Vintage Trailer of the Week 53

I've written here before about how I adore Elmore Leonard's Western writing; I think its his best material. Not nearly as dialogue-led as his Crime fiction - altough the dialogue is still tough and witty - his Western books and stories showcase his exceptional descriptive prose, fine storytelling and unmatched facility for creating brilliant villains and thoroughly impressive, capable heroes. My favourite of his Western books is Hombre, which was made into a terrific and seriously underrated film by director Martin Ritt in 1967.

Ritt and Newman were habitual collaborators at that time, with Hombre standing as their sixth - and last - film together (the most famous and celebrated of that series is probably the fabulous Hud (1963)). Ritt was a successful director for almost three decades but his reputation had declined since his death in 1990, perhaps because of the worthy, stolid nature of some of his more high-profile late work, particularly the likes of
The Front (1976) and Norma-Rae (1979) and the awkward stiffness of some of his earlier literary adaptations, such as The Sound and the Fury (1959) and the Newman co-starring Hemingways Adventures of a Young Man (1962). In this, he reminds me of Richard Brooks, a peer of his who liked risky literary adaptations (including films of Lord Jim, In Cold Blood, and The Brothers Karamazov) but whose gifts as a storyteller and technical expertise mean that his most lasting work is the genre material he occasionally lowered himself to, such as the Westerns The Professionals (1966) and Bite the Bullet (1975).

Similarly, Ritt's genre films are his most satisfying work. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1965) is a brilliantly dour, grim LeCarre adaptation, and the best of his social issue films is the one with genre elements: labour dispute drama The Molly Maguires (1970) with its gripping undercover plot. But Hombre is a purer genre film and a tense, exciting, well-mounted cinematic experience all round. It has the classy cast and James Wong Howe photography of an Oscar contender, and a fine Newman performance at its centre too. Its one of the best Leonard adaptations - certainly the best version of one of his Westerns - which alone should make it compulsive viewing...

2000-10 In Westerns - The Missing

Every single time a new Western gets released, I read a review or profile piece somewhere which contains this statement: The Western is Dead.
Well, to massively oversimplify, and speaking relatively and in purely commercial terms, this may be true. In the 1930s and 40s, the Western genre was Hollywood's staple diet, as the studios churned out a relentless stream of cheap and cheerful programmers, B-features and serials. By the 1950s, the industry had changed and Westerns were less popular. They had also gone more mainstream and attracted big budgets, big directors and big stars. Back then, a lot of Westerns still got made by Hollywood. This continued into the 1960s, when the revisionism of many of the Italian Westerns reinvigorated the genre. They also came close to burying it, them and the cultural change which gripped the Western world in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era. Who could buy the old black hat white hat conflicts of the Classical Western in a world of napalm and riot police killing students in campus protests? The Western survived by becoming even more revisionist and cynical. There was also the ubiquity of the genre in Western (more specifically American) culture throughout the 50s and 60s. Not just in cinema but on television, in Dime novels, in comic books - this was a played out genre, it seemed. By the end of the 1970s, the genre had become marginalised. One - or perhaps two - Hollywood Westerns were made a year, and they generally had little commercial impact unless they were made by and starring Clint Eastwood. This state of affairs has continued, more or less, to the present day, with the occasional nostalgic Western enjoying some success (Silverado or Tombstone, for instance), and the odd success for a romp in Western clothing (Maverick) or a stately, serious, Oscar-bait Western (Dances With Wolves). But Westerns, by and large, are no longer a major commercial genre.

But this is a genre which will not die. It is too rich, too flexible, too classically pleasurable. Any kind of story you want to tell, you can tell it as a Western. And Westerns are made for cinema - those landscapes, the spectacle, the simple drama of the conflicts and themes. The 00s were, against the odds, a great decade for Westerns. I say this without even considering the many sub-genres that thrived during the decade: the Modern Western (Brokeback Mountain, No Country For Old Men, even There Will Be Blood), the Asian Western (good, bad & Weird, django sugiaki) and the Tarantino Western-appropriation (Kill Bill I & II, Inglourious Basterds). No, the Western itself, about the American frontier and law and order, filled with unmistakable iconography - it too enjoyed a marvellous decade.
And so, the first of a series, hopefully:




The Missing
Ron Howard's best film (by far) is sort of a sidelong remake of The Searchers. Sometimes it feels like all movies are remakes of The Searchers. The premise of John Ford's adaptation of Alan LeMay's novel has acquired enough mythic weight - through repetition, perhaps, or just through the power of its purity and simplicity to have transformed into something of a generic staple - a base-myth, not unlike the gunfighter-cleans-up-town plot familiar from Shane and a hundred other films. The Movie Brat generation of the New American cinema of the 1970s certainly churned out multiple takes on the material, including Star Wars, Hardcore, and Taxi Driver. All of these films focus on a man in search of a young woman who he needs to rescue and/or redeem. Scorsese makes the reference most obvious by naming Harvey Keitel's villainous pimp "Scar" and giving him the long hair of an Indian Brave, but Lucas, too, steals some images and emotions outright from Ford. The most obvious is the scene where Luke Skywalker returns to his Tattooine farm to discover it raided and destroyed by Imperial Forces. Lucas returned to The Searchers with the Tattooine sequences of Attack of the Clones, where even the framing is taken directly from Ford.

Howard's film is a more literal remake, its plot following the fortunes of a Frontier widow who returns to her farm one day to find it raided by a band of Indians, who have abducted her teenage daughter and tortured and murdered her farmhand lover. She sets off in pursuit, joined by her recently arrived prodigal Father, who appears to have gone native as an Indian himself.
Thomas Eidson's source novel is a taut b-western written with a more modern sensibility and voice, which means it ascribes motivations, gestures towards themes and its prose aims at some poetic lyricism. But the characterisation and iconography are firmly rooted in the classic Western of the 40s and 50s.

Howard's adaptation of the novel is dark - so dark its hard to believe that Howard directed it - startlingly violent and features a strong, classy cast headed by Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones. Jones in particular is fabulous, and he was born to act in Westerns, seeming as at home in that world as any actor since Walter Brennan. He has something weathered and elemental about him, and that Texan presence seems to suit these landscapes. As does the air of melancholy he lends to his character, a man bowed by regret and struggling to make amends. The plot chiefly concerns the long pursuit of father and daughter of the missing girl and climaxes in the battle to reclaim and keep her. This allows Howard to give us a short tour of the West, and so we get to see Val Kilmer in a brief, somewhat distracting cameo as a Cavalry Officer, among other notable sights.

Like Eidson's book, The Missing is essentially a classical pulp piece, here a b-movie with the production values and gloss of a big modern studio picture, bearing the obvious influence of the revisionist Westerns of the last two decades. This means that while it sometimes feels a little slight, its a sensually pleasurable watch, due in part to Salvatore Totino's beautiful phtography. Some of its other virtues are a vivid portrayl of the frontier world it portrays, tough action sequences and an emotionally effecting character relationship at its centre. Howard, ever the competent craftsman, makes it as gripping as a modern thriller, and its pacing is never as deliberate as was once mandatory in the Western genre. What it brings to the genre are the strong female lead - Blanchett plays her heroine as a tough, calloused woman who hides her femininity from the tough world she exists in. It was made some years after the brief wave of Female Westerns which included the likes of Bad Girls, The Quick & the Dead and The Ballad of Little Jo, and it benefits from the distance. Here the feminist reading of the genre has been internalised and is significantly less didactic than in some of those films.



Another element which has developed during the revisionist era is the treatment of Indian Mysticism. While its often celebrated for its more New Age, Humanist qualities - this tendency unsurprisingly originating in the psychedelic era of the late 60s - here it is unequivocally a black magic. The villain is an Indian Witch Doctor with a Jonah Hex-style facial disfigurement and a way with powder, potion and rattlesnake, played by Eric Schweig (Uncas from Mann's The Last of the Mohicans). He is a great Western bad guy - terrifying, mysterious, unpredictable. He is also perhaps the most arresting and unusual part of Howard's film, which is a good if never spectacular modern Western. Its failure - both commercial and critical - was disappointing if unsurprising. It is a rare Western that makes a splash at the Box Office in today's cinematic climate, and The Missing is not such a film.

Into the Western

Some creative talent was just made to make Westerns. Walter Hill, say. Tommy Lee Jones. Viggo Mortenson. But they all know it, you can see it in their choice of material. Others aren't quite there yet. Tom Jane. He desperately needs to play a decent cowpoke with a fast draw and a bloody past in a modest modern Western. I feel its his destiny. Michael Madsen. He did it in Blueberry, but nobody saw that, and got close in Kill Bill to playing the shit-eating bad guy he looks and talks like, but not quite close enough for my liking. Javier Bardem, surely born to play a Mexican bandido? He would imbue such a stock figure with depth and humanity. Salma Hayek. As a whore in some border town.

And then theres Marco Beltrami. Hes a soundtrack Composer, responsible for a dozen forgettable Scores for action and genre movies. Remember the Hellboy score? No, me neither. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines? Nope, but I'm presuming it ripped off the original theme Bigtime. Live Free or Die Hard? Did that one sound like Michael Kamen's original? I, Robot? Sorry, I'm drawing a complete and utter blank.

But put Beltrami on a Western, and its a different story. Put Beltrami on a Western, and he'll net himself an Oscar nomination.
Maybe its the Morricone factor. Just as some composers seem to feel the need to go all Bernard Hermann whenever they write a score for anything remotely Hitchcockian, many young composers embrace their inner Morricone as soon as men in hats ride by on horses on screen. Out come the surf guitars, the unorthodox choral passages, the eccentric rhythms.
On his score for 3:10 to Yuma, Beltrami is guilty of all this. But he does it all so well. And he writes some great melodies to twist the stylistics around, which is always key. The main theme, a swooningly romantic passage, is lovely and sounds classically Western but also inescapably modern.

This is because Beltrami puts his own stamp on these familiar elements. He modernises where he can - there are synthesisers and samples alongside the electric guitar and orchestra and mandolin. The score sounds like a score for a Western, but could also belong to a modern action film in its propulsive sense of forward momentum, in its constant tension.
Here is the closing theme, the best showcase of that melody:



And this, the very Morricone Bible Study:



3:10 to Yuma is as Classical a Western as Hollywood can make these days, devoted only to telling its story without much in the way of subtext or genre revision in mind, and so the strained romanticism of Beltrami's score is a good fit. His other prominent work on a Western, for Tommy Lee Jones' fantastic The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a lot stranger and more experimental, which suits the material. At heart it contains an unmistakeably Western theme, picked out on guitar, but Beltrami surrounds it with strange synth noise, echoes and a jerking percussion which make it thoroughly modern. There are also haunting quivers of what sound like Native American instruments underneath the main melody, which is lovely in itself:



Beltrami seems to be splitting his career cleverly at the moment, working on big genre movies (like the upcoming sci-fi actioner Repo Men and Knowing) and also on projects for quality directors, such as Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker and Bertrand Tavernier's In the Electric Mist. However, there are no Westerns on his slate at the moment, which is a damn shame.

Novelist George Pelecanos loves Westerns. He refers to them in his books - one of his recurring heroes, PI Derek Strange, is a Western nut and even listens to Soundtrack cds at his desk ( I bet he loves Beltrami) - and writes reviews and articles about them on his website and in online and print media. He wrote a great piece for Sight & Sound a few years back in which he discussed Elmore Leonard adaptations, including a couple of Westerns (he praised the unjustly underloved Valdez Is Coming) and I've read his paeans to Classic Western Novels like Oakley Hall's Warlock and Charles Portis' True Grit. He even contributed this List of 10 Best Westerns to Read for Amazon and this one of his favourite Western movies to the Rumpus. So he knows the genre.

His own books are basically Urban Westerns, in a sense. He tells tales of Men in conflict, of law and order, full of moral quandaries and loyalty and violence and blood, of honour and revenge, and always with an extraordinarily vivid sense of place. He has written several period books - altough only The Big Blowdown is set in a period far removed from his own experience - and recently worked as a writer on HBO's The Pacific, set during WW2. But he needs to write a Western. His crime writing has become somewhat repetitive in its setting, characterisation and concerns, and a change of focus would freshen up his approach, I think. A screenplay would be good, but I really want to see Pelecanos try his hand at an Elmore Leonard-style Western novel; taut, spare and gripping the way Leonard used to do it. Pelecanos is more than capable.

A few years ago I would have said I fervently wanted Quentin Tarantino to direct a Western. Now, post-Kill Bill; not so much. But I would love to see Michael Mann on a western. Or Terence Malick. Carlos Regaydas. Scorsese or Soderbergh. Peter Weir. Many more...