Howard Zieff (1975)

I first came across the New Yorker as a teenager, on visits to the doctor’s surgery. There were always a few copies of it among the magazines in the waiting room. I found out more about Pauline Kael and splashed out on Deeper into Movies, her latest collection of New Yorker film reviews, in Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford in the first week of October 1975. It wasn’t until later that month, though, that I bought my first copy of the magazine. It wasn’t something you found in an average newsagent’s in England. (That’s probably not changed much in the years since.) In that particular issue, of 13 October 1975, Kael reviewed Hearts of the West. Over the last four decades, I’ve read plenty more New Yorkers and every piece by Pauline Kael that I’ve been able to find but I’d never seen Howard Zieff’s film until now. To be honest, I’ve not made much effort to track it down but there was still a mission-accomplished satisfaction in watching it at BFI a few days ago. The UK release print used for the screening was in such poor shape that BFI actually sent an email in advance – apologising for the ‘magenta bias’, expressing the hope that this-won’t-spoil-your-enjoyment etc. Hearts of the West begins with a 1930s movie screen test. I wondered for a moment if BFI had looked only at this intentionally sepia sequence before sending their apology but what followed turned out to be pinkish in what I’m starting to think is the standard colour scheme of unrestored 1970s American movies. (It was too muted to merit the slightly alarming ‘magenta bias’ description.) In fact, the shabby antique look didn’t bother me. It felt appropriate to the film’s place in my personal history of not getting round to seeing movies I’ve always meant to see.

Set in the early days of the Depression and of sound pictures, Zieff’s comedy is the story of Lewis Tater, a young Midwesterner whose dream is to be the next Zane Grey. Rather in the manner of Joel McCrea’s film director in Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels, Lewis feels he needs to immerse himself in the real world in order to make art from it. He decides to better his prospects of publishing Western novels by spending time in frontier country. He reads about the University of Titan in Nevada, and journeys from his father’s Iowa farm to enrol there. Lewis arrives in Titan to discover its university doesn’t exist, except in the form of a mail-order correspondence course scam run out of the hotel that Lewis has checked into. During his night there, he’s attacked by one of the two scamsters. Lewis manages to escape by stealing their car which, unknown to him, contains a cache of money. Lost and bewildered in the Nevada desert, Lewis comes upon a film unit, shooting a B-Western. He catches a lift to Los Angeles with some of the cowboy actors – employees of an outfit called Tumbleweed Productions. In LA, Lewis first gets a job washing dishes at a Western-themed eatery in Hollywood. He then finds himself working as a Tumbleweed stuntman before being offered a speaking part in one of the company’s shoestring-budget Westerns. All the time, the two crooks in whose car he escaped are on Lewis’s trail.

Hearts of the West was well received by many American critics – Pauline Kael included – but didn’t do well at the box office. Although that’s not surprising, it’s a pleasing film. Rob Thompson’s script treats Hollywood’s lower rungs and Lewis’s aspirations with a nice balance of good-humoured mockery and affectionate wit. Howard Zieff’s direction struggles to maintain a consistent tone but Jeff Bridges is excellent as Lewis – it’s his easy charisma and emotional openness that give the film a degree of coherence. The bits involving the pursuing conmen (Richard B Shull and Anthony James) are pretty lame but Lewis’s two differently romantic relationships are another matter. The first of these is with Miss Trout, the script girl: Blythe Danner, as well as looking lovely, times her lines to perfection. She stylises the character yet inhabits her fully. Lewis’s second romance doesn’t have a sexual dimension but it’s no less strong for that. It’s an expression of his love for Westerns and embodied by Howard Pike, one of the Tumbleweed cowboy veterans.

Howard turns out to be the alias of the Western writer Billy Pueblo, one of Lewis’s literary heroes. Andy Griffith plays the role beautifully and the moment of Lewis’s discovery that he’s been betrayed by his mentor and idol is genuinely distressing – thanks to the reactions of both Jeff Bridges and Andy Griffith. (Partly as a result, the later scene in which Howard/Billy redeems himself seems perfunctory.) As Kessler, the tight-fisted, neurotic director of the B-Westerns, Alan Arkin is ingenious but, compared with most of the rest of the cast, too knowing. This is even more the case with Donald Pleasence’s turn as a pulp-Western publisher. The bit players include, among many others, Herb Edelman, Thayer David and Alex Rocco – best known as Moe Greene in The Godfather but, thanks to that role, instantly identifiable. Perhaps because of its disappointing commercial performance in the US, the film was released in Europe in 1976 as Hollywood Cowboy. It’ll always be Hearts of the West to me.

15 January 2016