Another in the occasional series on Western cinematographers
A Western master
After dropping out of college and wandering round China, Ballard started working at Paramount in the very early days of talkies and married Merle Oberon. He became famous for inventing a special camera-mounted light, the ‘Obie’, that managed to make Oberon’s facial scars, suffered in an auto accident, almost invisible.
He formed a close professional
relationship with three great Western directors, Budd Boetticher, Henry Hathaway and Sam Peckinpah, and so Ballard himself became almost a Western
specialist. He worked with Boetticher first in 1958 in the Randolph Scott Buchanan Rides Alone and with Peckinpah
on The Westerner TV series and Ride the High Country in 1962, again
with Scott. The high country in question was filmed up in the Inyo National
Park in California and is very fine. It is, for me, the first Western Ballard
did in which you really notice the photography as being very good.
For Hathaway he photographed the
1965 John Wayne vehicle The Sons of Katie Elder – not, perhaps, the greatest Western ever made but certainly visually
pleasing with its Durango locations. The following year he worked with Hathaway
again on Nevada Smith, again not the
classiest horse opera but visually attractive.
I would also highlight a ‘little’
Western of 1968 of which I am very fond, Will Penny, directed by Tom Gries, in which Ballard did wonderful work on the
snowy high-country winter scenes (Inyo again).
But it is really 1969 that
marks the high water mark of Ballard’s Western career because in that year he
did two masterpieces, True Grit for Hathaway and The Wild Bunch for Peckinpah.
In his review of True
Grit, Vincent Canby of The New York
Times wrote, ''Anyone interested in what good cinematography means can
compare Ballard's totally different contributions to The Wild Bunch and True Grit.
In The Wild Bunch, the camera work is
hard and bleak and largely unsentimental. The images of True Grit are as romantic and autumnal as its landscapes, which, in
the course of the story, turn with the season from the colors of autumn to the
white of winter.”
It is true that these movies are totally different,
visually and in spirit. Westerns of the old and new schools, if you like. The True Grit locations (some Durango and Inyo again but mostly in Colorado
round Ouray, Buckskin Joe and Owl Creek Pass) are wonderful, glowing, luminous,
almost pastoral. It makes you want to go there. (I did). The Wild Bunch, however, with all its technically brilliant
editing, its Durango and Coahuila dust and heat, yellowness and sun, along with
gloomy interiors, is as different photographically as could be. It was in The Wild Bunch that Ballard showed his
mastery of true widescreen photography. Both films are masterpieces in many
ways (script, direction, acting) but not least in the look of them, thanks to
Ballard.
Later on Ballard shot The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) and Junior Bonner (1972), both directed by
Peckinpah and once again these are feasts from the visual point of view. Breakheart Pass in 1975 was a pretty
ropey Charles Bronson Western despite it being directed by Gries again (more of an
adventure/whodunit in fact) but once again the winter mountain scenes (Idaho)
were very well shot. Ballard’s last western was another Bronson/Ireland
partnership shot in the Burbank studios, the low-grade From Noon Till Three (1976). Pity to end on such a low note.
But it is for True Grit and The Wild Bunch that we Western fans
elevate him to greatness. Personally, despite the heat and dust of Cable Hogue or The Wild Bunch, I’ll always think of cold, high country when
Ballard is mentioned.
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