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western #5, 'for a few dollars more.' [another day, another movie.]

By • On • In another day. another movie., scott • 1 min read

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 #3, 'stagecoach.' [another day, another movie.]

By • On • In another day. another movie., scott • 2 min read

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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