In a recent workshop, novelist Barbara M. Britton said, “What are your three favorite movies? What do they have in common? Those are apt to be the themes and topics you hold dearest as a writer.”
In the last analysis, It’s a Wonderful Life is all about home and family. Public Domain photo.
That impressed me, because it’s true.
How does it apply to Your New Favorite Writer? My three all-time favorites are sentimental Christmas movies.
I like many kinds of films. I’m tickled by screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby or The Gods Must Be Crazy. I like great political satires such as Romanov and Juliet, Dr. Strangelove, or The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming. I’m bolstered by writing, directing, and acting brilliance as displayed in Casablanca, Double Indemnity, The Third Man, or any film by the late, great Hitchcock.
But the three I would choose to answer Barbara’s question are: Meet Me In St. Louis, It’s a Wonderful Life, and We’re No Angels. The first is a cozy domestic drama, the second a stark morality play with an Everyman hero, and the third a blackish comedy in which the stock villain gets a hilarious comeuppance.
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So, what do these three flicks have in common? And what does that say about the subject matters and themes in my own writing?
“Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Judy Garland comforts Margaret O’Brien in Meet Me in St. Louis. Screen grab, fair use.
These films are old. Meet Me In St. Louis came out in 1944, It’s a Wonderful Life in 1946, and We’re No Angels in 1955. I like people and things that are my age. This backwards look is my brand, if I have a brand. The fiction I write tends to be historical. Most of the posts here relate, one way or another, to times past. I like to explore the days of yore because I think that all treasures worth having, all the secrets of life, reside there.
Why Christmas movies, in particular? I happen to be a Christian and attach theological meaning to Christmas. To me, it seems Christmas is when our Creator showed how much he cares for us by taking on all the burdens of our creaturehood. The birth of Jesus is the event that starts the reconciliation of God and man. That theme strikes a deep chord in my heart.
In these films, the characters—ordinary folks like you and me, not rich and powerful people—have their lives, their homes, and their families restored to how they should be. In a deep sense, this is a kind of homecoming.
One of the chief plot lines of literature is that of someone returning home. Odysseus, the Prodigal Son, E.T., Dorothy Gale—all are bound on homeward journeys. In the films I love most, the characters have not necessarily left home, but their homes are threatening to leave them.
The Smith family of St. Louis, the Baileys of Bedford Falls, and the Ducotel family in the French Caribbean colony of Cayenne all face crises in which their homes are about to disappear, leaving them suspended, as memoirist Dinty W. Moore might say, “between panic and desire.”
The purpose of the plot is to break open a new dispensation, a new state of affairs in which the characters can find their way home. A path is opened. In each case, this shifting paradigm of reality comes as a mental transformation.
Three of Santa’s helpers drop in on a distraught family, just in time for Christmas. Aldo Ray, Humphrey Bogare, and Peter Ustinov in We’re No Angels. Fair use.
In St. Louis, Alonzo Smith suddenly realizes that success is not counted in dollars or prestige, but in his family’s happiness. In Bedford Falls, George Bailey is awakened, through Divine Intervention, to the fact that all these years he has not been wasting his time in meaningless sacrifice but investing in the currency of abiding love. In Cayenne, the inward epiphany comes not to the family whose home is saved but to the trio of criminals who enact that salvation. It doesn’t seem to matter who has the revelation, as long as the audience gets to experience it.
So I guess the cat is out of the bag. I like stories that bring people home, bring them in from the cold, reunite families, and restore harmony in local communities.
In The Price of Passage, I wrote about people displaced from their homes—Norwegian immigrants and fugitive slaves. They prove Thomas Wolfe’s assertion that you can’t go home again. They are called to rise above their loss of home and create new spaces where they and their offspring will eventually find their harbor.
In Izzy Strikes Gold!, I focused on a 12-year-old boy being jolted from his comfort zone by family circumstances. Will Izzy have to leave home? If so, will he find a new home? Those are the dramatic questions addressed.
My current manuscript follows two brothers who can’t coexist at home with each other; their mutual resentment is too great. War intervenes and poses the question whether the brothers will ever be able to find each other again and re-establish their family relationship. I don’t know that answer because I haven’t read the book yet.
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What is the point of all this rumination? Simply to help me find and become more aware of the central themes in my writing. Ideas that reside close to the writer’s heart make for authenticity in his voice. So these are the kinds of things a guy likes to know.
See you next week, Dear Reader, when it will be about Something Completely Different.
Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy were the Big Three.
Supreme Pictures poster for 1936 Johnny Mack Brown film Desert Phantom. Public Domain.
But there were also Johnny Mack Brown, John Wayne, Jock Mahoney the Range Rider, and others. They rode across desert, plains, and mountains, chasing bad guys and protecting the innocent. That all happened in a hazy time frame that might have been the 19th century but sometimes looked like the 20th—when the moviemakers included automobiles, for example.
An endless series of cowboy films made in the 1940s—“B” pictures, made mostly by Republic or other “Poverty Row” studios—played endlessly on our TV sets in the 1950s.
Television was new. It was all black and white, with constant technical problems, despite which it swept the nation. “In 1948, 1 percent of U.S. households owned at least one television; in 1955, 75 percent did,” says Wikipedia.
Family watches TV in 1958. Photo by Evert F. Baumgardner. Public Domain.
That made my family late adopters; we got our first TV in 1957. Before that, I would drop by my friends’ houses after school to watch Midwest Matinee on WCIA-TV, Channel 3 out of Champaign, Illinois. Midwest Matinee, formerly Western Theater, was just like the afternoon show on every other TV station in the land. A genial host, in this case “Sheriff Sid,” entertained a gaggle of children in the studio but mainly introduced segments of old cowboy films.
Sheriff Sid and the kids. Fair use.
Local stations could rent these classics cheaply, and a large crowd of children would glue themselves to their sets. The films shown on afternoon kids’ shows seldom featured the Big Three—Roy, Gene, and Hoppy. They were superstars, still at the top of the box office. But we kids had an appetite for stars like Wild Bill Elliott, Lash LaRue, Rex Allen, and the Cisco Kid.
Rex Allen had his own comic book series. Public Domain.
All this late-afternoon western viewing was a result of local stations renting low-budget westerns. Prime Time, the domain of the Big Three networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—was dominated by situation comedies like I Love Lucy and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show and by quiz shows like You Bet Your Life and The $64,000 Question.
But funny things can happen in Hollywood. The high-budget western film industry, which had given us pre-war epics like John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), starring John Wayne, and Cecil B. DeMille’s Union Pacific (also 1939), with Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea, now invented a new product called “adult westerns.”
These were films with a western setting but with dramatic psychological undertones or social messages. Films like Stanley Kramer’s High Noon (1952), starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, and George Stevens’s Shane (1953), with Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Van Heflin, Brandon DeWilde, and Jack Palance, made network programmers sit up and take notice. Something new was going on.
Gary Cooper pleads for Grace Kelly’s understanding in High Noon. Public Domain.
In those days, the early 1950s, Radio was still a force, producing and airing a full variety of programs, including dramas acted out with convincing sound effects. It was only just dawning on America that everybody wanted to watch TV.
In 1952, CBS had launched a radio drama called Gunsmoke about a western marshal, Matt Dillon, played by popular voice actor William Conrad. It was meant to be a more adult kind of western than the kids’ cowboys who dominated the dial—The Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid, and the Big Three.
Matt Dillon, by contrast, would be a hard man disillusioned by constantly meeting the lowest scum of the frontier. He had a close, unspecified relationship with a dance-hall hostess, Miss Kitty, and provided steady business in the form of gunshot victims for the town physician, Doc Adams. He also had an assistant named Chester, who had little of the competence, and none of the comic relief, of traditional sidekicks like Gabby Hayes, Smiley Burnett, and Pat Buttram.
James Arness as Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke, 1956. Public Domain.
Gunsmoke episodes featured adult themes, and Marshal Dillon often found himself on the short end of the stick. The program ran for nine years during a time when radio drama was dying, the medium dissolving into a platform for disc jockeys and talk show hosts.
It was so popular that CBS made it over for TV. The manly-voiced yet pudgy actor William Conrad was replaced in the role of Matt Dillon by lanky and manly James Arness. The first television episodes of Gunsmoke ran in 1955. It played continuously in prime time, on a weekly basis, for twenty years.
Hugh O’Brian as Wyatt Earp, with Louise Fletcher, 1961. Public Domain.
In Hollywood, success breeds imitation. The imitation can be so instant that sometimes all the players seem to have the same idea at the same time. On ABC, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, starring Hugh O’Brian, premiered just four days before Gunsmoke on CBS. And Cheyenne, starring Clint Walker, came along, also on ABC, two weeks later.
It took a couple of years for the notion to sink in, but the floodgates were opened. We, the American people, simply couldn’t get enough TV westerns:
Broken Arrow, with John Lupton and Michael Ansara, ABC 1956-1960.
Have Gun—Will Travel, starring Richard Boone, CBS 1957-1963.
Sugarfoot, with Will Hutchins, ABC 1957-1961.
Wagon Train, with Ward Bond and Robert Horton, NBC 1957-1962 and ABC 1962-1965.
Maverick, starring James Garner and Jack Kelly, ABC 1957-1962.
Trackdown, with Robert Culp, CBS 1957-1959.
Wanted Dead or Alive, with Steve McQueen, CBS 1957-59.
Bronco, with Ty Hardin, ABC 1958-1962.
Steve McQueen as bounty hunter Josh Randall in Wanted Dead or Alive, 1958. Public Domain.
Bat Masterson, starring Gene Barry, NBC 1958-1961.
Lawman, starring John Russell and Peter Brown, ABC 1958-1962.
The Rifleman, with Chuck Connors, ABC 1958-1963.
Rawhide, with Eric Fleming and Clint Eastwood, CBS 1959-1965.
Bonanza, starring Lorne Greene, Pernell Roberts, Dan Blocker, and Michael Landon, NBC 1959-1973.
Laramie, with John Smith, Robert L. Crawford Jr., Robert Fuller, and Hoagy Carmichael, NBC 1959-1963.
The Virginian, starring James Drury and Doug McClure, NBC 1962-1971.
The Rebel, starring Nick Adams, ABC 1965-1961.
The Big Valley, starring Barbara Stanwyck, ABC 1965-1969.
The Wild Wild West, starring Robert Conrad and Ross Martin, CBS 1965-1969.
The High Chaparral, with Leif Erickson and Cameron Mitchell, NBC 1967-1971.
Alias Smith and Jones, with Pete Duel/Roger Davis and Ben Murphy, ABC 1971-1973.
I’ve probably left some out. They were all over the dial. Besides the newly-created westerns listed here, networks and local stations kept right on playing new installments and reruns of our old kiddie shows featuring the Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and Gene Autry. Not to mentnion variants such as Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, a Canadian western, and Sky King, an aviation western.
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Your New Favorite Writer grew up on all this intellectual property, should you choose to call it that. Dear Reader, it was intensely romantic to me.
I listend on the radio three nights a week to The Lone Ranger, that daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains. And between movies and TV, I spent hundreds of hours in Monument Valley.
But living in Illinois, I had never been any place that was not flat. When I was twelve, we moved to Wisconsin, and I learned for the first time there were hills—gently rolling, rounded hills, with holsteins grazing peacefully by well over ten thousand picturesque lakes.
I had never seen an honest-to-God mountain.
In 1958, we set out in our 1953 Buick Special for a grand tour of the West. I was thirteen and my kid sister, Cynda, was eight. We were thrilled.
Dad laid a sheet of plywood across the transmission hump in the back seat so there would be a flat floor. Cynda and I thus had our own compartment, with two sleeping berths: back bench seat and plywood floor with a sleeping bag laid over the top. There was no question of seat belts. Cars did not have them, and we did not yet know we needed them. Luckily, [SPOILER ALERT:] we did not crash.
We drove down through Illinois and Missouri, following Route 66. Not much to see, only a few oil wells with rocking-horse-style pumpjacks at the wellheads.
In western Kansas, however, around Dodge City—Gunsmoke territory, Wyatt Earp territory— the landforms began to change. Undulating hills were covered with clump grass—not actual sagebrush yet, but something definitely western-looking.
Aapproaching Albuquerque, New Mexico, we saw our first mountains, the Sandia Range, from fifty miles away! Whoa. This was something.
Sandia Mountains at sunset. Photo by G. Thomas. Public Domain.
Aunt Jo, who lived in Albuquerque, took us to Old Town, where everything was heavily Spanish-influenced. We went to a nice Mexican restaurant and ate tamales and sopapillas. We shopped in a store that claimed to be a “trading post,” where I bought a pair of genuine Indian mocassins. They weren’t very comfortable, but I sure enjoyed wearing them.
North of Albuquerque, in Taos, we stayed in our first motel. It was the usual kind of 1950s motel: A row of little cabins. The motel office in the center cabin had postcards and matchbooks that bore the slogan “Best in the West.” It didn’t mean just this particular motel. There was a group of motels that advertised together. They, as a group, were “Best in the West.”
I don’t know whether that chain evolved into today’s Best Western or not. Local motels being part of a larger, regional group—that was novel. We had never heard the term “Holiday Inn” or “Motel 6.”
We drove on through New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, and back across Minnesota and Wisconsin to home.
We saw lots of mountains. And cowboys. And tumbleweeds. And Indians. And such like.
I thought it was great. I didn’t get enough of it. In the intervening years, I’ve spent little time in the great American West. But I’ve always enjoyed it.
Maybe the reason I enjoy it so much is all those shows I saw. Not the reality of the American West, but a fanciful version conjured by writers, producers, directors, actors, and others. Did you notice I listed “writers” first? Tune in next Tuesday.
