John M. Stahl's Strictly Dishonorable

John M. Stahl is mostly known today (to the extent he is known at all) for his melodramas -- Imitation of Life in 1934, Leave Her to Heaven in 1945, et al. -- but he was also quite skilled with comedy, as in Strictly Dishonorable in 1931, from a Preston Sturges play.  The film stars Paul Lucas as a womanizing opera singer and Sidney Fox as the sweet girl who is the target of his lust (need I mention that this is a pre-Code film, with all of Sturges's sexual innuendo intact?).  Fox and the annoying George Meeker are planning to marry and live with his mother in West Orange, N.J. but they stop at a speakeasy and everything changes.  Lewis Stone, later Andy Hardy's father, is an inebriated judge who lives upstairs, just as the opera singer Paul Lukas does.  Lukas tries to seduce Fox but ends up smitten by her sweetness, while Stone gets Meeker out of the way by telling Irish cop Mulligan (Sidney Toler) that Meeker is an Orangeman and convinces Mulligan to put him in jail for the night.

Perhaps if Hollywood had not instituted the Code Sturges might not have felt the need to direct his own films, not only for control but to circumvent the Code, as he did so brilliantly in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944).  In Strictly Dishonorable Lukas uses those exact words to describe for Fox his intentions, though Stahl leaves it ambiguous as to whether Fox understands what that means and whether it appeals to her, as she is too busy looking at the cigarette butts in Lukas's ashtrays and  noticing the lipstick.  Bringing the opera singer and the naïve girl from the South together was possibly Sturges's tribute to the influences of his father's practicality and his mother's interest in culture.  Stahl and cinematographer Karl Freund (who had worked with Murnau) keep the plot, the dialogue and the camera moving through the two basic sets, as the night gradually turns to morning.

Gregory La Cava's Smart Woman 1931

Rich and poor, masters and servants, socialites and Socialists are observed side by side in La Cava's films with what appears to be a cultivated impartiality.
--Roger McNiven, American Directors Volume I, McGraw Hill 1983

Gregory La Cava is not a name remembered by many filmgoers today, though W. C. Fields (are people aware of him?) thought he had the best instincts for comedy (other than that of Fields himself).  Few of La Cava's dozen or so silent films are ever shown and he is best remembered for the so-called screwball comedy My Man Godfrey (1936), while most of his films are awaiting rediscovery.

In the pre-code days and early sound days (1929-1933) studios tended to play it safe by adopting  plays and shooting them on limited sets.  Smart Woman, from a play by Myron Fagan and an adaptation by playwright Salisbury Field, has a brief scene on a boat and the rest of it takes place in and around a large country house, owned by Mr. and Mrs Gibson (Robert Ames and Mary Astor).  Nancy Gibson comes home from France after visiting her mother there and finds her sister-in-law (Ruth Weston) and her husband's business partner (Edward Everett Horton) at home after her husband had failed to meet her at the dock.  She soon discovers that her husband has taken up with a young gold-digger (Noel Francis) and wants a divorce.  Nancy quickly recovers from the bad news and suggests inviting the gold-digger and her mother (who is always with her) for the week-end and, scheming to get her husband back, invites the wealthy Sir Guy (John Halliday)-- whom she met on the boat -- to pretend to be her lover while at the same time he is seducing Peggy, the gold-digger.  Lots of intrigue and permutations follow, worthy of P.G. Wodehouse and played with low-key and deadpan humor. The film ends with the Gibsons back together, Peggy and her mother gone, and Sir Guy melancholic after falling in love with Nancy and leaving alone.

During the thirties the male stars did not shine as much as the female ones.  Robert Ames (who died of drugs and alcohol shortly after Smart Woman was released) is, to one's modern eyes, a somewhat more ineffectual George Brent and one thinks that the luminously backlit Mary Astor (Nicholas Muscura, who photographed Out of the Past,1947, and a number of other films noirs, was the cinematographer) deserved better.

Turner Classic Movies Sept. 2019

Solid month of classic films, including the return of Noir Alley, after a one month hiatus.

Sept. 1 starts the month out well:  Lubitsch's The Merry Widow (1934), Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), Mark Sandrich directing Rogers and Astaire in Top Hat (1935), Fritz Lang's intense and fatalistic Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) and John Ford's The Searchers (1956).

Sept. 4 has King Vidor's Street Scene (1931; see my post of Dec. 1, 2018),Howard Hawks's Scarface (1932), D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossons (1919), Buster Keaton's The General (1927),

Sept. 5 Phil Karlson's corrosive The Phenix City Story (1955), Otto Preminger's widescreen black-and-white Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), Chaplin's The Circus (1928).
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Sept. 9 Charles Walters's charming musical Good News (1947, see my post of Jun. 17, 2018)

Sept. 11 Deborah Kerr in Michael Powell's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940), and Alexander MacKendrick's dark The Sweet Smell of Success (1957).

Sept. 14 Budd Boetticher's austere Western Ride Lonesome (1957)

Sept. 17 Otto Preminger's film noir Angel Face (1953)

Sept. 19  Kay Francis in Robert Florey's The House on 56th St.(1933, see my post of 4/1/19), John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939).

Sept. 21 three bleak masterpieces:  Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953), Otto Preminger's The Man with The Golden Arm (1956, from the Nelson Algren novel), Jean Renoir's Woman on the Beach (1947).

Sept. 24 Phil Karlson's downbeat caper film 5 Against the House (1955)

Sept. 30 Vincente Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy (1956), from the play by Robert Anderson, who went to the same prep school I did, where the play and movie take place.

Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed by Lisa Duggan

Lisa Duggan's book (University of California Press, 2019) is a fairly incisive review of Rand's life and work.  I read Atlas Shrugged (1957) when I was twelve years old and its anti-authoritarian stance made quite an impression on me, who grew up in a small town with authoritarian parents and teachers.  There were very few books in my house and no public library (there was an elementary school library, consisting of mostly white-washed histories of famous Americans) so when I got a paper route at twelve I spent much of the money on the paperbacks on the racks in the local store; Atlas Shrugged was one of my first purchases.  Of course I had never heard of it but I was instantly enthralled by its combination of melodrama and didacticism that suggested it was okay to think for oneself.

Of course I have since grown up -- something Alan Greenspan and other Rand acolytes never did -- and realize it is a nice adolescent fantasy to think it possible to always "objectively" act in one's own self interest -- as Marx, Freud and many others have demonstrated -- something Rand couldn't always successfully do for herself.  And I was misled to think Rand supported the idea of thinking for oneself; it was only allowed if one agreed with Rand.  When I read Atlas Shrugged it did, however, strike a clear note about the absurdity of religion, something I was feeling myself at the time and which kept Rand always at odds with religious conservatives such as Bill Buckley.

Duggan does go a bit askew when she relates Rand to what she refers to as "neoliberalism," which she ascribes to both Reagan and Margaret Thatcher;.  I wonder if terms such as neoliberalism and populism are at all useful in the current political climate.  Duggan does point our correctly that Rand has had a big influence on tech gurus, many of whom are fans of Rand, for better and, more often, for worse (the idea that the rich deserve to be rich and it is their own fault that the poor are poor). And I do have a quibble with Duggan's oversimplification of the film industry (where Rand worked for a time):  "a major economic powerhouse by selling glittering prosperity and glamour, of heroic white American conquest and industry."  There have been a number of filmmakers who have shown a more complex view of America, even after the Hays code was enforced, with portrayals of working class women and men (John M. Stahl, William Wellman) and Native Americans (John Ford, George B. Seitz), as well as King Vidor (the director of The Fountainhead, 1949), who is not mentioned by Duggan.

Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar's American Factory

It was somewhat dispiriting to watch this exemplary documentary by Reichert and Bognar on Netflix.  Chinese mogul Cao Dewang opened a Fuyao glass factory in a shuttered General Motors plant in Dayton, Ohio.  Many former auto workers were happy to get jobs that allowed them to move out of the basement in relatives' houses.  Everything seemed  rosy, even though former autoworkers were now making $14 an hour after having made $29 at GM.  But Cao wasn't making enough money so safety precautions were reduced and pressure was exerted on the workers, with American supervisors replaced by Chinese.  Some workers spoke in favor of a union and attempted to organize and the organizers were fired, one by one (technically illegal but hard to prove, as other reasons were found) while union-busting consultants were hired to mislead and intimidate workers.  Some workers were rewarded for their loyalty by being flown to China's Fuyao factories, where the regimented workers received one or two days off a month and often worked 12-hour days.  The workers in Dayton voted against a union.

In the news this week, however, was a story about Democratic candidates for the presidency appearing at the Iowa Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO.  It has been well established that inequality in this country is directly related to the diminishing number of union members and all the Democratic candidates are resolved to do something about this.  Bernie Sanders has the most detailed plan, which includes substantially increasing union membership by signing cards (ending the voting that gives management the opportunity to intimidate), ending right-to-work laws, bargaining by industry instead of by company and requiring the savings received by companies no longer needing union-negotiated health plans (Medicare for all taking their place) be used for raising wages and adding other benefits.

Edward L. Cahn's Guns Girls and Gangsters 1958

"lean and mean."
Danilo Castro describing Guns Girls and Gangsters in  "Noir City" no.26

Edward L. Cahn's career lasted from 1931 to 1961, during which he directed over 100 films, nine in 1958 alone!  The quality of course varied (see my previous posts about his work) but Guns Girls and Gangsters was one of the best of his later films, just as Law and Order and Afraid to Talk (both from 1932) were among the best of his early work.  Guns Girls and Gangsters (there was only one girl and no real gangsters but everybody has a gun) has a gritty intensity and integrity.  The Girl is played by Mamie Van Doren at her slinkiest, singing two single-entendre songs -- by Buddy Bregman and Stanley Styne -- "Anything Your Heart Desires" and "Meet Me Halfway, Baby" and crooks Gerald Mohr (who was terrific as Philip Marlowe on the radio) and Grant Richards are in love with her and planning to rob an armored car carrying cash from Las Vegas to Los Angeles.  Van Doren tells Mohr to wait, her husband is in jail, and he says "fine; I don't mind waiting as long as I'm first in line."  Van Doren agrees to take part in the robbery and helps to case things while staying at The Stagecoach Inn (suggesting the film's relationship to Westerns), run by a pleasant Korean War vet and his wife. Unfortunately Van Doren's husband -- played by the sleazy Lee Van Cleef -- escapes from jail just before the robbery takes place and insists on being a part of it; the body count rises as everything goes wrong.

There is impressive imagery in this film, from a fistfight entirely inside a motorcar to Van Doren driving an Edsel and pulling a horse trailer loaded with electronic gadgets to use in the robbery.  There is a stentorian narration that helps to fill the holes in the plot and a mood of passion and fatalism as well as a grim ending that helps to qualify this low-budget film as a film noir.  The film was written and photographed by, respectively,  B veterans Robert E. Kent and Kenneth Peach.  Guns Girls and Gangsters is currently available on Amazon Prime.

Peter Bogdanovich's Great Buster: A Celebration

Perhaps Peter Bogdanovich's talent lies more in the field of documentaries than narrative fiction film.  Bogdanovich's film about Buster Keaton is a worthy successor to his 1971 Director John Ford and celebrates Keaton's ten great feature films of the twenties while chronicling his forty-year decline afterwards, until he was re-discovered just before his death in 1966.  I saw most of Keaton's films when they were shown at the Elgin Theatre in New York in the seventies;  there were lines around the block, as most of these films had long been unavailable.

It's always a question what point this kind of documentary makes:  if people have never heard of Buster Keaton will they watch this documentary and, even if they do, will they seek out his films?  If one has seen all of Keaton's great films is there anything to be gained by watching Bogdanovich's tribute?  Two inevitable quibbles I have:  the first is that the film emphasizes the brilliance of the gags in Keaton's films at the expense of their role in the narrative and, secondly, Bogdanovich goes out of his way to tell us how funny something is before he shows it to us.  Even if it is funny I can decide that for myself.  Bogdanovich also has little or nothing to say about the beauties of Keaton's films, which are considerable, even if one doesn't find them particularly funny.

Still, Bogdanovich's excerpts from Keaton's films are  well chosen, just as the ones from Chaplin's films were when Bogdanovich put them together for the Oscar broadcast in 1972, when Chaplin received his honorary Academy Award.  When the Chaplin excerpts were shown, however, most of Chaplin's films were unavailable and I think the overwhelming response to that Oscar broadcast was a factor in Chaplin allowing them to again be shown (at that point only The Gold Rush,1925, was available, somehow it had fallen into the public domain).  Fortunately Turner Classic Movies screened a number of Keaton's films along with Bogdanovich's documentary. Keaton's films have long been available (on DVD as well as often shown at Film Forum in New York) and one can only wonder if Bogdanovich's loving tribute will provoke increased interest.

Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise by James Steichen

In less than a decade, George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein had faced challenges and opportunities that neither likely envisioned when they first met in the summer of 1933 in London.  Their collective enterprise had weathered much:  summertime thunderstorms in Westchester county, byzantine politics at the Metropolitan Opera, mediocre reviews and lukewarm audiences, recalcitrant corporate monopolies, and the continued dominance of Russian ballet in the public imagination.
--James Steichen, Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise, Oxford University Press 2019.

This detailed but flatly written and overly notated (over a thousand footnotes for 236 pages of text) book comes across like a dissertation, though the author says the work was only "inspired" by his dissertation.  In any case, it's not surprising that a PhD in musicology puts more emphasis on music than dance.  Steichen's book tells us everywhere Balanchine and Kirstein were in the 1930's and more or less what they did but it doesn't go much beyond that; the analyses of the ballets especially do not go very far beyond the superficial.  And there are endless and useless quotes from critics of the time along the lines of "a deeply felt work."  Few critics then or now have been able to write intelligently about ballet; they either can't use standard ballet vocabulary or are not allowed to by their editors.  (By the way, I'm still waiting for Arlene Croce's book on Balanchine.)

Both Kirstein and Balanchine wanted to produce work that was both commercial but of high artistic quality.  While Balanchine worked on Broadway shows and movies with his wife, Vera Zorina, Kirstein took Ballet Caravan to Maine and Georgia.  Balanchine's shows --On Your Toes, Babes in Arms -- were received enthusiastically while the movies he worked on -- like Kirstein's ballet Caravan to the South and the Midwest -- were mostly greeted with incomprehension.  Meanwhile Balanchine's choreography for the American Ballet as part of the Metropolitan Opera were rarely received with enthusiasm by the stuffed shirt opera-goers and the American Ballet was given the boot after three years.

Obviously Steichen can say relatively little about Balanchine's ballets from this period -- only Apollo and Serenade survive  -- but he also falls quite short in his research and commentary on Balanchine's film work, which one can still see.  In the 80's I attended a series of lectures at the 92nd St. Y by Vera Zorina where she showed Balanchine's film choreography and talked about the compromises he was forced to make.  Balanchine was a tremendous admirer of Fred Astaire's (if they ever met there is no record of it) and must have hated having to use Eddie Albert's torso and someone else's legs in the dance numbers of the film version of On Your Toes. And there is almost no financial information divulged in this book, other than the generality that Edward Warburg and Kirstein were financial backers of the American Ballet and the related Ballet Caravan.

Arthur Lubin's Impact (1949).

"Doing the right thing never works out; turn the other cheek and you get hit with a lug wrench."
--Walter Williams (played by Brian Donlevy) in Impact, screenplay by Dorothy Davenport and Jay Dratler.

If Impact had had the courage of its fatalistic convictions, as Edgar Ulmer's Detour did, in 1944 -- "every time you turn around fate sticks out its foot and trips you"-- and hadn't ended relatively happily it would have been a better film.  The cast was good and so was the cinematographer, but Arthur Lubin was a strange choice for director, mostly having worked on Francis the Talking Mule and Abbot and Costello pictures. There is one effectively noir scene of a murder and a flaming car crash of a roadster and an oil tanker that go off the edge of a cliff but otherwise this is more of a solve-the-mystery film, though Hitchcock would have appreciated that the audience knows what actually happened when Walter Williams is accused of murdering his wife's lover (they had tried to murder him!).

The film includes a good girl and a bad girl from others films noirs (Ella Raines and Helen Walker) and the cinematographer is Ernest Laszlo, who did the bleak Laura (1944) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955).  The film has some effective San Francisco location work --including tracking down an important witness -- (silent film star) Anna Mae Wong-- in Chinatown, but too much of it takes place in the daytime of a small bucolic Midwest town, which does have the virtue of war widow  Ella Raines running an auto repair shop and Mae Marsh (who appeared in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance in 1916) as her mother, the kinds of roles common in classical films but relatively rare in contemporary ones.

Jerry Thorpe's Day of the Evil Gun (1968)

Day of the Evil Gun is a pretty good Western, imaginatively written by veterans Charles Marquis Warren and Eric Bercovici, filmed on locations in Mexico and starring Glenn Ford and Arthur Kennedy as older men riding together through a bleak and hostile environment, encountering Spanish landowners, hostile Apaches. a town decimated by cholera, and military deserters.  They are searching for Ford's wife and two young daughters, who had been captured by the Apaches, two months before Ford returned from two years of unexplained wandering, and his wife had promised to marry Kennedy, on the assumption that Ford was dead.

Day of the Evil Gun was originally meant for TV.  By 1968 most television was in color and Thorpe's widescreen movie tended to keep the action in the center of the screen, an all-too-common practice in the days when VHS versions were mostly panned-and-scanned, something now that has fortunately been mostly eliminated,  with DVD's usually in the proper aspect ratio.  Thorpe does use the zoom lens judiciously and only for things seen in the distance and he does sometimes use the widescreen effectively, especially with overhead shots of the deserted village where Kennedy and Ford are held by the army deserters.

The film is filled with fatalism, irony  and regret, as Kennedy now sticks with Ford because, as he says, "I should have done something" when Ford's family was captured, one of the reasons he is helping Ford now, though they never discuss what will happen if they rescue the captives.  Ford, the former gunfighter (perhaps) eschews using his gun during their trek, while peaceful farmer Kennedy does all the killing en route to rescue the captives.

Robert Z. Leonard's The Bribe (1949)

The Bribe has all the necessary ingredients to make a good film noir --an aura of post-WWII fatalism, a disillusioned law enforcement officer, a femme fatale, fascinating but slimy villains, chiaroscuro lighting and cinematography, the source story from Black Mask writer Frederick Nebel -- except the right director and the right studio.  MGM tended to pull its punches in this genre; think how The Bribe might have turned out if it had been directed by Jacques Tourneur at RKO instead of Robert Z. Leonard.  Leonard was known for relatively frivolous work -- he directed a number of Nelson Eddy/Jeanette MacDonald vehicles -- while Tourneur directed gritty films for Val Lewton before directing Out of the Past in 1947.

The Bribe resembles Out of the Past in a number of superficial ways --falling in love with the bad girl in a South American locale and being morally compromised -- but is too lacking in ambiguity and its fatalism is too compromised.  As Robert Taylor grew older he made more genre films -- Westerns and policiers -- but he was not quite as successful in the transfer from lighter fare as John Payne, James Stewart and Dick Powell.  Still, Taylor does a decent job as his voice-over narration struggles between his desire for justice and his passion for saloon singer Ava Gardner, while Charles Laughton and Vincent Price try to thwart his investigation into their crooked racket in war surplus materials.  Joseph Ruttenberg (who was the cinematographer on Fritz Lang's Fury in 1936) does a beautiful job with the black-and-white photography, capturing the steamy, sweaty environment. Miklos Rozsa's score is intense, though perhaps not as good as the one he did for Robert Siodmak's The Killers in 1946.  I generally don't care for happy endings in film noir but I give Leonard credit for irony at the end of The Bribe.

Broadway, Balanchine and Beyond: A Memoir, by Bettijane Sills with Elizabeth McPherson

It wasn't long before all the teachers came to recognize my ability, musicality and talent.
--Bettijane Sills; Broadway, Balanchine and Beyond (University Press of Florida, 2019)

I never saw Sills dance; she started at New York City Ballet in 1961 and retired as soloist in 1972, just before I discovered the company.  But the book contains many photos of her in ballet performances as well as excerpts from seemingly every time she was mentioned in a review.  Sills had a musician (double bass) for a father and an aggressive stage mother who helped her find employment on the stage when she was eight and took her to an audition at the School of the American Ballet when she was in high school.

I read whatever is published about Balanchine, but Sills book is like many others in its failure to get much beneath the surface complexity and beauty of Balanchine's ballets (some of us continue to wonder if Arlene Croce's long-promised book about Balanchine will ever appear).  Sills says "When I think of dancing some Balanchine ballets,  I find myself describing almost a religious experience-- a marriage of exquisite music, visualized by exquisite choreography to produce an incredible, transcendent, physical satisfaction."  That the dancers on stage seemingly were having more fun than the audience watching them led me to my own ballet studies, which I not only enjoyed physically and mentally but which also enhanced my enjoyment and appreciation of Balanchine's choreography.

Sills thinks her struggles with her weight made Balanchine lose interest in casting her in his ballets.  She also married, something of which Balanchine supposedly disapproved.  Sills does appreciate that Balanchine chose many dancers who did not look like the "pinheads" who were considered typical of the NYC Ballet dancer but whom Balanchine "thought were interesting" (my own favorites included Patricia McBride and Karin von Aroldingen).

Sills is now a repiteur of Balanchine's work for her students at Purchase and elsewhere.  "I love being able to share what I remember from rehearsals with Mr. B -- what he told us and how he wanted us to dance... The dancers improve when they dance his work."

Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai (1967)

Thematically Le Samourai is the bleakest and most austere of Melville's films, its central figure pushed to a remarkable degree of stylized impassivity.
--Colin McArthur, Underworld USA (The Viking Press, 1972).

Montage is the heartbeat of a film.
Jean-Pierre Melville.

First and foremost, Le Samourai is a beautiful film, its colors beautifully controlled by a director who was a master of black-and-white (the cinematographer on Le Samourai was Henri Decae).  The colors are mainly blue, grey, black and brown, portraying the bleak world of the hired killer Jef (Alain Delon) and the police that pursue him. The low-key score is by Francois de Roubaix.

Jef lives in a cheap room with a caged bird for companionship.  He plays poker and has a girlfriend, but the main point of his relationships is to have alibis.  He only kills those he is contracted to kill and he goes to his death when he pulls an unloaded gun on the woman who betrayed him (she saw him kill someone but worked for his employer) and is shot by the police.

The main influences on Melville when he made this film were John Huston and The Asphalt Jungle (1950, Melville's favorite film), especially in the line-up scenes; Graham Greene's This Gun for Hire (1936) and Frank Tuttle's film version (1942), starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, and Robert Bresson's Pickpocket,(1959) both for the use of montage in the Metro and its minimalist use of expression using just the eyes (both Bresson and Melville of course were influenced by Buster Keaton's expressiveness using only his eyes). Melville transcended all these influences with his own world of the existential cat-and-mouse game between the criminal and the police.

Addendum:  for my posts about other Melville films see Jun. 12 2014, Oct. 8 2017, Apr. 8 2018,
July 5 2018

Richard Thorpe's The Last Challenge 1967

Richard Thorpe made 182 movies in his long career, starting in 1923 with Rough Ridin'  and ending in 1967 with the appropriately named The Last Challenge.  Most of Thorpe's career was spent at MGM, where he did Tarzan movies as well as Lassie and Thin Man films.  He was known for working quickly and below budget and few of his films were particularly memorable -- with the possible exception of Night Must Fall (1937), from an Emlyn Williams play.

The Last Challenge is in many ways an iconic Western and Thorpe was always comfortable with such relatively generic films.  There are brothels and dancehall girls, a whore with a heart of gold (played by Angie Dickinson), a poker game with a crooked dealer, wild Indians seduced by whiskey, an aging sheriff (Glenn Ford) and the young gunfighter who wants to challenge him (Chad Everret).  This was a point where the Western was being taken over by television and Italian directors and Thorpe enjoyed the "last challenge," shooting on location in widescreen and color (cinematography by Ellsworth Fredericks) from a screenplay by John Sherry, who wrote the source novel "Pistolero's Progress."

TCM has been showing a number of Glenn Ford films recently and I have found him to be intensely low-key in Western roles, where as he grew older he effectively played aging gunfighters who wanted to settle down as the frontier was closing but had difficulty overcoming their past. As Ford rides out of town at the end of The Last Challenge, with Angie Dickinson watching him with tears in her eyes, there is no place left for him to go.