Respect for women.  The detestation of cruelty, whether that of the Indian or of the white man.  Manly struggle for the good of others.

These are the values upheld in the short 1957 novel, West to the Sun, by Noel Loomis. Loomis wrote Westerns, and this is essentially what Sun is despite its being set in the 1700s on the cusp of the Revolutionary War.  Yes, the characters–Englishmen, Frenchmen and Spaniards in North America–are paper-thin, but the story is a sturdy grabber and the details are engaging.  Disturbing too:  boy, could the Indians be shockingly brutal!

In Between the Lines (1977), directed by Joyce Micklin Silver, pleasing performances issue from John Heard, Lindsay Crouse, Stephen Collins, Jill Eikenberry and others. Thanks to Silver, though, Eikenberry looks almost unattractive, and so does the satisfactory Gwen Welles except for her bare bosom.

The flick is about the worldly concerns of workers at an underground newspaper, the Mainline, in Boston. (Heard’s character is a Damn Good Writer.) Although I was often entertained by it, I found very little of it to be believable. It ain’t the gold we would like to see from Silver.

Though it has a sympathetic attitude toward the Indians of the late 1800s, the Martin Ritt Western, Hombre (1967), is close to misanthropic.  The white brave whom Paul Newman plays is a cold man who, at long last, makes up for his coldness at the movie’s end.  The whites who accompany him on a stagecoach ride are not always very decent, and such men as enacted by Richard Boone and Frederic March (an atheistic jerk—the character, I mean) are clearly depraved.

Based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, the film is interesting and somber, not to mention curiously tragic—eventually dropping, in my view, the near misanthropy for a kind of humanism.  Ritt directed cleverly, and there is a lot of good acting.

Cover of Hombre

In the Anton Corbijn film, Control (2007), among Western nations England in the 1970s doesn’t seem to have much going for it. Young Ian Curtis (Sam Riley), however, has a lot going for him with respect to creating rock songs, and is the lead singer of the well-liked band Joy Division. But Curtis is a wayward romantic and a suffering sinner (and naif). He is afflicted with epilepsy and a lack of love for his wife Debbie (Samantha Morton) whom he treats inhumanely. He cheats on her with a woman called Annik. He is indifferent to the child he wanted his wife to bear. Curtis, a real-life person, commits suicide at age 23.

Control is about a man who finally cannot reconcile himself to social life, at all. Personal failure kills him. Made in black and white, the film is like a grim 400 Blows for young adults (and everyone else), without being the masterpiece that Truffaut’s movie is. Why we never hear what Curtis thinks about his music I don’t know, but Corbijn’s film is absorbing nonetheless. A first feature for the Danish director, it is refreshingly free of visual artiness—and of shallow acting. Important, that.

In the Fifties Mark Robson adapted for the screen a James Michener book, The Bridges at Toko-Ri. Having to do with naval aircraft in the Korean War, the film does what any such war movie would be expected to do by 1954, the year of its release. It makes intelligent use of aerial space and it doesn’t stint on the American bombing of those Korean bridges. It also pays attention to technology and procedure in the military, and is good with crowd scenes; Robson is. Bridges is highly worth seeing, especially for the solid performance of Fredric March, whose Rear Admiral Tarrant is a grave and observant figure.