Western Views

Corrie and I were hanging out the other night, perusing our few local free channels on the tube, and came across an old western, one that looked pretty good, and pretty quick I could tell which one it was: Yul Brenner and Steve McQueen were recruiting a super-young Jimmy Coburn to be on their team.

Ooh! It's the "Seven Samurai" remake, "The Magnificent Seven":

I hadn't seen it before, and it being late on a Friday, we decided to keep an eye on it until a commercial break.

It turns out it was on one of our PBS channels, and we watched probably the last hour of it, interruption free.

I'd forgotten how Russkie Yul Brenner looks, and the Toshiro Mifune character---the young, hot-head seventh from the title---is a dude named Horst in real life, a Kraut if ever there were one.

Anywho, the ending spawned a conversation about the ending of the Wild Bunch, the more fatalistic look at the end of the "wild west era."

Kurosawa is influenced by American westerns, makes samurai films like "Seven Samurai" and "Yojimbo" that are essentially Japanese westerns, and these films in turn influence American westerns. "Magnificent Seven" and "A Fistful of Dollars" (as well as the Bruce Willis prohibition-era vehicle "Last Man Standing") are direct remakes, respectively.

Magnificent Seven seems like the connection of the earlier, John Wayne-era westerns with the Peckinpah-era blood-letting westerns, mostly starring Clint Eastwood.

That's when I remembered I hadn't ever seen Eastwood's "Unforgiven."

I was under the impression that this was a different storyline. Or different and novel plotlines. Or something.

I found a list calling itself the "30 Greatest Westerns" online, and was disappointed at best. "Unforgiven" was ranked quite high, and so we stuck it in the instant queue and trudged it out later that weekend.

At this point I'm not sure what my previous misconception about it was...maybe I thought Clint's Will Munney was, like, a librarian or professor or in someway not really connected to the "cowboy life."

Nope. I guess Eastwood held onto the script for a decade until he felt he was old enough to star in it.

I thought the opening and closing silent prologue and epilogue were hackish, but thought the bumbling Will Munney was a pretty decent frontier-era doofus. That worked well. This guy was so crazy and mean that he inspired what?

I thought some scenes went on and on and on, past the point of they were trying to prove, but I did like the chilling conversation between Morgan Freeman's Ned and Eastwood's Will that went something like this:

"Remember [some character I can't remember]?"

"You shouldn't waste time thinking about him."

"His teeth were blown through the back of his head." (Silence) "In the morning I couldn't remember what reason I had for doing that." (Silence) "I get to thinking about him sometimes."

"You shouldn't waste time thinking about him."

Those little terrifying and heartbreaking moments made the movie for me.

I didn't realize it's essentially the same as most other Eastwood westerns, only made from the perspective of age, wisdom and regret. Gene Hackman plays "Gene Hackman the Badguy", and his bullying scenes are what he does well. Even when they drag on. I guess the whores coming up with the bounty money is novel; I found it striking no one ever uses the N-word or anything in that vein; my favorite line may be Eastwood telling that kid, "Well, you sure killed the hell out of that guy."

The end was pretty satisfying.

But I wouldn't rank it ahead of plenty of the movies of which it was ranked ahead.

The ending of "The Wild Bunch" is like crossing Unforgiven's with The Magnificent Seven and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid's.

I watched the ending of that one when I was laid up on the couch when I heard news that Ernest Borgnine had died. The first time I saw the movie was in high school when I went on a "classic" movie watching bender. Still one of my favorites, and the ending definitely doesn't fuck around:

These conversations Corrie and I were having over the course of this specific weekend led me to reflect a little on other westerns I had really enjoyed growing up. None of them starred either Jimmy Stewart or the Duke. That probably says more about me and my age group and our visual sensibilities than it does the quality of those films.

I loved "Silverado" as a kid, and doesn't follow the same story arc that many of the Eastwood westerns follow, the same ones as Seven Samurai and it's copies...

Eh...maybe it does follow the same arc...my memory is fuzzy.

Are these all the same movie?

I saw "Tombstone" in the theater on a movie-hopping afternoon and loved it ever since. Even as a young person I tried to understand why it was so much better received than Kevin Costner's Wyatt Earp from that same time period. Maybe because of the laser focus of Tombstone, Val Kilmer, and a running time under three hours.

I remember the "shootout" scene at the OK Corral happens mostly by accident, and it wasn't until later in the movie that I learned this was the famous shootout from the OK Corral that's been burned into our collective consciousness, and it made me love the movie even more---it was an accident and downplayed and acted as a precursor.

More recently there was the movie-for-grown-ups that was also a western starring Brad Pitt as Jesse James:

I read about it while we lived in New York. It was well received by critic but not well attended by audiences, and I never saw it. A year later in Texas I found the DVD in a dollar bin (or some facsimile thereof) and bought it. If it sucked, whatever.

I really liked it. It was mostly plodding, but deliberate. Jesse James isn't the heroic figure Rob Lowe played in the "Frank and Jesse" HBO movie upon which I've based my entire knowledge of the crew. Brad Pitt plays him probably how he would had been: a violent and abusive asshole, damaged by many awful things that happened to most people back in those days. Casey Affleck is also pretty good.

One reason this movie surfaced is because of a recent conversation with Auntie Peg and Uncle Dan, two film buffs whose opinions I respect and seek. They hated it. I tried to quickly rattle off the things I liked about it, but was too slow, and pretty much the subject was changed without me able to make my case.

And I don't even know what that case would be. I posted about back in 2010, but still...

And the Rambler Award goes to...!

What're your favorite westerns?