But essentially the story is "talked out." Indeed, these uncommonly loquacious Westerners almost seem to be competing for the girl by offering her their troubled souls.
Miller knows this and has tried to compensate for the verbal quality of this film by including some graphic visual elements, like the rodeo and the hunt. It is an honorable tradition, and The Crucible ornaments it but it is not film-writing. In form this screenplay is basically uncomfortable because Miller is a theater-writer who has a generally orthodox and socially utilitarian view of theatrical art. Droppin' a bomb is like tellin' a lie - makes everything so quiet afterwards." Then we get literary utterances like Guido's "We're all blind bombardiers. There is much acute and vivid writing a phone-call to his mother by Perce, the third man, is a brilliant character sketch. (In Death of a Salesman the vernacular Biff apologizes to his mother: "I've been remiss.") Here the mixture is as before. Miller has often had surprising lumps in his generally true dialogue. " Or, after an emotional scene, looking at the sky, "Help." Especially at night." Or when the drunken Guido starts working on his unfinished house in the middle of the night: "He's just trying to say hello. This infatuation leads to some embarrassingly bathetic instances in her dialogue. It is something like a man becoming infatuated with an attractive but undistinguished girl and, out of a sense of guilt, investing her with qualities which the world simply doesn't see. We have no reason to believe her more than a good-hearted, highly sentimental showgirl, like hundreds of others, but the longer Miller looks at her, the more rich and mysterious qualities he sees in her. She is a night-club performer, who had an unsettled childhood and now makes her living by scantily clad "interpretive" dancing. The author seems bemused by Roslyn, rather than perceptive about her. Her outburst is unrelated to the modern debasement of his mustanging, as such. She would presumably have been equally hysterical in 1850 if he had been killing deer to feed himself and her. Her hysteria is not persuasive as a reason for his seeing these facts more clearly. But how has this made him realize that the straitening of contemporary life is inevitable? He has known for some time that mustang-hunting is less than it was when he first did it to get stock for breeding and riding.
She won't let him kill a rabbit (although she never bats an eye when he tells her that their friend Guido goes eagle-killing in his plane) and on the horse-hunting trip, when she learns that the mustangs are to be killed for dog-food, she becomes so frenzied that Gay gives up the hunt and hunting and decides to change his mode of living. What produced this fantastic change? A few weeks of bliss with Gay? Can Miller seriously believe that?Īnd how does she effect a resolution in Gay? Through her extreme revulsion against pain-specifically against hunting. Maybe it's not even fair to them," etc.) Then, although she has just told Gay she doesn't feel "that way" about him, she moves in with him and the first time they are visited by their friends, one of them tells her "You found yourself, haven't you?", and the other says, "You have the gift of life." Where did she get it? From then on this girl, but lately nervous and restless, is treated as the Eternal Feminine, in tune with the universe ("hooked in" with the stars). "Maybe you're not supposed to believe anything people say. ("The trouble is I'm always back where I started". But what does her search consist of? In the beginning we are shown a highly insecure, neurotic girl. The film moves with Roslyn, the girl: she is one of the two chief searchers for truth and she is the cause of the revelation of truth to Gay, Her lover.
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