Reviews by bharath

Featuring Carlos Gallardo, star of Robert Rodriguez's cult-classic debut El Mariachi, Bravo is a tense action thriller about a musician struggling to stop a criminal rebellion. Gallardo is Carlos Bravo, a mariachi who was once a dedicated government agent. When the Mexican president is kidnapped by a group led by an evil and powerful drug lord, the guitar player must conjure up his heroic past to save the day. Throwing an additional wrench in the gears is the fact that Bravo is dating the president's daughter

A train rumbles through the desert, drawing into a small western town -- Shinbone. Only two people emerge, Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles), to be met by Link Appleyard (Andy Devine). There seems to be a link between these three which surpasses the smart clothes of the Stoddard's, the scruffy outfit of Appleyard and the fact that Ransom is State Senator! The local newsmen soon find out about his unexpected visit, principally for the funeral of Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). Who? No one else seems to know of Doniphon's paupers funeral so Ransom decides to relate the whole story to the local press. Dissolve to the old Wild West...

Ransom, a recently qualified lawyer from the East, suffered a brutal introduction to his new home. His stage was ambushed by outlaws, resulting in a savage beating as he defended a female passenger. Luckily he was found by Doniphon, a hard-bitten and sharp-shooting character, and brought into the town of Shinbone. Here Ransom finds out a few facts - Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) was the man who beat him, a gun is the only law in the area and that the town is crying out for a man like him. The result is that Ransom vows to put Valance in jail, using the law not a gun, by using his education and principles. This raises some laughs, for the crazy Easterner, but we can see that the townspeople respect Ransom for his knowledge, ideals and the fact that he represents the progress which they want for their children.

Soon Ransom is teaching people to read and write (especially Hallie), showing them how to use their vote and proving that you don't need to wear a gun to be a man. However a showdown with Valance is inevitable and we can see the arena already. Shortly there is to be an election for two representatives to the state senate, although the real issue is whether the area should become a true state. On one side are the cattlemen (with a hired Valance) who want to keep the land free and on the other are the townspeople who want the protection gained from being in a state. As the vote takes place (no women and no blacks!) there is a tense standoff between Ransom and Valance as the latter tries to force his own election. Although he fails in this Valance challenges the lawyer to a gunfight, knowing that Ransom is no match for him. We know that Ransom survives, since he's telling this tale, but the path from this election to the Senate is nail-biting to the end.

The beauty of this film is just how well it works on several levels with such resonance - such as the sparring between Stoddard and Doniphon, the battle of the town-folk with the cattlemen and the triumph of good over evil (represented superbly by Liberty Valance). Each character is well-acted and fits perfectly into the life of the town - from the nervous marshal Appleyard to the reliable servant Pompey (Woody Strode). From scene to scene the tension mounts yet there are many moments of humour in an amazingly strong script. Perhaps, though, the greatest triumph of this movie is that it places James Stewart, against stereotype, in a Western and succeeds.

Bruce Lee, Dan Inosanto, James Tien, Robert Wall, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao Tags: Escrima, Golden Harvest, karate, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kung-fu, martial arts, Robert Clouse






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Starring Bruce Lee, Dan Inosanto, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar,

Robert Wall, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Kim Tai Jong, James Tien

Fight Choreography for Bruce Lee’s fights by Bruce Lee

Fight Choreography for everyone else by Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao

Directed by Robert Clouse

Let’s get one thing cleared up first: Game of Death is not Bruce Lee’s last film. That moniker belongs to Enter the Dragon, and to that film alone. Game of Death could be best described as a compilation/tribute/b-sides album. The film compiles memorable scenes from Bruce’s earlier films, new scenes shot by a bunch of fake Bruces (Yuen Biao being one of them) and the final fights that feature the actual Bruce Lee.

Was it a good tribute to Bruce? In a small way.

Was it a grab for more cash after the success of Enter the Dragon? Hell yes.

Bruce Lee–or actually his body doubles–stars as Billy Lo, a martial arts film star who is filming a scene with Chuck Norris (archived scenes from Way of the Dragon) when a light from above crashes on the ground near him, stopping production. During these scenes you see Bruce from behind only, and I just knew this was gonna be a long film. I almost died laughing when they would show Bruce speaking to different people from behind, and then Bruce’s reaction shots would be clipped scenes from his other films. Anyway, some douchy fight promotor who works for some shadowy company called the Syndicate wants Billy to fight in the ring, and Billy slaps the guy away. Shit, the real Bruce would’ve slapped the guy through the door. During this scene they had the audacity to actually superimpose a cut out of Bruce’s head on the actor’s body!

Anyway, we then cut to the Meeting of Evil Villians, where the same douchy promotor and his lackeys played by Robert Wall (what’s the deal with him being Bruce’s bitch?) and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar decide to beat Billy into signing the contract. Billy goes out to dinner that night with his girlfriend played by Colleen Camp, when he gets ambushed by some of douchy’s men. This first fight of Fake Bruce is exactly what you would expect-badly shot scenes of a guy trying to pretend to be Bruce, but isn’t even close.

This brings me to what would be common theme in this film until you get near the end: Billy gets his ass kicked. A lot. WTF?! Okay, I can accept a lot of things, but the sight of a couple of hired thugs beating up someone who is supposed to be BRUCE LEE just kills me. I’m surprised Bruce not only didn’t roll around in his grave at this, but didn’t outright punch his way back to the land of the living so he could smack Robert Clouse around for a second, telling him what the hell, man?! There is not one scene, in any of Bruce’s films, where anyone—and I mean no one—kicks his ass. Yeah, some guys get their shots in, but Bruce NEVER LOSES. It’s not boring, that’s just Bruce. He doesn’t lose. And who would be equal to him for him to lose to? Nobody, that’s who. And yet in several fight scenes with Fake Bruce, he gets his ass owned by everyone, hell even Robert Wall. He punches and kicks these thugs, and they get right back up. If Real Bruce hits them, they ain’t gettin’ back up.

Before long Billy is shot on the set of his film, but isn’t killed, and with the help of an old friend stages what has to be the absolute worst scene ever filmed, lacking in any amount of taste whatsoever. Any respect I might’ve had for Robert Clouse died right at this moment. Billy fakes his own death, and the funeral scenes were ACTUAL FOOTAGE OF BRUCE’S FUNERAL. That takes some balls, but holy shit that was a dung pile of bad decision making to allow it into a fictional film.

Not long afterward I was able to briefly set aside my disdain by watching a fight between Robert Wall and Sammo Hung, which was actually well done—no where near Sammo’s normal quality—but well done nevertheless. It allowed Sammo to show off some fancy moves before Robert Wall kicks his ass, and then in turn gets his ass killed by Fake Bruce following this fight. I’ll say this for Mr. Wall, he always looks great getting his ass kicked.

Soon Billy’s girlfriend is kidnapped by Douchy, and Billy frees her and goes after Douchy and his boys, and here is where Real Bruce returns for the final fights between himself and Dan Inosanto, nunchuck to nunchuck, a fight with another karate master, and the crowning moment, the fight between Bruce and his real life student NBA superstar Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Each fight is great in it’s own way, and the fight with Kareem is fantastic, a study of fighting while facing a great size disadvantage (it could be argued both ways) and Kareem does a great job here.

After that we go back to Fake Bruce and he has to fight Douchy, in a fight that tries to make Douchy feel like a threat, but his isn’t, and is weakly killed and the film thankfully ends. This is really a horrid film, but I get what they wanted to do. They tried to honor the memory of Bruce and to make sure that audiences would feel that absence would make the heart grow fonder, and at least in this film, it succeeds.

(On a scale of 1-10, 10 being the best)

CHOREOGRAPHY: (4) Sammo tried his best to choreograph fights the way Bruce would’ve, but without the secret ingredient of Bruce, none of it works. Sammo’s fight with Robert Wall was the best non-real Bruce Lee fight in the entire film.

BRUCE’S CHOREOGRAHY: (8) For what there was, was terrific. The fight with Kareem was a classic. The last we would ever get from Bruce.

STUNTS: (3) Not much here. Some good acrobatic here and there, but that’s about it.

STAR POWER: (8) There really was a lot of star power from the martial arts world here. Too bad that power was used in this film.

FINAL GRADE: (4) Only the Bruce fights, because they are classic, keeps this film from getting a lower grade that this. Unfortunately the success of this film would spawn the legion of fake Bruces to follow, and an insipid sequel.

SHANE, Paramount, 1953.
Dir. George Stevens, Perf. Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Van Helfin.
Review by Dominic

As young Joey Starrett (Brandon DeWilde) plays around the front of his isolated valley home, stalking a deer with an unloaded rifle, a buckskin-clad stranger (Ladd) rides in from the distance and crosses on to his family’s land. The boy is captivated by the man, who reveals his name—Shane—and little else. His father, Joe (Heflin), on the other hand, eyes the wayfaring gunfighter with the caution of one who works hard for their dreams in a world adept at kicking them over. It is at this point, however, that the real bad guy appears—riding right over Joe’s crops rather than around them like the courteous (if mysterious) Shane. Cattle baron Rufus Riker (Emile Meyer) needs all this land for free-grazing, and is bent on banishing hardworking homesteaders like the Starrett family by any means available.

After Joe proudly bucks Riker’s threats, the latter hires notorious gunfighter Jack Wilson (Palance) to wage a campaign of intimidation and violence on the occupants of the range. The answer to Riker’s hired gun is of course Shane, the enigmatic wanderer with a gift for gunplay so ingrained that he draws his pistol at the first sign of trouble as involuntarily as drawing a breath.

More than this, though: it is through the figure of Shane, and Joey’s admiration of him, that Stevens’s film establishes an ideological conflict between the workaday pride of family life on the frontier, and a solitary life of adventure. The stranger and Joey’s father represent competing instincts. The subtle attraction between Shane and Joe’s wife, Marian (Arthur), evokes the security and companionship of an existence he can never have. Nevertheless, the buckskinned glamor of gunfighting and lone riding is difficult to resist. Shane’s departure at the conclusion of the film, as Joey famously calls after him, represents the idea that the boy must accept his father’s values over the romance of the gunfighter (a romance signified by his desire to show Shane his rifle in the opening scene).

Despite his relatively short screen-time, Palance’s Wilson is one of the most memorable villains in film history. He is sadism and violence in every gesture: a skull-faced, black-clad serpent of a man, taunting his adversaries with the acid-sizzle whisper of someone who enjoys killing for cash. A gunfighter of this variety is like the terrible negative-image of the idealistic and courageous homesteaders. Whereas they humbly strive to make the most of themselves and provide for their families, he asserts his gunfighting skill with loathsome arrogance and may move from job to job without responsibility, using his independence to ruin the dreams of others.

Story-wise, Shane retreads what is, by 1953, already a distinctly familiar scenario. Additionally, Stevens does have a habit of too deliberately infusing scenes with idealism, lacquering them over with momentous dialogue and vaulting score. However, strong performances and thoughtful character-relations lift the film beyond mere melodrama. Shane is not content with spellbinding viewers with grandiose visual and musical cues, providing an intriguing portrayal of the subtler conflicts inherent in the romance of the frontier.

THE SEARCHERS, Warner Bros., 1956.
Dir. John Ford, Perf. John Wayne, Natalie Wood, Jeffrey Hunter, and Vera Miles.
Review by Sam Rahn

In the history of popular Westerns, Sergio Leone’s fistful of Spaghettis (featuring Clint Eastwood) are arguably the most renowned and frequently mentioned as genre touchstones. For critics and scholars, however, perhaps no Western is more celebrated than The Searchers, the 1956 collaboration between director John Ford and his favorite leading man, John Wayne.

Occurring towards the latter half of each man's career, The Searchers is said to embody both Ford’s full maturity as a director and Wayne’s as an actor. With its complex characters and epic scope, The Searchers has a uniqueness and presence that far exceeds that majority of the studio Westerns produced so prolifically through the 1950s and 1960s. A famous many directors, too, cite The Searchers as a source of major inspiration, and as it is plotted, the film is indeed an icon of the Western’s cinematic values. However, the awkward realization of its script and inconsistent direction render it a critically flawed film that frustrates as much as it fascinates.

The film’s most glaring issue is also its most untouchable: John Wayne himself. Integral to the Western genre and as revered a contributor as John Ford, Wayne’s performance in The Searchers is frankly amateurish. Though perfect as a gritty, hardnosed loner, tenacious cowboy, and even a bitter but proud old man (the performance in True Grit [1969] that won him his Oscar), Wayne struggles to realize the complexity of Ethan Edwards. In areas where Ethan is akin to classic Western men, Wayne has no difficulty and is as convincing a frontier cowboy as ever swaggered before the camera. However, Ethan has other qualities—reverence for his family and consequential vulnerability, a caring, albeit callous, spirit, and even an occasionally light sense of humor—to which Wayne can merely pay lip service.

We see hints of his suffering, but these rarely correspond to the primary dilemma regarding his niece, Debbie Edwards, who has been captured (i.e. corrupted) by the Comanche. Rather, it is relatively easy suffering that comes from mourning the lost and “pure” spirit of his other niece, whom the Comanche killed before she could be assimilated into the tribe. Another display of anxiety occurs in the immediate aftermath of a standoff with the Comanche when the captain-cum-sheriff instructs Ethan to cease firing. Wayne’s temper flares, but not because of latent rage he feels towards the Comanche for the massacre of his family, but rather because of the sheriff's affront to Wayne’s own sense of authority and independence. This pride-related anger is natural to classic Wayne and expected of him, but not of the Ethan first introduced.

This inconsistency of character is complicated by the scant precedence set for Ethan’s familial affection, with little being done throughout the rest of the film to support this end. Ford makes a habit of aggressively outlining characters when they are introduced—thereby plotting out their conflicts and desires—and then failing to color them in, so to speak, or support their actions with meaningful interactions and dialogue. Instead, more time is spent on lighter subplots of dismissible stock—an accidental wife, simpleton as sporadic comic relief, nosey but well-intentioned foreigners as neighbors—while skimping on the more compelling and serious narrative.

On the technical side, the most consistent issue is the inexpert handling of time passing, both in the scene-to-scene segues and through the film at large. Aside from Debbie, who suddenly grows from a child to a fully developed Natalie Wood, other characters show no physical or personal effects of aging. Instead, demarcations of time are conspicuously thrust into the dialogue, and rather than consistently seeing evidence of time in characters or seasons, the audience is merely told of its passage and must therefore accept it.

The handling of emotional subtexts in the film is similarly brusque. Ethan struggles between his supposed love of family and his obvious hate for the Comanche, but we never learn the source of either emotion and see their interaction but rarely. Even in his dealing with a grown and Comanche-spirited Debbie, Ethan is either entirely hostile or entirely docile. During the climactic chase of her down the slope, only the peripherals suggest tension: the score, his young companion giving chase and crying out (heavily leading the audience), and the physical context of her flight. Once Wayne catches her, the gun he drew on her in camp is ignored, he embraces her without deliberation, and symbolically carries her to the threshold of home. Other relationships, such as the romance between Laurie Jourgensen (Miles) and her sometimes beau Martin Pawley (Hunter) are less complex, and thus more tangible in this instance, but barely more credible and largely superfluous.

If The Searchers is wholly successful in any respect, it is visually. The breathtaking landscapes and bold cinematography fully immerse the viewer in each event. Only the representation of the Comanche war chief Scar (Henry Brandon) seems hackneyed, but such caricatures were inevitable in this film’s time and have only recently been overcome. Unfortunately, after showing its setting so vividly, The Searchers is content merely to tell us the story, and in doing so it fails that paramount tenet of fiction: show, don’t tell.

THE MAN FROM LARAMIE, Columbia, 1955.
Dir. Anthony Mann. Perf. James Stewart, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Crisp, Cathy O’Donnell.
Review by Dominic

The concluding chapter of Anthony Mann’s collaboration with James Stewart is a stylish and well paced—if awkwardly plotted—tale of intrigue and betrayal. Will Lockheart (Stewart) is lugging three wagonloads of supplies to the town of Coronado from (you guessed it) Laramie. He makes the drop all right, but is savagely and inexplicably attacked by the son of a local land baron before he can leave again. Understandably irritable, and irked by the town’s air of disquietude and secrecy, he decides to stick around, befriending a local woman and few else. Someone there has been selling guns to the Apache, and Lockheart makes it his business to find out who.

There’s no way around it: The Man from Laramie’s plot points are real gear-grinders. The land baron’s son (Alex Nicol) makes a believable enough hothead but his provocation of the film’s initial conflict is implausible, and there is something too perfunctory about his crowning folly later on. Similarly, the film’s romantic subplot is sustained by the combination of coy dialogue and Stewart’s modest charm, but it’s hardly load-bearing drama, and Lockheart’s obsession with the Apache arms deals is never satisfactorily explained.

The greater narrative may lean unfortunately toward the by-the-numbers angst of a soap opera, but at the more immediate level of the scene, Mann’s film is wonderful: even if it isn’t quite one, The Man from Laramie certainly looks like a classic. The cinematography of Charles Lang, who went on to do the camerawork for The Magnificent Seven (1960), is both measured and energetic. Elegantly colorful shots of the midday sunlight spread across the township or corrugated by rocky outcrops supply that truly “cinematic” feel, and subtly creative camera positioning amps up the action sequences considerably.

Stewart doesn’t fail to deliver, bringing to this one a conflicted mix of assertion and humility that seems to enliven his every move. The man simply cannot utter a bad line: “Why you scum!” may not be the greatest of Western lines, but it sure seems like it when Jimmy says it.

The Man from Laramie’s structural flaws are of a pretty regular variety, in all. Nevertheless, it is a testament to the film’s strengths that predictable dramatics don’t keep it from being a fun, likeable thriller and a satisfying end to the Mann/Stewart partnership.

THE GRAND DUEL (Il Grande Duello), Synergy Entertainment, 1972.
Dir. Giancarlo Santi. Perf. Lee Van Cleef, Horst Frank, Alberto Dentice (as Peter O’Brien).
Review by Dominic

Van Cleef stars here as Clayton, an enigmatic sheriff who offers protection to rough-and-tumble dude Philipp Wermeer (Dentice), who is wanted for the murder of town kingpin Eli Saxon (Frank). The two subsequently travel to Jefferson in order to confront Saxon’s sons, a bunch of high-powered crooks, and uncover the truth about “The Patriarch”’s murder.

The Grand Duel is Giancarlo Santi’s only Western as director, although he worked as First Assistant Director to Sergio Leone on both The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and his own film contains plenty of dramatic close-ups reminiscent of Leone’s work. It is also much heavier on the action sequences—although several of these are exaggerated and ridiculous, clashing with the moody poise of Van Cleef’s presence. The contrast of exploitation grit and musical elegance exhibited here may strike some as awkward, particularly before we’ve been sufficiently swept up by the narrative itself. Fortunately the score (courtesy of Luis Enriquez Bacalov) is such a distracting gem that sub-par picture quality and the occasional unsteady camera pass with considerably less intrusion than they may have.

The villainous Saxon sons don’t appear until nearly halfway through the film. The most striking of these is clearly Adam Saxon (Klaus Grünberg), a pock-marked anemic fop whose decadent appearance not only contrasts with that of the rugged Philipp, but signifies his wasteful indifference to human life when he smokes an old-timer upon his debut. Adam is certainly the film’s most unsettling character: the unnatural combination of his pretentious image and hyper-masculine surname alerts us to the fact that this guy is no ordinary bad egg, and we wait patiently for the full extent of his effete sadism to be exposed. Although its sexual politics might sit uncomfortably with modern audiences, this development is communicated with genuine chill and renders Adam one of the more memorable villains in the history of the Spaghetti Western.

Several of The Grand Duel’s earlier sequences feel unfortunately cluttered, the result of a paucity of contextualizing landscape shots and a number of over-hasty transitions from close-up to close-up. However, this is largely made up for in its latter half, where the film is fluently (even poignantly) shot and a number of smoky flashback sequences lend to it a surprisingly hypnotic aura. Overall, The Grand Duel remains an enjoyable and energetic (if little watched) film. Van Cleef’s trademark combination of edginess and austerity serves the concluding showdown wonderfully as Santi’s editing pace sidles up to Bacalov’s score to end this one with an eloquent bang.

HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER, Universal, 1973.
Dir. Clint Eastwood, Perf. Clint Eastwood, Verna Bloom, Mariana Hill, and Mitch Ryan.
Review by Dominic

In the opening scene of Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, a stranger (Eastwood) rides out of the desert toward the isolated town of Lago, wherein he butts heads with a few townsfolk, and tentatively sides with a few others. When summarized briefly the scenario presented here is certainly familiar. However, the opening shots of Eastwood’s film, rendered in a distorted, heat-rippled haze, and the bizarre soundtrack—a ghostlike whine that transforms gradually into an otherworldly chiming, both acoustic and psychedelic—ensures we recognize that the director is toying with conventions rather than pandering to them.

The complex and self-reflexive use of genre that occurs in High Plains Drifter is characteristic of other Eastwood films such as The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and Unforgiven (1992). The film also represents a particularly intriguing example of the mixture of psychology, mythicism and theology Eastwood brings to his vision of the West in Unforgiven, addressing similar themes of sin, self-loathing and retribution. The focus on guilt and atonement in High Plains Drifter, for example, seems to go some way to explaining why the town of Lago apparently contains no children—typically symbols of innocence in adult cinema.

Unlike any of Eastwood’s other films, however, High Plains Drifter captures these themes in a disorientatingly expressionistic style; the world of the film is dreamlike, absurd and impossible, and because of this High Plains Drifter is perhaps the most unique and challenging film in Eastwood’s Western oeuvre.

The drifter rides solemnly into town, and as he grabs a drink he is fiercely eyed-off by a group of three gunmen, whose attempts to intimidate the stranger succeed only in shaking their own confidence, and eventually costing them their lives. As the drifter hangs his head at the local hotel, a ghostly wailing over the soundtrack as he dreams of a man being savagely whipped to death by three hired goons. We later discover that the man in the dream is the former Marshal, who was the victim of the townsfolk’s conspiracy to retain control of an illegal mining operation.

With significant echoes of both The Magnificent Seven (1960) and High Noon (1952), the drifter is hired to both train and defend the townsfolk against the return of the Marshal’s three killers. For his work he is given the run of the town, and after making an affable midget the new Marshal and commandeering the hotel, he has the entire town painted red and renamed “Hell” in anticipation of its malevolent visitors.

Eastwood’s film employs the Western form in a difficult and ambitious way, and steadfastly resists being swept up into the greater crowd of easily digestible genre fare, and its ambiguity won’t sit well with all viewers of a genre so steeped in formalism. For this reviewer, though, Eastwood’s vision is wonderfully developed. The town itself, a sparse and windswept scattering of buildings by the ocean, is purposely unrealistic, and the director makes excellent use of natural sound to emphasize a temporal stasis that amplifies the inhabitants’ concealed sense of moral decay.

As the townsfolk watch the dusty wayfarer trot ominously through town at the start of the film his face cast in shadow, they are largely motionless, as if frozen in time. And time itself, the return of past sins, is a key point of focus. The townsfolk here surely secretly believe that they deserve their punishment—hence their willingness to go along with the drifter’s excesses once he is given the run of the town.

The film is driven along by instinctive, aggressive and powerful performances, and its climax—though predictable—is disturbingly played out, staying with one well after the drifter has vanished into the hills from whence he came.

A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE / DUCK, YOU SUCKER (Giù la testa), Columbia, 1971.
Dir. Sergio Leone. Perf. Rod Steiger, James Coburn, Romolo Valli.
Review by Dominic

“The Revolution,” according to a curiously candid white-on-black insert, “is not a social dinner, it is not a literary event, a drawing or an embroidery...” Chairman Mao’s quote is punctuated by A Fistful of Dynamite’s unglamorous first images: a close-up of tree trunk ant-traffic being overwhelmed by a powerstream of piss. It is an ironically bodily metaphor to kick off a big-hearted picture. Make no mistake: Fistful is an oaf, parading its hangdog humor with black-toothed grin. But how remarkable it then seems when this grotty lout, to the serenading strains of Morricone’s score, actually dazzles you with its elegance, pirouettes before your very eyes, sidles right up to you and—lo and behold—you swoon.

But before that... As they tumble to the ground the poor critters are hosed again for good measure. We see a pair of dirtied, bare feet nonchalantly shaken free of any unexpected blowback. The stocky, bearded fellow on the (relatively) dry end of the piss offensive is also our hero, or one of them at least—and one as reluctant as he is unlikely.

The year is 1913, and in the midst of the Mexican revolution pistol dynamo and salt-of-the-earth grub Juan (Steiger) is quite content keeping his hands clean—metaphorically, that is. And of matters political, that is—preferring to occupy himself robbing the baleful Mexican upperclass as they’re stagecoached from the troubled region with the most intolerable pomp.

Enter Sean Mallory (Coburn), an IRA dynamiter on the run from the British authorities. The two form an unlikely alliance when Juan, in an amusingly crackpot epiphany, envisions using Sean’s expertise to blast his way in to Mesa Verde Bank. Little does Juan know that Sean has promised his services to the Mexican revolutionaries, and hitting the bank is actually a move far more “political” than the crass campesino realizes.

One of Fistful’s most endearing charms is the sheer ingenuousness of its shifts from the absurd to the heartfelt. With a childlike lack of coercion the viewer is led to take very seriously what is, ostensibly, a very cheeky film. For one thing, the line between homage and parody was never so ambiguous as it is in Fistful. The Western genre’s Americanism is a subject of both adoration and triumphant irreverence: “You’ll pay for this, you bastard,” cries one of Juan’s victims, having been relieved of his clothes as well as his possessions, “I’m a citizen of the United Stated of America!” The bandit’s father wheezes indifferently: “To me you are just a naked son of a bitch.” The opening scene is surely a comical reference to the ant-torture that opens Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), and Steiger’s portrayal of the loudmouth Juan puts one in mind of Tuco (Eli Wallach) from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)—a deadly goof who, if he doesn’t quite have a heart of gold, at least has the stuff on the brain. Moreover, the oddball temperament of Morricone’s score ensures the viewer’s eyebrow is at least as frequently cocked as firebrand Juan’s pistols.

But it is with this mongrel makeup that Leone’s film gives the mind an insistent prod and the heartstrings quite the heave-ho. The flashback sequences, long-time favorite of the Spaghetti Western dons (and gorgeously complemented here by a Once Upon a Time in the West-style musical theme), attribute a cryptic backstory to the character of Sean. He is the man without a past familiar from any number of Westerns, certainly, although Leone is able to skilfully suggest obscure personal trauma without ever compromising the chummy accessibility necessary to sustain the character’s central position in a colorful adventure like this one.

It’s not all good-time quirkiness and candor, however. Ungainly charm aside, Fistful’s pacing goes belly-up several times, a problem possibly attributable to its playful brand of characterization—one that doesn’t lend itself particularly well to deficits in action or prolonged, single character scenes. Either way, the film feels at least a little disjointed and overdrawn. Nevertheless, one of Fistful’s grandest coups is the number of times Morricone’s score, like a character in itself, is able to shoulder the narrative momentum and push the film to its emotional peaks.

The most arresting of these relate to what is perhaps the film’s primary theme: betrayal. It seems modes of insecticide aren’t the only thing Leone picked up from Peckinpah: forms of betrayal (personal, political) are as central to A Fistful of Dynamite as they are to that director’s oeuvre. Finally, it is the compelling and nuanced exploration of this subject that makes Leone’s final Western, if not a better one than its much lauded predecessors, quite a different one—and certainly one worth watching.

HIGH NOON, Paramount, 1952.
Dir. Fred Zinnemann. Perf. Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly and Lloyd Bridges.
Review by Dominic

Note: First-time viewers are advised that the following makes details of the film’s plot explicit.

Much reviled by John Wayne, who felt its focus on a man’s abandonment by the community around him was a metaphor for McCarthyism, Fred Zinnemann’s otherwise celebrated film High Noon sees Marshal Will Kane (Cooper) hanging up his guns as a lawman and leaving town with his new bride, Amy (Kelly), to open a store. As the deal is sealed, however, he hears word that scum-of-the-earth criminal Frank Miller, a man who has sworn vengeance against him, has been pardoned and is due to arrive on the noon train. Once reunited with his gang of three cutthroats at the station, Miller intends to ride into town and gun Kane down.

Retired, and intending to leave anyway, Kane and his wife ride out, only to turn back, at Kane’s insistence, so that he can face his aggressors. Abandoned by his impudent deputy, Harvey (Bridges), however, and unable to deputize the cowardly townsfolk, it looks as if he must face the Millers alone. As if this wasn’t trouble enough, Kane’s decision to stand his ground drives a wedge between him and his Quaker wife. Not wanting to wait an hour to find out whether she’ll be a widow, pacifist Amy threatens to leave Kane if he faces the bandits.

Despite his 1952 best actor win, Cooper’s characterization of Will Kane is beat out in fairly broad strokes. A few serious lines are either paced too bluntly, or delivered with melodramatic breaks in eye-contact and side-to-side glances. This is not all Cooper’s doing though; the actor’s relationship to the camera, generally, does not seem to have been adequately worked out, and the occasional close-up unduly exaggerates his gestures. His character’s initial introduction, prior to news of the Miller gang’s impending arrival, also seems misjudged. Confronted with the same blinky, moist-eyed act he perpetuates throughout the film, we are unsure as to why Kane should seem so visibly discomforted at this point in the story (particularly as he marries a Grace Kelly less than half his age).

High Noon’s narrative unfolds in almost real-time as the fatal hour creeps closer, and the now-iconic shots of the clock seem to expand each moment, investing it with urgency. The film’s editing is for the most part carefully handled and highly effective: a wonderful pulse-thudding montage startles us with the dread of the situation when the hour is finally struck. The opening scenes make good use of energetic and creative cinematography to perpetually reinsert the viewer into the thrust of the narrative. The film is, however, somewhat let down by the intrusive repetition of its theme-tune, which undermines the subtleties of particular scenes by explicitly cataloging basic events in the plot.

The effective use of cross-cutting easily sustains High Noon’s real-time trajectory and helps make us feel this town is a real location with a temporal life of its own. It is at the level of attributing real character to its townsfolk, however, that the film falters and allows us to question its thematic agenda.

The townspeople’s attitudes toward Miller’s gang are so inconsistent it seems implausible that they should, ultimately, behave so uniformly. These people are purposely intended to make life difficult for our hero—rather than acting of their own accord in such a way that would allow this situation to arise naturally. As the gang rides into town, people scurry in fear; one woman sanctifies the space through which they pass with a sign of the cross. Clearly these men are devils incarnate. Later, however, a hotelier admits a fondness for the Millers, whose presence made his business more profitable. The same goes for the bartender, whose patrons also liked having the Millers around—so much so that, prior to Frank Miller’s arrival, his brother rides in to town for a drink with his old friends. Despite this, when Kane attempts to raise a posse in the same bar the reason for the men’s reluctance is inexplicably given as their fear of being outnumbered, rather than that they are unwilling. In this way, the film seems to adjust the characterization of the Millers and the townsfolk’s attitude to them to suit its moral and emotional purpose: ensuring the villains are greatly feared—while having everyone still effectively end up on their side. This episode makes the townspeople’s collective failure to act seem unnaturally unanimous—a device for increasing Cooper’s isolation, inflating his bravery and sustaining this trial of his manhood.

The problem with this is that while High Noon surely purports to demonstrate how a group of people can be murderous through their very passivity, it never convincing portrays group psychology at all. The scenario it presents is a priori contrived to morally endorse a masculine ideal of independence and bravery. At the same time, one suspects the film uses Cooper’s visible moments of self-doubt to assure the viewer that because this isn’t a pretty situation what they are cheering for cannot be mere egotism and pride.

And if it isn’t egotism, it is something odorously close to it. As he famously attempts to raise a posse in the church, Kane is advised to leave town because it is his presence alone that ensures trouble. Anyway, the church-goers argue, when the new Marshal arrives, he will have the community’s full support should trouble eventuate. The film, of course, intends for us to frown on this position, and uses it to reinforce Kane’s pitiful isolation (and thus our sympathy for and identification with him). However, because the story consistently declines to clarify whether leaving would not indeed cancel the threat of violence to Amy and himself (a subject of dispute from early in the film), we cannot see that his insistence on staying is more than a matter of pride. The film’s music also seems to emphasize foremost damage to one’s own ego and reputation, with its fear that the protagonist will “lie a coward, a craven coward—lie a co-ward in [his] grave.” Despite what Kane might do, then, High Noon is insistent that some problems must be solved through violent force and, without due explanation, that this is one of them.

The construction of the bad guys is just as targeted toward testing Kane’s manhood: hardly real characters, they ride into the town as if possessed, accompanied by ominous musical themes to assure us of their inexorable badness. The problem they pose seems speculative—a worst-case scenario—rather than realistic, because the challenge to Cooper’s masculinity they bring about is what the film really wishes to focus on. An interesting variation in their appearance concerns Ben Miller (Sheb Wooley), who observes Amy from a distance as she visits the train station with an approving “Hey, that wasn’t here five years ago.” The handsome Ben shows none of the roiling antagonism and scrunched features of his fellow gang-members, and the pleasure he takes in seeing Amy seems to threaten Kane with cuckoldry more than violence: there is more to this conflict than the basic narrative seems willing to admit.

High Noon’s problematic politics are most immediately enacted through the relationship between Kane and Amy, and one of the film’s more dissatisfying moves is the arrogant dismissal of the latter’s position on the conflict in which she and her husband are embroiled (that they should leave town as originally planned and avoid the confrontation). At one point in the film, Amy gets it into her head that Kane refuses to leave because of some lingering devotion to his past love, Helen (Katy Jurado). She visits the older woman, requesting she allow her husband to go. This otherwise unnecessary plot point allows the film to use Helen to morally silence Amy with the reason her husband must stay (because he is a man who stands up for himself), enforcing the film’s dominant politics of masculinity from an apparently objective point of view.

The specific language Helen uses to do this is even more interesting. To Amy’s question of why her husband won’t leave, Helen responds: “If you don’t know, I can’t explain it to you.” This is a direct echo of Kane’s response to Harvey’s question about why he cannot be made Sheriff on a whim. In this way, Amy (the “child bride”) is associated with the explicitly childish Harvey, and her pacifism denounced as a product of her immaturity rather than treated as a legitimate philosophical viewpoint.

To be fair, the film does allow us a degree of moral ambiguity when Amy responds to Helen by recalling the death of her family through gun-violence, giving us a real sense of the trauma it may inflict. However, this ambiguity serves as a kind of rhetorical holding-bay. The film temporarily abstains from clearing up our moral ambivalence until it can do so with the kind of dramatic absolutism afforded by its finale, in which Amy rejects her pacifism by killing one of her husband’s attackers.

Prior to the climax of this ideologically questionable character-arc, Amy urgently proceeds to the scene of the showdown where she encounters the dead body of one of her husband’s assailants. This spectacle, given to us from her perspective, viscerally recalls the horror of violence she experienced as a child and led her to pacifism. Now that she has decided to do the “right thing” and stick by her husband, the corpse occurs as a faintly sadistic test of her courage. However, in a move that is surely intended to disappoint or frustrate the viewer, she fails this test: traumatized, she locks herself in the Marshal’s office alone. The viewer counts her out; in fact, her turn-around here might even render her more treacherous than before—for she decided to help her husband only to wimp out once our expectations were up. Through this, the character is maneuvered to such a point that only a violent act can redeem her in the viewer’s eyes. Not only must her passive ideology be abandoned, but she must bring herself to commit real violence in order to legitimize her devotion to her husband.

In one scene of Zimmermann’s film, Harvey overhears the bartender admit that, while he doesn’t like Kane, the man has guts. Turning to Harvey, he claims that his own decision to abandon Kane showed brains. Harvey, of course, tired of being considered but a boy, doesn’t want brains. In the world of High Noon, guts and brains are oppositional: guts are what really make the man, and the specific logic of Kane’s predicament is secondary.

This focus on the ethos of masculinity is High Noon’s real interest, and the dilemma at the narrative’s center is geared to provide a morally approved pretext for its demonstration. When questioned as to why he will not allow himself to run, Kane responds: “I don’t know.” His need to stay is something ideologically ingrained and normalized rather than ethically argued-for or justified.

Whatever High Noon’s politics, though, the film is more than a straightforward male fantasy; it takes us on a fascinating emotional and intellectual journey, lingering at a number of psychic places that we would probably prefer not to visit. If we are to share in Kane’s triumph, the film still asks we share in his doubt and, at times, piercing vulnerability. The narrative manages the passing of diegetic time and its significance masterfully, and there isn’t a moment that it fails to engage the viewer. Combined with this stylistic energy, High Noon’s controversial politics and its enduring cultural impact make it essential and discussion-provoking viewing.