Arizona

There’s nothing more satisfying for me than watching a great western. More often than not criminals in a good western do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men. The men they wronged. The outlaws in a great many westerns I watch know they won’t get away. They know they ultimately can’t get away. I once knew a man who committed no crime, but was sentenced to prison because he was persuaded to take a plea. He’d been severely beaten and raped at a penitentiary transfer station. So they put him in a hospital to make him better so that they could make him worse. He was destined to be beaten and raped again. During the eight years he was gone, he collapsed a number of times as a result of Parkinson’s disease, and the doctors put him in the hospital again. He became friends with the nurses and the doctors, and after a while they helped him to get well enough to go back and take more punishment. I saw him after the brutal attacks and he was a broken man. The spirit of the man was gone. The person sitting next to me during the visit with the man said, “This country’s law and their stinking judges! Isn’t anyone going to do something about them?” Staring into the hollow face of the beaten man I once knew as my brother I said, “I don’t want the people who made the law, and I don’t want the people who passed the sentence. The only ones I want to see get theirs are those that falsely accused and caused this pain.” I am convinced that will never really happen. A good western soothes my soul in the midst of the conflict raging in my mind. Last night I enjoyed watching Arizona. Released in 1940, Arizona is more memorable for the thousands of feet of stock footage it provided for other films. For this tale of the development of Arizona, Columbia reconstructed Tucson as the mud-adobe town it had been while the movie’s director, Wesley Ruggles, created set-pieces in the style of De Mille. In one of the movie’s best scenes, the town’s inhabitants watch the Union troops setting light to everything in their wake, as they withdraw. Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur starred in the picture.