Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Do Not Forsake Me,
Oh, My Dushen’ka
Should Tex Ritter and John Wayne be cancelled as Russian
sympathizers?
Imagine Tex Ritter, that good ol’ Panola County boy,
singing a western song composed by a veteran of the Soviet Red Army whose early
works include music for huge Communist spectacles. Who among us hasn’t joined
in to sing along with that merry toe-tapper, “The Storming of the Winter Palace?”
Imagine John Wayne hiring the same Russian musician for a
number of his movies as well as becoming his friend.
And it’s true, of course. Dmitri Tiompkin was born in the
Russian Empire in what is now Ukraine, was educated in Saint Petersburg / Petrograd
/ Leningrad, did some time in the Red Army, and made his way to Hollywood via
Berlin, Paris, and New York. Had he been able to find steady work in the USSR he
would later have been murdered in Stalin’s purges of thousands of artists,
poets, scholars, filmmakers, musicians, soldiers, childhood friends, old
comrades, Ukrainians, and, finally, physicians.
Tiompkin, a classically trained musician, was a biggie in
American films for almost fifty years, and won his first Oscar for High Noon,
including its title song, “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh, My Darling.”
John Wayne famously disliked High Noon for its
purported Communist associations, although the Soviets criticized the film for its
“individualistic” protagonist. In this movie the solitary sheriff faces the
baddies with no help from the citizens except his Quaker wife.
As a response to High Noon John Wayne and Howard
Hawks made Rio Bravo which took the same situation – a solitary hero facing
a bunch of bad dudes – and reverses the concept by having the sheriff refuse
the help of the willing but untrained citizenry, who in the end show up anyway.
Both are brilliant American films, but one would be
required in film class with the sheriff as a protagonist; the other is a
Saturday afternoon yippee in which the sheriff is a hero. “Protagonist” is film
school; “hero” is old school. High Noon is in minimalist black-and-white
and Rio Bravo is in glorious Technicolor. High Noon is heavy with
introspection and existential philosophy, but Rio Bravo is pretty high
in thinky-ness too.
What High Noon really lacks, though, is Angie
Dickinson throwing a flowerpot through a saloon window.
Both films were scored by Dimitri Tiompkin. Wayne and
Hawks were hawks, all right, but they wanted their favorite Russian to make the
music, and no one could depict the old west as well as Tiompkin, who wrote in
his autobiography:
A steppe is a steppe is
a steppe.... The problems of the cowboy and the Cossack are very similar. They
share a love of nature and a love of animals. Their courage and their
philosophical attitudes are similar, and the steppes of Russia are much like
the prairies of America.
The point in all this is that neither Russians nor anyone
else should act like Communists or Putin-istas through acts of canceling, of
censorship, and we’ve been getting some of that lately. Recently we have seen
pictures of silly people pouring Russian vodka into sewers, which neglects the
reality that the Russians were already paid for the vodka. But some folks never
allow an opportunity for posturing to go by.
Many thousands of Russians are in prison right now for
protesting Mr. Putin’s illegal and unrestrained invasion of Ukraine. They
represent many more thousands of Russians who agree with them but are not yet
ready to be beaten in the streets, humiliated, arrested, imprisoned, and tortured.
They are not posturing. They are being censored and, in some cases, canceled – really
canceled - for disapproving of the mass murder of their Ukrainian neighbors.
When anyone suggests canceling or censorship, let us
remember that the First Amendment (Russia doesn’t have one of those) is all
about not canceling or censoring.
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