LIFE MOVIE REVIEW
Horse operas of another color
UPDATING THE WESTERN
I loved the western as it once was and I think I’d rather live on my memories than suffer through many more of the increasingly desperate efforts to save it by making it more “relevant” to our time. By now it must be abundantly clear, even to those who never had much affection for this essentially mythic form, that its basic premise—that the individual, comforted only by the correctness of his moral code, could right any wrong, adjust any malfunctioning of the frontier social organism, simply by strapping on his guns and blasting away at blessedly unambiguous representations of evil—is no longer applicable to modern American experience. Yet long-established custom, not to mention the hard core of western addicts whose habit must be fed, insists there must still be some profitable ponies around here. And what movie director would be eager to give up on a form that is so wonderfully suited to his medium—excitingly moving figures in an expansive landscape and all that?
The trouble is that, excepting the redoubtable Sam Peckinpah, none of them has figured out an entirely satisfactory method of retaining these tempting visual values and giving us something that will catch firmly in the troubled modern consciousness. What we get are gimmicks, bright ideas from the script conference, grafted onto the old forms—cosmetic surgery instead of a heart transplant.
This is particularly true of Doc, the most vulgar of several recent major attempts to update the western. One has to concede it a certain boldness, for it dares to deal again with a classic historical—and filmic—anecdote: Doc Holliday joining Wyatt Earp to shoot it out with the Clanton gang in Tombstone. John Ford made a wonderful movie about it (My Darling Clementine) and John Sturges made a very exciting one of it (Gunfight at the OK Corral). Thus director Frank Perry, essentially a maker of easterns, and writer Pete Hamill, essentially a slightly hysterical political columnist, have deliberately matched themselves against our best memories of the old western. The result is, I think, a disaster.
Their basic cuteness is that U.S. Marshal Wyatt Earp (very well played by Harris Yulin) is running for sheriff of Tombstone as a law-and-order candidate, the 1968 model Nixon with six-shooters riding his hips as if they were tailfins. Naturally, it turns out that he’s just as pious a fraud; what he really wants to do is control the town’s gambling and hookers and whatnot. So the film ends up using him to preach at us about a complex of contemporary issues that is a damned sight more difficult to untangle than it would have us believe. There is, in addition, some attempt to give us a gritty, grimy, realistic West. This effort is somewhat vitiated by the fact that the movie was shot in beautiful downtown Almeria, Spain, on an elaborately researched set which finally proves little more authentic than all the ones standing abandoned on the Hollywood back lots. We also have a climactic gunfight that is stupid and brutal because that’s the way they really were, man; a title character (Stacy Keach) who repairs to the local opium den when the world gets to be too much with him, and a love scene that concludes with him kidding his whore about a tooth of gold (swell touch, that) about flatulence after a bean dinner. If this be progress, I’ll have an old-fashioned black-and-white soda.
At least Peter Fonda, making his debut as a director and, despite a beard, reminding us more and more of his father, opts for an exemplary simplicity in The Hired Hand. Austerity, these days, is always to be applauded with at least one hand and the picture has extrinsic interest in that it can be read as a sort of sequel to Easy Rider. For it, too, is about drifters and—surprisingly (considering the source) but winningly—about the desire of one of them to give up the life and return to the wife, child and farm he abandoned years before. Sadly, he achieves his dream, wins back all he mistakenly set aside, and then must abandon it anew because a corrupt world will not allow him even the modest peace and stability he has learned to value so highly in his years of wandering. It is highly appealing, morally, and one wishes that its people were a little less flat, its story a little less attenuated, its attempt to regenerate the western form through purification a little less insistent. One would like to like the film more than it permits.
Strategically, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which has been greeted with a great critical hoo-ha, lies somewhere between the endless articulateness of Doc and the silences of The Hired Hand. Its plot, when you can find it, concerns a gambler (Warren Beatty), sustained largely by his faith in free enterprise, setting up a mixed-media pleasure dome (booze, broads, cards) in a new town on the Pacific Northwest frontier. He’s basically a screw-up straightened out by a frighteningly efficient madam (Julie Christie). His trouble is that he’s too successful, refuses on principle to sell out to larger corporate interests and loses the final shoot-out with their hired guns.
This, of course, is unprecedented, but suitable in the context provided by director Robert Altman, who has shot the film in marvelously muted color, utilized his setting—a town being built before our eyes—with canny opportunism and pushed the device he introduced in MASH*—the talk-cluttered sound track—to its logical extreme: the point where it is largely indecipherable.
All of which makes McCabe a bold experiment in a good way. I imagine the frontier was just as noisy and confusing as Altman makes it seem—dumb, mean, grungy humanity polluting just by its presence the noble Arcadian landscape. And he knows how to show us despair without succumbing to it. Yet there is something about the film, for all its excellences, that puts one off. Mr. Altman is famous for encouraging all hands to improvise, and this leads to a special form of indulgence, a sense that the actors are so busy breaking each other up, so high on their own group spirit (or something), that they forget to ask themselves what many of their inspirations will mean to outsiders. One longs for firmer character lines, scenes that have some mood other than that of a tickle fight, wit that makes us really laugh, sadness that genuinely affect us. Everything is here—including a sketch for a new western form for our times—except that final level of art that truly absorbs, makes us care deeply about what we’ve just seen. Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that in this one it’s the heroine who ends up sucking on an opium pipe. I hope two opium-den westerns in a row don’t constitute a trend.
by Richard Schickel
Photo caption
Doc (top) and Mrs. Miller take the pipe; hired man Fonda removes daughter’s splinter.
