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Yeah, maybe on the nose, though I don't know how topical that argument was in 1964. Also I did like that officer speculating that he may have taken on the same societal role as the cossack horsemen that terrorized his family at home; it seemed like he was edging towards an awareness that this kind of violence is as much about systems rather than personal hatred. Edit: Oh, also! Wtf is up with the Jimmy Stewart Wyat Earp interlude? Was he just on the set and insisting on playing the gunfighter in a western? Did Ford try to slip in a comedic beat like in the searchers and just have it go on too long? It doesn't match the feel of the rest of the movie and went on way longer than I thought it should; it was a fine couple of scenes on it's own but not in the context of the larger film. Jack B Nimble fucked around with this message at 13:20 on Jan 29, 2021 |
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Jan 29, 2021 13:10
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Jack B Nimble posted:Edit: Oh, also! Wtf is up with the Jimmy Stewart Wyat Earp interlude? Was he just on the set and insisting on playing the gunfighter in a western? Did Ford try to slip in a comedic beat like in the searchers and just have it go on too long? It doesn't match the feel of the rest of the movie and went on way longer than I thought it should; it was a fine couple of scenes on it's own but not in the context of the larger film. Yea my guess is that Stewart and Ford kinda knew they weren't gonna be making too many more Westerns so it was just a fun idea to throw in there that would allow them to work together one more time.
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Jan 29, 2021 14:37
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What are the thread's thoughts on The Proposition and Posse? I watched both last weekend, and enjoyed them both. The Proposition starts with a simple story (criminal must find his older brother, else his younger brother be hanged) and uses it as a springboard to examine colonialism in the Australian outback, look into the lives of all the different characters, and just watch all these lovely people interact with each other. It's pretty bleak, but it looks great and has great performances. Posse is Mario Van Peebles' follow-up to New Jack City, and it's a fun time, but kind of sloppy. The editing never gets into a good flow from scene to scene, and the final shootout has terrible editing and geographic sense, but it's such an energetic and exciting take on the genre, I still enjoyed it a lot.
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Jan 29, 2021 18:20
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Jack B Nimble posted:Still working slowly through Westerns, saw Cheyenne Autumn last weekend, really not the treatment I was expecting from John Ford. I think it illustrates a real change from his earliest films like Iron Horse and Stagecoach, you can see how his ever present interest in the narrative of the American West is changing as the decades go by. Beautiful landscapes and cinematography, as always. Fort Apache The Man from Laramie Lonely are the Brave Sweetgrass X-Ray Pecs posted:What are the thread's thoughts on The Proposition and Posse? I watched both last weekend, and enjoyed them both. The Proposition starts with a simple story (criminal must find his older brother, else his younger brother be hanged) and uses it as a springboard to examine colonialism in the Australian outback, look into the lives of all the different characters, and just watch all these lovely people interact with each other. It's pretty bleak, but it looks great and has great performances. Posse is Mario Van Peebles' follow-up to New Jack City, and it's a fun time, but kind of sloppy. The editing never gets into a good flow from scene to scene, and the final shootout has terrible editing and geographic sense, but it's such an energetic and exciting take on the genre, I still enjoyed it a lot.
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Jan 31, 2021 11:23
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As I said, Posse's messy, but it's notable for being a Black-led Western made by a Black director. It opens by saying even though 1/3rd of all cowboys were Black, their stories are almost never told by Hollywood, and Posse aims to correct that. Also the cast is bonkers: Tiny Lister, Tone Loc, Paul Bartel, Pam Grier, Billy Zane, and more. I watched it about a week ago and keep turning it over in my mind, because it's one of those movies that's a little too ambitious to be great, but it leaves an impression.
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Jan 31, 2021 21:57
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The fact that we haven't gotten a big budget movie about Bass Reeves is insane.
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Jan 31, 2021 23:33
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B-Rock452 posted:The fact that we haven't gotten a big budget movie about Bass Reeves is insane. Someone needs to get a script to Denzel. I haven't seen Posse in over 20 years, but "unfocused" is how I remember it. Good idea, good performances, but needed to be polished. Another movie in that vein is Quigley Down Under. Tom Selleck stars at Matthew Quigley, an American sharp shooter with an experimental Sharp's rifle that is enticed by Alan Rickman to come to Australia for work. What Rickman doesn't tell Quigley is he's hiring him to shoot Aborigines, who have learned to stay out of standard rifle range. Tom Selleck makes a great western hero and it's a shame that we couldn't have seen Quigley: Up Over instead. He's got the screen presence and attitude, and he's got a unique firearm so he's already half way down the road to being a noteworthy character, but the story doesn't utilise him very well. You can tell the only had Rickman for a couple of days of shooting, all his scenes are on the same set and he barely interacts with Quigley. The Australian countryside is a nice change from the American West, but they don't do alot with it. The Aborigines fill in the role normally held by Native Americans but I can't remember any distinctive characters from them and I'm not even sure any of the Aborigines had lines in English or with subtitles. The biggest problem with the movie is tone. It wants to be a jaunty traditional western with funny music, very cliched Western types, and Tom Selleck would not have been out of place in any 40s or 50s Western. But the movie also has a plot that revolves around Rickman wanting Quigley to shoot any Aborigine he can find and features several scenes of the Aborigines being murdered by Rickman's men. There's also a love interest played by Laura San Giacomo who has gone crazy after smothering her infant son while hiding from Apaches in Texas. Now, you can make a dark western, but Down Under swings to far from one extreme to another and it doesn't quite work. Also, I'm sure there's something Freudian going on about American vs Australian Cowboys, based on this picture.
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Feb 1, 2021 01:54
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PeterCat posted:Someone needs to get a script to Denzel. I haven't seen that movie in ages, but I still remember the ending. It's a great line.
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Feb 1, 2021 21:37
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Quigley Down Under is a weird movie, but I've always remembered it being fun, especially the final confrontation and how it plays with audience expectation. "I never said I didn't know how to use it."
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Feb 1, 2021 22:32
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The ending showdown is great, I love the little grin Rickman gives, like he appreciates the situation and is happy to go out losing a gunfight to an obviously skilled fast draw.
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Feb 1, 2021 23:09
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Just watched "Run of the Arrow," a Sam Fuller directed western starring Rod Steiger. Steiger plays a Confederate soldier bitter about the end of the war who goes off to live with the Sioux. He's later made to act as a scout for the American Cavalry as they go to build a fort in Indian land. Features Charles Bronson as a Sioux chief, dude was yoked back in the day. Good performance form Steiger, presages his role in Duck, you sucker!, but the movie spends way too much time on apologizing for the Confederacy. His character goes on and on about how the South just wanted its liberty and didn't want to be told what to do by the Union. The movie ends by saying that Lee's surrender was not the death of the South but the birth of the United States. Not surprisingly slavery is never mentioned, and the Klan is only mentioned obliquely. So, good performances, some gnarly violence, and some really annoying takes about the South. It's hard to get away from that kind of whitewashing in the 50s and you still run into it today with movies like Gettysburg and Gods and Generals. I am glad that Tarantino took the piss out of all of that in Django.
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Mar 1, 2021 03:25
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I know the common refrain that "John Wayne's politics aren't the politics of John Ford's films" but I really couldn't get over the weird Confederate apologia of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. It's some baggage that you sometimes run into. Thankfully, I haven't seen a bunch.
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Mar 1, 2021 22:14
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Westerns are really the best window into American historiography, maybe the John Fords most of all. So much to say about war and love and the meaning of life while conveniently compartmentalizing the foundations in slaughter and slavery. I think it tends to be overblown how much Western stories buy into the myth of the frontier (by the time the movies got any good we were well past the romanticizing days of Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour), but yeah, they do show their age by how casually the Lost Cause narrative or supremacy over Indians seep their way into otherwise thoughtful themes.
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Mar 2, 2021 20:05
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Yeah, I agree that Ford's Westerns in particular are a direct route to the Dad History of yesteryear, I don't mean to belittle him but regarding history he's just an interested amateur expressing the conventional views of the time. Fairly populist though, lots of villainous bankers and big land owners. Finished El Dorado and True Grit a couple weeks ago, the last of the Ford/Wayne westerns I'll be watching in this list. I feel like I've been waiting through an eternity of Cavalry films for El Dorado; that's John Wayne for me, masculine but not barbaric, independent but not willing to tolerate evil. Big and stout but clean shaven and rugged without being coarse. Speaking of coarse.. True Grit has really paid off in this sequential viewing, I can see why he won the oscar, his performance really is a stretch beyond what he normally brings. The first half, aka "woman defends own interests in conversation, town shocked" was unexpectedly fantastically; nobody likes her but the audience and we love her. Rooster Cogburn recognizing and admiring her spirit (her grit!) makes for a great slow building friend ship. Honestly, now that it's all said and done, if someone said "show me old westerns" I might just shove stage coach, el Dorado, and true grit at them as THE big three. Johnny Guitar is there for a female lead, and High Noon gets you both a non-wayne picture and an usual plot, and I'd probably have those and a few others handy based on what someone asked about, but I'd probably start with these three Ford / Wayne pictures. Next up, the first of my Spaghetti Westerns, whichever one is the first of the Man With Name. Fistful of Dollars? I only ever saw the third one (which I adore). Excited! Jack B Nimble fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Mar 2, 2021 |
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Mar 2, 2021 20:33
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If you even vaguely dig Ford/Wayne movies and haven't seen The Searchers then boy howdy, you are sitting on a goldmine.
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Mar 2, 2021 23:05
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Criterion Channel curated a new collection: Black Westernsquote:As the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s, leading filmmakers and stars sought to reshape the myths of the Hollywood western. Sidney Poitier, Gordon Parks, and even John Ford were among the directors who drew on the historical experiences of African Americans to tell unexplored stories. In the decades that followed, Black actors from Woody Strode and Poitier (who broke with his urbane image in his thrilling directorial debut BUCK AND THE PREACHER) to Vonetta McGee and Ving Rhames would repeatedly play key roles as cattle rustlers, cavalrymen, outlaws, and bounty hunters in bold revisions of the genre. Featuring works by Mario van Peebles, John Singleton, and Gordon Parks Jr., this selection curated by guest programmer Mia Mask shows how the western aged and changed. It incorporated Blaxploitation (THOMASINE AND BUSHROD), documentary (BLACK RODEO), historical drama (ROSEWOOD), and the coming-of-age film (THE LEARNING TREE) as new generations of artists sought to broaden our understanding of the old frontier. Films included: Sergeant Rutledge (1960) - John Ford Duel at Diablo (1966) - Ralph Nelson The Learning Tree (1969) - Gordon Parks Skin Game (1971) - Paul Bogart, Gordon Douglas Black Rodeo (1972) - Jeff Kanew Buck and the Preacher (1972) - Sidney Poitier The Legend of Black Charley (1972) - Martin Goldman Thomasine and Bushrod (1974) - Gordon Parks Jr. Posse (1993) - Mario Van Peebles Rosewood (1997) - John Singleton Buffalo Soldiers (1997) - Charles Haid Here's a teaser for it
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Mar 2, 2021 23:17
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TheOmegaWalrus posted:If you even vaguely dig Ford/Wayne movies and haven't seen The Searchers then boy howdy, you are sitting on a goldmine. Damnit, my trio of movies! Now what I am going to do!? I saw it and loved it but now I have to have a long think about which of the four I would cut. Black westerns, hell yeah. They did noir earlier and they were great.
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Mar 2, 2021 23:54
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Yoooo I’ve been wanting to see Skin Game for ages.
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Mar 3, 2021 01:05
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I know I said earlier in the thread the Posse is messy, but I keep turning it over in my head and liking it more. It’s just so exuberant and celebratory.
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Mar 3, 2021 03:25
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Silverado should have just been about danny glover and Jeff goldblum
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Mar 3, 2021 05:55
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I don't even know if I liked Silverado that much but I've had such a hankering to watch it again. It's one-of-a-kind for its time.
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Mar 3, 2021 17:00
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Kull the Conqueror posted:I don't even know if I liked Silverado that much but I've had such a hankering to watch it again. It's one-of-a-kind for its time. I know I've seen Silverado, I cannot remember a thing about Silverado, but I can instantly recall the theme song of Silverado. So there's that.
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Mar 3, 2021 18:13
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Silverado is probably my favorite Hollywood-style western. The casting and the writing are so on point and everything that comes out of Kevin Kline's mouth is loving golden. Though I freely admit that I feel this way because it's my mom's comfort movie and I watched it a lot at a formative age 
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Mar 3, 2021 19:41
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X-Ray Pecs posted:It opens by saying even though 1/3rd of all cowboys were Black, their stories are almost never told by Hollywood, and Posse aims to correct that. And the other third were Mexican/Indigenous
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Mar 4, 2021 07:16
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Franchescanado posted:Criterion Channel curated a new collection: Black Westerns Not surprised they went with the alternate title for this one.
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Mar 4, 2021 23:21
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FreudianSlippers posted:Not surprised they went with the alternate title for this one. ...Oh wow...
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Mar 8, 2021 17:49
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Holy poo poo I can't believe there were TWO blaxploitation westerns with the n-word edited out of their title.
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Mar 8, 2021 18:01
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Saw Fistful of Dollars last weekend. Relevant: Yojimbo is my favorite Kurosawa action film (my heart must make room for Ikiru, regardless Yojimbo is certainly my favorite "fun" Kurosawa picture). What a palette change from True Grit; this movie feels so, so much NEWER. Leone is something like 36 years younger than Ford and you can feel the generational shift between the two films. I'd never seen it, and compared to one of my all time favorites, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, Fistful of Dollars is rougher, and I was surprised to realize they only came out, what 2 years apart? If that's the case, and there's another movie in between them, I think I want to know more about the circumstances of making this trilogy. Still, compared to the previous Westerns in my list, this feels almost as dramatic as the change from silent to voiced (I think the first one was My Darling Clementine?) or the introduction in color (beautifully harnessed in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon); it's such a departure from what came before it in tone, style, aesthetic; in music and in the general attitude of the characters. It's just very, well, cool. Great movie, and now I can't wait to see the next one in the trilogy.
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Mar 8, 2021 22:25
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Lumbermouth posted:Holy poo poo I can't believe there were TWO blaxploitation westerns with the n-word edited out of their title. legend of n***** charlie has a sequel too
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Mar 8, 2021 22:29
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Honestly what's crazier to me is knowing there's only like two years between Ford's Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Leone's Fistful of Dollars. I generally find Ford to be the better and more interesting director, but I'll always have a soft spot for Leone.
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Mar 8, 2021 22:36
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Jack B Nimble posted:Saw Fistful of Dollars last weekend. Relevant: Yojimbo is my favorite Kurosawa action film (my heart must make room for Ikiru, regardless Yojimbo is certainly my favorite "fun" Kurosawa picture). Yeah, the Leone movies are neat because they feel like they came from a different planet form American Westerns. It's like they're somehow more down to earth AND outright mythic at once, I dunno.
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Mar 8, 2021 22:37
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I'm in the possibly weird position of considering the Clint/Leone films as my "baseline" westerns, probably because I grew up watching them (no idea how, as that was long before even VHS - they must have been required family viewing whenever they were on TV. We also had a book about them that I've been trying to track down for years, with almost play-by-plays of all the gunfights complete with diagrams). As a result, older Hollywood westerns feel somehow wrong; they're usually too green, too clean, too talky - too conventional. In my mind, westerns are set in scrubby deserts, have sweaty Spanish extras looming into frame in close-up to a demented wailing score, and there isn't a cowboy or Indian to be found.
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Mar 8, 2021 22:57
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No, I get you, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly defined westerns for me, actually getting to know these older Hollywood Westerns was why I started watching all these to begin with. Leone's movie didn't seem surreal to me because I grew up with it; and it's only much later in my life that they started to seem distrurbly detached from the real world.
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Mar 8, 2021 23:01
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Any of you ever seen Barquero (1970)? After some quite frankly hideous opening credits we get bad guy Warren Oats and his gang who need to cross the river, and ferry operator Lee Van Cleef who refuses to cross over to pick him up. It's a fun little western with the final showdown taking place in and across said river. There's a bunch of townsfolk and dissenting factions on both sides and a wacky old mountain man. What I really love is how the gun boats and really the entire finale feels like some kind of Gatlinburg wild west stunt spectacular, but maybe that's just me.     
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Mar 8, 2021 23:54
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A Fistful of Dollars was an international hit so by the time Leone went to make The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, he had like 6X the budget to work with. I feel like the mythic quality that the Eastwood trilogy has is due to the multiple layers of culture that the material was filtered through. Kurosawa idolized John Ford, and films like Yojimbo and Seven Samurai were heavily influenced by Ford. So by the time Leone takes the story and shoots it in Spain filling in for the American West, it's already filtered down through these two titans and it comes out as something instantly iconic yet also somehow different than anything seen before. You can say the same thing about the success of Star Wars, obviously.
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Mar 9, 2021 00:15
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I have a hard time choosing which one I prefer between For a Few Dollars More... and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, so you're in for a good time if you're watching it for the first time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDRNEwFOttw
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Mar 9, 2021 07:16
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I've heard that just the train station set from the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West was more expensive than the entire budget for A Fistful of Dollars.
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Mar 10, 2021 01:47
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Definitely worth visiting the three western film sets near Tabernas in Spain if you get the opportunity (Mini Hollywood, Texas Hollywood and Western Leone). But it's also amazing how many of the locations from the Dollars trilogy weren't custom-built, but are literally people's houses. Agua Caliente from FAFDM was, and still is, a residential street that just happens to look as if it could belong in the American desert. (It's now called Calle Clint Eastwood, which has to be one of the world's coolest postal addresses.)
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Mar 10, 2021 10:01
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Payndz posted:Definitely worth visiting the three western film sets near Tabernas in Spain if you get the opportunity (Mini Hollywood, Texas Hollywood and Western Leone). Made pilgrimage in '19.  Next time we go to Spain I'm hoping we can hit up the GBU cemetery in Burgos.
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Mar 10, 2021 15:56
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Kull the Conqueror posted:Made pilgrimage in '19.
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Mar 10, 2021 16:05
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