The Drifting Avenger (1968)

Original title: Kôya no toseinin

A gang of stagecoach robbers stumble into the Old American West cabin of an expat samurai (three minutes of Takashi Shimura are better than no Takashi Shimura), shoot the man and his wife and leave their cowboy son Ken (Ken Takakura), also pretty shot, for dead.

Because this is a western, Ken survives with a righteous lust for vengeance only tempered by the samurai code his father taught him, and rides out in search for the killers. He still doesn’t quite have the killer instinct he’d actually need to conclude the whole avenging business successfully, and lacks some of the technical skill of the proper gunman as well, so it comes in useful he soon encounters the experienced Marvin (Ken Goodlet), who is good with guns, paternal advice and being an old west kind of guy. He also happens to be the father of one of the killers, though that conflict isn’t quite resolved as you’d expect, or made as much of as you’d hope for.

Ken does seem to have a thing for fallen in with relatives of his prospective victims. For he also develops paternal feelings for the son of another one of the killers, and also gets close to the same man’s soon to be widow, who takes her husband’s fate philosophically even before he is dead.

Vengeance, it turns out, is a place full of relatives who are rather more okay with having their family killed than Ken is.

Despite being more than just a little fond of classic Japanese genre cinema, I’ve never been able to see any of the westerns some of the major studios at put out, so my only actual contact with this somewhat surprising genre has been Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django until now – and that’s of course neither a classic era studio movie nor sane nor normal. On the other hand, there’s been so much back and forth influence between chanbara in Japan and the western in the US and Italy, it’s not as if I’m moving through unknown territory here.

Still, this is my first proper Japanese western (if one shot in Australia with an Australian cast apart from its star and a couple of intro characters). The film was directed by Toei contract man Junya Sato, whose direction tends to the technically competent yet workmanlike, at least in most of his films I’ve seen. This certainly applies to Drifting Avenger. There’s nothing here that’s badly staged or ugly to look at, but there’s also a certain lack of flair and visual energy – as a western director, he’s certainly no Leone, Boetticher, Ford, or Corbucci. Which is a particular shame because the Australian landscape would at the very least offer up some spectacular – if not very American looking – vistas beyond what Sato shows here.

The script is more routine than inspired as well, with some attempts at complicating Ken’s quest for vengeance via entanglements between honour and humanity that equally speak to western, chanbara and yakuza film traditions but that never feel as emotionally or intellectually captivating as they could. The film’s structure is a little too episodic for this to work as well as it should, particularly since it repeats plot beats between Marvin and the other killer’s family that would have been better explored through a single set of characters.

The situation isn’t helped by the fact that Takakura and Goodlet are the only professional screen actors in larger roles – the rest of the Australian cast only has this as their single film credits, and the lack of experience and ability gets in the way of proper emotional and thematic exploration, even though everyone is dubbed into Japanese. An all Japanese cast out of Toei’s stable of character actors, stars and pros would have provided much needed personality to everyone. And while Takakura is great as always, he does need other actors to play off of when emoting, instead of the walking talking cardboard he has to cope with here throughout.

Still, The Drifting Avenger is not a terrible movie by any means, just one that’s never more than very basically entertaining.

Silverado (1985)

The Old West, mythical version. Four men (Danny Glover, Scott Glenn, Kevin Kline and Kevin Costner) meet, like each other’s compatible principles, ride together and eventually arrive with plans for various futures in the town of Silverado.

Alas, Silverado’s a place where dreams have gone sour, the sheriff's a former outlaw (Brian Dennehy) who is now the boot on the feet of the rich, and friendships and principles are put to the test.

I can’t say I really disagree with anyone calling Lawrence Kasdan’s not really revisionist western epic Silverado a bit – or a lot - self-indulgent. It does feel as if Kasdan wanted to cram all of the genre – apart from the “Evil Indian” tropes – into a single movie, having written it a maximalist love letter he’d then turn into a film.

However, I think there’s a joyfulness to the indulgence here, a genuine and very direct love for the genre, its look and feel and sound that’s utterly charming and that needs the scope of the kind of movie that’s close to the fifty minute mark when it actually arrives in the titular town. There’s space for characters and their relationships to breathe here, and while one could argue Budd Boetticher or Howard Hawks could create comparable depth of relations in much less time, I certainly wouldn’t have complained spending more time with any Boetticher or Hawks character, the virtue of concision be damned.

Kasdan’s approach definitely leads to a film that can feel like a world more than it does like a narrative, but it’s a world full of fantastic actors being fantastic, a series of fun western set pieces, and quite a few moments where Kasdan adds a telling detail or two to a character – even the villains - to turn them from stock to person.

There are also joyful little twists to the formulas of the genre – a black man (Glover is fantastic and feels so very young) as an actual lead among four and not a sidekick or Linda Hunt straight-up doing the Angie Dickinson part. It does help that the cast is absolutely brilliant, Lynn Whitfield, Jeff Goldblum (as a totally, absolutely, completely trustworthy gambler named “Slick”), Jeff Fahey and on and on, and everyone here has something that suggests a past and a future instead of just a narrative function.

The only bit where things do get a bit indulgent for my tastes is in the double climax – there’s really no need for two big shoot-outs directly after each other, though both of them are great. Which might be the reason why both of them are in the movie.

A Time For Dying (1969)

Young and not terribly bright Cass Bunning (Richard Lapp) has set out from the family farm to become a gunslinger - a bounty hunter, to be more precise. Making his way across the country, he encounters a psycho gun kid with the unfortunate name of Billy Pimple (Robert Random), saves young Nellie (Anne Randall) from being enslaved in the sex trade, is pressed into marriage with Nellie by Judge Roy Bean (Victor Jory), has a short encounter with Jesse James (Audie Murphy), and learns a bit about the shortness of life, among other things.

In many ways, A Time for Dying is an objectively bad movie; some of these ways are also what make it a fascinating, potentially great movie.

In any case, this is the final narrative film directed by the great Budd Boetticher, as well as the final on-screen appearance by Audie Murphy. As rumour says, the project was an attempt at alleviating some of Murphy’s mob gambling debts, but legal trouble kept it off most screens until the early 80s, when this kind of film must have baffled any audience encountering it, Boetticher was breeding horses, and Murphy dead for a decade.

Which does seem curiously fitting for a film so cheap, there are genuinely moments on screen when the sets don’t survive encounters with horses because they are so shoddy. It is shot in garish colours by the great Lucien Ballard, and often replaces action with a lot of gabbing and supposedly funny business in the way that usually suggests a lack of budget to put even more basic things on screen.

Where most of Boetticher’s other films – and most certainly his Westerns – where pared down to their essentials, tight and tense even when they objectively weren’t actually always more action packed than this one is, A Time for Dying’s eighty minutes feel much longer. There’s a meandering one damn thing after another quality to the narrative, and an appearance of randomness to much that we witness.

But then, the meandering makes all kinds of sense when you think about it: Cass is no Randolph Scott character, but a kid who hasn’t got an actual plan, nor even the brains to know that he hasn’t one, and so he drifts through the film, encountering an Old West that’s like a bitter funhouse mirror of even the ones encountered in the revisionist westerns. All the jokes that don’t land, the hokey, over the top acting, are a thin veneer painted over a place where might always makes right, where the only law we will encounter is an insane alcoholic (perhaps making this, ironically, the most realistic portrayal of Roy Bean), and where brutality rules all.

The broad acting (Lapp is objectively terrible, possibly perfect), the shoddiness of the sets, the unfunny humour and the brutally bright colours all help drag this version of the West in the direction of the grotesque, until everything culminates in a downer ending Sergio Corbucci must have been jealous of.

The only moment of actual humanity and considered acting on screen is the short, one-scene appearance of Murphy, a haunting moment that seems to be the centre of gravity of the whole affair, as ramshackle as the rest of it appears/is, as if the film were struggling to say something really important, but can never grasp it tightly enough to articulate it.

I’m still not quite sure what to make of A Time for Dying as a whole, but it’s certainly not a boring film for a director to go out on, and something I’ll probably have to revisit from time to time, if only to find out if this is horrible or brilliant or both at the same time.

Three Films Make A Post: Never have so few taken so much from so many.

The Great Train Robbery aka The First Great Train Robbery (1978): This Michael Crichton movie, also written by Crichton, and based on his own historical fiction bestseller, has a really fabulous climactic action scene in the titular robbery. To get there, the film slogs through what clearly is supposed to be a semi-comedic romp through mildly satirized Victorian period detail. Alas, the word that actually describes this is “dull”. Crichton, never a man to know which details to cut, shows no feel at all for pacing dialogue scenes – even a sure winner of an innuendo-laden scene between Sean Connery’s mastermind character and a married lady goes down like a lead balloon – or timing jokes, leaving the main cast of Connery, Donald Sutherland and Lesley-Anne Down to fend for themselves while they are crushed by all that – never telling – period detail. Even that trio can’t win against such odds.

Exist Within aka 사잇소리 (2022): This thriller by Kim Jung-wook about the noises a young woman hears from the apartment above her, and the nasty surprises that follow, is about as middle of the road as South Korean productions get. There’s not much of the subversion of tropes going on that most genre movies from the country eventually at least dabble in, the pacing is never quite as effective, and the tone never quite as surehanded as it could be.

However, making a thriller of this type entertaining can also be achieved by the simple virtue of technical expertise, and though that is not the way a classic is birthed, being a genuinely fun time is an achievement in itself.

The Old Way (2023): This revenge western directed by Brett Donowho manages something you don’t see every day – getting a performance from Nicolas Cage that makes the high energy thespian look unengaged. Much of Cage’s performance gives the impression of watching him doing a second run-through of the material rather than actually putting his full force into a scene. If you’ve seen Cage emoting loudly and sometimes quietly but distinctly, throwing himself into whatever a script has to offer for most of your movie watching life, this is a rather disquieting thing to watch, like a night sky turned hot pink for no reason.

There’s little else to distract here: the script is about as rote a revenge western as is possible, the performances are uneventful, and Donowho directs with the blandness of a shrug.

Three Films Make A Post: No experience necessary.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023): I didn’t think I needed a big budget blockbuster fantasy heist comedy in my life – in general, I prefer my secondary world fantasy with a more serious tone – but John Francis Daley’s and Jonathan Goldstein’s D&D movie is so fun and charming, turns out I do need it. Being a modern blockbuster, it can present all the incredible vistas the probably underpaid parts of the production crew could come up with, and let its merry band of rogues run through it as merrily as this suggests.

Of course, this being a contemporary movie, it’s also about found and assumed family, but it treats that trope so genuinely, it simply works in the proper wish fulfilment manner of such things. Really, the only larger flaw in the film I see is that it sometimes wants a bit too desperately to be a fantasy version of Guardians of the Galaxy, whose greatness it can’t quite reach. But then, that’s not something to be ashamed of.

Kenpei to barabara shibijin aka The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty (1957): This film by Kyotaro Namiki about a military policeman whose approach to mystery solving is rather different from that of his peers solving the case of the dismembered body of a woman who was found in the well of a military base is sometimes listed as a horror movie. However, this is really a very traditional procedural crime movie, just one set in the very problematic 1937, which it never really acknowledges one way or the other on a direct political level. If one can ignore that, this is a typically solid product of Japanese studio filmmaking, a decent mystery, well acted and solidly shot.

Surrounded (2023): Whereas this Western about a cross-dressing black woman (Letitia Wright) in the post Civil War US trying to survive the worst day ever is as openly and obviously political as they get. It’s quite the candidate for a film people will look back at in twenty years or so to see where the cultural mind was at this time. There’s nothing wrong with that, mind you, and while I find some of the very on the nose, theatrical dialogue sequences about being black a bit much, most of the time, director Anthony Mandler takes care to actually put into action what his characters can’t stop jawing about as well.

There, the film shows itself as a brutal, visually beautifully bleak Western that manages to show everything it is telling as well.

The Swordsman in Double Flag Town (1991)

aka Swordsmen in Double Flag Town

Original title: 雙旗鎮刀客

A teenage boy named Hai Ge (Gao Wei) travels through the deserts of Northwest China to a village known as Double Flag Town. On his deathbed, his swordmaster father told Hai Ge about the girl that’s supposedly been promised by her father to marry him. She’s the daughter of an old companion of Hai Ge’s father (the film actually uses the term “uncle” to describe the man, but everybody here’s called “uncle” or “sister” by basically everyone else, so he’s probably not an uncle by blood), but the only things our protagonist actually knows about her is that she must be about his own age, has a father with a lame leg, and a mole on her butt. This not being a comedy, Hai Ge concentrates his search on the thing with the leg.

It isn’t actually all that difficult to find the two, even for a shy and naïve young guy like Hai Ge. Other problems arise, though: both Lame Uncle (Chang Jiang) and his daughter Hao Mei (Zhao Ma-Na) start out deeply unimpressed by the young man. Though Uncle does give him a job and a place to stay, he’s not willing to marry off his daughter to a nobody she very much doesn’t want to marry, at first. During life in the closed-off little community that is apparently regular visited by duelling swordspeople, and is dominated from afar by the murderous Lethal Swordsman (Sun Haiying, I believe), Hao Mei’s heart softens towards Hai Ge.

Before things can properly develop there, the little brother of the Lethal Swordsman attempts to rape Hao Mei. Hai Ge uses his surprisingly great swordsmanship to defend her, killing the would-be rapist. Alas, killing the brother of a guy like the Lethal Swordsman is not a healthy thing – not only for Hai Ge and Hao Mei, but for the village as a whole as well. It is doubtful that Hai Ge can win a duel against a swordsman this, ahem, lethal, but running away might mean the end of everybody else in the village.

Far too few wuxia films use the Chinese Northwest or a Silk Road setting, so I’m always happy to stumble over one, especially when it is as interesting a movie as – recently deceased – He Ping’s Swordsman in Double Flag Town. Officially taking place in the Chinese West, this is as much influenced by Westerns, particularly the more abstract of the Italian Westerns, as it is by wuxia cinema of its time.

So instead of long, artfully choreographed, non-realistic martial arts battles, this is a film where scenes of guys eyeing one another – in Hai Ge’s case often as fearfully as befits him being a kid and not a grown-up – end in short explosions of quick violence. He Ping loves to hide those behind quick cuts, or, in the finale, a dust cloud, until the slow dropping of a body explains who actually won the fight. Which does of course also have parallels in Japanese cinema.

Where wuxia is traditionally colourful and set in clean – at worst artfully cobwebbed – locations and sets, everything here is realistically grimy and dusty; people look like people eking out their living in the desert do probably look, so there’s a decisive lack of glamour.

Still, the film never feels like one of those dreaded attempts at making a “realistic” wuxia (or western, or chanbara). Rather, it uses what could be flags of realism as its own way of stylizing things when it then shoots them in a surprisingly slick early 1991 visual style, where a synthesizer score doing slightly shifted westerns score riffs feels absolutely appropriate.

On a narrative level, this is a rather minimalist work that eschews huge backstories and monologues in favour of suggestion and archetype efficiently as well as effectively. This is not a film of many words, or one that wants to explain its philosophy to you, but rather one that knows a viewer will understand its morality as well as the emotional price characters here pay for decent actions without it emphasizing any of this.

So often, this feels more like a mood turned film than a detailed narrative, a minimalist, but elegant picture that demonstrates the moral parallels between Western and wuxia by working exactly where these genres meet.

Three Films Make A Post: The gun that became the law of the land !

Pickpocket (1959): The arthouse crowd loves to recommend this short crime drama with a prologue scroll explaining it isn’t a crime drama as a comparatively easy in to the world of French director Robert Bresson’s “minimalist, “austere”, “hypnotic” etc style. So I thought to myself, why not try it, for I do find quite a bit in at least a third of the films recommended thusly. It’s certainly easy to see the artfulness of the filmmaking, the intensity and elegance the film comes by exactly because Bresson is so aesthetically focussed. I’m much less sure about the rest of the style: emotionally and intellectually, this does very little for me. Bresson’s moral viewpoint seems completely disinterested in complexity, so is frankly rather boring for my tastes; I also find it hard to emotionally connect to a central character who mostly spouts half-cooked mock-existentialism about the superman. Add to this Bresson’s habit of casting non-actors in the main role to get “authentic” camera performances (or as I call it “the jitters” and monotonous line reading) which is something I absolutely loathe, and I think I’ll pass on Bresson’s films for the next decade or so.

The Mourning Forest aka Mogari no mori (2007): This also arthouse crowd approved tale of what I assume to be a care-giver (Machiko Ono) at some sort of retirement home (the film doesn’t do exposition) getting stranded in a forest for several days with one of their patients (Shigeki Uda) and working through their respective griefs, as directed by Naomi Kawase on the other hand, does quite a lot for me. It does appear rather loose and unfocussed at the beginning, but that’s really Kawase opening up the world of her characters for the audience without comment, opening up an approach to her grieving people’s endless complexities that may make things difficult, and not always obvious, but which also makes it possible to understand much more about them once one has tuned into things in the right way.

Colt .45 (1950): This Edwin L. Marin western with Randolph Scott as a salesmen for new-fangled colts finding himself set against the evil and somewhat perverse Zachary Scott (no relation) is a bit rough around the edges. There are certainly some great moments and ideas in here, but Marin isn’t quite the director to make the most of them.

So expect Scott teaming up with the local native American tribe in a nicely progressive turn, but also expect their portrayal to be even more awkward than typical of the era, and whose problems only start with their Chief being played by Chief Thundercloud, who was no chief of any tribe, and most probably not a Native American. There are huge (these things look as phallic as all get out, so I use the word on purpose) suggestions of the colts’ psychosexual influence particularly on our villain but they never quite gel in the end. Also worth mentioning are a pretty juicy part for Ruth Roman as the wife of a secondary villain (Lloyd Bridges in his young and buff phase) turning to Randolph rather quickly; a corrupt sheriff and other elements that make this unmissable on paper.

In practice, it’s just not that good of a movie (though not a bad one, either).

Blind Justice (1994)

Some time after the US Civil War. A nearly completely blind, yet still exceptionally deadly when shooting, gunfighter named Canaan (Armand Assante) roams the borderlands between the US and Mexico, carrying two guns and a baby, looking for a town that might not exist. He promised the baby’s father, whom he killed, to get the little one to her family, apparently, though Canaan and the film will be reticent about going into further detail.

After a meet-cute with a quartet of Mexican bandits – three of whom he shoots while the last one gets to hold the baby – Canaan comes to a small town that is under sieged by the gang of Alacran (Robert Davi). Alacran is after a wagon-load of silver protected by an ever decreasing number of soldiers. Their leader, Sgt Hastings (Adam Baldwin) has repeatedly sent men out to fetch help, but not one of them has come back alive, or seems to have reached the next cavalry outpost. Hasting is too dutiful to give Alacran the gold, or simply not stupid enough to believe the sadistic maniac wouldn’t murder his little troop in any case.

Canaan is still bitter, as well as PTSD-stricken, about what happened to him in the war, so he’s not terribly interested in the soldiers’ plight. He might be willing to do some blockade running for them, for a price, of course. Cigars and milk have to be paid, after all. In truth, the gunman will have trouble with Alacran and his men in any case, for one of the three bandits he shot before coming to town was the man’s younger brother; and while Alacran – a man who mutilates his own men regularly – doesn’t have many softer human traits, brotherly love was one of them.

I can only assume that when he was writing the HBO western Blind Justice Daniel Knauf asked himself why only blind swordsmen, masseurs, boxers and vigilante lawyers have all the fun, but nobody thinks about the poor, blind shootist and then proceeded to solve this problem. As directed by Richard Spence, the resulting movie is a lot of fun.

Clearly going for the spirit of the Italian western in its goofier variations, the film does a very enjoyable job of presenting touches of wonderful weirdness like Canaan’s disgust about having come to a town that has neither smokes, nor milk, nor booze - and yes, when our hero has got a smoke, he’s huffing it in the direction of the poor kid. These elements, Spence presents with a degree of camp, but never so much as to overwhelm the more dramatic or nasty moments of the film with the horrors of irony; here, it feels more like a companionable nod at an audience to suggest that, yes, the film knows it trades in silliness and well-worn clichés, but it also genuinely wants us to simply enjoy them as they are, and actually revel in them a little.

So we get a mix of jokes good and bad, some genuinely fine and creative shoot-outs, explosions, and standard Italian and Revisionist western scenes like our hero’s crucifixion. From the latter, Canaan is at least partially saved by an elderly and somewhat crazy Native American shaman (Jimmy Herman), who is put in stark contrast to the town’s traitorous Catholic priest (Ian McElhinney), which you may or may not want to read as a political statement.

There’s also a romantic subplot between Canaan and the town nurse (Elisabeth Shue), but the less said about this horrifying combination of no chemistry and bad acting choices (what the hell does the usually perfectly competent to awesome Shue think she’s doing!?), the better. It’s not so terrible as to actually damage the film as a whole – it’s just too weird at heart for that – but it sure does little to improve it either.

In general, the acting tends to broad scenery-chewing, strange line readings and the overwrought – particularly, and to nobody’s surprise, Assante and Davi are downright incredible whenever they get going, leaving no mouth in the audience closed. This is not a complaint, of course, for this style of acting is the only fitting approach to the movie’s mix of peculiarity and Italian western made in the USA two decades too late. You don’t go method when the going gets weird, unless you’re not as clever an actor as you think you are, Jared Leto.

As an added bonus for the “before they were stars” column, there’s a one-scene appearance of Jack Black as a Private who gets knocked out by an unarmed blind man. The stuff careers are made of, apparently.

Three Films Make A Post: Vengeance for the right price

The Duel at Silver Creek (1952): This was the first western Don Siegel directed, and in its first act, it does feel somewhat insecure. How much of this is Siegel or just the curiously structured script by Gerald Drayson Adams and Joseph Hoffman that goes through plot and character set-ups with maximum awkwardness isn’t quite clear. Once the film has set into its groove, and every character is actually where they need to be for the real plot to start, things improve markedly. The tale of men’s friendship (between Stephen McNally and Audie Murphy), an evil brother-sister pair (Gerald Mohr and Faith Domergue) pretending to be extremely upstanding or into marshals, and other complications isn’t terribly original by western standards of the time, but Siegel and the cast provide the whole affair with a lot of energy.

Dead for a Dollar (2022): Energy is rather what this new attempt by the great Walter Hill to get back to his old form lacks; the storytelling meanders enough to rob the film of much of its potential drive, and certainly of any actual tension. There’s still quite a bit to like here, though. The cast, particularly Rachel Brosnahan and Christoph Waltz (as well as Willem Dafoe when he’s actually in the movie), do sink their teeth into characters of a type that doesn’t make one wonder why Hill dedicates this one to the late, great western director Budd Boetticher. And while the action isn’t much to write home about (in a Hill movie!), the final shoot-out sees the man regaining some of his old powers in this area.

Mr. Vampire Part 3 aka 靈幻先生 (1987): If you’re looking for much new in the third entry into the deservedly classic Mister Vampire series from Hong Kong, you might be disappointed. If you come for Lam Ching-Ying’s monobrow, and an incredible amount of stunts, slapstick and slapstick stunts and more throw-away visual gags in any given scene than most movies pack into their full runtimes, director Ricky Lau has you covered again, zipping through jokes and fights with abandon and enthusiasm. And hey, we’re fighting a wildwoman style sorceress this time instead of hopping vampires, so there’s that as well.

Three Films Make A Post: If you can't breathe, then you can't scream.

Reeker (2005): From time to time, Dave Payne’s low budget supernatural slasher hits on the set-up for a good scene or two. Invariably, said scene never is quite as good as it could be because it is shot and/or staged as the most clichéd bit of early 00s horror imaginable. The pacing is off as well, characters are the usual annoying clichés, and the ending goes for the worst plot twist. And yes, it’s exactly the twist a curiously large number of desert set horror movies use, and towards which I feel a particular dislike. It’s a pretty desert, at least.

What movie those among the film’s contemporary critics saw to speak of interesting characters and a smart script, I don’t know.

Black Wood (2022): This contemporary indie horror western directed and written by Chris Canfield, does actually feature rather better character writing than you’d expect, as well as a script that understands how to use elements of the – somewhat revisionist – western and horror genres well together. The acting’s a little off sometimes (in a way typical of very indie films), but the central performances by Tanajsia Slaughter and Bates Wilder are very strong. Plus, the film does manage to work as a western as well as a horror film, which isn’t actually that easy a thing to achieve.

Moloch (2022): There are a lot of things to like about this piece of folk horror from the Netherlands: peat bogs and bog bodies are sadly underused elements in horror at the best of times, and director Nico van den Brink does milk the locations for quite a bit of foggy mood building. The script (by van den Brink and Daan Bakker) has some fun ideas about how to include the central folk legend; I haven’t seen this sort of thing done in a sort of screwed-up child nativity version before, and it certainly works well with the way actual folk traditions radiate outwards from their sources.

The more typical horror moments are a bit too generic and jump scare-heavy for my tastes, but the film’s use of folklore and its attempts at speaking about family trauma via horror are more than enough to make up for that.

Three Films Make A Post: They said he couldn’t cut it – they were right!

Cosmic Dawn (2022): There are exactly three things Jefferson Moneo’s very mysterious cult plus aliens movie has going for it: cheap but clever production design, a bright yet strange, sometimes even psychedelic, use of colour, and a perfectly decent central performance by Camille Rowe. Alas, the rest of the film is terrible: the pacing is drawn out and slow for no reason apart from keeping things “mysterious” and “ambiguous” (both of which they aren’t, if you’ve ever read about actual cults or have seen movies about fake ones), the dialogue tends to the inadvertently comical, the rest of the acting is so broad one might think this is supposed to be a comedy (it apparently isn’t?), and all the script’s structure of shifting between different time periods does is draw out things even more. Sometimes, narrative devices that are good for TV or can be used productively by really great screenwriters aren’t what more pedestrian talents should use, apparently.

And since there are at least a handful of movies about UFO cults that are actually good (decent would be enough in this case), I don’t see why anyone should waste their time with this one.

Ghosts of the Ozarks (2021): While it isn’t without its problems either, I’m rather more fond of this Weird, somewhat philosophical, Western-ish film by Matt Glass and Jordan Wayne Long. Sure, its script does have some unnecessary lengths too, but it also has something to say, saying it via a fantastical narrative because that’s simply a great way to talk about complicated things without getting distracted. That Ghosts does this in ways which are sometimes a bit cheesy, perhaps even silly, will be a problem to some viewers, but does feel so personally and individual to me in this case, it actually becomes one of the film’s strengths.

The direction is a bit awkward sometimes, but mostly in the way films straining against their budgets can get. The acting is generally good to great – with leads Thomas Hobson, Tara Perry (who also co-wrote) and Phil Morris doing fine work. And it’s always nice to see Angela Bettis, and David Arquette being weird.

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things (2021): As if we were trapped in one, we are living in the age of the time loop movie again. Like certain characters in many entries of the genre, I’m perfectly fine with it, at least as long the time loop movies are as good as the current batch. Quality-wise, this teen romance version by Ian Samuels (with a script by Lev Grossman in a very uncynical incarnation) is certainly keeping with modern sub-genre standards, hitting all the mandatory beats of the time loop film and the teen romance, but giving all of them a neat, even mildly subversive twist of their own. Kathryn Newton and Kyle Allen make for very likeable leads indeed, too. Newton should have a nice career in front of her even when she’s not playing characters possessed by Vince Vaughn, it seems.

Apart from making a film that’s charming as all get out, the filmmakers also succeed in giving it one of those “positive emotional messages” without letting it get schmaltzy; instead the emotional beats feel genuine and deserved. Perhaps a bit too optimistic about the non-crappy nature of the universe, but them’s the breaks.

Swamp of the Lost Souls (1957)

Original title: El pantano de las ánimas

Warning: major spoilers for a film that’s going to be older than most people reading this ahead!

The Mexican equivalent of the Old West. Don Mendoza, one of the local Big Men, has died of what is apparently cholera. Thanks to practical good sense, the local graveyard is quite a bit of swamp travel away from town; less great is that the area is supposed to be haunted by the souls of the wicked dead. There’s certainly curious stuff happening: Mendoza’s body disappears between his wife and his suddenly returning stepson wanting a lookaloo at the corpse; and when grandson galops off to fetch his cowboy detective buddy Gastón (Gastón Santos) to explain that particular weirdness, he is ambushed and dies in his friend’s arms. And once Gastón makes his way to his new case, various people are attacked or killed by a gill man style swamp monster.

It is clear early on that there’s a very human kind of conspiracy involved too. Please don’t tell me the supernatural is only faked to scare away superstitious villagers and riding detectives?

As indeed, alas, turns out to be the case in Rafael Baledón’s ranchero horror mystery Swamp of the Lost Souls. The Scooby Doo before there was Scooby Doo-ness of the whole affair is made a bit more disappointing by the fact that Baledón certainly wasn’t a filmmaker opposed to the supernatural as well as by the fact that there are quite a few Mexican movies that mix ranchero (the Mexican parallel genre to the US western) with enthusiastically portrayed supernatural shenanigans.

On the plus side, this does explain the shoddiness of the gill man costume rather nicely. The film’s not a complete loss for us more horror minded viewers anyway, for particularly the film’s first half has a couple of choice scenes of Mexican gothic. The burial sequence is done very well indeed (and by daylight to boot!), really getting an audience into a properly swampy mood, as are the first two or so swamp monster attacks. I’m also rather fond of the high-strung gothic melodrama surrounding the deceased’s wife Doña María (Sara Cabrera) and her rather handy in a pulp adventure lady’s maid Carmela (Lupe Carriles). The good lady does after all try to hide her blindness with the help of a lot of handwringing and contrived plans while still doing a good bit of snooping, all things Carmela is very helpful in doing while throwing a lot of dramatically meaningful glances her boss lady can’t even see.

The ranchero business is very much in the classic white hat against black hat style, with a pretty man dressed up ridiculously making a not terribly interesting hero (as is the tradition with this style of western) but still going through the mandatory bar fights, shoot-outs and chases with enough verve to make them interesting. The mystery elements for their part are enhanced by their minor pulp supervillain vibe, with bad guys that not only concoct plans including a fake gill man but also communicate via hidden portable telegraphs and really like to tie you up and explain their plans to you. There’s also a scene in which the – otherwise perfectly boring – romantic female lead’s horse does a Lassie to fetch Gastón like any good anipal would.

All of which makes it rather difficult for me to dislike Swamp of the Lost Souls, however much I despise Scooby Doo endings, and however creaky some of the film is. Baledón’s way of adding all of his disparate genres and ideas up is just too damn fun to complain about.

In short: The Comancheros (1961)

After arresting professional gambler – and man with an awesome name – Paul Regret (Stuart Whitman) for killing a man in a duel in Louisiana, Texas Ranger Jake Cutter (John Wayne) repeatedly finds himself pushed into teaming up with the guy. Especially once the Ranger he gets the mission to break up a very particular gang of arms dealers known as Comancheros that rile up (and arm) the Comanches. The usual stuff about growing respect and understanding happens, of course.

This John Wayne (and Stuart Whitman) vehicle is the final movie directed by Michael Curtiz, director of many a great movie and some that annoyed me considerably (and may still be great movies if you’re not me) and it is very much a mixed bag. It’s certainly  one of those Westerns that doesn’t play very well today ideologically, its crappy treatment of Native Americans having a certain whiff of conviction instead of being a mere genre trope, which doesn’t really surprise given its star’s real life politics.

Structurally, it’s a bit of a mess, often playing more as a series of scenes connected by very tenuous strands than a proper narrative or a character piece. On the positive side, at least half of those single scenes are very strong indeed, particularly whenever the film posits Wayne - at this stage of his career still not a great actor but one who had gotten very comfortable with the possibilities afforded by his considerable screen presence - as a guy who is actually hiding quite a bit of wisdom about matters of the human heart he has won through hard experience under his tough guy exterior. There’s some good Western action too, though the Indian attacks tend to the overly generic, and Curtiz doesn’t always seem to have the staging as well in hand as he could.

The film is also spending too little time on its most interesting character, Pilar Graile (Ina Balin), the daughter of the Comanchero leader as well as the instant love of Whitman’s life and the problems of being an independent (clearly raised Libertarian, poor kid) woman falling in love but wanting to keep control of her life. Balin is great with what the film gives her, really making much of the fact the script isn’t portraying her character as a shrew nor as an idiot once she’s properly in love. I really want a remake that’s all about her.

Big Jake (1971)

1909. In what’s still not quite a civilized West of the USA, the outlaw gang of John Fain (Richard Boone) attacks the prosperous McCandles ranch, nearly killing one of the family’s sons, while murdering quite a few people and last but not least kidnapping the McCandles’ grandson, Little Jake (Ethan Wayne), for a ransom. Apart from getting together the humungous ransom money of a million dollars, family matriarch Martha (Maureen O’Hara) calls in her estranged husband Jacob aka Big Jake (John Wayne), deeming him the proper kind of brute to deal with brutes.

Jake hasn’t seen (or written to) his sons for over a decade, apparently roaming the West increasing his already huge reputation as a frightening badass, so the family reunion is even more strained than the situation would suggest. But needs must, so Jake has to team up with his sons, the slick-ish James (actual Wayne son Patrick) and the younger Michael (Christopher Mitchum, of course the son of Robert). Everyone will learn a valuable lesson: the best way to solve family troubles is to punch each other in the face a lot, apparently. The bad guys clearly don’t stand a chance.

This final big screen outing directed by George Sherman (he still shot some TV episodes afterwards) is certainly one of the better John Wayne vehicles of its era. It is neither trying to crib from the Spaghetti Western book nor make gestures towards the revisionist Western, which were seldom directions that worked well with Wayne in the lead, instead making much of the more traditional (though not squeaky clean) Western.

There are obviously elements that will not have aged well for every viewer today. It’s not difficult to imagine a reading of the film as celebrating toxic masculinity or some such for all of the scenes in which the male McCandles solve their interpersonal problems by hitting each other in the face (with Wayne inevitably knocking his – grown – sons out). I found this business mostly funny, the film simply realizing that having these larger than life cowboys right at the end of the line for their idea of the West solving their interpersonal problems with a civilized heart to heart (or a stupid shouting match) like you or I would simply doesn’t feel believable in the world of the film, while their solving their problems with companionable violence seems rather fitting to them and their lives, and also funnier.

And this is a film that likes having its little chuckles: apart from the joys of family violence, there’s a lot of comedic business about the contrast between the Old West and all the new ideas and objects that come in from the less rough East, mostly exemplified through Jake’s exasperated reaction to all the new-fangled stuff his sons are into, from automatic guns to motorcycles. Big Jake does of course use this opportunity to put a motorcycle stunt into its Western business, too, for why wouldn’t it? There’s some not completely uninteresting subtext hidden away here too, James and Michael representing young men caught right in the middle between the old and radically new ways, not quite belonging to the former side like Jake, his old buddy Sam Sharpnose (Bruce Cabot) and the villains of the piece do, but also being rather too far away from the places where the new is really happening to be completely part of that, particularly when they go on an old school bandit hunt with their dad.

There’s a lot of cool, classic Western business happening in said bandit hunt too. Sherman seems to go out of his way to include every single type of traditional Western set piece in the movie, all of them realized with great gusto, timing, but also a sense for mood building that’s not always been common in the genre. A particular favourite here is obvious the long showdown between Jake and co and the gang of villains, a showdown that includes a sharpshooter duel, various sub-shootouts, some machete action, and starts with a fantastic staring contest between Wayne and Boone (that also includes some very clever dialogue), both of whom give a hell of a performance against each other. The way Wayne twists Boone’s own threats against him before the shooting really starts is utterly brilliant, hitting home that Wayne may have been an actor with a limited scope but also one who could work wonders inside of it.

Big Jake does very well with its villains, too, providing every one of them with enough (nasty) character to make them memorable threats. On the hero side, things aren’t quite as interesting, but then, part of the point of the whole affair is how larger than life Jake is compared to his surroundings, so him being the centre of non-villainous affairs is not (just) Wayne being vain, but the film following its own argument. Which doesn’t mean there’s nothing of interest happening around him – son Patrick and Chris Mitchum are a lot more expressive here than later in their careers (the latter is in fact repeatedly showing off a range of facial expressions he seems to lose over the next decade). It’s a bit of a shame that Maureen O’Hara’s role isn’t larger than it is, for she quite believably plays the only person in the movie willing and able to call Jake on his shit, and also able to win without punching. But then, Big Jake really isn’t a movie about calling macho heroes on their shit (though the film at least does not approve of Jake just ignoring his family for years) but celebrating them going for one last wild ride before the wild rides stop existing.

Three Films Make A Post: A Western Classic in the tradition of 'Shane' and 'High Noon'.

Bite the Bullet (1975): This Western (not at all in the tradition of Shane and High Noon, whatever the taglines said) by Richard Brooks concerns an early 20th Century horse race across the Southwest of the USA. It’s a film certainly interested in the adventure, and the physical toll these adventures take, but at its core, the film does very much treat its race as a way to explore the nature of the USA, the divisions of class and race, the way crass commercialism can turn into acts of quiet heroism, the vagaries of love on an aging cowboy’s wages, and the way people of a certain age drag their pasts around with them. With Gene Hackman, James Coburn, Candice Bergen, Ben Johnson, Jan-Micheal Vincent and so on, it has a cast that helps Brooks turn something that could be a bit too didactic for its own good into something at once lively and epic.

Rancho Deluxe (1975): Frank Perry’s Rancho Deluxe, made in the same year, seems also very interested in the question of America. But unlike the Brooks film, it also has an anarchic quality to it and quite a few jokes, good, bad, and strange to make, so it never quite seems to come to an argument, and certainly no conclusion, except that sex and nudity are good (and pretty funny), rich people suck (in a very non-sexual manner), and that there’s something to be said for having a very peculiar sense of humour. And everything’s better with Jeff Bridges and Harry Dean Stanton, of course.

Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw (1976): Keeping with the decade, this AIP production directed by Mark L. Lester does its best to transfer the kind of Bonnie and Clyde doomed gangster plot that’s more at home in the depression era US into then contemporary times, with mixed results. From time to time, the film really hits on a moment or two that manages to cast very different times in parallel; at other times, it just seems to go through the sub-genre motions and couldn’t afford the period dress. The performances by our titular characters, Marjoe Gortner (also getting to preach for a moment) and Lynda Carter (who also sings and is nude, providing for more than one kink, it that’s why you’re here), are a mixed bag too, both making at least half of their scenes more interesting through their presence and choice, the other half more awkward.

It’s never a less than interesting film, though – and even this early in his career, Lester knew how to shoot a great low budget action scene or three.

In short: The Train Robbers (1973)

Aging, upright gunfighter Lane (John Wayne), his – also not exactly fresh - buddies Grady (Rod Taylor) and Jesse (Ben Johnson) and their new, comparatively young, hired help Calhoun (Christopher George) and Ben Young (Bobby Vinton) are hired by widow Mrs Lowe (Ann-Margret) for a rather interesting project. Mrs Lowe knows where her late husband hid quite a bit of gold he robbed from a railway company, and needs some experienced gun hands to get it for her. Or really, as it turns out, to accompany her to the gold, for she’s not that trusting. She’s not planning to keep the stuff, mind you, but wants to return it to the railway company to wash her husband’s name clean in the eyes of their son.

The gold is hidden across the border in Mexico, and obviously, Mrs Lowe and her men aren’t the only ones interested in it, making their little project rather dangerous. And that’s before you add the natural dangers of crossing the desert where the gold is hidden and the – pretty mild – tensions in the group to the mix of dangers.

This Burt Kennedy joint isn’t the kind of Western that goes terribly hard or terribly deep, playing a bit too nice with its characters for my taste. Everyone here resolves their conflicts a bit too easily and too pat, and apart from some leering at Ann-Margret and the usual Wayne bluster, there doesn’t seem to be a mean bone in any non-bandit’s body here. From time to time, there are some pleasantly off-handed moments concerned with the plight of being an old man in a young man’s job (certainly something gun hands and our actors have in common, exceptions notwithstanding) that add a bit of melancholy to the mix.

This doesn’t mean the film isn’t a entertaining time – Kennedy is after all an old pro with the genre and knows how to keep this more amiable style of Western far from the Italian style or the revisionist Western (some of whose predecessors were ironically enough scripted by Kennedy with rather more depth than this one) engaging and fun.

There are also some pretty spectacular nature shots, and – eventually – some fine action set pieces to keep the willing viewer diverted, again keeping The Train Robbers fun throughout, though seldom more.

Kill Them All and Come Back Alone (1968)

Original title: Ammazzali tutti e torna solo

During the US Civil War. After demonstrating to the rather annoyed Confederate Captain Lynch (Frank Wolff) that his base security sucks in a fake sneak attack, mercenary Clyde McKay (Chuck Connors) and his gang of weird, violent men are hired to steal some gold belonging to the Union. As is usual in the man on a mission genre, McKay’s men (this is a film completely devoid of women in front of the camera, which on the plus side spares us the mandatory rape scene) are mainly characterized by the way they like to kill people, which can work, as it does here, when a filmmaker actually knows how to hone in on the right details about a killer that turn murder method into character. The best bet to get at said gold is apparently to somehow infiltrate a heavily secured fort and hope the dynamite it is hidden in doesn’t explode.

Further complicating the mission are the fact that McKay and his team are a bunch of backstabbers and cut-throats who can’t even wait with murdering each other until their mission is over, and that Captain Lynch may very well have an agenda all of its own.

Apart from crime movies, the great Enzo G. Castellari was particularly great at directing men on a mission style plots, may they take place during World War II or, like here, the US Civil War. So it’s no surprise that the perfectly appropriately titled Kill Them All makes for a pretty riveting watch, full of very exciting scenes of sweaty men with nasty dispositions first doing pretty unpleasant things only to their enemies but increasingly to their supposed partners too. Castellari’s great at staging the lighter, somewhat humorous action at the beginning, but he transitions just as well to the moment when things become seriously brutal, using the same vigour with which he portrays a brawl meant as a distraction when things step up to a jail break that turns into a massacre.

Speaking of massacres, more conservative critics have often tended to call the Italian Western “amoral” and “nihilistic”, a judgement that usually needs a healthy inability to understand the genre’s actual texts and subtexts. In the case of Kill Them All, that interpretation is for once actually applicable. Don’t get me wrong, Castellari isn’t exactly cheering the characters on, rather he never seems to judge the characters one way or the other, just showing the murderous nonsense they get up to without approving or disapproving. And make no mistake, these men are particularly nasty examples of their type, sacrificing bystanders and so-called friends alike for the tiniest advantage, and often in ways that actually must disadvantage them sooner or later. Which obviously makes perfect sense for the kind of people they are supposed to be.

In the very end, the film really earns the raised eyebrow of moral disapproval though, when it cheers on the final survivor’s acquisition of the gold, as if he hadn’t murdered friends and comrades, and killed hordes of people only for greed. That’s certainly one way to avoid the traditional ending where he’d end up alive and wiser but without gold, but really felt like one step too much for me.

Stagecoach (1966)

Nearly everyone reading this (hi, Mum!) will know the plot of this one, though not this version of it, so to keep matters short: a diverse group of travellers on a stagecoach to Cheyenne – saloon girl Dallas (Ann-Margret), alcoholic Doctor Boone (Bing Crosby), Marshal Wilcox (Van Heflin), comic relief whiskey salesman Peacock (Red Buttons), Southern-born gambler Hatfield (Mike Conners), pregnant cavalry captain’s wife Lucy Mallory (Stefanie Powers), banker with a case full of stolen money Gatewood (Robert Cummings), coach driver Buck (Slim Pickens) and eventually outlaw-with-a-cause Ringo Kid (Alex Cord) – have to survive natural and human dangers. Which is the sort of thing that happens travelling during one of the endless wars between the US military and the pre-colonial native population.

Though, to put that right in front, the film really isn’t interested at all in any more modern view on these wars or on the Lakota as a people, using both as forces of nature that endanger and kill anybody coming too close. So if this traditional approach bothers you too much, you’ll not be happy with the movie; but then you’ll probably not be happy with much of the canon of US Westerns.

Speaking of canon, this is indeed a remake of one of the great, canonical classics of its genre (probably Hollywood cinema as a whole), John Ford’s Stagecoach. Remaking this sort of certified masterpiece is a bit of a fool’s errant, the kind of endeavour seldom bound to earn praise from critics or audiences (though the latter may have been more tolerant in the home video-less times when this was made). It’s also somewhat arrogant. However, at least in my view, Gordon Douglas was a genre director who was not actually a lesser filmmaker than Ford. As a matter of fact, if I had to choose to between both, I’d most probably go with Douglas as my preferred director. But then, I do prefer working filmmakers like Douglas who still managed to develop a voice of their own to professional crafters of masterpieces like Ford. Though I have taken a decade or so to watch enough of Douglas’s films to truly appreciate him as more than a guy who just happened to make a lot of good Westerns and my favourite US giant monster movie. All of which does not mean I don’t appreciate quite a few of Ford’s films (and his original Stagecoach is surely one of the great Westerns).

Much of this is simply a matter of taste, Douglas lacking certain things that can drive me to distraction with Ford: as a rule, Douglas’s movies tend to be less socially conservative, feeling more genuinely concerned with the outsiders of society, and less beholden to a nostalgia which can sometimes become cloying in Ford, particularly connected to a kind of sentimentality that simply does not work for me. Though the original Stagecoach is one of Ford’s least conservative movies in some regards, particularly the ending. Douglas also does not generally delve as deeply into the abyss of odious comic relief as Ford, usually relaxing the tension in his films in ways more based on the simple joys of human companionship, though the film at hand does indeed feature the Peacock/Boone combo doing some comic relieving.

Which indeed he does a lot in his version of Stagecoach, in between often genuinely wonderful scenes in which the characters reveal or discover their true natures in their shared encounters with danger. Interestingly, most of the characters are better than the world or they themselves believe to be, finding strength and dignity in the business of survival, most of them looking to stay their better versions in the future. There are exceptions of course: Gatewood learns exactly nothing about himself or the world, and – alas, quite realistically – Crosby’s alcoholic doctor sobers up quite heroically in the moment of greatest need but is back to the bottle immediately afterwards.

But then, Crosby’s sobering up is a great moment anyway. The actor shifting from humorous alcoholic wreck to a rather wise man about his business is staged and played with great dramatic and emotional heft that’s further strengthened exactly by the fact he has been part of the comic relief – though a more complicated one than his partner – until now. Crosby, not exactly an actor I’d expect this sort of performance from (I generally prefer him as a crooner and in musicals), does play the alcoholic very well indeed, suggesting the man buried under the bottle even in his silliest scenes.

As a whole, Douglas’s cast is pretty fantastic, in individual moments as well as in their interplay, all giving performances a step above their usual quality, which is saying quite something in a lot of these cases. Ann-Margret is heartbreakingly beautiful and intense at this stage in her career before starting to border on camp caricature, and really seems to embody the confusion of a young woman who already has seen quite a bit of crap in her time. Now, she is confronted with the roles she is allowed by society to play, none of whom seems to fit very well, and finds an opening to something happier (because this is a kind film at heart). Alex Cord, never much of an actor, brings something awkward, but also simple, straightforward and honest to Ringo that doesn’t feel as much as a performance but like watching a guy finding the thing he is best at; that not much in this line came afterwards for the actor is a bit of a shame, but so it goes.

Visually, Stagecoach ‘66 is just as excellent as it is in its character work. Douglas uses the much enhanced technical possibilities he had compared to the original to their fullest, staging stagecoach sequences and sometimes surprisingly brutal violence (particularly in a film that seems not at all influenced by the budding revisionist tendencies in Western, nor by what the Italians started doing) Ford simply couldn’t have realized at the time when he made the original, adding action and stunts that are often incredibly exciting and intense, as well as varied in their approach. Action and characters do tend to feed into each other rather wonderfully, as well, really turning this not just into my favourite version of Stagecoach but into one of my favourite US Westerns.

Death Hunt (1981)

The early 1930s, Canada, the Yukon territory. A trapper named Albert Johnson (Charles Bronson) has just returned to the area to reclaim a way of life he followed before he became a spy in World War I (and did whatever guys like he do after that). When he sees local influential asshole Hazel (Ed Lauter) attempt to kill his own dog because it was losing a dog fight, he intervenes, making Hazel and his gang of violent cronies his bitter enemies. Hazel does his best to escalate things when it turns out that Johnson isn’t one to be easily killed by the likes of him, eventually managing to set the – very unwilling and generally tired – local Mountie Millen (Lee Marvin), his partner Sundog (Carl Weathers) and newly arrived rookie Mountie Alvin (Andrew Stevens, quite some time before he became one of the kings of Skinemax) against the trapper.

Because Johnson is a very dangerous man when riled, and a master at survival in dangerous circumstances, things escalate into a huge manhunt that makes the national news, making any idea of a peaceful solution nearly ridiculous.

Peter R. Hunt’s Northern Death Hunt is a wonderful film, basically doing nothing whatsoever that could destroy its balance, and doing very many things very right indeed.

The character work is strong throughout: Hunt makes excellent use of those elements of Bronson’s external stoicism that can suggest a combination of compassion and stubbornness when used properly (and Bronson clearly liked to do that when a film gave him the chance, and so applied himself fully in these situations instead of going through the motions of being Bronson), showing all the complexities of the character despite him only having a handful of dialogue scenes.

This ability to work via the body language of veteran actors also produces quite a resonant relationship between Marvin and Bronson despite them never meeting between glances through binoculars. Of course, these two are constructed as very parallel characters, decent men of violence who see their ways of life coming to an end, and not liking the replacement at all. It’s not that the film is getting all melancholy about the great times of frontier barbarism, mind you: it’s clear that nearly everyone populating these last spaces ruled by the old ways is a violent thug of some kind, cruel and callous; the film’s just as clear about the fact that the new ways of living coming up North now are not really any less terrible – they just like to pretend they are.

The film works wonderfully as a grim adventure movie with quite a few great set pieces, atmospherically filmed. The environmental dangers of snow and ice are ever-present, and, the film seems to suggest, are outward symbols of everyone’s mental states, which generally aren’t terribly healthy. The film takes some rather clever detours when it puts its mind to it, using tropes of the Western and revisionist Western but giving them interesting little twists to turn characters more human. Somewhat surprisingly, but certainly fitting in this context, for a film whose view on human nature seems to be rather cynical as a whole, Death Hunt shows a decided tendency to give every single side character (all played by wonderful character actors) something to be beyond their premeditated genre role, even fleshing out some of Hazel’s shithead henchmen as if they were proper human beings. The most impressive thing is not just that Hunt had the immense ambition to add all this humanity to his icy chase movie, it’s that he managed to do this while keeping the film ticking away like clockwork, ending up with a film that’s sprawling when thought about, but which feels tight and focussed while you watch it.

Three Films Make A Post: Get a Lift

Harry and Tonto (1974): Having lost his home to city development, and not really jibing with living with his son and his family, elderly New Yorker Harry (Art Carney) and his cat Tonto (Tonto) go on a road trip through the USA, encountering old flames and new experiences, living parts of life Harry never did before. Among other things, for this Paul Mazursky comedy is stuffed full with humanity and human encounters big and small, feelings simple and complicated, treating aging and old age and the loss that comes with it with as much dignity as humour, exhibiting an openness to different ways of seeing the world that seems to be utterly alien to today’s “you’re either for us or against us” world.

Mazursky creates (or sees) an America made out of very different people believing very different things that still express a shared humanity, never making a grand gesture out of this, but treating his characters kindly, even those that might not completely deserve it.

A Man Called Sledge (1970): This is one of two movies directed by actor Vic Morrow, though producer Dino DeLaurentiis apparently robbed him of the final cut, and there may or may not be material included shot by Giorgio Gentili instead. Despite an American cast, director and US money, in feeling and tone, this is a lot like an Italian Western, starting with its treatment of the Southwestern setting, over the “sweat and dirty shirts” production design, and certainly not ending in its pretty cynical view of the world. The film also includes a pretty hefty heist movie element and ends up as a Treasure of the Sierra Madre variation.

It features James Garner in one of his grimmer performances as the titular gunman Sledge, and moves through its set pieces of dust and mud with a degree of vigour. It never quite manages to reach the allegorical heft the director – at least going by the final act – clearly wants it to have, but then, I dislike allegories anyway. In the state it is in, it’s a solid enough movie, not as well directed as the best Italian westerns (nor as crazy as these can get) but entertaining enough for what it is.

Jiu Jitsu (2020): On the plot level, this thing directed by Dimitri Logothethis is a completely bizarre attempt to mix martial arts movie traditions with a Predator rip-off, plus the dreaded amnesiac protagonist (Alain Moussi is our hero, such as he is) syndrome. And Nicolas Cage is a crazy jiu jitsu swordsman veteran (jiu jitsu in this film has little to do with the actual martial art, by the way), so you can expect a couple of scenes of Cage flipping out entertainingly, doing his best in martial arts fight scenes against people who are actually good at this sort of thing, and doing an Obi Wan (just louder). Also appearing are action and martial arts film darlings like Tony Jaa and Frank Grillo, but they only get a couple of fights in. Moussi is good in his action sequences but pretty terrible at the whole acting thing. He was probably much cheaper than those members of the cast who can do both; but then, the script is so utterly bad at stringing the decent, sometimes fun, action scenes together, even a great actor might have not gotten through the affair with dignity intact.