Ghost Riders and Death Angels

The desert, somewhere in the American south-west; a figure on horseback materialises out of the heat-haze, apparently travelling with purpose as the credits slowly appear and disappear. We are watching High Plains Drifter, starring and directed by Clint Eastwood (his second film as director and his first western in charge, although some would argue that the issue of the film’s genre is open to question), screenplay by Ernest Tidyman (if not quite hot in Hollywood after the success of Shaft, then certainly agreeably warm to the touch). The music, by Dee Barton, is rather mournful and eerie.

It soon becomes very obvious that Eastwood is not in the business of tearing up the form book as far as the western genre is concerned – although, as we will see, he is certainly not averse to playing with it a bit, in a mordant sort of way. The Stranger (for we never really learn his name, although on-the-ball viewers will certainly have an idea or two in this direction by the end of the film) rides into a small town named Lago, a desolate little place on the edge of a lake. The local tough boys are not pleased to see him; they follow him from the saloon to the barber shop, where Eastwood gets his retribution in first by gunning all three of them down in short order.

So far, so very much in the spirit of A Fistful of Dollars, with Eastwood as the enigmatic, ruthless antihero. He seems intent on pushing the archetype here as far as he can go, however: a woman from the town (Mariana Hill) is rather snooty towards the Stranger, not long after the shooting. He decides she needs a lesson in ‘manners’ and proceeds to drag her into a stable, where he rapes her.

It’s fair to say that this is still a shocking moment, almost unparallelled in Eastwood’s movie career – it’s still deeply uncomfortable to watch today, perhaps more than it was when the film came out in 1973. All kinds of nasty tropes swirl around it, not the least being the implication that after putting up some resistance, Hill’s character yields and finds herself actually rather enjoying it. Later on she tries to kill Eastwood (though not especially hard) and the jokey suggestion is that this is simply because he didn’t come back for a second helping. The fact that the Stranger is still the closest thing the film has to a hero is also a problem, while the eventual revelation that Hill bears some moral responsibility for nasty things herself hardly excuses what Eastwood’s character does to her: virtually everyone in Lago is guilty (with the possible exception of the town dwarf), but it’s only the attractive women that the Stranger gives his special attention to.

Anyway, the story rolls on: everyone in town has other reasons for concern, as it is revealed that three proper villains are due to be released from prison, and are sure to be heading this way in search for revenge (they were arrested in town, though it’s implied there’s something more going on, too). Who will save the town from evil? Who is that good with a gun? The cogs of archetype tick and click and the town elders approach the Stranger – will he accept the job of defending the town? Naturally, he demurs at first, but eventually agrees to take the gig, provided everyone does what he says. Black comedy ensues as the various worthies realise just what they’ve done by effectively giving Eastwood absolute power as the Tyrant of Lago: he appoints the dwarf (Billy Curtis) as mayor and sheriff, gives everyone a free drink at the saloon owner’s expense, clears out the general store getting materials for defence, and so on. Very soon the blanched townfolk are wondering if the sickness wouldn’t be preferable to the cure…

As westerns go this is a sour one and a dark one: the classic western, the western of John Ford, is a tale of self-realisation and individualism, out amongst the wide open spaces of a new land bursting with promise. High Plains Drifter isn’t anything like that, as befits a film made by someone who rose to stardom in Sergio Leone movies (Leone’s name apparently appears on a headstone in the cemetery at the end of the film) – it’s a cynical tale of darkly moral retribution, set in a wasteland. It’s a western for the Nixon generation, not Eisenhower’s. And this was noted at the time – John Wayne wrote to Eastwood complaining that the film misrepresented the West and the people who lived there. (Other films that Wayne took exception to included 1941 – not only did he turn down a part in it, he asked Spielberg not to make it at all.)

This is the kind of Clint Eastwood western where, come the closing credits, the whole town is either in ruins or actually on fire, and most of the major characters have been shot, usually by Eastwood himself. It’s a story pattern which resonates throughout his career in the genre, from the very beginning to the very end. High Plains Drifter is perhaps its most harsh and uncompromising treatment; though it is playful too, in its way. One thing it is not is tremendously subtle, compared to the other films it resembles.

One of the criticisms made of Eastwood’s 1985 film Pale Rider is that it is essentially a remake of High Plains Drifter, or at least High Plains Drifter mashed up with Alan Ladd’s Shane. And both of these assertions are substantially true. Pale Rider is probably a better film – or at least a more comfortable one – but it certainly has the same central conceit, concerning the identity of the main character. The Stranger, in his quieter moments, has visions – or perhaps memories? – of the town’s former marshal being whipped to death by the three villains he’s been hired to kill. The marshal (played by Eastwood’s own regular double, Buddy Van Horn) was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere outside the town. ‘The dead don’t rest without a marker of some kind,’ says one of the townswomen, ominously. Gradually the truth emerges that the marshal discovered the town’s prosperity derives from an illegal gold mine on government land, and that rather than face the consequences the people of Lago arranged to have him killed, and then had the assassins sent to prison to avoid paying them off. In short, the Lagoites have it coming to them, and the Stranger is… well, Eastwood has played an exterminating angel of justice often enough over the years – on this occasion he may literally be a spectre of vengeance.

It’s a great premise for a film and Eastwood handles it confidently and competently (this was still very early days for him as a director, after all). Drama, black comedy, and action are deftly interwoven, and there is always Eastwood’s potent charisma at the heart of the film. But for all that, I find it to be a tough film to really warm to – it’s not a patch on Unforgiven or The Outlaw Josey Wales, certainly. There’s a cold, formal element to it, almost as if the allegorical aspects of the story are resting just a little too close to the skin of the thing. Pale Rider buries them more successful, and is more successful as a film as a result. But you still couldn’t call High Plains Drifter a member of that select club, of which membership is limited to bad Clint Eastwood films. At the end of the film the Stranger rides out into the desert, and – the opening in reverse – appears to simply fade out of existence. Maybe it’s the heat-haze. Maybe it isn’t. But a harsh kind of justice has been done, a circle has been closed – and if it’s been an ambiguous experience for the viewer, perhaps there’s a kind of truth in that, too.

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Carry On Campion

As I may have alluded to before, I spent three months last Autumn living with family, a situation which none of us had ever really anticipated happening pre-pandemic. As a result, even more than usual I had a constant eye out for interesting films which would, not to put too fine a point on it, get me out of the house and give them a break from me. One of the movies which popped up on the radar was Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, which enjoyed a very brief run at the local art house at the end of November. I pencilled it in. Then various people in the house tested positive for Covid, which put the mockers on any social movie-going for well over a week.

So we’ve only just got around to watching it (on TV, need it be said), which poses an interesting question. The Power of the Dog seems to have a lock on every single Best Film award going, with Campion enjoying a similar status with respect to Best Director prizes (I would have said something similar about Benedict Cumberbatch and the Best Actor gongs until he got beaten by Will Smith at the BAFTAs); it is the critical darling of the season. Do I therefore find myself more inclined to say nice things about it, than would have been the case three months ago? Have I spared myself the embarrassment of basically saying ‘Mmm, well, it’s okay,’ about what later proved to be a towering instant classic?

It’s a moot point. What is certain is that this is an adaptation of a relatively obscure novel by Thomas Savage, set in the wide open spaces of Montana in the 1920s. Cumberbatch plays Phil Burbank, one of a pair of brothers who own a successful cattle ranch – it is fair to say Phil knows his own mind and is not too concerned about social niceties like politeness or personal hygiene. He routinely addresses his mild-mannered brother George (Jesse Plemons) as ‘fatso’ and there is never any doubt over who is really in charge, certainly when it comes to ordering the hired hands about.

Then, in the course of one of their regular cattle drives, the brothers meet a widowed inn proprietress named Rose (Kirsten Dunst), and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). George takes rather a shine to Rose, much to Phil’s disdain – Phil himself is scathing about Peter, declaring him to be weak and effeminate. You may therefore be able to imagine Phil’s response when George elects to marry Rose and bring her back to the ranch, with the prospect of Peter staying with them for long periods of time, although the extent of the campaign of psychological warfare Phil embarks upon may still come as a surprise. But is there something deeper behind Phil’s vicious resentment of Rose and her son?

It would be remiss of me not to point out that the critical acclaim The Power of the Dog has received has not quite been entirely universal – ‘hate is not too strong a word’ for one friend’s response to it, while the actor Sam Elliott’s complaints that the film misrepresents the American west, being altogether too gay, and had no business being filmed in New Zealand, have been met with bemusement and some mockery (this apparent insistence on Dogme-like authenticity is a little surprising coming from someone who appeared in Hulk, Ghost Rider, and The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot).

Then again, this is ostensibly a western, and that’s one of the genres that certain kinds of traditionalist can be a bit over-protective of, on the grounds that it epitomises all the key values of both America and genuine masculinity. Well, that’s a point of view, but there would be a lot to unpack there and I think the key question is whether The Power of the Dog really qualifies as a western at all. Geographically it’s on point, of course, although the mid-1920s setting is a shade after the ’classic’ period (although not by much – The Wild Bunch is set in the 1910s, after all).  But really it comes down to the essence of the genre, which for me is about issues of morality and self-realisation; how people choose to behave in a context where the laws of civilised society are still nascent and open to debate. If The Power of the Dog touches on this, it’s only very obliquely; this is a very modern film in its focus on issues of identity and its psychological depth – although I would agree there’s a lot of self-realisation, or lack of it, in the back-stories of the major characters here. It may be a western, but it’s also a brooding psycho-drama and a character piece, particularly with regard to Phil Burbank.

I mentioned a while back about how we are currently enjoying a period of Peak Cumberbatch; I’ve no idea how well the Louis Wain film actually did money-wise, but the last Marvel movie he appeared in was practically the definition of a smash hit and (BAFTA excepted) he looks set to fill up his bathroom with prizes for this one (I don’t think it’s too controversial to suggest that Netflix fund films like The Power of the Dog to get credibility rather than make money). And deservedly so: he succeeds in making Phil a colossally nasty piece of work without going over the top or suggesting he is irredeemably bad. The film gains much of its effect from the suggestion in the second half that he may not be, although this is a film with an essential element of ambiguity to it. Characters’ motives remain unclear – when Phil suddenly begins to act much more amiably towards Peter, is it out of a genuine desire to make a connection, or is it just part of his latest plan to make Rose’s life even more miserable? Questions like these are where the power of the film emanates from.

It’s a terrific performance from Cumberbatch and one which makes up the core of the film – though he is very capably supported by the rest of the cast, most of whom are also up for awards recognition, and deservedly so. (Jesse Plemons in particular deserves credit for taking a stolid sort of character who apparently says and does very little and turning him into a three-dimensional human being.)

Then again, and I don’t think I’m being wise after the fact, the whole film is of the kind which radiates class and quality – New Zealand stands in for Montana to breath-taking effect, and there’s a nicely understated score from Jonny Greenwood too. All the elements are marshalled with great precision and skill by Campion, who nevertheless never gets caught either writing or directing the film with ostentation. And while I’ve spent a lot of time talking about The Power of the Dog’s awards chances, it’s the actual quality of the film which counts. I can see how it might not be to everyone’s taste – too slow, or too oblique, to say nothing of the subject matter – but this is still a film of substance.

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Definitely Tonto

As regular readers will probably have gathered, in happier days it was very unusual for a big studio movie with a decent release to pass me by. (Obviously there were always exceptions: I swore off Michael Bay movies nearly fifteen years ago.) Sometimes I look back at a big film that I didn’t see on the big screen, and wonder, what was wrong with this one when it was new? (Especially considering some of the rubbish I’ve gone out of my way to see in the past.)

Hey ho. A few months ago I was on holiday with the family and the late movie on the telly was Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger, which is one of those movies I’d skipped on its release in 2013 – mainly, I seem to recall, due to largely terrible reviews and a general impression that the whole enterprise was somehow laboured and a touch misconceived. Rather to my surprise, it looked, if not great, then certainly intriguingly different, and I decided to check it out on catch-up the next time I had a few hours spare. Naturally, I had forgotten about the Empire of the Mouse’s hawkishness when it comes to exploiting its various properties, and the BBC hadn’t stumped up for the catch-up rights. The modern world being as it is, though, movies seem to come around with the frequency of buses, and it turned up again just the other week.

The movie opens at a San Francisco theme park in 1933 (the year is probably a reference to the first appearance of the original Lone Ranger radio show), where a young, Lone Ranger-obsessed lad is startled to come across an extremely elderly Native American featuring in one of the exhibits. The old chap claims to be the one-and-only, original Tonto, sidekick of the Lone Ranger, and goes on to reveal the truth of this legendary figure’s origins…

The bulk of the movie occurs in 1869, with the railroads unfurling and slowly taming the old west. Idealistic young lawyer John Reid (Armie Hammer) is heading back home to see his family for the first time in years – but travelling on the same train is brutal outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner), who’s being taken to the gallows. (Also chained up with Cavendish is Tonto (Johnny Depp), who has his own reasons for wanting to stay close to the bad guy.) Cavendish’s gang appear and spring him from the moving train, nearly causing a disastrous accident which Reid and Tonto only manage to avert with the help of Reid’s elder brother (James Badge Dale), a Texas ranger.

Reid Minor is soon deputised by the rangers and a posse sets off in pursuit of Cavendish and his gang – but they are betrayed and ambushed, and all killed, apart from John Reid. Tonto, who has somehow managed to escape from jail, turns up and performs the necessary burial duties – but recognises that Reid’s ordeal has left a spiritual mark upon him. Adopting a mask and various other eccentric accoutrements, Reid assumes the identity of the Lone Ranger, intent on justice for the death of his brother and Cavendish’s many other victims…

The fact that the origins of the Lone Ranger so closely recall those of a superhero shouldn’t really come as a surprise, given the character was a product of the same era of pulp adventure stories which gave the world characters like the Phantom and the Shadow, many of whom were very influential on the first actual comic-book costumed heroes. A mask, a gimmick, and more often than not a sidekick was the formula for this type of character, and the Lone Ranger stories stuck to the formula with great fidelity.

These days, of course, you can’t really do sidekicks, and especially not sidekicks of a non-caucasian ethnic background. Even so, it’s hard to shake the sense that the reason Tonto is promoted to partner and co-lead of the movie is basically because Johnny Depp is playing the part. I suppose it could have been worse – at the time I got the impression that Tonto was actually the main character, a reasonable assumption considering that the Lone Ranger seems in danger of being crowded off his own movie poster by his erstwhile sidekick.

Looking back, I think it was the impression that The Lone Ranger had been rejigged as a star vehicle for Johnny Depp which put me off it: I’m not saying I’ve never enjoyed one of the actor’s performances or movies, but I got tired of the whole quirky-comedy-schtick thing which seems to be his stock-in-trade before the end of the 2000s. (No doubt the actor has bigger issues to worry about these days than the fact I’m not exactly a fan.) Nevertheless, Depp was still a big, bankable star back in 2013, which might lead one to wonder why this movie ended up costing Disney over $200 million.

As so often seems to be the case, the real question is not ‘why did this movie lose $200 million?’ but ‘how is it possible for this movie to expose its makers to that degree of liability?’ – I mean, to lose $200 million means the movie had to cost at least $200 million in the first place (maths isn’t exactly my forte, but the logic here seems sound to me) – and the total production costs for Lone Ranger were apparently closer to $400 million. And why was anyone spending $200 million on a Lone Ranger movie in 2013? It appears to have been a combination of a fumbling attempt to reproduce the success of the Verbinski-Depp Pirates of the Caribbean movies, together with typically risk-averse Hollywood thinking; choosing a title that everybody knows (even if very few people actually care that much about it) rather than taking a chance on something new.

Certainly, as a reasonably-budgeted (say, $130 million) blockbuster this would have done well and probably been a better movie: the version we ended up with certainly looks lavish, and has a couple of enormous set-pieces that Verbinski handles well, but it suffers from a bloated plot and concomitantly extended duration. Furthermore, the film seems to be trying to do all kinds of things, not all of which naturally go well together: the Lone Ranger itself is, obviously, a faintly absurd pulp western premise, but the film seems intent on threading it through a very dark, revisionist and arguably subversive western narrative: the Comanche are the good guys and the US Cavalry the instruments of evil. Then on top of this comes an element of the supernatural, with the suggestion that one of the characters is possessed by an evil spirit, whose presence is disrupting the natural order (there are some carnivorous rabbits at one point, and some very odd behaviour from the Lone Ranger’s horse Silver). And then, of course, they attempt to lighten it all up with the same kind of dead-pan, off-beat comedy that you find in the Pirates movies, together with some whistles and bells with the narrative voice (Tonto is a rather unreliable narrator). It’s a very peculiar concoction.

That said, it’s usually interesting and occasionally funny and even thrilling: the closing sequence, which is of course choreographed to the rousing strains of the last part of the William Tell Overture, is an almost irresistible piece of overblown blockbuster bombast – if the rest of the film had been made to this standard, The Lone Ranger would surely have been a palpable hit. As it is, rather than capping the movie, it just helps to salvage it. This is a shame, because as well as Depp and Hammer (Hammer seems to be one of those actors who has all the essential star attributes except the ability to pick good scripts), there’s an impressive cast here too, even if most of them never need to get out of first gear: Tom Wilkinson, Helena Bonham-Carter, Ruth Wilson, and so on.

But there you go. All the talent in the world isn’t enough to make a great movie if the basic conception of the thing just doesn’t quite hang together, and that’s the case here. The Lone Ranger is by no means a terrible movie, it’s just one that didn’t make enough money. But then it should never have been expected to. That’s Hollywood, I suppose.

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We Built This Nation On Fake News

There’s a school of thought which suggests that the western genre was essentially a wholesome, thoughtful and sincere vehicle for examining the nature of the American national psyche, until Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood came along and perverted it into something cynical, nihilistic and obsessed with hollow slaughter. I think this is overly simplistic: darkness crept into the West years before the spaghetti western came into vogue, allowed in by some of the genre’s most celebrated home-grown exponents.

John Ford’s 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance opens with Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) arriving by train in the town of Shinbone, presumably some time around the turn of the century (the film is deliberately coy about the times and places involved, for this is in a sense the story of the entirety of the American frontier). Stoddard is one of America’s leading politicians and a very significant figure; his unexpected arrival causes a stir. What has brought him back to the town where he first became famous?

Journalists gather, but Stoddard and Hallie are more interested in catching up with old acquaintances: retired marshal Link Appleyard (Andy Devine) and lowly ranch-hand Pompey (Woody Strode) chief amongst them. There is an air of inescapable melancholy and regret in the air, of things long-buried being uncovered, all connected to the reason for the Stoddards’ visit: to attend the funeral of washed-up town drunk Tom Doniphon (who, when he eventually appears in the flashback which makes up the bulk of the film, is played by John Wayne). But why?

Stoddard, with the air of a man finally getting something off his chest, tells the tale. The scene changes to many years earlier: Stoddard is travelling to Shinbone by stagecoach, a freshly-qualified lawyer. However, the coach is ambushed by the notorious local bandit Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) and his men, and Stoddard is badly beaten when he resists. What’s left of him is hauled into town by Doniphon and his servant Pompey, and he’s taken in by the family running the local saloon. He’s nursed back to health by their daughter, Hallie, which Doniphon is a bit disgruntled about (he has plans of the marryin’ kind which involve her).

Stoddard is determined to see Valance brought to justice, which Doniphon roundly ridicules him for: law books mean nothing here, compared to the authority of a gun barrel. If Stoddard wants to stop Valance, he’s going to have to kill him, law or no law. Stoddard is appalled by the prospect (to say nothing of the fact he’s useless with a gun). Meanwhile, tensions are growing between Doniphon and the lawyer, as Stoddard grows closer to Hallie, teaching her to read and write in his capacity as the town’s new schoolteacher.

The lack of law and order in Shinbone is partly due to the territory not having been given statehood yet, which Stoddard and the town dignitaries would like to see happen – but the powerful local cattle barons want to see things stay as they are, and retain Valance to ensure this happens. Stoddard finds himself inevitably heading for a confrontation with the gunman – but, even with Doniphon’s tuition, can he possibly have a chance?

There’s certainly more of a drama than a traditional western about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and perhaps a fair bit of a romance, too: a big portion of the plot revolves around the love triangle between Doniphon, Hallie and Stoddard. The fashion in which this resolves is one of the bittersweet elements which runs through the movie; there is something profoundly melancholy and wistful about the framing scenes that bookend it. The Stoddards reflect on the changes that the railroad and modern technology have brought to the town, rather ambivalently. ‘The desert’s still the same,’ offers Appleyard, rather dismally.

Perhaps, then, this is the story of how the west was lost – or, at least, tamed, if that isn’t the same thing. It’s about the creation of civilisation and society about of anarchy, on one level, a place where men like Stoddard can prosper, but not – it’s implied – ones like Tom Doniphon or Liberty Valance himself.  What’s telling is that it’s suggested that Doniphon has much more more in common with Valance than with Stoddard – neither man has much time for rules or finer points of behaviour, being ferocious individualists, and if Doniphon is a ‘better’ man than Valance, that’s simply due to his essential character rather than any kind of sense of moral obligation.

That this is put across so effectively is mainly due to Ford’s casting, which is both brilliant and obvious: Wayne is playing his usual monolithic rugged individualist, verging on self-parody by this point: by his own admission, a very tough, unreconstructed alpha male. You can’t imagine him playing Stoddard any more than James Stewart playing Doniphon: like Hitchcock and many other directors, Ford recognised Stewart’s genius for playing flawed, human heroes, and that’s what he does here. (We should probably note the irony that in real life, Stewart was a decorated war veteran, while Wayne was acutely self-conscious about his own lack of military service.) In many ways the film is much more about the conflict between Doniphon and Stoddard than either man’s clash with Valance himself (and, as noted, Doniphon and Valance are in many respects mirrors of each other).

In the end, of course, Valance is shot and a bright future for the west is assured – but this, like most of the film, is couched in numerous levels of irony and ambiguity. The film does romanticise the old west, but not without qualification; it suggests that the old west, with its heroes in white hats and virtue always naturally triumphant, is a myth, with little grounding in truth – in this respect it to some extent anticipates Unforgiven, and many other revisionist westerns. But it also suggests the myth is a necessary one for America’s sense of itself to endure. In this respect The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a surprisingly dark and complex film – amongst other things, suggesting that dark and ruthless acts, carried out in secret, are necessary for civilisation to thrive – but it is also a touching and surprisingly moving portrait of the central characters and their relationship. A serious film about complicated ideas, and real emotions; one of the great American westerns, I think, and a harbinger of the genre’s future.

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When the War is Over

People talk a lot about the decline and even the death of the western as a film genre, despite the fact that they still make cowboy movies, just nowhere near as many as they used to. Just when the genre fell out of favour is relatively easy to determine: as long ago as the late seventies, John Badham was making Outland, which is essentially just a western set on one of the moons of Jupiter, his logic being that it was easier to raise the money for a science fiction film than something with a historical frontier setting.

More evidence for the ‘George Lucas killed the western’ school of thought, perhaps (a little ironic given the western imagery and tropes sprinkled through the first of his stellar conflict movies in particular). If we accept this, we can quite accurately date the Last Days of the Western (as a popular mainstream genre, anyway) to 1976 or 1977 – which, if nothing else, bestows the title of Last Great Traditional Western on Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales, a film better equipped to bear it than almost any other.

Eastwood himself plays Wales, who at the start of the film is a struggling farmer with a wife and young son. But then they are caught up in the savagery of the American civil war: his home is burnt to the ground and his family are killed by Unionist fighters. For a moment the familiar chilly Eastwood mask slips and we see him rendered almost insensible with grief: but then he teaches himself to shoot and  joins up with a Confederacy militia.

As the opening credits end, so does the war: with defeat for the Confederacy. Wales’ commander, Fletcher (a terrific performance by John Vernon, who is rather under-used) has negotiated the terms of their surrender – but Wales cannot yet bring himself to relinquish his hatred, and does not go with the others. This proves to be a wise move, for Fletcher has been sold a pack of lies: the other soldiers are ruthlessly shot down after giving up their arms. Despite an attempted rescue (this yields up the daunting image of a grim-faced Eastwood manning a gatling gun), only Wales and another young man escape, and the lad is grievously injured.

Perhaps not quite realising who they are dealing with, the Union authorities commission Fletcher to hunt Josey Wales down, so he can be killed by Terrill (Bill McKinney) – the man who killed Wales’ family – and his men.

It almost sounds like a chase movie, but for the fact that after a while, Wales isn’t sure he’s being pursued (he does keep running into bounty hunters everywhere he goes, though).  But where is he running to? Nowhere, really: he’s just running. Even this would be easier if he didn’t keep acquiring waifs and strays and misfits on the trail: an aging Cherokee chief with a nice line in dry repartee (Chief Dan George), two settlers heading for a new home in Texas (Paula Trueman and Clint’s then-wife Sondra Locke), and so on. As the chief suggests, Josey Wales is very good at getting rid of people he doesn’t like – but will he find it quite to easy to dispense with people he does genuinely care for?

The context for The Outlaw Josey Wales is interesting. You don’t really need to know anything about the American civil war to follow the story, but if you do know the topic it is immediately apparent this is another film laden with regret regarding the conflict. I always used to think it felt almost as if Hollywood believed that the wrong side won – you can sense that same regret in movies from Gone with the Wind to Cold Mountain – but now I wouldn’t put it quite so strongly. This movie doesn’t concern itself with the causes or politics of the war any more than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, in which it is just an appropriate backdrop for a cynical tale of adventurous gunmen trying to get rich quick. However, The Outlaw Josey Wales deals with the end of the war, and feels almost post-apocalyptic in places: there is a sense of a shattered civilisation beginning to pull itself back together and rebuild, particularly in terms of the nascent community that Wales finds himself increasingly committed to.

This itself is a bit of a departure considering Eastwood’s role in his films for Sergio Leone was essentially that of the Angel of Death, cooler, faster and meaner than anyone else in the west. The role is almost an operatic cartoon character; what sets the two great westerns Eastwood directed apart is the way in which they examine how a person gets that way (or at least gets to be perceived that way), and – crucially, in the case of this film – if there is a way back to being a human being.

‘We all died a little in that war,’ says Eastwood towards the end of the film, basically encapsulating the theme of the movie. The story is about death, and loss, and grief, and then learning to go beyond it  and find hope somewhere else. At one point, when the climax seems imminent, Wales rides off to single-handedly take on the local native tribe, with little expectation of a safe return – but rather than the bloodbath the audience may be expecting by this point, Eastwood (underplaying masterfully) delivers a quiet speech about the unimportance of governments compared to the reality of people learning to live together in peace, without endless violence. When I first saw this movie it felt like a left turn; now I watch it and it is one of the most moving and powerful scenes I can think of. (Needless to say Eastwood knows his audience and still manages to orchestrate the movie so it concludes with a hum-dinger of a shoot-out.)

That’s the joy of The Outlaw Josey Wales: you get all the stuff you want – Eastwood at the height of his powers, commandingly cool, with great one-liners and superb action – but also a genuinely touching story about a man who has surrendered himself to violence finding the courage to contemplate that, perhaps, there is another way of living. If this movie does mark the end of an era, then it does so in the best possible way, for this is an excellent film.

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Lucky for Some

John Carpenter’s 1976 movie Assault on Precinct 13 opens with a cosmopolitan group of young Los Angelinos out for a walk one night. As their neighbourhood is perhaps not the swankiest, they have opted to play it safe and are all carrying automatic weapons. Unfortunately, when they bump into a group of police, the officers of the law are likewise not inclined to take any chances and mow them all down with pump-action shotguns, apparently before the youths manage to get a shot off. These days this sequence feels rather provocative, though it was probably never intended to.

The rest of the movie takes place in the course of the next twenty-four hours. The leaders of the street gang whose members were killed meet and swear a blood oath to exact vengeance for the deaths of their friends – quite who is never made entirely clear. Initially it seems to be anyone who crosses their path, particularly ice-cream men, before they settle for ‘anyone sheltering someone we don’t like’. This is a plot device, to be honest, but a very functional one.

Carpenter goes on to introduce the various characters who will populate the story: Lieutenant Bishop (Austin Stoker), a Highway Patrol officer on his first night’s duty – a decent, principled man, keen to make a difference, Bishop isn’t completely delighted to be given a posting supervising a near-derelict police station on the verge of being entirely shut down. All he has to do is answer the phones, redirect anyone who comes in to the new station, and make friends with the secretaries (Laurie Zimmer and Nancy Loomis).

Meanwhile, a group of prisoners is being transferred from one penal institution to another. Amongst them are Wells (Tony Burton), a fairly undistinguished crook, and Napoleon Smith (Darwin Joston), a celebrity multiple-murderer with a bit of an attitude, not to mention an ego. Also going about his business is Mr Lawson (Martin West), a man taking his young daughter to visit his mother. And, of course, the gang warlords are on the prowl, looking for trouble.

Needless to say, all these characters eventually come together at the virtually-abandoned old precinct: Lawson has a shocking run-in with the gang and ends up killing one of them. With the others on his tail he takes refuge in the precinct, where the bus carrying Wells and Smith has made a brief stop. Before anyone realises what’s happening, the building has been surrounded by dozens of heavily armed gang members, all apparently out for Lawson’s blood, and all of them totally psychotic.

The movie basically treats the gang members like something out of a horror movie, which makes the ensuing alliance between Bishop, one of the secretaries named Leigh, and the two convicts more plausible. The quartet have to work together in order to fend off the waves of attacks the gang throw against the precinct, all the while trying to raise the alarm or find a way to escape…

The last time I wrote about a John Carpenter movie, I was unfortunately obliged to be fairly unkind about it, and proposed the standard thesis: that Carpenter is one of those people who for some reason has done his career backwards. It’s perfectly understandable for people’s work to improve over time, as they practise and learn from their mistakes – the fact that this happens is one of the very few benign laws of nature – but there is something a little bit baffling about people who get worse as they progress through their career. Carpenter started with this film, Dark Star, Halloween, The Fog and The Thing, but then unaccountably seemed to go off the boil, and what ensued is essentially – oh, dear, I feel awful for saying this – a long slide into creative irrelevance.

But this movie – oh, boy! If we’re going to go with the ‘backwards career’ notion, it follows that Carpenter’s first proper movie should be amongst his best – and so it is. Halloween is the early Carpenter film that gets all the attention, not least because it was a huge hit and consolidated a new horror subgenre (I hesitate to say it actually invented the slasher movie, because, you know, Psycho). I fully see why Halloween is so acclaimed, but for sheer pleasure and entertainment value, this is the Carpenter movie for me.

Of course, watching it now, you can see that this was a director who would at some point do something noteworthy in the horror genre – the faceless, silent gang members have something of George Romero’s zombies about them, and the precinct-under-siege of course recalls the embattled farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead (Carpenter has acknowledged the debt). But you might also anticipate there would be a proper western somewhere in Carpenter’s future, given Assault kind of resembles a mash-up of a zombie movie and a cowboy film – I’ve heard it described as an ‘urban western’, which strikes me as as good a description as any (always assuming we’re still allowed to use the word urban figuratively, anyway).

What we can learn from a film like this is that sometimes a script doesn’t need a lot of subplots and subtext and character motivation: it sets up the situation and characters with supreme economy, and, once it has brought them together, proceeds to play out virtually in real time, apart from a couple of cutaway sequences. Even then, there is barely a wasted moment or line – virtually all of Darwin Joston’s dialogue in the first part of the film is setting up a pay-off near the end. Carpenter has said the final script was put together in not much more than a week, which only goes to show that an intense creative blitz can sometimes pay dividends.

Having the right neighbours probably helps, too: Carpenter was living in the same building as Darwin Joston at the time, and Joston knew Austin Stoker from other acting work, and this was how the film found its two male leads. It is almost impossible to look at this film now and not wonder why Stoker, Joston and Laurie Zimmer did not go on to much more substantial movie careers – Joston in particular is effortlessly charismatic, but the others aren’t far behind him. The pay-off to the whole movie comes in the final shot, when Bishop and Smith walk out of what’s left of the precinct side by side, and it’s one of those moments which almost lifts you out of your seat.

The rather charged by-play between Joston and Zimmer, not to mention some of their other dialogue, does betray Carpenter’s great fondness for the films of Howard Hawks – Assault also owes a debt to his Rio Bravo – a classic Hollywood touch to what is still clearly a low-budget exploitation movie with some notably graphic violence. There’s still a film-school-punk edge to Carpenter’s work at this point, most obviously in the ice cream scene – the censor insisted Carpenter remove this, or the film would be given an X certificate (Carpenter obliged, but then put the offending moment back in for the film’s wider release). Even the director has since admitted he perhaps goes a little too far at this point.

Well, maybe: but it’s the combination of traditional virtues and restless edginess that gives the film its energy and ability to relentlessly grip and entertain. It occurs to me we are sometimes a bit too hard on John Carpenter, and are too inclined to judge him based on his later films: if you or I happened along and made a film as good as Assault on Precinct 13, then promptly retired, we would still be acclaimed as having made a significant contribution to cinema. Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, and The Thing go to comprise a very impressive legacy, to say nothing of Carpenter’s other movies. But for me, this is the one at the top of the pile.

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Genre Reassignment

From a British perspective you can’t fault John C Reilly’s approach to the year so far: having befouled cinemas with Holmes and Watson right at the beginning of January, he has apparently been doing his very best to make amends, giving an excellent performance in the very good Stan & Ollie, and now doing much the same in The Sisters Brothers, which he also produced. On the other hand, this is sort of a trick of the light, given that The Sisters Brothers was actually released in the States well over six months ago and is only now reaching screens in the UK (and not many of them at that).

In our world of day and date releasing, with films usually coming out more or less simultaneously across the anglophone world, what can we infer from this delay? Well, it’s usually a sign that a studio doesn’t have much faith in a movie and isn’t in a hurry to capitalise on the buzz it has generated, often because there isn’t any. Certainly The Sisters Brothers has been released into the world at a fairly quiet time (at least, as quiet as it gets with everyone gearing up for the first really big releases of the year in only a few weeks), without much in the way of publicity, and much of that rather odd (we shall return to this). How come? Well, here we come to the nub of the issue. Money has nothing to do with artistic achievement – well, less than you might think – but in a spirit of full disclosure I feel obliged to mention that The Sisters Brothers was a bomb on its American release, making back only about a quarter of its budget.

The film is the work of the acclaimed French director Jacques Audiard, who won the top prize at Cannes with Dheepan in 2015 and before that made the very impressive Rust and Bone. The Sisters Brothers finds him working in that most American of genres and idioms, the western, with Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix playing the title characters, who are a pair of ne’er-do-wells – basically hired killers – in the service of a wealthy but unprincipled man known as the Commodore (Rutger Hauer, in what proves to be a startling instance of stunt casting). Reilly plays Eli, the elder and more thoughtful of the pair, who is beginning to have reservations about their lifestyle; Phoenix plays Charlie, who is more of a loose cannon and thinks everything is fine just as it is.

As the film opens, the brothers are dispatched in support of a private detective, Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), who is also working for the Commodore. Morris is on the trail of mild-mannered chemist Hermann Warm (Riz Ahmed), who has developed a new process vastly facilitating the acquisition of gold – as this is 1851, with the California gold rush still a going concern, there is potentially very big money to be made here. Morris is to find Warm and restrain him, at which point the brothers will forcibly extract the secret of the process from him and then dispose of his remains. It’s very simple, if not exactly virtuous – but then Morris finds himself warming to Warm and his idealistic notions as to what to spend the gold on, and the two men strike up a tentative partnership of their own. Meanwhile, the pursuing Sisters have issues of their own, with Eli increasingly coming to the conclusion that this is not how he wants to spend the rest of his days…

I was fairly indifferent about the prospect of seeing The Sisters Brothers when it first started popping up in the ‘coming soon’ sections of my preferred media outlets – I’ve nothing against a good western, but this is a genre which feels like it’s been on life-support for decades. Whenever they do make a western now, it’s usually an opportunity for an art-house director to do something radical and revisionist to it, or it’s a clumsy attempt by a big studio to revive the genre which normally ends up bland and annoying. This is certainly from the former camp, and my tolerance for this sort of thing really depends on exactly what the director’s take on the form is: extra grit, misery and gore is neither inspired not particularly impressive. The trailer that eventually turned up for The Sisters Brothers promised something rather different: it was fast, funny, and was soundtracked by (I am assuming) Gloria Jones singing ‘Tainted Love’, which is not the kind of tune you would associate with the American west. The idea of a western with a northern soul soundtrack struck me as an interesting and witty one, and did the job of making me interested in seeing the film.

Well, I have to report that this is practically a case of false advertising, for while this film’s soundtrack is certainly quirky, it is almost wholly orchestral. Should I feel cheated? Well, maybe: but the rest of the film is certainly interesting and generally speaking a worthwhile watch. To begin with it looks very much like a classic western tale, dealing with issues of morality and self-realisation on the open range, but kept lively and very watchable by great performances from the four leads – but especially Reilly, who brings real depth and warmth to someone who could easily have had neither. Audiard isn’t one of those people who tries to ‘fix’ the western by turning it into something else – there is all the magnificent scenery one could hope for (I should point out that this film was made in the land of the Spaghetti western, i.e. Spain), and frequent shoot-outs along the way – for all of their tendency to bicker with each other, the Sisters brothers are alarmingly proficient killers. The story builds up to the encounter between the brothers and Warm and Morris very satisfyingly.

And then something very odd happens, which may be at the root of the troubles that The Sisters Brothers has had at the box office. The film takes an odd turn, with what feels undeniably like a allegory about greed and its effects on the environment briefly appearing, and then… Well, we’re into the final act of the film by this point, so I can’t really go into detail, but the film-makers essentially rip up the rule-book as to how a story should develop and do something radically different instead. It’s the kind of thing that could happen in real life, but never happens in movies, the sort of plot twist that film critics tend to love (85% on a well-known solanaceous review aggregation website) but general audiences respond very poorly to (only $3.1 million at the US box office). I can kind of admire Audiard’s audacity in playing with expectations and dispensing with traditional ideas of closure, but I have to say that something with a bit more rootin’ tootin’ would have felt more emotionally satisfying.

Still, one gets a definite sense that Audiard has made exactly the film he wanted to make, and it is still a pretty good one: the setting is well realised, the performances strong, and there are moments both amusing and emotional in the course of the film. But at the same time I can see exactly why it has struggled commercially: the strange shifts in tone and the lack of a conventional ending feel like an attempt to deliberately wrong-foot audiences, and this happens too late to really win them back again before the film is over. It’s hard to criticise the film for this, but I think this is certainly the source of its problems. Worth seeing, but I couldn’t give this an unqualified recommendation.

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Wild on the Frontier

When I was a student, many years ago, one of the things that people did on a Saturday night was go to the weekly midnight screening of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. It became almost like a regular event for many of us – once every couple of months, we would go out for a few drinks and then turn up at the Odeon in Hull just as the normal screenings were letting out. At one point, as if to emphasise the slightly cultish nature of the event, there was something of a vogue for wearing the suits and dark glasses. This went on for literally years, to the point at which the actual prints of the film started wearing out. The film was originally released in the UK at the beginning of 1993 and was still enjoying this odd afterlife two or three years later, even occasionally resurfacing for a more conventional run. This was mostly due to the unique circumstances of this film, which was banned on video in the UK for most of this time, but such a long cinema run is still unusual. However, when it comes to violent ultra-masculine action thrillers that enjoyed unusually protracted UK cinema visits, then the film for you is undoubtedly Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 film The Wild Bunch, which ran in one London picture house for seven years.

The movie opens with a group of men in US Army uniform riding into a small town in southern Texas. The year is not specified but one can infer it is around 1913. As the group arrive at a railroad office, it soon becomes apparent they are not soldiers but thieves, led by the ruthless outlaw Pike (William Holden), along with his lieutenant Dutch (Ernest Borgnine). But the gang’s plan to rob the railroad payroll seems to be going awry, for their appearance has been anticipated: lying in wait for them on top of the building across the way are a motley group of bounty hunters, led by Thornton (Robert Ryan) – a former associate of Pike’s who has been offered early release from prison in exchange for his assistance in hunting down his former friend.

After a long, tense build-up, the thieves attempt to make their escape, and a full-scale gun battle erupts between them and the bounty hunters, with many members of the local town caught in the crossfire and casually gunned down. Pike, Dutch, and several of the other gang members manage to shoot their way out of town and escape, leaving ugly scenes in their wake as the hunters squabble over the spoils and pick over the corpses.

However, Pike and the gang are disgusted to discover the silver they planned to steal has been replaced by steel washers, and Pike’s authority over the group is challenged. He manages to hold them together and they head down into Mexico to plan their next move. Pike is aware that time is running out for men like them, and maybe the chaotic situation south of the border will throw up some opportunities. So it initially proves, as a tenuous deal is struck with a corrupt general, to steal arms for him from the US government. But Thornton and his posse have not given up, and a member of the gang has his own reasons for opposing the general. Pike and the others find themselves having to choose between personal loyalty, and self-interest.

The Wild Bunch showed up at the UPP in Oxford recently as the finale of their classic western strand – an entirely appropriate choice, given it is generally accepted to be one of the last of the truly great western movies. Showing just the previous week was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which I went to see with a friend – she thoroughly enjoyed it and asked if there were any other ‘cowboy films’ coming on. I said yes, but probably should have made it clear that this was a slightly different kind of film in its tone and outlook.

That said, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Wild Bunch have much more in common than you might initially think, even considering they’re both westerns (and thus naturally share a kind of generic resemblance). Both films are essentially concerned with the death of the old west, as it is generally conceived, and feature characters who are increasingly aware that the world around them is changing. Pike and his comrades see automobiles and machine-guns starting to appear around them; there is even talk of aeroplanes. There are a number of images and plot elements shared by both films as well – the pursuit of the main characters by hired killers (although in this case the leader of the posse is a more complex, sympathetic figure), the flight from the USA to another country, the climactic, bloody encounter with the army.

Nevertheless, this is a textbook example of how two films in the same genre can take similar material and produce totally different results. Writing about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid recently, I said that there’s a sense in which it almost doesn’t feel quite like a western at all – it’s a charming, romantic film that includes a lot of western iconography, but the focus is wholly on the central trio rather than the milieu in which they live. The Wild Bunch almost feels like a riposte to the other movie, an attempt to set the record straight – the real-life Sundance Kid was actually part of a gang known as the Wild Bunch, who were far from the inoffensive rogues beloved of most Hollywood depictions.

If there is any romanticism in this movie, it is of a very hard-edged kind. Pike, Dutch and the others are visibly ageing, grizzled and weather-beaten by their hard lives – Pike is half-crippled by an old wound, for instance. Charming they are not. Unlike Redford and Newman, this gang are ruthless killers when the situation demands it, showing little remorse for their actions – Pike has no qualms about finishing off one member of the gang who is too badly wounded to accompany them in their escape. You might therefore wonder how they can have any demand on the audience’s sympathy – shouldn’t everyone just be rooting for Thornton all the way through?

Well, Thornton himself comes across as an ambivalent, conflicted figure throughout, disgusted by the trash and scum he’s been given to lead. ‘What kind of man are we after?’ asks one of the bounty hunters, referring to Pike. ‘The best,’ Thornton curtly responds. Ryan’s performance makes it clear that Thornton hates himself for going after his former friend, and is only doing it to escape prison and the accompanying torture. Through his regard for Pike, we gain some ourselves.

And there is, of course, the fact that while the gang themselves may be crude, violent, ruthless men, Peckinpah still surrounds them with other characters who are appreciably worse. They live by some kind of code of honour, look out for each other, respect each other as men. And as the film goes on and we share in their small victories and the accompanying camaraderie, we do come to respect and care about them ourselves, even though they are obviously doomed.

When that doom eventually arrives, it is in the extraordinary climax of the film. Watching it again, you can’t help wondering about the extent to which Peckinpah is suggesting that these men are knowingly going to their deaths, opting to go out guns blazing. Is this really about their personal code of loyalty, or just a convenient pretext to cover a breathtaking outburst of nihilistic violence? At one point there’s a temporary lull in the slaughter and it looks like the gang may be able to get away with their lives – but Pike seems to make a deliberate choice to provoke a further surge of killing, this one uncontrollable. The director keeps it ambiguous. What is certain is that the Wild Bunch don’t get the gentle, sepia-toned freeze-frame-and-pull-back accorded to Butch and Sundance: they die bloody, in full view of the camera, but by no means alone.

You could probably argue that the final battle of The Wild Bunch was the shot heard round the world, in terms of finally extinguishing whatever innocence the western had left once Sergio Leone had his hands on it (well, more like several hundred shots heard round the world). Even today it is a remarkably intense nearly-five-minute sequence, a crescendo of blood as everyone involved seems to lose their reason and becomes fixated on killing anything that moves. The result is a kind of reflexive spasm of violence, made unforgettable by Peckinpah’s use of fast cutting, slow motion, and large quantities of blood squibs. Apparently the director’s intention was to shock the audience and confront them with the realities of violence, and he was concerned that viewers actually found it cathartic. Even today it is hard to decide which is really the case.

This kind of careful ambiguity extends through the movie, affecting how we view the characters’ motivations and identities. The result is a kind of studied amorality, which – when combined with the staggeringly violent sequences that bookend the film – could make it possible to dismiss the film as something technically competent, but with little to say for itself. I think this would be to do it a disservice. One of Peckinpah’s more striking choices is the sheer number of cutaways to women and children observing the main action of the film. They are there watching the gang ride in, they are present at the various villages they visit, they are taking cover during the final massacre, and so on. It looks like Peckinpah is making a point about the contrast between the men who are his main characters and the innocent lives damaged by their violence – but are they really so innocent? The playing children watching the gang’s arrival turn out to be torturing animals, while in the midst of the final battle, Pike is shot twice: first by a woman, then by a child. Whether you interpret this as representing masculine violence contaminating everyone exposed to it, or simply a sign that there is really no such thing as innocence, it suggests that Peckinpah did have moral ideas he wanted to express – just not very comforting ones.

Of course, you can interpret The Wild Bunch in terms of its presentation of violence and moral theme, or simply enjoy it as a terrific, hard-edged western. It has the epic scenery and rousing soundtrack you would expect of the best of the genre, and it really is about the classic themes of the genre – what it means to live as a man, in this particular setting. It’s still a challenging film to watch, but a challenge which it’s well worth meeting.

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Men Out of Time

Once more unto the Ultimate Picture Palace (if this keeps up I shall have to consider buying yet another cinema membership card), where they are currently showing a season of classic westerns (and why not). To be honest with you, the collection of films on offer is a bit of a mixed bag – they have The Searchers, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and The Wild Bunch, which obviously all qualify, but also Rio Bravo – I mean, it’s okay, but I prefer the John Carpenter semi-remake – and The Last Movie, which in addition to being fairly obscure also features in a book entitled The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. Also on the list is George Roy Hill’s 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – now, this I would say was an indisputably classic movie, one of my personal favourites, but a classic western?

On paper it looks like a fairly standard example of the genre. The film is set, we are invited to infer, in the very last years of the 19th century, with the charming and ingenious Butch (Paul Newman) and the taciturn but deadly Kid (Robert Redford) well-established as outlaw robbers of banks and trains, and happily ensconced in a not-quite-love-triangle with schoolteacher Etta Place (Katharine Ross). They are local celebrities, sort of, generally trying to avoid hurting people in the pursuit of their activities. The sun shines, the scenery is beautiful; Butch and Sundance barely seem to have a care in the world.

But the wheels of progress crush everyone, and what the duo fail to fully appreciate until too late is that their world is vanishing. They are virtually the last of their kind, and one irate businessman determines to complete the eradication of the old-west outlaw by hiring a crack posse of expert hunters and killers to chase them down and finish their careers permanently. It’s a nasty shock for the carefree duo, who only manage to escape through a desperate gamble and sheer good fortune. Butch and Sundance resolve to take the heat off by travelling down to Bolivia, where there are still opportunities for the old-fashioned banditry they love, and better days return – but only for a while…

Well, it’s always a pleasure to see a film like this back on the big screen, especially given the thick-headed TV edit currently in circulation. It’s actually a little discombobulating to realise that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, for it feels as fresh and engaging as it ever did (I guess it must: the UPP is also currently showing The Old Man and the Gun, in which a rather more grizzled Redford bids his adieu to the screen playing a role not a million miles away from the Sundance Kid). I first saw this film at a very early age and have lost count of the number of times I’ve seen it since; my appreciation for it has done nothing but grow, and it is on the list of those films which seem to me to be virtually perfect.

But is it strictly speaking a classic western? It might sound like an absurd question. I suppose it boils down to how you define the western as a genre – if you consider it to be any film predominantly set on the American frontier in the nineteenth century, then naturally it qualifies. Some people would be more rigorous and suggest that a classic western must deal with themes of honour, loyalty, individualism, perhaps even rugged masculinity. These are the same people inclined to dismiss Sergio Leone’s films as superficial nihilism, for all their critical and commercial success.

Certainly you could argue that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid often feels much more like a comedy-drama buddy movie, as the title duo banter and squabble their way through the movie; part of its charm is that it is genuinely and consistently funny throughout. The soundtrack, provided by Burt Bacharach, is also hardly the stuff of a classic cowboy movie. Real purists might also take issue with the fact that the closing stretch of the film is set in South America, and the film did apparently struggle to get financed for a while as studio bosses objected to the fact that the heroes essentially spend much of the movie running away (‘John Wayne don’t run away,’ was the comment of one executive).

I think this is to miss the point of the film, which is essentially about the classic cowboy in retreat. It is, obviously, a deeply nostalgic film – there’s probably an interesting discussion to be had about the place of nostalgia within the western genre – fully aware of a world slipping away. The appearance of modern bank vaults and bicycles in the old west are just signs that things are changing on a deeper level, and there is no place for outlaws any more. The film is about the death of this romantic world, and due to the sheer charisma of Redford and Newman, you feel its loss keenly no matter how irrational this is.

One of the most impressive things about William Goldman’s script is the way in which the tone of the film gradually but imperceptibly grows darker as it progresses – Butch and Sundance are never short of a wisecrack or put-down, even in the midst of their final encounter with the Bolivian army, but their exploits become progressively grittier and more violent as the film approaches its end. As bandits, they are presented as committing almost victimless crimes – it is their attempt at going straight that leads to them becoming killers. You could probably view the whole movie as a metaphor for the western genre’s loss of innocence – it opens with footage from a silent movie from the genre, and grows progressively darker and more ‘realistic’, as I’ve mentioned. The bodies of the Bolivian bandits killed by the duo tumble in slow motion very much like something from a Sam Peckinpah film, which the film in some ways begins to resemble. Is it stretching a point to suggest that, by killing off the lead characters at the end, this film is an example of the western anticipating its own imminent demise, in its traditional form at least?

We should also perhaps remember that this film came out in 1969, and there are surely echoes of the sunlit days of the summer of love in the film’s lighter moments. Butch and Sundance are obviously anti-establishment figures, not actively seeking to harm anyone, just to carry on the relatively carefree existence they enjoy – they are rogues rather than villains. Perhaps by the very end of the 60s it was already becoming apparent that the dreams of the counter-culture were part of a world as doomed to pass as that of the two outlaws, and this is why young audiences responded so strongly to the bittersweet mood of the film and the poignancy of its conclusion: we are spared the gory details, left with an image of our heroes frozen in a sepia-toned past, drifting off into the distance. This film is a joy, while never forgetting that all things must pass – but so far, at least, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid itself seems to be timeless.

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The Return of the Shpace Cowboy

It has become almost facile to point out that the demise of the traditional western – as a significant part of the cinema landscape, anyway – occurred almost simultaneously with the rise of science fiction and fantasy films to the position of box office dominance they enjoy to this day. The conclusion to be drawn is very nearly as straightforward – it’s not quite that SF movies have simply replaced westerns, but that both genres meet the same need and appeal to the same audience. Or, to put it another way, there’s a certain type of action-SF movie which is basically a western in disguise.

The disguise is seldom as perfunctory as in Peter Hyams’ 1981 film Outland, however. Hmm, you may be thinking, where is this Outland place and why did they decide to make a film about it? Well, I have to tell you that this seems to be an example of film-makers not being able to agree on a good title and reaching a consensus on a duff one instead. The film was made under the title Io, which as any fule kno is a volcanically-active moon of Jupiter, but apparently the big brains of the production were concerned that non-astronomically-savvy audiences might read the title as either 10 or Lo, hence the change.

 

I will happily agree that Io is not a great title, but at least it’s accurate (personally I would have called the movie High Moon, because sometimes you just can’t be crashingly obvious enough). The film is set in one of those non-specific not-all-that-distant futures where the outer reaches of the solar system are being explored and exploited; people apparently go for many years without ever visiting Earth (the journey from the Jovian region to Earth apparently takes a year in cryo). Io is being mined for titanium and the story takes place in one of the mining outposts, mostly concerning the chief lawman of the place, Marshall (or Marshal, depending on where you look) Bill O’Niel (Sean Connery).

O’Niel has only recently taken up his post and is still receiving apparently mock-stern lectures from the outpost’s manager, Sheppard (Peter Boyle), about how he needs to be flexible in his approach to the job and cut the hard-working miners some slack. To begin with O’Niel is more preoccupied by the fact that his wife can’t hack rattling around yet another space outpost and has left him to go back to Earth, but his cop instincts are triggered when he comes across a string of suspicious deaths – workers cutting open their spacesuits while outside, or not even bothering to wear them.

(Outland is notable for its enthusiastic championing of the notion that if you go into a hard vacuum without a spacesuit, either your head or your torso will explode. Apparently this is just one of those myths, but it does allow the special effects department some fun. One of the people whose head explodes is John Ratzenberger, best known for playing Cliff in Cheers, but eminently spottable in small parts in many famous late 70s and early 80s films, thanks to a stint based in London.)

Normally the remains of these ‘accidents’ are quietly disposed of, but O’Niel eventually manages to lay his hands on the body of a worker who apparently goes mad. With the help of the outpost’s medic, Dr Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen), O’Niel discovers that all the dead men had been taking high-powered amphetamines, allowing them to work longer and harder but eventually frying their brains.

It transpires that Sheppard and even some of O’Niel’s own men are in on the racket – the drugs increase productivity, which is all Sheppard and his bosses really care about. Their assumption is that O’Niel, like his predecessor, can be bought off, because only a fool would risk his life by taking on Sheppard and the men behind him. But this does not sit well with O’Niel, who finds himself compelled to hang onto his principles and take a stand (or, this being a Connery movie after all, a shtand).

One day someone will write about Outland and not draw comparisons between it and Alien. But that day has clearly not yet dawned. The aesthetic of the two films is almost identical, to the point where they could quite easily share a continuity: the mining outpost is a grimy, cramped, industrial warren of corridors, controlled by faceless and uncaring corporations.

The setting of Outland is important as it’s the only thing which gives it its SF credentials. The story itself is that of one principled man attempting to put an end to drug racketeering despite the odds being stacked against him – it could really be set anywhere. Even the drug racketeering is on one level just plot fluff, setting up the central conflict of the movie, which is not so much Connery versus the drug dealers as Connery’s sense of self-preservation versus his stubbornly principled streak. What is he really hoping to achieve? Nobody would blame him for taking bribes or running away…

This owes, of course, a big debt to High Noon, although Outland only really closely resembles the earlier movie for a chunk of its second half: a far-from-subtle digital countdown indicates how long before the space shuttle carrying professional killers will arrive at the outpost.

To be honest, though, I found these scenes and the eventual fight between Connery and the hitmen to be rather laborious, though fairly well-mounted; much more interesting are the earlier scenes in which O’Niel uncovers the extent of the corruption around him and realises just what a sticky spot he’s in. There is some really good material here, including some top-class moral outrage, and Connery plays it for all that it’s worth. I find that in a lot of Sean Connery’s later appearances, his tendency is just to play it very broad and just do the same lovable twinkly performance, but this is a proper acting job from the big man.

His main support comes from Sternhagen as the grumpy doctor, and she is also very good. This is a well-played film throughout, to be honest, and a reasonably well-written one. The film’s visual effects and model work are pretty good, but you can tell that the director and the screenwriter are also working hard to keep the film focused and credible.

I first saw Outland on TV in the late 80s and do recall that I wasn’t especially impressed by it: good production designs, but a bit dull. I think I would revise that opinion now – this is a solid film with a compelling central story and performance, but let down slightly  by its climax. And I do think it’s telling that Hyams admitted later that he only really wanted to make a western – the outer-space setting was just the only one that the studio felt was commercially viable. You can tell that none of the major talent involved was really that interested in making a science-fiction film, because in a very real sense they didn’t. Nevertheless, this is a watchable thriller with some distinctive elements.

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