December Potpourri

I'm behind on my reviews again. Here's a round-up of what I've seen recently:

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Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

I have mixed feelings about anti-westerns. Do you know the type of film I'm talking about? The ones that debunk the myths of classical Western movies? The heyday of the anti-western was the early 1970s, when movies like Soldier Blue, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and The Wild Bunch blew the conventions of the Western into bloodstained gobbets. Some of the anti-Westerns are legitimately great movies, and I'm not even going to argue that point because it's self-evident. But anti-Westerns aren't usually much fun, either. The Wild Bunch is a lot of things, but "fun" ain't one of them. Even satirical anti-Westerns like Little Big Man tend to become bleak in the end. Plus, some of them tend to preach. I dunno, maybe it's not appropriate to make a "fun" western on themes like genocide, capitalist exploitation, and violence as the instrument of Manifest Destiny. But damned if the new version of The Lone Ranger (2013, directed by Gore Verbinski) doesn't try. The Lone Ranger as a character is the very embodiment of Hollywood myths about Western heroes, part Zorro, part Wyatt Earp, all corn, so the fact that the makers of this new film have used him to completely debunk not only Western movies, but American myths about ourselves, is downright subversive. That they've done it as a summer blockbuster is an act of smuggling so brazen that I can't believe they got away with it, especially given that this was made for Disney, of all people.

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Black, White, and Red

As I was making my way out of the theater after seeing Django Unchained (2012, directed by Quentin Tarantino), I overheard a woman ask her companion: "Why did he shoot the sister?" Clearly, this was beyond the pale of chivalry in her mind, a gratuitous act of violence, perhaps even "reverse racism." I don't think I could have explained to her why Django might want to kill that character, why it might even be appropriate in context. I doubt she would understand me.

Django Unchained is a film I'm uncomfortable with. I don't know that I can write about it without stumbling over my own biases and privileges and cinematic appetites. I'll try, but I'm fallible and I'm probably going to screw it up. My apologies for this in advance.

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Along the Scenic Route

Y'know, I'm not even sure of where to begin with Stagecoach. It's one of those great movies that seems pretty straightforward on the surface, but gives way to bottomless depths once you begin to examine it. In some regards, it's like Citizen Kane or Persona, in so far as people have been writing about them since they first debuted, and yet people still return to them time and again. Its director, John Ford, used to introduce himself like this: "I'm John Ford. I make Westerns." He was being entirely too modest. The great period of the American Western movie begins with Stagecoach. You can pick any end point you like. Stagecoach encapsulates the Western in one sprawling, beautiful package. It has everything. No wonder Orson Welles screened it repeatedly when he was starting to make films.

So, I repeat: I don't even know where to start.

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Silence is Golden

There's something wintery about the anti-Western. Altman felt it in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Sydney Pollack felt it in Jeremiah Johnson, and you get it full-bore in Sergio Corbucci's The Great Silence (1968), a film that razes the Western to the ground and sows salt in the soil.

The movie is set in Utah somewhere during the period thought of as the Old West. I can't pinpoint it any closer than that, because the movie is strangely anachronistic. Utah is a territory in the film--Utah became a state in 1896--but our hero, Silence, carries a broomhandle Mauser rather than the stock guns of Western gunfighters. The broomhandle Mauser was first manufactured in Germany in 1896. So there's a disconnect. Further, the events of the film are based in part on the Mountain Meadow Massacre of 1857. As with most other Westerns, I prefer to think of this film as an abstraction of history, but this one seems even more anachronistic than most. Silence's gun of choice also Europeanizes the film, which may have been its intent.

In any event, our hero, Silence, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant without any dialogue, falls in with a group of "outlaws" who are being hunted by bounty killers. And by "outlaws", I mean Mormons, though the movie never uses the word. The bounty killers are led by Klaus Kinski's Loco, who'd rather bring 'em in dead than alive. It's a pretty stock set-up. What happens at the end of the movie is NOT stock. At the end, Loco draws a wounded silence out into the open by holding the captured outlaw families hostage. Silence has been sheltering with Vonetta McGee's Pauline, a widow whose husband was killed by Loco, presumably as part of the same bounty on anyone who wasn't a white Christian. She follows him to try to stop him. In the showdown, Silence, Pauline, and all of the "outlaws" are massacred. The end.

Sergio Corbucci's spaghetti westerns are all laced with with a Marxist point of view, and this one is no different, though it's more pessimistic than most. This movie is a critique of the Western's notions of heroism, when in Corbucci's worldview, the West was settled at gunpoint by genocidal murderers. This, at least, has some basis in history, and it may be why the rest of the movie is so ahistorical as a means of softening the blow. The heroic gunfighter prevailing against all odds, Corbucci seems to be saying, is bullshit.

As if to emphasize the point, the landscapes in this movie are bleak snowscapes. We first see Silence on his horse struggling through snowbanks, which eventually unhorse him. This is a kind of fimbulwinter for the West, a prelude to the twilight of the gods. It's the end of the world. The movie it most reminds me of is Hideo Gosha's Goyokin, which indulges in the same motifs of bare trees, snow, and crows. The symbolism is the same in both movies.

The silence of our main character, and his European-ness, are presumably both representative of Europe at the time the film was made. America was indulging in massacres anew in Vietnam in the name of its ideal of democracy, and Europe didn't have a voice in the matter. I could see Corbucci making the same film again in the 2000s.

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For what it's worth, the studio behind The Great Silence compelled Corbucci to film a "happy" ending for the film, which is included (appropriately without a soundtrack) on the Fantomas disc. This ending just goes to show that an ending doesn't need to be happy to be satisfying, because it's just ridiculous.