Get Three Coffins Ready -- The Western Thread

[Marc]

And after Unforgiven, for a good laugh: The Wild Bunch.



Oh no, sorry, I mean Maverick!
With Mel Gibson, James Garner, Jodie Foster, James Coburn et al.

http://www.youtube.com/v/ObDecyoLHBo

[DavidW]

Rio Bravo (my son's favorite, as well)
High Plains Drifter (love the "look" of this one)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Tombstone

Great list Bill!  Rio Bravo is great, High Plains Drifter is my favorite Eastwood western, and the last two are golden, and also provided me with two of my favorite lines:

"I'm your huckleberry"
and "you just keep thinking Butch, that's what you're good at it."

[eyeresist]

The weirdest of them all : El Topo.

[ASIN]B000NY1E8U[/ASIN]

[DavidRoss]

The weirdest of them all : El Topo.

Just discovered this thread.  How nice to see so many who enjoy good Westerns.  I would have told Bill about it if he hadn't turned up already. ;^)

El Topo has lost some of its power over the years.  I'm surprised to see it mentioned, and doubly surprised by whom.  You get a thumbs up from me for that, El Resisto!

Another allegorical Western with a small cult following is Robert Downey's Greaser's Palace, starring photographer Diane Arbus's ex, Allan, the fashion photographer turned actor, better known for playing the sympathetic shrink, Sidney Friedman, on M*A*S*H, a recurring character. 

[eyeresist]

El Topo has lost some of its power over the years.  I'm surprised to see it mentioned, and doubly surprised by whom.  You get a thumbs up from me for that, El Resisto!

I like the nickname, thanks! Not sure why you're surprised I mentioned it - I like things that are dark and weird, and Jodorowsky is plenty weird. I do think El Topo is slightly overrated due to its initial historical impact - I'd say The Holy Mountain is a much stronger film.

[david johnson]

i tend to regard westerns as the cowboy flicks/tv i saw as a kid.
some of the ones we've mentioned seem to me to be more like stories that occur in that time period rather than 'westerns'.
doesn't matter much, though.  i like several of these movies!

[Sergeant Rock]

Some of my favorite Westerns haven't been mentioned.

Cat Ballou (1965) starring Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin.



The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), a Sam Peckinpah film, starring Jason Robards and Stella Stevens. Was this the first Western with extensive nudity? It had framing bath scenes: she washes him at the beginning of the film; he washes her at the end.



Dead Man (1995) a film by Jim Jarmusch, starring Johnny Depp who plays, not a gunslinger, not a sheriff, not a rancher, but an accountant    and featuring an Indian obsessed with the poet William Blake and the Western's first transvestite, an extremely creepy and funny Iggy Pop.





My favorite Duke Western is The Train Robbers (1973) with Ann-Margret. Love the twist ending where the Western's moral universe is turned upside down 





Being an old cavalry trooper, I also love the John Ford/John Wayne cavalry trilogy: Fort Apache (1948), She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950).



But my alltime favorite Western is




Sarge

[DavidW]

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was recently on tcm but I didn't have room on my dvr for it.

Good list Sarge, especially those John Wayne movies.  I'll have to watch the ones I haven't seen.

[Grazioso]

Some of my favorite westerns haven't been mentioned.

Dead Man (1995) a film by Jim Jarmusch, starring Johnny Depp who plays, not a gunslinger, not a sheriff, not a rancher, but an accountant    and featuring an Indian obsessed with the poet William Blake and the western's first transvestite, an extremely creepy and funny Iggy Pop.

Mentioned several times, actually It's definitely a weird one that will upset stick-in-the-mud purists, but if you're open-minded towards what the genre can be, it's an interesting film. It has Mitchum in one of his last roles, too, so +1

Just discovered this thread.  How nice to see so many who enjoy good Westerns.  I would have told Bill about it if he hadn't turned up already. ;^)

I think Hollywood is missing something here. Westerns are pretty rare these days, but there's obviously still interest. (Hollywood exec taking notes: "20,000 CGI Apaches...Lindsay Lohan as prostitute with heart of gold...Jessica Alba as Governer's prim New England wife--start scouting for skinny-dipping locations...Vin Diesel for stage coach race along edge of Grand Canyon...can we fit in a vampire romance...is Michael Bay free?")

I wonder if part of the waning of Western popularity might have been the big cultural shifts of the 60's that rendered some of the traditional conservatism and moral/political themes of the Western less widely appealing?

[snyprrr]

Phil Hardy The Encyclopedia of Westerns anyone?

[Sergeant Rock]

Mentioned several times, actually

Indeed you did mention Dead Man. That'll teach me to skim through lists. Nice to see Quigley mentioned. I enjoy watching that (especially enjoy Laura San Giacomo). Mrs. Rock likes it for a rather different actor 

Sarge

[Sergeant Rock]

I wonder if part of the waning of Western popularity might have been the big cultural shifts of the 60's that rendered some of the traditional conservatism and moral/political themes of the Western less widely appealing?

Could be. Most of my favorite Westerns were made in the 60s and beyond and could be more correctly called anti-Westerns (I'd group Sergio Leone's films in that category too). Even The Train Robbers doesn't end the way a John Wayne film should. The cynical films, the satires, the parodies killed the traditional Western. There are exceptions of course: the magnificent Lonesome Dove, for example.

Edit: Just thought of another great film that changed the way we thought about the Western...and I can't believe no one's mentioned it yet: Little Big Man. Impossible to imagine Dustin Hoffman being the hero of a 40s, 50s Western 

Sarge

[DavidW]

The cynical films, the satires, the parodies killed the traditional Western. There are exceptions of course: the magnificent Lonesome Dove, for example.

I thought I was the only one that felt that way on this forum!   I've seen as many if not more anti-westerns on this thread as I have the stuff I like.

[Holden]

I love Westerns. To me there is one that stands out above them all...

I am in total agreement - this is an absolute classic and I think it's about 14 minutes into the film before the opening credits roll yet the tension created is simply amazing.

One writer you might like to investigate who writes historically accurate westerns is Loren D Estleman and I'd particularly recommend both "The Adventures of Johnny Vermilion" and "Billy Gashade". There are others as well and all are well written. Estleman also embraces other genres including detective fiction and his writing is always interesting.

[TheGSMoeller]

I am in total agreement - this is an absolute classic and I think it's about 14 minutes into the film before the opening credits roll yet the tension created is simply amazing.

One writer you might like to investigate who writes historically accurate westerns is Loren D Estleman and I'd particularly recommend both "The Adventures of Johnny Vermilion" and "Billy Gashade". There are others as well and all are well written. Estleman also embraces other genres including detective fiction and his writing is always interesting.

I am always in awe of the patience that Leone uses in many of the scenes, and the opening scene is mesmerizing.

http://www.youtube.com/v/VDUbBMe1Nbg&feature=related

Thanks Holden! I'll checkout Estleman's writings.

[DavidRoss]

I wonder if part of the waning of Western popularity might have been the big cultural shifts of the 60's that rendered some of the traditional conservatism and moral/political themes of the Western less widely appealing?

Yep--many of the traditional Western themes and subtexts (genocide, imperialist expansion, masculine primacy) were more than a little embarrassing and guilt-provoking during the cultural revolution of the '60s and America's tragic misadventure in Vietnam.  After a spate of revisionist Westerns like Cheyenne Autumn and The Wild Bunch and Little Big Man, even The Shootist--and McCabe & Mrs. Miller (let's not forget that one!)--it virtually died as a traditional genre, though it's death seems to have rekindled an interest in the contemporary West:  Rancho Deluxe and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot come quickly to mind.

[Grazioso]

Yep--many of the traditional Western themes and subtexts (genocide, imperialist expansion, masculine primacy) were more than a little embarrassing and guilt-provoking during the cultural revolution of the '60s and America's tragic misadventure in Vietnam.  After a spate of revisionist Westerns like Cheyenne Autumn and The Wild Bunch and Little Big Man, even The Shootist--and McCabe & Mrs. Miller (let's not forget that one!)--it virtually died as a traditional genre, though it's death seems to have rekindled an interest in the contemporary West:  Rancho Deluxe and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot come quickly to mind.

The values implicit in the classic Westerns certainly seem to embody traditional American cultural values--and therefore stand at odds with what developed from the 60's onward.

For example, the traditional villain's evil ways aren't typically explained or justified, nor is there any attempt to reform him, beyond a pro forma offer for him to surrender. He is an expression of original sin and must be fought, not reasoned or parleyed with. Nowadays the villain wouldn't be shot; he'd appear on Dr. Phil to examine his feelings, and pundits would decry his socioeconomic misfortunes.

The inefficacy, cowardice, or corruption of law and authority in inchoate frontier societies is another traditional theme--and what could be more American than a mistrust of authority?--but in the past, the hero would step in and bring peace at the end of a gun. Force was necessary, but applied according to a personal sense of honor and justice. Later, we get the anti-heroes who are little different than the villains.

Of course, the best Westerns have always interrogated such tropes, with films like The Searchers featuring a "hero" who is racist and obsessive.

[eyeresist]

Yep--many of the traditional Western themes and subtexts (genocide, imperialist expansion, masculine primacy) were more than a little embarrassing and guilt-provoking during the cultural revolution of the '60s and America's tragic misadventure in Vietnam.

It's probably important to differentiate here - genocide was rarely a "theme" of the classic western!

I think the fundamental appeal of the western is quite primal - literally. Characters exist in a landscape whose starkness is often almost Brechtian, and the plots are about conflicting wills ("will" in the Nietschean sense) much more than they are about social minutiae or complex emotions. You could almost set these stories in Mesopotamia 5000 BC - except for the presence of the gun, the great "equalizer". Thanks to the gun, the importance of physical power is diminished. It really is about will - the man who thinks, the man who acts, the man who persists, will triumph.

I would say that imperialism was of little importance to the classic western beyond setting the scene for a drama which was essentially ahistorical. OTOH, the roles of the sexes were very important to the classic genre. The will mentioned above is definitely masculine, and the man who loses the battle of wills is not just defeated but unmanned. For women of course the opposite is true: a feisty woman may be stimulating, even admirable, but if she is not tamed by the final reel she will be relegated to the role of freak. I'd say the new ideas of the sexual revolution were more important to the decline of the western than new notions of anti-imperialism, which could be accomodated with the pre-existing notion of the "noble savage". The fundamentally gentle man and uncompromisingly strong woman had no place in the iconography of the western, except for the purposes of parody.

[Grazioso]

Watched this very interesting film:



A Western, perhaps, but in mood and pacing, it's closer in feel to something like King Lear (or Ran): a tragic character study that slowly and inexorably leads towards a desolate, ugly, banal ending.

James, played by Pitt, is (in)famous throughout America for his criminal exploits and has been glamorized into a star of cheap paperback novels. In the waning days of his career, he's sought out by the 19-year-old Robert Ford, who grew up idolizing the man and memorizing every little detail of his hero that he could find in newspapers or fiction. The question then becomes: does Ford merely want to join up with and emulate James--or does he fundamentally want to be James?

This is one of the more intriguing and complex on-screen relationships, and Casey Affleck's performance as Ford is finely detailed--Pitt is no slouch, either. It's a relationship rife for interpretation, too, with its hints of homosexual desire, Oedipal love/jealousy/fear towards a father figure, a Judas-like betrayal...

While the plotting and pacing could have been tighter, this is a smart investigation of hero-worship and the shady meeting point of fame/infamy/celebrity/myth.

[Grazioso]

It's probably important to differentiate here - genocide was rarely a "theme" of the classic western!

True. Many of the classic Westerns deal with Indians tangentially, if at all. They were often more notable by their absence, having already been pushed out of the picture (pun intended) by the whites that that films focus on.

I think the fundamental appeal of the western is quite primal - literally. Characters exist in a landscape whose starkness is often almost Brechtian, and the plots are about conflicting wills ("will" in the Nietschean sense) much more than they are about social minutiae or complex emotions. You could almost set these stories in Mesopotamia 5000 BC - except for the presence of the gun, the great "equalizer". Thanks to the gun, the importance of physical power is diminished. It really is about will - the man who thinks, the man who acts, the man who persists, will triumph.

It is a quintessential "guys' genre" in that regard, related very much in spirit to the modern action films of the last few decades, in which the hero tests himself against the villain: Die Hard, Cliffhanger, Under Siege, etc. and perhaps the comic book hero vs. villain.