11.20.2014

King's Highway pt. 77: Revival - a Review

Who is screenwriting our lives? Fate or coincidence?

You read it yet? 

If not, turn back now, lest ye be spoiled. (...whistles Jeopardy theme...) Still here? Okay.


First things first - when I wrote my initial reaction last Friday, I rated this one quite highly. It left a bold impression upon first read. And while I still think it's a fine piece of work, the impression faded somewhat, and I revised my rankings as a result. It dropped from being my 20th favorite King novel to my 31st. This is more a testament to the books ahead of it and less a comment on Revival. But the incursion it made onto my imagination receded a bit, the more I thought about it. 

I still think it's a strong work. In many ways, it reads better as a film than as a novel, and perhaps it'll make a great film one day, with only the problem of how to effectively portray Jamie Morton as child, adolescent, adult, and old man. (Aging the Rev is a less daunting problem.)

Let's start at the very beginning, i.e. the dedication page. At the end of a list of shout-outs, we find: 

"And (to) Arthur Machen, whose short novel The Great God Pan has haunted me all my life."

I haven't read that one. Been meaning to for years. (Here's a link to the Project Gutenberg text for it.) I only know of it because King has mentioned it from time to time as a seminal influence on his writing. My understanding is that its subject matter has a few things in common with Revival, and it would be interesting to do a compare/ contrast of the two. Maybe someday.

The official King site sums it up thusly: "A dark and electrifying novel about addiction, fanaticism, and what might exist on the other side of life." Most of that sentence makes sense to me. Not the part about addiction. I think addiction is only a very minor theme of Revival. It doesn't seem as interested in exploring the topic as it is explored, say, in The Drawing of the Three, Misery, Doctor Sleep, etc. But close enough, I guess. 

It goes on:

"This rich and disturbing novel spans five decades on its way to the most terrifying conclusion Stephen King has ever written. It’s a masterpiece from King, in the great American tradition of Frank Norris, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe."

Now wait. What? Why those three authors? It's not anything at all like them. A little (and only a very little) bit of Poe, at the end, sure. But still, what? Is this a novel in the "great American tradition" whatever that is? It does span five decades, I'll give it that. 

Sometimes, the official King site confuses me.

Polish edition
For me, while the first few acts are perfectly fine, it only really kicks into overdrive once Jamie gets the letters to come to Maine for the healing of Astrid and obligation of further service to the Rev. Until that happened, I was concerned the various threads of the book weren't going to tie together. Those threads were:

- the coming of age section: learning rock and roll and his romance with Astrid.
- the may-to-December romance of Jamie and Bree.
- Jamie's heroin addiction.
- Jamie's somewhat over-principled objections to the Rev ("You may be helping some of them, but you're pissing on all of them. (...) You're taking revenge on broken people because you can't take revenge on God for taking your wife and son.") 

I want to stress these threads were perfectly fine on their own. I had no trouble reading them, and I felt invested in the drama of Jamie's life. Just, against the backdrop of The Terrible Sermon (Electric Jesus, loss of faith) the subsequent reinvention of the Rev in the Mr. Electrico-esque carny years (where the Rev cures Jamie's heroin addiction with his "secret electricity") and the development of the Charles Jacobs as a traveling healer in a revival show, I wasn't sure if any of this was just window dressing or if it would all be incorporated into a greater narrative.

I believe they were - and quite successfully. The rock and roll and Bree threads are resolved logically in the aftermath of Jacobs' last experiment, the romance with Astrid is of course the catalyst for Jamie's involvement in said experiment, and the heroin addiction (in addition to being a plot catalyst of its own) is mirrored by Jamie's antidepressants at the end. I need a story to do this sort of stuff - I can't stand loose ends. I like them to mirror each other and provide counterpoint. 

(Kev - one of my two on-the-web go-tos for all King criticism - doesn't seem to be bothered by this: "King doesn’t skimp on the details of Jamie’s life; as in the middle section of 11/22/63, Revival gives its main character time to breathe, to live. It’s not that there isn’t a sense of urgency in the book – there is, and King ratchets that up as we grow closer and closer to the finale – but Jamie is a fascinating good guy, and many of the best parts of Revival involve simply watching him grow up, dabble in music, and fall in and out of love." All of which is true, certainly. I just prefer this stuff to be in service of a novel's theme and not exist for its own good-guy/life-lived sake.)

Obviously, there is a huge difference between antidepressants and heroin, I just mean there is a symbolic resonance between the two as storytelling devices. And as we-the-reader have seen firsthand the horror that justifies Jamie's retreat into chemical neutralization, there's a subtle tragedy in this - numbed and fighting a holding action against the inevitable horrors of life and death - which serves the novel's larger theme of religious mystery and horror very well.

As for Jamie's indignation with the Rev, I was on Jacobs' side during all of those exchanges. It just felt like Jamie was being completely unreasonable. Of course, once you get to the end, keeping in mind he's telling the whole story in retrospect after everything that happens, it makes a great deal more sense.
 

As for that religious mystery part of it - I quite liked it. Things start off with a traditional (and well-sketched-out) homey New England faith, much like the boyhood King had himself. But the Rev is into electricity - really into it. After a Jesus-like healing of Jamie's brother, the Rev's wife and child are killed in a road accident, and the Rev becomes unhinged. (p.s. The "terrible sermon" isn't all that terrible, but it was shocking for its time and place/ context, sure.) He researches alchemical mysticism and taps into "secret electricity," all the while proclaiming religion is a fraud but that God - the true God - exists in lightning. God is an impersonal force to be channeled to his own purposes. (Shades of The Mosquito Coast's Allie Fox.) We learn his ultimate objective is the same as Isaac Newton's: to penetrate the deepest mystery of all, that of eternal death. Healing the rubes is just a means to that end. 

And where does it all lead? There's some stuff about Patient Omega and Jamie Is the Chosen One (so to speak) that is all fine and good - that kind of window dressing I don't mind whatsoever in a supernatural work, so long as effort is made for it to make "sense," which it does here - but the real payoff comes when, at last, the Rev succeeds in breaking through to the other side:

"The room didn't fade; it was still there, but I saw it was an illusion. (...) The whole living world was an illusion (...) as flimsy as an old nylon stocking. The true world was behind it.

"Basalt blocks rose to a black sky punched with howling stars. I think those blocks were all that remained of a vast ruined city. (...) Barren, yes, but not empty. A wide and seemingly endless column of naked human being trudged through it, heads down, feet stumbling. (...) Driving the humans were antlike creatures, most black, some the dark red of venous blood.

"(...) The foolish mirage of earthly life had been torn away and instead of the heaven preachers of all persuasions promised, what awaited them was a dead city of cyclopean stone blocks below a sky that was itself a scrim. The howling stars weren't stars at all. They were holes, and the holes emerging from them came from the true potestas magnum universum. Beyond the sky were entities. They were alive, and all-powerful, and totally insane."

"Somewhere in it was Claire * who deserved heaven and had gotten this instead: a charnel kingdom where guardian ant-things (were) waiting not just for the evil ones but for us all."

* Jamie's sister, whose offscreen death and abusive marriage was also a thread I thought might be in danger of not tying in properly. But, as we see, it certainly does.

For me, this was a pretty bad-ass moment that I was not expecting. King is a big fan of the movie The Changeling with George C. Scott, and that has a rather similarly bleak ending. (Maybe this is why I think it "reads" as a movie, because I'm channeling The Changeling? Another work, for what it's worth, where a protagonist becomes enmeshed in the shady afterworld as triggered by his wife and son's death.)

In a lot of King's works, the afterlife is counter-balanced by some benevolent force. (Or in the case of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon or It, a nonetheless benevolent indifference.) Not here. I was impressed with King's "going there," as well as tying it all together so sensibly (if tragically) in the epilogue. 

I'd also like to note three things:

1) I mean, this is a supernatural, sci-fi sort of situation. Some of the reviews I've read (mostly, again, at the official site - what is it with that site?) focus too much on its theological implications, whether good or bad. I don't really see the need. Let me indulge my inner Supreme Court Justice here and decline to review that case. (If I did, though, I'd treat it only as solemnly as I would the same sort of implications in Evil Dead 2 or Army of Darkness, though things take an admittedly more comically heroic turn for our man Ash.)

2) I was similarly puzzled by reports of the "extreme horror" of it all. It's certainly a damn bleak world of affairs for Jamie and the gang. But it makes sense - the novel holds together very well when seen through his character's lens/ arc. 

3) And really, if what waits for us after death is a life of toil, "gone to serve the Great Ones, in the Null. No death, no light, no rest," then hey, be happy to be alive, folks. As King often says when asked about his own religious beliefs, "I'm an optimist, okay?" 

3.5) Is this really so different a scenario than Greek mythology? The shades of the Underworld don't have it too well. I only bring it up because it made me think of Rose Madder. Civilizationally, we seem well-adjusted to the idea. Maybe it's just me.


A few last things:

- The Rev's stroke-speech goes away awfully conveniently, eh? All that "yessh" stuff doesn't appear anywhere in the last experiment. A line saying "Oh, I jolted myself - it'll last for a few days" or something would've gone a long way.

- "My fifth business" is this novel's repetitive phrase. As always, I want King's editor's job.

- At one point, Jamie refers to the movie Heathers as a "nodder for sure." i.e. a boring movie. I'd like to point out that in the afterword to Doctor Sleep, King also referred to the Mick Garris Psycho sequel as arguably the best of the series. As a film critic, King's acumen seems to have peaked with Danse Macabre

Well, that's my two cents. What did you folks think?

11.15.2014

King's Highway pt. 76: Revival

I will put up a proper rundown of Stephen King's latest, Revival, but I finished it a few hours ago and have been thinking / typing about it ever since.


So I figured I'd run the book through my King's Bingo Scorecard, i.e. the rest-area-keepsake of the original King's Highway cannonball run.

A quick word on the bingo - this is only for amusement, not a surgical tool or anything. I certainly don't want to give the impression of reducing King's work to these little categories of mine. It was more of a fun thing for me to do while making my way through his catalog, and so I enjoy applying it to the books published after the end of the Highway. Just a crossword to pass the time, or, in today's case, as a placeholder until I can better organize my thoughts.

While the below reveals some info from the novel, it is spoiler-free, unless you're a lot stricter on the definition than I am.

Is the protagonist from Maine? Yes.

Does someone entertain thoughts of suicide? Complicated.

Is there a psychic child? No.

Are plot events foreshadowed explicitly by a dead character/ dream character/ psychic? Yes.

Is there a big-ass storm at the end? And how.

Is there a racist antagonist? No.

Is there a misogynist antagonist? No. Misanthropic, sure - I suppose that means he technically is both racist and misogynist, as the whole rubes-infestation of planet Earth falls under his umbrella of disdain, but I wouldn't say it's an especially specific characterization of Charles Jacobs.

Is there a falsely-religious antagonist? Complicated! Man. Very complicated.

Is there telepathy? No.

Is there a wisecracking sidekick with repetitive catchphrases? No, but "my fifth business" appeared a few too many times.

Are there epistolary sections? Only very, very briefly. (And they work! All too often I report only negatives in this category.)

Is info deliberately withheld between chapters/ sections to build page-turning suspense? Yes.

Does someone not give "shit one" or say "happy crappy?" No.

Does someone imitate or engage in "mammy" dialogue/ reference Little Black Sambo? No, thankfully.

And perhaps the most important square: 
Is it a ridiculously enjoyable read? Also complicated.
I will say this - I revised my Best Of rankings and was surprised where it ended up. I'll spare you the click and just screencap it for you:
The top 11 on the left are, I hope, self-explanatory. The 24 - 13 on the right are as excerpted from my 56 Books Enter, 1 Book Leaves list.
I'll be back.

11.11.2014

Captain's Blog, Supplemental: Beam Me Up, Mr. Klum


This post is a little all over the place. I apologize in advance. (Folks - this is why I don't write eulogies.)

A little over three weeks ago, I received one of the most difficult phone calls of my life, informing me that AJ (aka Aharon Julian Klum) my best friend of over twenty years, was gone. 

At Art Institute of Chicago, August 2012.
He was found dead in his apartment - no signs of foul play or overdose, just a reaction (it seems; we await the toxicology reports) to the medication he was on. As his wife described it, "the good news is he experienced no fear, no pain, no suffering of any kind." A small - but very real, and appreciated - comfort, that.

Some stills (and re-purposed Robocop footage) from one of his student films Random Violence.

Obviously, it was a shock to any/all who knew him, not just me, but we'd texted only the night before about Natural Born Killers, which he'd just re-watched ("all these years later... NBK is still the real deal" - now permanently locked in pole position in my inbox) and earlier in the week about Community, which he was making his way through. 

Most of our correspondence, text or otherwise, was about movies or media. If I had to represent it in a pie chart, it'd be 80% movies and media, 10% women we thought were attractive - we did meet as adolescents, after all, and never got out of that habit. Hell, the last email he sent me was a random Victoria's Secret advertisement with the text "Good God..." - and 10% real-world stuff.

A good chunk of that 80%, though, was about Star Trek

And a good chunk of that chunk was exclusively quotes from "The Cloud Minders," sent back and forth to one another with undiminished enthusiasm since the late 90s.
I can't tell you accurately how many times one of us said "I SAID DIG!" to one another, but it had to be in the hundreds of thousands.
And so it is perhaps not surprising that as I process this loss, Trek imagery keeps bubbling up from my unconscious. 

Just a couple of examples.
I don't know, honestly, if I'll be ever be able to watch this particular scene again.
Last year when I did the Captain's Blog series of posts, I looked forward more than anything to Klum's reviews. He never left them as comments here on the blog but always emailed me his favorite lines and reactions and general Trek thoughts. I went through as many of them I could trying to prep for this post, thinking I'd pull some choice quotes from them. I failed utterly, though. Not only was it a sad business - particularly when I re-read something that made me laugh out loud, only to realize even more deeply the unfathomable context of it all - but I was getting lost in there and this post was in danger of not coming together. 

Which it needs to - at least for me. It's been three weeks of trying to write this, and I know I'll spend the rest of my life trying if I don't get it done today. The thing is, I don't know if it's going to make sense to anyone else. I feel bad about that. Klum had a thousand friends, and we're all looking for closure/ some recognition of what he meant to us in one another's words and experiences. But when I sit down to write - what comes out?


I picture the reaction - what the f*ck, dude? You stand up to eulogize the man and instead just tell us about the f*cking Star Trek you watched together - and I have no answer/ no defense. He deserves more, undoubtedly, something about the kind of man he was, the adversities he faced and bested and his intensity and dreams and loyalty and humor and warmth. Or even his hang-ups and/or foibles. And what do I do? F*cking Star Trek? I'm as aghast as anyone. But simply put, I can't think of Klum - a topic which has consumed me happily and comprehensively over the years - without thinking of Trek. And vice versa, very much vice versa. Vice versa forever. 

I sat down a dozen times to write something differently, something more traditional, and I just keep hearing Nimoy's hoarsely whispering I have been and always shall be your friend, and Shatner's agonized No... from the screencaps above, and then a gazillion other less-on-the-nose quotes (particularly this one, of Sulu's, one Klum - who just thought the way Takei said it was amusing - once yelled to me from across a crowded bar:)

..."O-NEIL!!"
I mean, who is that going to make sense to? Probably no one. Least of all me.

I would never be able to do something like the Captain's Blog now, or going forward - simply not possible. There's no aspect of my media library that doesn't bear some trace element of Klum, but our mutual relationship with Trek was so overriding that I don't know if I'll ever be able to engage with it without a sense of loss so profound that my brain just shuts down.

For that reason, man - I'm glad I did it, as imperfect as it is, while he was around to read it and engage with it. Glad isn't even the right word. It feels somewhat mystical to me, like we were wrapping it up / saying goodbye / closing the Trek door before we knew why we were doing it.

So, a Trek-requiem of sorts for the occasion seems an appropriate, if hard to explain, end to the Captain's Blog.  

AWAY MISSIONS. At the Chicago Brauhaus, 2012.
At The Bean, Millennium Park, 2012.
Dawn and Klum, Narragansett, RI, 2009. (He didn't get to meet Dawn's and my little girls, but at least he got to meet Dawn a few times.)
When I sent him the first of my TOS blogs, ("Return of the Archons") he responded:

"This episode is really 'the one to beat'.  I was thinking to myself about my favorite Trek episodes - I opened my email on my phone before I took the dog for a walk so I knew this was going to be part of my morning routine/reading.  Right off the top of my head...it's gotta be this one.  For the two main reasons, for me, that I love Trek when it's really cooking on all cylinders, and Trek-watching/laughing/quoting with you.  Therefore this one in particular has it all!!"

I include that because it's that last bit - how our experience of Trek was filtered through having experienced it with one another, and re-enforced over many years with endless quoting and laughing and memories of when-we-watched-"Archons"-that-one-time or remember-when-we-kept-yelling-LANDRU-at-that-party, etc. - that is why I'm here today.

He wasn't a big fan of anything but TOS. He had my list of favorite TNG episodes and was looking forward to those - as I was looking forward to reading his reactions/ sharing in that with him. If he had, he might understand why I include this particular sequence here and what it means to me to do so:


I even used "Picard and Dathon... at El-Adrel" as a means of trying to communicate what I was feeling to one of our mutual friends. His response - "Dude, I'm not THAT much of a Trekkie" cracked me up. Klum, like I say, wouldn't have recognized it either. But, I'm absolutely positive he'd have loved it, because he possessed the ability to love things the way I loved them through osmosis. No one else has had that sort of easy empathy with me. It's not something I even know how to think about losing. Much less write about.

Mainly, I remember the thousand-and-one personal jokes that had accumulated re: Trek over the years. He and I had millions, probably, of personal jokes, and we we kept them in active circulation between us. (An out-of-left-field text or email referencing one or many of them was an almost daily experience for many years running.) But some of the Trek ones that have helped me sort through this over the past few weeks:

- We had a few different rap tunes that are too ridiculous to type out, but they had to do with "Day of the Dove" and "The Changeling," mainly. "The Changeling" one had a physical-comedy component, where we'd pantomime Sulu karate-chopping Nomad and then the reverberation traveling up his arm and making his head shake and teeth chatter. See? Sounds stupid, typed out. In person? We'd be laughing until we coughed up a lung.

- Speaking of Sulu, when we lived in Dayton in the late 90s, we made an effort to get TOS on laser disc. The guy at the shop didn't want to break up the set, but we assured him we'd be back, week after week, to pick up a new one until we got them all. We almost made it, but not quite. 

Sorry, laser disc shop guy.
This was even commemorated by our mutual friend the poet and educator (though he prefers "master and commander") Mike Haeflinger, who referenced "Klum and McMillan finally got the entire Star Trek collection on laser disc" in a poem of yesteryear. One I wish I had a copy of. (If you're reading this, Mike, and you have a copy, please send my way, eh? It was one you recorded at our place circa 1998, on that Mad River mix tape with all our other stuff.)

Anyway, we'd get a 15-pack of Strohs from the Kroger and set up our lounge and poppa-san chairs with a paper bag between us for empties and every now and again, one of us would slowly turn our heads back at the couch like this


and crack the other one up.

- Also related to those laser discs, the "Star Trek: Next Voyage" previews were constantly referenced between us. They were clumsily edited and just so much fun. The one for "Turnabout Intruder" in particular. This was a throwback to when the only Trek we had between us were three VHS tapes, and there'd be the same previews at the end of those. 

- Kirk's double-shoulder grabs and weird pronunciations were a source of ongoing hilarity over the years. I don't think a month went by between us since 1996 without one of us thrusting our arms out and saying Kirk-from-"Gamesters of Triskelion"-style 

WHAT'S HAPPENING TO LIEUTENANT YOU-HRRR-YUH!?
Oh man. So many others. (Don't get me started on our Law and Order: SVU jokes.)

Or Wheel of Cenobites.
Technically, the joke was "Wheel of Cenobites with your host... FRANK," i.e. Frank Cotton, from Hellraiser. Pinhead was just the announcer. (That's what makes that "...FRANK" thing so funny to me, imagining him saying it.) But it was more visually effective with having Pat Sajak in the picture.

If this was a eulogy, I can only picture the embarrassed coughs and awkward head-turns that would have accompanied it by now. And while I'm somewhat amused - and I find it somewhat well-suited to the memory of our friendship, given our rather warped sense of humor and affection for the inappropriate - at the idea of delivering a 45 minute power-point eulogy consisting of little but Trek screencaps and personal jokes, I'd best wrap it up. 

I don't know if I could ever hope to choose just one Trek quote that comes close to expressing anything I've been feeling the last few weeks. The Gilgamesh bit from "Darmok" comes close, Kirk's TWOK eulogy for Spock maybe even closer, particularly because Klum did such a spot-on impersonation of it. (And also because the words are very fitting.) The one that resonates the most accurately with me the most right now ("Let's get the hell out of here" from City on the Edge of Forever) isn't it, either. 

So rather than fumble for one, let me close with this image put together by his wife, with a message in his own handwriting.

"It's not what you think, it's better!"
As his mother wrote upon seeing it: "My beautiful boy ... he is traveling the universe and having one hell of a good time."

Godspeed, AJ. You were the best, and I love you. 


~

Klum did some blogging of his own. You can check it out here. Not sure how long they keep these things up, but let's hope forever. 

11.08.2014

Ten Westerns You Should See

I grew up in an era where westerns weren't very popular. My generation (or at least my friends and I) grew up playing ninjas and Rambo rather than cowboys and Indians. I don't know if they're more popular now than they used to be - I suspect it's about the same - but the height of the genre's popularity was probably somewhere in the early 60s, though some put it further back than that.  

I had some westerns on VHS I watched an awful lot, though, mainly: 

(1979) Directed by Robert Aldrich
and
(1985) Directed by Lawrence Kasdan
Later in life, I discovered reviews of the above that criticized both movies for being mainly collections of cliches and over-used tropes. I didn't realize that while watching them over and over as a kid, although I can see the truth of that criticism as an adult. But they were useful in communicating the vocabulary of the genre, and to any kid who wants to know what a western is like, I recommend them as primers. Granted, both films are very male oriented - as is most of the genre, speaking broadly - and white male oriented at that. If such things embarrass you, there's your spoiler warning. 

For no other reason than westerns have been on my mind lately, I decided to make a Ten Westerns You Should See post. To make that job easier for myself, I came up with some rules. First, no sci-fi westerns.

Sorry, Firefly.
Sorry, "Spectre of the Gun."
And sorry, Westworld.
I mentioned Firefly, which also is omitted per Rule #2: no TV westerns.

Sorry, Lonesome Dove. (Though if you're interested, there'll be a few posts about that coming your way down the Dog Star Omnibus pike sooner or later.) And sorry, Deadwood, Gunsmoke, Rifleman, Brisco County Jr. et al.
Rule No. 3, no Magnificent Seven or The Wild Bunch. No real reason, except that they're on every list already - as are more than a few of the below, I grant you, but I thought I'd try and focus attention on other titles. They're both great, of course - everything aforementioned (with the exception of Brisco County, Jr. I guess) is great and you should watch it all. 

Also, no spaghetti westerns (if you like one, you'll like most of them, and there are hundreds) or 'sploitation/ satire westerns. Or tripped out surrealist fantasy Freudian death rides, or however one would describe El Topo.


Again, no one's saying you shouldn't watch any or all of the above - you very much should. But here are ten (mostly) traditional westerns, presented in order of when they came out, that I'd define as essentials. Here's a game you can play - pick a holiday, any holiday, and commit to watching one of the movies listed below on it each year. Tell me what you think in 2025. (Myself, I've committed to watching the complete filmographies of western-genre maestros Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann, and John Ford. This explains why these guys are not represented - with the exception of one Ford film - below: my unfamiliarity with them. We'll compare notes in ten years time.)

1. High Sierra (1941) Directed by Raoul Walsh. 



The oldest of our ten westerns, this one is technically considered a gangster picture. But it has significant overlap with the western. At the time of its release, it was considered to be a swan song for the gangster films, which were fading in popularity (like the musicals) after their heyday in the Depression. As Martin Scorsese pointed out in his indispensable A Personal Journey Through American Film, the furious tap-tap-dancing of musicals and the rat-a-tat-tat of tommy guns of gangster pictures - not to mention the ruthless rise-to-the-top storylines of both genres - struck a chord with Depression-era audiences.


Here's what that once-great paper The New York Times had to say upon High Sierra's release:

"As gangster pictures go, this one has everything—speed, excitement, suspense and that ennobling suggestion of futility which makes for irony and pity. Mr. Bogart plays the leading role with a perfection of hard-boiled vitality, and Ida Lupino, Arthur Kennedy, Alan Curtis and a newcomer named Joan Leslie handle lesser roles effectively. Especially, is Miss Lupino impressive as the adoring moll. As gangster pictures go—if they do— it's a perfect epilogue. Count on the old guard and Warners: they die but never surrender."

2. High Noon (1952) Directed by Fred Zinnemann


Often hailed as the best western ever made - and understandably so - High Noon tells the story of a lawman (Gary Cooper) who has given his life to protecting a town and is about to retire when he hears three men are coming to kill him. He turns his coach around (to the intense frustration of his wife, played by Grace Kelly) and makes the decision to protect the town, ("I've got to - that's the whole thing") even though no one wants him to or offers any help at all.


Here's the Times again, nailing it:

"Familiar but far from conventional in the fabric of story and theme and marked by a sure illumination of human character, this tale of a brave and stubborn sheriff in a town full of do- nothings and cowards has the rhythm and roll of a ballad spun in pictorial terms. And, over all, it has a stunning comprehension of that thing we call courage in a man and the thorniness of being courageous in a world of bullies and poltroons."

Some see it as an anti-McCarthy picture, and while I can sympathize with that reading, such a thing is addressed more overtly (though still under the wire, albeit only barely) in:

3. Silver Lode (1954) Directed by Alan Dwan


I discovered this one through the aforementioned Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese. This is an absolute essential, not just for westerns but for American history. Released at the height of McCarthyism - a subject I have mixed feelings about, as it's more often than not misrepresented by Hollywood and misunderstood by people in general - it tells the story of Dan Ballard, who, on the day of his wedding (July 4th) is falsely accused of murder. The townsfolk, once his friends and supporters, turn against him, and the villain (ahem, McCarty) riles them up even more. He spends most of the film running for his life, until his fiance forges a faked telegram to clear his name. At the top of a bell tower, he turns the tables on McCarty and kills him.

Notable for its incredible tracking shots - I'm always amazed when the bulky cameras of yesteryear move so fluidly; this is the western equivalent of a Max Ophuls film, in many spots - and its highly subversive material, Scorsese puts it bluntly in his Personal Journey:

"Persecuted for the wrong reasons, he's pardoned for the wrong reasons. A church bell and a fantastic lie save the day."

God bless America.

4. Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) Directed by John Sturges


This is a bit of a cheat, as it takes place in the post-WW2 Southwest. It's described as a film noir, but, for me, this is very much a western. A one-armed man (Spencer Tracy) steps off a train in Black Rock and is immediately followed, obstructed, insulted and harassed by the townsfolk (Anne Francis, Robert Ryan, and Lee Marvin, among them.) He is there to find a man named Komoko, a Japanese-American who is the father of the man who saved his life in World War Two (where he lost his arm.) But we don't know why for a good while in the film, something which very much enhances the paranoia and mystery of proceedings.

Released only ten years after the end of World War Two to a prosperous and optimistic America, it explored unsettling territory: a crime, hidden from view, unpunished, and the internment of Japanese-Americans, something the US government only officially acknowledged in 1988. (The year of Rambo III.)

Described as an "action film for people who don't like action films," I was going to lift a few choice quotes from the TCM write-up, but the whole thing is worth reading. This film, like many of my favorite Westerns, has an irresistible, steadfast morality. 

Tracy's character is one of my all-time favorites.
As is the protagonist of our next one, but for very different reasons.

5. The Searchers (1956) Directed by John Ford


John Wayne (in his greatest performance) plays Ethan Edwards, a man who is searching for his niece (Natalie Wood,) kidnapped by the Comanche years before when they burned down his brother's house and slaughtered his family. As Martin Scorsese notes in his remarkable analysis of the film, until the very last reel, you're not sure if his plan is to rescue her or kill her.

"Ethan Edwards as brought to life by Wayne and Ford is a cousin to Melville's Ahab on one hand and his Bartleby on the other -- driven to the point of madness and absolutely alone. There's a shocking scene early on, in which Ethan and his search party find a Comanche buried under a rock. He shoots out the dead man's eyes so that he won't be allowed to enter the spirit lands and will remain destined to wander forever between the winds. No one in his posse understands the meaning of the gesture: He hates Comanches so much that he actually has bothered to learn their beliefs in order to violate them. That's the craziness of Ethan Edwards and the craziness of race hatred -- murderous fixation and disgust are side by side with fascination and attraction. The author does an excellent job of addressing that craziness and how it played out in American history and in the Western genre." 

Driven to wander between the winds - as Ethan says of the Comanche whose eyes he shoots out - is exactly what the viewer realizes at film's end, when Ethan approaches the door of the home he can never enter, turns, and drifts into the landscape. 


A remarkable film on many levels. A complete game-changer, both for the western genre, and for American psychology. The 50s are an underrated cinematic treasure trove of deep and compelling (and unsettling) American insight. I think people think it took until the 60s for America to start questioning itself and until the 70s to start making ambivalent masterpieces. For my money, it all began in earnest in the 50s.

6. Day of the Outlaw (1959) Directed by Andre de Toth


Although this is a pretty universally well-reviewed film, often I'll ask people if they've seen it, and they've never even heard of it. Film buffs, I mean, not civilians. I envy anyone who has still to see it for the first time. The plot isn't particularly complicated - a love triangle is interrupted by the arrival of a gang of outlaws led by an ex-Army man who's dying of a bullet wound - but as with Silver Lode, the blurred lines between hero and outlaw/ friend and betrayer imbue the proceedings with something more.

As many of the reviews of it out there point out, snow sets the tone of this one. The end of the film in particular is intriguingly symbolic. I'm not sure if Robert Altman intended the end of McCabe and Mrs. Miller to echo the end of Day of the Outlaw, but if not, there are quite a few similarities. McCabe is often described as an anti-Western, and that seems accurate enough to me. And while Outlaw is definitely a traditional enough western, it has more of a 1970s American New Wave sensibility than its 1950s counterparts.

And although Tina Louise's image is used as poster-bait: 


she is not really used for any salacious scenes. She's a pretty well-realized character, actually.


7. Unforgiven (1992) Directed by Clint Eastwood


Probably the greatest western ever made, if not the greatest American film altogether. 

Eastwood plays William Munny, a reformed killer of men, women, and children, who has reformed and takes one last job with his old partner, Ned (Morgan Freeman.) The job doesn't go quite as planned, thanks to Sheriff Gene Hackman.

There's way more to it than that, of course. The whole film is damn near perfect, but everything from this shot 

"Take a drink, kid."
to the last 


is as good as cinema gets. 

8. Tombstone (1993) Directed by George P. Cosmatos


Ho boy, Tombstone. What fun. Easily Val Kilmer's greatest performance -

as Doc Holliday. "I'll be your huckleberry."
and probably the most impressive "mustache" movie ever made. It isn't concerned with commenting on the western as a genre or saying much of anything about American history. It's only concerned with kicking as much ass and firing as many guns as possible.

Also starring: just about every dude who was active in Hollywood in 1993.
And Dana Delaney.
The shootout at the OK Corral has been filmed so many times in so many different ways. I'm not exactly sure why it continues to capture people's imagination as much as it does. Like the invasion of Normany and its curious over-representation in WW2 films, sometimes I want to say "Good lord, people, there were other things going on, and almost all of them were more important to the history of the West/ end of WW2." And yet, I'll watch damn near any film about either topic. What that says, I don't know, but both stories lend themselves well to film, I guess.  

9. Open Range (2003) Directed by Kevin Costner


I was torn between including this one or one of Costner's other epic westerns (Dances with Wolves and Wyatt Earp.) But I think Open Range is his best work. (Not counting The Postman - man, do I loves me some Postman.) Visually sumptuous, as a feller says, with great characters and relationships and themes - it just works on every level.


And the shootout at movie's end is often referred to as the genre's best. I don't know if I'm qualified to say if it is or isn't, but it's one hell of a furious rainstorm of gunfire, to be sure.


Not everyone agrees with me that this is a damn fine and essential western. The New York Times referred to it upon its release as "suffocating in its own earnest self-seriousness." I don't see it that way at all. The relationship between Costner and Duvall is great, and the scene where Costner breaks down how he thinks the gunfight will go (and the classic "Are you the man who killed our friend?" "Yep." BLAM) is a great (and underrated) bit of writing.

And finally:  
10. The Proposition (2005) Directed by John Hillcoat


A quieter western - and set in the Australian outback, to boot - but no less impactful than any of the above. Unsettling, poetic, hallucinatory, yet straightforward, this one will stay with you for awhile after you see it.

The plot - Captain Stanley, (Ray Winstone) newly arrived to Australia with his wife (Emily Wtason) strikes a deal with a member of the Burns Brothers gang (Guy Pearce.) In exchange for tracking down and killing his more notorious brother (Danny Huston) he is allowed to go free. Pearce has nine days, or Stanley will hang his other brother, who he holds as leverage.

If it has a weak spot, it's Emily Watson. I'm not sure what to make of Watson as an actress. She came charging out of the gate with Breaking the Waves and has been cast in so many things since. But, and perhaps it's just my personal taste, she's just not very good - her range is charitably-put extremely limited, and she just doesn't do anything interesting with the roles I've seen her in. (shrugs.) 

Ray Winstone is fantastic in this, though, and Nick Cave's script is dynamite. I need a long break between viewings of this one, but I'm always impressed. Roger Ebert described it as "a record of those things we pray to be delivered from." Amen.




~

And there we have it! See you in 2025. Some alternates: My Darling Clementine (1946), Unconquered (1947 - not really a Western, but I'll allow it), Red River (1948), Winchester '73 (1950), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), and Dead Man (1995).