ode to oaters
A friend of approximately my age—actually half a year older—recently mentioned a while ago that despite having passed her formative years in an era in which “westerns” were still a popular form, she had never warmed to the genre, and had not sat through one since before she attained her full growth. I compiled the following list of possibilities for her:
The Baron of Arizona (1950): Vincent Price portrays the nineteenth century fraudster James Reavis, who painstakingly forges a series of documents with the aim of giving himself legal title to the Arizona Territory. There are few of the elements of the traditional western, apart from the prospect late in the film of an old-fashioned necktie party, but that’s what gives the production a certain novelty.
3:10 to Yuma (1957 and 2007:) I like both versions of the tale, originally a short story by Elmore Leonard, in which a rancher in need of cash agrees to transport a captured outlaw to a prison-bound train. The B&W 1957 production, gorgeously photographed in Arizona winter light, is tighter, more of a psychological drama, and features Glenn Ford, cast very effectively against type, as a ruthless but affable bad guy. The remake “opens up” the story with some extraneous detail, but Russell Crowe is a lot of fun to watch. Each version features a climactic shootout with its own distinctive implausibilities.
One-Eyed Jacks (1961): Notwithstanding its many imperfections, I feel safe in describing Marlon Brando’s sole directorial effort as incontestably the finest western ever set in Big Sur. When “Kid” Brando and his bandit partner Karl “Dad” Malden have to flee the Sonora rurales after a bank robbery, they end up separated, with Marlon in a Mexican prison and Malden, ultimately, as a comfortable pillar of the community in Monterey CA. Once out of prison, the Kid tracks down Dad with the intent of reminiscing about old times and, if possible, shooting the older man full of holes. The best-laid plans, et cetera. The principal antagonists turn in wonderful performances, the supporting cast of John Ford regulars, most notably Slim Pickens as a bullying deputy and Ben Johnson as an ambitious outlaw get the job ably done, and the luminous Pina Pellicer as the love interest makes my heart go pitter-patter.
El Topo (1970): This is a western: Stagecoach. El Topo is a western on drugs. Consider: over 7500 liters of stage blood, by my estimate, were used in the film. Scores of animals were mistreated. In the service of verisimilitude, and departing from the script, the director/star raped the leading lady on camera. I took Veronica to see this at the local repertory cinema in 1973, and she thought it was hilarious, but I could not in conscience recommend it except as a cultural/historical curiosity to any but the most jaded palate. That said, it is interesting as a curiosity.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971): Another unusual setting for the genre, more a Pacific Northwestern, tells the story of handsome but not overly bright entrepreneur McCabe and implausibly gorgeous procuress Mrs. Miller as they partner up to run a brothel in a mining town, which undertaking attracts the attention of “hostile takeover” artists. Very hostile. Nicely atmospheric, and the soundtrack gave Leonard Cohen’s career a leg up.
Bad Company (1972): A very young Jeff Bridges and Barry Brown (a gifted actor who in the event never got much older than “very young”) play Civil War-era lads of conscription age who conclude that lighting out for the West and making their living as junior desperadoes will be safer than donning Union blue. Could be, but it looks like a near-run thing. The life of an outlaw here depicted is anything but glamorous.
The Missouri Breaks (1976): Now this is a very strange alignment of the stars indeed: Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, two idiosyncratic and, ah, forceful screen presences, share top billing in Arthur Penn’s rustlers versus ranchers epic, but it’s as though each one worked under a different director. Nicholson’s turn as a horse thief is, for Nicholson, highly disciplined and restrained, while his co-star's is anything but. In his role as the “regulator” hired to hunt down Jack’s gang, Brando chews scenery the length and breadth of Montana in a performance that one critic described as “a kind of cowboy Charles Manson.” Kathleen Lloyd, the alumna of many a television appearance, makes her maiden feature film appearance here. It was not a distinguished debut, and within a couple of years she went back to the minors.
Silverado (1985): This is something of a "paint by numbers" western as writer-director Lawrence Kasdan plays rope-a-trope. One senses Kasdan dutifully ticking off the conventions of the genre one by one. Barroom brawl, check. Free-range ranchers vs. farmers, check. Outlaw hideout in canyon, check. Wise and worldly female saloonkeeper, check. Oily gambler, goodhearted prostitute, check. Taciturn hero, check. Gunfights, check, check, check, check, check. Injuns, inexplicably MIA. There’s something to be said for this approach, self-conscious and contrived as it is. Fans of the genre expect certain elements, and if your favorite trope has not put in an appearance at any point in the flick, another quarter hour will likely summon it forth. Among the cast members, craggy Scott Glenn acquits himself well as the aforementioned taciturn hero, as does Kevin Kline as the hero's diffident sidekick. Kevin Costner’s annoying performance is partly offset by the infectiousness of the fun he’s obviously having, which elicits a measure of our indulgence. Danny Glover hits all his marks as the Magical Negro (warning: TV Tropes link); Roseanna Arquette is briefly on camera as the Love Interest in a role so severely truncated that it probably ought to have been omitted altogether; John Cleese amuses in a small part as a local lawman. The soundtrack by Bruce Broughton is unobjectionable as music, but is deployed in an almost intolerably heavy-handed fashion, and serves throughout as an auditory irritant.
Lonesome Dove (1989): Boy-howdy, though, the conventions of the western have never been more masterfully arrayed than in this six-hour miniseries about a Texas-to-Montana cattle drive that gallops along on the shoulders of Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, who, together with a vast supporting cast, deliver something close to the platonic ideal of the genre (shows up Kasdan as a dilettante, sez I).
Lone Star (1996): OK, It’s a real stretch extending the boundaries of the form to include this flick, set along the Texas-Mexico border in the fifties and in the nineties, but it does feature three badge-bearing, gun-toting lawmen, portrayed very differently by Chris Cooper (hero), Kris Kristofferson (villain) and Matthew McConaughey (which? —that’s partly the point). McConaughey has, like, three minutes of screen time, but his character looms large over the narrative. Fine ensemble work under John Sayles’ direction, and I'm struck by the theme of reconciliation—between cultures, between generational outlooks, between parents and children, between social and even military ranks, between past and present—that runs through this movie like a seam of gold. Also, unlike Kasdan, Sayles trusts the intelligence of his audience, and never assumes that a goosed-up soundtrack is required to cue it in that a moment of high drama, poignancy or suspense is intended.
Deadwood (2004-06): This jaw-droppingly impressive series, cut loose by HBO one season short of a projected four-season story arc, is set in Deadwood, South Dakota (at that time simply the “Dakota Territory”) in 1876. The principal characters are most of them historical figures: James “Wild Bill” Hickok, Jane “Calamity Jane” Cannary, Sheriff Seth Bullock, local saloonkeeper Al Swearengen and many, many more. The language is rough and deliberately anachronistic—the cursing of the era would have been more blasphemous than sexual/scatological, and would have fallen far short of conveying the intended effect to a contemporary audience—and some obsessive-compulsive soul has taken the trouble to estimate that the word “fuck” and its variants are uttered an average of 1.56 times per minute of footage over the life of the series, which I can well believe. The performances are uniformly first-rate, but critics have justly singled out the magnificent Ian McShane as the aptly-christened Swearengen, Deadwood’s utterly ruthless crime boss, for especial praise. There is something positively Shakespearean, many have noted, in the way the coarsest obscenities come rolling off his RADA-trained tongue. We initially see his character as a despicable blackguard; well before the series is half through, Swearengen also compels our sympathy as a put-upon businessman struggling with ruthless competitors and regulatory interference. As gritty a western as you’re likely ever to encounter.
Appaloosa (2008): Ed Harris cowrote, directed and starred in this engaging story of a pair of itinerant lawmen-for-hire, Virgil Cole (Harris) and sidekick Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), who are engaged by the city fathers of Appaloosa NM to bring to heel renegade rancher Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons, speaking with one of the oddest “American” accents you’ll ever hear), who has taken to killing such local authorities as cross him. As the senior partner in the team, Cole is a man whose language displays a tendency for his reach to exceed his grasp, but his deputy can generally provide the word he’s left groping for. When pretty widow Allison French, portrayed not altogether satisfactorily by Renée Zellweger, arrives in town she captures Cole’s heart, but proves in the event to have a highly unsentimental eye for the main chance.
True Grit (2010): The brothers Coen are more faithful by far to Charles Portis’ novel in this go-around than were the makers of the 1969 version, and Bridges’ Rooster Cogburn is endearingly uncouth: next to him, John Wayne’s character looks as though his next line will be “I say, tennis anyone?” Young Hailee Steinfeld’s first turn on the big screen, as character and narrator, is far more impressive than Kathleen Lloyd’s, but from the looks of her 2015 résumé, it has not been followed up with any memorable roles.
Meek’s Cutoff (2010): Partisans and detractors are way apart on this one. All acknowledge that it’s deliberately slow-paced; some aver that paint in the act of drying makes for a more gripping spectacle. In 1845 a group of western-bound emigrants hire local escort Stephen Meek, who may or may not know the terrain as thoroughly as he claims, to guide them over the arid Oregon High Desert. The route he selects does not prove a happy one for the party. The film is bleak and austere (one critic invites us to imagine it as a “a collaboration between John Ford and Wallace Stevens”), and probably a truer evocation of the place and period than many another oater.
Rango (2011): Of this captivating CGI cartoon the Philadelphia Inquirer film critic said: “You know those animated films that have bits that the parents will enjoy? Rango is mostly those bits.” The eponymous hero is a pet chameleon whom mischance deposits on a parched southwestern interstate. From there, not without misadventure, the character (voiced by Johnny Depp) makes his way to the rough-and-tumble town of Dirt, populated exclusively by anthropomorphic small animals. Dirt is in the grip of a prolonged drought, and the town’s water reserves are critically low when Rango more-or-less simultaneously assumes both his name and the job of town sheriff. You will lose track of the number of cinema nods and references. Apart from one unduly extended action sequence that could have been trimmed by two or three minutes, the flick is a delight from beginning to end. Special voice-acting kudos to Ned Beatty as the mayor (channeling a legendary John Huston performance), Timothy Olyphant as the Spirit of the West (channeling Cl*nt **stw**d) and the protean Bill Nighy as Rattlesnake Jake.
****
Other nominations?
cordially,
The Baron of Arizona (1950): Vincent Price portrays the nineteenth century fraudster James Reavis, who painstakingly forges a series of documents with the aim of giving himself legal title to the Arizona Territory. There are few of the elements of the traditional western, apart from the prospect late in the film of an old-fashioned necktie party, but that’s what gives the production a certain novelty.
3:10 to Yuma (1957 and 2007:) I like both versions of the tale, originally a short story by Elmore Leonard, in which a rancher in need of cash agrees to transport a captured outlaw to a prison-bound train. The B&W 1957 production, gorgeously photographed in Arizona winter light, is tighter, more of a psychological drama, and features Glenn Ford, cast very effectively against type, as a ruthless but affable bad guy. The remake “opens up” the story with some extraneous detail, but Russell Crowe is a lot of fun to watch. Each version features a climactic shootout with its own distinctive implausibilities.
One-Eyed Jacks (1961): Notwithstanding its many imperfections, I feel safe in describing Marlon Brando’s sole directorial effort as incontestably the finest western ever set in Big Sur. When “Kid” Brando and his bandit partner Karl “Dad” Malden have to flee the Sonora rurales after a bank robbery, they end up separated, with Marlon in a Mexican prison and Malden, ultimately, as a comfortable pillar of the community in Monterey CA. Once out of prison, the Kid tracks down Dad with the intent of reminiscing about old times and, if possible, shooting the older man full of holes. The best-laid plans, et cetera. The principal antagonists turn in wonderful performances, the supporting cast of John Ford regulars, most notably Slim Pickens as a bullying deputy and Ben Johnson as an ambitious outlaw get the job ably done, and the luminous Pina Pellicer as the love interest makes my heart go pitter-patter.
El Topo (1970): This is a western: Stagecoach. El Topo is a western on drugs. Consider: over 7500 liters of stage blood, by my estimate, were used in the film. Scores of animals were mistreated. In the service of verisimilitude, and departing from the script, the director/star raped the leading lady on camera. I took Veronica to see this at the local repertory cinema in 1973, and she thought it was hilarious, but I could not in conscience recommend it except as a cultural/historical curiosity to any but the most jaded palate. That said, it is interesting as a curiosity.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971): Another unusual setting for the genre, more a Pacific Northwestern, tells the story of handsome but not overly bright entrepreneur McCabe and implausibly gorgeous procuress Mrs. Miller as they partner up to run a brothel in a mining town, which undertaking attracts the attention of “hostile takeover” artists. Very hostile. Nicely atmospheric, and the soundtrack gave Leonard Cohen’s career a leg up.
Bad Company (1972): A very young Jeff Bridges and Barry Brown (a gifted actor who in the event never got much older than “very young”) play Civil War-era lads of conscription age who conclude that lighting out for the West and making their living as junior desperadoes will be safer than donning Union blue. Could be, but it looks like a near-run thing. The life of an outlaw here depicted is anything but glamorous.
The Missouri Breaks (1976): Now this is a very strange alignment of the stars indeed: Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, two idiosyncratic and, ah, forceful screen presences, share top billing in Arthur Penn’s rustlers versus ranchers epic, but it’s as though each one worked under a different director. Nicholson’s turn as a horse thief is, for Nicholson, highly disciplined and restrained, while his co-star's is anything but. In his role as the “regulator” hired to hunt down Jack’s gang, Brando chews scenery the length and breadth of Montana in a performance that one critic described as “a kind of cowboy Charles Manson.” Kathleen Lloyd, the alumna of many a television appearance, makes her maiden feature film appearance here. It was not a distinguished debut, and within a couple of years she went back to the minors.
Silverado (1985): This is something of a "paint by numbers" western as writer-director Lawrence Kasdan plays rope-a-trope. One senses Kasdan dutifully ticking off the conventions of the genre one by one. Barroom brawl, check. Free-range ranchers vs. farmers, check. Outlaw hideout in canyon, check. Wise and worldly female saloonkeeper, check. Oily gambler, goodhearted prostitute, check. Taciturn hero, check. Gunfights, check, check, check, check, check. Injuns, inexplicably MIA. There’s something to be said for this approach, self-conscious and contrived as it is. Fans of the genre expect certain elements, and if your favorite trope has not put in an appearance at any point in the flick, another quarter hour will likely summon it forth. Among the cast members, craggy Scott Glenn acquits himself well as the aforementioned taciturn hero, as does Kevin Kline as the hero's diffident sidekick. Kevin Costner’s annoying performance is partly offset by the infectiousness of the fun he’s obviously having, which elicits a measure of our indulgence. Danny Glover hits all his marks as the Magical Negro (warning: TV Tropes link); Roseanna Arquette is briefly on camera as the Love Interest in a role so severely truncated that it probably ought to have been omitted altogether; John Cleese amuses in a small part as a local lawman. The soundtrack by Bruce Broughton is unobjectionable as music, but is deployed in an almost intolerably heavy-handed fashion, and serves throughout as an auditory irritant.
Lonesome Dove (1989): Boy-howdy, though, the conventions of the western have never been more masterfully arrayed than in this six-hour miniseries about a Texas-to-Montana cattle drive that gallops along on the shoulders of Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, who, together with a vast supporting cast, deliver something close to the platonic ideal of the genre (shows up Kasdan as a dilettante, sez I).
Lone Star (1996): OK, It’s a real stretch extending the boundaries of the form to include this flick, set along the Texas-Mexico border in the fifties and in the nineties, but it does feature three badge-bearing, gun-toting lawmen, portrayed very differently by Chris Cooper (hero), Kris Kristofferson (villain) and Matthew McConaughey (which? —that’s partly the point). McConaughey has, like, three minutes of screen time, but his character looms large over the narrative. Fine ensemble work under John Sayles’ direction, and I'm struck by the theme of reconciliation—between cultures, between generational outlooks, between parents and children, between social and even military ranks, between past and present—that runs through this movie like a seam of gold. Also, unlike Kasdan, Sayles trusts the intelligence of his audience, and never assumes that a goosed-up soundtrack is required to cue it in that a moment of high drama, poignancy or suspense is intended.
Deadwood (2004-06): This jaw-droppingly impressive series, cut loose by HBO one season short of a projected four-season story arc, is set in Deadwood, South Dakota (at that time simply the “Dakota Territory”) in 1876. The principal characters are most of them historical figures: James “Wild Bill” Hickok, Jane “Calamity Jane” Cannary, Sheriff Seth Bullock, local saloonkeeper Al Swearengen and many, many more. The language is rough and deliberately anachronistic—the cursing of the era would have been more blasphemous than sexual/scatological, and would have fallen far short of conveying the intended effect to a contemporary audience—and some obsessive-compulsive soul has taken the trouble to estimate that the word “fuck” and its variants are uttered an average of 1.56 times per minute of footage over the life of the series, which I can well believe. The performances are uniformly first-rate, but critics have justly singled out the magnificent Ian McShane as the aptly-christened Swearengen, Deadwood’s utterly ruthless crime boss, for especial praise. There is something positively Shakespearean, many have noted, in the way the coarsest obscenities come rolling off his RADA-trained tongue. We initially see his character as a despicable blackguard; well before the series is half through, Swearengen also compels our sympathy as a put-upon businessman struggling with ruthless competitors and regulatory interference. As gritty a western as you’re likely ever to encounter.
Appaloosa (2008): Ed Harris cowrote, directed and starred in this engaging story of a pair of itinerant lawmen-for-hire, Virgil Cole (Harris) and sidekick Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), who are engaged by the city fathers of Appaloosa NM to bring to heel renegade rancher Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons, speaking with one of the oddest “American” accents you’ll ever hear), who has taken to killing such local authorities as cross him. As the senior partner in the team, Cole is a man whose language displays a tendency for his reach to exceed his grasp, but his deputy can generally provide the word he’s left groping for. When pretty widow Allison French, portrayed not altogether satisfactorily by Renée Zellweger, arrives in town she captures Cole’s heart, but proves in the event to have a highly unsentimental eye for the main chance.
True Grit (2010): The brothers Coen are more faithful by far to Charles Portis’ novel in this go-around than were the makers of the 1969 version, and Bridges’ Rooster Cogburn is endearingly uncouth: next to him, John Wayne’s character looks as though his next line will be “I say, tennis anyone?” Young Hailee Steinfeld’s first turn on the big screen, as character and narrator, is far more impressive than Kathleen Lloyd’s, but from the looks of her 2015 résumé, it has not been followed up with any memorable roles.
Meek’s Cutoff (2010): Partisans and detractors are way apart on this one. All acknowledge that it’s deliberately slow-paced; some aver that paint in the act of drying makes for a more gripping spectacle. In 1845 a group of western-bound emigrants hire local escort Stephen Meek, who may or may not know the terrain as thoroughly as he claims, to guide them over the arid Oregon High Desert. The route he selects does not prove a happy one for the party. The film is bleak and austere (one critic invites us to imagine it as a “a collaboration between John Ford and Wallace Stevens”), and probably a truer evocation of the place and period than many another oater.
Rango (2011): Of this captivating CGI cartoon the Philadelphia Inquirer film critic said: “You know those animated films that have bits that the parents will enjoy? Rango is mostly those bits.” The eponymous hero is a pet chameleon whom mischance deposits on a parched southwestern interstate. From there, not without misadventure, the character (voiced by Johnny Depp) makes his way to the rough-and-tumble town of Dirt, populated exclusively by anthropomorphic small animals. Dirt is in the grip of a prolonged drought, and the town’s water reserves are critically low when Rango more-or-less simultaneously assumes both his name and the job of town sheriff. You will lose track of the number of cinema nods and references. Apart from one unduly extended action sequence that could have been trimmed by two or three minutes, the flick is a delight from beginning to end. Special voice-acting kudos to Ned Beatty as the mayor (channeling a legendary John Huston performance), Timothy Olyphant as the Spirit of the West (channeling Cl*nt **stw**d) and the protean Bill Nighy as Rattlesnake Jake.
****
Other nominations?
cordially,
