The Limits of Control (2009)

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Rating: *** spurs (out of four)

Quentin Tarantino, as part of a veritable orgasm of hornswoggling to accompany his latest cinematic venture, pronounced Inglourious Basterds a "spaghetti western" to the press. The inside jokeyness of the claim aside, I confess that I fail to recognize much of the elan of Leone (or others) in that challenging, exhilarating mess of a film; but his reckless genre-izing raises piquant questions about setting, soul, and simulation. Without belaboring worthless distinctions between form and content (or that third nebulous artistic aspect, "style"), we might leap-frog to the point that trimming one's film with flourishes reminiscent of a particular cinematic tradition is not necessarily the same as contributing to that cinematic tradition. Angularly aping the vernacular of the old west, emphasizing sweltering masculine clichés, and employing an episodic, slow-burn plot with dribbles of violence occasionally over boiling apparently does not add up to a western-minded film (let's be generous and at least say that at intervals IB is a film ABOUT western films): What then, does?

Jim Jarmusch is just as fecklessly allusive and genre-bending -- explain the plot of Ghost Dog to anyone and it's likely to seem a poor excuse for mis-matched archetypes. Similarly, that film explored its roots in the least subtle manner thinkable, with the protagonist a fan of Rashomon's source material. And yet Jarmusch's references are the direct opposite of Tarantino's name-dropping, though the latter can at first appear more satisfying in its fleetingness and coiled passion. Just as the destiny of the young girl in Ghost Dog is definitively shaped by a ratty paperback serving as a cheeky, existentialist movie connection, so Jarmusch's characters (especially those in Ghost Dog, Dead Man, Night on Earth and Down by Law) actively learn from their antecedents in profound ways -- to the point that Jarmusch's cinema seems at times to be an incisive, ongoing conversation with its predecessors. Tarantino's, on the other hand, is a tremendously popular clearinghouse of worthless film ephemera.

The Limits of Control is the not the first film by Jarmusch I do not love dearly (that distinction goes to the subpar but still perfectly adequate Broken Flowers), but it's the first film of his to startle me with its lack of candor. It's not that his other movies aren't complex, but one can be honest and sneaky simultaneously, and Jarmusch always struck me as a champion of that filmic voice (just as JD Salinger was in print, especially in his short fiction -- those dreadful camp letters from Seymour Glass!), adept at pinning useful emotions to his lapel while keeping quieter themes with more longevity close to the vest. LoC is an insidiously recondite hodgepodge of tropes, types, and twists (the best: the trade of an antiquarian Spanish guitar is brilliantly used as a MacGuffin, the only purpose of which is to foreshadow the murderous denouement with a creatively-used, tautly pulled low E string), following a sophisticatedly sable Man With No Name (Isaach De Bankolé) as he tediously carries out unexplained steps towards a vague assassinary objective in the Spanish (I think?) countryside. Out of Jarmusch's oeuvre it most closely resembles Coffee and Cigarettes in the sense that it amounts to, in the end, a series of bewildering conversations -- in this case between the (possible) hit man and other operatives who feed him instructions via hand-written ciphers delivered in classy matchboxes.

As my editor Ed Gonzalez astutely puts it, the film "[resembles] what a David Lynch film no doubt looks like to people who don't actually like David Lynch films," though to someone familiar with both directors the distinctions are enormous. Lynch has become something of a peddler of unsolvable puzzles -- perhaps coincidentally like the koans one can use to clear the mind while meditating, a practice Lynch actively engages in -- of electric images bewilderingly branching out in to the great, dendritic unknown. Jarmusch, on the other hand, excels at portraits comprised of film grammar divorced from any greater narrative meaning -- eg, the pop culture quotation of "Danger, Will Robinson" as evidence of a character's clunkingly mechanical fatalism (which in turn amounts to jack squat -- but again, we've emotionally acknowledged the reference in a way we don't with Tarantino). Perhaps he's unintentionally chasing the dragon of purely reflexive cinema as Altman (The Long Goodbye, especially Quintet) did, and admittedly Tarantino as well with less successful results (Kill Bill).

And much in the sense that Jarmusch's film Stranger than Paradise was structured around non-encounters and non-events that ordinarily would only be implied at the periphery of a typical story, LoC is collection of cinematic mannerisms (a nude girl with a gun, a peculiarly anal method of drinking espresso, an old man who won't shut up and a woman in tantalizingly obscure trouble) without any sort of expository foundation. It's one of the best examples I've seen of what we might call "swinging trap door" cinema -- rather than "releasing" the plot at the proper time for dramatic effect, the film simply operates as though the bottom had already been dropped out from under it, and the narrative's neck had been snapped and stilled long before the audience even arrived.

This gallows metaphor is a fine enough transition to my final point, namely that if LoC is an incoherent assembly of filmic gestures, they are almost certainly western ones -- and the film's rewards via this interpretation are not insignificant. There's no disputing the occasional noir-isms -- especially Paz de la Huerta's pouting, supple bottom -- but their implementation is far more akin to the western milieu. (It's worth noting that de al Huerta's seduction of the Man With No Name fails, if it is seduction, and that they spend impotent nights curled up on hotel cots with the former's hand gripping the latter's uncomfortable thigh with restless inanimation.) The most successful westerns are counterintuitively derived from unacknowledged emotions and seething (often masculine) vulnerabilities -- these elements are not foreign to noir, certainly, but in noir they're often parsed as an inability to act (The Crimson Kimono, Ace in the Hole) rather than as an inability to feel. Decision at Sundown, the most psychologically penetrating of the Ranown series, limns a protagonist unable to cope with his estranged wife's infidelity; even more so than with the discovery of Ethan Edwards' unholy, incestuous determination, our realization of Randolph Scott's character's culpability and projections of violence are deeply affecting. And while individuals in noir often wheedle and misrepresent, in the western world facts are made to be distorted beyond recognition and salvation, very probably because motives are more crucial (see how quickly a raucous act of sexual violence expands in ugliness as it travels the countryside by hearsay in Unforgiven, and how few people care).

What Jarmusch has slyly constructed in LoC is a universe without facts, without details, and without (for the most part) the visceral punch that makes a Fuller or a Mann or a Peckinpah shuffle along with grace. What's left is a tone poem not at all like the "white on white" painting that the Man With No Name observes in a Spanish gallery -- it is, rather, a collection of blocky colors with bleeding juxtapositions not unlike a Rothko or a John Ford tequila sunset. One such hue is John Hurt's whiskered vagrant, scraggily clearing his throat like he desperately needs a cerveza. Another is the wide shot with which Jarmusch frames the Man With No Name sauntering down the street with a guitar case in one hand (remember, with a smile, Desperado?) and a leather duffle in the other. A third is an impenetrable fortress much like that of El Jefe's, and the Man With No Name is able to freely enter for the same reason as Warren Oates' Bennie. He holds something of monstrous value: A putrid objective correlative for male weakness and, naturally, the limits of a man's control over his sexual sensitivities.

The Last Command (1955)

Director: Frank Lloyd

Rating: *** Spurs (out of four)

There is no way to describe The Last Command except as earnest in its inaccuracy. Still, this 1955 western, unavailable on DVD, is likely the most accurate and best depiction of the Battle of the Alamo as seen through the eyes of one of its heroes, Jim Bowie. In fact, the film begins with the song "Jim Bowie," lyrics by Sydney Clare ("On the Good Ship Lollipop") and music composed by the great Max Steiner. The Austrian Steiner was Warner Brothers go-to composer in the early days, responsible for the famous themes for Gone With the Wind (1939) and Casablanca (1942) among others (by the time he composed the score for this Republic film he was working freelance). As sung by Gordon MacRae—the very same year he hit his career peak in the movie Oklahoma!—"Jim Bowie" immediately sets the reverential tone for the picture.


Good thing it's the stolid Sterling Hayden playing Bowie. Hayden already had The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Johnny Guitar (1954) under his belt by the time The Last Command rolled around. His laconic dynamism keeps the character of Bowie both grounded and exciting, just a hair away from decking someone if he pushes Bowie the wrong way. And even if that quality is not easily discernible to his Texian compadres, Hayden's 6'5" frame lets you easily buy into why so many of the salty men in this story respect and choose to follow him despite his softspoken nature. That and his prowess with the eponymous Bowie knife he became known for.


Ernest Borgnine, having already gotten some notice for From Here to Eternity (1953), plays the half-crazy—and fictional—Mike Radin. Radin is representative of the kind of man who not only volunteered, but hoped to go to war with the despotic Mexican President Santa Ana (J. Carroll Naish). The Texas War of Independence attracted a mercenary lot, eager for an outlet for their aggression. Borgnine's Radin has one of the best action scenes in the film, his itchy need for violence pushing him to challenge Bowie to a knife fight... which he promptly loses. Bowie lets him live after severely injuring his right arm. Radin responds with a gruff, but simple, "You're a good man, Bowie." The next time Bowie sees Radin while on a scouting party against the Mexicans, the now stiff-armed Radin gives his allegiance to Bowie—shaking his hand with his left hand now—with an endearing, "Like I said before, you're a good man, Bowie."

Shot in Republic's proprietary Trucolor, the film had an atypically high budget for the studio. According to TCM, the genesis of the film lay with John Wayne. Wayne had expressed great interest in participating in a film about the Alamo. Indeed, years of research and a screenplay came together under Wayne's auspices. When Wayne couldn't come to an agreement with Republic head Herbert Yates on the ambitious budget the star desired—and after Wayne hesitated working again with Yates' wife, actress Vera Ralston, in the film (after a bad experience working with her in Dakota)—then the Duke walked and began mounting his own production, The Alamo (1960), an oversized epic (and flawed) version of the story. Yates put The Texas Legionnaires (as it was then known) into production right away. Wayne would never work on a Republic film again; Trucolor lost ground with the emergence of less expensive color film processing in 1957; and the studio division of Republic Pictures folded in 1959.


The Last Command is filled with some nice moments throughout. One fictional conceit of the film is that Santa Ana and Mexican citizen (this detail is true) Bowie are longtime friends before the battle puts them on opposite sides—Bowie having served under the General in an earlier campaign according to the backstory. This gives us a couple of nice scenes between Naish and Hayden before the battle begins where they trade the customary platitudes about it being too bad that war has come between them but neither would ever back down. Another bit of male bonding occurs after Hayden's Colonel Bowie clashes with Colonel Travis (Richard Carlson) over who will lead the volunteers in the standoff. They put the matter to a vote which Bowie wins, but he immediately offers Travis an equal part in the leadership, instantly winning Travis' respect. This ultimately makes the film's only graphic killing—a bullet in the forehead for Travis—all the more poignant.

Frank Lloyd (The Mutiny on the Bounty) directs in a manner both solid and understated. He lets the story unfold slowly, allowing for interesting character moments like the one Borgnine has later on, after the Mexicans have surrounded the Alamo. Borgnine's Radin stands guard at night before the fighting has begun, listening to the distant sound of the Mexicans singing, and turns to Bowie and says, "They sing real pretty, don't they?" The beautiful young Anna Maria Alberghetti is a distraction as a love interest, but one that's easy on the eyes to be sure. Arthur Honnicutt's crotchety performance as Davy Crockett (the part Wayne ends up playing in The Alamo) brings a touch of humor into the otherwise ardent proceedings. It's too bad he doesn't appear earlier than right before the battle starts midway into the film. And the cinematography by Jack Marta—who would go on to shoot cult TV fare like Batman and The Green Hornet in the sixties—takes full advantage of the generous (for Republic, at least) budget. The torchlit day-for-night scenes just before Bowie's ambush of a Mexican column are spectacular. You've rarely scene as many horses thunder across the screen as you do in the ambush scene, which leads up to a climactic explosion of a wagon filled with gunpowder.

The Last Command was Frank Lloyd's last film before he died in 1960. Hayden would go on to star for Stanley Kubrick in The Killing a year later. And Borgnine would win the Academy Award for one of his best known roles in a movie he would star in later in 1955, Marty.

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Tony Dayoub considers all manner of films and TV at Cinema Viewfinder.

The Long Riders (1980)

Director: Walter Hill

Rating: *1/2 (out of four)

How appropriate that fresh off a viewing of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds I sat down to watch Walter Hill’s The Long Riders. Two totally different movies made by two totally different filmmakers actually have one thing in common: they take their liberties with history. However, Tarantino does it in a way that fleshes out fictional characters while providing factual situations as a backdrop – filling in the peripheries of his altered take on WWII with historical figures. Hill just says “damn the torpedoes” and chucks the whole James-Younger gang mythology into the trash. Tarantino’s film compounds on history – using it as a spring board (and tweaking it along the way) for a more interesting film; Hill’s film demystifies the legend of the James-Younger gang by simply making a film of nothing by bullet points, rushing along through every scene until the viewer is left wondering “that’s it?” when the credits role. The only interesting thing about The Long Riders is how badly it fails.

The plot, which just kind of stumbles its way through necessary Western tropes, is a paradox: it’s brusquely boring. By that I mean each scene is filmed with an energy or sense of urgency to get to the next moment, but this fast pace is excruciating to get through because each short scene reveals less and less about the characters. We’re never allowed to really feel anything for these characters because Hill rushes them from scene to scene so quickly that it took me a while to get all of the characters straight in my head. Is Hill making the James-Younger gang out to be anti-heroes? Are they disillusioned Civil War vets who work on their issues by robbing banks? Hill isn’t interested in any kind of psychological explication, here, and it’s a shame, because he has a cast here that seems more than up to the task.

One of the biggest marketing aspects of the film was no doubt the casting of real life brothers in the film. You have the Carradine’s (Keith, Robert, David) playing the Younger Brothers; The Keache’s (James and Stacy, who also wrote the script) as Frank and Jesse James; and the Quaid’s (Randy and Dennis) as the Miller brothers. The acting is good across the board as David Carradine as Cole Younger really steals the show (Keith has a lot of fun in his role, too). However the casting of James Keache as Jesse James seems an odd choice as he just doesn’t have a western look about him. Stacy seems at home as Frank and the Quaid brothers have good supporting roles. It’s a mildly innovative aspect of the film having these sets of acting brothers play the real-life sets of brothers.



This seems to be where the innovative thought process ended for Hill, though. I get the feeling that the idea to cast these sets of brothers, and to have legendary Ry Cooder do the score, are the only good ones Hill had while making The Long Riders. The movie is a complete failure in editing as key action scenes are just confusing instead of exhilarating. Hill also gives nothing for his actors to do, and there are confusing moments where the first 30 minutes introduces us to the gang as we watch them rob a bank, talk with some lady friends when they get back to town, and then watch as Jesse gets married (the obligatory wedding/dance scene). We're never quite sure what the point was of the scene we just watched. The movie kind of moseys from scene to scene at the beginning (using classic wipes to transition to a new scene), but then it's almost as if Hill was sure that he didn't want his film to be longer than 100 minutes, because after that leisurely opening the film just goes from bullet point to bullet point.

And that’s your set-up. No effort is made to examine just why the James-Younger gang was being written about, and no attempt is made to explain why they do what they do. Instead the movie goes from being about nothing while doing nothing (the wedding scene goes on way too long), to being about nothing while going from one butchered scene to the next. This film needed an editor.

When the film moves colder to its ending I was expecting to get a more fleshed out version of Jesse and the Ford brothers (Christopher and Nicholas Guest), their relationship, and why they ended up shooting Jesse. Instead we get an extended gun fight with lots of slow motion in an obvious homage to Hill’s mentor Sam Peckinpah. Then we see the Ford brothers (who make a brief two minute appearance towards the beginning of the film) show up after the shoot-out and immediately shoot Jesse. And that's pretty much it. Movie over. No real context to understand why the Ford brothers did what they did, and it's just weird going immediately from Frank and Jesse escaping the shoot-out (abandoning the Younger's along the way) to the two of them in their home with the Ford's.

The shoot-out also showcases one of the major problems of Hill's film. The shoot-out is a well filmed, there’s no denying that, and there is lots of blood; however, the shots were so close that I couldn’t tell what was happening during the big action scene. I never understood where the gang was riding off to (it just seemed like they kept going in a big circle) as the camera never pulled back and stayed static long enough for the viewer to get a good sense of the towns logistics. And after awhile you get bored watching people get shot in slo-mo for ten solid minutes. This happens numerous times throughout the film where the camera either stayed too tight on its subjects that I couldn't get a good idea of what was going on around them, or just stayed in medium shot, refusing to pull back to give us the panoramic view of the action.

Walter Hill has had this problem in other westerns, too. His Wild Bill is an awful re-telling of the James Butler Hickok legend. Hill, as he does in The Long Riders, disregards any notion of legend and simply gets his character from one bullet point to the next – covering all of the historical ground he needs to in order for the film to feel authentic enough in his mind. It’s not that I have a problem with Hill taking liberties with these legends and their stories; it’s that his disinterest strongly comes across as a film of nothing but moments without anything tying them together. When you remove the mythological thread that holds these stories together you’re removing the very thing that makes them unique and interesting. One needs only to point to 2007’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford to see that.

Perhaps I’m just missing something, here. Maybe Hill is constructing a mythology in The Long Riders with its short scenes acting as brief chapters in the retelling of the James gang legend…and maybe I’m just missing the whole point of it. I don’t know, but I have to say that this one of the most unpleasant westerns I’ve sat through – I never once felt like what I was looking at was pleasing to the eye, I never understood where the James-Younger gang was in regards to their history, and the logistics of the shootout at the end just left me scratching my head. There are countless positive reviews for The Long Riders that exist out there, so maybe I completely blew it with this one, but watching Hill’s western was one of the most excruciating exercises I’ve had to endure in a while.

Hill’s film did succeed at the box office, rejuvenating a pretty dormant genre at the time (although the genre wasn’t completely dead as Heaven’s Gate wouldn’t be released until November of that year), but he would fail to get out of the 80’s having made a movie as successful as his three biggest films: The Warriors, The Long Riders, and 48 Hours. The Long Riders is the weakest of those three, and Hill has returned numerous times to the western themes he obviously loves (Trespass, Geronimo, Wild Bill, and Last Man Standing) but was never able to capture the success of The Long Riders. What I think his underlying failure is in all of the aforementioned movies is that he moves through scenes too quickly. The blanks are purposefully not filled in, and that is maddening to me when you’re dealing with major historical figures like Jesse James, Geronimo, or Wild Bill.

It’s more than okay for an artist to tweak historical facts to fit their vision, but that vision still has to be interesting. And just because you have long dance sequences with good western music, and you film your movie in a sepia tone…that doesn’t mean your western is good, it just means you sought to make it look as authentic as you wanted it to be. Unlike Tarantino’s Basterds, Hill’s films don’t use this re-imagining as way to look at history through a different lens; instead Hill throws the lens on the ground, shattering it to pieces. Hill doesn’t further explore his alternate take on history because I think he just doesn’t care. He’s content with his film looking and sounding like a western, and that’s all. Which in Hill’s case is a paradox: he seeks have an authentic western aesthetic about his film, but he’s obviously not interested in making an authentic western.

Rio Bravo (1959)

Director: Howard Hawks

Rating: **** (out of four)

Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo is the pinnacle of the director's late style, in which he increasingly stripped his films down into ambling, nearly plotless examinations of his signature themes and the interactions of his characters. Hawks' cinema was always more about relationships than stories: relationships between male friends, between men and women getting to know one another, between professionals working on dangerous jobs together. Rio Bravo is about all these things, and as in much of Hawks' other late work, all the extraneous stuff, like the narrative, is pared away to focus more directly on these relationships as they develop and change. The plot itself is utter simplicity. Small-town sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) arrests Joe Burdette (Claude Akins), the brother of the notorious outlaw Nathan Burdette (John Russell). Chance holds Joe in the town's tiny jail, while Nathan schemes to break his brother out. The film was famously inspired by Hawks' well-known hatred of Fred Zinnemann's High Noon, in which Gary Cooper's small-town sheriff must plead with the unwilling townspeople to help him face off against an outlaw who's coming for revenge. The macho Hawks obviously despised this show of weakness, and conceived of Chance as standing virtually alone against the encroaching outlaws, aided only by a motley assortment of true friends: the drunken former deputy Dude (Dean Martin), the old cripple Stumpy (Walter Brennan), and eventually the quick-shooting young Colorado (Ricky Nelson).

From this slight material, an archetypal white hat/black hat story, Hawks developed one of the great works of cinema. His patient pacing allows plenty of time for the character arcs to develop naturally. Dude was once a proud, tough man, brought low by a woman and reduced to a pathetic drunkard, memorably introduced in the opening scenes stooping to pick up a coin that a man throws into a spittoon for him. Throughout the film, he struggles with his alcoholism, trying to regain control of himself, to reassert his dignity and intelligence and bravery, as well as his formidability with a gun. Chance is, in comparison, a bedrock of stoic self-confidence and moral rigor, though Hawks emphasizes that he's merely human too by including all of the fumbling, awkward love scenes with Angie Dickinson's ambiguous bad gal Feathers. These scenes play off of Wayne's own obvious discomfort in romantic scenes, infusing a layer of metafiction into each of them: is Chance thrown off balance by Feathers, or Wayne by Dickinson? Seemingly the only thing that can ruffle Wayne's drawling onscreen persona, pushing him out of his comfort zone, is the presence of a pretty girl, a fact Hawks would take advantage of again in Hatari!, to equally amusing effect.


There's a lot more going on in this film, too, even as virtually nothing actually happens. The film simply rambles along, the connective tissue between set pieces often consisting of lengthy scenes where the characters just sit around and shoot the breeze. Much of the film takes place in the tight, constricted space of the jail, where Hawks is comfortable filming tight, constricted compositions crammed with people. The joy of the filmmaking is palpable in every frame; there are few Hollywood movies that are so relaxed, so carefree. Watching Rio Bravo feels like spending a few hours on the set with Wayne, Brennan, Martin and Nelson, hanging out, cracking jokes, sparring sometimes in jest and sometimes in earnest, shifting between the two so smoothly that it's hard to tell when the characters' jokes bleed over into genuine hurt. The film is packed with incident, but somehow it never seems to add up to a real forward-moving plot, perhaps because the whole film is based around stasis: it's a waiting game. That's what gives it its unique charm.

The easygoing pace also allows Hawks the time to examine his themes and characters in depth, with subtle touches rather than broad gestures. There's surprising nuance and emotion in set pieces like the one where Stumpy nearly blows off Dude's head when the latter enters the jail unexpectedly. On its face, its a comic bit of action, a near-miss that the men can laugh about because it wasn't a hit. But it also lays bare some of the deeper emotions at the core of the story. Stumpy doesn't recognize Dude to begin with because the former drunk has cleaned up and gotten sober, has taken a bath and donned some new clothes, replacing his old threadbare, filthy rags. He looks like a real man again, and Stumpy, accustomed to seeing him as a ragged beggar, doesn't even realize it's him. It mirrors the earlier scene where the rancher Pat Wheeler (Ward Bond) doesn't recognize Dude because he'd never seen him sober before. Underneath the violent humor of the incident, there's this poignant undercurrent, as Dude is reminded yet again of how far he'd fallen, while Stumpy, behind his ornery chatter, is horrified by what he almost did to his friend.

Hawks treats these complex emotions seriously, but he never allows them to truly overwhelm the film's surface charm, its low-key wit and humor. After all, this is a film in which, at a pivotal moment, the characters decide to take a break and have a good old singalong, showcasing the star voices of Nelson and Martin. It's a wonderful moment, a perfect indication of the film's total commitment to its anti-narrative languor: when the tension is at its peak, the final showdown approaching, the characters break out into not just one but two folksy songs in a row, as though they had all the time in the world. Dude is lying on a cot with his hat shading his eyes, Colorado plays the guitar, and Stumpy hollers and plays the harmonica, all while Chance looks on, smiling benevolently, too stiff to join the fun but not to enjoy it. Indeed, one would have to be pretty stiff not to enjoy this film, which encourages the audience to revel in the sparkle of the dialogue and the ways in which the charming personalities of these likable actors blend seamlessly into their characters. Hawks, though he appreciated fresh faces too, was always adept at using star personalities in interesting ways, zeroing in on the essence of an actor and channeling that into his or her onscreen persona.


Here, the confined space of the jail allows Hawks to play these personalities off of one another, ricocheting Brennan's manic grouchiness off of Martin's slouching, half-speed delivery, while Nelson's boyish confidence resonates as a nascent version of Wayne's mature persona, his unflappable manliness. The film juggles these different personalities admirably, and the film's tone shifts smoothly between comic patter, hesitant romance, slow-building suspense, and action. Indeed, despite the laidback pace, Rio Bravo boasts some exceptional action sequences, not only the justifiably famous final shootout, in which Chance and his allies finally defeat the bad guys with dynamite, but also an earlier scene in which Chance and Dude track an assassin to a saloon filled with Burdette's men. This scene is formally precise, rigid in its geometry and use of the bar's space. It's through angles that Chance and Dude control the room, lining up the men at gunpoint in a straight line on one side of the room. The way Hawks frames this scene emphasizes how the two heroes remain on opposite sides of the room, both angled towards the disarmed bad guys, forming a triangle with the bar at its base and its point balancing on the line of criminals. The scene's denouement, in which Dude discovers the hiding assassin by noticing the man's blood dripping down into a glass of beer from above in the rafters, is similarly precise in its formal mastery.

For all these reasons and many more, Rio Bravo is one of Hawks' most sublime achievements: it's more like an old friend than a film, a familiar place to visit and revisit over and over again, always enjoying the company and the ragged charm of its storytelling.

[This review is cross-posted at my blog Only The Cinema.]

Classic Maiden's Top 10 Westerns

The always insightful and knowledgeable Classic Maiden has posted a list of her top 10 westerns, and kudos to her for not picking the most obvious choices. A good example: The Searchers is naturally included, but as number 10, feeling more like a "let's get this out of the way and move on, shall we?" type of entry. Let's have a look at all the titles:

10. The Searchers (1956)

9. Shane (1953)

8. The Man From Laramie (1955)

7. Seven Men From Now (1956)

6. Ride The High Country (1962)

5. Forty Guns (1957)

4. Chato's Land (1972)

3. Chino aka The Valdez Horses (1973)

2. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

1. Once Upon A Time In The West (1968)


It's great to see both Sam Fuller and Charles Bronson, two underrated western myth-makers, represented here. And Ride the High Country, though it surely needs no defense from an amateur critic, is to my mind one of the finest films of its decade, and is my current pet Peckinpah (though Warren Oates raving to one end of a messily decapitated body is forever nipping at its heels...I want my new nephew to call my "El Jefe" when he gets old enough to speak, in fact).

Classic Maiden's soliciting YOUR lists and notes in the comments, so get a move on, little doggies!

Westbound (1959)

Director: Budd Boetticher

Rating: **1/2 spurs (out of four)

Shot and released during a small seasonal hiatus between two classic Ranown westerns, Buchanan Rides Alone and Ride Lonesome, Westbound is one of the few collaborations between Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott to be produced without the usual gang. and while author Burt Kennedy, co-producer Harry Joe Brown and the impeccable scenery/set team of Robert Boyle and Frank Tuttle never seemed like auteurs, per se, after this movie I felt as though I had been unfairly taking their contributions for granted; Westbound is one of Scott's weakest westerns. It's also a firm testament to the parched, mythic glory of Lone Pine, California, which inhabited the space of the Ranowns with the slinky, needly eroticism of a flaming Fata Morgana (Westbound was made in Calabasas, and the backdrops reek of LA artificiality). The sketchy plot follows John Hayes (Scott), a Union Captain in the Civil War who's commissioned to protect the transfer of California gold through the hazardous border states to Northern reserves. Upon setting up shop in a small Colorado town brimming with crotchety confederates, Hayes begins butting heads with local businessman Putnam (Andrew Duggan) and his small, trigger-happy posse, who are determined to halt the shipments at all costs (this includes swiping stagecoach horses, torching outposts, and overturning wagons transporting women and children in addition to the Union bullion).

We also discover between yawns and rolling eyes that Putnam's wife (a maddeningly unconvincing Virgina Mayo) was once Hayes' lover, and that Hayes' right hand man in the operation is a ex-Union soldier who lost his left arm to gangrene after a battle injury (the deformity more or less just gives the southerners another reason to mock and emasculate Hayes and his crew) -- the overlapping histories of the characters are a grating mixture of maudlin and nostalgic that only exacerbate the pitifully "can't the south and north just get along?" finale. But there are chinks in the patina, too. Putnam's primary goon -- Mace, played by Michael Pate -- is a black-silk oasis of post-modern confusion; Pate's performance is something of a three-way cross between a bigoted good ol' boy Randy Newman might have sang about, a backwoodsy sodomite, and an effeminately lispy belle-gun the likes of which Dan Duryea nailed with eyelash-batting aplomb. In an early stand-off, Mace demands that Hayes show him whether or not he’s armed, and as the captain daintily lifts his coat you wonder whether or not the curled-lip antagonist isn’t tenderly undressing Randolph Scott in his mind.

And even when the very bedrock of a picture is wobbly and warped, Boetticher’s mise-en-scène is complexly effective. Of all the classic western directors Scott worked with, Boetticher seemed to be able to visually render the star's leathery on-screen persona most agilely – even in Westbound, the nuances of the Scott character are communicated in surprisingly grammatical ways. In the clip below, the scene fades and gracefully dotes on two lovers flirt-scheming before wryly swiveling to reveal Scott as the ubiquitous third wheel, unromantically loafing about. It’s a great representation both of Scott’s sense of humor and the audience’s reluctant faith in his character’s sobriety (a sentiment capitalized on marvelously in Ride the High Country).



Finally, after the somewhat anticlimactic shoot-out (a set-piece Boetticher excelled at), the camera glances after a townsman walking away at a lower-than-usual angle. It seems at first as though we’re observing the scene’s aftermath from the perspective of Mace’s corpse (Scott has just shot him) but after a second or two we realize we’re slightly too elevated for that. We’re actually at the POV of an individual crouching down to examine the dead, making our implied participation and interaction with the screen far more realistic and dramatically potent; Boetticher wants to implicate us as passive bystanders, rather than letting us off the hook with simple sympathy for the fallen.

Westbound can purchased from Warner Brothers' on-demand archive service.

Terror in a Texas Town (1958)

Director: Joseph H. Lewis

Rating: *** Spurs (out of four)

I'd have taglined this movie Sterling Hayden with a friggin' HARPOON. This tasty taco of a B Western may lure you in with the fast food flavor of Hayden and harpoons, but it has serious nutritional value in the form of unforgettable performances by Victor Millan as farmer standing up for once in his life, and Nedrick Young as the force of evil he must confront.
This don't mean Sterling Hayden's ain't no slouch here either. Ya, he plays Big Swede- coming home to his Papa's farm, only to learn that someone done shot his Pa. We see the final confrontation first thing, Swede with his Pa's harpoon, facing the gunman Johnny Crale all in black, in a near parody of the classic Western showdown. Crale, played by blacklisted screenwriter Nedrick Young, quietly goads him on: "Just five steps closer, Swede. Give yourself a fighting chance." Swede backs down, and we learn what led to this...

Pa Hanson's death begins the story with Johnny Crale once again facing the old man who has only his harpoon from his whaling days. He wants him to sign over his land, and when he doesn't, he shoots him dead and empties his six shooter into the fallen corpse. Yeah, it's a brutal story. Written by Dalton Trumbo through front Ben Perry, it is bleak and cynical. The town fat cat, played by Sebastian Cabot, has Crale and the town sheriff in his pocket, and wants the folks land for the crude he's found beneath it. The only one who knows is Jose Mirada, a good man frightened because he and his son Pepe are the only witnesses to Hanson's murder. And if Crale finds out, his family will surely be killed.
Sterling, that big expressive brute, comes to town unaware of the tragedy. He meets his father's murderer first thing, but doesn't know it. The town toughs play the big Swede for a dummy. The Sheriff tries to run him off with sly questions about his immigrant status and shaky standing as an heir. He won't be moved, and once he finds the Miradas he realizes something is amiss in town and won't budge. So the thugs taunt him until they can beat him up and throw him on the next train. But he staggers home along the tracks, collapsing at Jose's feet. His stubborn perseverance begins to inspire Mirada, whose family has been threatened again by Crale.

Once Swede and Jose talk they figure out that fatcat McNeil wants the land for oil, and Swede wants to get all the farmers to church that day so they'll stand together. So when McNeil sends Crale to force the Miradas out, Jose stands fast. It's a tense and emotional scene, with the fear playing across the unarmed man's face, as he confronts the stone cold killer. Victor Millan's dignified portrayal singled this film out for Turner Classic Movies Latino Images in Film marathon, and it still holds today. He knows he's dead whether he takes it standing or on his knees. He chooses to take it on his feet.

But his newfound courage shakes the killer to his core; Ned Young was better known as a screenwriter, but his performance here is somehow more chilling than Jack Palance's famous turn in Shane. But he knew something about standing up. He was blacklisted for refusing to name names, and was blacklisted for it. Maybe he drew on the ruthlessness of power he saw in the men who tried to break him? He'd later win the Oscar for best screenplay for The Defiant Ones, and be well-remembered for others like Jailhouse Rock and Inherit the Wind. But here his acting is likely at its best, crafting the classic Western villain that we want to see more than dead- we want to see a harpoon hanging out of his chest!
The 80 minute script surely obliges, and fans of Sterling Hayden will not be disappointed by his simmering portrayal of the good man done wrong. This overlooked Western is fine viewing, and about the only time you'll get to see sixguns face a whaling harpoon on the silver screen. But look past that to the roles of Jose Mirada and Johnny Crale, which defy our expectations of hackneyed cutouts and elevate a B movie to something special.

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Thomas Pluck reviews movies new and old, and greasy spoons across the world at Pluck You, Too!

This post first appeared at Pluck You, Too! on 7/26/09.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

Director: John Huston

Rating: ***1/2 (out of four)

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is John Huston's epic exploration of American greed, paranoia and violence, of the ways in which material wealth can corrupt the soul. It's a dark, relentless parable, setting up its central tensions very early on and then simply letting its characters slowly build up pressure until they inevitably boil over. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) is an American drifter in Mexico, scraping by without any dignity by begging for coins from American tourists. A running gag throughout the first segment of the film is Dobbs' habit of asking for change from the same American man in a clean white suit (played by Huston himself in a cameo). He asks the man for change three times, each time in the same way, each time receiving a coin, but finally the man blows up at him and asks to be left alone. It's both a moment of humor and a demonstration of just how pathetic and beaten-down Dobbs is; he hadn't realized that he was continually begging from the same man because he never looked people in the eye when asking for money, looking only at their hands and the money itself. Dobbs is a slave to money, debasing himself for it, obsessed with getting more of it. He soon meets a fellow American bumming about, the equally poor but slightly less desperate Curtin (Tim Holt), and the two of them decide to hook up with a wizened old prospector named Howard (the director's father Walter Huston) to look for gold.

This trio heads off into the mountains together to search for gold, but it's obvious from the beginning that there's too much tension between them for this to end well. Huston masterfully foreshadows the explosions to come, in tightly packed frames where the characters seem jammed together, pressed against one another, their fates intertwined as they share the same cinematic space. In one early shot, Dobbs and Curtin shake hands, agreeing to become partners, and Huston frames Howard in the background, looking on sadly at the hands joining in the foreground. It's obvious that he already knows: this union will be only temporary and fragile, will shatter as easily as two hands drawing away from one another after a handshake. (Or as easily as the film's illusion of verisimilitude is shattered whenever Huston awkwardly stages a fistfight.)


Throughout the film, Huston's images have this kind of clarity and insight into his characters. His deep-focus compositions are strikingly beautiful, but more than that they have texture, they have weight to them. The scratchy beards of the prospectors look as sharp and spiky as the spines of cacti in the rocky area around their camp. The dirt and exhaustion of their labor is palpable; they move with the feel of men who have actually just spent all day in the sun hauling rocks and swinging pickaxes. Huston immerses his audience in this world, and thus he allows the quarrels between the men to develop organically from their frustrations and daily toils. Dobbs' innate greed and ornery nature, already evident in the early scenes of him as a beggar in a Mexican town, becomes even more dangerous once he's at the gold mine.

In one of the film's most telling early scenes, immediately after Dobbs had begged enough money to get himself some food, he is approached by a young Mexican boy (played by a very young Robert Blake, of all people) asking for money for a lottery ticket. Dobbs simply snarls at the kid and tries to chase him away, even throwing a glass of water at his face. Dobbs has no sympathy for those like himself, no understanding of the parallels between his own situation as a beggar and that of this boy — once he gets some money, he doesn't care about anybody else. It's as though he's forgotten that only an hour earlier he'd been approaching strangers as well, begging for money without even a lottery ticket to offer in return. Later, when he's dreaming of what he'll do when he's rich with all his gold, he describes a rich man's day of indulgences: a Turkish bath, ordering fancy food at a restaurant, and treating the staff with contempt. Dobbs seems to see money as an excuse to act superior to others, to become what he hates when he's poor.

There's a not-so-subtle socialist undercurrent to the film in scenes like this, and at times it's startling just how much Marxist critique Huston was able to smuggle into the film. At one point, Howard all but quotes from Karl Marx, applying the labor theory of value to the search for gold, theorizing that gold is valued so highly because its price factors in all the labor that went into searching for it, not just of those who actually found it but of all those men who didn't find it as well. More pointedly, Dobbs is oblivious to his own class status, and he's such a miserable figure because he never recognizes any companionship with those who struggle, like him, for every coin that falls into their hands. Instead, Dobbs — like Curtin and Howard to a lesser degree — embraces the race for wealth, the all-encompassing greed that dictates that there is never enough. Instead of truly uniting himself with his partners, developing a trusting, mutually beneficial relationship, he sabotages everything with his paranoia and every-man-for-himself ethos.


Dobbs is, essentially, the ugliest incarnation of a popular American icon, the rugged frontier iconoclast, striking out on his own to make his fortune. Huston completely undermines this figure, suggesting that his determination is far from admirable, and Bogart plays Dobbs with ratty, nervous energy: he's both hunched-over and wrapped up into himself. He's cruel and vicious, a hard contrast against the compassionate, righteous Curtin and the vivacious, doggedly cheerful Howard. As Howard, Walter Huston continually steals the show, infusing his character with a touch of the eccentric old codger charm of a Walter Brennan role, as well as a quiet dignity and decency that shows through especially in the scene where he tries to read the last letter a dead man had received from his wife, and keeps stumbling over the words but determinedly pressing on. He's at his best, though, in the film's final moments, when he reacts to tragedy and defeat with hearty, heaving gales of laughter, his body shaking, his mouth wide open, letting out gasps and howls of convulsive laughter. It's the only possible reaction to the unfairness and absurdity of what's happened, the way all his struggles and labor have led, ultimately, to nothing, at least in material terms.

For Dobbs, of course, such laughter would never be possible. He's too obsessed with money to ever laugh so genuinely over its loss. He's trapped by money, and trapped by the things it drives him to do. In one of the film's most memorable shots, Dobbs lies down for a guilty, sleepless night beside the campfire, and Huston has the flames lick up across the frame, obscuring Dobbs' face from view, swallowing him up. Dobbs is sentencing himself to Hell, to a self-imposed Hell of greed and perpetually unfulfilled desires. He can never have enough, and so he's devoured and cast aside, with no one to protect him and no one to mourn his loss.

[This review is cross-posted at my blog Only The Cinema.]

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)

Director: Robert Altman

Rating: **** Spurs (out of four)


Perhaps it was the disillusionment with Vietnam, or the revolutionary assault of American society by it's younger generation that led to the marked change in film from the sixties into the seventies. One thing is certain, westerns had up until then been the dominant genre in American film. And as the realities of the civil rights movement, anti-war movement, and feminism started encroaching on our lives, movie audiences started turning their back on these, and other "fantasies" that existed in American film.

Musicals were dying at the box office... just look at Doctor Dolittle (1967) as Mark Harris discusses in his excellent book, Pictures at a Revolution. War movies were becoming less Dmytryk's Back to Bataan (1945), and more Boorman's Hell in the Pacific (1968). Even John Ford was redefining his own depiction of Native Americans with the extremely sympathetic take in Cheyenne Autumn (1964), his last western. With Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah now becoming the torchbearers of the genre, cowboys were taking on a distinctly antiheroic role. The time had come for an outsider, like Robert Altman, to subvert the western, which he did in McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971).

Altman was by no means a young novice when he hit it big with M*A*S*H (1970). Already well into his forties, he had made a few less than notable movies like Countdown (1968). And like Peckinpah, he had been a prolific TV director, having directed some of the popular shows of the day, like Route 66, Combat! and Bonanza. But M*A*S*H was the first indication that he was destined for more than the journeyman directing he had done thus far. Ostensibly about the Korean War, Altman admitted that the reason it was such a hit was because it really spoke of Vietnam at a time when few other films were. And while it had many of his hallmarks, like the overlapping dialogue, ensemble cast, and naturalistic approach to shooting, his unique style arguably didn't solidify until McCabe.


The film opens to the haunting sound of Leonard Cohen singing "The Stranger Song" as a man enters frame left riding a mule in the constant drizzle of an unmistakeably northwestern town called Presbyterian Church. It is a mining town slowly drifting into modernity with the building of a church. The man enters Sheehan's, a bar where he sets up a game of poker, introducing himself as John McCabe (Warren Beatty). When the proprietor, Paddy Sheehan (Rene Auberjonois), asks him if he's "Pudgy" McCabe, the man who shot down Bill Roundtree with a Deringer, McCabe doesn't deny it. He just grins as Altman zooms into his gold-toothed smile.


As the myth of McCabe the gunfighter starts spreading, he starts to promote a new enterprise, a prostitution camp. Attracted to the new endeavor, Mrs. Constance Miller (Julie Christie), an opium-addicted madam, arrives in town. Mrs. Miller is the only one to see through McCabe's phony facade to the hard-drinking, charming con-man hidden beneath. She bids to go into business with McCabe to turn the camp into a luxurious brothel. The establishment of the brothel, and the church, accelerates the town's development, bringing both the God-fearing and the corrupt together to form a community.

Soon, the Harrison Shaugnessy Company, in the form of a man named Sears (Michael Murphy), comes calling on McCabe to buy his business. McCabe's response, "Well, Sears, I'm Roebuck. Who'd you leave minding the goddamn store?" McCabe's folksy humor falls on deaf ears, as does his haggling for a greater bid when Sears shows interest in buying McCabe out. Sears leaves, and his company sends out three hired gunmen, a British giant named Butler (Hugh Millais), a kid, and an Indian half-breed, to kill the brothel owner.


When Sheehan tells Butler how McCabe is really the outlaw "Pudgy" McCabe, Butler says, "That man never killed anyone in is life." But as he trudges through the snow, hunted by the gunmen, McCabe has an ace up his sleeve that brings that denial into question, a Deringer pistol.

Altman spends the first hour of the film setting up the house of cards on which McCabe, and Presbyterian Church, is built on. The legend of McCabe is given a lot of credence in the iconic style used to shoot his entry into town. Vilmos Zsigmond's then innovative soft focus cinematography creates a warm, nostalgic, almost historic mood. The haunting Cohen folk songs, heard throughout, serve the same mystical function as a Greek chorus, commenting on the tale and enhancing its archetypal relevance to traditional myths. The silence McCabe adopts when interrogated about Bill Roundtree plays into our expectations of western outlaws and their stoicism when referring to killing.


But once Sears and his company appear, the film shifts into a second hour where Altman explodes the western myth. The outlaw hero, McCabe, is visibly shaken by the quiet departure of Sears. The sun-dappled greenery of the northwest turns into a bleak snowy landscape. When questioned about a gun he carries, an innocent young cowboy (Keith Carradine) explains how he wears it mostly for show, and doesn't know how to shoot it. Goaded into unholstering the gun by one of the hired guns, he is brutally murdered while atop a bridge, falling into icy water, and demolishing the cliche of the honorable gunfight on a dusty street.

Altman's style is never more evident than in this film. His penchant for naturalism comes to the fore in this film, which was shot chronologically as the town was erected. The early scenes are abundant with overlapping dialogue, designed to confuse one's opinion of McCabe. But as his backstory becomes clear, so does the soundtrack, until almost the only sound heard in the climactic 20 minutes is that of snow falling. The cast consists of several actors that had been or would become part of his repertory, including Auberjonois, Murphy, Carradine, John Schuck, Bert Remsen, and Shelley Duvall. And like in M*A*S*H, he uses the setting to reflect his personal views, here the formation of a society.

Altman acknowledges the unimpressive plot in his commentary for the film's DVD. A stranger comes into town and gets together with the hooker-with-the-heart-of-gold to defend the town from a gunslinging kid, a giant, and a half-breed. But he isn't as interested in the cliche plot as he is in what fuels each character's motivation. He is cognizant that societys evolve much the same way the town does in this film, through the push and pull of conflicting moral extremes, as represented by the church and the brothel. Big business generally comes in once the pioneering has been done by the little man, and may sometimes use unethical means to push him out.

Despite just an average box office gross at the time of its release, McCabe & Mrs. Miller has become a cult favorite. It's influence can still be felt today in films as recent as Michael Winterbottom's The Claim (2000) and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007).

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Tony Dayoub considers all manner of films and TV at Cinema Viewfinder.

This post first appeared at Blogcritics on 9/7/08.

Night Passage (1957)

Director: James Neilson

Rating: * (out of four)

Night Passage is best known as the film that ended the fruitful period of collaboration between director Anthony Mann and star James Stewart. The pair had made eight films together, and this was to have been the ninth, until Mann walked off the picture, citing the poor script and costar Audie Murphy. The finished film, directed instead by James Neilson, proves Mann right, and one can only regret that the Mann/Stewart friendship was ended by such a slight film — Stewart never worked with Mann again. The film itself is melodramatic and convoluted, surrounding a relatively straightforward story with all sorts of distractions and ornamentation, populating it with an oddball cast of bit players who keep wandering into the story for no apparent reason. It gives the film a weird, faux-folksy vibe, a very stagey, artificial idea of frontier life. The core of the film is a story of redemption, about the former railroad troubleshooter Grant McLaine (Stewart), who was fired from his job, suspected of working with train robbers after he allowed the outlaw the Utica Kid (Murphy) to escape. Now, Grant still hangs around the train camps, playing his accordion for money, until a string of payroll robberies cause the train management to ask him back.

This story is the film's center, and one can imagine it being made with Mann's characteristic toughness and single-mindedness, with a driven Stewart willing to do anything to redeem his shattered reputation. One can also imagine it, with twenty minutes cut out, as a stripped-down low-budget B Western. Instead, it's bloated and torturously overwritten, with so many characters crowding around the fringes of the film that it never really acquires a forward momentum. There's Grant's former girl Verna (Elaine Stewart), now married to the train company boss Kimball (Jay C. Flippen) because she'd believed Grant was a crook. There's the local restaurant girl Charlie (Dianne Foster), patiently waiting for the Utica Kid to go straight so she can marry him. There's crooked railroad man Renner (Herbert Anderson), struggling cross-country on a mule, trying to reach the robber gang to give them information. There's a kid named Joey (Brandon de Wilde) who was formerly a lookout for the gang but ran away and started hanging around Grant instead. There's an ornery old frontier woman named Ma Vittles (Olive Carey), who seems to wander into the frame whenever things are starting to get slack, to provide a bit of eccentric humor. There's a big group of tough Irish railroad workers waiting for their pay and getting antsy, brawling and dancing and running after the prostitutes kept around the camp for them. And of course there's the wild outlaw leader Whitey (Dan Duryea doing his best whiny, cackling impersonation of Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death) and his gang, among them, of course the Utica Kid.


This is a big cast for a short little Western actioner, and director Neilson can never quite manage to balance the film's many different tones against each other. The ragged comedy relief of Ma Vittles and the railroad workers, including a bickering married couple, sits uncomfortably against the darker undercurrents of Grant's beaten-down depression. And then there's the musical numbers, with Stewart lip-syncing along with a couple of accordion tunes. There's even a dramatic showdown with the Utica Kid — who turns out to be his brother — where he wins over the Kid by playing a song their father always used to play on the accordion. Neilson captures the moment by focusing on the Kid's foot as it starts tapping along with the rhythms of the music. It's silly and kind of goofy, as is the sight of Stewart lugging his accordion around with him everywhere he goes, including into battle.

The film does have a few virtues, mainly in the grandeur of its Technicolor compositions of the open range, a virtue it shares with even the worst of the period's Hollywood Westerns. Its action sequences are also satisfying, particularly the robbers' assault on the payroll train, with the Utica Kid watching it all from a high cliff, as below the other men break off into groups, each accomplishing their tasks with mechanical efficiency. Later, the multiple shootouts of the climax are inventively staged, with real urgency. The first is a confrontation in a darkened saloon after Grant smashes out all the lights and hides behind the bar, shooting through the darkness at the robbers while he makes his escape beneath the floorboards. Then, after a chase through a (suddenly sunny) valley, shot from a distance to emphasize the wide blue sky, Grant and the robbers settle in for an extended siege at an abandoned mining camp, where Grant picks off the gang one by one. Neilson obviously knows how to stage action, and these scenes are as tense and well-crafted as the rest of the film is aimless and talky.


Night Passage is obviously a second-rate Western, a meandering mess of a film that only really comes together when the trite dialogue (including Grant's corny speeches about good and evil and "the soul") is replaced by gunfire.

[This review is cross-posted at my blog Only The Cinema.]

Open Range (2003)

Director: Kevin Costner

Rating: ***1/2 (out of four)


Kevin Costner's western is the best modern entry into the genre since Unforgiven; I actually think it’s better than Unforgiven. It’s a call back to the kind of western that Raoul Walsh would have made; a film that is conventional in plot, but unconventional in its execution of the plots action. The acting is superb, especially by the veteran Robert Duvall who owns this movie from beginning to end. What's even more interesting about Open Range is the detail that Costner puts into the film. Every nuance seems true, every seemingly simple artistic touch hits the right note, and there’s something warm and comforting about the pacing of the film and the antiquity in its aesthetic.

Costner is most interested in the theme of displacement and men in power positions telling those “beneath” them what to do with their live. There’s a great speech by Boss (Duvall) at the beginning of the film that sets the plot in motion. He and Charley (Costner) are free grazers who are looking at some men who roughed up their buddies and scared their herd away. They’re looking out at the great expanse when Boos says: “It’s a beautiful country. A man can get lost out here. Man can forget that people and things aren’t as simple as all of this.” It’s a great moment that foreshadows their decision to get into a war with the evil Baxter (Michael Gambon in a great villainous performance), the owner of a nearby that doesn’t take kindly to free grazers.

In another great speech by Boss he informs the townsfolk that he and Charley have no intention of hurting them, and as Boss stares right at the towns corrupt Marshal, he gives another great speech: “Losing cattle is one thing, but a man telling another man where to go in this country…well that just aint right.” And so begins Boss and Charley’s time in the town. They meet some friendly people: a feed store owner (played by the late great Michael Jeter, in a great supporting role), a nice woman that Charley has a fondness for named Sue (Annette Bening in a throw away role, but she’s good when she’s on screen), Sue’s brother Doc Barlow (Dean McDermott), and the corrupt Marshal played by James Russo. But all of these characters take a back seat to the relationship between Boss and Charley.

What makes this film better than your average Western is the amount of time and attention that is paid to the relationship between Boss and Charley. Boss is obviously a father figure to Charley, and it’s interesting to watch the way he handles him, almost reining him in at times, during certain situations. Charley is an ex-hired gun, a man who saw a lot of bad things and did even worse things during the Civil War. There’s a great moment when Charley tell Boss not to stand behind him, which leads to a nice quiet moment at night as the two look up at the stars and Boss just listens as Charley calmly tells him about his history as a professional killer.

The final shootout is an amazingly constructed and masterful piece of mise-en-scene. However, before the shootout there’s a great moment with Boss and Charley as they load their guns and prepare for the battle that’s about to occur. Now watch as Boss cedes authority to Charley as he begins to lay out for them what will most likely occur. Charley can pretty much see how things are going to go, where people will be, and how people will react; and Boss is almost scared of this version of Charley. The shootout that follows begins abruptly with a loud bang, getting the message across that these shootouts from the old west weren’t always drawn out exercises. What follows is moment after moment of meticulous execution of the town’s logistics as the camera sweeps in and out of corridors and buildings. The camera looks through all kinds of perspectives: high angle, low angle, dutch angles, through windows, down low shots obstructed by onlookers (as if we ourselves have been dropped into the action). It’s an amazing piece of filmmaking, and Costner’s control and restraint of the moment, his ability to change perspectives and show a lot of the action through long shots, proves what a great director he can be (forget for a moment The Postman and Waterworld).

The big shootout aside this is just a fabulous western that raises some interesting themes of displacement, and how “lesser” civilians are being discriminated against by those “higher authorities”. It’s also an interesting look at the ugliness of gun violence. Like Clint Eastwood’s masterful Unforgiven, Costner’s film also is interested in how loud, brusque, and altogether unpleasant gun violence is – especially in the old west. Costner shows the town as people who are not just bystanders watching the violence unfold, but as people who retreat to the hills to get away from what they know will tear their town up. There's a great scene where Charley and Boss are riding into town as most of the town is retreating up the hill to the church and Charley calmly states "they know a fights commin'".

I have read interviews where he talks about how Costner was not just interested in the loudness and abruptness of the violence caused by guns, but also how the towns where these shootouts occurred had to deal with this fact and try to live a normal life. He mentions in the same interview that he saw pictures where there were bodies everywhere; obviously someone had to remove those bodies, and he was interested in not making a John Wayne type western where the bodies just seemed to disappear, and then the town rejoices with piano and whiskey. Costner was more interested in showing how a town has to deal with the aftermath of a shootout, and what kind of closure does it really bring anyway?

Open Range is a great reminder just how powerful and affective the western can be while simultaneously being a great entertainment. There is great scene after great scene of classic western tropes, but above everything is Robert Duvall's performance as Boss. The way he tries to rehabilitate Charley into a functioning member of society is one of the most interesting things about the movie, and the conversations they have with each other and with Sue are sometimes more interesting than the action scenes. Watch Duvall deliver that speech in the tavern the first night they go into the town, or the concern he has for a dog floating down the street due to a flash flood, or the disdain in his voice when he tells Sue that Baxter’s men killed his dog. He is just so fun to watch in this role, and it's a shame he was never properly recognized for it. Yes, it's true the ending may go on a tad too long, but I didn't mind the stay too much because to say it plainly (which seems apt for this film): Open Range is a great, great movie...easily one of the best of 2003.

Extra Stills (I went a little crazy capturing images):

The Vulture Speaks #2

It may seem trivial or sentimental to say that [Anthony] Mann filmed trees better than anyone -- but look at the movies long enough and you will know what I mean.

-David Thomson, Have You Seen...?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films

The Texans (1938)

Director: James P. Hogan

Rating: ***1/2 spurs (out of four)

Is three-and-half "spurs" egregiously generous for a film that the New York Times described as a wooden misfire? Do I really mean to say this is as good as, say, Cheyenne Autumn? Part of the delight of the four-star (versus the five-star or even ten-star) system is its poetic clumsiness -- the gaps between each score are as vast and crammed with plaintively mobile tumbleweeds as the Comanche territory depicted in a movie like James P. Hogan's The Texans. This is an A-picture that feels like a diluted, propped up B-picture: Randolph Scott's Kirk returns to the Lone Star State after the disillusioned finale of the Civil War to find his home beset with carpetbaggers (Robert Barrat is Middlebrack, the film's land-swiping villain), Confederate insurgents determined to prolong and alter the outcome of the war (Robert Cummings is a pretty boy with grand plans of uniting Texas and Mexico), and stubborn lovers of the latter category (James P. Hogan veteran Joan Bennett is the aptly named Ivy, a bullish ranch girl whose political ideals are a hormonal tangle). After Middlebrack makes a move on Ivy's cattle, she hires Kirk to drive the herd to Abilene, where a new railroad annex can haul them all the way to the beef-deprived north. The long drive is a nearly surreal concatenation of westernly clichés intensified by May Robson's belligerent, alcoholic "Granna" and Walter Brennan's gentle simpleton foreman, who both tag along -- dust storms, snow storms, mismatched stock footage of cattle stampedes, and Native American scalping jokes have never seemed quite so raw or epic. But most rewarding, as usual, is Randolph Scott, whose lean professional plays the idealistic third wheel (was there any actor better at this?) to both an unrealistic love affair and a doomed battle for the South between corrupt legislators and vendetta-wielding Confederates still aching from the bruise of Appomattox. Only Scott's Kirk sees that uniting the North and South will be a painful but necessary and ultimately gratifying process -- and by noting the high prices that Kansas City butchers will pay for Ivy's cattle he seems to suggest that economic manipulation is fine so long as one plays by the rules of supply and demand (he's the glorious-by-half future of the Republican party). The film's ending in Abilene is a bizarre, post-modern montage nervously sweating with the knowledge of where Reconstruction's errors will lead -- the herd runs through town destroying every structure in its path while train whistles blow and Robert Cummings' beleaguered rogue announces the founding of the Ku Klux Klan. The film's depiction of the era is reductive, sympathetic in all the wrong places, and sensationalist. But it's also eerie, optimistic, and as taut as an Indian burn. It's a masterpiece of found art, and the fact that no one even in the 30s took its message seriously is all the more reason to adore it.

Frontier Marshal (1939)

Director: Allan Dwan

Rating: **1/2 (out of four)

The Wyatt Earp myth more or less began with a 1931 pocket paperback entitled "Frontier Marshal," a daringly infantile piece of scrubbed fiction that the lawman himself probably had a hand in fabricating. Whatever the scandalous, debauched historicity the book's fantasy obscures (for example, that Earp was as likely to be a criminal as a marshal, and that he engaged in less than 10 gunfights in his entire, storied career), the tome was a fine piece of literature, and gave the rapidly disappearing reality of the old west a towering, heroic colossus to retrospectively make sense of the era's barbarism -- even if it was mostly overgrown boy scouts who swallowed the tripe at first. This legend provided the framework for countless films, the first of which were a collection of adaptations curiously removed from their source material. Frontier Marshal is a sleepy, distant moon orbiting the influential grandeur of Stagecoach (also from 1939), but unlike John Ford's minor masterpiece the film recalls a time when noir, western, and romance all sprouted from the same musky bulb. Concentrating not on law and order but the sexual exploits of Doc Halliday (Cesar Romero doing his standard tortured heartthrob schtick), a young, rigid Randolph Scott (in contrast to the lanky, doubt-laden S-posture he'd develop by the time the Ranown films were produced) plays matchmaker and love-triangle mediator. Even when the bandits show up, they're directed to kill Earp for meddling in Halliday's affairs rather than for attempting to impose any semblance of civilized municipality. The script is smartingly bad in spots -- like the much later Witchita with Joel McCrea it uses the injuring of a child as a sobering mechanism, only in this case the kid is a stupefyingly thin Mexican stereotype and the individual who comes to his medical aid (Halliday) was historically a dentist rather than a surgeon, and probably a quack at that. Director Allan Dwan, however, an unsung silent filmmaker from Canada, tenderly milks what grim grandeur he can from a collection of baroque shadows -- even women's dressing rooms seem tragic. And the gunfight at the OK Corral that climaxes the film, while revisionist at best, is cleverly choreographed; at night, every bullet seems to tear through the darkness with an ebullient if deliquescent shaft of light. An obese Lon Cheney Jr. and a fairly healthy John Carradine also have notable supporting roles, though only Scott moves through this picture unscathed: much like the myth of Wyatt Earp, he seems slyly immune to even the most violent of undermining attempts. His playful response to the town mayor when asked to fill the station of marshal is priceless. The Earp/Halliday love story was later recycled by Ford for My Darling Clementine, a few sequences of which are shot-for-shot remakes of Frontier Marshal.

The Vulture Speaks #1

The western is one genre that has become richer in feeling and more profound in form as it rode ever closer to utter extinction.

-Andrew Sarris, You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet: The American Talking Film

The Far Country (1954)

Director: Anthony Mann

Rating: ***1/2 Spurs (out of four)

Aside from being very likely the quirkiest Mann/Stewart western, The Far Country is also the most unabashedly psychological (the cycle of movies being often related to Freud and Jung for no apparent reason other than the conflicted masculinity of Stewart's central characters). Sure, The Man From Laramie has a pair of ranch heirs locked in a battle that suspiciously feels like a simulacrum of Stewart's psychic hierarchy coping with the man-hunt it must complete, but The Far Country's alpine landscapes (most if them matte paintings, of course) are like an eager sidekick to Stewart's glacial personality: Jeff Webster is a man in search of nothing but money, dismally determined to ward off intimacy, and even treating his shadow of a pal Ben (Walter Brennan essentially playing the same inebriated man-child as in To Have and Have Not) more like a rascally kid brother he ain't so fond of than a friend. Jeff and Ben head up to the Klondike with a herd of cattle to sell; their product is confiscated by the archetypally corrupt Judge Gannon on the way (John McIntire, sporting a Vincent Price beard, is lecherously repugnant in the role). After they make it to Dawson the two men find a lawless, emotionally barren frontier predicated on highway robbery and claim-jumping; it's a land numb to ethics just waiting for a showdown to determine the lesser of two evils. When the dualist war arrives, it turns out to be two-fold, with a sexual component -- the sublime, backstabbing saloon owner Rhonda (Ruth Roman) spars with the beautiful but girlish French-Canadian Renee (Corinne Calvet) for Webster's affections using a collection of seductive glances and feminine "maternal" flourishes -- as well as the expected moral one between Webster and Gannon (who migrates up to Canada with the intent of fleecing the entire community of Dawson). What makes Stewart's performance noteworthy compared to that of, say, The Naked Spur is that while we feel his icy misanthropy is just a set-up for the third act thaw, Mann lets the developmental flames lick the character's heart at a closer proximity than we expect. By the end, Webster literally has to be nursed back to health so he can confront Gannon, and in the ultimate gunfight the two become pillars of social idealism (however subversively interpreted) crawling around in the dirt beneath the parlor deck (a scene cut with Mann's typical tension-building, expectation-reversing deliberation). Stewart becomes the law in Dawson not due to humanitarian obligation or pride but because Gannon's acidic capitalism batters his blank slate of an economic perspective out of torpidity. The code of the west goes something like this: If you find a man who'd be perfect for the job of sheriff, just get the town villain to double-cross him. In a snow-covered land, justice is best served with the irrepressible heat of a personal grudge behind it.

The Man From Laramie (1955)

Director: Anthony Mann

Rating: ***1/2 Spurs (out of four)

The Man From Laramie may or may not be the most fruitful collaboration between its director and leading man, but there's no doubt that it contains more quintessentially Anthony Mann sequences than any other western he was at the helm of (with the possible exception of The Furies). Horse riders rocket out of the dusk into a Rothko-like cobalt-and-black firmament, and the violence digs into pressure points: if there's a fire, you can be sure someone will get dragged through its ashes on their belly. Jimmy Stewart plays Lockhart, a man further from the existential fringe than most of his other cowpoke protagonists but still harboring a dark grudge; his younger brother was slain by Apaches bearing repeating arms and Lockhart means to hunt down the man who sold the guns. Aside from the blithering white man's burden subtext in this vendetta (injuns can't help themselves, being simple savages, so it's easier to blame the Caucasian who gave them access to weapons -- like parents with tenuously-latched gun racks standing trial for their progeny's unmerciful killing sprees), it for once gives Stewart's character a leathery nobility: in the scenes with Cathy O'Donnell it almost seems as though he'd rather unload the burden of filial retribution and move on, but the code of the frontier simply won't let him. This endows Lockhart with a poetic push-and-pull personality and a graceful unpredictability (you know how he's *supposed* to react but not precisely how he will). His reluctant tenacity, if we can call it that, runs afoul of the family who owns most of Coronado -- the patriarch (Donald Crisp) is a grizzled old rancher, partially blind for metaphorical urgency, who knows his son Dave (Alex Nicol wearing a "Harvest"-era Neil Young-type native outfit) is a complete wack-job but can't abdicate the throne to his main man Vic (Arthur Kennedy, the best he's ever been) without forsaking blood lines. The screenplay is sharper and tighter than most westerns even with this budget -- how often do you hear Biblical-grade dream premonitions foreshadowing tragedy in a movie without laughing? -- and the whole enterprise pivots marvelously on those signature Mann setpieces. My favorite: Lockhart is more or less minding his own business when the manic bully Dave decides to teach him a lesson; Lockhart, being the more dexterous with a gun, nails Dave in the palm. Dave then rounds up his posse and orders them to restrain Lockhart with his arm extended: The edits quicken with our breath and the framing continually contracts, pacing back and forth between the two adversaries nervously until the inevitable bullet leaves its pistol's chamber. Our ears are still ringing when the end credits roll.

The Naked Spur (1953)

Director: Anthony Mann

Rating: *** Spurs (out of four)

Often chosen as the "favorite" of the Mann/Stewart cycle by its ardent fans (whereas posterity, ie TCM, might select The Man From Laramie), The Naked Spur lacks the innovatively cyclical, episodic charm of Winchester '73 and the balderdash mercantilism of Bend of the River, opting instead for a kind of "B"-Western claustrophobia. Stewart plays Howard Kemp, a lowly rancher-turned-bounty hunter on the trail of an expensive murderer (Robert Ryan in a marvelously weaseling performance), whom he nabs in Act 1 with the assistance of a no-nonsense prospector (Millard Mitchell) and a dishonorably discharged soldier (Ralph Meeker). The remainder of the film is eaten up by arguments over reward money and occasional skirmishes with natives who turn out to be after Meeker's character--rather than a journey of steadily growing intimacy between a group of people, Stewart's profound jaundice (startling for anyone more familiar with his "gentle" persona) facilitates consistent alienation and bitterness. Unlike the other Mann/Stewart westerns, the setting is a far cry from civilization and any metaphysical sense of "community": Stewart, Meeker and Mitchell are like representatives from warring tribes (the cowman, the miner, the lawman) who find nothing but perversity in spheres outside their own, and Ryan eggs on their suspicions in an effort to save his neck. Of course there's a backstory involving a woman to explain Stewart's attitude, and of course Ryan has brought a woman along with him as a sexist aegis (Janet Leigh, natch) who turns into Stewart's salvation. But even his eventual realization of the self-destructiveness of cynicism seems not like an absolution of previous sins but a despondent admission of their failure to numb--Stewart's character isn't any better off at the end of the film, he's just more self-aware, his trembling senses made more acute by the gleaming light of the spur's teeth.