The film depicts cowboys as grimy (Heston balks at the suggestion of a bath after weeks on the trail) and essentially prairie drifters. Insisting on such ragged authenticity in costume and landscape throughout, the film soon becomes an essay in loneliness. The cowboys are isolated figures, many of them valuing the temporary friendships that develop on the trail, where petty egos and resentments don’t get in the way. The small details are telling – in a new bunkhouse for instance, Heston’s main concern is for mending his socks: these are not the traditional western heroes, but practical survivors, constantly having to battle against an inhospitable nature. Heston is an old man, fifty-something and seemingly equating mortality with endurance. He claims contentment in his loneliness but it is clear from his smile when in company that he has wondered of something else, despite himself. His quiet longing finds its brief fulfilment in his relationship with Hackett and her son, where for the first time Heston is able to experience what it is like to be a potential husband and father. His actions reveal his inner tenderness but also chart his mounting inability to deal with the emotional instability that comes with such love. His personal battle is thus with the realization that he may prefer his aimless, familiar cowboy life to the emotional flux and uncertainty that is love. He has been conditioned by his hard life.
As usual for the western, the woman represents a civilizing and stabilizing force, literally making him bathe and shave – to appear at least to make himself into a new man. In this film in particular, however, she also represents the taming force of Christianity and especially the New Testament as opposed to the Old Testament eye-for-an-eye philosophy of the demented preacher Pleasence. She is the way of the New West and Pleasance the Old, with the ageing Heston caught between the two – just as another future is offered him, the reality of his lonely lifestyle comes to plague him as he realizes, and accepts almost as a safety valve, that he is irrevocably bound to it. Much of the nuanced film thus concentrates on the slowly developing relationship between Hackett and Heston, revealing Heston as a man who does not know how to react to the stirrings of romantic love and the select pleasures of fatherhood and domesticity that he slides into as he assumes responsibility for the mother and child. The security he found in his loneliness is slowly eroded by his discovery of love and he is thus emotionally lost, forced to choose. His eventual decision is perhaps inevitable given this predicament and the film has an air of understated melancholia, which nevertheless breaks to depict Heston’s befuddled joy at what he discovers within himself. It is a tender film without ever being maudlin. read more