Category Archives: Western

Hour of The Gun (1967): James Garner and Jason Robards

Posted on by
5

The story is as old as the mythology of the West. You cannot avoid tales of Tombstone, Arizona on October 26, 1881 and the famed Gunfight at The O.K. Corral. John Ford covered the events most famously in My Darling Clementine headlined by Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, and Walter Brennan in the title roles.

A generation later, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas teamed up to do their version. And the lineage runs a lot wider and deeper than this. It leaves one to wonder how many ways you can retell the same story with the same central characters.

Director John Sturges answers the question almost immediately by doing away with the one scene that this whole mythology effectively hinges on. The movie opens with the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which feels more like a glorified street fight, done in seconds, with Clanton standing by and unharmed by the events at hand. Whether it plays more to the timber of actual history or not, it sets a precedent and recontextualizes everything we must relearn about these legendary figures of the West.

The men who play them are more than up to the task because of what they bring to the characterizations. Their names should be familiar. James Garner. Jason Robards. Robert Ryan. They are featured prominently in the title credits like figures on the marquee.

There might be some questions of where the movie might possibly go from here because it quickly disposes of its most “climactic moment,” underwhelming or not. Still, there manages to be a story built off the foundations of this inciting incident.

It becomes part courtroom drama momentarily, then it’s a town-wide conspiracy against the Earp brothers, and it finally turns deadly when they are ambushed with shotguns in the dead of night. The bloody gunfights and surreptitious ambushes are quickly deliberated over in the very same courtroom. There’s a kind of legal impasse.

Ryan always managed to be a fine villain, and it’s no different here. He plays Clanton as a shrewd businessman with most of the town on his payroll including sheriffs, public prosecutors, and a bevy of wanted gunmen (including a young Jon Voight). Though he never pulls the trigger himself, he has many minions in his pocket prepared to do his bidding. It’s a lot more convenient since he has the money to spend.

Hour of the Gun also feels like a western straddling two generations. Garner and Robards represent it well. Garner’s Maverick and to some extent his Local Sheriff put a different spin on the western genre as a kind of anti-western star, at least compared to the James Arness or Chuck Connors archetypes.

And Jason Robards, who only a year later would find his way into Sergio Leone’s epic spaghetti opera Once Upon a Time in The West, is equally adept in such an environment. He can be rugged and tough but not without a kind of wry sense of humor and intuition. We like them both for who they are. First, as performers and then as two of the West’s most prominent figures: Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday respectively.

Lucien Ballard was a Hollywood veteran with saddlebags full of movie credits including many entries shooting his wife and leading lady Merle Oberon. Jerry Goldsmith takes on scoring duties with work that observes the purview of the West while reminding us of his crucial role in future New Hollywood and blockbuster hits.

It’s curious how the movie hews closer to history, and it looks to dispel myth and tell a version of the tale that feels more like a procedural. In some ways, it is a more modern expression of the western, though John Sturges is not in the Eastwood, Peckinpah, or even Leone school.

He was actually the very same man who helmed The Gunfight at The O.K. Corral with Lancaster and Douglas. But this is hardly a reworking in the way Howard Hawks remade Rio Bravo multiple times. Rather it feels like Sturges is intent on telling the tale with different terms more to his liking.

Initially, it builds off the legacy of The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape where there’s something honest and sure about its telling, but it’s not gun shy. There’s still a sense of violence and ambiguity in other ways. Because hypocrisy exists in a world where as long as men have warrants and badges or they are fighting wars, killing is legalized. In all other contexts, it’s not permissible.

It becomes so easy to bend the rules either in service of good and often in the service of evil. Hour of The Gun ultimately is quick to distance itself from the comfortable morality of earlier westerns. This too is a bridge to its future brethren in the genre.

Doc is the man who ultimately assembles the troops; it’s a sequence we know well and somehow Sturges’s best films always captured this brand of male camaraderie — the kind of scenes that little boys of a certain generation aspired to. Getting together with their friends to fight the baddies. There’s still a sense of good fun and the kind of innocent naivete the western used to breed. Though it never amounts to anything.

It all comes down to Wyatt Earp and his personal vendettas. Garner shows a ferocity and a simmering rage that’s rare in him or at least he hides it well often through down-home charm or a coward’s prerogative. Here he’s driven by a sense of justice for the deaths of his brothers. He’s not squeamish when it comes to searching it out either.

The ending could not be a further departure from its predecessors. It feels like the dilapidated, windswept ruins and facades in pictures like Vera Cruz or Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid where the classic western modality goes to die in some sense.

Wyatt finally completes his search for Clayton and comes face-to-face with the man who was so very hard to find. Doc and some bandits stand by testily as Earp flips his badge to his friend, signaling this is a personal action not enacted under the letter of the law.

It’s a quick, unsentimental climax, but it stays true to the opening depiction of the O.K. Corral. I would not hasten to say it’s realistic as much as it gives a more murky and unembellished version of the story. Still, whether he meant to or not, Sturges effectively revises one of the most quoted American myths adding yet another complicating footnote to how we come to understand it. All other things considered, from the imagery to this commitment to a raw account of history, Garner and Robards are still the ones who make the picture.

3.5/5 Stars

The Tall Men (1955)

Posted on by
1

We open in Montana 1866 with the Allison brothers (Clark Gable and Cameron Mitchell), two former Confederate soldiers, leaving behind the “heartbreak memory of Gettysburg” for the promise of wealth in California. But first they must traverse frostbitten exteriors.

It’s no picnic as they join forces with Robert Ryan and face a treacherous trail overtaken by blizzard conditions. It chills your bones just watching them wade through the snow, fighting against the icy landscape.

When Jane Russel gets into the picture, the story and the dialogue start to pick up. She always had a way with words — and meeting in a snowstorm has a way of bringing folks together — she’s quickly trading repartee with first Gable and then Mitchell. Ryan just sits by and lets them have at it.

Gable and Russell end up in a cabin together out of the cold. It’s not quite the “Walls of Jericho,” but as Gable cooks up some meat over the fire, and she warms her feet on his back with a few playful kicks, the moment becomes the highlight of the picture thus far. We understand and appreciate the human connection unfolding before us going beyond dialogue or plot points even the nature outside. It’s about two people connecting with one another in a movie but also as individual performers.

In fact, I liked it all very much until I realized I was being imposed upon by a story and a plot. The characters are forced apart and spend the night pouting in their separate corners. It feels like a cheap rom-com ploy in a movie that might have been about something far more gripping and substantive. Instead, it becomes a feeble excuse to inject some amount of tension into the picture.

Sadly, it’s never able to reignite the same alluring lightheartedness of their opening introduction. They’re too busy trying to be distraught with one another to make time for much fun. In this way, Raoul Walsh is not Howard Hawks.

Ryan is frankly subdued if fairly determined with what he wants, be it cattle driving, making money, or charming the women he keeps company with. In his own quiet, self-assured way, he’s out for status and remains the envy of every other man. He can never be mistaken for a villain or even a real rival for Gable. They never play it that way. Even when his hot-headed brother, played by Mitchell gets belligerent, Gable’s quick to defuse the situation.

There’s also little push or purpose to the ensuing cattle drive as it is more of a conduit for the romantic tension, and it hardly seems to be enough to carry the weight of such a lengthy picture. Jane Russell is given ample opportunity to sing, bathe herself, and remove her stockings for the camera. Whatever the contemporary audience might have clamored for, it’s a sorry use for her talents and adds very little to the film.

They do indeed run tall in this movie. What the title fails to mention is how each man is pretty old, past the prime of a cowboy, and so we’re asked to let it slide. It’s almost laughable that Cameron Mitchell is meant to be a youthful hothead. Instead, it feels like he’s caught in a state of arrested development. It could be worse.

So while there’s a desire to see the mythos of the West played out in front of us on a grandiose scale, the movie never quite manages the whole package. Walsh is a consummate professional, and he makes the images as grand and as resplendent as he knows how with all the resources availed him. And yet the narrative itself — the sinew that makes up the story — never hits a lasting resonance. One exception might be a thrilling standoff with some Kansas extortionists.

Alas, there isn’t very much more to appreciate on the journey. It does feel like a sizeable waste of talent even as the film itself has vistas well worth our time.  It is a pity because I couldn’t think of a better way to draw up a western than enlisting the help of Clark Gable, Jane Russell, and Robert Ryan at the height (or even the trough) of their powers. Surely they were deserving of a bit more consideration.

3/5 Stars

The Law and Jake Wade (1958): Robert Taylor and Richard Widmark

Posted on by
Reply

It’s initially intriguing to have a western pairing of Robert Taylor and Richard Widmark, rather like what we get out of Warlock from Henry Fonda and Widmark the year after. My estimation of the dashing ’30s matinee idol has refined over time as he matured into such worthwhile westerns as The Devil’s Doorway, Westward The Women, and even Saddle the Wind.

Here again, Taylor holds the mantle as the inscrutable, no-nonsense lead and Widmark falls back into his role as a merciless reprobate, prone to all sorts of aggression. What’s more, there’s something delightfully skeezy about his voice. He slips into it so seamlessly playing a kindred of Tommy Udo or any of his more reprehensible characters.

The premise is set up immediately with a brazen jailbreak — one man comes in for his pal — and then they shoot their way out of town toward freedom. However, it quickly becomes more complicated. Jake Wade (Taylor) and Clint Hollister (Widmark) are not so much friends as former acquaintances.

This is merely an act of reciprocation because when they raided the Yankees during the Civil War, they formed an uneasy alliance, out of necessity, before eventually parting ways. If they don’t entirely hate each other’s guts, then at the very least they’re deeply mistrustful.

It’s even more curious when Jake returns to his current life. He’s a town’s marshall. How do you make sense of him? In one moment he commits a brazen act of jailbreak, and yet in another, he sits behind a desk in a decent, sleepy town holding a position of repute. Here the noir element is made evident — the way a dark past always comes back to haunt the protagonist and the life he’s tried to make for himself.

In the meantime, the imagery and more specifically the snow-covered mountains are an awesome backdrop and something only the western landscape affords. Jake also is keeping company with a pretty gal. Patricia Owens reminds me a bit of Julie London, mousier but deeply sensible. Her requests make sense, but her man can’t tell her his misgivings without dredging up unwanted memories.

Because Widmark is the force out of his past he can never totally get rid of. We wonder why he pulled him out of prison. It might come down to some moral prerogative, but it feels a lot like letting the monkey out of the cage so it can end up on your back again.

The old gang moves in and Taylor is taken prisoner with the sole purpose of leading them back to a cache of gold pieces he buried in some forsaken town years before. The journey is long and arduous and the callous Clint makes his old partner do it with his hands tied behind his back. He’ll give him a horse, but he doesn’t trust him with more. If you give him an inch, there’s no telling what will happen.

Deforrest Kelly never quite does it for me as one of the heavies — though he’s quite a psychotic hulk in Warlock. Of all the sidekicks, Henry Silva has real umbrage and a chip on his shoulder, coming off smug and vaguely dangerous.

However, in its best moments, it really becomes a fitting inverse of The Naked Spur held aloft by the two central performances dueling it out. The bad guy is the one holding the reins and dictating the story while our hero and his girlfriend are under his watchful eye as they go on the hunt for the buried treasure. The tension rides with them every moment of their trek.

When Widmark skirts off to catch the Native scouts that bode trouble, there’s a fear something will be lost in the movie. We stay back with the others as they wait it out in the ghost town, and it feels mostly stagnant. The dynamic brought by Taylor opposite Widmark is momentarily relinquished.

In its wake, there’s a run-of-the-mill shoot ’em-up Indian barrage. I couldn’t help but compare it with the shootout in Man of the West also preoccupied with a ghost town. However, whereas that film has Gary Cooper and a mythos about it like a knowing predecessor to Sergio Leone’s stylized showdowns, Jake Wade feels mostly unspectacular. It’s a shame because the film packages together a handful of worthwhile performances and tangible menace in fits and starts.

3/5 Stars

Backlash (1956): Donna Reed and Richard Widmark

Posted on by
Reply

Only in a western could we meet our protagonists in a sand trap known as Gila Valley. It says everything you need to know about the Arizona landscape, and then the sweeping Technicolor tones say a bit more.

Richard Widmark is easy enough to place as an enigmatic figure. There’s a glint in his eyes, and we know from his pedigree he’s capable of playing shifty. The true pleasure is watching Donna Reed — because she becomes very much his equal — another sturdy customer with her own personal agenda.

It feels so very unaccustomed for the woman who played Mary Bailey and anchored her own family comedy. Then, again, the edges of From Here to Eternity are not too far in the past. It’s hard to forget what she did there across from Monty Clift.

The movie gets its legs when a man takes a shot at Jim Slater (Widmark) from the rocky crags above. He thinks he’s been a mark. The woman, Karyl Orton, was trying to play him, and he nearly fell for it. Leaving her behind, he scurries to the rockface to have it out with his enemy on the high ground.

Backlash is a constant exhibition in deciphering characters’ intentions. Because as an audience we are thrown into the action and asked to follow what’s going on. She’s searching for some gold, and he asks us to believe his interests are purely in his father who disappeared in the territory.

Although it’s adapted from source material, it does feel reminiscent of some of Borden Chase’s other patented efforts with a craggy showdown reminiscent of Winchester 73′ (1950). Thematically, John Sturges’s turn as director also proves a decent facsimile of some of Mann’s best westerns where the blending of psychological duress, perturbing imagery, and in-your-face action strings out the story into a taut state of tension.

It’s easy to become genuinely immersed in the first act with a fleeing stagecoach looking to cut across the open plains with Indians in hot pursuit. As they fall back, they’re forced to hold down an isolated trading post against the onslaught of marauders.

Unfortunately, all this buildup feels a bit too convenient. Because Slater searches for a seasoned soldier named Lake (Barton MacLane), who was a part of the detail that found the dead bodies that were left behind in an earlier massacre. In serendipitous Hollywood fashion, the old man keels over from a battle wound, just before divulging the remnants of what he remembers of a “6th man.” Surely he is the key to the movie, and Slater has been propelled forward.

If we can stop for a moment to acknowledge them, Backlash has a couple doozy bits of casting with the normally maniacal heavy Jack Lambert playing a sniveling Indian trader. Then, Harry Morgan, in a role reversal, takes on the role of a squat, no-nonsense heavy out to hunt Slater with his big brother. Because Slater killed their sibling.

But if there was any doubt in the red-hot chemistry of our primary stars, it sizzles while Reed brandishes a knife to cauterize the gunman’s most recent injury. It is a movie moment made for the big screen audience if there ever was such a thing. This smoldering passion and growing relationship are nearly enough to salvage the picture in its slower ebbs as they continue their search for answers.

In the end, they split the thread pretty thin between the two of them. It can only go one of two ways. Either the man he’s looking to find is her long-lost husband, a corrupt man, or it’s his own father — a man he’s never known a thing about. We must wait to discover the answer.

But the factions in the buildup are interesting. Our protagonists meet a man named Major Carson (Roy Roberts), who runs a local ranch. He seems like a pragmatic, sensible sort of fellow, and he’s got a range war on his hands thanks to a man named Bonniwell (John Mcintire).

One hotheaded sharpshooter (William Campbell) goes turncoat, and there are still thugs looking for Slater to gun him down in an act of retribution. The local sheriff (Robert Foulk) aims to remain impartial in all of this while still maintaining some manner of civility. He’s not concerned with private vendettas, only some semblance of local law and order. Widmark quickly gets tossed into the jailhouse, effectively sidelining him and leaving him incapable of exerting any influence on either side.

I won’t spell out the final act because that’s part of the fun of the picture, watching it unfold. There’s a dog-eat-dog mentality; it’s about family, but it never stops being a picture founded on Richard Widmark and Donna Reed. If you’re curious about seeing them together, that’s a good enough reason as any to invest in this western from an often underrated craftsman.

3.5/5 Stars

My Name is Nobody (1973): Terence Hill and Henry Fonda

Posted on by
Reply

For those familiar with the tales of Odysseus, My Name is Nobody earns its name from the witty trick the Greek hero uses to escape the Cyclops. However, the movie should draw more comparisons to the works of Sergio Leone than Homer.

It’s difficult not to immediately calibrate the film’s first scene against something like the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West; it’s as much about the stretching and manipulation of time as it is the near-wordless actions. There’s even a clock ticking in the background.

We have a callback to Fonda getting a shave at the Tonsorial Parlor in My Darling Clementine (feet even propped up) however, here the scene is done up with this new sense of impending dread, and we can’t quite fathom why. We just feel it.

Again, getting a shave, milking a cow, brushing a horse, are mundane activities undertaken by three strangers, and yet the scene imbues them with this uneasy energy. They could be Jack Elam, Woody Strode, and Al Mulock biding their time at the creaking train depot for Charles Bronson.

Although Leone’s not the director; he conceived the original idea, and Tonino Valerii, who was Leone’s assistant director on some of his most prominent films, knows what it means to milk the moment through images and sound.

It’s not even the heart and soul of the movie, but like the earlier picture, it gives us the essence of the style and certainly Jack Beauregard. Because after giving the public a shock by turning Henry Fonda into a bad man, Leone’s done the western icon one last favor by canonizing his legacy for a final time.

Before any of this gets perilously high-winded and overly contemplative, it should be mentioned forthright that My Name is Nobody remains an unadulterated comedy on multiple accounts. Given what I’ve said already, I’m not sure if this comes as a shock or not. But what’s even more imperative is how it’s intended to be this way.

The dialogue is pure pap. It feels generally tone-deaf and totally out of sink with some of the best images of the movie, but this is all very much in the tradition of the Spaghetti western no matter the language, locale, or subject matter. It’s telling the only actor who actually dubbed himself was in fact, Henry Fonda. Again, he’s given the ultimate deference and his audience probably expects nothing less.

I’m also no music man, but there are elements of Ennio Morricone’s compositions here — the man who wrote the book on the Spaghetti soundtrack — seeming to gleefully parody himself. The interludes during the title credits are merry and gay literally popping with an almost sickening buoyancy. Later, it devolves into a melding of Wagner and chanting chorale arrangements that can only hearken back to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

Here we get our first look at Terence Hill. He’s a vagabond who catches fish with his bare hands. This too builds off the same persona he had in They Call Me Trinity. He’s the anti-Eastwood if we can call him that — bearing a convivial manner — though equally adept when it comes to gunslinging.

Since there is no Bud Spencer, he gets Henry Fonda as his main partner in crime. Nothing against his most prolific friend and countrymen, but you’re definitely getting a different kind of picture with this change in personnel.

True, it’s hardly Fonda’s best work, but he feels strangely at peace with his surroundings and coolly confident since he’s done this so many times before. He’s not capable of going into parody in the same manner as Morricone’s score. Or if he does, it only aids in burnishing his already established legend.

Because he has a pedigree with forging the West you never had in a movie like They Call Me Trinity, though it shared some tonal similarity thanks in part to Terence Hill’s quick drawing ne’er do well. Fonda manages some amount of grandeur in a movie that otherwise is happily preoccupied with slapstick and scatological humor. There’s Sam Peckinpah’s name listed on a tombstone for goodness sake! And yet Henry Fonda, that is Jack Beauregard, provides a certain level of enduring gravitas to the proceedings.

It functions relatively effectively because Nobody (the name of Hill’s character) idolizes the older gunslinger so much. He makes us believe in him even as many of us bring our own history with Fonda to the movie already. The younger gun can best be described as a historian of Jack Beauregard and better yet a fanboy. He knows all about his exploits and has followed him from his earliest days.

He’s a peculiar sort of figure. At once, seeming to jostle for the spotlight and dog the renowned fighter, and at the other end, trying to grow his acclaim. He wants people to remember Beauregard as the larger-than-life figure he was in real life on countless occasions. But he also wants the man to go out by living up to his expectations. He can only do this by facing off with The Wild Bunch, a pack out of outlaw roughriders at least 100-strong.

The fun and games of the movie happen at a bustling carnival. Nobody takes the time to shoot a stilt walker down to size and pie a fat-headed vendor. He’s equally game for some gunplay in the saloon showcasing both his tolerance for alcohol and his uncanny sharpshooting.

All of this feels like an audition for a bout with Beauregard. Because the whole movie they toy with their adversaries, whether it’s in a funhouse, over bombs, or dynamite. Nobody ably turns some of his playthings into bobo dolls and runs off with a train filled with gold after staring down the engineer in a urinal. Yes, this really happens.

But of course, the movie is never about rivalry and this is how it sidesteps the usual trope others will remember from The Gunfighter or I Shot Jesse James, et al. In the final stand we have The Wild Bunch kicking up a dust storm in a face-off against a solitary, bespectacled Henry Fonda at the ready with his shotgun. He’s kept his part of his bargain, for the sake of his legacy and his ever-present shadow has provided him a fitting piece of assistance.

Although I have little call to cast aspersions on the picture, it feels like My Name is Nobody strives to be both comedy and elegy. It can never fully succeeds at either, but there are distinct elements to be appreciated. One of these is Fonda, and he goes out as a “national monument” rightfully so.

It’s not his greatest western by a long shot, but his last round in the saddle puts a fitting denouement on Fonda’s career adding its own addendum to the kind of Liberty Valance mythos or the cyclical lineage of toxic gunfighters. The pronouncement “Nobody shot Jeff Bearegaurd” maintains its double meaning. Sometimes myths aren’t bald-faced lies. They can also be acts of willful preservation and frankly, peace of mind.

In My Name is Nobody, there’s a warm jocularity to it all, down to the very last shot. It’s an accommodating movie, and although this keeps it from being totally profound, that’s okay.

3.5/5 Stars

They Call Me Trinity (1970)

Posted on by
1

When I was living abroad it was one of my European friends who first introduced me to Terrence Hill and Bud Spencer. I had never heard of them and was anxious to learn something about the duo. Regardless of what their names imply, both men are Italians with aliases befitting American action heroes.

They Call Me Trinity is one of their most lucrative pairings together, and it fits into the historical narratives I know well. It is a spaghetti western a la Leone or Corbucci, but it was made with deeply comic inflections.

We all know the laconic heroes: Eastwood’s “Man With No Name” or Bronson’s “Harmonica.” Hill seems to be one of their ilk, although he can be found lounging lazily on a litter pulled by his horse. He proceeds to get up and walk into the nearest cantina looking half-naked as he scarfs down a skillet of beans and drains a bottle of booze with a hearty belch. It’s the kind of showing that draws the curiosity of all bystanders. He represents a different kind of temerity — totally comic in nature. It helps he’s also ludicrously fast on the draw.

If he’s one source of easy laughs, the other is his brother played by Spencer, a sheriff in a nearby town at odds with some of the locals. It doesn’t help he’s got one of their buddies held prisoner. Bambino, as he’s called, showcases some farcical gunplay and superhuman brawn, wiping the floor with anyone who dares challenge him. Also, he’s not too pleased to see his blood relation, who quickly turns the showdown into a spectator sport.

Beyond their sibling rivalry, Trinity is just the man who could let everyone know Bambino is actually an escaped convict and not a true sheriff; he stole the job from the real man while he bides his time waiting for his cronies. None of this is of great importance

It must be said that the sense of reality is always strained to the nth degree in these Italian western pieces, normally shot in Europe with international casts, copious amounts of dubbing for various audiences, and any number of anachronistic flourishes. The dubbing is so prevalent it becomes an artistic decision more than a purely merchandising one. It’s part of the charm of the Spaghetti western and Trinity gladly soaks in this tradition.

The eponymous hero calls on his brother’s sense of propriety to help a clan of defenseless Mormons, whose pious hospitality is brutalized by Mexican marauders who might as well be under the commission of a corrupt landowner (purportedly Farley Granger) intent on pushing the migrants out.

Trinity is rallied to their cause by two bodacious Mormon daughters (Gisela Hahn and Elena Pedemonte) and Bambino reluctantly takes part thanks to their fine stock of horses. He might be able to gain something out of the arrangement. When his friends do arrive, they start instructing the righteous people on how to defend themselves and fight their battles.

They make their final stand, and it’s full of kinds of cathartic poundings and pummelings of the enemy. The good guys put up a valiant fight. It’s not quite The Magnificent Seven, but it has an ending worthy of its own characters.

From time to time, it’s a pleasure having heroes like these who feel a bit like a reincarnation of Laurel & Hardy for the buddy, western, action movie era. Bud Spencer as a bit of an indestructible hulk with an irascible temper. Hill as the handsome rapscallion who’s more than easy to root for.

They would follow up this success with many more — some westerns and then other pairings taking advantage of all the crazes taking over the international movie industry. I was introduced to them in Miami Supercops, which indubitably ripped off a handful of Miami Vice episodes and any number of cop shows being released in the ’70s and ’80s.

Here you have a great deal of the charm in Hill and Spencer. The Spaghetti Western was a hit in how it took the American conventions and gave them a facelift through pastiche and violent homage. It sounds like a formalistic mess and in many ways, it is, but that’s also part of the charm.

3/5 Stars

The Hired Hand (1971)

Posted on by
Reply

It’s true that Peter Fonda comes out of a western tradition of sorts, which is merely an indication of his family’s presence in the film industry. Obviously, one of his father’s identifying genres was the western, and he worked with some of the greats from John Ford to Sergio Leone.

Films like My Darling Clementine have become the bar with which to evaluate future generations. Then, Peter’s older sister, Jane, of course, tried her hand with the wildly popular Cat Ballou. It’s not high art, but there’s a great deal to appreciate between her gallivanting around and the drunken histrionics of Lee Marvin.

However, with The Hired Hand, Peter starred and directed a western of a very different breed. There’s a hallucinatory quality to the movie suggesting it’s not too far removed from Monte Hellman’s acid westerns of a few years prior. It’s composed mostly of images swimming in the restless score of Bruce Langhorne.

We already have Warren Oates and Peter Fonda, and it’s obvious the genre is funneled through the vision of the counter-culture that brought us pictures like Easy Rider and even Two-Lane Blacktop. In some of his earliest feature film work, Vilmos Zsigmond provides a casual, unsentimental sense of the landscape fitting the overall canvass developed by both the editing and score.

In their passing dreams, floating just out of reach, the California coast acts as a kind of far-off oasis for the three drifters staked out by a river bed. I couldn’t help thinking of generations before. Peter’s father as Tom Joad headed to California and faced his own brand of disillusionment with the dream packaged for him. Expectations didn’t meet reality.

Peter Fonda is besieged by the discontentment and malaise of his generation, but if we recall The Grapes of Wrath maybe this youthful sense of Sehnsucht, while morphing and evolving, is not totally lost or forgotten. It’s only reimagined in new forms and under new banners.

After days without bathing and nights without a warm bed, they roll into a town. But it’s not much better than the backcountry they’ve been frequenting. At any rate, it’s hardly the picture of civilization.

The film remains mostly a sullen affair plagued by death, but not just physical death, the death of joy or adulation in any sort of quality life. It starts grappling with the life of a drifter — the camaraderie of saddle buddies — and the solace of a settled home life. Because Harry Coilings didn’t always live this peripatetic existence. Once he was married. Funny how he never mentioned it before to his companions, but then again, the overwhelming emptiness in his heart has made him crave something different. So he and Arch pay a visit to his former missus.

Warren Oates has gained some welcomed acclaim since his death as a kind of cult favorite, but in The Hired Hand there’s something especially welcomed about him. He’s congenial and faithful, a source of affability in a movie that is mostly lacking in any kind of generosity toward its audience. Fonda gives us nothing. Verna Bloom has nothing to give because her character has learned to insulate herself. And there’s really no one else to offer any kind of condolence.

The film’s barely a meditation on marriage. There’s hardly time to build this into something substantive nor entirely profound, but we do have a sense of this male camaraderie. And suddenly it gives the movie a central question. Fonda must reconcile this relationship, one that has stayed with him for years on the lonely roads, with that of a distant wife who never expected him to show his face again. Whether he totally acknowledges them, they are both of great importance to him.

At first, I mistook the finale — a giant bloody shootout — for a pointless exercise. What good does it do? Very little aside from bludgeoning us with a bleak view of the world. However, it does speak to a man’s vow of friendship. While other elements of this western are irrevocably different from the past, there’s some small amount of stability in such a simple trait as this. Is this stupid courage like the screenwriter Bill Goldman enthused about? Probably.

It’s also a glimmer of something laudable speaking to the exact same listless despondency an entire generation was looking to grapple with from Easy Rider to Five Easy Pieces. This alone doesn’t make it a superior western, simply by having a muddied, unadorned sense of the world. But Peter follows in the footsteps of his dad and sister to leave his own impression on a deeply American genre.

3/5 Stars

Cat Ballou (1965)

Posted on by
2

When the Columbia statue whips off her toga and comes out with western wear and six shooters, the movie’s intentions are made quite clear. And if that’s not enough Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye appear on the scene, decked out, strumming their banjos. They become the accompanying bards relating the ballad of Cat Ballou.

To my mind, it’s one of the only moments in Nat King Cole’s movie career where his talents seem used in a more robust way, and it seems like he’s genuinely having a ball sending up the story. He and Stubby have an open line of communication going with the audience becoming one of the film’s primary conduits for comedy.

And of course, the world itself is ripe with screwy antics easily sharing a world with the likes of Support Your Local Sheriff if not Blazing Saddles. It feels like the West is a place filled with all sorts of oddball characters and idiosyncrasies worthy of laughs and a myriad of double-takes.

Jane Fonda was still ascending on her way to becoming one of the ’60s and 1970s most visible performers, and she teems with an undeniable pluckiness in the title role. In its own likable and goofy way, it becomes a picture of empowerment for female heroines.

If hardly a feminist screed, it nevertheless has the kind of charm you might find in an episode of That Girl. It’s Hollywood not quite coming to terms with the full brunt of counter-culture (Ann-Margret was even earmarked for the role).

But if Fonda proves her mettle as a “wanted” outlaw destined to be hung and the leader of a “nefarious” gang of desperados, it’s Lee Marvin who becomes the film’s undisputed attraction. Kid Shelleen is an inspired western hybrid: the restless gunslinger crossed with the town drunk.

He’s got hair like Harpo Marx coiffed under his beat-up hat, hands twitching, married to a bottle, with his disheveled buckskins hanging down to put his long john undergarments on full display. It’s this whole package making Lee Marvin’s performance such a crowd pleaser, but this is only true because it flies in the face of so much of what he made a name for himself doing. He was tough guys, psychos, and henchmen. Here he’s more than game to lie prostrate in the street, falling over his horse, in fits of comedic inebriation.

However, it’s the scene before his auspicious introduction that really brings the picture together. The square dancing sequences become a wonderfully visual merging of characters and arcs all in one place as Cat formulates a plan to help her daddy out: enlisting the help of a gunslinger, or at least a man with a gun. It devolves into glorious chaos as all the men who have been thrown into her life (Michael Callan, Dwayne Hickman, and Tom Nardini) vow to protect the elder Ballou (John Marley) to the best of their abilities.

Cat Ballou is mostly corny, and it works best leaning whole hog into this sentiment. When it tries to be something with the semblance of drama, it doesn’t quite work as if it’s grasping for something outside its comfort zone. Cat loses her father, faces a town complicit in the killing perpetrated by a rival gunman — a silver-nosed murderer (also played by Marvin). Even a storied hero like Butch Cassidy (Arthur Hunnicut) has stuck himself behind a mercantile counter.

Jane Fonda exerts herself pouting and throwing a rock tantrum to get her three male companions to see it her way. The Hole-in-the-Wall gang is revived to acquire their much-needed funds, and they do quite a job of it without a Superposse to chase after them.

These exploits are how Cat Ballou earns notoriety across the Old West although she finds herself before a scaffold for quite a different reason. The gallows humor of the noose going around her gorgeous neck feels like another unbecoming scenario until we slip back into a much-preferred gear of silliness.

Cat Ballou is at its finest as a goofball western, a bit dorky around the edges but no less lovable. It does mystify me how it became such an award-season darling, though it’s not without a few unremitting charms. Its impact on the western mythos feels minor at best if only for Fonda’s spirited heroine in a genre otherwise replete with male heroes.

3.5/5 Stars

Cowboy (1958)

Posted on by
Reply

In Cowboy, Delmer Daves and Glenn Ford continue their fruitful partnership by examining the life of a different sort of cattleman. The movie opens on a grand mid-century establishment soon to be frequented by a  cowboy named Reece. Everything is colorful and ornate in the Spanish style with gaudy curtains and wood interiors.

Thus, it begins as a hotel drama that switches out a sulking Garbo and destructive John Barrymore for a gang of cowhands and a hotel clerk’s romance. The movie would not be the same without Jack Lemmon. He is Frank Harris, a lowly clerk with the unenviable task of moving some guests to make way for Mr. Reece. It runs deeper still. He’s fallen in love with the gorgeous daughter (Ann Kashfi) though her father dismisses the young man’s affirmations of love.

Soon enough, they will return to their native Mexico, and Maria will be a distant memory to the impressionable boy. Before he can sort out his feelings, Reece’s contingent comes pouring in and takes over the hotel.

The whole movie is built out of these two men coming together and what a glorious juxtaposition of characters it is. The dreamy-eyed idiot and a veteran cowboy, pragmatic and hard-bitten. Ford and Lemmon have been created on their most fundamental level to chafe with one another. Still, the tinge of comedy is not entirely imperceptible in the setup.

In their introduction, you have Lemmon sidling up to Reece’s bath to get in with his gang while Ford shoots stray cockroaches with some relish. Equally important is how real life intersects with film fiction because Glenn Ford built a storied career in westerns, even if you only count his films with Delmer Daves. Lemmon was always the common, everyman schmuck. Now he’s a tenderfoot barely prepared to place his backside on a horse.

Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo explores a modern mode of western calling for a different brand of star. Lemmon could easily be built into the City Slicker archetype, lovelorn and ready to prove himself. The first time Harris gets tossed from his horse it feels like a kind of initiation. He’s begrudgingly allowed to ride along, but there’s not going to be any concessions for him. He better toughen up or get out.

As their journey together begins, Daves does remind us about the austere beauty out on the range. It’s a tough life certainly, there is no Sabbath; you must learn to sleep in the saddle and pick yourself up when you fall. And yet there’s a newfound appreciation watching the cowboys at work against nature’s grandeur all around them. It feels like a noble profession out on the land using your heads and working hard each and every day.

Brian Donlevy was a minor icon of the 1940s, once he overcame his relegation as a tough guy, but almost 20 years later, there’s a modicum amount of joy seeing him still up to the task at hand along with such disparate figures as Dick York and Richard Jaeckel, each prone to their own sins, whether drink or violence.

It becomes apparent as a long-form almost classical tale, Cowboy can easily be compared with other cattle movies a la Red River. Because while we have Jack Lemmon and Ford’s not totally averse to humor, there must be hardship and conflict stirred up. They take up the mantles of John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, vying for control as they exorcise personal demons and hone in on their priorities.

Later there’s a strangely poignant funeral sequence after one of the trailhands (Strother Martin) is killed in a rattlesnake attack instigated by a practical joke. These unfortunate circumstances lend a troubling undercurrent to the sober congregation. It’s Frank’s first lesson in the cruelty of the trail.

In another moment, one of their group is drinking it up at a Mexican Cantina and is obviously about to be jumped by some jealous locals. Harris is intent to help him, but they live by the credo: if a man’s old enough to get himself into trouble, then a man’s old enough to get himself out of trouble. There’s no sentimentality or loyalty as far as they are concerned. You do your work and look out for your own hide.

These events are not completely isolated, but they put the newest trailhand over the edge. We know he’s naive about what it takes to survive out on the road, but he also highlights the callous code these men are willing to live by. He barks at Reece, “I thought I would be living with men, not a pack of animals.” It changes him thereafter. He won’t allow it to affect him anymore.

Cowboy hints at Jack Lemmon’s substantial chops as an actor. And I use the term in the sense it is often used. Sometimes comedy is not considered true “acting” to the same degree as drama, but it seems comedic actors are capable of some of the best drama. Perhaps they can see one in the other or vice versa.

Because the movie begins as a kind of comedy on the range. At least this is what it hints at and what we know Lemmon can offer. And then it builds into a story with greater ferocity and also emotional depth. It’s not just about a jilted romance, but a disillusionment in this admiration he had for a certain brand of masculinity. There’s something inwardly thrilling in this transformation even as we see the change projected over Lemmon’s character.

With grit and determination, Harris gets below the border to see his girl once more, but he’s been made callous and her circumstances are different. It feels like a betrayal. In these specific scenes, Dalton Trumbo, who was currently an exile in Mexico due to the Blacklist, calls upon a locale not far removed from him or even his earlier bullfighting effort, The Brave One. Also, he would go into a further deconstruction of the cowboy archetype in Lonely Are The Brave only a few years later. It’s difficult not to view these films across the same continuum.

True, it is a tale about cowboys — their lifestyle, whether real or imagined — and both the toxicity and mythos that comes with such a life. I couldn’t help thinking, like The Magnificent Seven, it fashions itself into something greater — a broader exploration of morality. Masculinity in the West takes on many facets be it survival, gunplay, or getting the girl, but it’s movies like these making it about a kind of stalwart integrity.

Like The Magnificent Seven, it starts out as a mission — representing a job with specific utility — and becomes a parable of doing right by your fellow man. Lemmon must mature and Ford must soften until they both settle on a newfound prerogative. The movie reverts back to the cycles these men know best, and yet not without changing them.

Cowboy is easily the most unheralded picture in Delmer Daves’s western trilogy with Glenn Ford, but it’s held together by some more stunning imagery and two truly complementary performances. Now as they lounge side by side in their bathwater picking off cockroaches, there’s a mutual respect between them along with a newfound parity.

3.5/5 Stars

The Paleface (1948)

Posted on by
3

As a kid, I was fond of Frank Tashlin’s Son of Paleface for a myriad of reasons. Thanks to that esteemed institution known as the local library I was well-versed in the Hope & Crosby Road Pictures by an early age and Roy Rogers was probably second-only to Gene Autry as king of the Singing Cowboys. Jane Russell wasn’t too bad herself.

More recently, coming to understand Tashlin himself — his background in animated comedy and his partnership with Jerry Lewis — gives greater context to his place as a creative visionary. Because it’s true he blends the gray area between live-action and the cartoon logic of animation better than almost anyone else.

In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Tashlin had these unsavory words for The Paleface and its director:

“After seeing the preview of it, I could’ve shot Norman Z. McLeod. I’d written it as a satire on The Virginian (1929), and it was completely botched. I could’ve killed that guy. And I realized then that I must direct my own stuff.”

While it’s true the original movie doesn’t have the same outrageous commitment to comic gags that its successor did, if Tashlin was not so close to the material, he might be able to appreciate some of its elements.

However, before we go there, it seems necessary to introduce a caveat. The Paleface is a film out of a different era. If you’re an immediate impression of the movie is one of distaste, there aren’t any surprises here. Particularly jolting is when they are taken in by the local Natives to die some gruesome death only to be saved by Hope’s masquerading as a medicine man armed with the black magic of dynamite.

But if you have a sense of nostalgia, can look past the blind spots, or have a reservoir of goodwill toward Bob Hope, it delivers alongside the best of his comedies by providing a genre and allowing him to bend it to his will, courtesy of his usual feckless, smart-aleck shtick.

It works by first introducing all the western tropes Tashlin was mentioning. Russell, the feisty female outlaw, Calamity Jane, is enlisted by the government to investigate clandestine operations supplying the Indians with firearms. She joins a wagon train after outsmarting some adversaries in the ladies’ showers. It allows her to do some recon and she uses a first-class boob as her cover.

Bob Hope (as Painless Potter) is showcased with a row of dentistry gags including his canister of laughing gas, which becomes a recurrent plot point throughout the picture. When he’s not getting them lost in the woods, he knocks back “Buttons and Bows,” a tune that has remained a lasting relic of the movie, thanks to renditions by the likes of Dinah Shore, and its reintroduction in the sequel.

Every kiss he shares with his costar is like a rap over the head with the butt of a pistol. But along with being the aggressor, Russell also does his shooting for him on multiple occasions. In fact, when he is goaded into a shoot-out over the hand of a woman in a saloon, the outcomes prove surprisingly close to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Paleface was released over a decade earlier). Could it be John Ford was influenced by Paleface? I’ll let you be the judge.

As for Norman Z. Macleod, I’m inclined to give him my good graces given his pedigree with Marx Brothers and screwball-like comedies of all sorts. While he might not commit to gravity-defying visual gags as Tashlin would have — we understand how he would be able to expand and punctuate them — Macleod always seems intent on zipping the pace along and keeping the tone zany.

This suits Hope even as Russell and the other characters allow the story to still stay true to many of the western tropes of cowboys, Indians, and western towns needing to be tamed. This melding of the usual beats with the wacky subversions instigated by Hope is the crux of the movie and blended with its color photography and the antagonistic chemistry of its stars, it’s more than enough to garner a watch. My own biased nostalgia still makes me partial to The Son of Paleface.

3.5/5 Stars