Revisionary Westerns? The Wild Bunch, Once Upon a Time in the West, Unforgiven
Evolution of genre
- primitive phase
- classical phase
- revisionary phase
- parodic phase
Primitive phase: see The Great Train Robbery and possibly a host of silent and early
sound westerns that confused genre expectations. Perhaps the most infamous are Phantom Empire (1935) and The Terror of Tiny Town (1938).
Classical phase: represented by the
westerns of John Ford, Henry King, Raoul Walsh, and others. This phase sets the
conventions, and works with these in a celebratory manner. Themes of justice,
honour, and protection appear in film after film. Ride the High Country serves as an example, as do the films by Ford
and Hawks. ‘Myth” is a word that applies to the classic western. This western
functions as an expression of the ‘mythic west.’ This is the west presented as
a geography of freedom and enterprise. It celebrates America as the land of the
free, as the land peopled with strong and independent people, especially men.
In the classic western, women play relatively small roles. The land is open and
ready for settlement, as if it were a “virgin land.”
-conventions
include: a high mimetic hero, a quest of some sort, a valuation of the natural,
a masculinity associated with strength, responsibility, judgment, honour,
loyalty, resolve, courage, and self-reliance/independence. The hero more often
than not chooses the companionship of horse or sidekick to that of a woman; he
chooses the life of a wanderer instead of the domestic life. He chooses duty
over desire. The good guys are always small ranchers or pioneers or
newspapermen, and they find themselves threatened by representatives of Big
Business. The classic western supports small business – a classic form of
capitalism that frowns on monopoly. Monopoly often finds itself allegorized in
the figure of the gambler, or at least the gambler who cheats. This is a figure
of corruption who turns a game of chance into a rigged system. The open market
is compromised by the marked cards or ace up the sleeve. Corruption and
cheating in the classic western are signs of civilization’s failures.
Civilization fails when one person can monopolize land or business. We have
come a long way from this vision of capitalism.
The
hero protects the very people who represent the hero’s obsolescence. The hero
is different from the average person because he can make a difference. His
action results in betterment.
Revisionary phase: reassessment of
conventions and themes. ‘Revision’ suggests a re-seeing, a seeing from another
angle or perspective. It also suggests a revising; a revisionary work revises
what we have come to take for granted, asking us to see again for the first
time familiar conventions. Defamiliarization is a term from literary studies
that may apply here. What has become all too familiar is given a new look, made
new, as it were.
Another
way of describing revisionary westerns is for us to say that these are westerns
that debunk the myths of the west that the classic phase films construct.
Instead of heroes, we get anti-heroes. Instead of noble deeds, we get petty
action and dubious motivation. Instead of romantic landscapes, we get closed
spaces, crowded spaces. Instead of perfunctory killing, we get brutal death.
Instead of sartorial neatness, we get scruffy and dirty clothing, greasy hair,
unshaven faces, and dust everywhere. Instead of a world that is thoroughly
masculine, we meet strong women who sometimes are the equal of men. At the very
least, we meet women who have independent lives.
Casting
might also mark the revisionary western. Actors we have come to know as a
certain kind of character, take roles unusual for them. An example might be
Joseph Mankiewicz’s There Was A Crooked
Man (1970), in which both Henry Fonda and Kirk Douglas play to and against
type. The obvious example in the films we have watched, is the casting of Henry
Fonda as the cold-blooded Frank in Once
Upon a Time in the West. We also have the case where the anti-type becomes
the type – I am thinking of Eastwood’s man with no name character in his first
westerns for Leone, and then in several of his later westerns.
Parodic phase: revisionary work continues
to take a form seriously. It may turn familiar conventions on their heads, but
it does so not to trivialize a form or genre, but rather to reinvigorate the
form or genre. The parody, on the other hand, may or may not trivialize. I
think films such as The Villain
(1979), The Three Amigos (1986), Rustler’s Rhapsody (1985), maybe even Ride ‘Em Cowboy (1942) are examples of
parodies that trivialize. They do not take the western seriously; they debunk
the myth of the west. On the other hand, the parody that we find in the Italian
western can celebrate as much as it burlesques – see for example, My Name is Nobody (dir. Tony
Valerii/prod. Sergio Leone).
One
thing is certain, the parody western has fun with the genre by rendering its
conventions in an exaggerated manner.
-the
phases that a genre is supposed to go through appear chronological, and for the
most part I guess they are. But it is crucial to note that each of these phases
can occur at any time. In other words, we can have parodic westerns from the
beginning – and we do. Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Harold
Lloyd, Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, and others
made comedy/parody westerns. We might also find revisionary westerns in the
classic period. One obvious example is Ford’s The Searchers, but we might go back 10 years to King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946) for another
example.
Question: are The Wild Bunch, Once Upon a
Time in the West, and Unforgiven
classic westerns, revisionary westerns, or parodic westerns?
Answer: ultimately, the question
for me is: what position vis a vis the western myth does a film take? If the
answer is that the film ends with a feeling that the west and its iconic figure
– the cowboy hero – are somehow great beyond the common order of men, then the
film participates in the classic western’s “myth-building,” rather than myth dismantling.
-The
Wild Bunch: Pike, Dutch, and the Gorch brothers take that heroic walk
at the end of the film, a walk reminiscent of the gunman’s walk (the title of a
film, by the way – Gunman’s Walk
1958). Given the epic proportions of the film, and the echo of the Greeks
dragging Hector’s body around the walls of Troy, and the iconic backdrop to the
action, we can have little doubt that these guys are the last of a noble breed.
Elegy, as always, elevates. It lets us know that we are the poorer for what we
have lost.
-Once
Upon a Time in the West: need I say more? This film has a conflicted
relationship with the western – for obvious reasons. It derives from a leftist
culture at variance with the central concern of the western – individualism.
The final panoramic crane shot (the shot missing from the screened version in
class) lets us know two things: 1) the days of the individual (people like
Harmonica and Cheyenne) are over, and 2) what matters in the future is not the
railroad moguls (men like Morton who are “crippled” by their greed), but rather
the collective, the workers, the men to whom Jill brings water, the men who
might pat her on the behind, but who don’t mean anything by this gesture (ha!).
But this film too cannot resist the elegiac content, as clear in the sound
track as in what we see. Men like Harmonica and Cheyenne are the stuff of myth,
and as the stuff of myth they are celebrated. Harmonica’s motive is revenge (a
familiar theme in westerns), but we know that he is on the side of right, and
he knows he is not a man for the future (“I gotta go.”). Cheyenne says
Harmonica has “something to do with death.” Cheyenne’s motive is less clear,
but we know that he is a man’s man, a fellow who rides with a gang who all wear
the same kind of coat. He is a sign of the working together that will be
important in the future, even though he will not be a part of this future. The
scene in which Harmonica measures out the station, and the men begin to build
it is important because it shows us the way to the future (the building of a
town and civilization), and it also shows us how out of place in this future
men like Harmonica and Cheyenne are. They quite simply do not look like
carpenters.
The
Italian western often has a political edge – more often than not Marxist (see
Corbucci’s The Companeros 1970 or Sergio Sollima’s The Big Gundown 1966 or Leone’s Duck, You Sucker 1971). The political content may be seen as
revisionary of the American western that is more often than not conservative or
only obliquely political.
The
Italian western is also operatic or baroque. By this I mean that it delights in
excess. It moves in the direction of camp. The music is an obvious aspect of
this operatic quality. Then the films have baroque touches – Woody Strode’s
sawed off Winchester in Once Upon a Time
in the West, the harmonica in the same film, Sabata’s arsenal in the
‘Sabata’ series, Ringo’s golden pistol in the film of the same name, Django’s
gattling gun that he drags around the west in a coffin in Corbucci’s Django (1966), and other crazy stuff
like a rifle inside a banjo or a pony whose farts are like “cherry blossoms.”
The ritualistic and drawn-out gun duels are an obvious extension and hence
parody of the American western. And yet these same gun duels very much participate
in the mythic west and take it seriously. Such content veers toward parody of
the American western, but a parody that celebrates rather than deflates. We get
what I might call serious parody. And so I conclude that the Italian western
(generally) both parodies and celebrates the American western. Revisionary
parody, maybe.
-Unforgiven:
the western just cannot seem to get away from its own myth, here the myth of
the lone gunman who cleans up a rotten place and leaves it for others to
populate. This film consciously accepts the myth of the classic western while
at the same time it attempts to re-see the classic western. Like Ride the High Country, it has three main
protagonists, two of whom are aging gunfighters and the third is a young
untried, but cocky, kid who will learn the truth about killing during his
travels with his two aged partners. But unlike Ride the High Country, Unforgiven
foregrounds race. In Ride the High
Country, the main characters eat in a Chinese restaurant, but not much is
made of this. The restaurant is a reminder of changing times. In Eastwood’s
film, the two aging gunfighters are a black man and a white man. The black man
has a Native American wife. Nothing obvious is made of this racial mix. It is
taken for granted. Then we have English Bob who is hired by the railroad to
shoot Chinese people. As he enters Big Whiskey in the stagecoach, English Bob
mockingly pretends to shoot two Chinese men he sees walking in the town. Little
Bill asks him if he has run out of Chinese to shoot. Such gestures are, in one
way, small. But in another way, these gestures to race are large. They remind
us that the west was not peopled only by whites or only by whites and Native
Americans who provide canon fodder. And they remind us that racism was alive
and well in the west, and they remind us that the west was peopled by a variety
of people.
Age
is an issue in both Ride the High Country
and Unforgiven, but it becomes more
of an impediment in the latter film. William Munny (Eastwood) can’t shoot the way
he once could. Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) no longer has the will to shoot at
all. Munny cannot mount his horse easily, although we know this is partly his
lack of practice and his horse’s lack of practice. Even the young gunsel, the
Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) can’t shoot well because his eyesight is poor.
These guys may be professionals or may have been professionals at one time, but
now they are a rag-tag trio who work rather inefficiently.
That
is until the end when Munny reverts to his younger self after the news that
Little Bill (Gene Hackman) his killed his friend. He becomes a killer again to
avenge his friend who has been cruelly murdered. He takes to the bottle and
regains both the nerve and the steady hand and eye of his younger crazier days.
Here is where the film takes its classic turn.
Before
I comment on this classic turn, I note the revisionary examination of violence.
In the early westerns, we have violence. But this violence is more often than
not bloodless and painless. We may have spectacular falls from horseback or
from roofs, but we rarely hear gasps of pain or thuds of bullets into flesh. We
rarely see grimaces on the faces of those shot. We hear a gunshot, then we see
someone fall down. That’s it. Then Peckinpah came along and slowed the action
down, allowed us to see the impact of a bullet upon flesh, and the opening of
the body and the release of blood in an arc of anguish. Eastwood shows the
brutality of gun violence both orally and visually. First we have a story such
as the one Munny recalls to Ned; remember, he says, the time he shot some
drover in the mouth, and his teeth came out the back of his head. This guy did
little or nothing, and yet he dies this horrid death. Then we have the shooting
of the young cowboy who was with his partner who cut the prostitute. This
shooting leads to a drawn out scene that allows us to know the pain of a
stomach wound. The scene draws on an earlier one in Howard Hawks’s El Dorado, another film about pain and
violence. The beatings Little Bill gives both English Bob and William Munny are
also meant to suggest the ugliness of violence. The terrible nature of this
violence registers on the faces of those who witness the violence. Late in the
film, Little Bill whips Ned in a scene that registers the pain of violence both
in the grimaces on Ned’s face and the blood running down his back, and also in
the faces of the townspeople who stand outside the jail listening to what is
happening inside. Finally, we have the scars on William Munny and on the
prostitute, Delilah. These are reminders of the physical effect of violence –
its lasting mark on both the body and mind.
But
violence has its heroic and romantic side. It is an aspect of the myth of the
west. We see this in the presence of W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), the
western writer who chronicles the exploits of English Bob, aka The Duke (or the
Duck) of Death. Beauchamp is a writer of dime novels, popular fiction that
romanticizes the west and makes the figure of the gun fighter a popular hero.
Ned Buntline is perhaps the most famous of these writers; Buntline chronicled
the exploits of Buffalo Bill and was, for a time, the wealthiest author in
America. The film means to expose such writing for what it is: fiction parading
as history, sensationalism and a pack if lies. The kind of heroic violence
chronicled in the dime novel is held up to scrutiny when it is contrasted with
the actual violence of people like Little Bill and William Munny. At the end,
Beauchamp slinks out of the saloon without his interview with the wild William
Munny. He does not have a new gunfighter to follow about. But the film is not
so simple. What Beauchamp does is turn history into myth, and the film does
something the same with William Munny. And Munny himself speaks his own myth.
For
most of the film, William Munny is an aging pig farmer who used to be a killer
and a drunk – or a drunken killer. Now he is a family man, a widower who vows
to remain true to his wife’s memory. As a gunfighter, he is bumbling and
ineffective. He can no longer shoot a pistol with any accuracy, and he is no
great shakes with a Sharpes Rifle either. His ability as a horseman is
questionable too. But when it comes to avenging a friend, William Munny is as
efficient and cold as they come. He enters the saloon and dispatches the bad
guys one by one. Once the smoke has cleared, W. W. Beauchamp begins to question
him, but Munny will have none of this. He takes his own myth under his own
control. He tells those waiting for him outside the saloon that he is coming
out and that if anyone tries to shoot him, he will kill them, then he will kill
their wives, then their friends, and then he will burn down their homes. He
enters the street, mounts his pale horse (see. Revelations 6:8 – and he who sat
upon the pale horse was Death), and rides into the night. No one dares shoot at
him. He defeats his enemies, ultimately, by the force of his myth. Like Ulysses
in Homer’s epic, Munny is a scourge. He comes to rid a place of its bad
element.
The
mythic dimension to William Munny is clear from his horse and his words. But we
also have this final scene played out in a thunderstorm, at night, in pouring
rain. As so often, this scene echoes the opening scene which is also in the
rain. In the opening scene, it is Little Bill who arrives like thunder to deal
with the two cowboys who have cut the prostitute. Little Bill is a version of
Munny. At the film’s end, Munny enters the saloon as a loud clap of thunder
sounds. He is, in effect, a force of nature, a scourge of the gods. He comes
from the thunder itself. And he comes to cleanse, to wash away the evil in Big
Whiskey. Here is the heroic and enigmatic character Eastwood has played in such
films as Pale Rider (1985) and High Plains Drifter (1973). In all three
films, Eastwood plays a semi-mystical character – one reminiscent of Shane in
George Stevens’s 1953 film. In Unforgiven,
note the opening and closing shots. Both are elegiac in lighting (as is the
film itself in its use of autumn and winter settings). The opening shot gives
us the sense of a place out of time, and the closing shot accentuates this
feeling by having the clothes on the line, and the figure of the man disappear
from sight, just disappear. We read that William Munny may have ended up in San
Francisco as a dry goods dealer. But this is the stuff of rumour and hearsay, a
way to underscore the mysterious nature of this powerful force. William Munny
exists in a state of limbo, neither of this world nor the next. He is what he
is because of a bottle of whiskey (Eastwood’s insistence on the whiskey and on
the empty whiskey bottle near the end of the film brings into focus all the
drinking we have seen in earlier films, especially The Wild Bunch). He is William Munny the Killer only when he is
drinking. When sober, he is William Munny dry goods dealer or hog farmer. The
point is that the mythic William Munny lives outside normal, sober, quotidian
reality.
Finally
elegy again. Unforgiven contains a
dedication to Sergio and Don, that is Sergio Leone and Don Siegal, both
directors who worked with Clint Eastwood in his early days, and both directors
who made westerns. They are also both dead when Unforgiven is released in 1992. Eastwood’s invoking of both Leone
and Siegal signals the past, the tradition, the connection with both directors
and a form that is passing, that has seen its day. Eastwood has always known
that the lone figure on horseback, the protector of the innocent and defender
of the poor and disenfranchised, the man loyal to the code of honour and friendship
exists only in myth, not in reality. And so we have two William Munnys, the one
who is father and provider, and the other who is an inebriated killing machine.
The former is hardly of interest; the latter captures our imaginations, just as
he has captured the Schofield Kid’s imagination. What the kid learns is that
imagination is not life. Life is raw and fearful; myth is quick, nimble, and
beyond reach.
Property and Literacy:
-before
we leave the western, I note the recurring themes of property and literacy. In Unforgiven, for example, we have clear
references to property in the prostitutes. Skinny Dubois (Anthony James) claims
he has a paper that indicates he owns the prostitutes; they are his property.
Little Bill, of course, has a house (“I don’t deserve this. I’m building a
house.”). The two cowboys who cut the prostitute bring horses (property of a
sort) to pay for their crime. Property in westerns is a burden. Someone is
always trying to take it away or to gain control over it. The cowboy hero is,
as often as not, without property. When William Munny has property, he is in
the dirt with the hogs; when he rides free from property, he rides into myth.
As
for literacy, we see this in the figure of W. W. Beauchamp, a writer not just
of letters (both Little Bill and William Munny make this mistake), but of
books. In all the westerns we have seen, letters in the form of writing (most
often writing on buildings or on signs, but sometimes in letters or newspapers
indicates a new time, a change from a frontier existence to a modern urban
existence with its technological changes.
Question: can a film be all three
(classic, revisionary, and parodic) at once?
The Western and the Samurai
Film
-The White, the Yellow and the Black (aka Samurai), directed by Sergio Corbucci (1975)
1. Historical material:
-both the samurai film and the western locate their
action at the end of an era – the closing of the frontier in America and the
end of the clan system in late 19th century Japan.
-both have mythic dimension, but the samurai genre
stretches its mythic content to the extreme. For example, an element of the
supernatural can pervade the samurai film, but rarely (and rarely successfully)
does the supernatural pervade the western.
-the samurai film is, in some ways, a response to
the post-atomic moment in 1945.
2.
The hero:
-the lone hero who wanders a land in search of
injustices to combat.
-the maimed hero – one-armed samurai or blind
samurai (e.g. Zatoichi). This aspect of the samurai film is not prevalent in the
American western; however, it does inform the Italian western (e.g. Blindman dir. Ferdinando Baldi 1971 or The Great Silence dir. Sergio Corbucci
1968). One early American film that does draw on the maimed hero tradition of
the samurai film is John Sturges’s Bad
Day at Black Rock (1955). This is a modern day western. (Note: Sturges also
directed the more famous western based on a samurai film, The Magnificent Seven 1960.)
-aversion to guns in samurai films. The samurai hero
disdains the gun. The gun is anti-traditional, a sign of encroaching
industrialization and mechanization.
-the duel:
two swordsmen must fight, although neither is necessarily evil. These fights
taker place in private, often in an open field – something the Italian western
picks up. The American western more often than not has its duels in public (see
Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead,
for example or Henry King’s famous film, The
Gunfighter.
-honour and the conflict between inclination
(desire) and duty (responsibility)
-from Stuart Kaminsky’s American Film Genres (1974): “The western hero has a great sense of
self; the samurai has a great sense of subordination of self” (54).
-western hero is alone (mostly), but the samurai is
alone only because he has been cut off from a master.
-pride and shame: the western gunman is often wary
of his own prowess (see for example, Shane
or The Gunfighter); the samuarai is
proud of his ability with a sword. There is, perhaps, more art in being a
samurai than in being a fast gun.
-the samurai film presupposes a knowledge of a great
many fictional and historical characters. The American western has some of
this, but to a much smaller extent.
Ritual:
-both
samurai films and westerns are ritualistic. However, the rituals in the western
are often broken (“Put an A-men to it,” in The
Searchers or the bad guys’ willingness to cheat in a duel or Cole
Thornton’s ruse in El Dorado).
Rituals in the samurai films are, for the most part, adhered to.
The Seven
Samurai
(1954)
Why end with this film?
1. Kurosawa has stated that he
admired the American western films, especially those of John Ford.
2. The Seven Samurai has the epic proportions of the western, although it is far less
interested in the land than in the people who share the land.
3. The film uses techniques we
see elsewhere: the slow motion violence of Peckinpah, the frenetic cutting also
of Peckinpah, the noble close-up for both the heroic characters and for the
peasants, ritual in battles, funerals, food, etc., themes of friendship and
honour, visual cues to themes such as the water wheel, the flowers, the forest
undergrowth, the rain, fire, the guns, deep focus to create a full mise en
scene, fast tracking shots of horses racing through the forest or across the
landscape.
4. Unlike the western, The Seven Samurai does not personalize
the villains. They remain without character, nearly faceless. They say little
other than grunts and yells. They are a force of nature that the peasant has to
contend with.
5. Unlike the western, horses
are merely functional. If they serve to signify anything (I speak as a western
viewer), then they signify necessity itself. They are a sign of an energy which
is inevitable, natural, and powerful. The scene in which Mifune rides the horse
through the covered bridge, and then has to chase the horse is both a comic
moment and also a reminder of failure, perhaps a premonition of the end. This
character is associated with nature; he captures a fish bare-handed; he rolls
about the earth when he is drunk; he tries to ride the horse; he has kids
follow him. He is a doomed character.
6. The samurai take up the
cause of the peasants for food and lodging, not for money or glory or even for
justice.
7. The Seven Samurai, like The Wild Bunch, has a
rhythmic quality both in the story with its rhythms of calm and action and in
the technique in which we see the camera weave establishing shots with medium
and close-up shots. One example of the work the camera does is in an early
scene in which one of the peasants wants to kill the bandits any way he can,
but the other villagers refuse to accept his hot-headedness. From a crane shot,
we see him leave the group and walk away from the foreground. He slumps to the
ground. We cut to a shot closer to ground level in which we see the slumped
figure in the foreground with the group of villagers behind him. The camera
lens flattens the visual field so that we the figure in the foreground not so
much isolated from the group as blending with the group. What follows is his
re-integration into the group.
8. Careful framing that gives
each shot a pictorial look.
9. Sound: the film uses sound
carefully. Music is sparing, but important. Natural sounds – wind and rain, the
sound of fire, the chopping of wood, the pounding of hoofs – all these
intensify the emotional impact of the film.
10.
The international nature of filmic art.
11.
Because I like it. I like the characters. For me, this is a film of
faces. Much of what the film communicates is through faces. I read that the
dialogue in the film is often nearly indecipherable, and that the subtitles
cannot capture this quality. We have seen this before in Godard’s Weekend. I especially like the peasant
faces, and of course the face of Toshiro Mifune.
