Let’s closed ‘fight week’ with another George Stevens directed fight sequence. Earlier this week we watched his superb fight scene from ‘Shane’ (which took place in a bar). The day before we caught the fight from John Sturges ‘Bad Day at Black Rock’ (which took place in a diner that I’m convinced surreptitiously sold liquor). On Wednesday we were in a very bar-ish bar for the John Huston directed fight from ‘The Treasure Of Sierra Madre’. And yesterday we were in the bar-from-hell to end all bar-from-hells in the fight scene from William Peter Blatty’s ‘The Ninth Configuration’. Today, though, we are alcohol free. The setting is clearly just a diner–and a very nice, 50s-esque diner at that. (I really want to order the bacon/scrambledeggs/hashbrowns/whitetoast/coffee thing when I watch this scene.) Rock Hudson’s confrontation with the diner’s proprietor ‘Sarge’ (played by Mickey Simpson, filling in for an otherwise occupied Ernest Borgnine) is not just a conflict over whether the Mexican family who Sarge is throwing out should be allowed to stay; it’s also a turning point in Hudson’s character’s growth and understanding of his obligations to his own new family member who also happens to be Mexican. Thus the scene is the rare fight scene that actually has emotional growth within its confines. There were many other fight scenes I considered posting this week but ultimately I went with this one, not only because I love it but because today marks the fiftieth anniversary of George Stevens passing. I thought I’d close with an amusing remembrance about Stevens from actor Michael Anderson who played James the Younger in Steven’s ginormous biblical epic ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’. As I mentioned in the post about ‘Shane’, Stevens was a slow, deliberate craftsman, taking weeks to fashion sequences on set and given to taking long walks by himself in between takes, presumably thinking things over. Says Anderson:

“On the first day the cast and crew gathered, sprinkled a little water and said a prayer…and took one whole day to do it. The next day we all thought ‘right, okay, we’re going to work…and we sat there for three weeks and Stevens took a chair and he sat where we could all see him on a hill overlooking the entire valley, and he did not move. He came down for an hour to rehearse and then he would go back up and we were ready to shoot this thing. And it went on for days and days and days. Finally we rehearsed the scene a little bit more and then he went back up for five or six hours. Nobody really knew what that meant. We all realized at that point that we were not going to knock this movie off…”