by ·Comments Off on The Big Trail (1930, Raoul Walsh)

A couple years after earning his eyepatch, Walsh directed the first widescreen 70mm epic sound western, and gave John Wayne his first starring role. And it’s got title cards – I love title cards in a sound film. In the end it’s a bit awkward and overdone, but good effort.

Villains:

Wayne is on the trail of ugly murderer Red, who’s about to lead a wagon train west. Wayne gets himself invited along, so Red hires an evil blackhat cheating gambler as protection. There’s a girl of course, better known from Dracula’s Daughter and The Walking Dead, and a fake Swede, who played fake Swedes all his life. Red is Tyrone Power’s dad, in his final role before a fatal heart attack. He and the gambler (of Queen Christina) keep trying to murder Wayne even though he’s friends with the Cheyenne and arranging peaceful passage through their territory. Finally, grizzled John Huston-looking Zeke (of The Cat & The Canary) shoots the gambler.

by ·Comments Off on El Dorado (1966, Howard Hawks)

Glowing restoration of a classic western – you wouldn’t know it’s the mid-1960s except for some casting failures, and the occasional Pink Panther-ass music. John Wayne is a Yojimbo-type gunman, taking the side of the MacDonald family he’s supposed to have been hired to kill, Mitchum the hopelessly drunk sheriff who needs to sober up before the big showdown. Michele Carey is very good as the pissed-off McD girl who shoots Wayne in the spine early on – too bad her career never rose past couple-episode appearances on big TV shows. Pre-Godfather James Caan and Wayne’s girl Charlene Holt both suck, however. There’s gotta be a grizzled deputy – in this case Arthur Hunnicutt, returning from The Big Sky. Baddies include Ed “Up” Asner as Black Bart and Scarface McCloud (Chris George of City of the Living Dead and Pieces) as the hired gun who takes the assassination job offered to Wayne. And gunsmith “Swede” is a Swede (played by a Dane).

Wayne and his girl:

Our heroes:

by ·Comments Off on The Great Silence (1968, Sergio Corbucci)

This one’s your standard sort of mysterious-stranger spaghetti-western with a few twists. Firstly, it’s a white western, snowbound like Track of the Cat (and moving around in the snow can go slowly, so you’ve gotta undercrank your movie a little). Hero Jean-Louis Trintignant (just before Maud’s and Conformist) is mute, hence the title. Then you’ve got a killer “Tigrero” who is always calm and polite, so they cast “Loco” Klaus Kinski (the spoken words and subtitles don’t always agree). The biggest twist for me is the ending, as the villains (corrupt bounty hunters) kill the sheriff, the hero, his girl, then all the families he was trying to protect.

The girl was much later in To Sleep with Anger:

L-R: corrupt Pollicut (a Bay of Bloodsman), the sheriff of Salvatore Giuliano, jailed Kinski

by ·Comments Off on Fistful / Sucker (Sergio Leone)

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

What a picture. Clint comes to town and meets the grey-haired bartender next door to the busy coffin carpenter, proceeds to get paid by both sides of the warring criminal families, then after Clint does a good deed by rescuing an imprisoned girl, he and his bartender are tortured. The coffin maker secrets Clint away to a cavern so he can recover then return and slaughter everybody.

Been a while since I saw the not-really-sequel – this is just as good, though it suffers from lack of Lee Van Cleef. The girl was in Franju’s Spotlight on a Murderer, the lead Rojo gangster in Le Cercle Rouge, his main brute in Dead Pigeon, and at least two others are from Viridiana. If nobody has yet made a supercut of atrociously dubbed children in Italian movies, nobody ever should.

–
Duck, You Sucker (1971)

Real class-warfare pervert stuff, right from the start. “He doesn’t know anything” says the white man’s mouth in grotesque Svankmajer-esque extreme closeup about the peasant their coach picks up, unaware they’ve picked up bandito Rod Steiger. The bandits next encounter a fellow criminal, explosives-rigged James Coburn, so they team up. Coburn is fighting for a cause, Steiger for cash, but after the idiot bandito gets pulled into the revolution and the government slaughters his family he becomes a true believer.

Steiger is the Run of the Arrow guy, and Coburn is the oscar winner for Affliction who was also in 100 other movies I haven’t seen. I’d preferred the alternate title A Fistful of Dynamite but once you hear Irish Coburn say his catchphrase moments before his bombs go off, you realize Duck, You Sucker is correct. He drops the accent almost immediately, but Steiger lays his on so thick I had to turn on subtitles – at long last the Italians are working with sync sound, and it’s actually worse than before. Ultimately the movie gets tedious, and the Leone apologists out there making excuses for Steiger are wrong, but some stuff blows up real good.

Coburn + parakeets:

by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in China and America (1997, Sammo Hung)

Cheesy, stupid movie whenever anyone is talking, but it’s also the most handsome-looking one of these movies in a while, and Jet Li is back, and his and Clubfoot’s action scenes are hot. The action is chopped up more than usual, but it works, until it doesn’t. Music is hit or miss – playing the OUATIC theme on Western instruments is cool but sometimes the composer plays a choir on a sampling keyboard, which is less cool. Wong loses his memory on a trip to America, joins a native tribe and hooks up with Agent Tammy Preston (in her only acting role outside of Twin Peaks). Sammo sure is trying some things to revive the series, sometimes successfully, but goes too broad and ends up with anti-racism for babies, nowhere near the heights of his Millionaire’s Express.

Our guys are joined by Billy (stuntman Jeff Wolfe), far right:

by ·Comments Off on The Damned (2024, Roberto Minervini)

Civil War union boys attempt to patrol out west. Non-period-accurate dialogue, the actors apparently just told to say whatever’s on their minds, it loses me whenever they speak religion or philosophy. I wondered with a half-hour left where this is all heading, and decided it’s heading nowhere and will have an open non-ending, and yup.

As far as movies where women don’t exist, this isn’t as good as Chevalier. The DP (who also wrote the music) uses some unusual lens, dark on the edges with blurry backgrounds, editor also works with the Dardennes.

by ·Comments Off on 3:10 to Yuma (1957, Delmer Daves)

Butterfield’s stagecoach and a nearby cattle farmer’s horses get robbed by Glenn Ford’s gang, then Glenn hangs out casually in Bisbee falling for bartender Felicia Farr (Jubal) while the posse runs away from town searching for him. The sheriff tries to enlist the cattle farmer Cowboy Dan (Van Heflin: a major player on the cowboy scene) in a scheme to capture Glenn – he refuses until Butterfield offers more cash than a drought-ruined farmer can pass up.

The plan: they arrest Glenn knowing his murder-gang will try to rescue him, and pull a switcheroo at the farm so the gang won’t know they’re holding Glenn at the hotel. Then simply wait for the 3:10 train and put Glenn aboard, easy peasy. But the gang has spies and once they find the hotel, they kill Drunk Alex (the only other guy who’d take the money for this assignment), Butterfield walks out, and nobody thinks Van/Dan can get Glenn onboard to the train alive (he can). Glenn is terrific at playing the overconfident villain, should’ve done that more often. I have not much interest in the remake, despite Alan Tudyk playing the drunk.

by ·Comments Off on Eureka (2023, Lisandro Alonso)

Viggo Mortensen is searching for his missing daughter again, this time as a killer in a b/w Western. Presumably this is a prank on those of us who wanted another Jauja, because after a half hour Viggo’s movie is shrunk down to an SD TV movie and ignored like Danny Glover in Bamako, and instead we follow a Native American cop on her rounds, and then… I think her niece gets transported by a CG stork into a dream-recounting ceremony where a young man stabs somebody then tries to escape.

Shot:

Reverse shot:

“Each story explores questions of indigeneity and its reaction or resistance to the imposition of Western law and order” – Jeff Reichert works through the cinema/myth/dream journey on Reverse Shot, and Alonso has no fucks to give in his Cinema Scope interview.

From Bamako to Dead Man:

by ·Comments Off on The Big Gundown (1967, Sergio Sollima)

The Big Movie Series #2. This is my third show in a row (after Nemesis and I’m a Virgo) where a lead character belatedly realizes they’ve been doing damage not out of righteousness but as a tool of capitalism. Lee Van Cleef is a ruthless lawman chasing escape artist Cuchillo because corrupt rich guys say he’s a criminal. Lee is as badass as you could hope for, but Cuchillo (Tomas Milian of Identification of a Woman and Four of the Apocalypse) still runs off with the movie. All I knew about this previously was the Morricone score – he and the writer and producer followed up with Once Upon a Time in the West, while Sollima went on to make a reportedly-great Charles Bronson revenge flick.

Just some doomed outlaws:

Our guys:

Hotwife Manolita Barroso: