4/8/2023 0 Comments Dark and light taming panthers![]() ![]() And don’t call everything since 1969 a “revisionist” age for westerns, at least not around me. Nearly all the western’s key narrative elements-from righteous individual vendettas to barn-raising evocations of the continent-settling communities-were absorbed by such far-flung big-screen series as the Dirty Harry cycle or the Star Wars chronicles. The western’s spirit is everywhere-not unlike one of the mid-twentieth century’s great augurs of the vanishing frontier, the ghost of Tom Joad.īut such formal stabs at modernizing shoot-’em-ups also concealed a deeper truth about the genre. ![]() There were also extended, sobering renderings of the American West in the mode of gore-stained elegy (1972’s Bad Company and The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, along with practically every Sam Peckinpah movie set in pre-World War I America). The western genre got an extensive makeover in the wake of the sixties, featuring full-frontal attacks on white hubris (1970’s Little Big Man, 1974’s Blazing Saddles) and canny countercultural sendups of traditional gun-toting heroism (1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1971’s McCabe & Mrs. But even in the wake of the My Lai massacre and the Tet offensive, American filmgoers weren’t ready to let go of their cowboy dreams just yet. Indeed, the closer you look at recent film history, the more you marvel at the sheer adaptability of our fables of interior conquest-power-mongering sagas that were supposed to be laid to rest with the Vietnam era’s bloated presumptions about manifest destiny and frontier justice. But while today’s film industry isn’t exactly awash in dusty boy-meets-horse epics, the western’s spirit is everywhere-not unlike one of the mid-twentieth century’s great augurs of the vanishing frontier, the ghost of Tom Joad. Such dismal returns tempt the unwary and indifferent to get that plywood casket ready for the western movie’s sorry cadaver. It was, by my own reckoning, one of 2018’s best movies-and, from the box office numbers, one of the year’s biggest duds, grossing in a theatrical run of less than ten weeks roughly $9 million against its $40 million budget. ![]() The Sisters Brothers’ poker-faced grit, polished production values, and dryly idiosyncratic storytelling were redolent of the edgy, crisply wrought, and irony-laden 1950s westerns of Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann. ![]() Last year, Jacques Audiard, a sixty-six-year-old French director of such critically acclaimed contemporary fare as 2009’s A Prophet and 2012’s Rust and Bone, submitted his own contribution to the genre. At worst, they’re straddling oblivion.Įven so, some of the homages are truly distinguished. There’s scarcely any aesthetic trace of the frontier shoot-em-up, a genre that no less an authority than the sainted French film critic André Bazin declared in a 1953 essay to be “the American film par excellence.” Today’s stoic-yet-bloody fables of the conquered American West are, at best, studies in curatorial indie homage. Nowadays, moviegoers are turning out in huge numbers to Black Panther, Wonder Woman and, if the trend continues, Captain Marvel to rescue Hollywood (and maybe themselves) from pale male cultural hegemony. On the face of things, the cultural coroners would seem to be right. People have been saying westerns are over for such a long time that even the act of saying they’re over is, well, over. The Waco Kid to Black Bart in Blazing Saddles (1974) You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. ![]()
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