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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As I’ve made way through the Western genre, I’ve had one silly hope — that I’d stumble on some awesome, forgotten, cultish series that centered on a female gunfighter.  The Quick and the Dead couldn’t be the only one, could it? Surely Sam Raimi had a stash of some spaghetti westerns he drew from?

Obviously, there isn’t such a series.  I’ve met many a tough broad in the genre (I mean that in the most complimentary of ways) but other than Doris Day’s Calamity Jane (a write up that will come eventually) or Jane Fonda’s Cat Ballou, lady gunslingers are in short supply.  Thankfully, Sharon Stone has some competition in Raquel Welch and Hannie Caulder.

Hannie Caulder’s origin story is predictable pulp — her husband is killed, and the outlaws responsible promptly gang rape her.  Caulder strides out of her burning house with only a blanket to her name, and vows to get revenge.

Luck delivers her a bounty hunter in Thomas Luther Price (Robert Culp) who reluctantly agrees to train her in the art of killing. He also buys her a pair of pants (but not, it seems, a shirt) and takes her to Mexico where she can have a pistol made by Bailey the gunsmith (Christopher Lee).

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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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When you discuss the Western, there’s three shadows that loom over the main street at noon — John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Gary Cooper.  The sturdy Randolph Scott (who made dozens upon dozens of Westerns) doesn’t warrant much of a mention except in exhaustive compendium books about the genre.

I suspect this is because a lot of his Westerns were the muddled, bloodless movies most people associate with the genre. He didn’t really have a script that would allow him to stretch out and strike an iconic pose like Wayne or Eastwood. The makings were there, though.

To quote THE BFI Companion to the Western (by way of Scott’s Wikipedia page):  “In his earlier Westerns … the Scott persona is debonair, easy-going, graceful, though with the necessary hint of steel. As he matures into his fifties his roles change. Increasingly Scott becomes the man who has seen it all, who has suffered pain, loss, and hardship, and who has now achieved (but at what cost?) a stoic calm proof against vicissitude.”

It’s true. Scott was, in a weird way, his own icon or character — this stalwart and sad survivor of many a gunfight.   I think this is what makes Ride the High Country so affecting. Like The Shootist or Unforgiven,  Scott is looking back at the long and dusty trail, and wondering what it all meant and whether it mattered.  It seems particularly poignant for him since he was so overshadowed by successors and competitors.

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There’s something a bit sad in seeing a grimy spaghetti western after Quentin Tarantino has already had his way with it. This is a film I would have liked to have discovered at 1am on a cable channel, the better to marvel at its split-screen flashbacks and Morricone score.  But that was not to be. Instead, I saw this film by way of Kill Bill, which lifts best parts, and runs with them.

The plot of Death Rides a Horse is exceedingly simple and familiar.  Bill Meceita (John Phillip Law) watches his family butchered by a gang of outlaws, and grows up vowing to avenge them.  A few dusty canyons away, Ryan (Lee Van Cleef) has just been let out of prison, and is hunting the gang with dreams of extortion dancing in his angel eyes. Ryan refuses to work with Bill, but they end up crossing and recrossing paths anyway.  Sometimes they help the other out, sometimes they double cross, but it always ends with one of them being stranded in the desert.

Death Rides A Horse is not a great spaghetti western.   It wears its Leone homages heavy on its sleeve — the relationship between Ryan (Lee Van Cleef) and Bill Meceita (John Phillip Law) is a pale imitation between Manco and Col. Mortimer in A Few Dollars More, with lots of “old man!” and “boy!” thrown around.

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Welcome back to Western Wednesdays!  I apologize for losing sight of the trail last week — but let us be stern frontiersmen and women, and not dwell on past failings.

This past week, everyone (including myself) has been eating up the wild wild West in the form of Red Dead Redemption.  I’ve spent hours herding cattle, taming mustangs, and shooting horse thieves, thoroughly enjoying the experience of playing in this genre rather than simply watching it.   So when it came time to pick a film for this week, it was tempting to go for one that reflected the gritty nature of the game.

But then I thought hey, why not go for the exact opposite of Red Dead Redemption? Why not delve into a corner of the genre I’ve dodged thus far, and visit the singing cowboys?   Surely, there was no one more unlike the scarred John Marston than Gene Autry.  So, I selected Tumbling Tumbleweeds and prepared for some wholesome, musical fun.

Now, I had a very specific image of the singing cowboy. They were squeaky clean guys in pretty, fringe decorated shirts and ornamental gunbelts. They had horses with cute names.   They never got dirty, and their movie plots centered around rescuing lost little dogies or kids who wandered onto the prairie. If they shot a gun, it was never to kill, but to startle or warn.

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One of my biggest misconceptions going into this feature was that Westerns never tackled the topic of racism. (You may call me a brainwashed and judgmental liberal if you like. I don’t mind.)  I lumped them all in with The Searchers – which, incidentally, wasn’t as racist as I remembered but isn’t exactly condemning its characters’ biases either.

But a lot of Westerns tackle it.  They just tend to examine it through the dewy and sad eyes of the white man such as Jimmy Stewart’s Broken Arrow.    Hombre ups the ante by showing discrimination through the painfully blue eyes of Paul Newman.   How can anyone look down on those pool colored irises? You’d have to be really evil.  And boy, are the white people of Hombre evil.

Based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, Hombre introduces us to John Russell (Newman), a white man who was raised by Apaches and considers himself one of them.  When his adopted father dies, and leaves him a boarding house, he bristles at the suggestion that he relearn to walk and talk as a white man.  He sells the boarding house, and is on his way back out via stagecoach, but he can’t escape prejudice that easily.

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“What did you expect? ‘Welcome, sonny’?  ‘Make yourself at home’? ‘Marry my daughter’? You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know . . . morons.” — Blazing Saddles

But dang, did they cut a dashing figure in a gray uniform. I’m talking about you, Rock Hudson. Look at the rakish bend of your hat brim! Aren’t you just the handsomest Confederate I’ve seen since Bill Compton traded his uniform for a pair of fangs!

One of my new cinematic fascinations (if you’ll forgive such a pompous label) is the way Hollywood and pop culture imagines the Civil War. It’s not something I ever thought about beyond Gone With the Wind,  Firefly, and True Blood, but it’s an intriguing subset of American culture.

Since no cannonball has been left unturned when it comes to the War Between the States, I’m sure there are already twelve books about this very topic. If there’s not, well, maybe I will write one when Western Wednesdays is through.

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The Train Robbers has been sitting in my Netflix queue for ages, hoping every Tuesday night that I’ll finally pick it for a Western Wednesday.  It may have stayed there forever had not Justin Gray suggested it.  Gray, as you should know by now, is coauthor of the DC series Jonah Hex. If he says “You should watch The Train Robbers!”, you call up the Netflix queue, and then you apologize to John Wayne that you required someone to intercede on his behalf.

However about halfway through, I began wondering if I had picked the right movie.  Nothing was happening. The villains were a dustcloud shrouded bunch who just thundered around,  Ann-Margaret was getting on my nerves,  the sidekicks were blurring together, and Wayne was just being Wayne.  I checked the clock and was relieved to see there was only about 15 minutes left.

And in that 15 minutes, The Train Robbers becomes an epic, edge-of-your-seat Western that just beg the question “Why the heck did they save up all the good stuff until now?” There’s explosions, a dynamite-loaded mule, guns, a creepy town,  a train used as an entire weapon, and a big twist.  It’s really one of the best action pieces I’ve seen in a Wayne Western.

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“A Western like you’ve never seen before … An exciting new look at the Old West.”

Oh, taglines. I like when you do my work for me. You just described what Silverado isn’t!

I’ve had this one on my queue for quite awhile. I’ve anticipated it greatly. It was written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, who is no slouch with pulp-oriented films like The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark to his credit. If there’s one thing Kasdan knows, it’s action adventure, right? Not when it came to Silverado, a film that misses the mark so often that I fail to see how it’s garnered 2-disc collector sets and such enthusiasm among Western fans.

I suppose it’s all due to Costner. Little baby Costner. This is the film that made him a star and a dreamy genre successor to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. They seem to have costumed him with that very idea, because he’s wearing a variation on every famous Western and cowboy look ever filmed.

At one point, he even wears a serape. He’s a weird, goofy character — I can’t tell if he’s special or just supposed to be extremely young — and the highlight of the film is undoubtedly when he decides his horse needs to wear a hat.  It just comes out of nowhere.  Costner walks down the street, happy as a clam, and his horse is wearing a cowboy hat.

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Welcome to another Western Wednesdays. Today is the very special installment that I promised last week in which I would reveal my favorite Western, the one that not even The Searchers can dethrone.  Yes, my love belongs unreservedly to The Outlaw Josey Wales.

As popular legend goes, Clint Eastwood wasn’t respected as a director until Unforgiven. A hard look at his directorial credits through the 1970s and 1980s can speak as to why. But I believe The Outlaw Josey Wales was a really notable moment of his career, and it’s perplexing why he didn’t enjoy the kind of watershed approval he did in 1993.

I imagine it’s because he promptly went and made The Gauntlet. Sadly, Josey Wales kicked off a very dark period of his career that it’s polite to ignore, and if you know your tabloid romances, you know why. But would it have happened if his career had been reversed, and he won all his Oscar gold for Josey Wales? Would he have taken himself a little more seriously and avoided Pink Cadillac? I’d like to think so.

Of course, that lament implies Josey Wales was a failure, which it wasn’t. But it didn’t receive any Oscar nominations beyond one for its soundtrack.  Roger Ebert even recognized it as an unusual and revisionist Western, but I don’t think that critical consensus or popular culture ever followed suit.

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In some alternate dimension, it’s Lee Van Cleef who rocketed to squinty-eyed fame after The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Clint Eastwood just kept doing spaghetti westerns in Europe, never to be seen in a serape again and starring in movies like Captain Apache.

I don’t know much about Van Cleef, and why he favored working in Italy and Spain. I’m guessing it was because Hollywood would only give him villainous roles, and he wanted to be the laconic badass who got the girl. Overseas, he was a star. But it also meant he had to make films like Captain Apache where all that presence is completely and utterly wasted. But hey, he did get to sing the theme song!  (See, he is Bizarro World Eastwood.)

The plot is incomprehensible. Van Cleef informs us over the theme tune (I’m not kidding) that they call him Captain Apache and that “they” try to trick him regularly.  He’s a franchise character without a franchise in that mythic way that only 1970s cinema could aspire to. For the record, “they” don’t actually call him Captain Apache, they call him “Red Ass.” I can’t imagine why they didn’t use that as the title.

Captain Apache is sent to investigate a murder, which has something to do with a man selling guns to Mexicans and Indians, and something called “April Morning.” From there on, you’re on your own. But there’s a witch, a peyote trip, creepy twins dressed as the Mad Hatter, and women who will go to bed with anyone.

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