Archive for the ‘Western’ Category

Bad Day at Black Rock

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

A reader named Stephen A., and probaly some other people in the past, have been reminding me to watch BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, a classic 1955 badass picture from director John Sturges (THE GREAT ESCAPE, McQ). So I finally did. Thanks guys.

In a weird way the opening kind of reminded me of a great late ’80s, early ’90s action movie, because it’s widescreen with this train coming and SPENCER TRACY and everybody else’s names are in huge letters that fill almost the whole screen. Just like it would say STEVEN SEAGAL if that train was from UNDER SIEGE 2 PART 2: DARKER TERRITORY.

Our boy Spencer plays a mysterious stranger who comes into a tiny little turd of a town in the middle of nowhere. The movie takes place in the ’50s but it’s alot like a little old western town. And kind of depressing to me in the same way as those towns we have now where when you go into town all you find is a bland little strip mall identical to the strip malls in every other part of the country. The town is so small that everybody in it comes out to watch this guy get off the train, which they say hasn’t stopped there in 4 years. So watching it stop is like watching the Olympics I guess.

Spencer is not some drifter like Clint. He came on a specific mission. We just don’t know what that mission is yet. He has a suit, a fedora and a briefcase. And only one arm. He is coy about what the hell he’s doing there, I figured he was a detective investigating some crime, and the whole town obviously wants him to just get the fuck out. But they won’t say it in so many words, they just try to stare at him and make him uncomfortable.

And it’s a hell of a group of people to be intimidated by. The guy who turns out to be the top villain is Robert Ryan, and his top thugs are Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. It quickly becomes clear that the rest of the town, including the sherriff, are scared of these guys and helping to conceal some crime. And some of them (especially the sherriff) are completely ashamed of it. And there’s a doctor who talks kind of like Alan Alda. (more…)

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The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007

‘If all mankind shitted from a two-meter high toilet, we could have all the electricity we wanted.’
–Alejandro Jodorowsky, HOLY MOUNTAIN commentary

My friends, we will have peace in the Middle East. We will find cures for cancer and AIDS. The honey bees will return to their hives. Michael Bay will apologize and surrender himself to movie jail without incident. I know these things are possible because the impossible has happened: director Alejandro Jodorowsky and producer/Beatles manager Alan Klein have ended their 30 year feud. Everybody’s friends again, so Anchor Bay releases their THE FILMS OF ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY box set Tuesday.

This is literally the Holy Grail of DVDs. When Jodorowsky ditched plans to direct THE STORY OF O thirty years ago, Klein paid him back by shelving his other movies. So EL TOPO and HOLY MOUNTAIN have been legendary cult movies, but have not received the wide home viewing they deserve. You could never get these from corporate sources like Blockbuster or Netflix, because the copies in circulation were bootlegs. Jodorowsky supplied the materials to the pirates himself just to get the movies seen. (I wonder what section Blockbuster will put EL TOPO in?)

If you tried hard enough you could get your hands on a dark, blurry VHS copy with the pubic hair blurred out and burned on Japanese subtitles. But the idea of a legit, remastered DVD version, with extras no less… too much to ask for. These would always remain secret movies, legendary movies, like that movie that kills everybody in Moriarty’s first MASTERS OF HORROR episode. Until the day I read the announcement from Anchor Bay I honestly believed it would take the death of either Jodorowsky or Klein for them to come out. If one of them was found mysteriously crucified in a circle of weird shells and dead rabbits then they might hammer out the rights, but otherwise it could never, ever happen. But now it has. (more…)

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El topo

Wednesday, February 7th, 2007

The wind whistles in the distance as a scary cowboy in black rides through the desert. And for some reason he’s holding an umbrella. As he gets closer and steps off the horse we see he has a little boy with him too, naked except for a hat and a pair of mocassins. He hands the boy a teddy bear.

“Son, you are 7 years old. Today you are a man. Bury your first toy and the photo of your mother.”

The boy does as the man says. In the foreground we see the half-buried portrait of the friendly looking mother poking out of the sand as this crazy duo rides off toward the horizon. The opening credits tell us we’re watching EL TOPO. And that opening is the most normal and straight forward part of the movie.

What I’m trying to say is, John Wayne isn’t in this one, Kevin Costner isn’t even in this one. This is not your father’s western. Unless your father is a pervert who enjoys peyote, which he probaly is, so actually this probaly is your father’s western. Whatever the case, I’m sure it’s stretching it to even call it a western. There are hats, horses, guns, bandits, etc., but… remember when I reviewed David Cronenberg’s CRASH, I said it was like the Shannon Tweed movie that would only show on Videodrome? This is in that same universe, you switch the channel to some twisted mutant version of AMC in the middle of the afternoon and this is the western they’re showing.

In case you haven’t heard it yet, I have good news for you fans of director Alejandro Jodorowsky (or eltopians as I call you). As you know, after John Lennon called EL TOPO a masterpiece Klein financed HOLY MOUNTAIN and ended up owning both. But he and Jodorowsky had some kind of falling out, so Klein never released the movies on video, while Jodorowsky called Klein a “gangster” and gave prints to pirates to get them out there. I figured we’d never see these on legit DVDs unless one of them died. They probaly should’ve settled this a long time ago with a knife fight at Stonehenge or on top of a pyramid or something. But there must’ve been something in the tarot, because the two have finally called a truce in their blood feud. They will be releasing EL TOPO, THE HOLY MOUNTAIN and FANDO Y LIS as a box set through Anchor Bay next May. They’re gonna be packed with extras too, there’s even deleted scenes on HOLY MOUNTAIN! I don’t know about bloopers. The price isn’t too bad either, fifty bucks for three movies. I already have FANDO from when it came out a while ago (looks like the same extras), but the other two are easily worth $25 to me. (more…)

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McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

As part of my striving for excellence I’m trying to strengthen my background in the filmatic arts. I’m always trying to catch up on the Badass Cinema that I’ve missed, but it’s also important to watch some of the regular folk movies that are considered classics. MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER is no THE GODFATHER or nothin but if you talk to film buffs alot of times they have a boner for Robert Altman, and this is one of the movies they all mention. Before POPEYE.

I was honestly able to watch it without having a clue what it was even about, which is always good. It turns out it’s kind of a hippie western. Not in a psychedelic EL TOPO kind of way but in the way that

  1. alot of the cowboys seem like these hairy hippie types and
  2. they got some guy (Leonard Cohen) strumming a guitar and singing ’70s style folk songs on the soundtrack every five minutes. Like it’s HAROLD AND MAUDE or something.

The style is the usual Altman style, alot of the dialogue seems improvised and very naturalistic and the people talk over each other and mumble sometimes. There’s one scene where Warren Beatty sits and burps and mumbles to himself for about 3 or 4 minutes, I betchya that scene was improv.

The movie takes place in the Old Pacific Northwest and basically is the story of It’s Hard Out West For a Pimp. It’s funny because at one point McCabe (Beatty) puts on a giant fur coat and he’s wearing a bowler hat and I said, “ha ha, he looks like a pimp.” And it was the same scene where you find out that yes, in fact, he is buying some hoes which he is using to set up a brothel. (more…)

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Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Can you believe that? Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Has there ever been a better title for a film of Badass Cinema, because I don’t think there has. Leave it to Sam Peckinpah, that lovable old drunk who spent his whole career fighting with studios and filming innocent kids standing by the side of the road watching as horrible atrocities took place in slow motion to come up with a title like that. I don’t think that one will ever be topped.

I really like Peckinpah, especially one that I guess is not generally considered one of his best, The Getaway. I like that this is a guy who makes violent westerns and crime movies but instead of trying to dazzle the audience with explosions and car chases, he seems to pour his filthy old grizzled alcoholic soul into it. All of his frustrations, problems and paranoid delusions seem to end up in there somewhere. He knows that a good personal film is not necessarily about some dude reading poetry and being misunderstood by the ladies.

I never knew what this one was about, but I always wanted to see it because of that title. And people recommend it to me all the time as one of the greats of Badass Cinema. It placed #77 on the original Badass 100, but with its reputation and inevitable some day release on American DVD, I bet it will slip up a little higher if we ever revise that list.

But I gotta be honest, just to help out anybody that might be in that same situation. As great as this movie is, it is not as COMPLETELY FUCKING BAD as the title may imply. And I’ll explain why but let me tell you what it’s about first.

The movie starts out like a beautiful postcard in some Mexican villa somewhere. Ducks swim in a little lake while a young girl, obviously pregnant, sits at the shore. The girl gets brought inside to face her rich and powerful dad, who has his men rough her up until she will say who the father is: Alfredo Garcia. The old man is sad. “He was like a son to me.” And then of course he tells his men there will be a million dollars for whoever brings in this Alfredo’s head. (more…)

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The Master Gunfighter

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

First of all I gotta thank my man with a plan Jeremiah for sending me a screener of this movie. Unfortunately Jeremiah is no longer able to send me free porno dvds, but he has more than made up for that unfortunate situation by sending me this very enjoyable obscurity in Badass Cinema.

Now some of you may know, but I sure didn’t, that Tom Laughlin made one non-Billy Jack movie after the success of BILLY JACK. And it was this. He wrote it under a pseudonym and apparently the director is his son Frank. It’s a western, but with much of the cornball liberal action movie tone I loved about the BILLY JACK pictures. It is about to come out on video and I think dvd for the first time ever.

Now first of all let me say that I checked the reviews on IMDB (a sight I defeated roundly in the Cinemarati Best Film-Related Web Sight 2001 competition I might add) and they all seem to hate it. But fuck those bastards. If you like the Billy Jack movies, which you do, you oughta like this.

What really makes it stand out from other westerns is a great scenario with a sense of moral outrage but also a good motivation for the villains. And since it’s a Tom Laughlin picture it touches on that whole genocide thing that generally is swept under the rug or given a whitewash in westerns.

Laughlin plays Finley, who is alot like Billy Jack – he even wears a similar hat in the opening scene. He’s got the same quiet approach to asskicking, the same I’m-a-pacifist-but-I-guess-if-you’re-gonna-be-that-way Badass persona. And I think what makes these two characters great action heroes is that they genuinely have a strong sense of morality even when the odds are against them. There are alot of heroes who really believe they are doing the right thing, but generally they have most of the police force or the army or at least the common man on their side. Or maybe he’s framed so he has to prove his innocence and then you know at the end everybody will understand that he’s the good guy. (more…)

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Duck, You Sucker

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

You talk about striving for excellence – to a guy like me, Sergio Leone is just about the highest level of excellence any director could aspire to. He took the western genre, which had grown stale and conservative, and injected it full of his Leone brand cinematic steroid and turned it into an unstoppable super soldier version of the old beast, one so powerful it became its own genre that is still worshipped and studied by cult movie watchers to this day. All he did was five westerns bookended by a gladiator picture and a gangster epic. But those westerns contributed so much to the Badass Cinema I worship to this day that they might as well be considered its legal guardians.

Think about it: the stoic Clint Eastwood persona of A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, which he parlayed into an entire brilliant career and which spun off into a hundred bastard sons in the action genre, from Steven Seagal to Daniel Craig. The epic cinemascope wide shots showing the vastness of the desert, cutting to the extreme closeups on some ugly bastard’s squinty eyes, surrounded by wrinkles and lines of sweat. The ingenious use of sound – buzzing flies, some piece of metal somewhere clanging in the wind, the clicking of guns, and of course the legendary Ennio Morricone scores that are forever glued to any memory anybody ever had of these movies. Leone’s style is like a drug, it heightens all your senses. You feel like a blind man whose hearing becomes more powerful to balance out the loss of the eye sight, but then you get the eye sight back for some reason and the super-hearing stays so you go watch some westerns.

To me it seems like Leone must’ve had film spooling through his veins. He’s the definition of a guy who mastered the idea of camera angles, of sound, of music, of pacing. When I talk about what I love in movies, what I think is too often missing from movies these days, this is it – this CINEMATIC (all caps) feel, this god-like mastery of visual storytelling. (more…)

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Red Sun

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

Pretty much every day, somebody comes up to me and asks, “Vern, what in your opinion is the greatest badass ensemble cast of all time?” They expect me to go for a big cast like THE GREAT ESCAPE or THE DIRTY DOZEN. But I throw em a curve ball with the best possible answer: HELL IN THE PACIFIC. There are exactly two actors in the whole movie, and they’re Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune. That cannot be topped. The technology just doesn’t exist.

Here’s a cast that comes pretty close though: Charles Bronson, Toshiro Mifune and Alain Delon. I mean, that’s pretty fuckin good, right? You could argue whether or not Bronson + Delon > Marvin. But there’s other people in this movie, not just those three, and that lessens the impact. The minimalism of HELL IN THE PACIFIC is part of what makes it so great.

However, this one has something going for it: Charles Bronson is a cowboy. Toshiro Mifune is a samurai. In the same movie. I’ll pause now for you to go rent the movie.

Thanks for coming back. In case you haven’t watched it yet, I’ll explain. Bronson and Delon are pulling a train robbery. On one car of the train is a Japanese ambassador guarded by two samurai. That’s got nothing to do with the robbery but while they’re poking around, Delon notices a ceremonial samurai sword the ambassador is bringing as a gift. So he takes it, and shoots one of the samurai that comes after it. Then him and some guys pull a doublecross on Bronson and take off with the boodle. (more…)

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