Katy Jurado had already made twenty Mexican films when Hollywood beckoned. She would make many more—both in Mexico and in the States, especially in Western roles—and I remember her best in this scene from Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

Her other Westerns include High Noon, Arrowhead, Broken Lance and a personal favorite of mine, One-Eyed Jacks, a film made by Marlon Brando, who fell madly in love with her in the middle of torrid affairs with two other actresses. Who can blame him for falling in love with just one more?

Brando’s hijinks aside, there was, I think, a consistent feature in all the characters Jurado played, and it was in their dignity

She was born in Mexico City in 1924, when the nation was just emerging from the violence of a ten-year revolution that had claimed one million lives—one of every ten Mexican citizens. Sadly, violence marked her relatively short marriage to Ernest Borgnine. And violence is a hallmark of Sam Peckinpah films, and it’s a staple of his Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

This scene is no exception. Jurado plays the wife of lawman Slim Pickens, James Coburn is Pat Garrett, and they’re on Billy the Kid’s trail when they encounter outlaws holed up in a remote cabin. The gunplay follows. Jurado’s performance with a shotgun is impressive.

But the violence isn’t the memorable part. This scene moves me because of the final glances that Jurado and Pickens exchange as both of them realize that he is dying. This is marvelous, heart-breaking acting.

Bob Dylan had a minor role in this film. His song is all the dialogue this scene needed.

What a scene. What a song. What a woman.

And, of course, it’s such a fine song that I can’t leave the blog post hanging without the rest of. Dylan and Tom Petty perform “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” here. This is for Katy Jurado.

Since the weeds in the back are getting really tall, I watched the 1944 film Passage to Marseille, or at least the last half, the other day.

The concept is a grand one—making a movie with the cast of Casablanca (1942).

And they include:

Peter Lorre as Marius

Sidney Greenstreet as Major Duval

Claude Rains as Captain Freycinet

Humphrey Bogart as Jean Matrac

The premise is that a steamship picks up five men on a life raft in Mid-Atlantic. They are escapees from Devil’s Island who evidently want to repay the French government—for sending them to a place overrun with poisonous millipedes and tarantulas the size of catcher mitts and, just offshore, ravenous sharks who’ve acquired a French palate— by fighting for the Free French. 

Bogart’s Jean Matrac has evidently left his French accent behind back at the prison compound. Maybe a tarantula ate it.

It gets more complicated. On the steamship, we find Greenstreet–Rick’s rival nightclub owner in Casablanca—who turns out to be a hidden Nazi, and Greenstreet, “The Fat Man” in The Maltese Falcon, is not easy to hide.  His diction, as usual, is impeccable. Not French, mind you, but impeccable.

Lorre plays a kind of craven fellow, as he did in both Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, who turns out in this film to be heroic. 

Bogart, one of my favorite actors, sneers a lot, even more than he did in The Petrified Forest. I’m not sure, but I think that his character, Matrac, was sent to Devil’s Island because his haircut was an affront to the French nation.

Claude Rains is Claude Rains. He was allegedly a pain to work with, but his character, M. Le Capitaine (Renault’s rank in Casablanca), is from the Prefecture of Suavité et Drolleries. The man is incessantly classy.

Corinne Mura, from Casablanca, is also in Passage to Marseille. She plays a guitar-strumming nightclub singer in both films. She is brief.

Jay Silverheels is in this movie. Although he wasn’t in Casablanca, he played Tonto in The Lone Ranger, evidently forbidden by his dialogue coach to use many parts of speech, including articles and prepositions, or to conjugate verbs.

The ship, meanwhile, is a wreck. It looks like one of those Canadian ice-fishing huts perched atop a box of Rice Krispies. I chose that metaphor because one of the Krispies—I can’t remember now if it’s Snap, Crackle or Pop—looks vaguely French.

And Marseille is evidently located on the far side of a big tub of water on the Warner Brothers back lot. An ocean it’s not. The camera fortunately just misses the fingertips of the technicians who are pushing the little boat around.

Anyway, a German bomber attacks the ship—for the sake of argument, let’s call it the Madeline, because I love those children’s books–strafing it with machine gun fire.

During the strafings, the special-effects technicians are worked to the point of exhaustion in making reasonable-looking waves in the Warner Brothers water tank. I bet their fingertips got all pruny. 

(I hope they drained the tank between movies. If not, Burbank would’ve been plagued by mosquitoes the size of German bombers.)

Meanwhile, other techs “flew” the airplane, the little wire almost invisible, probably getting dizzy and falling down because the plane circles for many strafing runs.

Yes, I know I’m spoiled. I’ve grown accustomed to computer-generated special effects like those in The Lord of the Rings, where vast hordes of Orcs appear for the archer Legolas to shoot down so rapidly.

Lorre’s Marius dies shooting a clunky machine gun, a British Bren, at the airplane. Lorre was a marvelous actor—he might just be a match for Orlando Bloom—who was a sensation as a child-killer in Fritz Lang’s 1931 film, M. 

Lorre fled the Nazis to come to Hollywood, as did several members of the Casablanca cast, including Conrad Veidt, another Fritz Lang veteran, who played Major Strasser. His life ended when a heart attack struck him down at the Riviera Country Club. Veidt loved golf. He died on the eighth, a difficult hole, uphill, masked by trees and guarded by sand traps. It’s a widow-maker.

Back on the Madeline:

Bogart was firing another Bren at the German bomber. After replacing the ammunition drum and banging it with his hand, a trick he learned from his then-wife, whom he fondly nicknamed “Sluggy,” he got the thing to work and brought down the airplane.

Once Madeline reaches France, many of the characters enlist in a Free French B-17 bomber unit. Jean Matrac becomes a gunner and he expires as his stricken airplane flies over the home of his wife and little boy.

That left Claude Rains intact. During Matrac’s military funeral, Rains reads the man’s last letter home. Matrac was terse in the rest of the film, but he had lot to say in that letter. “The Marseillaise” plays in the background. Three or four verses.

The Warner Brothers technicians, worn out, were all taking naps by then. 

So was I.

The weeds remain.

There is a marvelous moment in The Big Lebowski when The Dude just can’t take it anymore. When the cabdriver puts on The Eagles, Jeff Bridges is in obvious pain. “Not THE EAGLES, man!” The irate cabbie throws him out. In the early 1980s, when I was working at Laguna Liquors in San Luis Obispo, now a sports-bar/burger place, I met an old and dear Arroyo Grande High School friend, a bassist in a not-very-successful rock band, who assured me that they didn’t play Fleetwood Mac crap.

I didn’t tell him that I loved Mac. And I wouldn’t have been ejected from the cab, because I love the Eagles, too.

When I was an impoverished student at the University of Missouri, what sustained me were eggs, Velveeta and Wonder Bread, because they were cheap, and me chasing the radio dial until I could find “Rhiannon” once again. The song’s first national splash on the television show Midnight Special—“This is a song about a Welsh witch,” Nicks deadpanned—was so epic that my reading material of choice back then, Rolling Stone (along with, of course, National Lampoon) many years later published a very funny but spot-on essay on the band’s appearance, called, modestly:

17 Reasons This ‘Rhiannon’ Clip Is the Coolest Thing in the Universe

By Bob Sheffield

Sheffield even commented on Stevie Nicks’s hair. I found this line stunning:

Stevie’s hair. Oh, the hair. Beyond feathered. The feathers have feathers.

That’s good writing.

Here’s the clip, from 1976, introduced by, of al people, Helen Reddy:

Of course, I fell immediately in love with Nicks, whom my mother-in-law, a devoted Reagan Republican, somehow met backstage because both women had connections to La Cañada Flintridge, a town that overlooks Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. My mother-in-law, whom I adored, was horrified. She seemed to think that Stevie was something that JPL had brought home from Deep Space.

I would find out only many years later that both my mother-in-law and my wife, Elizabeth, have Welsh roots. No wonder I loved “Rhiannon.”

And even thought it was “Rhiannon,” and Velveeta, that allowed me to survive an impoverished summer until my work-study job came through, that’s not my favorite Fleetwood Mac song.

Nope.

I have settled, after thoughtful consideration, on “The Chain” as my favorite, and for several reasons: it’s fraught with anger and recrimination, because the band members were uncoupling and so angry and recriminating during the production of Rumors. It’s raw stuff. I don’t know but there was blood on the recording studio floor. The Lindsey and Stevie who’ d been eyeing each other suggestively during the Midnight Special segment were not in love anymore. They were instead, metaphorically, at least, lacing each others’ Constant Comment Tea with rat poison.

That’s what makes the song so real. They were in a place where, tragically, nearly all of has been, the kind of place that, forty years later, might make you pull your car over on the 405, reach into the trunk for the tire iron, and begin hitting yourself repeatedly upside the head.

Why did I do that?

Why did I say that?

Why was I such an asshole?

Once the bleeding from the tire iron slows, though, you realize that the other element that makes this a great song is in the way it’s performed.

There’s the languid introduction, the rapidity and intensity of as its tempo once it passes the introduction—it’s the kind of musical acceleration that marks The 1812 Overture— the plaintive high notes, Fleetwood’s maniacal drumming and, for me, the best part: John McVie’s bass solo, maybe the best since Jack Bruce’s work with Cream, and the way it yields to Buckingham’s final solo. Yes, Buckingham is a ham, and his solos sometimes last longer than The 1812 Overture, but this one is sharp and wounding, which is exactly the way an angry song should end.

But you don’t have to accept my opinion on “The Chain.” It suddenly occurred to me that I’m not alone in my opinion about this song, because so many excellent musicians have covered it.

So I put together this video as my little tribute to Mac and the song. The original band appears at beginning and end, but in between are Florence and the Machine, then two country-inflected performances by The Highwomen, from Howard Stern’s show, and then by Keith Urban and Little Big Town with, of course, Nicole Kidman looking on fondly. Then, to avoid getting lost in Kidman’s charms, I ended the video with the McVie-to-Buckingham handoff.

I haven’t put “The Chain” up there yet with “Gimme Some Lovin’,” “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” “Gimme Shelter,” or Rubber Soul, but it’s kind of sliding unobtrusively, without being obnoxious about it, into my mind’s list of favorite songs.

I just have one more and extremely important point to make: Christine McVie, I miss you.