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I've disliked Sirk films before so if you're going to keep on raging on about that don't just assume I am stupid. Also you seem to be under the assumption that just because something is satirical it must be uncaring which is entirely false. The big difference between Sirk and Verhoeven is that Sirk genuinely loves his lead characters and second to satirist I would describe him as a humanist. You are attacking me with false slander because you have nothing to actually back up your argument with. I have already argued my point and I'll just wait for you to do that same without insults. One would assume that someone taking the supposed moral higher ground would refrain from false insults. Finally to bring up that Griffith is such an act of last resort that I am sure even you realize you may have been wrong and just refuse to budge once you've developed an opinion. That movie by the way was built in self promotion and nothing else when it comes to purpose (which I suppose makes the racism worse than if it was entirely genuine).

Here's a good essay on the satire that is found throughout Sirk's career.

Well, to go briefly through the points you've raised, I would still suggest it is as if you have watched a different film altogether... You say that "the white people are so foreign within the film that they take on the role of the Indians" and yet there is a white hero to mirror Taza, Captain Burnett, who takes up a significant amount of screentime. That we haven't been introduced to the female settler before she is murdered at the beginning of the film isn't unusual at all; such scenes of violence are frequently used to kick-start a western plot and in this case also to emphasise just how dastardly the renegade Indians really are. The scene certainly wouldn't have been crowd-pleasing either (unless screening at a sadists' convention). And if Taza were a "a perfectly normal western, but one where the roles are reversed" then the role of the white characters would simply be to threaten and kill, whereas, in fact, the bad guys in the picture are the renegade Indians, not the whites - the worst of whom, the misguided general, apologises and warms to Taza at the end. You say that "Sirk genuinely loves his lead characters", yet if we are to reverse the surface meanings of Taza this means dismissing the lead character as a traitor and a fool.

In short, I simply don't think you've offered a shred of solid anaylsis or evidence in support of your case. Yet the burden of proof lies on you, since you're the one making the radical proposition - that the sub-text of the film stands in diametric opposition to the events of the narrative. So that when we see an Indian killing or beating a woman, the sub-text is "white folks are bad!", when we see Rock Hudson charging heroically to the rescue of the US Cavalry, the subtext is "rise up and kill whitey!", when we see 'the evil Geronimo' portrayed as a cowardly and mean-spirited washed up alcoholic what the film really means to say is: "Geronimo is a great hero of the Native American race!"... Even those who see satire and subversion in Sirk's later work (a debate that has been going on for decades and which is unlikely to be resolved in this thread) wouldn't strive to go that far, and nor would they need to, since none of the work for which Sirk is justifiably known suffers the problems of this B-movie disaster.

No, the fact is that Taza is the third in a series of racist westerns that conforms to the stereotypes prevelent both in the previous episodes of that series and within the American culture of the time. Since you've highlighted nothing that would be unusual in a conventionally racist western of the period, there is nothing to suggest that the film is satirical - and if Sirk's name wasn't on the credits I don't believe we would be having this debate. As one unusually clued-in imdb reviewer points out, the real Taza died of pneumonia two years after his father - which sums it all up really.

I would suggest, again, that you watch Aldrich's Apache for a western of the same period that is genuinely trying (if not always succeeding) to challenge the audience prejudices of the day.

I think the pushback you're getting from your negative Taza reaction has more to do with the strange singling out of this film out of all the westerns featuring red-face indian portrayals as "the most racist film since X"-- I mean, I figure at least 90% of all Hollywood westerns feature a negative portrayal of indians, and while it's fair to find that offensive, going so voraciously after a picture that at least bothers to offer a sympathetic and human treatment of indians as one of the worst examples just seems like you want negative attention via making shocking statements

The cartoon stereotypes of Stagecoach are one thing - and no doubt offensive too - but that a film can go to so much effort to 'understand' a situation and yet draw conclusions that are so dishonest and reactionary is what singles out Taza (and no doubt the other Cochise films) for singular attention.

"Look!" says the film, "If the Indians hadn't arbitrarily killed those poor defenseless white folk then they wouldn't have had to go to the reservation in the first place!... Look! If the Indians would bother to grow their own food like us white folks then all of their problems would go away! Look at Taza - he's got the idea... Now there's an Indian who knows how to behave... He knows how to treat a lady, not like those other savages... Look at how he takes pride in his US army uniform! And he doesn't think twice about informing on the evil Geronimo's war party! And Wowzer!, he'll even ride in triumphantly and fight his own brothers in defense of the gool 'ol US cavalry! I sure was wrong about that Taza - he's a model Indian alright!"

Yep, a good 'ol Uncle Tom redskin who sure know his place, masser.

To appreciate most Hollywood films of the old studio system, which generally take place in a world of unquestioned white privilege, I don't think it makes sense in most cases to use the racial politics underlying the films to judge them as poor on qualitative grounds. And in my view it's misguided to favor westerns in which Indians are not present, as these films sidestep any serious questions about the conditions under which the settler society being depicted came to be placed on Indian lands in the past and tacitly approve of the invisibility of native peoples in the film's present.

Nothing wrote:I would suggest, again, that you watch Aldrich's Apache for a western of the same period that is genuinely trying (if not always succeeding) to challenge the audience prejudices of the day.

"Not always succeeding" doesn't begin to acknowledge the ways in which Apache is in some very basic respects essentially colonialist in its representation of Native Americans -- as essentially as in any other Indian-themed western, at least of all those I'm aware of. Most obviously, the main character is presented as an exotic fetish object, the central visual focus of the film being a nearly naked hero. Because of course Indians displayed no need (practical or otherwise) to cover themselves with clothing in nearly any of these films, as the white settlers did. The only reason they were dressed as much as they were was the Hays Code.
Less open to interpretation, however, is the notion that the Neanderthal-like southwestern Indians in the film have no culture, no relationship to the land, insofar as they have to be shown how to cultivate food by some southeastern natives, who, we are led to believe, had acquired this knowledge from their white neighbors. This, as in virtually all representations of native culture before the 1970s, is a crude undermining of their civilization and humanity, in order to place the settler society in the benevolent role of bestowing civilization to a land full of savages living on the margins of survival in an animalistic state.
I just don't think you can find any westerns coming out of the Hollywood studios (before something like Little Big Man) that escape the problems being discussed here. The people making these films, even if they sincerely believed that they had a positive attitude toward Indian actors and characters, simply didn't have anything like a well-developed sense of the cultural contexts and implications of these portrayals. The forthcoming Treasures 5 set will probably yield some atypical and exceptional cases.

I've been re-viewing more uncertainties and a couple of late arrivals, so:

Day of the Outlaw - There might be a running theme of flawed films I like anyway in this batch. In this case, I find all of the Robert Ryan / Tina Louise palaver completely dispensable, and their scenes together are dead wood. Fortunately, the film itself ends up having no use for this subplot, which means it embodies a pet theme of mine: when shit happens, soap opera falls by the wayside (see also The Tall T). And the grist of the movie, a single-minded (but appealingly multi-faceted) survival story, is taut and imaginatively staged, with an excellent villain in Burl Ives and a great sense of barely-contained chaos. There are a couple of weak studio shots that mar the climax - which otherwise draws great strength from its wintry location shooting.

The Chehchacos - Fine Yukon-made silent film that's remarkable for its big open-air set pieces and even more remarkable for the gay family unit at its centre. It's not as if the two guys sleep together (as far as we know, though it must get cold up north), but the relationship is explicitly coded as 'mother' and 'father', with no suggestion that this is problematic or unacceptable and - even more surprising - no suggestion that either man is in need of or in search of a heterosexual relationship, even though there's an obvious one waiting in the wings in the form of the birth mother of their child.

By the Law - Seeing two snowy westerns in a row made me realise that I had no good reason for excluding this great Kuleshov film, also set in the Yukon during the gold rush. Which is a relief, as this is easy top twenty material for me. Based on a Jack London story, it's extremely tense and claustrophobic - basic plot: five people winter over in a log cabin; one flips out and becomes a murderous psychopath. I have a particular soft spot for the flipping out scene, which is brilliantly staged (including a stomach-churningly symbolic upturned plate of beans) and performs a neat reversal on one of the most annoying cliches of action movies. You know when the hero rescues the damsel in distress from the villain and engages in a fraught, life-and-death hand-to-hand struggle right in front of her, while she just stands there, not even bothering to grab a dropped gun, or chair, or pointed stick to help out. Well, in this film its the woman who leaps on the murderer like a wildcat and wrestles him into submission while the guy stands around paralysed with terror.

Terror in a Texas Town - There are a lot of factors piled up against this film, primarily its preachy civics-lesson narrative and Sterling Hayden's bizarre John Qualen impersonation (which, I must admit, I find so bizarre as to be endearing), but Lewis's deep focus mise-en-scene is consistently arresting and there are some interesting tweaks to the stock situation, such as Sebastian Cabot's awkward transition into respectability and his gunslinger's resentful and contemptuous response to it. Oh, and there's that justifiably legendary showdown at the end, which is just ridiculous enough to be sublime.

In the Land of the War Canoes - I've been hemming and hawing over the eligibility of this, but again, I can't think of any strong arguments against it (since I don't think "no white folks" holds much water as arguments go), and Curtis is the film director who probably did more than anybody to establish the visual language of the Western genre - even though his influence was not primarily as a film director.

And new to me:

Django - Some interesting touches but, as others have noted, not held together very well and not remotely in the same class as The Great Silence or any Leone.

A Bullet for the General - Much more interesting and accomplished, but I find the political allegory ill-fitting and never followed through with plausible psychology. I agree with Sausage that a homoerotic reading papers over a few of those cracks - without some kind of infatuation, Volonte's character's behaviour is never remotely comprehensible - but even that collapses in the final scenes, which I don't think work whichever way you look at them. Ultimately, that incoherence is what's probably going to keep this off my list, though it's still bubbling under and I'm glad it was drawn to my attention.

Keoma - The third film in a British box set, this is a ludicrous mess of a film, filled to the brim with gimmicky effects and tricked out with a bizarre soundtrack of songs that way too literally explain what's supposed to be going on in the characters' heads (and, if I'm not mistaken, seem to have been written according to an earlier draft of the script, so the events in the song lyrics don't always mesh with what's happening, or about to happen, on screen). If you think the concept of the song-track is completely over the top - it is - wait till you hear the execution, which features a woman who sounds like Dagmar Krause crossed with off-her-meds Kate Bush, singing 90% of the score out of her register, and a guy with a death-metal grumbling basso. This whole dimension of the film is hysterical, made all the more so by the banality of the lyrics (along the lines of "Oh, Keoma, your father is dead! Don't you feel sad? But look out! Your brothers are here and they're going to tie you up!"). Fortunately, Castellari refuses to be upstaged by his own score, so he makes a visual stew of every attention-getting technique he's ever seen in a western, along with several of his own invention. It's exhausting, and hardly called-for by the routine storyline, but I couldn't tear my eyes away. I hope I can find a cosy spot for this psychedelic mishmash near the bottom of my list.

Dark Command - I'd never heard much for or against this film, but surely a film made by Raoul Walsh right after The Roaring Twenties and John Wayne and Claire Trevor right after Stagecoach can't be all bad? Well, I thought it was great. It offers a wonderfully relaxed and nuanced performance from Wayne, with nice comic shadings in the first part of the film - an interesting contrast to Stagecoach and a giant leap in technique and accomplishment from The Big Trail. Given the rivalry between Ford and Walsh over Wayne at the time, it's revealing to see that Walsh knew exactly what to do with the actor and his newfound confidence when he took him back under his wing. Walter Pidgeon's villain is also interestingly shaded and even Gabby Hayes gets to transcend comic relief status in his scenes with Wayne. And Marjorie Main definitely deserves a shout out as well for making her tiny role crucial and affecting. As usual with Walsh, there's a sense of bustling life in the backgrounds and a sharp clarity of action in the foreground. This is one of those plain good westerns that tend to get overlooked in exercises like this, but which I'll be saving a place for.

Well Gregory, you've identified the major problem with Apache (the farming theme) although in other regards it is more progressive than previous films, hence my toying with placing it low down on the list (still not certain). It is certainly several leaps and bounds above Taza.

Not sure about the argument that westerns without Indians are just as guilty. I can sort-of see the point on the one hand, but on the other to apply it fairly you'd have to indite EVERY American film without native American characters up until the present day, which seems a little over-zealous really. So I think the alternative is acceptable under the circumstances - to give the benefit of the doubt. This is one of the reasons why I am listing, say, Buchanan Rides Alone whilst sidelining Ride Lonesome (although the latter has other problems beyond its racism).

Re: A Bullet for the General, the political allegory is the point of the show and Chuncho's final Marxist epiphany is the film's greatest moment - It aims to make the audience stand up and applaud and yearn to follow his example. If your own politics are too reactionary to respond then you're unlikely to fully appreciate the film, no... And I fear these reactionary views are widely shared around here too, so it will be interesting to see if this widely-acknowledged classic even makes it onto the list...

I didn't want to have to deal with you again, but that's just insulting. Do you genuinely believe that someone not liking a film you do makes them reactionary? Are you saying with a straight face such a reductive and insulting thing?

Nothing wrote: this widely-acknowledged classic...

Oh, you mean like High Noon? Well, that's a pretty compelling argument.

As for being "reactionary", well, there's no other possible explanation for somebody not liking exactly the same films as Nothing exactly as much as he does, right?

Well, I guess Nothing's preoccupation with "democracy" doesn't extend to allowing people a free vote.

Did he really just say you can't appreciate the film unless you feel compelled to murder someone in cold blood before running off to find dynamite with which to murder people for the crime of not being Marxists?

What am I asking, of course he did. And I'm not the least bit surprised.

In all seriousness Nothing has kind of ruined the movie for me. When he first mentioned I was excited because I like Spaghetti westerns, but his promoting of it in this way has killed off all anticipation I had for it to the extent I never want to see it. The reason why I'm bringing this up is to hint to Nothing that maybe he should reconsider how he promotes his favorite films. Maybe people will like what you're handing them if you don't dip it into castor oil first Nothing.

It's not as though there aren't movies that can bring the audience around to revolutionary zeal, and to violent zeal at that- I think Pontecorvo was successful at it more than once, and the Battle of Chile makes me violently angry- but I don't know that inciting a 'blow them all to hell' nihilistic approach and then claiming anyone who's not on board with that is a reactionary is really much of an argument. Particularly since the whole crux of that kind of propaganda is that it's successful at converting the neutral into zealots- if it only works on people who were ready for a violent revolution in the first place, there isn't much of a goddamn point.

More to the point, does the world really need more extremists with dynamite fixations? And is there really anything reactionary about thinking it doesn't?

Jesus christ... this list is due the 20th, not the 30th! Not that it'd matter: I'm so far behind my kevyip that it's pitiful. When all is said and done and the kevyip is finished, I don't know how well I'll be able to stand behind my list. Far too many films ranking based off vague long-ago memories. Far too many blindspots yet to be filled.

But as the list is winding, and as I haven't been able participate as much as I'd like, I'll have to throw out a few recommendations:

Man of the West - the best?

Heaven's Gate - The best American film of the 1980s... hell, one of the best American films period. The American West as a photography quickly fading.

Ramrod/Day of the Outlaw - I never got around to those Randolph Scott westerns, but these will be ranking high. The former is possibly the most noir of all Western Noirs and certainly the best (sorry, Pursued). the second is just as tough and as austere as Westerns come, already hovering over the precipice of the all-consuming cynicism that would engulf the later Play Dirty, and much of the Revistionist Westerns to come.

Silver Lode - Quite possibly a masterpiece. An as someone who also can't stand the film, let me join dominoharvey in anointing this the Anti-High Noon

Terror in a Texas Town - "Ridiculous enough to be sublime" is a pretty good description. Perhaps the closest Lewis came to the heights of Gun Crazy.

One-Eyed Jacks - Obviously mangled and compromised, and showing the hints that even in its original form, it was indulgent and meandering, it still surprisingly emerges as a great film. It has the right mix of brutality and lyricism that makes it something of the missing link between Boetticher and Peckinpah. This is the sort of butchered, fragmented classic that works despite of itself that many people claim Major Dundee to be.

Django, Shoot... If You Live, Kill! - As sub-genres go, this film is a clean sweep - Spaghetti Western, Acid Western, Marxist Western... and a top-tier example in all three. Guilio Questi claims to have spent the war as an Anti-Fascist partisan, and the film shows it. A bleak, hallucinatory vision of a world torn asunder by greed and power. Possibly my favorite SW behind the Leones and The Great Silence

Bad Company - A 70s Western that might far too easily be overlooked next to the bigger names of the decade. It may be an "anti-Western" commentary on the genre itself, but it works mainly because it keeps everything on a small, thoughtful, funny, slice-of-life scale that makes you think all the "revisionism" is purely incidental... until that last scene pulls everything together.

High-Plains Drifter - Because the Eastwood Westerns don't end with Leone! His entire tetralogy is great, but I think this is one is my favorite.

El Dorado - Far from minor Hawks, this film is worth to be slotted alongside Rio Bravo and Red River.

Mr Sausage wrote:More to the point, does the world really need more extremists with dynamite fixations?

Well, I guess, there surely is need of rebellious role models as long as there are powerful people and oppressive circumstances to be resisted.

But never mind, let me just hint you at two rather new texts on radical Italian westerns in general and Quien Sabe aka 'Bullet for the General' in particular, which have been written by Austin Fisher and can be read on the author's homepage. Btw, his revised PhD on the matter, which has been examined by Frayling, is announced to be published in August.
In the 'Italienist' essay dealing with Quien Sabe, he also shortly comments on the suggestion that the filmmakers of 'Quien Sabe' are depicting a sexual attraction between the two main characters, which seems to have been fleshed out by Howard Hughes in his 2004 publication 'Once upon a time in the Italian West' (see p. 190).

Since we're talking about the general subject- has anyone seen My Name is Nobody? I broadly share Domino's view on comedy westerns, but it's got enough of a pedigree to make me curious anyway, and I haven't been able to find even a mention of it on the board.

I haven't seen that one, but my experience with spaghetti comedies is that they are not funny, but are still entertaining because of how peculiar they are. I haven't seen a great one, but none I have seen lack merit.

knives wrote: Are you saying with a straight face such a reductive and insulting thing?

zedz highlighted the ending as 'incoherent', as 'not working whichever way you look at it', which is patently untrue as the ending functions perfectly from a Marxist perspective - and indeed the entire film hinges upon the epiphany of these final moments. His is an ideological objection and I haven rightly highlighted it as such... Sausage then attempts to back him up by suggesting that Chuncho kills Nino simply for "not being a Marxist" - that he's also a US-government assassin working to undermine a popular revolution in a third world country presumably doesn't factor into it then (and this is something which never happens in real life, as we all know!) Btw, if the thought of writer Franco Solinas' Marxist politics puts you off, you better stay away from The Battle of Algiers, Burn!, Kapo and Salvatore Giuliano as well (and reality in general...)

knives wrote: Oh, you mean like High Noon?

A Bullet for the General / Quien Sabe is THE Zapata Western of note and is one of the most famous and warmly regarded Spaghettis out there (eg. it is also Alex Cox's favourite non-Leone Spaghetti and made regular appearances on Moviedrome on the BBC in the 90s).

Nb. Solinas wrote a second Zapata Western, Tepepa, starring none other than Orson Welles... It looks wonderful actually, potential Top 20 material, and it's up on YouTube in Italian, but unfortunately the Italian DVD (which also has an English audio track) is OOP and npw fetching silly money

Speaking of YouTube, there's also a dreadful, censored p&s transfer of Hellman's China 9, Liberty 37 here, although I I haven't brought myself to watch it yet.

Bad Company sounds interesting.

My Name is Nobody is pretty 'meh', a Leone parody, basically. Leone actually directed a couple of the scenes, but you wouldn't notice.

I don't why this is such a controversial topic... homoeroticism has long been pegged as an element of the Spaghetti Western by followers of the genre. When the inevitable Action list comes along, I sincerely hope that you're not a John Woo fan; we'll all end up with aneurysms.

John Woo films are gay? I've only seen his American work which doesn't highlight this, but it's something I had never even heard of.

I really don't understand why you always think you're the only True Leftist around, Nothing. I would be surprised if anyone here objected to Marxist politics on the face of them, and there are obviously movies with a serious leftist bent that nobody has trouble reading- as we both mentioned, virtually Pontecorvo's entire filmography. To back up the persecution complex, you move goalposts and half quote all over the place- you start with 'if you weren't such a reactionary you would get it' and then claim you were just explaining that the ending worked in a Marxist context (without actually explaining anything), and you ignore that Sausage's comment about non-Marxists referred to the general call to dynamite the shit out of everything and not specifically to Nino.

knives wrote:John Woo films are gay? I've only seen his American work which doesn't highlight this, but it's something I had never even heard of.

Oh, God, yes. I keep expecting Tony Leung and Chow Yun-Fat to make out throughout Hard Boiled. It's far from exclusive to Woo, though, Schwarzenegger's Commando is more homoerotic than most Almodovar movies.

Well Commando I know (seriously what were they thinking with that guy as the villain). It's just general action movie homoeroticism then? That's a tad disappointing. I thought he was referring to Miike type emphasis.

Not to get too far off base, but Woo's homoeroticism is definitely distinctive- it's more of an extremely close male bonding (without necessarily being directly based on violence) than the fighting-as-sublimated-fucking thing of Commando and its ilk.

matrixschmatrix wrote:I would be surprised if anyone here objected to Marxist politics on the face of them

:-$ Sausage, zedz...

matrixschmatrix wrote:there are obviously movies with a serious leftist bent that nobody has trouble reading- as we both mentioned, virtually Pontecorvo's entire filmography.

And yet Pontecorvo's three most celebrated titles were also written by Solinas (a point you all seem desparate to ignore)... Basically, they'll go along with the Pontecorvo titles because he's an esbalished 'auteur' and they don't want to find themselves out on a limb.