Some days it just doesn’t pay to get outta bed. First, the news broke this morning that Ridley Scott is jumping aboard the sequel/reboot train once again with a new Blade Runner movie which, let’s face it, is basically a terrible idea and completely unnecessary.

Now word comes that his brother Tony is prepping a reboot of Sam Peckinpah’s western classic The Wild Bunch. WTF? Sorry Tony, but that’s about as stupid an idea as rebooting or making a sequel to Blade Runner. Oh, wait. . .

Instead of mining classic films looking for good ideas you obviously can’t come up with yourself, how about finding some smart writers to come up with some ideas for you? I’m sure you can find one or two talented writers in all of Hollywood.

If you’re having trouble, I’ll get some friends of mine to send you over some scripts. Really, it’s no trouble. In the meantime, stick to making ridiculous movies about trains that won’t stop or trains that get taken over by terrorists or, well, you get the idea.

Please, leave the actual thinking to others. It’s painfully obvious you’re not capable of doing any yourself.

Oh, on another note, nobody plays baseball in the rain. It’s just stupid.

This week’s pick is a unique look at behind the lines action during the North African campaign in the early days of World War II. Zoltan Korda directs the 1943 Columbia Pictures release of Sahara, a morale booster of a film which was based on a 1936 Soviet film called The Thirteen.

The film stars Humphrey Bogart as the tough and grizzled Sergeant Joe Gunn who is in command of an American tank, which was apart of a small American task force which was sent to get combat experience, and to help the British Eighth Army turn back the famed German Africa Corp during the Western Desert Campaign in June 1942. This occurred just five months before American ground troops landed in North Africa to help turn the tide of the war. The film is dedicated to the American IV Armored Corp which assisted in the technical aspects of the film.

Rounding out the cast of Allied soldiers and the Axis are Dan Duryea (Jimmy Doyle, An American radio operator for the tank), Bruce Bennett (‘Waco’ Hoyt, Tank Driver), Richard Nugent (Captain Jason Halliday, Royal Army Medical Corp), Lloyd Bridges (Fred Clarkson), Patrick O’ Moore (Osmond ‘Ozzie’ Bates), Guy Kingsford (Peter Stegman), Carl Harbord (Marty Williams), Louis Mercier (Jean ‘Frenchie’ Leroux, a Free French soldier fighting with the British forces), Rex Ingram (Sgt. Major Tambul, a Sudanese soldier and desert guide).

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The moment I started up this crazy column, people have been asking me when I would write up The Wild Bunch.  It’s not my intention to snub Sam Peckinpah (though he has been poorly represented here) at all. When I started this column, it was meant to inspire discussion of older films, and encourage people to seek out classics they hadn’t seen.  With online streaming, it’s easier to do than ever, and I tried to focus on films that were on Netflix or Hulu because the format removed any excuses you had not to watch The Searchers or Stagecoach.

The past few installments haven’t been on Netflix Instant due to the luck of the draw — if The Great Silence or Hannie Caulder arrives in the mail, how can I not write it up? — and time constraints. One of the reasons I had put off The Wild Bunch was that I was hoping it, like The Searchers, Stagecoach, and much of Sergio Leone, would pop up on Instant Watch.  But it hasn’t.  Instead, it played on TCM.  A more savvy writer may have timed this piece to go up prior to its airing.  Oh well.  Chances are, this is a film you’ve seen. But it’s always a film worth talking about.

The Wild Bunch is a significant Western, obviously. It’s the first American western to get as down, dirty, and violent as they had in Italy.  (Vera Cruz paved the way though, remember?)  Sergio Leone considered Sam Peckinpah his only rival in the genre. That said, it’s not one of my favorites — I prefer a cool flip of the serape to scorpions being eaten alive, because I like my cathartic violence to be a little more stylish. But that’s just me.

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Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah painted some bleak and cynical portraits of the West. They gun down children, show the futility of civil war, pile corpses in wagons, and survive by whatever bloody means they have to.   It’s my humble opinion that Sergio Corbucci might make them both look like Walt Disney with The Great Silence.  (PG-13 Disney, mind you ….)

The plot of Silence is typical spaghetti – mysterious gunslinger rides into corrupt town, aims to clean it with bullets, rival bounty hunters get in his way – but is far more hellish.  Corbucci once again makes a greater use of landscape and weather than most Westerns do (Django was one of the few that embraced mud and dank, Silence is the rare one that replaces the bleakness of the desert with the inhospitable winter). But there’s no thrill of the wild here.

Leone took a certain glee in painting his fictitious “age of the bounty hunters”, and Corbucci embraced that spirit in Django, but here he creates a West of punishment and horror. It feels more like Purgatory than faux-history.  There’s no world outside of his Snow Hill. Characters ride in and out of it, but they don’t seem to go anywhere or have any awareness of a world outside their town.   There’s no greater plan for civilization – at one point the newly appointed sheriff speaks grandly of eliminating the bounty hunter in favor of law, order, and peace.  Everyone looks at him as though he’s speaking Greek.

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The Western genre has plenty of subgenres. There’s deconstructionist Westerns, post apocalyptic Westerns, spaghetti Westerns, classic Westerns, and so on. I’ve found you can also split the entire genres into two character categories — the young gunfighter, or the aging lawman / gunfighter.   It seems to me that you don’t see a lot of the latter in the heydays of the classic Western — the 1940s and ’50s — but as the stalwarts of the era aged, we started seeing more elegiac  tales come into vogue.

While John Wayne and Gary Cooper still maintained their crackling or saintly demeanor in movies like The Train Robbers or Vera Cruz, the stories still reflected that they were a little older, a little slower, and much grayer.  Movies such The Professionals and Lonesome Dove or even the recent Appaloosa spend a fair amount of plot wistfully thinking about the good old days.

Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country falls in the same vein. Aging lawman Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) is hired to escort a shipment of gold from a mining camp. The film gently pokes fun at his age (he’s utterly bewildered by the modernizing town) and the townsfolk are pretty blunt about it. He has a great reputation, but is he too old for the job?

By chance, Judd meets up with his pal Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott) who works for dimes as a gunfighter in a circus sideshow.   Westrum agrees to lend his gun to the mission, and brings in a young partner named Heck Longtree (Ron Starr) to assist.  What Judd doesn’t know, however, is that old age and circus living have changed Westrum for the worse.

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This week’s pick is legendary filmmaker and pioneer of balletic death scenes Sam Peckinpah’s 1977 production of Cross of Iron. The film stars James Coburn (in one of his finest performances, and as one of Peckinpah’s go-to-actors) as Sgt. Rolf Steiner, a tough German soldier stationed on the Eastern Front in 1943 as the German army was being pushed back by the advancing Soviets.

Steiner is in command of a small squad who are attached to the main German column who are retreating from the Taman peninsula on the Black Sea coast following the German defeat at Stalingrad (one year earlier), which turned the tide of the war in the east. The story is that of conflict between Steiner and a new company commander Captain Stransky (Maximilian Schell), a Prussian aristocrat who covets the famed Iron Cross which is one of the highest awards given to a German soldier.

Cross of Iron was Peckinpah’s only war film that shows the audience the kind of war that was being fought on the Eastern Front, and that it was the last place a German soldier wanted to go. Steiner (Coburn) is tired of war and has very little respect for those in charge. When Stransky reports to his new commander, Colonel Brandt (played by veteran British actor James Mason), he tells the Colonel that he applied for a transfer from occupied France to the Eastern Front in order to win the Iron Cross.

The Colonel’s adjutant, Captain Kiesel (the great character actor David Warner) who is also sick of war and military politics, scoffs at Stransky and his naive outlook. Steiner is introduced to Stransky who is told of his exploits. Stransky promotes Steiner to Staff Sgt. in order to curry favor. Steiner shows overt contempt and little appreciation for Stransky as a German officer. To Steiner, Stransky is the real enemy with false notions of heroism and bravery.

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