Jeffrey M. Anderson's 400 Screens, 400 Blows - The West Is Yet to Come
Filed under: Critical Thought, Box Office, Brad Pitt, Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows, Cinematical Indie, Western
Did the Western make a comeback in 2007, with 3:10 to Yuma (371 screens), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (294 screens), and last spring's Seraphim Falls? That's a tough question, but the better question would be: did it ever go away? Those three movies earned a lot of attention this year, and it showed that, if nothing else, filmmakers and actors are eager to make Westerns once again, as they did back in the 1950s. How much more of a indication do you need when Pierce Brosnan, Russell Crowe and Brad Pitt don cowboy hats and mount horses? Other actors, such as Matt Damon and Colin Farrell have suggested how much fun they had while making recent Westerns. Unfortunately, audiences don't seem so interested, and conversely, producers don't want to put up the money for actors to play if audiences don't want to share in the fun.
Director James Mangold told me that no studio would touch 3:10 to Yuma, and that he had to secure financing from a bank. It opened, happily, in the #1 box office slot, but after eight weeks, it has started to slide, and is still just shy of recapturing its $55 million budget. And this is a terrific, crowd-pleasing movie with a great performance by Crowe. It's directed with energy and clarity, with an innovative use of an authentic Western soundtrack. It has exciting gunfights and chases and escapes. And if aesthetes and elitists wish, they can see bonus allusions to Iraq in the film, even if they're not actually mentioned or hammered home. It's unpretentious in every way. (Paul Haggis could take a few notes from this movie.) So why has the box office slowed down so drastically?
It's much worse for Jesse James. I suspect that Warner Bros. has a crafty awards-season campaign in mind, and they intend to keep slowly rolling it out to more markets as it gets closer to December. But as of now, after six weeks, it has only grossed just under $3 million on a $30 million budget. Even though Brad Pitt won (and deserved) the Best Actor award at Venice, this movie is a much harder sell. It's closer to something by Terrence Malick than to John Wayne; it's very slow and contemplative, and it uses its landscape to underline the characters' emotional state rather than for action. There are more scenes of people sitting around in rooms talking than shooting one another, but I think it's one of the year's great films. Oddly enough, the country's most powerful critics have dismissed it, calling it boring and whatnot, but its current IMDB score stands at a very high 8.3. Apparently the small band of ordinary, everyday moviegoers that have actually seen it, love it, while the film community's supposed elite didn't get it.
Most of today's working critics were raised watching movies during the 1970s or 1980s, when the Western's popularity had faded. During the hippie days, it was seen as an outmoded genre, uncool, with nothing left to say. Mel Brooks' ridiculed its conventions in his massive hit Blazing Saddles (1974), and that is perhaps the only point of reference that today's critics have. They're very simply not familiar with the codes and tools for watching a Western. To go further, those critics who have gone back to watch "classic" Westerns probably started with the most acclaimed, pre-approved examples, such as The Ox-Bow Incident, The Gunfighter, High Noon, Shane or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, none of which have much to do with the Western. These are all what Andre Bazin termed "Super-Westerns." They're more interested in making statements that exist outside the genre, and are generally made by filmmakers who have no interest in the genre.
To truly bone up on the Western, viewers must delve into the pleasures of the "bread-and-butter" Western, or films by those who lived the genre: Anthony Mann, Howard Hawks, John Ford, Budd Boetticher, Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, Walter Hill and Clint Eastwood. These men were sometimes accused of making the same Westerns over and over, but by doing so, they achieved a kind of purity, something separate from other genres and closer to art. In these films, one can find a new visual language, with empty spaces and simple objects standing in for dialogue. It's an unspoken genre, where words mean very little (except, for other reasons, in the new Jesse James). In a way, it's a physical genre, and belongs closer to the horror film than to more prestigious genres.
Happily, certain filmmakers and films have been able to tap into the public's consciousness and to hang on throughout the years. All of Leone's films remain very popular, as do Clint Eastwood's Westerns. (I'm still reeling that a film as great as Unforgiven actually managed to win an Oscar!) And John Ford's complex, polarizing masterpiece The Searchers (1956), with its sticky issues regarding racism, continues to grow in stature every year (it's one of the few films that gets better the more times you see it). These are a great place to start learning the language, or the non-language, of the Western. When you're ready, if you hurry, you can still catch 3:10 to Yuma and Jesse James on the big screen. And then you might begin to understand the allure of playing cowboy.
The Geek Beat: Rated M For Mature
'Clash of the Titans' Trailer Now Online!
'Twilight' Fans: Do You Really Want to See 'Breaking Dawn'?
Finally! All Those Ambiguous Movie Endings Resolved!
Spin-ematical: New on DVD for 11/10
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
11-01-2007 @ 9:47PM
Gemma said...
I think Western productions are dead. I saw in the news they interviewed people coming out of this various new Western films of late and most of them just say it was alright. I know I would watch this films in dvd but not something to pay 10.00 out of my pocket and really go out of my way to see it.
I also think Hollywood should take a break from war productions too. I love war films but it seems Americans are not entertained going to the movies to watch documentaries or painful stuff like what they see on CNN news.
Reply
11-01-2007 @ 11:59PM
Troy said...
I LOVED this movie. I was hesitant to go see it at first because I'm such an old school Clint Eastwood western fan. I didn't think anything from the modern age could stack up. But, was I ever wrong. It was excellent.
http://www.mymoviefriend.com
Reply
11-02-2007 @ 2:47AM
USA said...
Its as good as the original and its the best performance I have seen from Crowe for so long. I like Bale but his angry intense dark roles are a bit tiresome of late. Cant he lighten up a bit? even critics and some fans notice this. Kinda like Depp who acts like Jack Sparrow in most of his movies nowadays. I volunteer at a vets hospital and many classics and westerns are shown so i have come to appreciate the old classics. Their actors have no artificial beauty and their scripts are really entertaining and original. What Hollywood have these days is pretty much advance technology but real original stories are a rare find.
Reply
11-02-2007 @ 11:52AM
Richard von Busack said...
"Aesthetes and elitists?" Them's shootin' words. And what's wrong with looking for the elite in an art, anyway? Yeah, I complained abut the electrocution scene in 3:10, and I'm proud of it. It was baroque stuff--it was fit for an episode of The Wild, Wild West, and what was it doing there if not to make us think "Abu Gharaib." Has Mangold copped to that yet?
While completely agreeing with your well-argued premise that the western must be preserved, I must also regretfully take issue with your assertion that "the hippies" ended the western. Hippies liked westerns, hippie westerns, anyway, like Zacahariah, Greaser's Palace, and Billy Jack. Let's not forget Heaven's Gate--a movie that's unwatchable without substantial herb-puffing. With the exception of Billy Jack, they didn't mak eany money. But hippies went to Oregon, or Montana or New Mexico...they loved unwashed drifters on horseback staring at the clouds.
Now Vietnam--a war detested by substantially more of the US population than just everyone's favorite whipping-boy, the hippie--that took a hell of a lot of fun out of the western. Since Hollywood couldn't say a thing about Vietnam without alienating half the viewers, they started making the massacres of Indians a metaphor for My Lai and so forth. The result was a string of westerns no one wants to see now. Let alone back then. (Who knows, maybe Soldier Blue is a lost masterpiece.) The historical comparisons are certainly valid. They worked later on after the war was understood as a fiasco--that's why Dances With Wolves was a hit. But there's a certain purity in the traditional western that has to be respected in order to make it a hit at the box office, which is what you were discussing.
That purity has to be respected, but it can't be the same thing every time--that's the plight of the western.
One reason you see less of John Wayne-style westerns in the erstwhile hippie days is plain old mortality. Wayne was identifying himself with some real caveman politics, but what really made him hard to put into westerns was his girth. As a fat guy myself I feel no shame at pointing this out. "He wants us to make more movies but he's gotten fat...he doesn't move like a cat anymore"--Howard Hawks to Joseph McBride, don't have the exact quote but it's something like that. Kael was scathing, talking about how even how the horses were starting to flinch under the weight of some of these old actors; the aging Lancaster and Douglas kept on making them, and Burt Kennedy and Hawks kept filming them, usually on studio lots: no one cares when it's Rio Bravo, but by the late 1960s, when Altman and Penn were getting out into the world...you can see the problem. Then came all the directors who tried to emulate Peckinpah, who had pretty much made the western to end them all...and you can see why the western went into temporary decline.
As you say, it is a real pity that so many viewers know Randolph Scott from Blazing Saddles instead of Ride the High Country. Once seen and understood, the appeal of the classic western is irrestible.
Reply
11-03-2007 @ 2:17PM
MosquitoControl said...
It's usually not that good of an idea to go buy IMDB rating when a movie is still in theaters.
When you go see a movie in theaters you tend to pick out a movie you want to see. You do some research, you have some advance knowledge; you don't want to lose $10.
So the people going to see a movie in a theater chose that movie carefully, more likely than with other ways of viewing, and will be more inclined to enjoy the film.
Movies always drop half a point to a point when they hit DVD. Then, when they hit cable and get watched by people simply for being on, they'll drop another half a point to a point.
Reply