The Western List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[Wu.Qinghua]

Oh, there must be other ways to interpret this sequence, too. But, anyway, I see your point or, at least, believe to do so. In my last post, I only wanted to question the mutuality of desire, that is, I did not want to question Chuncho's deep affection for the white Northern American agent, but only the existence of a similar kind of affection for the Mexican bandit on the side of Nino. That is, I'd interpret their relation rather as an ultimately one-sided and failed flirt of Chuncho (with Nino, the representative of Northern American imperialism and global capitalism, whom he shoots in the end) than as the story of "an American dandy and a Mexican bandit who fall in love with each other", as you wrote in your first post.

Oh, and just another remark: I guess that it's not up to Chuncho ("Quien sabe? I don't know why, but I know I must"), but to the audience of the movie to answer Nino's question ("Why MUST you kill me?"); they are asked to give reasons for Chuncho's claim, that, though not exactly knowing why, he has to kill the agent.
Btw, I've revisited the last scene: Before breaking free, Chuncho yells at a Mexican shoeshine boy: "And don't buy bread with that money! Buy dynamite!".

[Mr Sausage]

Btw, I've revisited the last scene: Before breaking free, Chuncho yells at a Mexican shoeshine boy: "And don't buy bread with that money! Buy dynamite!".

Indeed, don't buy life, buy death. There's a real self-destructive, apocalyptic sentiment here. And, indeed, Chuncho appears to go insane.

Oh, there must be other ways to interpret this sequence, too.

Is there any reason why we should be looking for them? What about my (rather obvious) interpretation is unacceptable and worth avoiding?

If there wasn't supposed to be a homosexual subtext to this movie, why is it hammered home that Nino is an effete dandy (always wearing perfect clothing even in the worst circumstances; carrying around perfume in his cache/purse) with a real distaste for women? Why does he turn down Adelita's advances so he can sleep beside Chuncho? Why do they both always stare into each others' eyes? Why is Chuncho so taken with him, to the point that he'll kill life-long friends if they threaten Nino, and will totally forget about his own brother to follow Nino around, and will nurse him through illness? And this for a guy he's known for all of two days! This is so blatant it almost stops being subtext and becomes text.

but only the existence of a similar kind of affection for the Mexican bandit on the side of Nino.

Why not? He's obviously being coded as gay according to 1960's stereotypes. Why do that if he's the only one of the two who isn't attracted to the other? He kills Chuncho's brother and beloved general without thinking for a moment that this should alter Chuncho's feelings toward him, and he waits a week for him for no other reason than to give Chuncho money to which the latter had no claim, and to persuade him to travel to America with him. Hell, the expression on his face at the end is pure 'betrayed lover.' I mean, really. You can come up with other explanations, but at what point are you simply making ever more tortured evasions?

For me, this movie has two narratives: the outward one about revolutionary politics, and the inward one about homosexual desire. I am certain these are both meant to be present. There's no way the filmmakers were ignorant of what they were doing (and these are the same guys who decided to include a totally unnecessary cunnilingus joke, so it's not like they're hesitant about pushing envelopes concerning sexual matters).

[Nothing]

The third world (Chuncho) is symbolically and falsely attracted to Western capitalism (Nino) but comes to its senses at the end. For his part, Nino is a-sexual, being the cold implacable, death-like hand of capitalism, he is unable to experience pleasure or genuine cameraderie, every relationship he enters into is a manipulation with the goal of profit in mind.

[Mr Sausage]

The third world (Chuncho) is symbolically and falsely attracted to Western capitalism (Nino) but comes to its senses at the end. For his part, Nino is a-sexual, being the cold implacable, death-like hand of capitalism, he is unable to experience pleasure or genuine cameraderie, every relationship he enters into is a manipulation with the goal of profit in mind.

If that is so, why does he not make off with the entirety of the profits himself? Why does he save Chuncho at all? Why does he wait a week for Chuncho's return and then give him half of the profits (of which Chuncho was totally unaware) before asking him to go to America with him? Nino is oddly generous and considerate for someone incapable of camaraderie or pleasure. And then there is that look of hurt on his face when Chuncho pulls the gun on him at the end, the kind you'd only see on the face of a betrayed family member or lover.

If what you wrote above was the allegorical intent, the writers, in trying to organize Chuncho and Nino into a final confrontation, borrowed (maybe even accidentally) the structure of a tragic love story. So the whole thing gains a second and more interesting narrative. At the least, it has a unique final showdown, if it can be called one.

[matrixschmatrix]

So, I assume it's kosher to talk about the big, obvious ones, right? I'd managed never to see Liberty Valance before tonight, and I'd like to discuss it, but I hate to be the guy who's all excited about Citizen Kane after the first day in film class.

In any case, it wound up being not quite what I expected. The initial situation seemed like the setup for the classic fascist allegory- a civilized man comes into a wilderness, and finds out that all his book-learning and laws and paper mean nothing in the real world, when confronted with an implacably violent force. The way it plays out obviously doesn't quite fit that- the movie obviously holds Stewart's concept of civilization in high regard, in many ways, and Stewart finds neither savage joy nor self realization when he believes he's killed a man. Moreover, even at his most civilized and Eastern, it's made clear that he's not a coward; obviously, the goal here isn't to depict a fop who becomes a man through violence. On the other hand, it doesn't exactly deconstruct the primacy of violence; Marvin is still a man who can be stopped only by killing him, and in some ways it privileges Wayne's viewpoint as the realist one, and his form of courage as the more admirable.

It works, overall, with what I've seen of Ford's themes- the view of encroaching civilization as broadly preferable, but the emotional preference for violence of the wilds, and the figure who is willing to sacrifice the world he knows and into which he fits to make way for civilization- but it still feels off, darker, and in some ways more savage than other Ford. The Searchers is obviously a dark movie in many ways, but its conclusion is still one of tenderness and forgiveness- this one seems more to imply that the mythology of our country, and a lot of what it's built upon, is a foundation of lies.

Which, obviously, is true, but it's not what I expect to see out of Ford, one of the primary architects of that mythology.

[Sloper]

Another obvious (though less big) one from me: I saw Henry King's Jesse James (1939) yesterday. The screenplay is kind of a mess, with far too much time spent on mis-judged broad comedy and subsidiary characters (especially Jesse's wife, wretchedly played by Nancy Kelly, and Randolph Scott's dull 'other man'), and not enough on the James brothers and their gang. We only really get to know the eponymous outlaw in the last couple of reels, and by then it's too late to invest him with any kind of tragic gravitas; the fact that his moustache disappears in every other scene is also distracting. Was the real Jesse James this indecisive about his facial hair?

It seems to me that the film hobbles itself by trying to broaden its appeal as much as possible, but it's well worth seeing for the wealth of authentic details you would expect in a Henry King film, and for at least two magnificent shots - one of Jesse running along the top of a speeding train at night, the other of the James brothers on horseback crashing through a shop window (and watch out for the notorious shot where two horses are ridden over the edge of a cliff; the fictional horses live, but the real ones didn't!). The entire botched robbery sequence is brilliant, actually. Definite foreshadowing of The Wild Bunch there.

[Finch]

Thanks to whoever brought up Delmer Daves' The Last Wagon - we just finished watching it, and it's going on my list. What a great find this was: the cinematography was just stunning; I particularly loved the many overhead and long shot compositions in the opening and the gorgeous panorama shots throughout the film: this really begs to be released in high definition, as good as the DVD is. What impressed me most about the picture was how the writers succeeded in making it about the struggle against prejudice and hatred of any kind, and to fight it with tolerance and acts of compassion without being preachy or sentimental. The film even managed to get in bits of cheeky humour (Billy mounts the horse and Julie says "Put your arms around me" and the little bugger goes "You bet I will") which made us laugh out loud a few times. Loved every minute of this film.

[zedz]

Backlash

Good call, domino. I’m not usually a fan of Sturges. For me he either fades into anonymity or tries so hard to impose his serious intent (e.g. Bad Day at Black Rock) that he comes off as stifling and pretentious. In this film he strikes a good balance, so that the film always looks handsome and interesting, but the brisk pace keeps the nascent psychodrama in check.

Donna Reed is surprisingly effective and no-nonsense, and she’s given much more to do than she was in Gun Fury, Widmark is as reliable as ever, and the familiar supporting crew do everything they’re expected and required to do (which makes a big difference – just look at the shambles of Westbound).

I don’t know if this is going to make my top fifty, but it will be in contention for the lower reaches.

The Return of Frank James

Any Fritz Lang film deserves your attention at the visual level, but I find him a director completely at the mercy of his material. Bad scripts come through to the screen with their problems intact, and he doesn’t even seem to be interested in using the performances or set pieces to paper over the cracks or distract our attention from their flaws. (In this respect I see a big difference with Hitchcock, who really had a showman’s gift for misdirecting our attention.)

So this is a good film, with a good Henry Fonda performance and some excellent set pieces (a tense hold-up, a canyon chase, a theatrical showdown and so forth), but a kind of slackness in the characterization – particularly with Clem, who just seems sort of hopeless and convenient throughout – and some lazy, offensive writing. Gene Tierney’s character is barely there, and she’s not the kind of actress that can overcome that kind of deficit through force of personality, and the film regurgitates a whole lot of racist stereotypes that make the scenes they infect very hard to take. Frank’s servant ‘Pinky’ is posited as a major character, but he’s never seen after his real plot function is served and he otherwise seems to have only three characteristics: blind loyalty to his ‘massuh’; stupidity; natural rhythm. He’s spared ‘easily spooked’: that choice tidbit is saved for the film’s only other black character (come on, she’s got to have something, right? Otherwise how would we know she was black?).

[domino harvey]

Well, I've always read the entire film (which I think is not only Lang's best western but one of his best films, period) to be a negative reaction against the first film (which I liked as well), with its flaws magnified and exaggerated as commentary on its perceived weaknesses. Thus the racist caricatures lurking in the margins of the first film are highlighted and toyed with and Lang can barely contain the simultaneous contempt for the material he is at the mercy of and the glee with which he is tweaking it. And go easy on poor Gene Tierney, it was her first film! She started smoking soon after the film's premiere when someone told her she sounded like Minnie Mouse on-screen, and whoops, that's what killed her in the end.

[zedz]

Oh, I actually thought Tierney was decent enough, but the role just wasn't there. And that's an admirably perverse reading of the racial politics of the film, though I can't quite swallow it myself!

The Deadly Companions

Finally sat down and watched Peckinpah's dreaded first film and found it wasn't as bad as rumoured.

It's still not a patch on his later work - the editing, for one thing, is strictly conventional - but there are plenty of interesting traces of his later themes and concerns. It's certainly an revealing film to lay out against his other portraits of women at the mercy of patriarchy, as Maureen O'Hara is probably the most overtly strong female lead in any of his films, and she's more transparently 'done wrong' by all the men in the film than most of his female protagonists. Unfortunately, her tough broad performance is too one-note to take that interesting premise very far.

For the first hour or more, I had very high hopes for a more interesting outcome, since the basics of the plot were strong, and things seemed to be going in an interesting direction. There's a great dream logic about the doubled-up 'receding quest' structure: Brian Keith is on a protracted revenge mission that he can't quite finish off, so he allows himself to be sidetracked onto another quest (Maureen O'Hara's), one whose goal seems to get further and further away the longer it's pursued (this section of the film had a strong whiff of The Shooting about it), until that original quest definitively slips from his grasp. The feel was very much like those dreams where you have some simple but important task to perform but get waylaid by increasingly complicated and distracting trivia, until it seems like you'll never get back on track.

This could have made for a bold and unconventional film, with Keith's character ultimately finding liberation from his mission, but no, the Hollywood mechanics insist that everything gets tied up in a pretty little bow at the end: everything is neatly and far too conveniently resolved, including letting Keith off the hook entirely, magically transforming O'Hara from whore to madonna, and allowing them to live happily ever after. It's almost an anti-Peckinpah ending and it negates most of what was interesting about the middle of the film.

The UK disc offered a good, anamorphic transfer with no extras.

[antnield]

Time Out couldn't wait for the June 20th deadline.

[domino harvey]

7 Women isn't a western

[Cold Bishop]

#9 is all I have to say. At least you've been vindicated, domino.

And I've actually been tempted to make the argument for 7 Women, but ultimately there are far too many pure "Westerns" for me to have the need to rank an "Eastern" like this, even if I very much like what it does with the genre.

[Murdoch]

Ride Lonesome and The Tall T don't make the cut but Open Range does, something's wrong here.

[Sloper]

I thought The Return of Frank James was quite a lot better than Jesse James in most respects: as expected, Lang has none of King's interest in evoking the period, but he's also not burdened with a half-baked hagiography, the narrative is far more focused, and the tone is consistently tense and serious. It reminded me of how much I prefer Hour of the Gun to Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. I thought there was a nice, wry bathos to the way revenge was finally taken on the Ford brothers too; I wonder if Lang had some extra creative input at those moments. I agree that Gene Tierney is wasted here, she's much too languorous to make this very slight role work. More Carradine would have been nice.

The film regurgitates a whole lot of racist stereotypes that make the scenes they infect very hard to take. Frank’s servant ‘Pinky’ is posited as a major character, but he’s never seen after his real plot function is served and he otherwise seems to have only three characteristics: blind loyalty to his ‘massuh’; stupidity; natural rhythm. He’s spared ‘easily spooked’: that choice tidbit is saved for the film’s only other black character (come on, she’s got to have something, right? Otherwise how would we know she was black?).

Well, I've always read the entire film (which I think is not only Lang's best western but one of his best films, period) to be a negative reaction against the first film (which I liked as well), with its flaws magnified and exaggerated as commentary on its perceived weaknesses. Thus the racist caricatures lurking in the margins of the first film are highlighted and toyed with and Lang can barely contain the simultaneous contempt for the material he is at the mercy of and the glee with which he is tweaking it. And go easy on poor Gene Tierney, it was her first film! She started smoking soon after the film's premiere when someone told her she sounded like Minnie Mouse on-screen, and whoops, that's what killed her in the end.

I actually thought Ernest Whitman was really good in the first film: I was bracing myself for some embarrassing hi-jinks, but he had some nice scenes. The one where he's waiting in the empty house for Jesse to arrive, and tells him that his family have at last buggered off, was one of the more emotionally involving scenes in the film; some quite subtle work between him and Tyrone Power there. He was still the stereotypical 'simple old negro boy' (the phrase is used of him in the sequel), but there's a big leap from that to the achingly bad 'Ohhhh Pinky...' comedy we see in The Return. I have to say I can't really see the ironic commentary here - Pinky was not stupid in the first film, in fact he was sometimes wiser than his 'massuh', but here he's singing and strutting to remind himself not to refer to Frank by his real name. I think this is meant to be hilarious, not ironically appalling. And Lang never really 'did' humour anyway. Thank goodness Uncle Rufus wasn't as ubiquitous this time around.

And hey, at least Pinky isn't as catastrophically dumb as young Clem, the loose cannon tagging along for the ride, screwing up at every turn, and

Spoiler

destined for a tearful death (which he is unaccountably surprised by).

[Camera Obscura]

Another obvious (though less big) one from me: I saw Henry King's Jesse James (1939) yesterday. The screenplay is kind of a mess, with far too much time spent on mis-judged broad comedy and subsidiary characters (especially Jesse's wife, wretchedly played by Nancy Kelly, and Randolph Scott's dull 'other man'), and not enough on the James brothers and their gang. We only really get to know the eponymous outlaw in the last couple of reels, and by then it's too late to invest him with any kind of tragic gravitas; the fact that his moustache disappears in every other scene is also distracting. Was the real Jesse James this indecisive about his facial hair?

At this stage of his career, I always think of Tyrone Power as a great comedian. In a film like The Mark of Zorro, it all works brilliantly and he's got me in stitches every time he's on screen, but for Jesse James he just seemed too fresh and innocent to play a part like this. Jesse James was young in his glory days, but Power just can't carry this along.

[Thomas Dukenfield]

This may interest a few that hang around these parts. I've compiled a list of westerns that are available on Netflix Instant Watch (U.S.) that have never, to my knowledge, been released on home video in the U.S. (neither DVD, VHS, nor burn on demand). I'm not sure if Netflix Canada has the same selection, though. The list is too long to just post in a reply, so here is a link: http://cinemagonzo.blogspot.com/2011/04 ... watch.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[knives]

4 for Texas is an other comedy western that works because it isn't. That's not to say it's a great movie, but it's perfectly enjoyable and the best of the rat pack movies I've seen (though it barely counts as one). really though I can't see how some one would consider this a comedy though. It takes a very light tone and there is the occasional joke, but the drama exists and the weight is on the conflict. I guess it's better to call it a soft punch drama instead. The closest it comes to being a real comedy is in Victor Buono's bumbling Kenneth Mars impression, but that's no worse than your typical Andy Devine character and even than he's given some dramatic importance to the story. There's also a bad three stooges cameo in the film, but it can be forgotten easily. So I guess this leaves only two good legitimate comedies for the western.

[knives]

When watching The Great Silence I couldn't help but be reminded of Dom's comments about Ride the High Country. It's even worse in this case because our leading lady is also black (though at times she seem lighter than Silence). Nothing seems to go right for anyone, but the women seem to get it more often because they're women. It seems like he's comparing gender issues with class issues a bit.
That doesn't even go into Kinski's performance which I think might be his craziest. The scene where he whips and drags the man is just pure lunacy and while it's nothing new to see an actor think as their character in a performance the shitting scene has one of the strangest visible thought processes I've seen. Hell even the unexpected ending has it's fair share of crazy turns in that performance.

[Nothing]

Yep, The Great Silence is a keeper.

So... What about Days of Heaven and The New World? Both depict historical westward migration in North America...

[zedz]

Well, personally, I wouldn't class either as a Western, but you're welcome to do so, since it's all pretty free and easy around here. I'd exclude Days of Heaven because it's set too late (1916, apparently, and there's cars and stuff). The New World is a harder call. Maybe it's set too early? It seems to me more a part of the 'explorer' genre, closer to Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo than regular westerns, but I'm sure that's partly to do with Malick's treatment of and interest in the material, which also seems quite distanced from the concerns of most westerns, even revisionist ones.

Sort of related, in terms of defining the genre: I watched Way of a Gaucho on the weekend and, quite apart from being a visually impressive film (hobbled by a bad central performance) did settle for me the 'North American' issue, since this seemed to be very clearly a western even though it was set in Argentina. So I'm definitely going to be including Black God, White Devil in my top 10.

[Nothing]

1916 isn't too late (The Wild Bunch is set in 1913, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1925, Black God White Devil in the 1940s)...

The question of whether The New World is too early is an interesting one. It doesn't feel like a western at all to me, but I'm hard pressed to say why. Perhaps it is the period, or perhaps the complete and utter absence of genre tropes. If I were to include it it would have to rank highly, yet that somehow feels wrong.

btw, perhaps you could explain BGWD to me. In principal I should be all for a Marxist Brazilian western, yet I found it incredibly amateurish and messy to the point of near-unwatchability. It's a first film, so I'm willing to give Rocha another go with Antonio das Mortes (currently in the pile), but it better be a marked improvement...

[zedz]

Well, I love the messiness of Black God, White Devil (and it's not a first film: Barravento is far more conventionally 'well-made' but nevertheless excellent), which is part and parcel of Rocha trying out new, less-colonized, film forms. He's always going to run into some dead ends, but for the most part the film has an infectious visceral energy, and I love how he somehow attains the mythic without sacrificing his specific political concerns and without falling back on traditional Hollywood western iconography - he's forging his own indigenous western myth. What's the point of making an anti-colonization statement if your language is colonized?

(And if you think this film is a mess, you'd better stay well away from Cancer and The Age of the Earth!)

But of course, if you don't think he's got there (which I can quite understand - there are some incredibly hostile responses to this film out there), it won't matter how he went about it.

Good luck with Antonio das Mortes. I need to watch it again myself, but I didn't like it nearly as much as Black God. Stylistically, it's more coherent, and it could even be said to be influential - Scorsese's a big fan and you can see traces of it in first-phase Fassbinder - but I think it loses out on a lot of the energy of the previous film.

As for Days of Heaven, I'll concede the date thing (which I don't think is a relevant concern for Black God, White Devil, since Rocha is deliberately making a film that could be happening right now or hundreds of years ago), but the presence of technology in general works against it being a western for me. I guess this is another film where it just doesn't feel like a western. Not that it matters much in my case, since I've never particularly liked the film. When I haven't seen it for a while I remember it as better than it is, but when I watch it again it always seems too pretty, too earnest and too insubstantial (not problems I have with Malick's other films).

[Camera Obscura]

Does Lonely Are the Brave count as a Western?

[Nothing]

What's the point of making an anti-colonization statement if your language is colonized?

I think it's a bit much to suggest that coherent and adept film language is colonial, rather than simply international (and if any one source had to be identified it would be Eisenstein). As for the visceral/rough aesthetic of BGWD, this is inspired by that bastion of 'colonial' cinema A Bout de Souffle, surely (another celebrated breakthrough film that I find almost unwatchably amateurish - as does Godard himself).

Days of Heaven - Is there much technology? I don't even remember the car, although I'll take your word for it. But there are cars in other westerns, eg. The Wild Bunch. Unlike The New World, Days of Heaven does also contain some western tropes - the outlaw on the run, the train journey west, the farming community fighting off a pestilence/affliction (in this case locusts rather than gunmen). If Heaven's Gate is a western (and it surely is) then it's hard to exclude.

Nb. in the interests of this list, have just been watching Major Dundee again. It's such a painful film to watch in that you can see all the seeds of greatness within and yet, like Magnificent Ambersons and Greed, you have to use you your imagination and picture what the film might have been without studio editing, as opposed to what it is. Still, on reflection, I think there is enough of quality and interest in there to merit a Top 50 place.