Super Seventies Movie Month

Like every October, the Luminous Mrs. V. and I watched spooky (But not too spooky this past Halloween season. Her acceptability level for such things is much lower than mine.) movies. This year, she suggested we dedicate November to seventies movies. I quickly agreed. It's the era in which we both grew up and both saw a ton of movies in the theater, though, she way, way more than I. There are so many movies for both of us from that decade that still hold strongly to our imaginations and memories of our childhoods that it seemed like a no-brainer of an undertaking.

Hollywood, in seeming retreat in the face of declining ticket sales and the continued loss of viewers to TV, tried anything and everything - including loosened standards of sex and violence - to win back their audience starting in the late sixties and on through the next decade. On the higher end, this meant giving a host of directors nearly free rein. The result was lots of amazing, practically art house movies. There were huge movies, like the Bonnie and Clyde (1967, dir. Arthur Penn) and The Godfather (1972, dir. Francis Ford Coppola). Those same two directors also made less-well known films that are more to my liking; Night Moves (1975) and The Conversation (1974), respectively. 

Hollywood's openness to practically everything, allowed idiosyncratic character movies like The Last Detail (1973, dir. Hal Ashby), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971, dir. Monte Hellman), and Badlands (1972, dir. Terrence Malick) to get made. Walter Matthau and Gene Hackman were able to become stars. It wasn't a new golden age for actresses in the same way it was for actors, which looking back pretty much bites, still, some, such as Gena Rowlands, Marsha Mason, Faye Dunaway got to make some solid pictures. Until Jaws and Star Wars taught Hollywood that there was gold in a certain style of summer blockbuster, it seemed like any movie was possible.

The best thing about Hollywood's new found artistic freedom was it seeped into everything. It might have come out of desperation, but who cares? It meant thrillers could be tougher and grittier, like Dirty Harry (1971, dir. Don Siegel) and Prime Cut (1972, dir. Michael Ritchie). Comedies could be blacker than almost anything Billy Wilder imagined, like Harold and Maude (1971, dir. Hal Ashby) and Where's Poppa? (1970, dir. Carl Reiner). 

It meant previously unsought-after audiences got attention, as with blaxploitation films. Sure, many of them were written and directed by white directors, but many weren't, most notably Shaft (1971, dir. Gordon Parks) and Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970, dir. Ossie Davis). There were also more confrontational movies like Melvin van Peebles' Watermelon Man and (1970) Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971).

That's only a scratch at the surface of Hollywood's output in this period and only of the most notable ones. There are dozens and dozens of films of in every genre imaginable. While we're going to watch some of the movies I've mentioned, we're also going to watch plenty of lesser ones, ones that hold a place in our memories because of when we saw them the first time when we were young, or they hit us in a particular way. Among others, for Mrs. V. this means Heaven Can Wait (1978, dir. Buck Henry & Warren Beatty) and Take Down (1979, dir. Kieth Merrill), and for me it means The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974, dir. Joseph Sargent) and Sorcerer (1977, dir. William Friedkin). Whatever we end up watching, though, good and bad, this is going to be a blast.

Note: I'll be posting everything we watch on my twitter feed, so follow me if you don't already.

A Century Ago

I started this back in November just before the Great War's centenary. My usual laziness coupled with my efforts to finish off my Black Gate obligations delayed its completion until now. It's not an especially focused piece of writing, but it does gather together several thoughts I've had on the war.

It's a good thing, however. I didn't expect to actually see Peter Jackson's astounding They Shall Not Grow Old. Fortunately, I did, so I can add some comments about it here.

I'm not exactly sure when I became aware of and fascinated by the terrible nature of WWI. It was probably around third or fourth grade when I found my dad's coffee table-history of the war by S.L.A. Marshall. It was the pictures that seared became seared into my brain, especially the one of a dead soldier in the mud. His head was just a skull and his limbs were bent in a grotesque parody of life. It's his hand, palm upturned, that for some unknown reason disturbed me the most. Skulls I had seen plenty of, from Halloween to movies, but the hand of a corpse, never.

I didn't read the book at first; I was content to stare at the hundreds of pictures. There were photos - some, incredibly, unposed - as well as propaganda and newspaper drawings. There were cartoons by a soldier on the Salonika Front and terrifying paintings by men trapped in the endless hell of the Western Front.

German soldier on the Western Front

When I finally read the book it proved far more horrible than the pictures. For those unfamiliar with the history and nature of the First World War, it's a tale of unremitting horror suffused with stupidity and arrogance. Fundamentally, it's the culmination of Western hubris, that somehow this great war could be fought and won without completely destroying the society that gave rise to it. For nearly fifty years, the time between the Prussian defeat of France in 1870, the Great Powers of Europe had direct avoided war with one another, but they seemed to be always testing each other's mettle. Oh, they backed each other's opponents to varying degrees, but real war with each other was avoided.

Australian watching Greek picking lice near Salonika

1917 - Loyal Russian soldier attempts to drive his comrades back to the front

On the other hand, the Russians and Japanese learned the nature of modern industrial in 1905, where artillery and machine guns slaughtered men by the thousands. These lessons do not seem to have been learned by any of the men who would command the armies on the Western Front only a decade later. Within weeks of the First World War's start in 1914 they were already beginning to feed their men into the bottomless meatgrinder of machine gun-swept battlefields.

British Infantry at the Mons-Conde Canal - 1914

I've recently read that casualty rates for the Great War really weren't higher than those of the Second World War. I'm not sure I believe that (except for maybe on the Russian Front and some of the Pacific island assaults), but the moments of suicidal attack and counterattack that define the 1914-1918 Western Front were much rarer in the later war.

The Western Front seems like war stripped down to an elemental level. There is only mud and ruins, gun and shell fire. The landscape, crisscrossed with trenches and fields of barbed wire, is lifeless and torn up. Soldiers exist in a darkling world lit by tracers and explosions. It is as the real world had been banished and only the muck of No Man's Land, stalked by death remained. As I've learned more, I've become equally interested in other areas of operations during the war (East Africa, the Caucasus, Poland, etc.). It's the West, though, that still remains the predominant image in my mental image of the war.

British infantry and tank at Cambrai - 1917

There are numerous single-volume histories of the First World War and I've read at least three of them. While adequate at providing information, I didn't like Martin Gilbert's The First World War. Liddell Hart's The Real War is concise. It's interesting because it partially serves as a platform for exploring the personal observations he made of static warfare and helped inspire his interwar theories of mobile warfare. Finally, and my favorite, is John Keegan's The First World War. He was a good writer, and he does a good job exploring the war outside of the usual Western Front that tends to dominate public consciousness of the war. You will still need to read campaign-specific works for the Italian or East African fronts, but Keegan is better on them than Liddell Hart. Oh, and SLA Marshall's isn't too bad, but it's really worth having for the pictures and isometric battle maps.

I'm only just starting to get into campaign specifics of the war. The first I remember reading was, that master of all things British army, Byron Farwell's splendid The Great War in Africa, 1914–1918. A short book, it covers all various efforts to conquer the German colonies in Africa - Kamerun, Namibia, and Tanganyika. The first were relatively short (ten months and nineteen months), but that in Tanganyika lasted two weeks longer than the entire First World War. The German commander, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, with a force of never more than 14,000 men, tied down hundreds of thousands of Allied troops that could have all been used elsewhere. Farwell, surprisingly, an American, wrote numerous fast paces histories of the Britain's colonial wars, but this is still my favorite of his works.

A few years ago I read and reviewed Alistair Horne's classic study of Verdun from a Francocentric perspective: The Price of Glory. If you haven't read my piece, go HERE. It's a powerful book and I recommend it.

Finally, I'm still working through Holger Herwig's The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle that Changed the World. Another good book, it covers a lot of ground, from the German and French preparations for war, to the actual campaign, following those two armies as well as the British and, to a lesser degree, the Belgian. I'm reading it as I'm also reading Geoffrey Wawro's The Franco-Prussian War about the 1870 conquest invasion of France. It's extremely interesting setting the two campaigns side by side, seeing the difference in tactics and strategies, and especially how French experience in 1870 dramatically affected their 1914 plans.

None of the histories I've read compare in ramming home the brute reality of attrition combat on the Western Front as Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel. It's a gut-punch of a read. He was wounded fourteen times, including five times by bullets. He fought in the Somme Campaign, the battles of Arras, Passchendaele, and Cambrai. He led a company in the 1918 Spring Offensive and was shot through the chest. And for all the gore and death surrounding him, he never seemed to fail to find a certain level of deep excitement from combat and surviving one near-death experience after another. 

As the storm raged around us, I walked up and down my sector. The men had fixed bayonets. They stood stony and motionless, rifle in hand, on the front edge of the dip, gazing into the field. Now and then, by the light of a flare, I saw steel helmet by steel helmet, blade by glinting blade, and I was overcome by a feeling of invulnerability. We might be crushed, but surely we could not be conquered.

 Ernst Jünger

Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front is always presented as the great anti-war novel of the Great War. It's been ages since I've read it, by my memories of it are that it is a solid read and a powerful condemnation of war. I always assumed it was semi-autobiographical and based on his wartime experiences. 

When reading about comparisons between the two books, I was surprised to learn Remarque, unlike Jünger, only spent a few weeks in combat. That fact doesn't take away from the strength of AQotWF as a work. The almost completely opposite reaction to the war on the part of someone who lived through far more of it, on the other hand, for me at least, makes Jünger's memoir a far more interesting one. Remarque's novel is the reaction of a civilian to the war, while Jünger's book is a soldier's.

I've also read Manfred von Richtofen's (the Red Baron) heavily censored autobiography, Der rote Kampffleiger (The Red Fighter Pilot). My memory of it reflects the Wikipedia entry:

The 1933 edition of Der Rote Kampfflieger appears to paint a much more accurate portrait of von Richthofen than the 1917 edition. It contains passages most unlikely to have been inserted by an official editor: "I am in wretched spirits after every aerial combat. I believe that [the war] is not as the people at home imagine it, with a hurrah and a roar; it is very serious, very grim."

I'm curious what it would be like rereading it today, but I doubt I will. As you'll see below, there's just so much more that I haven't read yet. 

There are several other novels and memoirs of the Great War I want to read. Henri Barbusse, a French novelist, spent a year in combat units before being invalided out to a behind-the-lines clerical post. Praised in its day, later attacked as being filled with inventions, his 1916 novel, Le Feu (Under Fire), looks interesting if only because it provides the often neglected perspective of the French poilius (a slang term for infantrymen that translates to "hairy ones"). Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That and Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer describe the war from a pair of British officer's perspectives. I don't know if there're books by Italian or Russian soldiers, but Jaroslav Hasek's comic novel, The Good Soldier Svejk tells the story of a buffoonish Czech soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army. That's a big shelf full of books to read, and maybe I'll get to some of them this year.

Films of the First World War are fairly few, but many of them are really good.  The most notable are among some of the best films ever made. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and La Grande Illusion (1937). The first is a moving adaptation of Remarque's novel. It stars Lew Ayres and is more brutal and honest than a lot of later war films. The second is about a group of French officers taken prisoner by the Germans and their relationship with the German commander. It's been a bit since I've seen either one so I feel a rewatch coming on.

The best WWI film I'm familiar with is Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957). While based on Humphrey Cobb's novel, its story of the execution of French soldiers for supposed cowardice ultimately comes from a real incident. I'm generally not a fan of Kubrick, but with Kirk Douglas on hand and a script initially by Jim Thompson, this is a movie that will slam you against a wall, wring you out, and leave you gasping for breath. Less the indictment of war it's usually presented as, it's a damning portrayal of bureaucracy and our lust for prestige and reward.

Finally, as I mentioned at the very beginning, I saw Peter Jackson's film, They Shall Not Grow Old. If you aren't aware, he took century old film from the British Imperial War Museum and made a movie out of it. He slowed it down, cleaned it up, colorized it, added sound and voices to it (the latter with the help of forensic lip readers), and over the top added interviews with British veterans. Footage and stories aren't presented in exact chronological order. Jackson didn't set out to tell a specific story, but instead recreate the general experiences of a British soldier from the declaration of war, through enlistment and training, combat, and the return to the UK.

I cannot urge anyone enough to go see this film. Jackson set out to bring men long dead to life and succeeded far more powerfully than I expected him to be able to. The only thing missing is the stink of death. Restoring voices to these men is one of the greatest gifts that can be given to the dead and I'll be forever grateful to Jackson for doing it in this masterpiece.

Every crime Jackson committed against JRR Tolkien (as well as each he seemed to have committed against Philip Reeve) has been made up for with this movie. If you have the slightest interest, hell, if even if you have none, avail yourself of any chance to see They Shall Not Grow Old. It will move you and leave you exhausted. I'm not sure when it will be available on Blu-ray, but it will be back in the theaters on next week on the 21st.

So, if there's a theme here, it's that there's been a tremendous amount written and filmed about the 1914-1918 war. I've read a lot of it but not nearly enough to satisfy my desire to understand the war as much as one who didn't fight in it and one who is a century removed from it can. In the broken state of Russia, in the ever-present fear of Germany, in the ethnic enmity that lays over most of the Balkans, and in so many other places, the shadow of the First World War remains. It's greatest legacy should be that even when society has reached a supposed apex of culture and civilization that it can all be squandered in a orgy of violence the likes of which had never been seen before.

Not a List of My Top Five Favorite Westerns

Jim Cornelius posted today that Mel Gibson is planning to remake Sam Peckinpah's epochal The Wild Bunch. While I don't doubt Gibson's affinity for bloody action, I have, let's say, serious doubts about this undertaking. You don't remake perfect movies, only crappy ones that have some cool idea buried inside. Still, I'll wait and see what happens.

It got me to thinking about my plan to review Westerns here a few years back, which in turn got me to thinking about which of them are my favorites. Since I've gone back to writing about the Long 19th Century, I thought I might ramble on about Westerns as well. The trick I'm learning, is to not let myself become focused on any one thing, but instead, like the title implies, write about stuff I like, whatever it is.

Making a list of my ten favorite Westerns would be a foolish effort. It's too wide a genre and there are too many I prefer at different times for different reasons to proclaim "these ten are my favorites" or "these are the best." Instead, I'll pick a few I think standout for assorted reasons and every fan should see.

The Wild Bunch (1969) - dir. S.Peckinpah, writ. W.Green and S. Peckinpah

Since this is the movie that reignited my interest, I'll start with Peckinpah's bloody, bloody masterpiece. Starring William Holden, Robert Ryan, Warren Oates, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson, among many other actual tough guys, this movie is awash in testosterone. There are damn few contemporary actors who can hold a candle to the manliness of anybody in the cast The Wild Bunch. Several of the cast had been in the military (most notably Borgnine who served nearly ten years in the navy), while others had been stuntmen and longtime actors in Westerns. Every line etched in their faces looks bought and paid for. There's a real toughness to the cast that enhances some of the best acting of all of these men's careers. When Holden utters the line "If they move...kill 'em." you believe him.

  When Peckinpah was on target he made some of the greatest Westerns of all time. He was completely on target here, and while I love the melancholy Ride the High Country more, this is a big, tough movie that makes no concessions to the viewer whatsoever. Save for the martyred Angel, there are no good men in The Wild Bunch, only men at different points on a scale of bad.

   The movie opens with robbery gone wrong and innocents' bodies in the streets. It ends in one of the most famous bloodbaths in movie history. In between there's mayhem and betrayal, all carried out by very bad men, including the "heroes." The bandits, led by Pike Bishop (Holden), are a band of aging outlaws who are seeing their age is coming to an end. In order to survive civilization's enclosure of the West, they plan one last score.

   What makes its plot more than just another series of robberies is the almost overwhelming feeling that an age of giants - even if monstrous ones - is passing. The badmen of the old West, who at least stood on their own feet and fought for themselves and their compadres, are being replaced by the diabolical agents of the new age, portrayed here by Albert Dekker as the railroad agent, Pat Harrigan.

   The movie was infamous for its violence when it premiered, and even by today's scant standards it's still a brutal piece of work. Innocence and idealism are no defenses against the violence that permeates the movie's world. There are few real differences in how they act between Pike Bishop's bandits and General Mapache's Federales, until the end. That's when the Wild Bunch decide there is something worth fighting and dying for.

The Tall T (1957) - dir. B.Boetticher, writ. B.Kennedy

I was never a particular fan of Randolph Scott. I had seen him in Ride the High Country, but only once. Then I saw this movie. It is one of the sparsest, most minimalist Westerns ever made. The main body of the film only has six characters and the action takes place at a lonely way station out in the middle of nowhere. There's none of the almost romantic attention to the landscape like in John Ford's films and the plot involves no great acts of revenge or getting the gold. This is the Western as anti-epic.

The Tall T is based on the Elmore Leonard story, "The Captives." The unfortunate passengers of a stagecoach are taken prisoner by a trio of bandits. To keep from being killed, one of the passengers convinces his captors that his new bride is worth a huge ransom that her father will gladly pay. There's a murdered father and son, marital betrayal, 

At the center of it is the back and forth between ranch hand Pat Brennan played by Randolph Scott and bandit Frank Usher played by Richard Boone.

Without any explicitness, it's one of the most vicious Westerns. Richard Boone, probably best remembered as Paladin on Have Gun Will Travel, played several brutal villains in his career. Frank Usher is clever and funny and completely amoral. Whereas his two partners seem borderline psychotic, Usher is completely matter of fact - whatever happens, he's going to kill everyone - and utterly chilling.

Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher made seven Westerns together. If one were to make a list of, say, the top 50 Westerns, six of them would belong on there (Seven Men from Now, The Tall T, Decision at Sundown, Buchanan Rides Alone, Ride Lonesome, and Comanche Station). They are all psychologically rich and at the center of each one is the weathered and often battered figure of Randolph Scott. If they've escaped your attention, go right now and find them, starting with The Tall T.

The Searchers (1956) - dir. J. Ford, writ. F. Nugent

For many people, John Ford is the quintessential Western director. With John Wayne (and a regular company of actors and crew) to bring his vision of the frontier to life, Ford created some of the most indelible images in American cinema, let alone in Westerns.

When you see the perfectly framed shots in The Searchers, you can believe Orson Welles' claim that he watched another Ford movie, Stagecoach, forty times before making Citizen Kane. Ford might have had problems with sentimentality and romanticism, but even his weakest movies look amazing.

Visually, The Searchers is the opposite of The Tall T.  Where Boetticher's film is spare, Ford's awash in vast horizons and rugged skylines. Shot in Ford's beloved Monument Valley, even the desert scenes feel lush and alive. Even if the story and acting had nothing to offer, it remains one of the most beautiful movies ever made.

John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a Confederate veteran who has been away from home in Texas for eight years. After the Civil War he ended up in Mexico fighting against the French. Now he's returned just in time to help with Comanche raiders.

Wayne made plenty of crappy movies and rarely pushed himself as an actor. He seems to have been quite content, once he'd achieved icon status, to just stay within its confines and play every role the same way, time and time again. The Searchers, along with the earlier Red River and this final movie, The Shootist, are the best examples of what he could do when took chances with his image. In The Searchers, other than his complete devotion to his cause, there's little good about Wayne's character, and even that's debatable. You may want Ethan by your side in fight, but even he's smart enough to know no one wants to live with him.

While riding the countryside with the local Texas Ranger unit, Ethan's brother Aaron's farm is raided. Aaron, his wife, and son are all killed and his daughters, Debbie and Lucy, kidnapped. The rest of the movie is about Ethan's quest to recover his nieces, or at least that's what he keeps telling everyone.

At the core of Ethan, and the movie, there burns the furious white-hot flame of racism. It becomes clear Ethan's plan isn't to recover his niece, but kill her alongside the Comanches he's hunting. Another character states that "Ethan will put a bullet in her brain. I tell you Martha would want him to." The Comanches are just as driven in their hatred of the whites, with one promising to kill many whites for each of his two murdered sons. John Ford has been accused of sentimentalizing the West and its settlement by whites, but there's none of that here.

There's some silliness involving Jeffrey Hunter's and Vera Miles' courtship that almost disrupts the dark tone, but not quite. Should you meet anyone who disparages Ford's Westerns as mawkish, point them to this movie. Even today The Searchers remains a raw wound of a movie.

Lonesome Dove (1989) - dir. S.Wincer, writ. W.Wittliff                                                                                                                                                        I thank my dad for getting me to watch this miniseries. Something about the commercials made it look cheap in my eyes. Man, oh, man, was I wrong. It is epic stuff from the final days of major network miniseries. To this day, Robert Duvall claims the role of Gus McCrae as his favorite role.                                                                          Lonesome Dove is primarily the story of two retired Texas Rangers, Gus McCrae (Duvall) and Woodrow F. Call  (Tommy Lee Jones), at the urging of an old comrade, Jake Spoon (Robert Urich), making a cattle drive to Montana. Along the way bad things happen and their path intertwines with those of drygulchers, a sheriff from Arkansas, his deputy, and a horrifying bandit, Blue Duck. 

Novelist Larry McMurtry first envisioned Lonesome Dove as a movie that would star John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda. John Ford convinced Wayne not to do it so it never happened. So McMurtry turned it into a big, fat book that won the Pulitzer in 1986.

Like so many later era Westerns, Lonesome Dove is about the end of the frontier and the numbered days of the hard men who fostered its settlement in the face of (understandably) hostile Indians, bandits, and a rough, unforgiving environment. 

Once Texas Rangers, now Call and McCrae are ranchers. Well, ranchers who fill out their herd by rustling across the border in Mexico. Later books - Deadman's Walk and Comanche Moon - fill in the blanks of their earlier days -but here they are old men who once walked like giants. Now in their twilit days they are hungry for one more chance to do that again. 

I imagine McMurtry, like Peckinpah with the aged Scott and McCrea in Ride the High Country, wanted iconic Western actors like Wayne, Stewart, and Fonda to underline the theme of an age passing and its heroes with it. I think it would have been a fascinating film, but I'm glad it wasn't made and the novel was written. 

Instead of a trio of Hollywood icons, the miniseries gave two other great actors the chance for roles of a lifetime. Both Duvall and Jones were perfectly cast. 

Duvall has rarely been more buoyant or charming than as Gus McCrae, a man more concerned about where he might find the next available woman than when or if they'll ever make it to Montana. For him, it's just one more lark before the inevitable end.

While decades younger than his character, Jones carries himself with a harsh, self-denying dignity that feels earned with every year of a life lived hard. My favorite scene in the series, one where Jones beats an army scout, is almost frightening in its sudden intensity but his portrayal previously has let you know it's completely in character. 

The rest of the cast are no slouches either. Of particular note are Chris Cooper, Robert Urich, Glen Headley, and Frederic Forrest. There's also Danny Glover, Barry Corbin, Rick Schroder, and Diane Lane, among many, many others. I'm not sure you could make a Hollywood movie with this sort of cast anymore. 

At nearly six and a half hours, Lonesome Dove is the longest of the movies here. It's worth every minute.

A Fistful of Dollars (1964) - dir. S.Leone, writ. A.Bozoni & D.Tessari                                                                                  There might be better made Spaghetti Westerns. It wasn't the first Italian Western. It's not Sergio Leone's best movie either. But, with Leone, Morricone, and Eastwood teaming up for the first time, it's one of the most influential and iconic Westerns ever made (even though it's ripped off from another movie, itself essentially stolen from Hammett's Red Harvest).

According to Wikipedia, the idea was to do a Western version of Akira Kurosawa's 1961 samurai movie, Yojimbo. In that film, a ronin comes to a small town fallen under the control of two warring gangs in order to destroy them both. If you haven't seen it, do so at once.

Leone followed the same basic outline, but Eastwood's character, the Man With No Name, is less the hero than Toshiro Mifune's warrior. Eastwood wanders into the San Miguel and learning of the warring gangs, decides to play them off against each other to make money.

Not the most expressive actor, Eastwood is excellent as the cheroot-smoking, poncho-wearing gringo wandering the direst parts of Mexico. This is the movie that elevated Eastwood from tv star and overseas movie actor to global icon. As much, if not more than John Wayne, the Man With No Name is the universal image of the Western gunslinger.

Barely speaking above a mumble, Eastwood imbues every one of his lines with a grim, sardonic humor. He's clever and ruthless. He stalks across the screen like some lithe beast, tricking first one side then the other before pouncing and leaving bodies scattered at his feet.

All four other movies I've discussed portray the West through a realistic lens. Leone wants nothing to do with that. For him the Western exists completely in the land of myth and legend. Colors, sounds, even the acting - mostly by Italian actors dubbed poorly into English - feels like it's seeped in from some dream world. Even the most elaborate and perfect shots in The Searchers are more "real" than any in A Fistful of Dollars. I remember (perhaps wrongly) Quentin Tarantino saying this was one of the first movies he saw where it was clear everything in it was the result of careful, deliberate choices made by Leone. 

Did I mention the music? I should have, because, next to those of The Big Country or The Magnificent Seven, this movie's is one of the most instantly recognizable Western scores. It's eerie, ridiculously over-the-top, and exactly right for the movie. If you don't think you know it, go to YouTube and check it out. I'll be shocked if you really don't know it.

I fell in love with this movie in high school when I watched it one Saturday night on Channel 5 with my dad. I think I saw it  once or twice previously, but it was that night that I really paid attention to it. I was enthralled by all the things I've mentioned. The colors, the script, the music, it came at me from somewhere far to the other side of John Ford's or Howard Hawks' movies. Raised on a steady, and nourishing, diet of John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart Westerns, this movie was a wild, mind-blowing experience. Rewatching it the other night for the umpteen millionth time, all that came back to me, and for an hour and a half everything felt wild and great again.

These are not my five favorite Westerns, but they are some of my favorites. The genre is big and wide. In addition to the sorts described above, there are Gothics and epics, mysteries and noirs, comedies and even horror flicks. 

In my long definition of what a Western is I point out the movies are essentially period pieces set on the frontier. That's a lot of room for a lot of different sorts of stories and themes and I couldn't make a list of which I like best if my very life depended on it, nor would I want to. These five movies, though, if you watch them you'll definitely understand what I'm looking for in the genre, and more importantly, you'll see five very different, and five incredibly successful works of art in probably the most American genre. Really, though, what you'll see are just five awesome freakin' movies.

Westerns - It's All About the Cowboys

Spurred on by Raphael Ordoñez's film noir reviews, I thought I might try my hand with some similar, but with Western movies. Unlike noir, which is bound together by an attitude and style, the only things a Western needs to qualify as such is to be set during a time of open frontiers (or while in the process of closing). Most Western films take place after the US Civil War, before the Great War, and west of the Mississippi River (and still with plenty of room for variants by locale and even time period). After that, all bets are off.

By which I mean, Westerns aren't bound by anything else. It really just comes down to cowboys (and Indians, lots of times). Roy Roger's singing cowboy flicks count just as much as Monte Hellman's low-budget revisionist ones. That's a little glib, but seriously, for me, boiled down to basics, Westerns are all about the cowboys.

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From the earliest days of film making to today, there have been Westerns. Wikipedia says the first one is Edwin Porter's 12-minute long The Great Train Robbery. While not the industry behemoth they were in the forties and fifties, after a dearth of them in the eighties, they've made a substantial comeback.

There was a spate of Louis L'Amour tv-movies featuring Tom Selleck among others, and I can't speak for them, never having seen any, but that was pretty much it for that decade. Okay, so there was Silverado too, but I never liked that one, so I try my best to forget it.

Brad Pitt as the late Jesse James

Over the past few years there've been a fair number of good or at lest significant Westerns. While often described as revisionist, Andrew Domink's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Forward is a very good, almost reverent, invocation of many classic Westerns.  Quentin Tarantino's last two movies, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, were both Westerns, more revisionist than classic by all accounts, but still seemingly respectful (I haven't seen either one yet, but folks seem to like them). Those other genre-dabblers, the Cohen Brothers, were bold enough to revisit the Charles Portis novel, True Grit. S. Craig Zahler's 2015 Bone Tomahawk, one of the most unsettling horror movies I've ever watched, proves how far a movie can range from one of John Ford's epics and still without any doubt be called a Western. For genre fans, it's been a pretty grand time.

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So, it's not just cowboys that make a Western a Western. There are a few other things to note that cut across much of the genre.  

The frontier setting, allows these films to strip away the complications of civilization, and let a man face off against high odds, be it other men or the elements. Even many of the lighter ones are about some lone hero facing off against a dastardly gang of rustlers or a criminally minded rancher looking to take over the whole county. The same itch for bravery and adventure scratched by swords & sorcery is satisfied by Westerns.

Many stories examine that point when civilization reaches the frontier. Sometimes it's an elegiac look at a lost time of freedom, others, a time when violence is supplanted by law and justice.

from Fort Apache (1948)

More than any other genre, Westerns are movies of the natural world. Sometimes it's just there, making even mundane scenes look beautiful. Whatever else you remember about John Ford's movies, you will never forget the shots of Monument Valley. Other times  it's integral to the film's atmosphere. Whether it's the Grand Tetons rising up in nearly every outdoor shot in Shane undescoring the precariousness of the farmers situation, or the barren Andalusian countryside in the Man With No Name trilogy depicting a landscape that seems to have been poisoned by corruption and cynicism.

from Shane (1953)

But the cowboy thing is important. To the casual watcher, it's the one consistent thing, linking John Wayne to Gene Autry to Clint Eastwood. There's the whole panoply of the cowboy: six-guns, Stetsons, horses, jingling stirrups, all those things.  The cowboy (or gunslinger), is one of the most iconic looks in the world. Some folks use it as an description of American over aggressiveness in foreign affairs, but most people see the cowboy as a model of independence and boldness.

I don't know when I saw my first Western. I was definitely very young and probably saw it with my dad, a bigger fan than even I am. All I know, is from an early age, my friends and I always had Colt pistol and holster sets. One year, I even got a rawhide vest, chaps, and cowboy hat for Christmas. I just thought the look was cool and I still do.

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I love Westerns, whether traditional John Ford ones or bonkers Sergio Corbucci ones. I particularly love that all sorts of stories can qualify as a Western. It's the sort of genre that encompasses all sorts of genres. They can be epic like The Big Country (1958), romantic like Shane, or even horror like Bone Tomahawk. They're big enough for heroes, rogues, and villains to star as the protagonists - just look at The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966). Without having to be twisted out of shape, they can be transported to other frontiers and lawless zones - Quigley Down Under (1990) and Nick Cave's grimy The Proposition (2005) move the genre to Australia effortlessly.

Jack freakin' Elam
and James Garner in
Support Your Local Gunfighter

I've tried to think of my ten favorite Westerns and it turned out to be a fool's errand. I've seen and loved too many to have only ten.  Besides, it varies from day to day. I might be Peckinpah mood one month and a Leone or Ford another. Maybe I'm itching for more comic movies like Burt Kennedy's James Garner-starring Support Your Local Sheriff (1969) and Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971).

Jones and Duvall in
Lonesome Dove

I've been watching a lot of Westerns, so I figured I might as well write 'em up as well. It gives me an excuse to finally put on a couple of low budget Spaghetti Westerns I've picked up over the years, but never watched, and dig out Lonesome Dove (1989) (the greatest Western ever made).

Saddle up and ride along with me. I suspect a fair number of regulars hereabout have watched more than a few of the films I'll write about. Heck, I'm hoping there're some I've missed you can hip me to along the way.

I'll start out this coming week with Howard Hawks' Red River (1948), starring John Wayne in old man makeup and Montgomery Clift in one of his earliest roles. It's a searing journey into the heart of father-(adopted) son hatred marred by a sappy ending and blessed with this "What in the Wide, Wide, World of Sports?" moments, a weirdly homoerotic scene about guns.

Movies from the Imperial Age

In keeping with what I'm reading, I decided to track down a couple of appropriate films. Three I've seen, the other only glimpsed part of years ago.

The first is Khartoum (1966). It stars Charlton Heston as Charles "Chinese" Gordon and Lawrence Olivier as Muhammad Ahmed, the Mahdi. The problem I see for many modern viewers will be the pretty terrible blackface worn by Olivier to portray a dark-skinned Sudanese. Personally, I'm less worried about that than I am by Olivier's awful hamminess. I haven't seen it in years, and I'm curious how it holds up.

The second is the blackly comic, Royal Flash (1975), the great Richard Lester's film about George MacDonald Fraser's rogue, Harry Flashman. It stars Malcolm McDowell and Oliver Reed, and it really doesn't get much better than that in the seventies for my money. Scripted by Fraser, it's the only one of the Flashman novels to ever be filmed. I haven't read anyof the books (yet). I remember liking this movie a lot.

Next, returning to seriousness, I got Zulu Dawn (1979), a prequel to Zulu (1964). It depicts the victory by Zulu forces under King Cetshwayo at Isandlwana earlier in the same day as the Battle of Rorke's Drift. Again, I remember liking it, but I have no idea how it stands up today.


Finally, a strange film I saw bits and piece of on cable several years ago: The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). It's filled with all sorts of off-kilter moments and Punch-inspired animation. It's supposed to be both satirical and decently accurate, its script be heavily based on The Reason Why by Cecil Woodham-Smith, a study of the Light Brigade's fatal charge. As I'm about to dive into Trevor Royle's history of the war, Crimea: The Great Crimean War, I'll probably watch this first.