Longish

Character Moodboards // Will Kane

I’ve got to. That’s the whole thing.

she doesn't do a lot to underline peckinpah's most beloved themes, she's mostly there to get assaulted many times, i think her naivety and black-and-white sense of morality could have been collapsed into. what's this fucker's name. heck longtree. the young jaded one, without really affecting the plot very much. judd and elsa aren't even a great parallel to the more vicious pair of westrum and longtree.

the whole inciting incident, the "am i gonna double cross my old best friend in order to steal (checks notes) the $11k in gold we're transporting down a big mountain instead of the $250k i thought was here at this mine" more than fills the "honor and ideals compromised by circumstance, the difficulty of doing right in an unjust world" themes peckinpah likes so much. the "will they help this girl get out from under the thumb of her abusive father in order to marry some guy who's also abusive and then help her get out of that also" b-plot seems to be there to fill time. which like. fine. i get you need a ninety minute movie and not an episode of television but think of a better b-plot. there was a whole ass carnival you didn't do shit with.

was it a competently made, well shot film? sure. did i enjoy the four separate assault scenes? no! why are those there at all! it's not like an equal amount of time is given to "wow the west sure sucks for guys too" bc mccrea's character is just like. poor and a little creaky and is not smothering under a life forced on him like elsa. i think getting shot four times over the course of his career is bad but on a different level of bad than being sexually assaulted four times in the course of three days and if THAT was the parallel peckinpah was trying to draw it's not a very good one

…and then how he absolutely SLAMS him down on it as though he’s delivering the coup de grâce in a professional wrestling match. The man has about 50 internal injuries, Jim!

I suspect the actual reason is that while it’s difficult to carry another grown person while standing, it’s MUCH more difficult to let them down gently because gravity starts to take over once you start bending. DeForest Kelley is thin but he’s still an adult male. 

with great skill

@cmee57 It’s just a hunch. Honestly, I know little about Anglo-Catholicism, since I’m an American from the south. But Waugh is great.

kivrin - you mentioned that Foyle read T.S. Eliot, who, Wikipedia informs me, was an Anglo-Catholic (we’re up to three - it’s a conspiracy!!). Eliot described himself as one with “a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament.” That gets me thinking. Could Foyle be someone aesthetically attracted to Catholicism - as portrayed in Waugh’s works - but with a no-frills, discipline-centric approach to doctrine - thus the Lutheran Bonhoeffer? (FWIW - that’s pretty much me.) Waugh, Greene, and Bonhoeffer all spent a lot of time writing about grace - there’s another commonality - and though this probably shows my ignorance of Catholicism - a focus on sola gratia strikes me as a Protestant emphasis. On the other hand, Foyle may have known of Bonhoeffer simply because, as Sam’s uncle mentioned, Bonhoeffer had been in England before the war. 

I note from wikipedia that both Waugh and Greene were converts to Catholicism in the 1920s/early 30s,  and Eliot was a convert from Unitarianism to Anglicanism (and specifically Anglo-Catholicism).  Converting to Catholicism in England at that period was probably only slightly less shocking than it would have been in the nineteenth century when there were still laws excluding Roman Catholics from full civil life.  I imagine the iconoclasm and apparent reactionary-ness of those moves (from CofE to RC, and Unitarian to CofE) by highly educated men might be fascinating to Foyle the “bolshy” individualist.  

Waugh and Greene are about 15 years younger than Foyle, the first cohort of men to be too young for service in WWI, so there might be a sort of fascination to that aspect as well - “this is what men who didn’t go through that are doing.”

Foyle has never struck me as personally devout, in the sense of practicing Christianity in any way apart from church attendance (though I can think of few people with a better track record for, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer’s charge to godparents, “renounc[ing] the devil and all his works, [and] the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same”)  I tend to imagine him as having a middle-of-the-road late-nineteenth-century Church of England upbringing (neither evangelical nor Anglo-Catholic) with some Sunday School, but in adulthood being a churchgoer but not a communicant.  (The distinction might not be very obvious to onlookers since - startlingly to an American Episcopalian of the early twenty-first century like me - Morning Prayer rather than the Communion Service was the main act of corporate Sunday worship in a majority of parishes of the Church of England up through the 1960s.)  

re: English Roman Catholics, longishthoughts, have you read In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden?  It is a terrific novel about a cloistered order of Benedictine nuns in Sussex (actually not far from Hastings!) in the 1950s-1970s.

In terms of fictional Anglo-Catholics, I have an affection for Susan Howatch’s Church of England novels that is out of all proportion to their literary merit.  I like to call them “ER with bishops” - instead of going into cardiac arrest, the characters spiritual lives go to pieces and they are revived with heroic doses of monastic practices.  The appeal for me, aside from all the minutiae of clerical garb and cathedral paraphernalia, is that probably that the tension driving the plots is usually about vocation and relationships and self-deception regarding those two issues.  

Of more literary merit, though still somewhat soap-operatic content, is Catherine Fox’s Acts and Omissions, an account of a year in the life of a CofE cathedral with particularly attention to the clergy and choir.  

Oh, and then there’s Robertson Davies’ The Cunning Man which involves the doings of a big Anglo-Catholic parish in Toronto.  Not Davies’ best work, alas, but I reread it for the bits about St. Aidan’s.

’[I]t’s easy to see which side of the family has the detective instinct.’

‘My dear child, you can give it a long name if you like, but I’m an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it’s so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes.’

Sauron: Yeah

Mouth of Sauron: Do we actually have him?

Sauron: No, but we’re looking. 

Mouth of Sauron:

Mouth of Sauron: If they find out I’m bluffing, I’m gonna look really stupid. 

Sauron: They’re going to believe you. You’re very scary looking, Greg. 

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