Road Trip - Interlude

 Interlude

I must have seen Rio Bravo, a half-dozen times.  But I didn’t recall a cowboy tune in the movie, a ballad sung by Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson.  The name of that song is “My rifle, my pony, and me,” with lyrics by Dean Martin for a melody written by Dmitri Tiomkin.  

In Victor Erice’s recent film, Close your Eyes (2023), a movie director has retired to a camp on the sea-shore.  One night, the director drinks with some friends and, picking up a guitar, strums a song.  He sings in English, the tune from Rio Bravo.  The music seemed familiar to me and I suspected that the melody was from Rio Bravo, not because of anything that I recalled from that 1959 Western, but more on the basis of my sense for the tastes of European cinephiles.  I looked at YouTube and, indeed, there are many clips, only a little longer than two minutes showing the song as it appears in Howard Hawks’ film.  Dean Martin is lying on a cot, stretched-out with his stetson hat tiled down to half cover his face.  He sings as Ricky Nelson plays the guitar.  John Wayne looks on; he is drinking coffee from a tin cup and looks bemused as the two cowpokes alternate singing stanzas in the song.  Walter Brennan has a mouth-harp at his lips and also accompanies the ballad.  Once you have seen this part of the movie, of course, you are moved and believe that you will never forget this little interlude.  But, apparently, time after time, I have, in fact, forgotten this scene in the movie.  Only Close your Eyes, itself a wonderful picture, brought this to mind.  

When I was younger, I was a serious person and, perhaps, thought that interjecting this song into the movie was problematic and distracting.  I’m not serious any more.  

***

The sun is sinking in the west / The cattle go down to the stream / The redwing settles in the nest / It’s time for a cowboy to dream.

Purple light in the canyons / That’s where I long to be / With my three good companions / My rifle, my pony, and me.

***

It’s a skid row somewhere:  our story brick buildings that are cold in the Winter and ovens in the summer, transient hotels and saloons, alleyways where abandoned mangy dogs bark, garbage cans along the stained sidewalk loaded with booze bottles, drifters in soiled jeans and tee-shirts loitering on the street corners where there are panhandlers and a couple of floozies standing under a street lamp.  The figures in the three-dimensional diorama are about five inches tall, each showing a particular person: broken noses from prize-fighting or brawls, high cheek bones, a shock of blonde or red hair, thousand-yard stares and impenetrable expressions.  The men on sidewalk and gathered at the stoop of the shabby hotel put their thumbs in their waist-bands and thrust forward their hips as if about to urinate on one of scabby brick walls.  A newspaper has fallen to the pavement.  If you put your eye close to the display, you can peek into the upper windows of the hotel: some unmade beds, a man with a cigarette on his lip leaning on the sill as he surveys the street scene below him, a woman in a dimly lit hallway with bare feet wearing her yellowish shift; in another room, someone squats on a stool, dazed, it seems, by the flickering light of a TV screen.  On the ground level of the lodging place, a larger window opens into a room where a broad in red skirt is leaning forward to take her shot at some white and red and green pool balls while three men sit at a table with a whiskey bottle between them and fans of cards splayed out on the table-top.  A tiny bulb in a street lamp casts an irregular yellow light on the scene. It must be midnight in the Bowery.  

This scene is displayed in the Ranch restaurant, a café about three-quarters of a mile off Interstate 90 at Fairmont, Minnesota.  The diorama stands at the entrance to the café.  You walk past it entering the place and leaving as well.  There isn’t really a name for a thing like this.  At least, I don’t know what a diorama display of this sort should be called.  And I have no idea why the scene is at this restaurant or what, if anything, it is supposed to mean.  I’ve admired this display at least ten times, when stopping on legal business, in Fairmont, a place that is about seventy miles from my home in Austin.  Unlike the tune in Rio Bravo, this isn’t something that I have forgotten.  It’s simply too indelible, too incongruous and remarkable.  A little card next to the diorama in the entrance foyer to the café – a place with an old dinner counter and about eight booths with formica tables – says that the object is the work of someone called Michael Garman.   

The display exhausts the eye with its patient accumulation of sordid details.  It’s some kind of art work.  But I don’t have a word for the kind...

***

Gonna hang my sombrero / On the limb of a tree / Comin’s home, sweetheart darlin’ / Just my rifle, my pony, and me.

Whipporwill in the willow / Sings a sweet melody / Riding to Amarillo / Just my rifle, my pony, and me.

No more cows to be rope’nd / No more strays do I see / ‘Round the bend, she’ll be waitin’ / For my rifle, my pony, and me.