Greer, suicidal actions?

Frankly, he had been suicidal ever since he decided to go into town, and without the money. And to tell everybody what he had done. Turning his back to Bodeen after saying that he still had something to do for Stride was just the tip of the iceberg (and perfectly giggle-worthy, since indeed there was one thing he could do: get himself killed to help Stride get the wife).

Words, Mr. Sullivan, are precious things, and they are not to be tempered with!

Another question was where was the sheriff? It was close to his office when he was shot in the back and someone inside would surely have heard it and came to investigate. If not the sheriff then an on duty deputy should have been there.

I think Greer just didn't think Bodeen was crazy enough to shoot a man in the back in broad daylight with witnesses all around.

"All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks and that's all." -- Matt Hooper, JAWS

Here's my thinking on this. Greer walks away, with his back to Bodeen, knowing that he's likely to be shot in the back, since this is his way of doing penance for his cowardly actions earlier on. He may not have lived a dignified, manly life, but he'll at least have a dignified, manly death.

I'm not sure that reading is really psychologically plausible (that is, I'm not sure a real person would act that way), but I do think it ties in with the film's thematic concerns. As I see this movie, it's primarily about masculinity, about what it means to be a MAN (yes, all-caps is necessary). You've got Stride, who's doubting his own manhood after the death of his wife (which he thinks is a result of his own failings as a man), trapped between two characters, viz. Masters and Greer, each of whom respresents a different type of man. Masters, like Stride, is a man of action; he's got courage, he's good with a gun, and he knows his way around. Moreover, Masters knows he's all those things, he's proud of them, and he thinks anyone who doesn't possess such strengths isn't really a MAN. Greer, of course, has no such strengths; and so both Stride and Masters have contempt for him and believe they're entitled to his wife--though only Masters is open about it.

And throughout the film, Stride's interactions with those two lead him to see important things in himself, things that raise questions about who he is and should be. Two things are especially important here: (i) Stride seems troubled by the ways in which he's similar (in both character and worldview) to Masters, especially as Masters grows more brazen (especially in his contempt for Greer) and destructive; and (ii) he slowly seems to realize that he doesn't fully comprehend Greer. And, of course, Greer's defying Bodeen and getting shot in the back for it suggests that he possessed more dignity and courage than Stride would have thought.

Having just discovered this fine western, it seems to me that the apparently irrational final action by Greer is partly an impulsive suicide by a man who believes he is unworthy of the woman he loves, and is a desperate step he suddenly realizes is inevitable when the bully Bodeen confronts him and he knows for a certainty his own utter weakness before such predatory men; taking seriously Bodeen's sarcastic and belittling invitation to 'step around me,' upon refusing Greer's quixotic demand for him to move aside in order that he shall allow himself to be reported to the Sheriff, Greer seems to decide at that moment to have found his shameful existence unbearable and at the same instant wished to demonstrate courage to his wife in the only way he is capable - that is, by taking himself completely out of her way. This forlorn gesture is unbearably sad, and self-destructively brave; and it utterly neuters Bodeen's easily swaggering but cowardly, back-shooting machismo.

This motivation is crucial to the film's ending, which - contrary to the general assumption of the final scene's import - does not show us a woman who changes her plans for a new life venturing alone to California in order instead to 'wait for the hero' (i.e. Stride) so as to end the film with every sign of a happy marriage, so that we can all go home and essentially forget all of the preceding film: Greer's widow says by way of explanation to the carter that she will stay a while in Flora Vista, but we surely are meant to intuit that the cold and unresponsive Stride will never return for her from Silver Springs, as he is still punishing himself for his own wife's death and is moreover still consumed by a sense of personal inadequacy, guilt and self-doubt that the preceding action has done nothing to redeem. Indeed, if anything, the course of Stride's wholly meaningless revenge has finally demonstrated to him only that he must take the post of Deputy Sheriff that he had refused out of sheer arrogance, as the fitting penance for the deadly pride he put before the welfare of his wife.

No: Greer's wife does not wait for that man who shocked by his refusal to believe - during the laundry scene - that she could possibly love 'half a man.' She says she loved Greer completely, and Gail Russell makes us believe those words. This cynicism is a dirty stain on Stride's superficially honourable character. The return of the gold to Wells Fargo is a meaningless formal charade, which represents no moral unburdening on the character's part, and does not redeem Stride any more than it would his old rival Masters, had Masters triumphed instead, and appropriated the fateful strongbox for himself. Masters' suggestive words having irreparably punctured the tenuous mystique of Stride, the dis-qualified Sheriff seems strangely absent from all the actions that would normally be made to appear heroic, as the camera simply averts itself from Stride's presence at just such moments as the early shootings in the cave and the final shoot-out with Masters: Such enactments of machismo are rendered meaningless - literally inarticulate in terms of their lack of cinematic expressiveness.

And Greer's widow suddenly understands that her newly dead husband is no frailer than any other man, indeed that his fate is tragically meaningful, and she obviously decides at this moment of revelation to remain behind in order to bury her husband, and to do honour to the memory of a man whom she truly loved and who has now been redeemed of all his shortcomings by the manner of his death: for all his inadequacies and well-meaning follies, he is certainly the only decent man his widow has encountered during the whole course of the narrative.

Not for Boetticher the all-too-common facile ending of the romantic Western: not for him the American Dream as trite and commonplace wishful thinking to pacify the paying public. No - this is an infinitely sadder and wiser meditation on America. And somehow the contemplation this ending inspires of the burial of a helpless little man who never made it - who never found that upright sheriff he wanted to defend him - seems such a true reflection of the futile violence which still threatens the pacific ideals of that great Republic.

This reflection of America's ritualised aggression as a confused moral quest for peace is perhaps second only to John Ford's great film 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.' In both films it is only little, frightened people who are shown as fit to build the civil society. Perhaps one day Stride will be sufficiently humbled to be able to take his place in this profoundly un-heroic but necessary society. Meanwhile, Mrs. Greer will grieve alone for the aborted journey (on which she and Greer were embarked together) that has been misdirected away from the hope of finding a new and worthwhile life by the fatal delusions of wealth and egotism that beset every pilgrim through this vale of tears. But at last Greer's burden of guilt was taken from him - to be taken up by Stride (I mean the metaphorical cash-box).

Probably there is no small part of the new widow's grieving that is regret for her husband's need at last to define himself somehow in relation to these myths of male power and pride, however destructive: He was driven to it by the dominant forces at work in this frontier world. This is no world for any woman to think of starting a domestic life in. This is a world of folly and death. In Ford's film, the Senator must carry the cross of his world's primitive guilt; in Boetticher's, Greer's martyrdom is a lesson just as uncomfortable for the still unregenerate soul of America, but somehow more uncertain. Ford makes the myth of America complex, but still indulges his audience's expectations of its oft-told tales. For Boetticher the American experience provides no refreshing return to the consoling validation of mythic dreaming, but rather only a wakeful night of worry preceding another uncertain day of struggle. The confusion, anxiety and loneliness on the woman's face at the end really tear apart the flimsy pretence of the whole western canon, and we finally see the emptiness of all the male posturing.

And of course that very unflinching realisation of the truth of the situation is in fact the basis of her survival, now entirely without illusions. All the heroes are either fallen from their pedestals or dead; She will go on alone, supported by the memory of a weak but fundamentally decent man. Greer's last reckless action was driven by sincerity and passion; it is the least selfish, most heartfelt behaviour by a man in the entire film. Both Stride and Masters were utterly cold-blooded to the end. After the funeral, the woman will have to endure this disappointing world. But it is in such unromantic persistence that America will have its true posterity. Her framing alone at the end necessarily implies that a better man must appear one day; but one feels that Boetticher would prefer if this individual does not submit to the cliched mechanism usual in romantic endings, whereby the stylized perfection of the union entirely precludes all the messy development of life.

Indeed, Mrs. Greer's very isolation frees the humanity of her character from the iron constraints of the film's primitive mythology. Unlike Stride merging into the crepuscular opening with only his back anonymously presented to us, she looks out from the light as a rounded personality. The men are barely adumbrated ciphers who play all their cards close to their chest; the woman is transparent. This film is projected through the clear though troubled medium of her soul; all we see is how crazy this world of an heroic West looks through her eyes. She'd certainly prefer to see her husband alive, however imperfect; but of course he could not resist measuring his own inadequacy against the perceived perfections of those alarming western idols whose feet, firmly mired in the clay as was the wagon bearing their tribute, he could not see. The deadly mechanism of a contrived fate snapped shut on the coward just as inevitably as on the heroes. The woman can only look on, uncomprehending and appalled; her sombre mood is infectious.

This is certainly no celebration of the Old West. It is, however, a splendid vindication of the Western genre of moviemaking. And demonstrates a sceptical Euripidean command of its mythology.