Wayward Westerns

The Great Silence is an atmospheric spaghetti western directed by Sergio Corbucci (of Django fame) in 1968. During a harsh winter a mute gunslinger squares off against a band of voracious bounty hunters who store their victims in snow drifts till spring. Though there’s not much to the script and it’s seems a little clichéd 40+ years later there’s a delicious cynicism and plenty of merciless violence to keep you entertained as the atmosphere builds to an explosive and suitably dark finale. Brilliant but probably not to everyone’s taste.

Sidney Poiter joins forces with James Garner to escort a bunch of soldiers through Indian infested territory in Duel at Diablo but the wheels soon fall off their wagon haha and a relentless siege ensues. It starts off fairly atypically, the usual technicolour 60’s western bedecked in thinly veiled social commentary but it soon reveals a surprisingly dark underbelly of violence once the journey gets underway. With a strong, sharp script and some talented performances this tense little gem packs a punch and is woefully neglected.

Tversity Trinkets

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is a startling mediocre slice of big budget quiche. Tom and co are disavowed by the government after Kremlin kerfuffle and have to hoon about on their own, infiltrating & subterfuging in order to clear their names and save to world. Pegg returns along with the Tom Cruise-bot and the bow guy from Avengers and they all burble their way through a simplistic, by the numbers script making weak, ill judged jokes to pass the time between the set pieces. No shortage of budget but a complete lack of imagination - shiny dross.

Sam Shepard stars as an aging Butch Cassidy in the elegiac western Blackthorn. After faking his own death at the height of his career Butch slips into Boliva for a quiet life breeding horses but years later yearns to return to the States to see his remaining family, after being joined by an affable Spaniard however his plans soon fall apart. Though the plot is paper thin it's a beautifully crafted film with a thoughtful, restrained script and some excellent performances from Shepherd, Rea and Noreiga.

Prime Pollack

Ossie Davies and Burt Lancaster star in Sidney Pollack's comedy/western, The Scalphunters. Lancaster's mountain man trapper is forced to hand over his furs in exchange for an erudite slave by a bunch of Indians and kicks off a action filled cross country romp to retrieve them. The two leads are admirable and handle the intelligent, witty script with brio and it's all beautifully paced with the lulls in action providing room for the snappy banter. A brilliant little gem that's got a whole lot more than to it than just shootouts and spurs.

Sidney Pollack's next feature, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, released the following year, received a whole sackful of awards and rightly so as it's a vicious depiction of the American dream in all it's brutal greed and ignominy. An ensemble cast including Jane Fonda, Susannah York & Bruce Dern compete in a epic dance marathon run by a merciless, cynical MC. The desperate characters are lured by the chance of a big pay out but still yearn and pander for pennies thrown by the ever present audience. This is intense stuff with 'big' performances all round, some superb cinematography that enriches the insanity and as the contestants are thinned out the atmosphere spirals deeper and deeper into the gloom towards a stunning climax.

Allegorical Frippery

A pair of young men escape their dreary lives and become talented gunslingers in the Rock N Roll, Acid(ish) Western, Zachariah. Don Johnson & John Rubenstein's friendship becomes strained as their notoriety increases and their divergent, barmy experiences shape them into mirror images of one another and an final confrontation becomes inevitable. There's some great tunes from Country Joe et al and nice period visuals which help flesh out the nonsense but it's essentially a diet version of El Topo festooned with ham fisted, cheap symbolism and a few laughs. Still I liked it and I'm quite surprised it's not received more attention.

I'm not really sure what to make of Rhinoceros, starring Gene Wilder & Zero Mostel. Filmed as part of the American Film Theatre series and based on a play by Eugen Ionesco this is a seriously odd little fable about one man's stand against a citywide tide of metamorphoses from man into Rhino. Wilder puts in a decent performance as the boozy office clerk who withstands the change but it's Mostel's film with an amazing transformation from effete city gent to monstrous apartment trashing beast that single handedly rescues the film from it's obtuse purpose. I dunno it's quite funny in bits but with the budgetary constraints precluding any actual Rhino action and it's general atmosphere of hysteria obscuring any meaningfulness it was a little disappointing, especially so given the potency of the previous Wilder & Mostel feature. Apparently the play has a bit more substance behind nonsense.

Wacky Wicked West

Kirk Douglas stars as Paris Pittman, an outlaw caught after an audacious heist and sentenced to a desert prison in Mankiewicz's There Was a Crooked Man. Accompanying Kirk during his stay are the excellent Burgess Meredith and Warren Oates and it's not long before a new, reformist warden turns up (played by Henry Fonda) with big dreams of rehabilitating the reprobates. It's quite jolly, with plenty of wit and one liners but it's a fairly dark, amoral tale as Pittman's ruthlessness supersedes all even once he's manufactured a jailbreak.

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is a John Huston Western from the early 70's and, like Crooked Man, it's a strange blend of comedy and merciless violence. Paul Newman stars as the titular Judge who after being thrown out of an isolated brothel returns to kill everyone taking over the local town in the process. He sets himself up as a, rather capricious dispenser of Justice and proceeds to kill any evil-doers who venture into town, divvying up the booty and improving the town over the years. It's a bit of an epic with a rich cast including Oates, McDowell, Perkins, Gardner, Keach and Beatty and despite it's length it a highly enjoyable watch about a singular individual.

Women of The West

The Coen Bros latest film is a stunning re-adaptation of True Grit starring Matt Damon, Jeff Bridges and Josh Brolin but it's the central performance of Hailee Steinfeld as the teenage avenger out to track down her father's killer that powers this movie into multiple Oscar territory - Steinfeld's portrayal as the feisty daughter pins together the script and provides a few moments of humour in an otherwise grim tale of death and hardship. That's not to say the other performances aren't equally as assured, Bridges in particular is brilliant as a curmudgeonly, alcoholic Marshall, and combined with an excellent script and some stunning cinematography this will, deservedly, collect a sackful of awards. It's definitely the Brothers least Coen-esque film and maybe that's no terrible thing, mind you I've always preferred their thrillers to the quirky comedies. Oh and according to Wikip they're working on bringing Chabon's excellent alt-history novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union to the big screen - nice.

The Shooting is an enigmatic western from Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop) & Jack Nicholson. Warren Oates stars as a former bounty hunter turned miner drafted by a mysterious woman into a lengthy manhunt but it's not long before a ruthless, gunslinging Nicholson turns up and as tensions rise they head into the desert towards the inevitable bloodshed. The plot is deliberately obtuse and with sparse, ambiguous dialogue and sun bleached vistas it all adds up to a quietly atmospheric little western that was rather enjoyable though I'm sure the 60's denouement won't be to everyone's tastes. Good stuff, which you can watch below. Will dig around for Hellman's Cockfighter which apparently also stars the impressive Oates.

Hammer Rebirth & Clint Squint

Let Me In is the latest in a long line of identikit, largely unnecessary US remakes of foreign language films. Most are usually butchered by the Hollywood machine and turn out like Taxi or Vanilla Sky for but this effort is somewhat more competent and maybe that's due to it being the first production from the relaunched Hammer Studio, now owned by some Dutch peeps. Anyways it's nicely shot, well directed and has two strong performances from the young leads but unfortunately didn't quite seem capable of conjuring the creepy, unsettling atmosphere that permeated the original though maybe that's just my prejudice (I've read the book too). It's still a decent horror vamp thingy and if you're too monged for subs I'd say dig in.

Written by Elmore Leonard, directed by John Sturges with music from Schiffrin and starring Eastwood, Duvall & John Saxon Joe Kidd is a sharp, snappy Western from 1972. Clint gets recruited into a posse searching for a Mexican revolutionary and it becomes quickly apparent he's fighting for the wrong side. They pack in plenty of action and wit in it's brief 83 mins but it's all a little unremarkable - there's nothing wrong with it per se it just lacks a definitive scene or line or something that would make it more memorable. An entertaining, solid Western but nothing to get too excited about.