When Lawrence Kasdan’s Wyatt Earp opened at
theaters across the country earlier this summer, it had become nearly
commonplace again to see the faces of familiar actors slanting under
Stetsons, their torsos cinched in by satin vests and six-guns, sporting
an air of lazy and perfect discipline. During the past year or so,
but especially this spring and summer, it’s been impossible for
moviegoers to overlook all the Hollywood notables rehearsing their
reappraisals of the drawl and the dehydrated squint, the menacing
glance and the fully-loaded draw. A partial list includes Kevin
Costner, Jodie Foster, Mel Gibson, Gene Hackman, Madeleine Stowe,
Val Kilmer, Kurt Russell and Dennis Quaid.
They appear in four major
studio releases: George Costakis’s Tombstone, Jonathon
Kaplan’s Bad Girls, Richard Donner’s Maverick and
Kasdan’s Wyatt Earp. Two more comedies, The Cowboy Way and City Slickers II, basket weave Western myths and
modem men, and a third, John Candy’s Wagons East is about
to be released. Add Walter Hill’s Wild Bill (in production),
and you have the makings of a real trend.
Problem is, so far they’re
rather uninspired, coming at you as they do all slender scripts
blazing. Blame it on an age in which much of our culture seems
defined by the secondhand, happy merely alluding to authenticity.
But the very point of the Western is its scorn for anything not
original, anything not bedrock America. One goes to a Western,
after all, to experience something real; for that brief spell
of watering horses and making camp and scouting territory.
In West of Everything (1991), Jane Tompkins records
her longing, watching Westerns, to belong to the towns that cowboys
ride into. The cool offices (telegraph, sheriffs, newspaper) that
line Main Street, and all the townsmen in wool (not denim or leather)
agog at the approaching rider. In town, a cowboy eases up, treats
himself to a two-bit bath and shave. In the heat he smokes a cigar
and keeps his head dry, his gun in easy reach. They are intoxicating
moments, maybe moreso because they don’t lead anywhere. One reason Wagon Master is so terrific is because of its breathing
spaces, the moments in it with little or no dialogue and no obvious
push of story development. It has long shots that just draw you
into that wavy heat, letting you drink in the dryness and glide
along the haywagon balance of the covered wagons.
 |
| Clint Eastwood squinted his way through a string of Sergio
Leone movies as "The Man With No Name." |
It’s a way of life that John Ford and William Wyler and Howard
Hawks put into their films in the 1940s and 1950s. And characters
were part of the landscape. In Stagecoach (1939)
John Wayne’s Ringo Kid seems to jump right out of the desert scene.
He’s unreal, but the rack focus makes him an immediate, ripe specimen
in dusty work-pants. Ringo, Ford found a way to make clear, is
defunct, and it is to the director’s everlasting credit that he
made filmgoers so aware of the perfect goneness of the way of
life he was depicting. When Ringo rides off with Dallas (Claire
Trevor) at the end, they might just as well be leaving the world
as entering it to become newlyweds. That’s a pretty heavy mythological
burden; against it the new films homestead in a world all homage
and allusion.
Entertainment Weekly saw the men in Cowboy Way and City Slickers II inhabiting a "virtual reality frontier,"
on dude ranches and in Manhattan’s gutted streets, but the same
could be said for any of the recently released films. They wriggle
out from under their load either to spoof it, as that long sigh Maverick does, or to riff along ably in its shadow, as Bad Girls does, or by attempting- to match it, epic pound
for pound, as both Tombstone and Wyatt Earp do.
But – was there a cross-studio storyboard meeting? – all seem
to concede from the start that they lack the leverage and the
ballast and the plain wrought iron of a John Wayne in The Searchers; his Ethan Edwards cants his weight off on one leg and suddenly
you know a man’s thirst and regret a solid century ago. The two
recent Wyatt Earps offer pretty striking examples of what
can happen when you endeavor to fix what isn’t broken. In the
radically uneven Tombstone, Kurt Russell plays a big clean
stud who steps off the train in Tombstone with a hankering for
money. But this is no Fistful cf Dollars; his Earp doesn’t
want filthy lucre, only a healthy financial portfolio and middle-class
respectability. When he flirts with Dana Delany, their faces look
so polished you can’t help wondering if they both use Noxema.
Kevin Costner’s performance in the gleaming Wyatt Earp is an
improvement. He manages a weightier but also heavier Earp that
a lot of moviegoers, even Costner fans, will find too deliberate
and solemn, especially in the second hour. Still, sometimes he
lays down lines like he’s flattening out bedrolls and in a way
lends the film a nicely authentic savor. Of the many Earps who
precede these two, including Burt Lancaster (Gunfight at the
O.K. Corral, 1957), the best is arguably Henry Fonda’s in My Darling Clementine. One moment in the early going captures
why: he’s swiveling in the barbershop chair with a fresh haircut,
and it’s clear he hates all the oil and tonic, hates the civilizing
mouth and looks at the sky and blows Russell and Costner off the
back lot.
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| Can Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp hold a gun to the great Westerns
of the past? |
At least some of what the new movies lack is the big
drum roll a Wayne or a Fonda or a Jason Robards brings to a picture;
yet there’s hardly even the secondary smoke of a Claudia Cardinal
or a Charles Bronson. There are stars thick as shag flies, but all
of them, with the possible exception of Gene Hackman, fail ,to attain
the aura that John Ford’s or Howard Hawks’s Westerns had for audiences,
and none of them contend seriously for a place among the late (or
"alternative," or "revisionist") Westerns that
began to appear at the end of the 1960s.
The studio-era Westerns
established the code of the hero. He was the taciturn loner who
shunned soft beds, homes and words, spurned the company of women
and all but the fringes of town life. The best of the later films
– including The Wild Bunch (1969), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) and Little Big Man (1970) – showed these codes to be
at the root of some later failures in American life. In the controversial
blur of bodies and bullets that commences Sam Peckinpah’s The
Wild Bunch, the historian Richard Slotkin finds references
to Vietnam massacres. The story – a band of outlaws heading for
the Mexican border to escape the railroad’s hired gunmen – is
rife with issues/08/images of the end of the West and of open territory
and expansion. The bunch’s leader Pike (William Holden) mutters
to himself at one point, "We’ve got to start thinkin’ beyond
our guns. Those days are closin’ fast." It is a moment that
chimes with a dozen others in films of the period. In McCabe
and Mrs. Miller, thought by many to have killed off the Western
for good, Warren Beatty meets a shabby end in the muddy snow of
the Pacific Northwest; it’s 1901 and he’s been killed by
developers for business reasons.
Indeed, most of the Westerns
released between 1969 and 1977 (more generously,
from 1961 on, when both John Ford’s The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance and Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars came out) – including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
The Wild Bunch, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Once Upon a Time in the
West, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, True Grit and John Wayne’s
last film, The Shootist – seem to make a concerted effort
to narrate both the end of the West and the Western. Jane Tompkins
believes that the cowboy’s established image (what she calls the
"anesthetization of the hero," his denial of needs for
family, companionship and love) was finally being called to account.
By the late 1960s, this image couldn’t square with social
realities, and 1975 was probably the last year that young
American males could go to cowboy movies every Saturday. By 1982, the only Western around, besides those in regular rotation
on the late show, was Sam Shepard’s True West, a play about
a showdown between two brothers, some stolen toasters and the
California desert. Its central characters are as disconnected
from each other as they are visibly disenfranchised from the Western
myths they have inherited and which they can never own. In that
year, John Ford, the Western’s great director, had been dead nearly
a decade (he died in 1973) and John Wayne, the genre’s
great icon, had been famously dead for five, his last film, The
Shootist, having included "memories" of the gunfighter
that consisted of footage culled from Wayne’s long career. Sam
Peckinpah would die two years after that, his best Western a decade
behind him.
If parody and pastiche
are the signs of a genre’s death (and look at the treatment the
deader-than-dead disaster pictures get in the Airplane films),
the writing was on the wall when Mel Brooks released Blazing
Saddles in 1974. On the other hand, it can be argued
that the Western never passed away, it just dispersed into the
culture which it had helped to form. And into world culture. In
Jean Renoir’s The Crime of M. Lange (1936), for example,
the hero writes stories about "Arizona Jim" ("Ah-riz-on-a
Jeem"), who undoes wrong and rides off in clouds of dust.
Inspired by his own stories, Lange eventually shoots the exploitative
owner of a crime magazine who has been publishing his writing.
Liberated at the end, he flees the country. The likeliest source
for the storybook hero is Arizona Ames by Zane Grey, the
Ohio dentist who helped to invent the very code and idiom in which
the Western exists.
The question of the appeal
of cowboy stories in a country that sold the Louisiana Territory
for four cents an acre has a simple answer: the stories take place
in a purely imaginative place – "Arizona" is the place
you go to be free. But you don’t have to cross the Atlantic to
see how the Western has seeped into the culture. Barbecue
sauce commercials feature comic showdowns from spaghetti Westerns.
We drive Mustangs and, unless we’re Albert Brooks, talk slow when
we’re angry. And in every major American city there is an unfortunate
tradition brought from Tombstone’s main street: the decisive gunfight.
My uncle Basil, forced into a wheelchair by the wasting effects
of a muscular disorder, lined his bookshelves with paperback novels
by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. Friends slightly older than me
have committed to memory fight sequences and plot complications
from an unbelievable number of old Westerns. I know a novelist
whose husband joked that his inner child was Clint Eastwood; she
briefly postponed the wedding. And so on. My favorite belt has
a stamped tin buckle and, running around the outside, faded ink
drawings of western archetypes: the wagon train, a rearing horse
and rider, an Indian Chief with full headdress. Missing is Cookie,
the half-mad mealmaker, the gussied up saloon girls, the hustlers
and the vested grifters who work for the railroad and wear their
affects flattened and their collars crisp. We have come to understand
that all of them in their own way are expressions of the freedom
we claim as our birthright.
Along the way the Western
got grafted onto non-Westerns, too, as Star Wars (1977), The French Connection (1971) and Dirty Harry (1971)
intimate. And then there’s Ronald Reagan’s loopy cowboy-style
defense initiative for the last frontier, his "star wars"
plan. (Dolly in closer: at the Republican convention in 1980,
Reagan’s "Morning in America" speech was preceded with
film clips from John Wayne movies).
But neither the stories
about the end of the West, nor its diffusion and disappearance
into the culture ever really killed off the Western. Historian
Slotkin counts three attempted revivals since the late 1970s,
the most recent of which is the likeliest impetus for the avalanche
we have on our hands now. It began early in the decade with Dances
With Wolves (1991), Unforgiven (1992), Lonesome Dove (1990)
and Last of the Mohicans (1992). These works attempted
to replace the bilious taste of the "alternative" films
of the 1960s with stories of a saving remnant. So in Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves, a soldier
fresh from a disillusioning experience in the Civil War requests
to be transferred to the farthest army outpost, where his independent
ego breaks against the Dakota Sioux’s wider and wilder feeling
for family and tribe. And in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, a
killer who had always worked with the laconic precision
of a lathe-worker carving bedposts, turns against the spiral of
his career in death. Eastwood’s case is particularly compelling
because his career cuts through four decades. With Ford and Hawks
gone by the mid-1970s, and with Peckinpah and Leone in serious
decline, Eastwood was essentially the only icon left to carry
the torch (or the SmithWesson). Eastwood’s TV career crossed
over into film with Leone’s first "spaghetti" Western, A Fistful of Dollars (1961), and by 1973 he was working
his own sour variations on the theme of treacherous loners in High Plains Drifter, a Western so grins and weird that
his anti-hero comes across, probably deliberately, as Charles
Starkweather in a black duster.
Eastwood’s ascent was
not automatic. As fine as The Outlaw Josie Wales (1976)
is, audiences avoided it. By the early 1980s, Eastwood was beloved
most by frat row Greeks, the President of the United States and
Barbara Walters. And Pauline Kael was not alone in deriding the
actor for the rigor mortis in his line deliveries. (In one aside
collected in When the Lights Go Down she writes, "he
looks stricken – he hisses his lines angrily, his mouth pulled
thin by righteousness"). But he raised his stock in the sagebrush
genre with Pale Rider (1985), and last year the semiologist
Paul Smith published a long, imposingly written analysis of the
Eastwood Image entitled Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production,
assuring his place as a Western film demigod.
It would make sense,
in this case, that the Eastwood line of Westerns, culminating
in the Oscar-winning Unforgiven, would be the standard
for new kinds of stories. But the recent films owe practically
nothing to Eastwood’s slower-paced, moody style. So where do they
come from?
 |
| Earnet Borgnine and William Holden in Sam
Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. |
The clearest forebear is Kasdan’s 1986 Western, Silverado, whose fresh laundry the new ones seem most attracted to. The
script was written as a tribute to Westerns and its ersatz feel
affirms that. But most anachronistic is the gentleness of the cowboys, most evident in Kevin Kline’s and Scott Glenn’s performances.
Their speech is tinged by none of their cinematic elders’ remoteness;
it belongs more to clipped lawns than desert campfires. They are
suspiciously at ease inside homes and prone to giving their nephews
a good squeeze when they visit. They’ve never been on the range.
Watch Ethan Edwards at dinner in The Searchers; he eats like
a convict, his eyes hawking around, his mouth cut into his face
with a knife, his words all serrated. A typical speech in Silverado occurs when the barmaid Stella (Linda Hunt) councils Paden (Kevin
Kline): "Some people think because they’re stronger or meaner
they can push you around. I’ve seen a lot of that. But it’s only
true if you let it be. The world is what you make of it."
By Western standards
that’s a soliloquy; in an earlier time Paden would have wheeled
his horse around and galloped off, or hushed her with a strong
word or a slap (Wayne’s characters shut up talkers – that is,
anyone who goes on for more than a sentence). Or her speech would
have been pared down to something like: "He’s mean, he’ll
hurt ya, Jake!" Stella’s talk is borrowed from drugstore
relationship manuals. In post-Civil War Silverado, men
in chaps wouldn’t know about the pliant whispers of the unconscious.
Cowboys are not, by definition, complex, neurotic and urban. Like
horses and buffalo and Arizona horizons; like duststorms and Utah
buttes, they inspire awe and a little pain. But there are no Hamlets,
except of course for the dying ‘Doc’ Holliday, who (in My Darling
Clementine) likes Hamlet’s speech on "the undiscovered
country," ever looking forward.
A pretty big proportion
of the angry reactions to these films – none of them terribly
bad – probably has to do with how far short they seem to fall.
The talent sometimes looks a little outdone by their period
costumes; everyone is Winona Ryder in The Age of Innocence. In Maverick, Jodie Foster’s hair is so sprayed
and done that her eyes and mouth shrink down into the shape of
drains, the effect finally something too porcelain and crisp for
a woman with a past. Kiss her, you half think, and chip a tooth.
Foster has arches too flat for comedy’s light step, it’s true,
but the real problem is that she’s no Mrs. Miller, the townbuilding,
opium-addicted manager of high class whores that Julie Christie
played twenty some years ago. Bad Girls isn’t such an embarrassment
either, but beside another female oater like Johnny Guitar it’s badly outclassed. In one scene, Drew Barrymore and Andie
MacDowell smoke and giggle on a shopkeeper’s porch, looking like
a pair of doped-up mall kids. And the plot begs the question:
did this project get kick-started when someone on the committee
asked, "What if Thelma and Louise drove over the cliff and
landed in the Southwest of the 1870s?"
George Costakis’s Tombstone fares slightly better in some respects, but in others, slightly
worse. It delivers one brilliant performance that will make any
moviegoer’s day: Val Kilmer’s portrayal of ‘Doc’ Holliday is so
hypnotic ("Ahm your huckleberry," is his weird tag line)
that you’ll wonder how many times he watched Tonmmy Lee Jones
in The Fugitive to perfect the supporting role routine.
But the rest of the long film sits in a light of revery as thick
and gluey as varnish.
Even so, there are exceptions.
Before the women in Bad Girls can be free, not only from
the law but from their pasts, they have to face down the story’s
bad guy, Kid Jarrett (James Russo). Cody (Stowe) had once been
his bad girl and it will take a gunfight to clear him from her
memory. It happens – she wins – and three of the women light out
on horses, passing over misted plains toward the hills and an
egg-yolk sun. The credits roll. It’s the 1890s and they’re going
to the Klondike in search of gold. Hardly the end to the peek-a-boo
male fantasy that many critics have described it to be. It’s really
a suffragette story that closes with a search for more than literal
gold. Jonathan Kaplan’s film is about getting clear of fate, about
shedding men and their laws and their yokes. In a way, it’s a
Western like any other – it’s about freedom.
There are moments in
any Western that lead confirms that. But most anachonistic
is the gentleness of the cowboys, most evident in Kevin Kline’s
and Scott Glenn’s performances. Their speech is tinged by none
of their cinematic elders’ remoteness; it belongs more to clipped
lawns than desert campfires. They are suspiciously at ease inside
homes and they give their nephews a good squeeze when they visit.
They’ve never been on the range. Watch Ethan Edwards at dinner
in The Searchers; he eats like a convict, his eyes hawking
around, his mouth cut into his face with a knife, his words all
serrated. A typical speech in Silverado occurs when the
barmaid Stella (Linda Hunt) councils Paden (Kevin Kline): "Some
people think because they’re stronger or meaner they can push
you around. I’ve seen a lot of that. But it’s only true if you
let it be. The world is what you make of it."
By Western standards
that’s a soliloquy; in an earlier time Paden would have wheeled
his horse around, or hushed her with a strong word or a slap (Wayne’s
characters shut up any talkers — that is, anyone who goes on
for more than a sentence). Or her speech would have been pared
down to something like: "He’s mean, he’ll hurt ya, Jake!"
Stella’s talk is borrowed from drugstore relationship manuals.
In postCivil War Silverado, men in chaps wouldn’t know
about the pliant whispers of the unconscious. Cowboys aren’t,
by definition, complex, neurotic and urban. Like horses and buffalo
and Arizona horizons, like duststorms and Utah buttes, they inspire
awe and a little pain. But there are no Hamlets, except of course
for the dying ‘Doc’ Holliday who (in My Darling Clementine) likes Hamlet’s speech on "the undiscovered country,"
ever looking forward.
A pretty big proportion
of the angry reactions to these films – none of them terribly
bad – probably has to do with how far short they seem to fall.
The talent sometimes looks a little outdone by their period costumes;
everyone is Winona Ryder in The Age of Innocence. In Maverick, Jodie Foster’s hair is so sprayed and done that her eyes and mouth shrink down into the shape of drains, the effect finally
something too porcelain and crisp for a woman with a past. Kiss
her, you half think, and chip a tooth. Foster has too- flat arches
for comedy’s light step, it’s true, but the real problem is that
she’s no Mrs. Miller, the townbuilding, opium-addicted manager
of high class whores that Julie Christie played twenty some years
ago. Bad Girls isn’t such an embarrassment either, but
beside another female oater like Johnny Guitar it’s badly
outclassed. In one scene, Drew Barrymore and Andie MacDowell smoke
and giggle on a shopkeeper’s porch, looking like a pair of doped-up
mall kids. And the plot begs the question: did this project get
kick-started when someone on the committee asked, "What if
Thelma and Louise drove over the cliff and landed in the Southwest
of the 1870s?"
George Costakis’s Tombstone fares slightly
better but also slightly worse. It delivers one brilliant performance
that will make any moviegoers day: Val Kilmer’s portrayal of ‘Doc’
Holliday is so hypnotic ("ah’11 be your huckleberry,"
is his weird tag line) that you’ll wonder how many times he watched
Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive to perfect the supporting
role routine. But the rest of the long film sits in a light of revery
that is a thick, gluey varnish. [CONCLUSION OF ARTICLE MISSING]