Peter von Bagh

As San Sebastian is under a new leadership fighting for its rightful place among the leading film festivals of Europe, it was natural that an especially magnificent retrospective was in order - them being by now an interestingly regular part of programming among all major festivals. William Wellman (1896-1975) was certainly an ideal choice, even when the sheer scope of his output meant that only a little less than one half of his some 60 sound films and 3 out of his 15 silents (most of them lost) was actually shown. Wellman has remained an unknown and outcast - and he is uneven beyond doubt: the more you see of his films, the more nonchalant he seems to be (even in films he produced himself). At the same time, the impression is all the time more strong and impressive, which makes it difficult to understand why some of the best writers (Sarris, Tavernier and Coursodon) tend to experience his output as deceptive when seen as a series. The opposite happened to us in San Sebastian - at least, I witnessed only enthusiasm around me. (The strange jumps of Wellman's Weltanschauung don't diminish his charm - he might be unrelented in his stand against fascism, and equally tough towards communism, or democracy at that, in one of the more tolerable cold war cakes - called The Iron Curtain and missing in San Sebastian, as were the even more alarmingly bad films like The Next Voice You Hear). Perhaps I should also mention the paradoxical and fatal echo that important retrospectives cause when they develop aside new and competition repertoire: a new hit like In the Line of Fire (Wolfgang Pedersen 1993) is so easily a boring experience if you have witnessed the constantly intriguing formal inventions of Wellman just before.

The most often mentioned "great" ones of Wellman are obviously Wings, Public Enemy, Heroes for Sale, Wild Boys of the Road, A Star is Born, The Ox-Bow Incident, The Story of G.I. Joe and Yellow Sky, all of which did match on the screens of San Sebastian, and should be complemented in our golden memories by many equally remarkable ones: You Never Know Women, Other Men's Women, Safe in Hell, Midnight Mary, Roxie Hart, Westward the Women, Track of the Cat, Goodbye My Lady... I can't boast of having seen all the rest (among the missing and longed films were, among others, The President Vanishes, The Lady of Burlesque, and Across the Wide Missouri), but the selection and the prints were fine (with the sad exception of the eagerly expected, because almost never shown, The Story of G.I. Joe).

Seen through the genre pictures, "Wild Bill" shows his last irreverence, not respecting at all the critical need to label and classify films into nice groups. Having seen too few of his flight films, I trust Tavernier and Coursodon on the paradox that the former air-pilot Wellman went paradoxically routine with this privileged genre. Maybe so, although Wings remains amazing (no other film shows the total view of war in such a magnitude, or conveys the sense of "being there", resulting not in "action" but sooner into a near intolerable close up of death and tragic experience), and Lafayette Escadrille, doomed by everybody (including Wellman, who felt betrayed by the changes), is an emotional farewell. The scarcity of silent Wellman films is a real loss: You Never Know Women (1926), the 12th film of Wellman, is - like Wings - an insider's view, show-business from inside, with "pure filmic" means; and Beggars of Life is a touching prelude of the roads of the Depression era.

Within the genre formation, his westerns were a fascinating bunch. Robin Hood of Eldorado, with its sudden changes of tone, poetic laws all of their own (the logic and non-logic, typical of a born teller) is different from any other western; many of the following ones created each a kind of sub-genre of their own. The Ox-Bow Incident is one of the greatest studio films ever, with its shadow play of justice and claustrophobic sets fully reflecting the horror story of spontaneous violence outpouring from the depths of decent citizens. Buffalo Bill, mostly judged to stay within mere illustration, already dramatizes both the "print the legend" perspective of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, plus the bitter corrections that Robert Altman was going to do with the "legend" (plus a moving, more general, understanding that life is always serious at first, but then becomes a parody). Yellow Sky belongs to the fraternity of Greed and Treasure of Sierra Madre, a violent film with almost no action (shoot-out being almost a phantom, with the shadows of horses conveying what really happened during the final power game), and the theme of Across the Wide Missouri ("they died nameless, they achieved immortality") well expressing the philosophy of Wellman's adventures. Westward the Women (1951), a film about a hard journey (its kill-or-get-killed is told in a way that makes both Red River and Wagonmaster look romantic, with dust, rain, mud and sand, it is almost one of Wellman's war films), is one of the great ones. One of its cruel random incidents (one hallmark of Wellman's) is especially shocking: an Italian lady is rehearsing with guns and kills her 10 years old son, just accidentally. Track of the Cat (1954), with its odd atavisms, mysticism, and the abracadabra of a demented family history (and strange color system, plus a fabulous cinemascope) is a fascinating introduction to the "experimental" passions of Wellman as well as his hidden demons.

Wellman was in his element during the "before the Code" period, and many of his films surface in the "Forbidden Hollywood" collections. His was a personal moral, outside the fake morality society was preaching: seldom a story, as well as pure "mise-en-scène", shows this better than Safe in Hell, where a woman chooses death by execution against corrupting herself. The totally unpredictable combination of tenderness and cruelty (the accident in Wild Boys on the Road, as a boy loses his leg) is certainly one of the Wellman characteristics. Despite the deliciously irreverent tone (and equally irrespectful story line, helped by Ben Hecht in his most inspired mood) and the flow of near-tasteless gags, most of the films stay safely within the Hollywood conventions: the trapped victims of the Depression are "good" in an unbelievable way, and an obeyance of convention invalidities another hard case, Heroes for Sale - as the beginning and end are almost in flames as social utopies and fears, the middle story is banally tied to dead personnel plots and script conventions.

The unknown and unrelented masterpiece, Midnight Mary, is an exception with its fast and tough 74 minutes: the puzzle and extreme hazards of life and the mysteries of film form are one in it. Its blessed irreverence continues in all its absurdity and blackness in Nothing Sacred (rare among the greatest screwball films to have an aggressively rural - moronic content), and Roxie Hart, both of which are (among other things) unsurpassed visions about publicity and media power. Wellman's comedies were at best as tough as his action films, and a certain tendency to mingle characteristics from quite unrelated genres is typical for him.

A frenzy easily born as the retrospective was progressing, led me to think for the first time that Wellman's original Star Is Born matches Cukor's masterpiece as an inspired insider's view of tinseltown pain. Seeing some 30 films in a row also gave a sense of intensive, secretive repetitions and images, the most beautiful of which remains the one often mentioned by Wellman in his interviews - rain. His sense of scenery and weather was as beautiful as that of Ford (who voted for wind), as his sense of adventure, physical action and men in war had the same depth as the best of Hawks or Walsh. The Story of G.I.Joe (1945) has both its rain scenes and its legendary power intact, just because it is, formally and thematically (a tale of unheroic, ordinary men, told more according to the individual logic of the group members than to the "story" logic), a film that only Wellman in this world could have directed. His last masterpiece was the very wonderful Goodbye My Lady (1956), a juvenile film about a boy and a dog - and nature, swamp, family - how every age requires a loss to get transformed truly and fully into a meaningful new phase.

I should end with a melancholy note. Jose Luis Guarner, a unique film writer from Barcelona, followed the Wellman screenings attentively, as he still saw all the miracles of Pordenone, only a few weeks before his death. His laughter during and his happiness after the screening of Midnight Mary - his new favourite among the many wonderful Wellman films, as it was mine - is the image I want to preserve from San Sebastian, as an homage to all involved: those who arranged the festival, to the heavenly powers of a meaningful communication between silver screen and ourselves, to "Wild Bill" Wellman Himself over there.