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 19^th 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.