Eastwood, Eastwood, Eastwood...

Since I've been on a bit of an Eastwood bender as of late, I've been looking to add more of his films to my collection, so I poked around online, looking for sales, release dates and upcoming special editions. I wanted to snag In the Line of Fire... until I got a gander at the reissued DVD cover for it.

Apparently someone in the design department let one of the interns handle this one because it's hideous. And I'm not just talking about the stupid floating heads-style design, the way the white stars and stripes make the type difficult to read, or the weird airbrushed glow around everything. I can even live with John Malkovich's head looking like it's on the verge of exploding, Scanners-style.

What does give me a super-sized case of the willies is Eastwood's face. I don't know what happened here, but it appears that his eyes were plucked out by crows (and he's mighty pissed about it), an alien symbiont is living inside of him or someone sent him to the taxidermist. In any case, don't stare at that cover for too long if you value your humanity.

On the upside, this four-film set of Eastwood movies is coming out, featuring The Beguiled, Coogan's Bluff, The Eiger Sanction and Play Misty for Me. It's a great deal, with some of his best work in it. And under $20 CND.

And then there's spike.com's list of 10 Awesome Things You Didn't Know About Clint Eastwood, which does contain a few surprises, and includes his failed attempt to become a pop-country star back in the day.

Curiousity piqued, I poked around a bit and found that eMusic has a Clint Eastwood album, which you can hear samples of here (and download if you're an eMusic member, of course). I snagged it and, while it's a perfectly competent collection of old timey country classics, the man is better with a camera than a microphone, as the croaky end credit title song in Gran Torino attests to.

Lastly, there's also this hilarious video where someone has made a trailer out of footage from Gran Torino, for The Growler, which distills Eastwood down to his essence. They could easy make a sequel called The Squinter, naturally.

-Dave Alexander

Pooleside

Back in ye olde early ‘90s, if you watched MuchMusic there was no escape from Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” video. In fact I was so sick of that video, that by the third week in heavy rotation I just wanted poor, bullied Jeremy to be home schooled so I didn’t have to see him anymore. Regardless, those images of tortured kid boiling over, which helped launch the band into the stratosphere, are burned into my brain.

A couple years later a video hit heavy rotation for a song with one of the weirdest names ever: “Hobo Humpin’ Slobo Babe.” It was made for Scandinavian band called Whale and has a very cute, impish girl with braces being tossed up and down on a blanket in the middle of a quarry while her cross-dressing male band mates rock out. It grabbed my teenaged attention. After all, this babe was wearing braces, and I had braces – maybe there was hope… . But wait, why is she humping hobos? Surely she could do better. Did that mean I would never know the love of a non-hobo as long as I had tracks on my teeth?!? Gah! I spent too much time thinking about it, mainly because the imagery was so arresting, so sexy, so original.

More recently, in 2002, The Flaming Lips, blew up, partially on the strength of their single for “Do You Realize?” The video, shot mostly on the old Vegas strip where rows of neon signs meet a block-long rooftop covered in blinking lights, has singer Wayne Coyne in a white suit, flanked by beautiful women, rabbit mascots and a real live elephant. It’s a feast for the eyes. Again, more unforgettable visuals.

The common thread here is director Mark Pellington, and while long before I knew who he was, he was grabbing my attention with music videos, I learned his name on the strength of his 2002 feature film The Mothman Prophecies.

“What? Isn’t the Richard Gere film about a moth-creature?!?” you ask, incredously, perhaps with a sneer, or a derisive eye-roll.

Sure is; it’s also one of the best modern horror films, which tanked mainly because horror fans didn’t wanna see a Richard Gere movie and Richard Gere fans are wimps who can’t handle a horror movie. Gere is actually fine in the film, but what really makes it work is Pellington’s stellar direction. Damn, it’s effective. From the gloomy, off-putting small town where the freaky events take place, to the chilling second hand pictures of the black creature with piercing red eyes, to that absolutely terrifying hotel sequence where Gere’s character realizes he’s dealing with something far from human – a thing we catch a glimpse of in a mirror. Atmosphere, uncanny imagery, psychological head-trips and the horror of suggestion are the tools Pellington wields like a master. And although the ending of the movie gets too Hollywood happy, The Mothman Prophecies is very effective at scaring your britches to stitches.

I’ve been waiting for another film from Pellington…and waiting. I wondered what happened to him – was he in director jail for birthing a box office flop? According to boxofficemojo.com, Mothman made under $36 million domestically on a $32 million budget. The answer came last summer in this New York Times article, in which Pellington talks about the sudden loss of his wife in 2004, and his new direction as a filmmaker.

Since her death, he’s become spiritual (he thanks god on his Myspace page), and this is at the forefront of his new film, Henry Poole is Here (just released on DVD). Poole stars Luke Wilson as the title character, a bitter, wounded guy who buys a house in the sunny suburbs, seemingly for the purpose of drinking, lying around and not grooming (he’s basically a joyless Jeff Lebowski who doesn’t bowl). He doesn’t want to be bugged by anyone, but when a neighbour lady discovers a stain on the side of his house that kinda, sorta looks like Jesus, he’s very grudgingly pulling into a miracle. Soon, church folk intrude to gawk, including a priest played by comedian George Lopez. At the same time, the single mother next door (Radha Mitchell) and her shy daughter catch Henry’s attention and he begins to question his faithlessness.

It’s to Pellington’s credit that he keeps it visually interesting despite it being set in only a couple different locations. It's something he does with interesting camera movements, dynamic backgrounds (e.g. the white slats on weathered fence) and a bright colour palette. However, there are no surprises as to where this one is going, and it’s just a matter of watching the character change in exactly the way you expect him to.

The main problem, though, is one common to music video directors: manufactured transcendence. Pellington has proven that he’s adept at potent visuals married to music, and he overloads Henry Poole with mini-music videos where characters come to powerful realizations set to heartstring-tugging tunes. Music video directors generally want to give you a transcendent experience, where the images and notes imbue each other with more meaning than they can muster as separate parts, like adding one plus one and getting three. This works fine in a four-minute music video, but repeat it over and over again in a feature and you’ve got a recipe for cheese. It’s fromage manufactured with close-ups, slow pans and fades that become cliché pretty quickly.

Henry Poole is just so damn self-righteous that after it you’ll wanna watch a Robert Altman movie just to get the saccharine sting of Uplifting Human Spirit out of your mouth. Or better yet watch the similarly titled Henry Fool (1997) by indie veteran Hal Hartley. Hartley makes films that often manage amazing moments of transcendence with very offbeat characters, excellent soundtracks and absolutely no sunshine blown up anyone’s nether regions. (Of course, if he had a more populist sensibility for characterization and drama, he’d be a household name.) Regardless, it’s too bad Pellington’s first feature in six years is so choked by cookie cutter joie de vivre.

Henry Poole is Here, and will hopefully go away quickly – like a water soluble stain.

-Dave Alexander

The Big Kowalski: Gran Torino and the films of Clint Eastwood (part 2)

Question: If Clint Eastwood's face was a McDonald's character, which one would it be?

Answer: Grimace.

In fact, he built a career on that sour puss, and never has it been so on display as in his latest film, Gran Torino, where he plays hardened, angry bigot Walt Kowalski. Here’s the second half of my interview (scroll down for part one) with Bill Beard, author of Persistence of Double Vision: Essays on Clint Eastwood, Co-ordinator of the Film Studies program at the University of Alberta and a guy who has spent years trying to forget those films Clint made with the orangutan. He discusses Eastwood’s career as an actor, director and (grimacing) cinematic icon, comparing Gran Torino to the rest of the filmmaker’s extensive body of work.

 

 

Eastwood has said this may be his last acting gig, that he's happy behind the camera. Is Eastwood making a statement through Walt? Is there some kind of a final word on the Eastwood "type" going on here?

 

Well, I might be tempted to say yes if Eastwood hadn’t come to this river and crossed it so many times already. Several years ago he was saying he wanted to give up acting and concentrate on directing – then we got Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino. I don’t think there’s anything more definitively farewell-ish about this than all his other valedictions. True, committing socially useful suicide does seem like some kind of ultimate, but no ultimate is really ultimate in Eastwood’s cinema. There’s a point of view – my point of view, admittedly – that says that Eastwood has been advertising his own impossibility for his entire movie career, and that activity has just melted imperceptibly into advancing a whole bunch of extra reasons for why he’s impossible, which now definitively include “he’s so-o-o-o-o old.” But would I be surprised to see him back on the screen next year? No.

 

Also, you mentioned that the film doesn't follow through on its intriguing ideas. Can you elaborate a little? What does it promise, and what would it have had to do to see through those concepts to satisfying place?

 

It would have had to be a lot more overtly hard on its audience, and a lot less sentimental and indeed lachrymose in its heavy flirtation with self-pity. Walt Kowalski is a comically grouchy guy, his poisonous anger about everything in the world never allowed to rise very far above comedy. That anger seems to be enough to make him socially dysfunctional, hating his kids, growling at everybody who annoys him, and drooling racial epithets as uncontrollably as somebody with too much oral freezing. But it’s not enough for the audience to be anything other than pleasantly scandalised by him in an Archie Bunker way. So much delightful political incorrectness. But he isn’t really politically incorrect, he’s really a guy with a heart as big as all outdoors who ends up committing everything to the cause of politically correct ethnic diversity (while at the same time being one more time the White Guy who saves deserving members of the Lesser Races, it’s always both/and with Eastwood). To present a character who was genuinely hateful, and make HIM into somebody with real human values, THAT would have been less soft and emotionally indulgent. Or maybe, to show us this guy taking up of the role of heroic champion and converting it to a self-willed martyrdom, and then have it NOT WORK.

 

What kind of hero is Walt Kowalski at the end of Gran Torino, anyhow?

 

At the end of the movie Clint is still as much the hero, and even the triumphant hero, as he is in any of his movies. The tributes of food and flowers from Mung matrons on his doorstep are funny, but these women have got it right, says the movie – and Clint’s fans know they’ve got it right too. Their parodic exaggeration, like Kowalski’s growls and his septuagenarian Dirty Harry moments, manage to amusingly cartoonify what Eastwood’s audience loves about him – his heroism – while still preserving it (again, how typical!) This oriental value system has managed to preserve the right kind of conservative hierarchical values, ones that  America has lost. These are the voters Republicans ought to be going for, not those American salesmen of oriental cars! All of this is steeped in irony, but in the end it’s all straight and true. Gran Torino is yet another Eastwood ambivalent movie: all is lost, nothing heroic and ideal is possible, but Clint is somehow still the hero anyway.

 

So in what Eastwood films do you think are most successful at examining or deconstructing notions of heroism?

 

As I was suggesting in our last talk, this is also the formula of the lesser recent Eastwood: Absolute Power, True Crime, Blood Work, even Space Cowboys. In all these movies the interesting schizoid quality is there, but it hasn’t been thought through, not really taken to its logical conclusion, instead it’s just metamorphosed into a more conventional story of heroic action. In the greater recent Eastwood, namely Mystic River, vigilante justice is just horribly wrong, a giant fucking mistake with hideous consequences. Even in the less tragic Flags of Our Fathers, the mythically heroic deed is in fact a mountain of lies and sickening phoniness. Unforgiven is still Eastwood’s masterpiece because it treats ALL those problems with astonishing power and self-truth: the extraordinary, powerful hero is an alcoholic mass murderer who hates everything in the world including himself, the myth of heroic action is literally completely myopic, the narrativization of these stirring deeds is a pack of ridiculous lies, violent revenge can only come at a cost that none of us would truly want to pay if we could see it clearly. It’s true that in Gran Torino, as in Million Dollar Baby, the presence of death at the end makes heroic Good Action into something less stupid and purely bullshit than it is in, say, Air Force One. As I keep saying, these are interesting movies even if they aren’t necessarily good one. The disappointment in Gran Torino, and those other “lesser” movies, is that the profound difficulty that sits at the centre of the story is finally finessed away into something sentimental and shallowly elegiac. Again, part of this comes from the construction of the Kowalski character as a loveable grump rather than a disturbing and unlikeable guy that we would have had to take more seriously in the first place. On the other hand, maybe Eastwood would still have found a way to make it an unsatisfactory movie: cf. the genuinely not-very-good True Crime, where the reporter hero is a human train wreck who betrays everybody – wife, child, co-workers, friends – and still manages to crack the mystery, overcome the odds, and save the good victims.

 

The ending of the film is particularly sentimental, with Thao driving along the coast in Walt's Gran Torino as Eastwood croaks/croons the film's theme song. What are we supposed to make of this imagery, where the Asian boy is driving the Eastwood metaphor? What's the message (other than that Eastwood should not sing)?

 

Yeah, Walt has, through his great life and great death, made it possible for the Asian boy to be a Real American. The message is clearly multicultural and even progressive – Asian-Americans, and every other kind of hyphenated-Americans, are just as American as white Protestants (a timely sentiment to accompany the arrival of Obama, though Eastwood has been preaching it for years). Thao is driving the Gran Torino, he really is America now, and also America’s hope for the future. But at the same time, the Americanness of Thao and every other member of a newly initiated group is enabled, and manufactured, and guaranteed, by Clint, WASP Number One, who, as it were, died to redeem them. They didn’t really take this station in life, it was given to them by Clint Eastwood.

The song is so bad that I honestly felt physically sick. It’s not the first time Eastwood has ended one of his parable-movies with a song of indescribabe barf-making badness: I think particularly of Bronco Billy.

I can't think of anyone else in the unique position to get these kinds of films made -- movies starring a near-octogenarian, dark narratives about failure, themes that uncomfortably undermine popular notions of American heroism, etc. Is Eastwood simply an anomaly doing his own thing in

Hollywood

, or is he making significant changes in terms of an established American cinematic mythology?

 

Yes, I agree with everything you say there about the uniqueness of Eastwood’s position and the unusualness of the subjects he’s taking on. There isn’t anyone who does this, or can do it. He’s an anomaly in large part because there’s nobody else with his kind of larger-than-life heroic stature as a screen persona. Apart from the fact that they come from later eras, the fact that a Sean Penn or a George Clooney can become myth-deconstructers in  Hollywood is fundamentally different from Eastwood’s position. Penn and Clooney (and Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino or Jack Nicholson, people at least closer to his time frame) were never heroes of a John-Wayne-type mythical grandeur. Nobody else was, either, Eastwood is completely unique in this way. And certainly none of those actors was ever a mythic hero to the right-wing audience the way Eastwood was. It’s this position – high up in terms of heroic scale, and operating at least in part on the myth-constructive right as opposed to the myth-destructive left – that allows Eastwood now to do stuff like this. The fact that he’s still prepared to play on this level even at an advanced age just adds to the kind of awesomeness of this powerful, enduring bigness that is found nowhere else. Incidentally, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Eastwood is a good actor, just that he is a big one.

For years there was talk of Eastwood starring in the movie adaptation of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, playing Batman in his twilight years. It would be an ideal Eastwood role, as it's about a bitter, angry, aging hero facing his own physical limits and inner demons. Having a particular interest in genre film yourself, if there a certain role or even (sub)genre that you've always wanted to see Eastwood tackle?

Starting with the first couple of sequels to the original Tim Burton film, I’ve become somebody who couldn’t care less about Batman, and who is just very tired of people carrying on as if the latest version were or could be something important. I get the same tiredness in the midst of debates about the new James Bond movie or the new Star Wars movie. These movies, no matter how incidentally entertaining they may be, are all essentially weightless and shallow, and if this or that new example is marginally less weightless and shallow, that doesn’t make it fundamentally more suited to be a potential carrier of meaning. I don’t object to the fact that they are popular and generic, but rather that they do not function with any substance as allegories about society or individualism or good and evil: they are all stuck in an aggressively flat landscape arising from their origins in comic books or kids’ serials of the 1940s or ridiculous spy-fantasy fiction of the 1950s, and have just become more and more purely self-referential, diversions of the same order as a fairground ride or video game. Elaborate action and a bunch of neat stuff are more essential than any other content, whose only value lies in its reassuring repetition with small changes in the face of the hero or the villain. The latest profound breakthrough, The Dark Knight, ran off in so many different directions trying to insist on its intensity and seriousness while making sure to put in lots of stunts and explosions that it looked like a sufferer from ADD. Batman’s inner demons are as cartoonishly empty as his novelty-item antagonists.

 

So then, are you saying that you wouldn’t want to see The Scowl in the cowl?

 

OK, I got that rant off my chest, but having said all this, Eastwood’s mere presence would give the movie Batman scenario a monumentality and substance it has NEVER had. Eastwood, too, has always been something of a cartoon character, but he did always have that size, and that weight. He could be really dangerous and really powerful; he could be really mythic, in fact he always seemed to have a mythic stature even when he was trying to escape from it and be more human and down to earth. So an Eastwood Batman movie is something I would rush off to with great interest.

 

-Dave Alexander

The Big Kowalski: Gran Torino and the Films of Clint Eastwood

It doesn’t take much to get me on a Clint Eastwood kick, and his latest, Gran Torino, is an ideal reason to talk about the Man From Malpaso. In GT, the 78-year-old plays Walt Kowalski, a bitter, racist Korean War vet whose prized possession is his mint 1972 Gran Torino. Recently widowed, disconnected from his children and hostile towards the Asian families that have come to dominate his neighbourhood, it’s Eastwood with his scowl cranked to eleven. When Walt catches the neighbour boy trying to steal his car as part of a gang initiation (the kid doesn’t want to be part of), and saves the boy’s sister from neighbourhood thugs, he’s pulled into their lives and forced to confront his own anger, and eventually the gang that won’t take no for an answer.

Much of the film has a comedic edge, as Eastwood drops a surprising variety of ethnic slurs and admittedly creative insults – in only the way that he can (squinting and growling) – all the while grumpily coming to terms with a culture clash that turns his life upside down. The film is also heavy on the drama, though, as Walt wrestles his demons and the family he comes to care about is terrorized by the violent gang. Along the way, the story also meditates on the nature of violence and revenge – long time themes in Eastwood’s films.

To poke around under the hood of Gran Torino, I’ve enlisted an expert on the cinema of Clint Eastwood, William Beard (pictured below, photo from here), author of Persistence of Double Vision: Essays on Clint Eastwood, Co-ordinator of the Film Studies program at the University of Alberta (where I took many a great film course from him), and a guy who lives up to his last name by rockin’ some excellent facial hair.

I’ve asked him to talk about Gran Torino and Eastwood. 

Here’s Part One:

 

For starters, did you like the film? And why?

 

I looked forward to seeing Gran Torino as yet another potentially interesting project of Eastwood’s. In the end I was disappointed, because the movie seems unable to overcome its vast heterogeneities of tone and subject, especially tone, and then ends up going to a more self-congratulatory place than key aspects of its story really warrant. Eastwood has never been particularly good at comedy, and sometimes he has been really bad at it. He has a clunking touch. The comedy in Gran Torino is actually better (i.e. funnier) than it has been in some Eastwood vehicles, but it just looks surreally wrong as the movie develops towards its completely unhumourous and in fact pretty dark conclusion. To watch Eastwood parody his own stereotype as an angry, contemptuous right-thinker has some real amusement value, but by the time the movie is half over, that animal growl he produces in moments of annoyance – a growl that never fails to provoke delighted laughter in the audience – is long gone, and he has turned into a much less caricatured personage.

 

Why doesn’t this character arc work for you?

 

There are two things to say about that: the first is that Eastwood’s whole career has been founded on combining things that aren’t supposed to go together, and the second that this particular journey, from sock-puppet to existential hero, is a really hard thing to negotiate. Earlier this week [in an email while setting up this interview] you referred City Heat, an Eastwood movie that is all caricature; in Gran Torino, it’s almost as if you were being asked to take something very close to the comic-book Eastwood figure from City Heat and give him the gravitas of the Eastwood hero of Million Dollar Baby.

 

Is this character another version of Frankie Dunn from Million Dollar Baby, or do you feel that he’s taking breaking new ground with his screen persona?

 

That’s the recent Eastwood movie that Gran Torino most reminds me of. Both of them have an Eastwood hero with family problems, adopting another child to compensate for the one(s) he can’t really deal with. Both of them even have a priest. More centrally both of them are movies that start out as unproblematic fun and finish up as tragedy. And both have stories that end in a way that no Eastwood story is supposed to end. In Million Dollar Baby Eastwood, instead of saving the girl, kills her (he kills her because there’s no way to save her, but that too is a failure of the Eastwood hero who’s supposed to be able to save everybody, and he does kill her). [WARNING: spoiler] And in Gran Torino, instead of kicking righteous ass on the malefactors, he allows himself to be shot dead. It’s pretty easy to see how the movie wants us to take this, as a solution to multiple problems: get rid of the sicko badguy types that Eastwood has been fighting ever since A Fistful of Dollars (and certainly since Dirty Harry), and resolve his own problems of social and familial dysfunctionality. [End spoiler] In a handful of Eastwood movies of the past decade or so there’s been this spectacle of an Eastwood protagonist who is defeated in some fundamental way, and yet compensates for it by being able to bring his special gifts to bear on a problem that helps others. At any rate that’s the pattern of Absolute Power, True Crime, partially Million Dollar Baby, and Gran Torino. As always, he’s trying to hold two incommensurable ideas at the same time: Clint Eastwood, hero + Clint Eastwood, fuckup or at least obsolete item. It’s an idea he first tried out, quite fascinatingly too, as far back as The Gauntlet in 1977 and Bronco Billy in 1980, and he’s played plenty of variations on that theme, including in Unforgiven.

 

So there are some fundamental problems with the Walt character in Gran Torino, and some ways he’s more of the same, but how about the concept for the story? Most of his films are about not just his character but the larger things that his character represents.

 

Actually almost every Eastwood project in recent years – good or bad – has started with at least an intriguing idea. Blood Work, for example, has as its central premise that the Clint Eastwood hero has, literally, the heart of a woman. Unfortunately Blood Work can’t think what more to do with this idea, and becomes a tiresome whodunit action movie. Even the entirely regrettable Space Cowboys thematizes the idea that Clint is getting a lot older, and can he still be a hero even though he’s so-o-o-o old?

Similarly, Heartbreak Ridge was already trying to come to grips with the fact that Marine Sergeant Eastwood was getting a little old to be an action hero, and that the America he somehow embodied was suffering from its own crisis of confidence. In the Line of Fire has him huffing and puffing and coming down with the flu, while Absolute Power explicitly identifies him as a member of the American Association of Retired Persons. Astonishingly, in Gran Torino Eastwood makes one last (?) comeback as the hardbody hero, kicking the shit out of one strutting young gang member, and remarking to another, in true Eastwood fashion, “You notice how every so often you run into somebody you shouldn’t have fucked with?” The continuity of Eastwood’s cinema, and of the heroes he plays, is evident again here too, as scarred veteran Walt Kowalski is haunted by the same memories of the Korean War as the hero of Heartbreak Ridge, while he is constantly spitting contemptuously on the ground just like the Outlaw Josey Wales. Interesting too that Kowalski = the Gran Torino itself and also = the America that made the Gran Torino. All of them are dinosaurs, and in particular America and the Detroit auto industry are in precipitous decline, while Eastwood the proud salt-of-the-earth worker always has the status of somebody long retired from a now pathetically and in fact embarrassingly superseded former star in the American crown, and still living in the same Detroit neighbourhood whose miserable decay just says everything America doesn’t want to hear too unmistakably.

 

 

[END OF PART 1]

-Dave Alexander

Best of the West

“Dusters,” “Oaters,” “Horse Operas” – the western by any other name is still one of the most distinctive genres in the history of cinema. Anything with men riding horses, wearing cowboy hats and carrying guns automatically falls under the umbrella. You can factor in time period (mid-nineteenth century to early twentieth century), location (the American frontier) and character traits (self-determination, freedom, living by a certain moral code), but even these things are fluid when it comes to the category. In fact, because the western can represent so many things on a variety of levels, it has proven itself one of the most complex genres, and one with much room for experimentation. In fact The 100 Best Westerns, a one-shot “Special Collector’s Edition from the Editors of Wild West” (published by the Weirder History Group), describes ‘em as “

America’s more imaginative art form” on the cover of the publication.

A long time lover of the genre, I snagged a copy a couple weeks ago and dove right in. If you’re also a fan or just a film buff interested in learning more about what was once the most popular style of American filmmaking, I highly recommend it. It’s a 100 pages worth of write-ups on the 100 best westerns (out of an estimated whopping 4600 ever made), written up by ten critics. One of those critics, Gene Santoro, writes an excellent intro essay discussing the western in the context of the real history of the old west, the cinematic history of the old west, some of its inherent parallels and contradictions, and why it captured the popular imagination. The mag does indeed cover the entire filmic history of the genre, from The Great Train Robbery (1903) to Appaloosa (2007).

Interspersed between the write-ups and the loads of film posters and movie stills are factoids about the stars behind the films, the productions themselves and, most interestingly, facts about the real old west – which usually note the artistic liberties (read: factual failings) many of the films take. For example, no one ever circled the wagons to repel an Indian attack and cavalry men never wore those wussy yellow kerchiefs.

As such, I very highly recommend snagging The 100 Best Westerns, although there are a few caveats. For starters, there are the oddball choices of films not set in the old west, such as John Sayles’ Lone Star and Bad Day at Black Rock. Plus, there’s no criteria set out for how the films earned their rankings – for example, why is High Noon the number one pick, ranking over The Searchers, Shane and The Unforgiven? Spaghetti westerns are woefully underrepresented here too. Plus, there also seems to be a blur between “good” and “important,” with some of the reviews rather apologetic of certain choices – films which may have brought something new to the genre, but ain’t that good.

The publication does acknowledge, however, that any such list is contentious, and invites readers to go here to discuss films that should have been added to the list, and here, for ones that should be removed.

I’ve added my own picks for both categories.

 

Here are five films that don’t belong on the list because they really, aren’t westerns. These movies simply stray too far from a variety of elements that identify the genre.

 

Blood Simple – The Coen Bros.’ first feature is a dusty, contemporary film noir. Way off base with this choice.

 

El Mariachi – Plenty of showdowns, gunplay and dusty streets in Robert Rodriguez’s contemporary-set first feature almost make it a cousin, but is more concerned with style than the themes of the old west.

 

The Last of the Mohicans – Seriously? Come on, this is a period drama. Buckskin jackets, muskets and the British does not a western make!

 

Mark of Zorro – The Zorro films are closer to superhero movies than westerns. Swords just don’t cut it in a genre so closely tied to the gun.

 

Treasure of the Sierra Madre – John Huston’s dramatic thriller about Mexican gold starring Bogart and set in 1925 is too far out of its element to label it a “western.”

 

And now five films that are indeed westerns but ain't good enough to be on the list.

 

3:10 to Yuma (2007) – Unbelievable: this cheesy remake made the list but the original didn’t. The terribly out of place smirky ending when Russell Crowe’s character, having just endured the heartbreaking murder of a good man, whistles and his trusty steed follows the train he’s a prisoner on, is reason alone to forget this one.

 

Appaloosa – This mediocre western from last year has a great cast, including Ed Harris (also director), Viggo Mortenson and Jeremy Irons, but the characters are poorly drawn and the drama just not that compelling.

 

Maverick – This 1994 riff on the TV series, starring Mel Gibson, Jody Foster and original Mav’ James Garner (well, actually the second in the ‘50s series, but the most memorable anyhow), is gutless as both western, and a comedy.

 

The Missing – Even the reviewer has problems with this idiotic Ron Howard sort-of supernatural duster, so why include it. Riddled with bad ethnic clichés, saddled with a self-important performance by Tommy Lee Jones (as an estranged father/mystic trying to save his kidnapped granddaughter) and generally a dumb story, this one’s a spur to the brain.

 

Posse – Although star/director Mario Van Peebles’ African American take on the genre is a fantastic idea in theory, in practice, it’s a try-hard post-modern example of style over substance.

 

Lastly, five films that desperately deserve to be on the list but for aren’t.

 

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford – This one should have been up for Best Picture last year, due to it’s stellar, layered performances from the likes of Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck and Sam Shepherd; its gorgeous cinematography, courtesy Roger Deakins; and it’s intensely thoughtful story, which uses the (mis)adventures of the James gang as philosophical meditation on the nature of violence and celebrity. Someone should be strung up for this omission...

 

Cut Throat’s Nine – A chain gang of animalistic criminals are forced by a lawman to trek through the mountains after their wagon is ambushed and destroyed and most of the guards killed. One of the nastiest spaghetti westerns ever made (although it’s Spanish-made), Cut Throats is jaw-droppingly nihilistic, dirty and bloody, but what makes the 1972 shocker a must-see is the tense plot, in which desperate men do increasingly terrible things. When they find out there’s gold to be had, well…check you gag reflex.

 

Django – Italian spaghetti western star Franco Nero is probably most famous for playing the stoic gunfighter who drags a coffin around (hell, Rancid even wrote a song about him!), and this 1966 film started it all, including numerous sequels – only a few of which were official. A plot to steal gold from bandits, a damsel in distress, betrayal and revenge and the need to know who/what is in that damn pine box drives this precursor to the Leone Eastwood westerns. Bad-ass and necessary.

 

El Topo – Passing over this one is a real head scratcher. Alejando Jodorowsy’s 1970 arthouse fantasy western about a rider (played by Jodorowsky) on an epic quest through the desert to duel four masterful gunslingers goes in so many surreal directions, it’s better just to go in blind to see why this was one of the most famous midnight movies of its era. This film will blow your mind; and – hooray – it was cleaned up and reissued a couple years ago, in a special DVD edition for the first time.

 

The Proposition – Set in Australia, this 2005 film is a look at a totally different, but no less wild frontier, and it was written and scored by none other than Nick Cave (who also did music for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford). Stellar cinematography (capturing the late nineteenth century locals in all their fly-ridden, sepia glory), stellar performances from Guy Pearce and Ray Winstone, shockingly effective bursts of violence, and complex characters in a biting narrative about an outlaw forced to track down his older brother in order to save his younger brother from execution make the Australian outback just as suitable as the American frontier for a horse opera.

 

If you want to scrutinize the list for yourself, go here to order The 100 Greatest Westerns or check the shelves of your nearest magazine retailer.

-Dave Alexander