There are no 'revisionist' Westerns

Film critics are so often lazy, or pretentious, which is much the same thing. Reviewers and TV previewers are especially guilty. Working to deadlines, I suppose.

You know the sort of thing: an actor who doesn't do a lot of emoting, like Clint or Greg is called 'wooden' as a matter of course, but if he rolls his eyebrows a bit he's called 'hammy'. If he's in a British war film, then the phrase 'stiff uper lip' has to be dragged out of the locker.

If he or she plays the same sort of role most of the time, they are 'type-cast'. Try something different and they are 'miscast'. If they use a different accent, it's always 'dodgy', even if the critic has never heard the accent itself in his life.

Plots tend to be 'derivative' if you don't like them, an 'hommage' if you do. Themes are 'Manichean' or 'post-ironic' or 'innovative' or 'ground-breaking' or, if the hero has to make a decision, 'existentialist'.

But the one I hate most - at the moment - is 'revisionist', when applied to the Western. What is being revised? Some non-existent standard of Western that has to be updated or undermined or improved?

The western has always been 'revising' itself, re-working stock themes and characters from The Squawman onwards. (All right, I haven't seen it, but I've read all about it). But I have seen these:

Stagecoach (1939): whore doesn't pay for her sins but gets the hero.

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943): tragic ending, where the good guys don't get to save the weak.

The Three Godfathers (1948): the Western as religious parable!

Red River (1948): the hero as drunken, cruel, paranoid, vengeful bastard.

Fort Apache (1948): pre-dates The Man who Shot Liberty Valance in its cynicism about 'printing the legend'.

Broken Arrow (1950): the Western as bleeding heart liberal plea for mutual understanding.

The Gunfighter (1950): ageing gunman wants to hang up his guns and retire, but trapped by his past. Ten years later The Magnificent Seven felt the same way, as did Steve Judd, and a few years later Pike Bishop.

The Furies (1950): the Western as Greek tragedy.

High Noon (1952): Communist propaganda - they say. Actually it's about as non-revisionist as you're going to get, apart from Shane.

The Naked Spur (1953) and all the Stewart/Mann films: 'psychological' Westerns, where the hero is seen as fallible, wrong, neurotic. See Red River.

Johnny Guitar (1954): McCarthyism, sexual frustration, weirdness. Final gunfight between women.

The Searchers (1956): the earliest one I've heard called 'revisionist'. It begins a long line of Westerns given that title, from the spaghettis through The Wild Bunch to Unforgiven.

After those the only revisionism you get is more authentic clothing, more moustaches, more foul language, more whores, even nastier Indians, even nastier cavalrymen, more corporate businessmen from 'back East' or 'up North', more bicycles and machine guns.

So are there any models which have been revised? Well, there are all the old B-westerns, which don't count and which are all that Mel Brooks could find to lampoon in Blazing Saddles. Shane was self-consciously 'classic', as were Duel in the Sun, The Big Country and Lawman.

No. If you want true, pure re-tellings of the classic Western myth, watch The Tall T, Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station. They don't come much better than that.

Recommended books

WALSH, John Are you talking to me? Harper Collins, 2003

I've mentioned this before. Love it. Walsh talks about his formative years in terms of the impact made on him by films. After the early childhood viewings of Lawrence of Arabia, etc, when he would have been about 10, he moves through films like The Innocents, The Enigma of Caspar Hauser and on to Don't Look Now. The last seems to haunt him and he links it with his experiences as a father. The childhood accidents, the times he felt he'd let his children down, a residual guilt.

It's obvious Walsh is a film fan, despite being a critic. Rather like David Thomson, his knowledge does not prevent the child-like wonder and love that the true fan feels for the movies.

As I've said before,it's the book I should have written. Maybe I still could, because the half-dozen films I would choose would quite different. I'll make a start by listing them soon.

By the way, on a similar theme, Alan Bennett talks about the influence on him of 'the pictures'. (Alan, of course, wouldn't talk about 'cinema', let alone 'movies'.) In his book, Untold Stories.

* * * *

COYNE, Michael The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western. Tauris, 1997.

I'm always cautious about books with titles like this. My hackles rise at the smell of anything 'sociological'. I remember being infuriated by Big Bad Wolves, a feminist take on Hollywood. Molly Haskell, I think. It's not that I disagreed with her, just that I didn't care. and why spend years watching films that obviously annoy you in order to write a book that will merely annoy others.

I remember Molly slagging off every male star - she seemed unable to distinguish between character and actor - for being fascist, chauvinist rapists. Every one, except Clark Gable. Apparently he respected women. Well, possibly. My theory is that the dear girl was just in love.

Anyway, back to Mr Coyne. I recommend it because the the theme of the book is just a framework for talking about Westerns, how they've changed, developed and reflect the environment in which they are made. But he doesn't push it and you get some pretty intelligent reviews of Stagecoach, The Wild Bunch, Outlaw Josey Wales,etc. He obviously likes Westerns and does not need a sociological reference to appreciate them.

I don't need to know that The Wild Bunch, Ulzana's Raid and Soldier Blue are 'about' or at least influenced by the Vietnam War to like them (or otherwise). If they were just that they would be as transitory as a newspaper editorial.

I get fed up with arguing on message boards about whether High Noon is 'left-wing'. I know that Foreman was a commie, that Zinnemann was a liberal. Maybe they did think, 'Aren't we clever, getting an anti-McCarthy message through via the most right-wing of genres.' Maybe, but the point is this: how does the film stand up 50 years later? Or with people who've never heard of McCarthy? The answer is - pretty well. And it's a standard right-wing Western: the triumph of law and order; the victory of the upright individual when normal society fails; the need to use violence; the failure of pacifism; the marginalisation of women, etc.

That's a good idea: Story to screen II.II

Why adapt? Well, I've already said what I think is the main reason - the need for ideas. But I'd like to muse awhile on some of the other reasons why books and plays, especially are transmuted in movies.

Hollywood likes to cash in on success. If anything, or anyone, is a hit, you can be sure that a movie will follow. As soon as The Da Vinci Code became the phenomenon it was, the only question was how soon the film would come out. With a book like that, you can dispense with the whole advertising budget.

Gone With the Wind, The Bridges of Madison County, Bridget Jones' Diary.

This process can sometimes get something onto the screen that wouldn't have had a hope had it not achieved success elsewhere. Alan Bennett's plays come to mind. I doubt very much if The Madness of King George or The History Boys would have impressed producers as original screenplays.

I mentioned a person being a 'hit', and thereby inspiring a film. Ali and Ray are recent examples of this. singers are particularly popular subjects, because you get the songs and that leads to another market. Al Jolson, Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis are among the dozens treated to a biopic.

Even songwriters and composers from Lizst to Cole Porter have received the honour.

I can't think of any actors off-hand who've had a film devoted to them. Hang on, Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest. But lookalikes turn up from time to time. I remember 'James Cagney' in The Cotton Club. In Gods and Monsters the whole cast of The Bride of Frankenstein turn up. Interestingly, that is one of the few films directed to a film director, James Whale. It seems that you have to be a really bad director, like Ed Wood, to merit a film of your own.

But there was The Aviator. (I'm obviously making this up as I go along, and what's more I'm getting into a hell of a mess trying to use bullet points, which I shall now dispense with. And I don't care that I've ended a sentence with a preposition).

To continue. It's not always about money. Sam Goldwyn, for example, liked a bit of class, with a capital K. Just as he like to fill his mansions with works of art, probably bought according to their surface area, every now and again he would make a film that he thought would make those snobby intellectuals out there sit up and take notice. Wuthering Heights and Arrowsmith were from serious novels and demonstrated how difficult it is to make that transition while being 'faithful'.

Pygmalion and The Little Foxes were more successful, because a play is halfway to a film anyway. I remember, with respect to the latter film, that GBS tried to puncture Sam's pretensions when He said, 'The difference between us, Mr Goldwyn, is that you are only interested in art, while I am only interested in money.' Sarcastic old bastard, and if I've quoted him correctly, he put the 'onlys' in the wrong place.

Putting it on record. Maybe we are seeing a little more altruism. I'm sure there are producers and directors out there who genuinely want to record great performances, such as Edithe Evans in The Importance of Being Earnest, or make a great work of literature or drama more readily available to the wider public. Olivier and Branagh are great apostles of Shakespeare and take - or persuade others to take - financial risks to put him on celluloid. I've no doubt that there was a touch of arrogance as well, or a desire for some sort of immortality, when Olivier filmed Richard III.

Whether or not this leads to a decent film is another matter. Olivier's record is pretty varied. His Othello, for example, was unashamedly a filmed record of a stage play, not quite a view from the front seat of the stalls, but nearly so. Richard III is more cinematic, but still very studio-bound and processional until the final battle. On the other hand, Hamlet is almost like a film noir and seems to me the most cinematic. Some say too cinematic, with the camera roving around gloomy corridors, wasting time that could have been used to save some of the ruthlessly pruned text.

Henry V is the most experimental, cleverly opening out from a re-created Globe Theatre, to studio sets, to the open locations for Agincourt, and then reversing the process.

Orson Welles, who had two stabs at Shakespeare himself (Chimes at Midnight and Othello), was not impressed. He said that most Shakespeare films were like films of a cricket match. (Why did he say 'cricket match' and not 'boxing match'?). I think he was being a bit unfair on the efforts of Olivier, Branagh and Zefferelli, Mankiewicz and Polanski, but he does highlight the dangers. Frankly, when I think of Hamlet, Henry V, The Taming of the Shrew, Julius Caesar and MacBeth, he was being very unfair.

I feel the urge to mention Rio Bravo at this point. The legend is that Howard Hawks made this as a riposte to High Noon; that Zinnemann's film was leftist propaganda, that Gary cooper was duped by commie infiltrators and needed to be debunked. Now, you have to be pretty rich or self-important to make a film as a reply to another, especially when that other had been made about 8 years before and probably forgotten by the paying public. It was all publicity, wasn't it? It was, I accept, a different take on an old situation, but no more. And, it was a lousy film. It's odd - when John Carpenter made a 'Howard Hawks' film, Assault on Precinct 13, he did a better job than Hawks himself.

One last reason for adapting. Simple respect. You've got to be a top, respected director/producer to do this. And here I take my hat off to John Huston, who made Moby Dick and The Red Badge of Courage, both pretty good movies from classic novels. Huston was a man of many talents, a painter, a writer, a film-maker (not to mention boxer, lover, liar and all-round cad), a man I could listen to for hours. I've no doubt he loved those books and wished he had written them. But they were perfect vehicles for movies - if you were not too respectful to the originals. I think he did a pretty good job. I've often wondered: Did Huston make the films because he wasn't good enough to write the books; or, did he make the films because the authors didn't have the opportunity to do so themselves?

'It's very educational'

John Walsh's book has reminded me of another reason why some people add a a film to their list of favourites. It's heard primarily from those who are not particular fans of the movies.

'It will help you learn about. . .whatever.'

These are the films that parents and teachers approve and they fall into two categories, the literary substitute, and the history lesson.

I've written elsewhere about the films made for people who don't like movies but can't be bothered to read the book. Or, who have read the book and think the film will be safe to watch.

This is why there will always be a market for the Shakespeare film. People can view the plays, nicely reduced and edited into digestible chunks and with the action sequences emphasised. I have to admit that they do provide a handy overview before tackling the text itself.

It's always amused me that teachers would encourage us to go to Zefferelli's Romeo and Juliet and then be outraged that all we could talk about was the brief glimpse of Olivia Hussey's naked breasts. How anyone can object to Leonard Whiting's buttocks and at the same time listen po-faced to Shakespeare's great line, 'The bawdy hand of time is on the prick of noon', sagely noting that it is a perfect example of the standard iambic pentameter, escapes me.

In this category, you will find other filmed plays- The Importance of Being Earnest, The Browning Version, Othello, Richard III. Classic novels - Dickens, Austen, Melville. Some work as films, some are recordings of the play, some respectful renditions from one medium to another. Some work as pretty good movies, Moby Dick, for example. People tell me that Dr Zhivago is a bad film, but I think it's great. Perhaps I'd just like to write poetry inspired by Julie Christie. Come to think of it, bugger the poetry.

Then there's the history lesson. Lawrence of Arabia, for example, or Patton, or Alexander the Great. Except they are quite untrustworthy as history, for all their consultants and advisors. If you take Cromwell on trust you'll believe that Lords and Commons sat in the same house.

Right, a decision. Going by the usual 'best' lists, something like Gladiator might be chosen here, or maybe Titanic or Lawrence. Henry V would probably feature.

As for me, when it comes to history turned into film, I would avoid Cromwell, which scores poorly on both counts and choose Schindler's List or A Bridge Too Far. I'm rather fond of the latest version of The Alamo too.

And for literature, let's have Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight and Moby Dick.

The 'Potemkin' moment

I've just started reading Are You Talking to Me by John Walsh. I've hardly read more than the introduction and already I know it's the book I should have written, the book I would have written, if I could. It's a serious book about the movies, written by a fan. I thoroughly recommend it.

And it leads me to another criterion for the inclusion of a film on a list, which I have called 'The Potemkin moment'.

By this I mean the moment when you see a film, any film, and comprehend for the first time the visceral power of the movie art form and its limitless possibilities. Suddenly you know that it can be more than an entertainment, something to be ashamed of liking. Maybe the film is not in itself outstanding, maybe it has many faults overall, but it has elements that you know can be harnessed to greatness.

'Potemkin' must have had this effect on many in the 20s and probably still does to new viewers. I would have chosen Abel Gance's Napoleon from that period, a silent film with epic sweep and technically daring. Birth of a Nation was a revelation to the world in its day, as was Citizen Kane 25 years later.

In conversation the following have been put forward as personal choices: 2001; The Shining; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Psycho; Seven Samurai. I suppose it's inevitable that people will choose big, brassy films. You have to be pretty sophisticated to choose a Japanese study in ageing as the film that made the first big impact upon you.

Walsh speaks of seeing, at the age of eight, Lawrence of Arabia, Mutiny on the Bounty, Casablanca and The Longest Day. Martin Scorsese, in his TV documentary series, remembers the garish colours of Duel in the Sun and The Ten Commandments.

As a boy myself I was impressed by Kane, The Third Man, The Magnificent Seven and The Guns of Navarone, respectively for performance and narrative structure, crazily-angled photography, character delineation and sheer exciting story-telling.

But, as anyone who knows me will have guessed, the film that turned my flirtatious toying with the cinema into true, deep, passionate love was The Wild Bunch.

It opens with movement. Even the music seems to start halfway through a bar. The frame freezes on Bill Holden's grim face as he says, 'If the move, kill 'em' and the credit appears, 'Directed by Sam Peckinpah', to the sound of a long, low chord.

The chord underscores the amateurish marching band playing 'Shall we gather' tightening the tension before an orgy of violence breaks out, the like of which I had never seen before, and which I did not realise would be outdone two hours later.

I was struck by the death fall of one man, in slow motion and intercut with other bursts of action, as two children watch fascinated.

I liked the radical concept of villains as heroes, of the original sin in children, the existential aceptance of a meaningless world. It is brutally honest and honestly brutal.

Every line is quotable and has entered my everyday speech. The music is perfect. The acting the best the cast ever turned in. Peckinpah himself was never as good again.

The Searchers is the one Western which appears on 'respectable' lists. It is indeed a great film, and with Once upon a Time in the West, one of the three which 99% of Western fans would take to their desert island. The third is The Wild Bunch. Perhaps it is still too strong and too illiberal for our bleeding-heart critics.

Recency

'Recency' is the curse of movie lists.

Just look at Channel 4's list of the 100 'greatest' films which was compiled about 5 years ago from the votes of viewers and somehow incorporated those of 'experts'. (I wasn't invited).

I don't propose to dissect the whole list, but a cursory glance shows the power of recency. At number 3 is The Shawshank Redemption. Now, I like it. Shawshank is moving and entertaining, but somewhat derivative. I could do a whole blog on prison films - and I probably will some day - and which no doubt would list the half dozen required elements:

1. An innocent man in gaol (or at least punished disproportionately)
2. A corrupt/weak liberal governor and brutal guards
3. A really evil prisoner - there aren't that many of them - whom the hero subdues
4. The crushing of a man without the hero's resilience
5. A moment of soaring humanity, which shows that even the lowest amongst are 'God's children'
6. Escape, or preferably death in the attempt.

So I ask. Is it a better film than no 5, Some Like it Hot?

And Gladiator, at no 6. Better than It's a Wonderful Life at no 7? The Matrix at 15, with Casablanca at 16? And Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon at 18, with Citizen Kane, for God's sake, at 19!

As I've already said, I do not wish to denigrate these fine films. But will they feature in a similar list 10 years from now? I doubt it, but I've no doubt that Kane, Casablanca and the like will still be there.

I always take a long time to decide I like a film above others, and so I would choose Schindler's List as my 'recent' choice, but it is getting on a bit now.

So what's it to be? The Constant Gardener, Brokeback Mountain (please!), Crash?

Oh to hell with it. Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-rabbit.

And this is my friend, Mr Hardy

This is substantially a comment I posted on the Internet Movie Database. I thought it deserved a narrower audience.


Earlier this year, 2006, the BBC televised the play Stan, formerly a radio play, by Neil Brand.

It has all the virtues of a small budget. It is concise, focused and unambitious. The actors, relatively unknown, inhabit their roles, not attempting impersonations like Little and Large, just occasionally reminding you of little quirks of speech or mannerism, conveying perfectly the essence of 'the boys'.

It is called Stan and it is Stan who has the lines and carries the story, but I prefer to concentrate on the portrait of Babe Hardy. We all know that Stan considered himself, and was paid as, the brains of the outfit. Babe, easy-going and unambitious, never disagreed. He knew there was more to life than work. But he was a lot more than the fat fool falling on his arse to earn enough to fund his golf habit.

The play goes some way to correct the received wisdom.

Stan pays tribute to Babe's comic skills: his timing, his inventiveness, his patient and courageous milking of laughs.

We see Babe persuading Stan, determined to rival Chaplin and disgruntled at being teamed with anyone, that they have have the makings of an effective partnership. Babe is not just a natural comic (something it is possible to argue that Stan was less so), but one with comic intelligence.

It is Babe, for example, who recognises the importance of humour even in hard times - especially in hard times - when Stan is going through one of his periodic bouts of discouragement and doubt. I hope it's true that it was Babe who had the idea for Their First Mistake, where they adopt a baby, an idea neatly used to make a little joke out Ollie's incapacity at the last.

Just a word or two about their comic abilities. There is no doubt that they would have got nowhere without each other, but I believe Babe was an instinctively funny man, while Stan would grind out a funny routine, which he would then implement. Rather like Steve Martin or Robin Williams today. Babe is more like reminiscent of the late Tommy Cooper.

Towards the end it is Babe who recognises that they are past it, that their work has become poor. He was right, of course, and I for one refuse to watch the last films. While the ever dissatisfied Stan can't bear to leave off, Babe has the wisdom to walk away, knowing that their best work is preserved for ever. I can vouch for that, having never known them until they were retired or dead.

The play's end is all the more moving for the touch of humour injected into it. Stan, portrayed sympathetically despite what other viewers have thought, for all his frustrated, over-achieving self-obsession, has to admit to himself the depth of his friendship and the debt he owes to his partner.

Primacy

A while ago I talked about lists, something to which film fans are particularly prone. The reasons for a film being included on anyone's list are obviously many and varied. My own list of 'greatest' would be different from 'favourite', for example.

The first criterion I plan to look at I call 'primacy'. In other words, the first film that made an impression on us. I do not mean the sort of film that I will consider later under the headings 'nostalgia' or 'Potemkin moment', but what are often childhood favourites.

My own introduction to the cinema was in the mid-fifties. These were the days of support features, Pathe News, Look at Life and Pearl and Dean advertisements. My mother would take me and my sister to the pictures, taking advantage of continuous performances. It was quite normal to take our seats halfway through the main feature, and then spend half an hour wondering what the hell was going on. And two three hours later she would announce, 'This is where we came in' and off we'd go, despite my protests. My mother didn't believe in watching films twice.

It's strange the things you remember from those early days. There was, for example the bust of Edgar Wallace at the beginning of Man of Mystery, which revolved through 360 degrees while The Shadows played the theme tune. The tune ended just as the bust finished turning and faced us again. Every time I watched it I would wonder if, this time, the process would not would not be synchronised properly.

Then there was the lugubrious Edgar Lustgarten recounting famous murders of the past. Pathe News was relentlessly cheerful, Look at Life relentlessly boring; there was a preponderance of monochrome, which I didn't appreciate in those days, and a growing realisation that British films were hopelessly cosy, while Hollywood knew how to deliver real excitement.

Hence my disappointment when, taken to see Reach for the Sky, I found myself viewing a black and white British war film, with a rather unattractive hero and lots of British domesticity, rather than the colourful American Western the title had led me to expect. I was only a child.

One such Western is a strong candidate for a place on my list, because it impressed me at the time and is even now regarded as an excellent film. I refer to The Man from Laramie.

It was the last James Stewart/Anthony Mann collaboration and I am little surprised that it's censorship category allowed me to see it because for the time it was startlingly violent. When I saw it again, many years later, I was surprised at details I remembered. Stewart's fight with Arthur Kennedy; Stewart being dragged through a camp fire and shot in the hand; Kennedy's sympathetic villain; the salt flats; and bullets ricocheting off rocks. While I was always a fan of Westerns, the only other one I remembered in such detail was Boetticher's Ride Lonesome. These films obviously had something more for a small boy who was only interested in gunfights and fistfights.

In this frame of mind others might choose a James Bond film. Or maybe The Magnificent Seven, The Guns of Navarone, The Great Escape. Alternatively, Brief Encounter or Four Weddings and a Funeral.

I remember going to see The Battle of the River Plate, another disappointment at the time. I told my primary school teacher about my planned trip, and she advised me that the supporting film was much better. When I saw it I couldn't have disagreed more. It was a short French film about a small boy. Now, the presence of children and women always detracted from a film for me in those days, and my prejudice kicked in within a minute of its opening.

I've changed my mind. This film is about loneliness and the cruel bullying of child on child. It is about hope and dreams, about escape from poverty, monotony and narrow-mindedness. It has much in common with Kes and is called The Red Balloon. An excellent little movie and is my choice in this category, if I allow myself hindsight.

The Wild Geese

The Wild Geese is rubbish.

A simple adventure story starts with a montage of scenes of suffering Africa, complete with song by Joan Armatrading, before we cut to Richard Burton playing a drunk, perhaps the only role he was capable of by this stage. He, of course, is an expert and commands the undying loyalty of all who have ever worked with him.

Richard Harris is an expert too, a 'planner'. He also has an embarrassingly obnoxious son, whom he loves dearly - so we know what will happen to him, don't we? He's also a 'liberal', who is persuaded to join the mission only because it is to save the only good African leader on the continent. His liberalism does not prevent him, however, planning the death of over 200 men by cyanide gas. There's even a token black mercenary who is reassured by Harris' presence that he is not being asked to do anything unworthy.

Hardy Kruger is there as the Afrikaaner who has to move rapidly from dislike of 'kaffirs' to such respect for this deposed President that he is willing to die for him. His changing form of address from 'kaffir' to 'man' to 'bloke' is as nauseating as Harris' son's whooping of 'Yahoo' when told he's going on a skiing holiday. Of course, he doesn't go. Cue for tears. Oh, Kruger is an expert in something. Explosives? I forget. He's handy with a crossbow, though.

The rest of the commandos must be the most middle-aged bunch ever recruited. Jack Watson is there, the devoted Sergeant-Major, giving us the routine tough training programme, Ronald Fraser and Percy Herbert left over from World War II, another hammy performance from Kenneth Griffith. And there are various superannuated British actors playing duplicitous, shadowy characters form business and government. The mercenaries, you see, are just naive pawns in some murky political game.

I forgot Roger Moore. He's there too, forcing men to eat heroin and charming women. 'He's such a dear' is another stomach-churning moment.

The operation goes well to start with - these men are experts after all - but then goes wrong, because they are betrayed. Opportunity for initiative and courage and self-sacrifice.

Director Andrew V MacLaglen once showed promise in a sub-Fordian way. Screenwriter Reginald Rose wrote Twelve Angry Men and Man of the West, and I can only ask, 'What happened?' I suppose he needed the money.

It's a dishonest, exploitative, derivative film, which wastes a good cast and leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth.

So why do I watch it so often? Why do I love every minute of the bloody thing?