for MF experience of life is 'quasi-picaresque', which may well be as near as we can get settling the matter.-paragraph- In fashioning his fiction, DeFoe had a multiplicity of literary and subliterary forms to draw upon and in whatever way he choose. Under no restraints to obey the rules of critics, he drew freely upon the forms his lively imagination, wide reading, and extensive knowledge of the lives of his contemporaries furnished him with. The result is, in the words of Micheal Mc Keon, a 'categorical instability' that is the mark of English fiction in its emergent stage before the full development and stabilization of the form in the works of Richardson and Fielding. Perhaps something of that instability can be felt in the contemporary reputation of DeFoe as a prevaricating rogue 'an ANIMAL who shifts his Shape oftner than Proteus, and goes backward and forward like a hunted hare' which may be our clue to the extraordinary versatility of a man who wrote so much and so well. Meanwhile, as Ian Watt reminds us, Moll looks back at us and smile.]

[p.19 Irony rests upon a complicity and duplicity. The complicity involves the author and the reader, who both know something the protagonist (or in some instance the other principal characters) does not. In this case we know, but the youthfull Moll does not, that her life, in spite of minor triumphs (usually involving deception and fraud), is headed for disaster. ]
Pretty cruel... Not "vulgar".
p.9"the development and final shape of the novel is governed by Defoe's intention of showing the gradual but inexorable moral degeneration of his heroine until the moment of her conversion in Newgate prison and the subsequent spiritual regeneration that flows from her contrition."
(In the original Duel novel, Pearl is used by Lewton to lure the people in the train and she elects to stay alone in jail when the Senator and his two other sons get the outlaw out by force... before Jesse Sprague gets her legally out of reach of the gallows, getting her as a lover in return)
"The concave shape of the story follows the moral history of mankind as we see in the bible, as interpreted by christian theologians and poets, particularly Milton, from the first sin in the garden and through all the episodic varieties of experimental wickedness, until moral regeneration, by the intervention of divine providence, makes possible a reconciliation with god and a reborn existence. Like ROBINSON CRUSOE and many other stories of moral recovery, from that of the prodigal son onward, it is the tale of a return."

Here again, the matter of "race"... The symbol of the flower stages another moral, opposite to the christian one. It stages pantheism, in which nature is the good creation of gods, and man a part of nature. As that, man cannot be "bad" and there is not original sin. (One might look up at that point the work of Rousseau. In that way, man IS vulgar as the next animal...)
That flower symbol evokes many literary works, among which I elect to choose the ones picturing the war of Messina in which a flower that grows in the ruins of the fallen dynasty links illustrates the wages of the sin of Ubris, the moral breach equivalent of Hybris from which there is no recovery.
As a result of the prohibition for ubris and hybris, the young greeks citizens were send in the eschaia, the limits of the city territory, to become free adults.
So is the fallen christian that is lead away in the mind from eden but reunited to god with love. But when the pantheist sees only good in man, it also totals him and denies him any personal choice.
This what that matter of "race" is about, in my opinion. I reckon that on the contrary to being vulgar and racist, the movie shows the ruthlessness of nature and the difference beetween independance and freedom... To think of herself only as the product of her own history, Pearl has nothing to "go" to back or forth…"


emm
"to tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men"