Raoul Walsh, between the Western and the Southern: Pursued (1947), Silver River

Abstract

This essay analyses how three films directed by Raoul Walsh and released as Westerns at the end of the forties are, in fact, steeped in the codes of “Southern” films, recalling films such as Gone with the Wind and heralding The Night of the Hunter or Walsh’s own “Southern” Band of Angels. These “Westerns” merge classical themes of the genre (the conquest of the West, mining, railroad extension, attacks on stagecoaches, train robberies, outlaws — in a typically male world) with the themes of plantation films: nostalgia for a paradise lost, the predominance of the past, a clandestine or mixed-race identity, Gothic elements, dilapidated houses, graveyards and memento mori, and strong female characters. Pursued, located in the wild landscapes of New Mexico, is built on the hero’s quest to recover his identity, on the ghostly return of the repressed and on the recognition of the destroyed childhood home; the film re-plays the Civil War in a conflict against the Spaniards, while constructing a complex Scarlett-like female character. Silver River mixes the ruthless environment of the silver mines with more refined places such as steam boats, game houses and ballrooms; the character of Georgia, with a first name that connotes the South, represents a blend of the Southern Belle and Calamity Jane. Finally, Colorado Territory presents outlaw Wes McQueen as a runaway slave, emphasizes the uprooting of the Winslows after their departure from the Deep South to settle in the Far West, and dramatizes the direct opposition between two women — the Southern Belle, Julie Ann, and the Indian half-blood, Colorado, whose names assert their geographical origins. The meeting of the Western and the Southern seems to give rise to an intense confrontation between a male-coded world and a female-coded world, in a war of the sexes that challenges filmic and social norms.