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Spoiler *******spoiler**** re: The Searchers, High Noon, Shane
 
 
Ah, the bolting protagonist. Does this also mean, the hero who has done
his job but finds no place for him in his community when his job is done?
If so, I bet I can come up with a few actors and their movies for you.
 
1) How about John Wayne in the end of the Searchers? He returns Natalie
Wood back to the homestead, and everyone is all excited and enters the
cabin to go inside. But Wayne, he realizes that he is too racist and
uncivilized for the new kind of society that is evolving and that he is
not a homestead kind of guy, so he turns away, alone, and walks into the
sunset as the front door to the cabin closes on our view of him.
 
2) Shane! At the end of this film, Shane has shot down Jack Palance
(Wilson) and the evil cattlemen so the homesteaders can live peacefully.
The little boy who idolizes him begs him and calls for him to return to
the homestead, but Shane is a wanderer, a loner, not a man of the land,
so he knows he has no place there, as a gunfighter, and rides on.
 
3) High Noon. At the end, Gary Cooper has been abandoned by his former
loyal townspeople to fight four bad guys alone.  He fights and wins, with
the help of his wife, and then looks around disgustedly at the
townspeople who gather around him, throws down his tin star, and rides
away with his wife.
 
Hope i haven't spoiled anything for anybody, but i hope i helped answer
your question.
 
On Tue, 14 Feb 1995, Joshua Hirsch wrote:
 
> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> OK, here's another annoying trivia question. My screenwriter friends are
> always coming up with these ideas, and they want to know where these ideas
> might have been done before. They're the kind of questions you just can't
> answer in a reference book. So I figure I might as well annoy y'all with
> them. Sometimes you just have to ask a group of people to throw out titles.
> It's more fun in person, but anyway... (Remember the twins question?)
>
> So we want a list of films in which the protagonist, or at least a major
> character, at the end of the film, just kind of walks out the door and,
> without a word to anyone, goes away and doesn't come back. I can't think of
> a more articulate way to put this. "Bolting protagonists" sounds awful.
>
> So far we only have two titles that really fit. "Five Easy Pieces" and
> "Positive ID" (an independent film from Texas from a few years back).
>
> I also have a list of titles that don't quite fit but that maybe have some
> tangential relation (or that I'm not sure about):
>
> The Passenger (note the Jack Nicholson repeat -- kind of interesting)
> A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (Peter Medak)
> Messidor (Alain Tanner)
> Fearless (Peter Weir)
> Ordinary People
> Naked (Mike Leigh)
> None But the Lonely Heart (Clifford Odets - Cary Grant)
> Bagdad Cafe
> Thelma and Louise
> The Sheltering Sky
> Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch)
>
> Perhaps people could refresh my memory as to whether any characters in these
> films actually do anything like what I've described. It also strikes me that
> an action like this would be typical of films by Godard, Antonioni, Wenders,
> Altman, Tanner, Bresson, Akerman, etc.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Joshua Hirsch
> UCLA
>
> P.S. Just thought of Badlands.
>