Harry Carey and Jack Ford.

The Universal Years 1917 – 1921

On the subject of his working partnership with Harry Carey, Joseph McBride quotes Ford as saying that the actor, ‘tutored me in the early years […] I learned a great deal from Harry Carey’ (in McBride, 2003, p.109). John Ford, who was directing under the name Jack at the time, and Harry Carey established a relationship early on in the director’s career that would serve as a template for Ford’s later partnerships with actors such as Henry Fonda and John Wayne. Carey embodied the archetypal ‘good bad man’ protagonist that, quite frequently, became an integral component of the Fordian sensibility. His cowboy character, Cheyenne Harry, embraced many of the characteristic traits that can be traced in a direct lineage to other Fordian protagonists played by Fonda and Wayne and, to a lesser extent, Will Rogers.

Ford and Carey first worked together in 1917 on The Soul Herder. By the time they made their last silent film together, Desperate Trails in 1921, the director and actor had collaborated on twenty five titles, the majority with Carey as the recurring character, Cheyenne Harry. During that period, how much either Ford or Carey contributed towards the creation of Carey’s screen persona is difficult to evaluate. Tag Gallagher maintains that Ford ‘often constructed a screen character by building on foibles or eccentricities already there in the actor. Thus, for example, Harry Carey became more Harry Carey than he actually was, i.e., more charismatic and relaxed’ (Gallagher, 1986, pp.467-468). Over the four years that Carey worked with Ford, however, his screen persona, like that of Wayne’s, evolved and matured into a more psychologically complex character, suggesting that the creation of the Cheyenne Harry character was as much Carey’s as it was Ford’s. The actors son, Harry Carey Jr, is of the opinion that, at the beginning of Ford’s partnership with his father, ‘the two of them were very much alike in their creative styles [...] they loved the idea of the tramp cowboy, not the kind with the fancy clothes [...] [Cheyenne Harry] was the sort of adventurous guy who doesn’t know what’s coming up next’ (Interview with author, October, 2007).

In viewing Ford’s first full-length feature film, Straight Shooting (1917), it is apparent that this early Fordian protagonist is a complex individual from the start, Cheyenne

(Fig. 1)                   (Fig. 2)                 (Fig. 3)

Harry is portrayed in turn as whimsical (Fig. 1), taciturn (Fig. 2), and, when required, a man of action (Fig. 3).

As to the popularity of the Cheyenne Harry character with audiences, whilst not in the same league as that of William S. Hart or Tom Mix, Universal Studios obviously recognised that Ford and Carey were a unique partnership. In an age when the star was generally considered to be more important than the individuals behind the camera, it is interesting to note that Universal championed Ford’s contribution as much as that of Carey as indicated in a studio advertisiment from 1919 (Fig. 4).

           (Fig. 4)

Working creatively within the framework of the Hollywood system, one can detect in Ford’s collaboration with Carey the beginnings of an auteurist approach to film. Although Universal had their own story department, it has been suggested by a number of their contemporaries, as well as Ford himself, that both he and Carey wrote many of the scenarios for their own films. Ford attests to this by stating that ‘he [Carey] and I usually wrote our own scripts. We finally got a writer who’d take it down in shorthand and tap it out for the crew’ (in Bogdanovich, 1978, p.40).

According to Carey’s wife, Olive, ‘Universal would send out these terrible goddammned scripts […] Jack and Harry would have it all in their heads. They didn’t have anything on paper. Jack would get the picture finished, [George] Hively would

then write the script and send it in to the story department to keep them happy’ (Transcript of interview with Dan Ford, John Ford collection at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington).

The Cheyenne Harry character is a quintessential loner, embodying the notion of the Fordian protagonist as the outsider and a man of action. It would appear initially, however, that Cheyenne Harry is more of a studio construct than an immediately identifiable Fordian character type. The promotional materials issued by Universal Studios for the various Harry Carey films indicate that he was specifically marketed as a man of action (Fig. 5), and the publicity and contemporary reviews accentuate the outsider status of this protagonist, also incorporating elements of the good bad man Western persona as well. An anonymous 1918 review of Hell Bent (1918) starts with ‘Cheyenne escapes the town of Rawhide after participating in a shooting’. A ‘Motion Picture News’ review of A Fight For Love (1919) describes the main character as being ‘wanted for cattle-rustling’ (Motion Picture News, 22/03/19). In Three Mounted Men (1918), ‘Cheyenne Harry and Buck Masters, a forger, are serving sentences in jail’ (Motion Picture News, 1918). In Marked Men (1919), he is ‘serving a prison sentence for robbing a train’ (Moving Picture World, 03/01/1920).

                                    (Fig. 5)

These and other reviews suggest that the majority of the Cheyenne Harry films feature the main protagonist as an individual separate from the main social group, who must prove his worth before acceptance by a community that represents civilisation and progress. By the time Ford came to direct his fifth Western for Universal, Straight Shooting, his third with Harry Carey as Cheyenne Harry, Carey already personified the concept of the good bad man seeking redemption through acts of violence and self-sacrifice. Certain aspects of the scenario mirror the William S. Hart film Hell’s Hinges (Charles Swickard, 1916). Hart’s character, Blaze Tracey, achieves redemption by destroying a town that harbours the chief villain and his cronies, whilst Cheyenne Harry makes amends by defying the bad men who have hired him to kill a family of homesteaders and drive them off their land. Both characters are then welcomed into the community they have found themselves morally obliged to protect.

This was not the way Straight Shooting ended when originally released in 1917. According to Joseph McBride, ‘The film has come down to us with what seem like two contradictory endings – one in which Harry decides to ride away […] and another ending in which Harry tentatively decides to settle down’ (McBride, 2002, p.116). The former scenario, in which Cheyenne Harry leaves the community, is more in keeping with the nature of later Fordian protagonists such as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956) who effectively reject domesticity and civilisation for a life in the wilderness. Upon re-release in 1925, a new ending was appended, one in which Cheyenne Harry shows intent to marry the heroine instead (Fig. 6). The alternate ending suggests that Ford’s early Western protagonists must embrace community in order to become civilised themselves, a thematic trait that appears to be a constant throughout the films Ford made for Universal from 1917 to 1921.

(Fig. 6)

In Straight Shooting it is Cheyenne Harry, as a man of action, who actively confronts those who endanger the family unit, whilst the more benign members of that social group stand on the sidelines, rendered helpless and impotent against those who use violence to achieve their aims. He defeats the corrupt cattlemen attempting to drive the homesteaders from their land, thus enabling Harry to eventually join, through marriage, the very community he himself was initially hired to discriminate against. The shootout between Harry and the leader of the cattlemen prefigures the ending to Stagecoach (1939), in which the Ringo Kid kills the men responsible for the death of his brother

                  (Fig. 7)                           (Fig. 8)

in a gunfight (Figs. 7 & 8). There is a further comparison to be made between the two films, both Harry and Ringo accepting the call of family and domesticity at the conclusion of the narrative. In both, the main protagonist is, at the beginning of the narrative, firmly on the wrong side of the law. It is only through an act of violence that each character achieves redemption and acceptance by the community that has previously cold-shouldered them.

In The Scarlet Drop (1918), Carey yet again plays a character on the margins of society, discriminated against because of lack of social standing and thus denied service with the Union army at the beginning of the American Civil War. Shunned by his own side, he joins the infamous Quantrill’s Raiders, a pro-Confederate group of outlaws who are more intent on murdering and looting than fighting against the North. As with Cheyenne Harry in Straight Shooting, the main protagonist, Harry Ridge, finds himself initially on the wrong side of the law. It is only when he is presented with the possibility of rejoining his own social group that Ridge confronts those who threaten the stability of the community.

Again, violence provides the opportunity for the outsider and man of action to rejoin the social order that had previously turned them away. In turn, it should be noted that it is usually through an act of lawlessness that Ford’s protagonists are cast out of the community in the first place. In Hell Bent, Cheyenne Harry is first encountered riding into the desert to escape a posse chasing him for cheating at cards. Prior to this, however, the narrative hints that he is not totally beyond redemption. The prologue of the film features a writer by the name of Fred Worth, studying a letter from one of his readers. This scene is accompanied by a title card proclaiming, ‘Dear Mister Worth, we would be thankful to you if the hero of your next book could be a common man, like all the others, good and bad at the same time. The audience is tired of perfect heroes, which (sic) have only virtues’. The obvious suggestion is that the writer is going to endow his main character with an element of lawlessness that emphasises the journey of the protagonist from bad to good.

The passage of redemption for Harry in Hell Bent starts when he takes it upon himself to rescue a young woman from the clutches of her brother’s outlaw gang. He and the leader of the gang face up to each other in the desert, Harry eventually victorious and free to join the community that had previously forced him to escape into the same desert at the beginning of the film. This early incarnation of the good bad man attempting to achieve personal atonement is a direct ancestor to later Fordian protagonists, Ethan Edwards in particular. Both men embark upon a crusade that inevitably leads to acceptance within the community: Cheyenne Harry embraces civilisation, whilst Ethan rejects the notion of domesticity outright. Both men, though, seek to protect those who fall victim to the prejudices of the social group. Harry rescues the sister of the outlaw from the degradation of working in a saloon (Fig. 9), and Ethan returns his niece to a community that has shown reluctance to accept her after she has been kidnapped by members of the Comanche tribe (Fig. 10).

(Fig. 9)

(Fig. 10)

As J. A. Place suggests, the price that Ford’s good bad man pays in order to maintain independence and outsider status, is forfeiture of any possibility of intimacy or a stable partnership with someone of the opposite sex (Place, 1973, p.25). This noticeable change in the nature of a key Fordian protagonist, from one who is willing to forsake the life of an outlaw and become a law-abiding citizen, to that of one who is emotionally incapable of abandoning a life outside of the law and community, can be traced back to an traced back to an earlier Ford film, Marked Men (1919) (Fig. 11),presumed lost. Remade by Ford as 3 Godfathers (1948), the story is very similar to

that of 3 Bad Men, in which the outlaw protagonists momentarily abandon a life of bank-robbing to protect the life of someone more innocent than themselves, in this instance the baby of a dying mother. The fact that the film yet again features Carey as Cheyenne Harry suggests an evolutionary change in direction for both the character and the Fordian notion of the good bad man as one whom, up to that point, embraces domesticity when given the chance.

(Fig. 11)

The early incarnation of the Cheyenne Harry character is inclined to his back on the wilderness for a position within the social group, indicating a desire and need for a permanent home. If that goal should become unattainable, then it is almost a prerequisite of the protagonist to sacrifice their own well-being for the very community that rejects them in the first place. At the end of Straight Shooting, Cheyenne Harry is shown wrestling with the choice to either wander the land, or settle down with his newfound love. As already mentioned, in the original version of the film Harry gives up the opportunity for family life in order that the woman he loves can settle down with someone who is already an accepted member of the community. This act of selflessness foreshadows that of another Fordian protagonist, Tom Doniphon, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Realising that the woman he loves favours a more civilised man from the East, Doniphon first of all burns down the house he had built for his intended wife, and then partakes in an act of deception that ensures fame for the individual to whom he has lost his partner.  

The urge to establish a home, from which a family unit can then be created, drives Cheyenne Harry, in Bucking Broadway (1917), to follow his girlfriend Helen to the city, and bring her back to her natural habitat. Prior to Helen’s flight, Harry invites her to the house he has been secretly building for them both, in anticipation that they will eventually marry and settle down. They share an idyllic moment in front of an open fire (Fig. 12), the surrounding darkness hinting at Helen’s uncertainty regarding her relationship with Harry. Harry’s desire to align himself with the institution of marriage implies acceptance of the permanence of community, and rejection of the uncertainty associated with wandering the land for the rest of his life.

(Fig. 12)

In The Scarlet Drop, Harry Ridge aspires to rejoin the community he turned his back on at the beginning of the Civil War. His need to belong to something more durable than life as an outlaw underlines the risks that Ridge takes in pursuing the affections of the heroine, Molly Calvert. His quest to create a family unit places him in danger from both sides of the opposing forces in the war, Ridge eventually being forced to kill the man who had threatened to blackmail his intended wife. As with the majority of the outsiders in Ford’s early Westerns, Harry Ridge craves, and ultimately achieves acceptance, from those who had originally rejected him.

Conformity and acceptance of convention also underline the choice of Cheyenne Harry to settle down to a life of domesticity in Hell Bent and A Gun Fightin’ Gentleman (1919). Both films feature sequences in which Harry flirts with convention and ritual by sitting at a table to indulge in the civilised pastime of taking tea with a female companion. The presence of a woman in each of the sequences obviously reinforces the fact that the male protagonist will eventually be forced to decide whether he belongs to the wilderness, or if he can assimilate himself in civilised society and attempt to create a family unit.

The definable tension within the character of Cheyenne Harry between wanting to settle down yet at the same time remain close to the wilderness is also exploited by Ford as a recognisable trait of the outsider. There is an almost innate desire on behalf of the outsider to embrace a mythical and morally uncomplicated existence, rather than to align themselves with the vicissitudes of modern life. For example, in Bucking Broadway, Cheyenne Harry rides on horseback down Broadway (Fig. 13) to his girlfriend from the clutches of an evil cattle baron who has tempted the young girl away from the open spaces of the wilderness to the city. Harry represents an era that had already passed into history by the time Ford started to film his escapades. In placing him within a contemporary and more modern setting, Ford highlights the moral gap between the old and the new, at the same time indulging his own passion for a past that was less complicated, a past that perhaps never existed except in the director’s own imagination.

(Fig. 13)

It is in the films that Ford made with Harry Carey, and the desire of the Cheyenne Harry character to reject modern civilisation, that one can trace the beginnings of the director’s own non-modernist stance towards a future that threatens to smother the mythical past. Ford indicates his admiration for an idyllic and Utopian age in preference to that of a more contemporary society, an ideology that is expressed within the narrative of practically all the Westerns the director would ultimately become famous for. The majority of Ford’s films with Carey, and a large number of films that followed, dwell on the past rather than contemporary society. The values and moral standards celebrated in his films champion a brief age of civilisation, caught somewhere between the end of the settling of the West in the 1870s, and the early part of the 20^th Century.

Steve Mayhew 

Bibliography

Bogdanovich, P. (1978) John Ford, 2nd Edition, California, University of California Press

Gallagher, T. (1988) John Ford: The Man and his Films, 2nd Edition, California, University of California Press

McBride, J. (2003) Searching for John Ford, London, Faber and Faber Limited

Place, J.A. (1973) The Western Films of John Ford, Secaucus, The Citadel Press