Virtually pressed up against the northern boundaries of Los Angeles, the Mojave Desert is Hollywood’s backyard, if not its backlot, just as it has been exploited as L.A.’s adjacent playground and dumping ground. It is, after all, a land of manhunts and murders, of all-terrain vehicles, of landfills and landing strips, of gambling houses and weapons stations, as much as it is a place of miners and ranchers, of parks and monuments, of beauty and light. But the Mojave’s natural role as a setting for motion pictures is one that dates to the beginnings of photography itself. Pioneer still photographers first staked their claim on the Mojave in the nineteenth century, with such luminous practitioners as Timothy O’Sullivan and Carleton Watkins developing memorable glass-plate negatives, particularly of the Colorado River regions of the desert. In the following century, Ansel Adams and Edward Weston would explore its greatest depths—Death Valley—and areas that now comprise the Mojave National Preserve and beyond. Witness Adams’s iconic prints of Death Valley’s Golden Canyon or Weston’s desert “Hot Coffee” road sign photographed in 1937 along U.S. Route 66 at Siberia, California.
And the allure for the motion-picture camera—specifically for narrative cinema—seems to have offered the Mojave a unique part to play. Unlike the more familiar and caricatured deserts of Arizona and the Colorado Plateau, whose angular buttes, table-top mesas and signature saguaros have functioned as clichéd landscapes for everyone from director John Ford (who claimed the archetypal Monument Valley as his own) to Wile E. Coyote, whose cartoon adventures were set amid animator Chuck Jones’s giddy and gravity-defying backgrounds, the Mojave hasn’t been as easily stereotyped or pigeonholed. Perhaps because of its sheer vastness and variability—no single landform truly epitomizes it, as does, say, Monument Valley or the Grand Canyon in neighboring deserts—the Mojave serves instead as a kind of geographic tabula rasa, whose broad limitless sweeps and uninterrupted horizons offer a blank screen on which filmmakers can project any or all of their imaginative fantasies with shimmering impact. Not only has the Mojave played its cinematic role as a traditional “desert,” whether in America or elsewhere, but its volcanic outcrops have substituted for Iceland (Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1959), its fluted canyons for ancient Egypt (Land of the Pharaohs, 1955), its dry lakebeds for ostensible other worlds (Planet of the Apes, 2001) or as landing strips for UFOs (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977), its northwest perimeter for the Himalayan foothills (King of the Khyber Rifles, 1953) and its borate deposits for the mines of Libya (Spartacus, 1960).
The number of movies made, at least partly in the Mojave, is legion. I have selected nearly a dozen representative titles for this dispatch that include key sequences in this desert while also serving as compelling emblems for other stories the Mojave has to tell, whether literally or metaphorically. Those movies are Greed (1924), Gunga Din (1939), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), The Conqueror (1956), The Big Country (1958), The Professionals (1966), Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), Zabriskie Point (1970), Star Wars (1977, 1983), Star Trek V (1989) and Casino (1995). In passing, it will be necessary to touch on other works with memorable scenes that have capitalized on the Mojave’s diverse terrain, but arranging a discussion of several signal titles serves to underscore a narrative relationship that the Mojave, perhaps more than any other desert, has nurtured with Hollywood.
Geographically, the Mojave ranges over such great distances that a camera is well advised to be focused on infinity. And while its landforms are not always distinctive, it often is true that the desert rouses itself to be at its most dramatic and photogenic at its very margins, where it collides with other geographic barriers such as the Sierra Nevada and the San Bernardino Mountains, or the Colorado River, Desert and Plateau. Thus, the Alabama Hills, in California’s northern Mojave; the Antelope Valley and Joshua Tree National Park to the south; and the chromatic canyons on its eastern edge such as Valley of Fire and Snow Canyon state parks in Nevada and Utah, respectively—all of them on the desert’s outskirts—have regularly burst on screen as the Mojave’s most dazzling settings and backdrops.
The Valley of Greed
(Greed, 1924)
The chief photographic exception to this perimeter-focused rule of thumb is the great white heart of the Mojave itself (to employ writer Edna Brush Perkins’ phrase[1]): Death Valley. America’s hottest, deepest sink and storied natural landmark (since 1994 a national park of vast proportions), Death Valley has served as a location in countless major films and many minor ones, and one of its earliest appearances has become legendary.
It was here that director Erich von Stroheim ventured nearly a century ago to film climactic sequences of Greed, the movie based on Frank Norris’s novel McTeague. The film, whose original nine-hour version (edited from as much as eighty-four hours’ worth of actual footage), now famously lost, was heralded to be one of the greatest films ever made.[2] The movie is remarkable in many respects, but not least because its production was a monumentally arduous undertaking, mirroring the tortured exertions of its plot. Stroheim insisted on realism and chose to film exclusively on location in the selfsame places Norris described in his novel.
Greed recounts the early twentieth-century saga of John McTeague (Gibson Gowland), a miner’s son who is apprenticed as a young man by a traveling hack dentist called Dr. “Painless” Potter. McTeague later establishes his lowbrow dentistry in San Francisco’s gritty Polk Street district. After befriending his flat neighbor, Marcus Schouler (Jean Hersholt), McTeague encounters Schouler’s cousin and fiancée, Trina (ZaSu Pitts), when Marcus asks him to attend to her recent broken tooth. On the same day of her appointment, Trina impulsively purchases a lottery ticket. Smitten with Trina, McTeague soon convinces Schouler to allow him to marry her. Not soon after, in a profound twist of fate, Trina discovers her ticket has won $5,000 in gold coin, which she promptly deposits in the bank. She then begins to habitually hoard her husband’s paltry income along with her winnings in behavior that is a caricature of frugality. Her former beau Schouler believes the lottery winnings ought rightly to be his—and takes revenge on McTeague by reporting his unlicensed practice to authorities as he prepares to leave the city to take up ranching. McTeague and Trina consequently sell their remaining possessions living as virtual paupers—even though Trina now has over $5,000 in savings. In a fit of rage over her continued money hoarding, McTeague eventually kills Trina and escapes with the gold she had withdrawn from the bank. He flees to Placer County, where he hooks up with a new prospecting friend and heads for Death Valley. Here, the two discover a purportedly gold-rich quartz deposit. Because he is an outlaw and fearful that he is being pursued (as indeed he is, by the vengeful Schouler and other lawmen), McTeague flees alone into the heart of Death Valley with a mule, a filled canteen, along with the remaining money. Slowed by the searing heat, McTeague finally meets up with Schouler, who, after a scuffle, shoots McTeague’s mule, and in the process punctures his water supply; the two fight a final time, and McTeague kills his former friend, who had handcuffed himself to him during the fight. Thus, Greed concludes with its protagonist left to die in the desert, without water and shackled to a corpse.
As histrionic as its plot may now seem, Greed was considered to be a Greek tragedy by Stroheim, and again, in an act of mirroring, one can reflect on the “tragedy” of the film itself—its long-lamented lost footage with cuts made at the studio’s insistence that Stroheim had objected to, along with the human suffering of its production. Filming of the Death Valley sequences began in the summer of 1923 and lasted six weeks, with temperatures soaring to as high as 125˚ Fahrenheit. At this time, Death Valley was remarkably inaccessible, with no paved roads, gas stations, running water, or hostelries. Another decade would pass before President Herbert Hoover declared it a national monument. At the time, Furnace Creek was still known as Greenland Ranch—certainly a far cry from the visitor center hub that it would later become. Nevertheless, at Greenland, Stroheim’s crew of more than forty individuals (all men plus one woman, script girl Eve Bessette) were holed up, encamped in the blazing heat on outdoor army cots. Stroheim enlisted two musicians, a harmonium player and violinist, whose charge was to supply “mood music” for the actors, a trademark technique of Stroheim’s that was largely effective, except that the violin soon warped due to the heat and became unplayable. (The musical repertoire included “Nearer My God to Thee” of Titanic import.) After shooting on the sand dunes and salt flats, performers and crew would regularly collapse of heat exhaustion. After the filming was completed, actor Jean Hersholt spent a week in the hospital, suffering from blisters, internal bleeding and claiming to have lost nearly thirty pounds. Tellingly, one of the gaffes often pointed out in Hersholt’s final scenes as a corpse is that he is visibly panting due to the extreme heat. Of the forty-three crew members encamped in Death Valley, fourteen became ill and were sent back to Los Angeles. It is no wonder Goldwyn Studio executives refused to insure the film company during its stay there.[3]
Among the suffering fellow-travelers in this stock company were cinematographers Ben Reynolds and William Daniels, whose revolutionary contributions to Greed cannot be overestimated. While they may have been taking their deep-focus direction from Stroheim, both Reynolds and Daniels were skillful lensmen. The director tested them in almost every sequence, as Stroheim’s insistence on location photography posed countless lighting challenges—particularly in the San Francisco interiors (which had to be balanced with bright exteriors) and in mining scenes that took place reportedly some 3,000 feet deep and required incandescent illumination. In the Death Valley episode, the shimmering deep-focused scenes on the salt flats are indelible. Significantly, Daniels became the preferred cinematographer for Greta Garbo (she insisted on him) and developed a reputation as a “glamour” cameraman. Nevertheless, the gritty realism of Death Valley that he helped project onscreen may have contributed later to Daniels’ Oscar-winning effort in the groundbreaking urban film noir, The Naked City, in 1948.[4]
The Mojave’s contributions to Greed, it turns out, were not limited to Death Valley. On the long-reviled cutting room floor (preserved, if at all, in still photos) are scenes shot by Stroheim in the ghost town of Skidoo, high in the Panamints; at the mining town of Darwin; and at Keeler, on the shores of Owens Lake. Here, an evocative sequence of a locomotive arriving at the Carson & Colorado narrow-gauge depot has been included in a reconstructed four-hour version of the film undertaken by Turner Classic Movies in 1994. In decades after (and to this day), many movie aficionados revere Greed as a groundbreaking accomplishment (the poet Kenneth Rexroth was among the handful of individuals who recalled seeing the original)—a wrenching tale of the conditions of the working poor, of feverish dreams and of avarice and dogged retribution. Yet, it is not unlike many other tales that have been told in (and by) the Mojave.
A Din in the Alabamas
(Gunga Din, 1939; Bad Day at Black Rock, 1955)
If we steal away from the desert’s white heart and stray westward, beyond the Panamints and Inyos, into the Owens Valley, the Mojave’s intersection with the Sierra reaches its most arresting terminus near the town of Lone Pine, which for more than a century has celebrated itself as a film-location mecca. Known to virtually every location scout in Hollywood, and part of the collective unconscious of countless filmgoers and TV watchers, the Alabama Hills, just west of town, are a jumbled orange-brown community of boulders whose stunted expanse of volcanic rock and weathered granite are as old as the towering gunmetal Sierra just beyond. Here, early Hollywood stalwarts like Fatty Arbuckle and director Clarence Badger discovered the distinguished foreground-and-background phenomenon that results from the slate-blue granitic escarpment of Mt. Whitney’s minarets accented upfront by the golden, rounded jumble of rocks that cry out for ambushes or hidden temples or wagon trains or cattle stampedes.
For decades, Hopalong Cassidy (William Boyd), the Lone Ranger (Clayton Moore), Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and virtually any major Western star imaginable, from Randolph Scott to Gregory Peck, from Barbara Stanwyck to Clint Eastwood, have ridden past or through these precincts (Stanwyck’s ashes are even scattered here). It is as if the echoes of gunfire or roundups still reverberate among the parked Winnebagos that now call this newly designated National Scenic Area their weekend home.
In 1938, when the Alabamas were still old, but the movies were young, the location was already something of an industry mainstay, but it had yet to see as elaborate a production as the one mounted by director George Stevens (who would later direct other classics like Giant, Shane, and A Place in the Sun, his Oscar winner). Based on Rudyard Kipling’s eponymous verse, Gunga Din expanded Kipling’s conceit to create a male-bonding adventure/epic that, at the time, was the RKO studio’s most expensive undertaking. Moreover, the movie would epitomize the Mojave’s illusory potential by positioning the Alabama Hills and their Sierra backdrop as a simulacrum of the Khyber Pass region of India.
Gunga Din, as realized by Stevens, RKO and the raft of scenarists who worked on the script (William Faulkner among them), is the tale of an 1880s valiant water-carrier and bugle boy who accompanies three sergeants of the British Royal Engineers and their attachment to investigate the cause of a lost telegraph contact with the British outpost of Tantrapur. This trio of boisterous comrades (Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Victor McLaglen), accompanied by loyal Gunga Din (Sam Jaffe), discover that Tantrapur has essentially been laid waste by a murderous cult of indigenous Thuggees, led by its menacing guru (Eduardo Cianelli). The ensuing plot involves Gunga Din’s discovery of a golden palace that turns out to be the Temple of Kali, the Thuggee stronghold. Gunga Din, the lowly water-boy, who yearns to be a regimental soldier, is ultimately the story’s sacrificial hero when—having discovered that Thuggees have gathered massive troops ready for attack—is mortally bayoneted by the enemy. As he is about to die, Gunga Din sounds his bugle to warn the regimental troops of the gathering Thuggee forces and thus precipitates the final, elaborate battle sequence in the film.
Seen from a twenty-first-century perspective, Gunga Din suffers from its glorification of British colonialism and its casting of European-American actors in non-white roles (both Sam Jaffe and Eduardo Cianelli appear in ludicrous brownface). Even at the time, the Indian government objected to the movie’s portrayal of native Indians as stereotyped villains. Despite these dated conventions, the overall film remains a pioneering and watchable action-adventure staple—one that demonstrably influenced such filmmakers as Steven Spielberg (Indiana Jones) and sound-effects wizard Ben Burtt, among others. Cinematographer Joseph August, who earned an Oscar nomination, achieves dazzling natural cloud effects and dramatic captures of shadows and light throughout the picture. From a production perspective, the film is remarkable because of the sheer extent of its location work: the cast and crew of several hundred spent more than 100 consecutive days in Lone Pine, far exceeding the original budgeted schedule and indeed exceeding the standard length of time to shoot an average motion picture, period. (It is unlikely another film crew ever spent as long of time at a single remote Mojave Desert location.) An entire tent city was erected near today’s Movie Road to house the lion’s share of the company (a notable exception was ingénue Joan Fontaine, who had quarters in town at the historic Dow Villa Hotel). As shooting commenced, the massive set of Tantrapur, constructed in the Alabamas, tragically caught fire, requiring the film crew and others to extinguish it with a bucket brigade. Hurriedly, the crew rebuilt the set at a great cost while scenes were shot at other locations in the area—the Temple of Kali in a nearby small slot canyon and a large cantonment set several miles to the north. The concluding battle sequences filmed at the southern reach of the Alabamas employed some 1,500 extras.[5]
It should be no surprise that this film has left its mark on the community. Only a handful of Lone Pine old-timers can now recall those three months in the summer of 1938 (the film was released the following year), when the desert town was transformed by Hollywood caravans, including an elephant, horses, trainers, artists and technicians. Today, at the Lone Pine’s Museum of Western Film History and the annual Lone Pine Film Festival each October, film buffs can read about—and visit—locations from Gunga Din and other pictures and be regaled with stories of excavations that have unearthed bits of plaster and rusty nails from the sites of the elaborate movie sets that now exist only as mirages in the nearby sagebrush.
Given the singular and exceptional concentration of motion pictures photographed at or near Lone Pine in the desert, it is appropriate to pause to address the area’s importance in the Western film canon. It has been a challenge to select a single Western film to epitomize this now-iconic location, which was initially a beachhead for B-grade programmers and serials that, while not critically applauded, were fixtures of American popular culture. Along with Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger and Hoppy, other lesser-remembered headliners such as Tim Holt, Dave Sharpe, Tom Mix, Rex Allen and Randolph Scott performed in many features and two-reelers here. Soon thereafter, the Alabamas and environs became the location for more well-established and epic westerns: films such as Yellow Sky (1948), How the West Was Won (1962) and Nevada Smith (1965), while also remaining no stranger to other genres, including film noir (Ida Lupino’s classic The Hitch-Hiker of 1953) and suspense (a second-unit appearance in location-averse Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur of 1942).
But for these purposes, I have selected a “meta-Western” (much in the mold of the true western High Noon of 1952, which the film has been compared) that capitalizes on the settings of the Owens Valley for their authentic historical and cultural resonances. Bad Day at Black Rock is a mid-century melodrama (and Technicolor film noir) that, despite its modern-day trappings, adheres to a Western-movie trope: a stranger comes into town, someone dies. In this case, the stranger is a returning war veteran named John Macreedy (Spencer Tracy) who stops in the jerkwater hamlet of Black Rock (population: almost zero) in search of the son of a World War II fellow-soldier and confronts an entire town consumed by guilt and fear, bent on thwarting the stranger’s efforts to seek out the man, a Japanese farmer named Komoko, who was murdered in a fit of racist rage by one of the townspeople, a ranch owner named Reno Smith (Robert Ryan)—while the others (a rogues’ gallery of pedigreed character actors including Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Walter Brennan and Dean Jagger) passively allowed it to happen. Black Rock was a significant message picture at the time, having been the first major studio production (M-G-M’s Dore Schary greenlit it) to confront the bigotry aimed at Japanese Americans during and after the Second World War. (Ironically, no Japanese are depicted in the film; they are the invisible elephants in the room.) Director John Sturges, who later made his name in such action features as Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, was lauded by critic Pauline Kael for helming “a very superior example of motion picture craftsmanship.”[6] Indeed, while certainly unsubtle and overly melodramatic, the film manages to suggest an epic treatment that belies the economy of its eighty-two-minute running time. William C. Mellor (Giant) was responsible for the widescreen CinemaScope camerawork. This grand aspect ratio, coupled with André Previn’s bold, insistent musical score, contributes to the movie’s impact and durability.
While half of Black Rock’s scenes are soundstage-bound (interiors were filmed on MGM’s Culver City lot), its exteriors are memorable for capitalizing on the wide Owens Valley horizons. The false-fronted town itself (which art director Cedric Gibbons seemingly intended to look as artificial and symbolic as possible) is located in an anonymous part of the American West, somewhere between Tucson and Los Angeles. It is situated along a railway whose trains never stop there—until Macreedy shows up. But the resonance of the true locale, in which Mt. Whitney can be clearly identified in the distance, is that the very site of the film set—between Lone Pine and Owenyo along the Southern Pacific “Jawbone” line—is only five miles from Manzanar, the largest and most well-known concentration camp for the wartime Japanese, which would have been dismantled less than a decade before the film was shot. For me, the movie is also freighted with the awareness that many of the Japanese-American evacuees were transported from Los Angeles to the Owens Valley on the same railroad tracks (now long removed) that bestride the Black Rock set (Lone Pine Station, just barely visible in the background of the opening sequence as the Streamliner train crosses a bridge, was the terminus for several hundred internees who arrived in the Owens Valley by train). But this is not the only desert location with import in Bad Day at Black Rock. In another pivotal sequence, the location shifts to the nearby Alabama Hills, glimpsable on the horizon. Spencer Tracy’s character has driven in a borrowed Jeep to seek out the Japanese farmer at his home at Adobe Flat. Macreedy is chased and run off the road by Coley (the heavy, played by actor Borgnine) in a modern twentieth-century parody of—or homage to—the innumerable chase and ambush scenes set in the Alabamas that even by 1955 had become almost stock footage in the Western-movie playbook. Black Rock is a meaningful exemplar of the Mojave as a resonant and self-conscious film setting, but it is significant in other respects. The script by Millard Kaufman—from a story by Howard Breslin with adaptation by Don McGuire—was nominated for an Oscar for a good reason. In addition to its groundbreaking exploration of postwar racism, the movie offers a bonanza of epigrammatic commentary on the West, the desert, greed, and human weakness. The character of Doc Velie (Walter Brennan), Black Rock’s physician-cum-mortician and jack of other trades, summarizes his profession and his dealings with the desert’s fortune seekers thus: “First, I sell ‘em a piece of land. Do you think they farm it? They do not. They dig for gold. They rip off the topsoil of ten winding hills, then sprint in here all fog-heaved with excitement, lugging nuggets—big, bright, and shiny. Is it gold? It is not. Do they quit? They do not. Then they decide to farm, farm in a country so dry that you have to prime a man before he can spit. Before you can say ‘Fat Sam’ they’re stalled, stranded and starving. They become weevil-brained and buttsprung. So I bury ’em. But why bore you with my triumphs?”
Another biting passage comes in a diner scene when Borgnine’s character accuses Tracy of being “a yellow-bellied Jap lover. Am I right?” Tracy’s character responds, “Not only are you wrong, you’re wrong at the top of your voice.” This quick exchange and Doc Velie’s soliloquy above can be seen as an index of many true Mojave stories—dashed hopes of gold strikes, failed attempts at irrigation and agriculture, ethnic tensions and hatred, and the constant, oppressive and unforgiving heat.
I once spoke with screenwriter Kaufman about his work on Black Rock and asked him if he visited the set outside of Lone Pine during filming in the summer of 1954. His response: “Nah, it was too damn hot up there.”[7]
A Red Rock Canon
(The Big Country, 1958)
Ninety miles south of Lone Pine, across the Kern County line, lies what geologists tell us is the Dove Spring Formation, a colorful assemblage of volcanic rock and sandstone with its most vivid upthrust in Red Rock Canyon State Park—again, at the Mojave’s edge. Along with the adjacent El Paso Mountains, this geological feature is one of several Red Rock canyons in the American desert (another well-known namesake is outside of Las Vegas). California’s formation, located a two-hour drive from Los Angeles, provides the backdrop of a litany of movies, television programs and commercial advertisements. Thus, the eroded, cathedral-like columns of the canyon with their horizontal lintels of red sandstone have their place in Mojave history as well as in movie annals.
In 1850, the Death Valley argonauts passed this way. In subsequent years miners took hold of the area in their attempt to become rich from gold, copper, precious opal, tungsten—and even Old Dutch cleanser. In 1932, Universal Studios came here with Boris Karloff and a host of extras to “mine” the canyon’s visual riches for sequences used in The Mummy—with the canyon doubling for Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Nearly sixty years later, Universal returned, with Steven Spielberg, to film the early sequences of Jurassic Park (1993) in which the canyon substituted for the dinosaur fossil beds of Wyoming. In between, John Wayne, Glenn Ford, Gary Cooper and dozens of others showed up for routine Westerns.
One of the grandest appearances of Red Rock Canyon and, indeed, this particular scenic corner of the Mojave Desert was realized in 1958’s The Big Country. The exterior shots of this epic western were largely filmed in the San Joaquin Valley. However, the narrative relied on pivotal scenes filmed at Red Rock Canyon and the adjacent El Pasos. Although criticized by many as being an overblown horse opera, the film, directed by the exacting (and often difficult) William Wyler, is the story of a Baltimore-based sailor, Jim McKay (Gregory Peck), who courts a young woman, Patricia Terrill (Carroll Baker). Eventually, McKay proposes and moves west to meet her cattle-baron family on a huge spread in the anonymous western plains (the Drais Ranch, near Stockton, California, served as the location). Upon arrival, Peck’s character is harassed by some local hooligans belonging to the down-and-out Hannassey clan and refuses to fight them off, dismissing their actions as harmless hazing and horseplay. When Patricia’s father, Major Terrill (Charles Bickford), learns of McKay’s “humiliation,” he dispatches a war party to terrorize the Hannassey encampment in remote Blanco Canyon (portrayed here by Red Rock Canyon). During the course of the film, McKay learns the ropes of ranching and discovers the longstanding enmity between Major Terrill and the head of the Hannassey clan, Rufus (Burl Ives, in an Oscar-winning turn) is merely personal. The two are held at bay by a local schoolteacher, Julie Maragon (Jean Simmons), whose inherited property stands a bountiful and necessary livestock watering hole, the Big Muddy, which she allows both warring families’ cattle to use. McKay strikes up a friendship with Julie and offers to buy the Big Muddy from her as a wedding present for his fiancée. She is reluctant because such a sale would likely violate her pact to share the watering hole with both families, but McKay assures her he will honor that pact. Tensions grow between Patricia and McKay. Ultimately they become estranged until Patricia learns she is to receive the Big Muddy as a wedding present. By that time, Patricia’s jealousy and vindictiveness toward the Hannasseys disillusion McKay, along with her blind devotion to her tyrant father and his henchman (Charlton Heston). McKay has also, of course, fallen in love with Julie.
The film ends with a mortal showdown in Blanco Canyon between the two elder ranchmen, while Julie and McKay ride off together into a future of wedded bliss, if not into the sunset. As star (and producer) Peck once noted, the film was conceived as “a left-wing parable of the Cold War,” [8] employing petty range disputes among cattlemen as a substitute for east-west political hostilities. It may be no accident that The Big Country was President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s favorite movie (he screened it at the White House more than once). While overlong and heavy with melodrama, the film is redeemed by its dynamic musical score—a thrumming, oft-imitated pentatonic main title and additional tracks that suggest the influence of Aaron Copland but are the work and trademark of composer Jerome Moross. Although Moross’s film scores are comparatively scarce, he has an admired oeuvre that includes accomplished symphonies and sonatas. The score dominates much of the film—including the segments that take place in Red Rock Canyon and the rarely photographed, but stunning, Last Chance Canyon and Copper Basin areas of the El Paso Mountains just to the east. (The movie’s climax is rumored to have been filmed in Upper Jawbone Canyon, nearby).[9]
The Big Country is also a striking example of panoramic cinematography, by Franz Planer, in a short-lived widescreen format called Technirama, which relied on 35mm film running through the camera horizontally rather than vertically to increase its resolution and scope. When considering both the visual and musical virtues of the film, I believe The Big Country’s Red Rock Canyon sequences remain among the most memorable uses of this much-photographed location. For a time, the sets of the Hannassey spread remained in the Hagen Canyon section of what later became Red Rock Canyon State Park. Another revered Anthony Mann-directed western, Man of the West (1958), with Gary Cooper and Julie London, used this same set. Today one can still locate rusty nails scattered at the site, now part of a nature trail, just as one can unearth scraps left over from set backdrops for Gunga Din and Bad Day at Black Rock, farther north at Lone Pine. But to position this particular setting—as The Big Country does—as a cattleman’s outpost is also to acknowledge the Mojave’s own legacy—albeit a fraught one—as a domain of range cattle and other livestock and beasts of burden, from the sheep once driven northward by Basque immigrants to the wild horses and burros that still roam its more isolated canyons and valleys. To this day, motorists passing through Red Rock Canyon can observe cattle guards and signage, as they can throughout much of the Mojave.
Desert Fallout
(The Conqueror, 1956)
At least one Mojave-made picture, photographed in yet another red-rock domain a few years before The Big Country, owes its significance not from aesthetic, thematic or technical considerations, but from true situational circumstances that have made it the stuff of legend and a touchstone for a tragic chapter in Mojave Desert history. The Conqueror released in 1956, was an ill-conceived “barbarian epic” of Genghis Khan called “deliriously bad” by one critic and has sadly become something of a camp classic due to its egregious unwatchability. I say “sadly” because, of course, much of its legacy is mournfully solemn: fully one-third of the production’s 200-plus cast and crew succumbed to some form of cancer within one or two decades of the movie’s release.
It has become customary to attribute this troubling statistic to The Conqueror’s exterior settings—again, on the Mojave’s outermost fringes, just north of St. George, Utah—some 140 miles east and downwind of the Yucca Flat nuclear test site. The St. George locations (including what is now Snow Canyon State Park) were meant to evoke the Mongolian steppe and Gobi Desert regions. While it’s arguable that these choices prove convincing in the effort (my own impression is one of obvious Southwest red-rock country embellished with strategically placed yurts), it was certainly understandable for Hollywood (in this case RKO, bankrolled by producer Howard Hughes) to choose a location within its budgetary constraints. The movie, which was the directorial debut of tough-guy actor Dick Powell, chronicles the story of Temujin (John Wayne, outstandingly miscast in Fu Manchu makeup), a fierce Mongol warrior who in order to seize the empire of a rival Tartar king (Pedro Armendariz) kidnaps the monarch’s daughter (Susan Hayward), whom he intends to woo. Inevitable battle scenes ensue, grandly staged and choreographed, and boy gets girl. The movie was decidedly lavish in planning and intent, and engaged the estimable Joseph LaShelle to photograph it (LaShelle had won an Oscar for Laura in 1945 and was nominated for his work in eight other pictures).
Just a year or two before The Conqueror’s filming, Yucca Flat had been the site of an extensive nuclear testing program known as Operation Upshot-Knothole. Its most notorious detonation—not communicated to the public at the time—was called UK-9, code-named “Hamlet” and nicknamed “Harry.” Because of various miscalculations based at least partly on wind direction, the highly radioactive fallout from this test swept over a 300-mile radius, much of it accumulating in St. George, Utah. The bomb would much later be called “Dirty Harry” once word got out of the severity of its impact. When the cast and crew of The Conqueror later ventured into the painted canyons near St. George during the summer of 1954, no one was sufficiently aware that the horses and wagons would be kicking up radioactive dust, or that their al fresco workplace would have set off Geiger counters with a vengeance. Although the nuclear tests in Nevada had not been a secret, there was no apparent impetus for alarm. And no one could have then predicted that the cast and crew of this picture would constitute a veritable necrology of cancer-related demise: star John Wayne (stomach cancer), star Susan Hayward (brain cancer), co-star Agnes Moorehead (uterine cancer), co-star Pedro Armendariz (suicide, kidney cancer) and director Dick Powell (lymphoma).
To make matters worse, cast and crew members who had not been on location in Utah were exposed to radiation through the truckloads of red contaminated Utah soil transported to RKO’s Hollywood soundstages for deployment in interior set sequences. Even before the death toll had reached its apex in the 1970s (director Powell was among the earliest casualties, having died in 1963), cynics referred to The Conqueror as an “RKO Radioactive Picture”—and a shamefaced Howard Hughes pulled the film out of circulation for many years. To watch The Conqueror now, without an awareness of its background, would be to indulge in harmless ridicule of a movie’s excesses and sheer ineptness. The actors speak using a forced, faux-King James Bible vocabulary that especially casts John Wayne’s performance in an unflattering light. However, even the film’s professionally trained thespians received less than flattering reviews. Instead, The Conqueror has become a “guilt-watch”: a forlorn celluloid record of a tragedy—decried by some as “the movie that killed John Wayne.” Pointedly, many have observed that Wayne (and others in the cast) were also career cigarette smokers. Likely, no clear medical consensus can confirm the exact cause of the cast’s deaths. Insurance actuaries still could have a field day with the risk analysis surrounding this failed Hollywood endeavor. In 1980 People magazine reported that of the 220 cast and crew members who worked on The Conqueror, ninety-one had contracted cancer and forty-six had succumbed to the disease.[10] And those statistics alone are nearly forty years old. At the time, this cancer rate was about three times the norm, prompting some authorities to categorize The Conqueror phenomenon as an epidemic, given the sobering number of subsequent cancer diagnoses of St. George-area residents.
Today, travelers to St. George can drive fifteen minutes north on Highway 18 to enjoy the campgrounds and viewpoints of Snow Canyon State Park. Its website encourages visitors to “explore the dunes and trails of beautiful Snow Canyon on foot, bike and horseback.” It also points out that “the canyon has been the site of Hollywood films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Electric Horseman and Jeremiah Johnson”—all nods to the films of longtime Utahn Robert Redford, but without any acknowledgment of the failed and tragic extravaganza that preceded them.
Valleys of Fire and Death
(The Professionals, 1966)
After above-ground nuclear tests were banned in Nevada in 1963 and the radioactive dust had settled and dissipated, not only did Robert Redford and his colleagues continue to capitalize on the scenery of the northeastern Mojave, but other productions blazed trails into new and seasoned territories there and beyond. Some four decades after Greed, Death Valley—and another, more distant Mojave Desert valley between Las Vegas and St. George—made colorful contributions to an outstanding action/adventure Western written and directed by Richard Brooks. The Professionals is an engaging, fast-paced yarn (based on the novel A Mule for the Marquesa by Frank O’Rourke) of a team of soldiers of fortune—“specialists” in their respective fields of explosives (Burt Lancaster), firearms (Lee Marvin), archery (Woody Strode) and horsemanship (Robert Ryan). Each have been hired by wealthy industrialist J.W. Grant (Ralph Bellamy) to rescue his ransomed Mexican wife (Claudia Cardinale), who has been ostensibly kidnapped by a Pancho Villa-like former revolutionary-turned-bandit Jesus Raza (Jack Palance).
The Professionals follows the team’s journey across the Mexican border, into Raza’s territory, searching for their client’s wife. When they secretly observe Maria in an embrace with Raza, the team realizes she is not a hostage at all but the longtime lover of Raza who had been “bought” by Grant in an arranged marriage. They nevertheless proceed to “rescue” her and honor the contract with their employer after a showdown with Raza, who is wounded and brought back by the team to the American side of the border. However, a plot reversal at the movie’s conclusion leaves the wealthy J.W. Grant getting his due.
Filmed almost entirely on location in several California deserts, with luminous cinematography by the celebrated Conrad Hall, including innovative day-for-night scenes shot on the floor of Death Valley and at its Mesquite Sand Dunes, The Professionals’ well-choreographed action sequences and zesty castanet-inflected score (composed by Maurice Jarre) set in motion a smoothly paced and superbly edited narrative. Perhaps not since William Daniels first focused his lens on these same salt flats in 1924 had Death Valley been so scrupulously and lovingly photographed. In the film, the setting may be beautiful—but it is meant to be deadly. The character played by Robert Ryan at one point complains: “Broiling by day. Freezing by night. Alkali dust choking every hole in your body. How in the name of God does anybody live here long enough to get used to it?”
But just as treacherous and stunning is another location, farther east, which stands in for the stronghold where Jesus Raza is keeping Grant’s wife: Nevada’s Valley of Fire State Park (an hour’s drive north of Las Vegas). This aptly named enclave served The Professionals as a versatile backdrop for gunfights, explosions and acrobatics on the part of star Lancaster. Brooks took pride that this was the first project to receive permission to film here (and where he returned for Bite the Bullet, in 1975).[11] Other impactful sequences were filmed just outside the Mojave, in the Colorado Desert’s Coachella Valley, along the now-dismantled Kaiser Eagle Mountain railroad line, where an evocative train ambush takes place. For the Valley of Fire sequences, an entire Mexican compound was built. Here, among reddish-pink rocks, Lancaster, a former circus performer, exhibits his muscular rope-climbing talents (he often shunned stunt doubles).
Director Brooks, whose other works include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, In Cold Blood and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, once noted in an interview how The Professionals’ premise had been adapted for the 1980s television series “The A-Team,” starring George Peppard.[12] But unlike “The A-Team,” the original film remains a critically admired achievement, especially by cinematographers. It is one of the subjects of the 1994 paean to golden-age cinematography, the documentary Visions of Light. Conrad Hall, the film’s director of photography, singles out The Professionals as a beacon of cinematographic achievement in this tribute (Hall earned an Academy Award nomination for his work in the film). All told, The Professionals is a masterly tribute to its panoramic Mojave locations in their guise as the treacherous deserts of northern Mexico.
Native Son
(Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, 1969)
Conspicuously absent from so many movies made in the Mojave are its indigenous people—the Chemehuevi, Mojave, Paiute, Shoshone, Serrano and others—whether as performers or characters (local Paiutes did serve as extras in The Conqueror and a few likely did so in Gunga Din). It would be tempting to single out Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here as a notable exception on both counts, were it not for the unfortunate fact that even forty years after the brownface enormities of Gunga Din, this self-consciously progressive film nevertheless had to abide by Hollywood casting practices that demanded Anglo headliners in ethnic imposture—in this case, Katharine Ross, fresh from Butch Cassidy and The Graduate as the female lead Lola and Robert Blake in the title role as a Chemehuevi man who was the real-life subject of an early twentieth-century manhunt. (Blake, né Michael Gubitosi, was already a veteran of non-white portrayals, making an early appearance as the Mexican boy who sells Humphrey Bogart a lottery ticket in 1948’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre). Here, despite both Blake’s and Ross’s bootblacked hair and dark makeup, and because of the participation of Morongo and other Mission tribes as extras and contributors, the message of Willie Boy remains elegiac and compelling.
As adapted for film (from the nonfiction book Willie Boy: A Desert Manhunt by Harry Lawton), Willie Boy’s story takes the 1909 Romeo-and-Juliet theme of the nonfictional protagonists and focuses it into an account of the posse led by Deputy Sheriff Cooper, portrayed by Robert Redford. The occasional outlaw, Willie Boy, has fallen in love with his cousin Lola, living on the Morongo Indian reservation near Banning, California. He elopes with her in defiance of tribal custom, which forbids unions of close relatives. Eventually, Lola’s disapproving father confronts Willie Boy, who Willie Boy kills in self-defense. This act thus frees the lovers to unite in wedlock according to a fictionalized tribal convention known as “marriage by capture.”
Local white authorities insist on bringing the young Willie Boy back to justice and thus ensues what is considered to be the Mojave’s last posse-led manhunt. The movie’s director and co-scenarist, Abraham Polonsky, who was blacklisted during the McCarthy Era, tempted critics to assume a parallel between the ostracism faced by Willie Boy and the director’s own travails. However, the film more overtly and sensitively addresses the issues of discrimination between Native Americans and whites at the turn of the twentieth century.
When Willie Boy and Lola escape together after the murder of Lola’s father, Willie Boy tells a frightened Lola that “they won’t chase us. They won’t even try. Nobody cares what Indians do.” The film is set among the Morongo tribe and was filmed near the tribe’s ancestral places in the chaparral country near the San Bernardino Valley and Whitewater River in the Colorado Desert. Later it traces Willie Boy’s and Lola’s flight into the same high desert regions of the Mojave where the historical figures met their ends—in an area known as The Pipes and Ruby Mountain, near the town of Landers. This laconic film—spare in dialogue but intensely felt—requires patient viewing: its pace is restrained, its protagonists flawed and complex. And again, the camerawork of Conrad Hall distinguishes this project with its sensitive lighting, especially in night sequences. The climactic scenes set in The Pipes region (again, on the fringes of the Mojave, where the historical actions took place) are exposed in muted colors that impart the film with its sense of bleakness and solemnity.
After the film’s climax, when Willie Boy allows himself to be killed in self-defense by Redford’s Deputy Cooper, the body is given to his tribal fellows, who build a bonfire on the site and cremate the remains. When he is confronted by the county sheriff, who affirms the public’s “right” to see Willie Boy’s body, Cooper responds, “Tell them we’re all out of souvenirs.” In this respect, Willie Boy is an essential Mojave movie, embodying as it does the desert’s tradition as a place of flight, pursuit and ephemerality.
Helter Skelter
(Zabriskie Point, 1970)
Taking a cue from the desert’s legacy as a place of spiritual refuge and retreat, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point is likely the most identifiable movie to cast the Mojave as a countercultural mecca, borrowing its name from—and later adding resonance to—the familiar Death Valley overlook. Initially lambasted by critics on its release, the film has, over the years, garnered more admirable reassessments, not least for its impressive cinematography (by Alfio Contini) and innovative use of ensemble music (with contributions from Pink Floyd, Roy Orbison, Jerry Garcia, John Fahey and even Patti Page).
Co-scripted by playwright Sam Shepard—no stranger to desert settings—this cinéma vérité film chronicles, somewhat laboriously, the parallel stories of Mark (Mark Frechette) and Daria (Daria Halprin). The former is a young radical student protester who is temporarily jailed in a mass campus arrest and then becomes embroiled in a violent Los Angeles conflict when a policeman is killed (it is unclear who killed him). Mark flees the scene, stealing an airplane at a suburban airport and heads toward Death Valley. En route, Mark encounters Daria from the air, driving to Phoenix to meet with her boss (Rod Taylor) after being waylaid by a group of young toughs who have harassed her. Mark’s plane swoops down close enough to make flirtatious contact. The two later meet up at the cabin of a desert rat (Paul Fix), where Mark has come in search of more gasoline for his stolen aircraft; he then hitches a ride with Daria, and they end up in the spectacular badlands of Zabriskie Point. Here, they make love in a prolonged sequence filmed deep within the canyons and ravines below the overlook. This lust-in-the dust interlude has its unintentionally comic elements for some. Still, it is counterpointed by the appearance of a highway patrolman who questions Daria while Mark remains hidden. Mark secretly aims his gun at the CHP officer with his gun—only to be blocked by Daria in the effort. The couple returns to the plane, which they paint with slogans. Mark then decides to fly back to Los Angeles and face the consequences of his actions. At the same time, Daria proceeds onward to Phoenix to meet with her capitalist real estate developer boss at his modernist retreat. The film concludes with Mark arriving to surrender in L.A. amid a fanfare of media coverage, while Daria looks back in dismay at her employer’s hilltop estate and envisions its spectacular implosion.
This modern-day flight-and-manhunt story, overlain with the countercultural themes of the late 1960s and early 1970s, served at least temporarily to impart the actual Zabriskie Point overlook with symbolic significance akin to today’s Black Rock City phenomenon of Burning Man: the desert as a liberating and spiritual sanctuary. (Antonioni’s Death Valley location work could not be replicated today, and it is astonishing that he succeeded in obtaining permission to do so in 1968, as the Zabriskie Point sequences were arguably invasive with respect to the fragile badlands environment). The film can also be viewed as a European’s homage to a romanticized American West as embodied by Death Valley—whose scorching temperatures and otherworldly landscapes continue to attract European visitors more than ever, particularly in the summer months.
Extraplanetary Action
(Star Wars, 1977, 1983; Star Trek V, 1989)
Earlier I suggested that no unifying landform may distinguish the Mojave. Still, it is undoubtedly true that this desert is the predominant home and hearth of a trademark plant, the Joshua tree. This statuesque yucca’s haunting appearance in the foreground of many documented nuclear blasts (like that of “Dirty Harry” of Nevada Test Site infamy) likely earmarked it as both a totem of science fiction (or science fact) and a symbol for the extraplanetary and fantastic. Early on, settlers marveled at the bizarre and often-humanoid plant. William Lewis Manly called it a “cabbage tree” in his journals.[13] Mormon pioneers likely christened it with the name that stuck—comparing Yucca brevifolia to the prophet Joshua with his arms upraised. Many see the Joshua tree as an emblem of the otherworldly aspect of the Mojave, a synecdoche for the desert’s onscreen function as a substitute for other planets, or a place for alien encounters, scientific experiments gone wrong and other fantasy narratives. In short, the Joshua tree’s desert home has become, on film, an alternative universe for flights of science-fiction fancy on a grand scale and the two epic touchstones here can be seen as mere points of inheritance or departure.
The Star Wars and Star Trek film franchises are so ingrained in popular consciousness that I need not elaborate on their plot points. The very first installment of George Lucas’ Star Wars, (1977), retroactively subtitled Episode IV: A New Hope, captivated filmgoers with its pulp-operatic lyricism, state-of-the-art pre-CGI special effects, thunderous John Williams score, and, as it turns out, indelibly memorable locations in Tunisia and Death Valley. While only occupying a fraction of the inaugural film’s 125-minute running time, the sand dunes, salt flats and badlands of Death Valley, playing their role as the planet Tattooine where R2-D2, C-3PO, Jawas and the human leads’ adventures occur, were so memorable that at least one web site is devoted to documenting each and every location.[14] (These include Golden Canyon, Artists’ Drive and Desolation Canyon, where an elephant was transformed into the fantastic Bantha creature). In Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983), Twenty Mule Team Canyon’s dirt thoroughfare served as the “Road to Jabba’s Palace” where R2-D2 and C-3PO converse before presenting themselves at the Hutt’s court.
Even the Department of the Interior maintains a section of the Death Valley National Park website devoted to Star Wars locations and notes that because many of these areas now fall under wilderness designations, filming is no longer allowed there, or, at the very least, is heavily restricted (likewise, as noted earlier, no similar Zabriskie Point orgy scene could be executed today without CGI intervention).
Star Trek V, directed by William Shatner, is subtitled The Final Frontier and features the cast of the original television series (Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelly, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig) and follows the USS Enterprise on a mission to rescue human, Klingon and Romulan hostages held by Mr. Spock’s half brother Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill). Sybok has lured them to the planet Nimbus III under false pretenses in order to enlist the Enterprise to engage in a search for the planet Sha Kee Ree, the place where creation began and the purported home of God. The settlement of Paradise City on Nimbus III is, in reality, the dry surface of Owens Lake (well before the city of Los Angeles undertook its dust-abatement project). Where “God” first makes his presence known is the Trona Pinnacles—the iconic tufa formations on the southern end of Searles Lake. (The Pinnacles would also make another significant appearance in 2001 in Tim Burton’s remake of The Planet of the Apes.) While the “final frontier” in this film is portrayed by the Pinnacles (which turn out not to be the home of God), this true frontier has been anything but final from a cinematic perspective—the Trona location has proved an ongoing boon for many undertakings on television and elsewhere (an early appearance was as the extraterrestrial backdrop for the 1960s TV series “Lost in Space.”) All told, the Mojave has served as otherworldly locales almost as often as it has played itself or other earthbound substitutes, whether it’s Death Valley as the Red Planet (Robinson Crusoe on Mars, 1964) or the dry lakebeds of San Bernardino County as another dimension altogether (Buckaroo Banzai, 1984).
Sin City Celluloid
(Casino, 1995)
What happens in the desert often stays in the desert—a place that, if personified, might undoubtedly be diagnosed as an amnesiac. And the dumping ground that is the desert—its delicate ecology often treated as a vacant lot or as a landfill or worse—is another theme that is often addressed in fiction and nonfiction cinema. The desert is also a place of mirages and illusions, where water is not a natural resource and can create a specious sense of sustainability when imported. But with respect to motion pictures in general and the Mojave in particular, the desert’s exploitation, corruption and deception are often at the thematic core of an entire subgenre of movies that take place in Las Vegas. The gambling culture that sprang out of mid-century speculation is now part of the desert fabric—whether it’s embodied by a Native American casino on a Mojave Desert reservation, a riverside Laughlin hotel or a neon-lit, chandeliered palazzo on the Las Vegas Strip. Some of the earliest treatments of Las Vegas attempted to glamorize this ethos—Ocean’s 11 (1960), Viva Las Vegas (1964) and Diamonds Are Forever (1971) capitalized on the cachet of the Rat Pack, Elvis Presley and James Bond, respectively. Later, Vegas’s louche underside and its tales of mobsters, corruption, excess and heartbreak became more standard fare in movies such as The Godfather (1973), One from the Heart (1981), Bugsy (1991), Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and (more comically) Honeymoon in Vegas (1992) along with The Hangover (2009).
Singled out here is Martin Scorsese’s Casino, which succeeds in combining so many Las Vegas themes into a lyrically violent and driven narrative that epitomizes one of the Mojave’s most visited and notorious places of all. Casino is in some respects a retread of Scorsese’s earlier picture Goodfellas (1990), which also shared the lead actors Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci and screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi. But Casino, while also a mob narrative, is specific to Las Vegas in the 1970s; before corporations took over the hotels and the city became more family-friendly. The film is narrated by De Niro’s character, Sam “Ace” Rothstein, a bookie with mob ties who rises in the ranks to become a Vegas hotel-casino manager, along with Pesci’s murderous mob enforcer character Nicky Santoro (Ace’s hometown pal). This profane three-hour epic chronicles the rise and fall of Ace, whose savvy and ruthless business acumen endears him to his mob-investor superiors but whose fraught relationships with Nicky, his hustler and ex-courtesan wife Ginger (Sharon Stone) and her con-man/ex-boyfriend Lester (James Woods) ensure his eventual downfall. In one of Casino’s opening voiceovers, Nicky sets the tone for much of the film: “[There’s] a lot of holes in the desert, and a lot of problems are buried in those holes. But you gotta do it right”—alluding once again to the Mojave as dumping ground and burial plot.
This movie is, in fact, about a lot of real and metaphorical hole-digging, with some characters getting buried literally within those holes. Several of the movie’s voiceovers accompany dramatic aerial footage of the crisp, clear Nevada desert with white playas, sharp-focused mountain ranges and patterned sagebrush sweeps where these secrets are concealed or buried. Yet this exterior aspect of Casino’s desert setting is less on display than the interiors of this unique Mojave locale—the luridly lit, gleaming, glaring hotel-casino (the fictional Tangiers, “portrayed” in the film by the now-demolished Riviera). Scorsese’s cinematographer, Robert Richardson, captures this world of mile-long aqua Lincoln Continentals, chandeliered ceilings and other excesses through magnificently chromatic shots that in many instances suggest the saturated pastels of still photographer William Eggleston. The fluid camerawork not only captures the neon, chrome and brassy ambiance of the Tangiers but the kinetic energy of the round-the-clock casino milieu. Even the opening credits, one of the last of film-graphic pioneer Saul Bass, are a neon-drenched celebration of the glare and energy of the setting. The character of Ace Rothstein in Casino is a ruthlessly honest storyteller; his early observation about the gambling culture of Las Vegas can ring painfully true to anyone with a weakness for gaming. Speaking on behalf of the casino owners, he says, “We’re the only winners. The players don’t stand a chance.” But because one theme of the desert is that of illusion, one of Ace’s final voiceovers serves as a coda that reinforces its ongoing promise of deception: “Today, [Las Vegas] looks like Disneyland. And, while the kids play cardboard pirates, Mommy and Daddy drop the house payments and Junior’s college money on the poker slots.”
Other Desert Cinema
The Mojave is so expansive and varied, both geographically and culturally, that it is impossible not to omit some aspect of its presence on the silver screen. And with that admission, I aim to conclude by citing a few other films that have escaped the structure of this dispatch. Because over the years, the communities of the Antelope and Victor Valleys have become subdivided, developed and increasingly suburban—their horizons now silhouetted by housing tracts and transmission lines. But in Hollywood’s golden period, the high desert’s proximity to L.A. was a boon to motion pictures, where local dry lake beds accommodated scenes for classics like 1937’s Lost Horizon and 1939’s Stagecoach (Lucerne Dry Lake) and much later in 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (El Mirage Dry Lake) and 1983’s The Right Stuff (Muroc Dry Lake). The Antelope Valley is also the breeding ground for the mutated giant ants of Them! (1954), a film that likely influenced another Mojave sci-fi stalwart, Tremors (1990), whose outsize earthworms terrorized the inhabitants of the fictional Perfection, Nevada (once again the Alabama Hills.) The desolate town of Trona at Searles Lake provides the hardscrabble location for Just Add Water (2008), a comedy starring Danny DeVito. The art-house favorite Bagdad Cafe (1987) was filmed at a Newberry Springs diner that acted as a stand-in for the fictional one at the former town of the same name, located along historic U.S. Route 66.
Nearby, the colorful Calico Mountains, near Barstow, while comparatively overlooked in movies, have been employed to effect by Joseph Losey in The Prowler (1951) and by Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill, Vol. 2 (2004), who is also fond of Antelope Valley locations, one of them the much-sought-after “Kill Bill Church” in Lancaster. Orson Welles’ film-noir cult favorite Touch of Evil (1958), while predominantly shot in Venice, California (standing in for the corrupt fictional Mexican border town of Los Robles), includes a scene in which the American wife (Janet Leigh) of a Mexican police chief (Charlton Heston) is terrorized by ruffians in a desert motel managed by a crazed pre-Norman Bates “night man” (Dennis Weaver). Welles shot this sequence in what is now a Palmdale subdivision but was at the time El Rancho Courson, a desert hideaway reportedly frequented by celebrities who wished to be left alone. No trace of it remains today.
Of course, the preceding is only a subjective discourse on the cinematic legacy the Mojave has left us. It does not address the thousands of television features, commercials, still photographs, music videos, and album covers that have capitalized on its vast skies and Joshua tree forests.
In Lone Pine, California, still a hub for much of these related activities, Christopher Langley, Inyo County’s film commissioner, has an optimistic take on the desert’s ongoing promise and potential as a cinematic place. “The natural light in these arid lands can illuminate the big skies and complex geological structures. Desert settings have many fewer rain delays than most locations,” he says. “Of course, these lands are often sparsely populated. People here generally tend to be ‘film-friendly’ because they are proud of where they live and they appreciate the revenue stream a film project can provide them.”
That is very much a practical matter rather than an artistic one, but it is also a matter of stewardship. Langley continues: “Much of the desert areas are managed by various federal agencies including the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service and California State Parks. Even the city of Los Angeles owns large plots of land. They all remain supportive of and friendly to productions. People who oversee the economic engine of filmmaking take special care of the locations so they will be there to use next time.”
Langley observes that while many visitors to the desert he calls home still view it as a wasteland “fit only for solar arrays,” the desert itself can play many parts in a visual artwork. “It can be seen as an actor in the story,” he says.[15]
Perhaps that is the lesson to be gleaned from this dispatch, the Mojave is not only a place, it is a character, one that is both familiar and multifaceted.
Jeffrey Burbank is a Los Angeles-based writer whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and L.A. Weekly.
This article is co-published with KCET Artbound. Visit Artbound’s Mojave Project page here. Opening image from Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983), Lucasfilms, LTD. filmed at Twenty Mule Team Canyon, Death Valley National Park.
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FOOTNOTES (click to open/close)
[1] Edna Brush Perkins, The White Heart of the Mojave (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). First published in 1922.
[2] Stroheim intended for Greed to be screened as a nine-hour-long film from forty-two movie reels. Although much of the original film was lost over time, Turner Entertainment embarked on reconstructing the film in 1999 using existing footage with over 650 still photographs for its four-hour version. In addition, the film and scoring collective Asphalt Serenade composed and performed a live, original score to accompany a shorter version of the reconstructed film at the Marigny Opera House in New Orleans, Louisiana, on March 9, 2018. Readers can be view this recorded performance online at https://vimeo.com/261226874. Note that the Mojave Desert scenes begin at 1:29:45.
[3] Richard Lingenfelter, Death Valley and The Amargosa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 445-446.
[4] The Wikipedia entry for Greed and the Turner Classic Movies’ reconstructed version of the film, are informative references for the film.
[5] Dave Holland, On Location in Lone Pine (Granada Hills, Calif.: Holland House, 1990) is a significant resource for many classic films made in Lone Pine, especially Gunga Din.
[6] Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1982), 47.
[7] Personal conversation with Millard Kaufman and the author, Beverly Hills, California, 2008.
[8] Susan King, “So big, it needed to be filmed in Technirama,” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 2007.
[9] Circa 1986, the author spoke with a ranger at Red Rock Canyon State Park who suggested that upper Jawbone Canyon was the likely location for The Big Country’s climax.
[10] Karen G. Jackovich and Mark Sennet, “The Children of John Wayne, Susan Hayward, and Dick Powell Fear that Fallout Killed Their Parents,” People, November 10, 1980.
[11] Personal conversation with Richard Brooks and the author, Directors Guild, Los Angeles, California, 1988. In fact, Brooks was mistaken—other movies, including Hal Roach’s One Million B.C., in 1940, had been filmed at Valley of Fire, which became a state park in 1935.
[12] Richard Brooks was interviewed by Charles Champlin at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, 1990.
[13] William Lewis Manly, Death Valley in ’49 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2007).
[14] One such site is https://www.panamintcity.com/exclusives/starwars.html, while the National Park Service serves forth its own reference https://www.nps.gov/deva/planyourvisit/star-wars-in-death-valley.htm. Christopher Langley provides an excellent treatment of Death Valley’s science fiction settings that includes Star Wars at https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/from-jayhawkers-to-jawa-a-short-history-of-filming-in-death-valley-part-i
[15] Christopher Langley, interview with the author, April 11, 2019.