I’m in.
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western #14, 'hang 'em high.' [another day, another movie.]
With a title like Hang ’em High
Instead, it was far more ambiguous and intelligent than that. A wonderful film to watch after suffering through True Grit.
It was a great rumination on the relationship and differences between justice and vengeance, and most of the characters were a realistic mixture of good and bad. It was strong across the board, and there isn’t much more to say than that.
This was also the first film I’ve seen featuring the stunningly beautiful and heartbreakingly tragic Inger Stevens.
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western #12, 'shane.' [another day, another movie.]
Another classic of the genre that I’d never seen before.
I was so impressed with how good it was. Such a great story, well directed and acted. Jack Palance was great in his small role as the gunslinger for hire, and Alan Ladd was fantastic, all 5’6″ of him.
It was so great. I was stunned by the emotional nuance and complexity, as well as how charged some scenes were. I really wasn’t expecting much going into it, and early on I was a little worried. But it really was a fantastic film. Tragic and beautiful.
It’s pretty rare, even in 2010, to find a film that leaves questions open for the viewer to decide. Yet, in 1953 Shane engages questions of violence, conflict, love, the value of human life and morality with subtlety and ambiguity. All that can’t be debated in the film’s message is that we make choices, and there are consequences, and usually life isn’t fair.
The climax of the film is so quiet and unassuming.
Ah, so good. For me this was the biggest surprise so far. I expected a generic Western. Instead I found genuinely moving storytelling.
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western #11, 'unforgiven.' [another day, another movie.]
This is the first of the Westerns we have watched so far that I actually owned, so, obviously I liked this one going into it.
Eastwood responds to the Western genre that helped make his career. Even going so far as to say it basically encapsulates everything he feels about the genre.
It is slow and taut, filled with great characters played brilliantly by gifted actors.
If Cooperstown was for actors instead of baseball players, Gene Hackman would only have to screen The Royal Tenenbaums and Unforgiven back to back and he would have my vote to get in without any further conversation.
It doesn’t deal with the Native American issues, but it pulls back the curtain a bit on the rest of what lies implicit in the Western genre.
As is the case with much of Eastwood’s directorial work, the story turns the myth of redemptive violence on its head. There is always a cost.
Great movie, all around.
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deathly hallows. [trailer park.]
This will probably get taken down in like ten minutes, but for now, here is about a minute of new Harry Potter goodness.
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western #6, 'the searchers.' [another day, another movie.]
The Searchers is another movie praised quite highly by AFI. Not only was it #12 on the ‘100 Years, 100 Movies’ list, they also selected it as the greatest Western of all time.
Directed by John Ford, it was released almost twenty years after Stagecoach.
The Positives: Visually, The Searchers was really impressive. Ford clearly took great pains to find remarkable shots and angles, and it was most certainly a beautiful film from that standpoint. There were moments where I found myself enjoying the film in spite of myself, which is no small praise.
The movie, up until the last ten minutes or so, was also far more ambiguous about racism than Stagecoach. Much of the racism was named and some even condemned in the text of the film.
There was also ambiguity in the morality of the characters. Wayne’s character was a thief with legitimate rage issues, and they never apologized or demonized it, they just let the character be. That’s something I didn’t expect, and it was refreshing.
The Negatives: For one, I’m decidedly not a John Wayne fan. I wonder if perhaps it is just different sensibilities in different eras, but to me all of his characters just seem drunk most of the time. His long, drawling speech coupled with his clumsy and awkward gait and movements just come across as being a lush, not an everyman.
Also, while I commend Ford for even attempting to address the racism in society and film, he ultimately failed. The racism was so deep that even the attempt to condemn racism was racist. For goodness sake, the main villain of the film was a Commanche war chief played by a German man painted a bronzish tan color… that’s right, a painted German guy.
Also, any ambiguity the film lets sit in the air during the movie falls apart during the climax, when all the white people kill off all the Indians and live happily ever after. Hooray!
It was almost as if Ford was saying, ‘Hey racism makes me uncomfortable, it’s downright sad even. But, they are savages, so what are you really going to do about it? If they refused to become “Americans” like us, they needed to be dealt with eventually.’
I guess for me, it doesn’t really matter how well a movie is made when its messages are this ugly, whether that was the intent or not.
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western #5, 'for a few dollars more.' [another day, another movie.]
It would seem the Man with No Name and the Masterless Samurai are even more connected than I initially thought. There was already the obvious connection, in that The Man with No Name was created as an adaptation of the Masterless Samurai. However, it seems to me the similarities extend into their sequels as well.
Sanjuro, the second film featuring the character from Yojimbo, was only supposed to be a straight adaptation of a novel called Peaceful Days, but after the success of Yojimbo, the studio decided to have Kurosawa bring the character back sooner rather than later and worked his character into the center of the film.
It felt to me like the same thing happened with the second movie to feature The Man with No Name.
For a Few Dollars More felt to me like the story of one man’s revenge, and that man was not The Man with No Name. Instead, he moved back and forth in the story, like we were following him in and out of the real story that was happening.
It was if Leone simply realized he had struck gold in Eastwood’s character and wanted him in the movie, even if he didn’t have much reason to be there.
The result was that I didn’t really care much about Eastwood’s character in this one. I still loved him, he’s Clint Fucking Eastwood. Yet, in A Fistful of Dollars, all of the best scenes, the ones with the most weight, were scenes featuring Eastwood front and center. That wasn’t so in the second one.
The film was a bit more scattered as well. There were flashes of brilliance, for one, the duel during the climax was pretty great all around, directing, acting, etc. And during a showdown at the beginning, Morricone was off his ass in all his composing glory, working organ music in with… well , you’ll just have to watch it if you haven’t seen it. It was pretty amazing. Outside of those flashes of brilliance, it was pretty straightforward, and at times even dull.
However, I can’t wait for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly!
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western #4, 'sanjuro.' [another day, another movie.]
Okay, so this wasn’t really a ‘Western’ at all. It was more of a ‘Samurai Comedy.’ It is the sequel to Yojimbo, and after loving the first film so much, I couldn’t help myself. I assumed some of the themes and feel would carry over from film to film, but they didn’t. This had nothing to do with the John Ford, American Western aesthetic that Kurosawa used for Yojimbo (among others).
It still had plenty of enjoyable moments, and was certainly worth my 90 minutes… especially closet guy, I loved closet guy.
However, not a Western. Maybe I’ll add a day onto the end to make up for it.
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western #3, 'stagecoach.' [another day, another movie.]
Film #3 was the genre classic, Stagecoach. The film was #63 in the original AFI list of the greatest 100 films of the first 100 years of cinema.
Personally, I’m not really a fan.
I’m not challenging its appearance on the list by any means. I understand that the film was important in film history, if for no other reason than because it was John Ford’s first western with sound. I just find it uninteresting at best, and downright offensive at worst.
The uninteresting part of it was writing more than direction, the characters were simply all two-dimensional. The happily drunk doctor, the tough as nails marshall, the heroic outlaw who really hadn’t done anything wrong when you think about it.
The offensive part was spread all around.
There were two primary women, each fit into the mold of Madonna and the Whore, although the Madonna was closed off and kind of a bitch, while the whore had a heart of gold, the filmmakers still only had two places to put young women. That is until John Wayne rolls onto the scene and saves the poor latter woman from a life of whoredom.
I understand that when engaging film, or any art, we need to view it within the lens of its time, understanding that it was a product of a different era. That’s just not really what I am interested in doing here. I certainly want to learn about film history through all of this, but at the end of the day I am also hoping to find movies I love watching. This movie just made me sad most of the time, especially pertaining to the depiction, unsurprisingly, of Native Americans.
It wasn’t enough that we killed off entire civilizations of people, taking every part of their homeland. We also had to turn them into punch lines and story props. A Native American character didn’t have a single line of dialogue. Wait, except for the wife of a Mexican character they meet along the way, she sings in perfect spanish (inexplicably), and she is Apache.
A cheap, insincere way to pay lip service to the idea that not all ‘Indians’ are bad right? Wrong, she took off in the night and stole her husbands horse to warn Geronimo about the Stagecoach. As it would turn out, all Indians are bad. The only hope the white man has is using their tribal divisions to get them to work for you. Sort of like the Cheyenne from the opening scene who stands around like so much set dressing, while a white guy reports on his behalf that he found out Geronimo is going to attack soon. They choose to trust him, not because he is actually trustworthy, but because the Cheyenne “hate the Apaches even more than we do.”
Then, there is the climactic stagecoach chase scene where a bunch of natives chase after them shooting rifles and bows, clearly just malicious for malice’s sake. I guess we are supposed to cheer as John Wayne sits atop the coach and picks off Apache after Apache. How dare they defend their own fucking land, we’re white, we should be allowed to take a stagecoach wherever we damned well please.
It would have been a little easier to swallow if the film offered even the slightest bit of ambiguity, the slightest hint that perhaps they understood that maybe this wasn’t all ok. As it stands, I just couldn’t enjoy it. The attitudes on display are just too shameful and tragic for that.
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western audacity.
Well, another day, another movie is hitting the next level. We’ve done horror movies. We’ve done time-travel. The plan was that all of these type things would be 10-14 days long.
Not so any longer.
The Western film extravaganza is going to be a full month long.
30 Days. 30 Westerns.
During that time, I will also be watching the complete series of Deadwood. And, if Gamefly cooperates, I may be playing through Red Dead Redemption as well.
Right now, the plan is to post a short post for each day, rather than waiting until the end and posting a huge long post that no one will actually read. Any ideas on a better format?
I’m looking forward to this, while also worrying a bit that I will hate Westerns by the end.
I’m going for it, because I think there is something beautiful about endeavors which are at once audacious and pointless.
For those in the Seattle area, company is always appreciated for any and all of these films.
June 1st, Western month begins!
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