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.

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).

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.

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.

“I’m a dying man, scared of the dark.”

I’ve put off watching The Shootist for a long time.  It has such a weighty legend hanging over it.   It’s John Wayne’s final film, and features melancholy appearances from a lot of  greats such as Jimmy Stewart and Richard Boone. Even Humphrey Bogart’s ghost looms over it because of Lauren Bacall’s sad and spare performance.  Even the horse figures prominently — Dollar was Wayne’s favorite horse, and its appearance was a condition of his doing the film.

My goal was to watch (or rewatch) all of Wayne’s Westerns before tackling this one.   But it’s been hanging on my DVR for a few weeks, tempting me, and I decided to stop putting it off.  Wayne died several years before I was born. There’s a finite amount of his movies any way you slice it, and why put off the inevitable?

Which is, of course, what The Shootist is about.  Acceptance.   It’s a powerful film. No matter how you feel about Wayne, it’s a moving portrait and one of his best performances.   We all know Wayne wasn’t the most nuanced or gifted actor. He played himself.

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.

In The Pardoner’s Tale, three drunk scallywags stumble out of a pub in the middle of the Black Death.  In their alcohol inspired brilliance, they decide to go looking for Death so they can kill him in retaliation.  A strange old man hears their request, and informs them they can find Death beneath a particular tree.

When they arrive, they find not the Grim Reaper figure they (and readers) were expecting, but a bag of gold.   Greed overtakes them, and they wind up killing each other.

MacKenna’s Gold is that story. It’s also a remake of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I would argue that Geoffrey Chaucer was able to get “Gold is death, greed is bad” a lot more effectively and simply than either film, but that’s just me. Besides, if MacKenna’s Gold stripped the movie down to its essentials, you wouldn’t have a corny theme song (which was at the heart of long running David Letterman gag), ponderous narration, psychedelic effects, and terrible miniature work.

You also wouldn’t have gotten to see Omar Sharif or Julie Newmar naked. What? Yes. And you thought gratuitous nudity didn’t exist before the 1970s.

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.

Forget 1980s action films, forget 300.  Westerns are the genre that set the highest and hardest expectations for manhood. I hesitate to say they’re unrealistic ones, though, since these are all things people actually did to survive.

Which is a very roundabout way of saying that I’m going to amend my “Dream Man” to be a Clint Eastwood kind of guy who can also survive the uncharted forests of the West with just a piece of twine. And one leg. A Zachary Bass, Man in the Wilderness kind of guy.

Man in the Wilderness takes place in 1820, and no further West than some dim point past Missouri and the Mississippi.   It’s not a period you see visited very often in the genre, and I suspect it’s because just contemplating it — vague regions still known only as “Spain”,  “Oregon Territory” and “Missouri Territory” — is rather terrifying.

Reading accounts of the first settlers is pretty harrowing, Heart of Darkness stuff.  There were forests back then, forests so thick you couldn’t get your wagon through without hacking for hours on end. And then you died of diphtheria.

If a bear didn’t get you first. That’s what happened to Zachary Bass (Richard Harris), and he knew what he was doing.

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.