Movies Since Last Time

I am enjoying this Summer of Western Research™ even more than I thought I would.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) A disappointment. I’d seen it before but didn’t remember

anything beyond the early sequence where Billy (a miscast Kris Kristofferson) escapes from jail. There’s a reason for that. The film lacks any definite narrative direction, a pursuit story that meanders through episodes alternating between Garrett (James Coburn) and Billy until they end up at the same place. I’ve read that director Sam Peckinpah was pretty much incoherent drunk through most of the production. It shows. (In case you’re wondering, we saw the 2005 Special Edition Blu-Ray, so the cuts that ruined the film’s original release should not have been a problem. It’s just not very good.)

The Magnificent Seven (1960) Shows its age a little, but once it gets going it’s still as

entertaining a Western as you’ll find. It likely begins the turning away from the idealized horse operas with its frank examination of a gunman’s life, a movement that picks up speed with Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country and the spaghetti Westerns until Peckinpah breaks the mold forever with The Wild Bunch. Good as it is, it has what has to be the single worst cut for time of any movie I’ve ever seen, when The Seven start to work their way into the hills to take out three snipers then magically appear in town with the snipers’ guns. The entire missing scene is explained away with “You got them?” I don’t know if the sequence was never filmed or cut for length. Either way, it should have been handled better. Still, among the Top Ten Westerns ever.

Hombre (1967) A masterpiece, based on what might well be Elmore Leonard’s best book. I don’t just mean his best Western; his best book, period. (If you haven’t read it, get busy. It’s

as fine a piece of taut storytelling as you’ll ever read, with nary a wasted word.) I was struck this time by how close this falls in Paul Newman’s body of work to 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and how there can’t be two characters more different than Butch and John Russell. Newman’s gift as an actor was how he never seemed to be acting. The entire cast provides outstanding work, and this may be Richard Boone’s best performance. Screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr. kept much of Leonard’s dialog and captured the tone perfectly. Hombre never tries to be more than it is, and it’s a lot. There have been Westerns as good, but I can’t think of any better.

The Long Riders (1980) Never seen this one before, in part because I thought it was a

Hollywood gimmick to have sets of brothers (Keach, Carradine, Quaid, Guest) play brothers (James, Younger, Miller, Ford). I should have paid better attention. The casting was organic, stemming from the Keach brothers wanting to play the Jameses, talking to David Carradine about it and him thinking his bros could play the Youngers and it grew from there. An outstanding example of minimalist storytelling as Bill Bryden and Steven Smith team with Stacy and James Keach plus director Walter Hill to tell you everything you need to know without wasting time on exposition. The action scenes ring true and the violence appears as painful as it must have been. Well worth the time as an entertainment, and just as much as a way for storytellers to see how to get in and out quickly without leaving anything behind.

Open Range (2003) Hard to believe people were once worried whether Robert Duvall could play a cowboy. Here he’s Boss Spearman, one of the last of the free range cattlemen, who

grazes his herd over unclaimed ground across the West with the help of his small crew led by Charlie Waite (Kevin Costner). Costner was the driving force, producing, directing, and even putting up his own money, though he insisted Duvall get top billing and says the film might not have been made had Duval not agreed to do it. Pitch perfect from stem to stern, including outstanding performances by Annette Bening as Charlie’s awkward love interest and a pre-Dumbledore Michael Gambon as the evil cattle baron who runs the town. I don’t see it often listed as among the great Westerns, but it should be.

Appaloosa (2008) Here’s another one that should be right up there, Ed Harris’s adaptation

of Robert B. Parker’s first Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch Western. Harris directed and co-wrote the screenplay in a faithful adaptation of Parker’s book, about which I’ll have more to say in a couple of weeks. Harris and Viggo Mortensen play a pair of traveling lawmen who will go to any town that wants to clean itself up so long as the town agrees to their conditions. The basic story is a clever variation of a love triangle, with Harris’s Cole becoming enamored of newly-arrived widow Allie French (Renee Zellweger), whose efforts to play Cole and Hitch against each other spur the core friction in the story. Well told, well acted, faithful to the original material as well as the period in history, this is another that deserves more attention than it seems to get.

Pass the Popcorn, Please

It’s been a while since I commented on movies I’ve seen recently; binge-watching The Shield has taken up most of our TV viewing time. But, we have seen a handful, and I’m stuck for a blog post today, so here goes.

Pain & Gain. Didn’t know what to expect, adding this to the Netflix queue on a recommendation, and was pleasantly surprised. Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson play a pair of muscleheads who lust after The American Dream™ (no, not Dusty Rhodes) and decide to get it by kidnapping millionaire Tony Shalhoub. Loosely based on a true story, this is a comic noir of half-baked ideas and half-assed execution. The kidnappers lack discipline, experience, and a clue, and things go as badly as one might expect. Director Michael Bay plays it for laughs and gets the tone just right. (Yes, that Michael Bay. Thus might be my favorite movie of his.) Lots of fun. Wahlberg and Johnson are well cast; Shalhoub is as good as always. Ed Harris makes a cameo appearance, and, as usual, is as good as it gets. Not a timeless classic, but a couple of hours of off-kilter fun.

Ride the High Country. George Pelecanos got to program an evening of Turner Classic movies; this was one of his picks. (I hope to get to them all.) Randolph Scott and Joel McCrae play a pair of over-the-hill lawmen who team up to guard a gold shipment from the wildcat miners to the bank. Unknown to straight-arrow McCrae, Scott and his young sidekick plan to steal the gold. The kid falls for a farmer’s daughter (Mariette Hartley in her first role), and things go bad at the camp, leading to a hazardous trip down the mountain where you don’t know who to trust. The two old pros play it out to the end in a movie that could have been cliché-ridden but instead gives a new look that presages the new wave of Westerns Clint Eastwood was about to start. Directed by Sam Peckinpah, and hints of where he’ll go with The Wild Bunch are evident. Far better than I expected from a 1962-vintage Western.

American Hustle. Meh. Lots of good bits that didn’t add up to as much as they could have. Too long, and I have an impression the original cut was even longer. (The voice-over near the beginning jammed exposition down your throat like a freshman composition major summarizing Genesis.) The director seemed to want to make a Scorsese picture, and only Scorsese should try that. (Not even him, sometimes.) Christian Bale was good, though he often seemed to be doing an Al Pacino impression, which made me think of how much better Pacino would have been when he was the appropriate age. The women carry the movie; Jennifer Lawrence steals all her scenes, in a good way. Louis CK was perfectly cast. Not a waste of time, but not something that deserved bumping to the top of the queue. (As we did.)

The Seven-Ups. Another of Pelecanos’s picks. In the style of the French Connection (directed by French Connection’s producer, Philip D’Antoni), Roy Scheider leads a team of cops that investigates only crimes with a penalty of at least seven years. His snitch (Tony LoBianco) is playing both ends against the middle. Lots to like, but it never grips you like The French Connection. Not only does the whole not exceed the sum of its parts, it doesn’t quite equal it. Best car chase ever though, covering more ground, units coming and going, and all doing stuff cars can actually do. No jumping or flying or rolling and continuing to run or shit like that. Just serious driving, well photographed. (For those who wish to cut to the chase, here it is. The cop in the trunk is Ken Kercheval, who would go on to play Cliff Barnes in Dallas.)

Appaloosa

The Western is the archetypal American story, the progenitor of the hard-boiled and noir schools. Few genres can get away with running the same tropes past an audience over and over again as well as the Western, when it’s done right.

Appaloosa is based on a novel written by Robert B. Parker as a break in the routine of writing Spenser novels. Any movie starring Ed Harris (who also directed), Viggo Mortensen, Jeremy Irons, and Renee Zellweger has to be good, right? (Well, maybe not Renee Zellweger. More on her later.)

Harris and Mortensen play the standard wandering lawmen, moving across the West to clean up towns as needed. Irons is the ruthless cattle baron. We know as soon as Irons shoots the old marshal down in cold blood two minutes into the movie that there’s going to be a final confrontation. The fun is watching the twists and turns of getting them there. And there’s a lot of it, and of them.

The laconic dialog Parker has made almost an affectation in his recent Spenser novels serves the characters well here. Harris’s Virgil Cole and Mortensen’s Everett Hitch are classic Western sidekicks; you can imagine Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in these roles fifty years ago. They understand each other without having to say a word, and both are good enough actors to make sure the audience understands, too.

As director, Harris was fanatical about authenticity. The window glass is period quality, and Harris makes several subtle references to it. (Having a horse and rider pass by the window while filming Cole indoors, to let an attentive viewer see the distortions caused by flaws in the glass is one example.) A tan line on Martensen’s forehead when he removes his hat. Nothing too obvious, set out like Easter eggs for those with their heads wholly in the movie.

Irons is his usual excellent self as the heavy, menacing and greasy at the same time. Lance Henriksen makes a brief appearance in the role Richard Boone would have played in the Lancaster-Douglas version and does his usual yeoman service.

It’s Renee Zellweger who’s the fly in Appaloosa’s ointment. The character is obviously there as a plot device, to cause friction down the road. It’s to everyone’s credit she doesn’t cause the overly predictable plot complications, save one, which actually works well for advancing the story. The problem is, there was no reason for her character to be in the town of Appaloosa in the first place, and there’s certainly no reason for the hard-bitten Virgil Cole to fall for her so quickly.

Let’s face it, Renee Zellweger is not an attractive woman. Maybe if you saw her in the mall she’d look okay compared to the overweight, belly shirt-wearing trailer trash coming out of the NASCAR Store, but not by movie standards. Even for a movie that works so diligently for authenticity, a woman who looks like her is not going to land a man like Virgil Cole with so little effort, even if she’s the local gold standard. Salma Hayek, okay. Even dirtied up after a long train ride, she’d make a man accept a lot of life complications. Not Renee Zellweger. (IMDB research shows Diane Lane was the original choice for the part. She could let a man agree to some complications, too. It still would have been nice to know why the character came to town at all.)

Still, a movie well worth seeing. The acting is superb, and the story goes in directions that aren’t always expected, with twists to make the less than unexpected palatable. A lot about Appaloosa deserves more than the 6.9 IMDB gives it. It’s a solid 7.5 without Zellweger.