50 STATES 50 MOVIES: NORTH DAKOTA
In A Desolate Landscape, It's Love, Loyalty and Optimism That Sustains You
Three Faces West
My parents had a friend in the United States Air Force who lived on base. For over a decade, they lived at Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York, between Syracuse and Utica for years, only about six hours north of where the couple grew up in New York City. The base closed in the early 1990s, and they and the husband were reassigned. First, they were slated to move to Minot Air Force Base in Minot, North Dakota, but the wife protested, joking to my mom, “I might not go to Minot.” The Air Force instead sent them to Utah, where we visited them in 1995.
Later, she explained that she didn’t want to go to North Dakota because she felt it was too lonely and cold. “Nobody lives there, and there’s nothing to do,” she told my mom.
North Dakota has a rather unfair and cynical stereotype. Like America's version of Siberia, the state is sparsely populated, prone to punishing weather, and poverty-stricken. Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming are the only less populated states. While that reputation can be seen as unfavorable, there is also a toughness and ruthlessness that comes from living in such harsh conditions. Angie Dickinson, perhaps North Dakota’s most famous native, once said living in harsh Plains gave her the stamina to survive in Hollywood, and it was escaping that harsh life at the town theater in Kulm, where her father worked as a projectionist, where she developed her love for the movies.
Dickinson’s family left North Dakota for the West Coast during World War II, the same period my North Dakota movie is set and the same trajectory the film’s characters made.
Three Faces West, directed by Bernard Vorhaus and starring John Wayne – who Dickinson would star in one of her first starring roles, Rio Bravo – is primarily set in the small fictional town of Asheville Forks, North Dakota. The film begins in New York in 1940, where a group of refugee doctors from war-torn Europe arrive in the United States and are offered up to towns and cities across the country that need a medical professional. We meet Dr. Karl Braun (Charles Coburn), an affluent doctor from Vienna, Austria, fleeing the Nazis with his daughter Leni (Sigrid Gurie), whom Karl calls Lenchen. Dr. Braun is sent to Asheville Forks to serve as the town’s doctor, as a veterinarian currently holds that job.
Taking the train across the American countrywide, Karl and his daughter enjoy the beautiful vistas and take comfort in being away from war-ravaged Europe. When they arrive in North Dakota, their optimism is shattered.
When they arrive, a massive dust storm is hitting Asheville Forks. The dust storms resulted from a Biblical drought that triggered the Dust Bowl, a period of economic decline from which the Great Plains still haven’t fully recovered.
The Brauns are met by John Phillips (Wayne), who appears to be the town’s de facto mayor. The demeanor on Leni’s face does a total 180-degree turn from her smiling, bubbling disposition on the train. This isn’t what she signed up for, and she wants to leave. John takes Dr. Karl to visit several of the town’s sickest residents, including a family struck by the flu. Leni assists her father as his nurse. By the end of the grueling day, the Brauns are taken to their new home, a dusty, run-down shack where John lives just upstairs. They must also put up with the sneering glances from the cynical, xenophobic Dr. Nunk Atterbury (Spencer Charters), the town’s vet and substitute doctor.
The next day, John introduces the Brauns to the townspeople at the town church. The town’s minister (Russell Simpson), who serves as a chorus in the story, thanks them for coming in their hour of need. The speech and his experience aiding the townspeople the day before convinces Karl to stay, but Leni is still committed to leaving the town, even as the townsfolk thank the father-daughter team for coming.
Hoping to influence her to stay, John takes Leni on a drive, where the two flirt and share hilarious exchanges. Unfamiliar with American wit, Leni is confused by some of John’s puns. Leni’s reaction when John says, “You slay me,” is a moment of levity in this otherwise serious film.
Leni still insists on leaving and packs her bags, but Karl puts his foot down and decides to stay so he can perform surgery on a boy with leg paralysis whose mother he met at the church. Karl is persuaded by the mother’s belief that God sent the doctor to aid the town and her son. Leni protests but has no choice but to agree. The surgery is a success and even gets the xenophobic Nunk to come around to Karl finally. The success of the surgery convinces Leni to stay, and the Brauns become full-fledged denizens of Asheville Forks.
Meanwhile, John tries to spearhead a way to save the town’s arid farmland and economy. Battered by drought, he concocts a plan to build an irrigation system to bring water to the city, but the town’s farmers are skeptical of the plans in part because academics thought them up. Even 84 years ago, you saw this dynamic where blue-collar workers and farmers expressed mistrust of intelligentsia, even when they were trying to help. In one scene, John visits the local Department of Agriculture office, where the regional director tells him there is no way to save the town and they should pick up and move the entire city to a lush, fertile valley in Oregon that the government will give them. Insulted, he storms out. This is pretty representative of real life at the time. President Franklin Roosevelt’s handling of the Dust Bowl crisis damaged his and the Democratic Party’s standing in the Plains. After winning the state in 1932 and 1936, Roosevelt lost North Dakota in the 1940 elections, the year Three Faces West was set, and Democrats have never really recovered in national elections since. The townspeople’s reactions to the government’s suggestions on how to manage the drought are a perfect representation of that.
Defeated, John goes home and tells Leni and her father to leave. I have to say I don’t buy John Wayne playing a hopeless character. It wasn’t compelling. Luckily, just as it all feels hopeless, it rains. Unfortunately, the rain only buys the townspeople time and gives them false hope. The town is later hit again with another dust storm, and this time, it’s clear there is no more hope. They must accept the government's offer to move the entire town to Oregon. In a frightening, relevant scene, the townspeople attack a reporter who had come to report on the disaster but seemed to be doing so in a rather exploitative way.
Meanwhile, Leni and John get engaged, and Karl receives an offer to work at a major medical institution. He promises to delay taking the job until after Leni and John marry, ensuring he leaves his daughter in a good place to build a good foundation. Their happiness is cut short as Leni receives a letter discovering that her fiancee in Austria, Dr Eric Von Scherer, whom she assumed was dead, is alive and is coming to the United States.
The town packs up and heads for Oregon with John leading the caravan, but along the way, the camaraderie among the townspeople begins to fray. Some citizens consider taking jobs picking crops in California for easy, quick money and, worried about another drought or catastrophe outside their control, consider abandoning the plan to rebuild the town in Oregon. Picking crops in California is easy money and offers stability and certainty. The debate erupts in a little fistfight between John and several dissidents, though most of the townfolk side with John.
In the meantime, Leni tells John about her Austrian fiancee, and a heartbroken John tells her and her father to go to San Francisco and see him in a very subtle “get out of my life” way. The Brauns travel to San Francisco and meet up with Eric in an expensive hotel suite, where they’re shocked to see him wearing a Nazi uniform (remember, this is before Pearl Harbor). As it turns out, Eric defected to the Nazis and plans to marry Leni and bring her and Karl back to Austria to live under the Third Reich.
Leni’s look says it all:
Nope.
The movie closes under a sprawling, lush tree in Oregon, where the minister from Asheville Forks marries John and Leni as the new Asheville Forks, Oregon, rises around them.
When picking a film for North Dakota, I was hesitant to go with Three Faces West because the characters flee North Dakota in the end since the state, like the rest of the Plains states, still has not fully recovered from the economic double calamity of the Dust Bowl and the Depression – and that has played a massive role in North Dakota’s history even up to today – no better story indeed shows the state’s history and culture than this one. From the year the move was set, 1940, straight through into the 21st Century, North Dakota’s population remained stagnant, and the state was besotted with high unemployment. A muddling economy focused mainly on agriculture and susceptible to the whims of Mother Nature. However, after the turn of the century, North Dakota saw an energy boom, and later, tech jobs began flowing in the state. Microsoft has the second-largest campus in Fargo.
However, farming is still central to the state’s economy and culture. North Dakota’s punishing climate and isolated location haven’t, until recently, attracted many people from outside the state, like my mom’s Brooklyn-born friend, but for those who live there, there is a sense of pride in enduring the harshness of the Plains and like the people of Asheville Forks, a drive to fight for their home until the very end, and a dedication to carrying their North Dakota values wherever they might have to go.