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Tag Archives: Western
28*. WALKER (1987)
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“I was seriously off the rails here.”–screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer, on Walker‘s Criterion collection commentary
DIRECTED BY: Alex Cox
FEATURING: Ed Harris, Sy Richardson, Rene Auberjonois, Blanca Guerra, Peter Boyle, Marlee Matlin
PLOT: Shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt hires William Walker, a mercenary and adventurer fresh off a failed campaign to establish an independent state in Mexico, to take a small army to Nicaragua to join their civil war on the side of the Democrats. Assembling a ragtag band of disreputable men lacking better prospects, Walker takes his army to Nicaragua, where he has unexpected success, driving back the Legitimist army and arriving in the capital of Grenada as a liberator. Initially accepting a position leading the army, Walker grows power mad and seizes the country’s Presidency.
BACKGROUND:
- William Walker was a real historical figure and, ridiculous anachronisms and obvious fantasy scenes aside, Walker describes the general direction of his career. Many scenes were drawn from his diaries and letters and other historical sources. (One major change was the role of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who did not sponsor Walker’s original expedition, but was involved in his downfall.)
- The practice of American adventurers invading Latin American countries with private armies was surprisingly common in the 19th century, so much so that it earned its own name: filibustering. William Walker was the most successful filibusterer of all time. He somehow took control of Nicaragua with an army initially comprised of a mere 60 men.
- Rudy Wurlitzer’s previous screenplays included the bizarre post-apocalyptic Glen and Randa (1971), Monte Hellman‘s cult film Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), and the Sam Peckinpah Western Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (1973).
- Cox made Walker in the same year as Straight to Hell, a quickie scraped together after plans to film a punk rock concert in Nicaragua fell apart.
- The movie was filmed while the C.I.A..-backed Contras were waging a guerilla war against the ruling Sandinistas. Cox filmed corpses from a Contra massacre and included the footage in the film’s end credits.
- Universal Studios gave Cox his largest budget ever, six million dollars, to make what they hoped might be a prestige biopic, or even a hit. They did not expect the deranged, anachronistic, incendiary film Cox delivered, and after poorly-received test screenings they buried the film. Cox never directed in Hollywood again.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: It’s tempting to cite one of the many iconic scenes of Walker, rifle in hand, striding confidently in the foreground in his smart Puritan-black suit while mayhem erupts in the background. We instead selected the surreal image of Walker striding confidently across the beach in the background, while in the foreground two of his men are being punished by being buried up to their necks in the sand with a tarantula crawling over one’s head, while their overseer enjoys a Marlboro and Coke.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Smoking during tarantula torture; 19th century helicopter evacuation
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Imagine Aguirre, the Wrath of God directed by Ken Russell (if he was obsessed with politics instead of sex and Catholicism). That’s Walker in a nutshell.
Original trailer for Walker
COMMENTS: Walker drops its strangeness on its viewers gradually. Continue reading 28*. WALKER (1987)
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND (2021)
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DIRECTED BY: Sion Sono
FEATURING: Nicolas Cage, Sofia Boutella, Bill Mosley, Nick Cassavetes
PLOT: By order of “the Governor”, a nabbed robber must infiltrate the Ghostland to rescue the Governor’s grand-daughter.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA LIST: Directed by Sion Sono, featuring Nicolas Cage.
COMMENTS: “They helped me because I am radioactive.”
This epic line is delivered, epically, by Nicolas Cage, standing atop a grand stairway beneath a massive clock, his right arm shattered, his left testicle likewise. He stands before a crowd of downtrodden souls. Amongst them is the bookish Enoch, volume of Wuthering Heights in hand, as well as the gaunt undertaker who collects souls. Watching from the periphery is Ratman and his Ratmen, a crew of thieving mechanics. Bernice, chalk-limbed and with obsidian-black eyebrows, begins a chant of rebellion. And so, the prisoners of the Ghostland rally, before marching on Samurai Town to depose the evil Governor.
Forgive me if I am telephoning in this review, but I was up until almost two o’clock this morning and arose shortly after six. Though rendering me useless for almost anything else, this primed me perfectly for Sion Sono’s latest, Prisoners of the Ghostland. Having snaked its way through the festival circuit all this past year (thank you very much, Covid, for keeping me from covering this at Fantasia…), this oddity has finally hit a handful of screens as well as pay-to-stream services. Under-slept and over-caffeinated, I watched, intermittently overcome with awe, perplexion, and hearty guffaws.
“They helped me because I am radioactive.” Even within the confines of this film, the line makes no sense. There is a permeating sense that something deeper is going on here: the growing flashbacks of a robbery gone wrong, the strange drawl-stilted speechifying by the white-suited baddie the Governor, the analogue slide show—narrated by a Greek chorus of the dregs of humanity—recounting the horrific crash between a truck full of convicts and a truck full of nuclear waste. There are moments of surreal whimsy, as when a hail of bullets cracks open a gumball dispenser, its candy-coated contents clattering in slow-motion throughout the carnage; or when Nicolas Cage’s “Hero” catches a burnt-out football helmet and busts out his gravedigger audition for Hamlet. Yes, the minds behind this story aimed for a much-too-muchness, half hitting the mark, half sputtering into the fizzly “What the?” of miscalibration.
I should be slapping the “Recommended” tag on this; I should have had my “Must See!” entreaty swatted aside by more reasonably-minded site administrators. However, as much as I enjoyed watching Prisoners of the Ghostland, it suffers from one or more of the following: too much incoherency, not enough incoherency, too much crazy, and not enough crazy. Nicolas Cage, as always, delivers; but his too much is only mostly enough. Its Sergeo Leoneciousness borders on Jodorowskity, but never quite makes the final leap. As a movie, Prisoners falls short, constituting merely a wacky, weird exercise in eccentricity and nuclear-samurai-symbolism; but in memory, I have little doubt it shall blossom into a strange patchwork of giddily campy memories of a Hero, played by Nicolas Cage, whose force of will makes me believe that he is, indeed, radioactive.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![Prisoners of the Ghostland (Steelbook) [4K UHD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51OrkKcYyNL._SL500_.jpg)
CAPSULE: THE ONE YOU FEED (2020)
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DIRECTED BY: Drew Harwood
FEATURING: Gareth Koorzen, Rebecca Fraiser, Drew Harwood
PLOT: When a hiker is injured, a man and woman bring him back to their remote farm to recuperate, where they engage in mind games of attraction and power that are destined to meet a calamitous end.
COMMENTS: The One You Feed luxuriates in its silences. The Stranger’s wanderings through a Western landscape are a wordless reverie, and the only residents of the ranch where he finds himself laid up after a wild animal attack speak in rudimentary instructions, when they deign to speak at all. He is an isolated character, by choice and then by happenstance, and we are forced to consider the world largely via the visual information available to us.
It soon becomes clear that the silence may be as much out of a lack of things to say as it is a mission statement. Writer/director Harwood (he also takes credits as editor, production designer, and casting director, and shares producer, story, costume design, and set decoration credits with Koorzen) has created a funhouse mystery, with a pair of antagonists (The Woman and The Man) who behave curiously and arbitrarily. They live in a timeless space, with modern tools on their farm but a 19th-century aesthetic indoors. Harwood clearly hopes that by withholding information, he’ll stoke interest. The names of the characters point to his dedication to this strategy.
The result, however, is not intriguing, but frustrating. If no one talks, then we’re going to rely on actions to guide us through. But if no one takes action, then it’s going to be damn hard to figure out what anybody’s game is. So we have to settle for what we can see: the Stranger is crippled by injury (and by a haunted memory which will be teased out over the course of the film). The Man is beefcake, dressed in his overalls with one strap carelessly unbuckled, delivering sparse dialogue that alternately identifies him as a himbo or an aspiring poet. Meanwhile, The Woman is harsh and shrill with a soupcon of neediness, and her propensity for plunging necklines suggests she shops exclusively in the Sexy Homesteader section at Spirit of Halloween. It’s all tropes, but tropes without consistency of purpose.
I’ve seen this film described as “romantic,” and while both of The Stranger’s healers/tormentors copulate with him, both encounters border on or fully embody rape. When he ultimately makes his plea to one of them to join him, the moment hasn’t been earned by anything that has come before. If this is supposed to be a universal tale of love, attraction, and jealousy, then the universality is based on capriciousness and hostility.
Ultimately, the roots of the film’s faults can be found in the title, which alludes to a metaphor about two wolves living inside a person’s heart. One thrives on love and hope, the other on hate and despair, and they are in perpetual conflict. Which will win? See the title. But in The One You Feed, there is no love, no hope. Violence is only a moment away, and anything more than a stock motivation is nowhere to be found. There’s only one wolf in this tale, and it eats the only thing it is served.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
PROGRESSIVE WESTERNS: JOHN FORD’S THE SEARCHERS (1956)
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John Wayne has been dead for over forty years, but still managed to create a storm of Twitter controversy recently when an old “Playboy” interview resurfaced—one in which he acknowledged belief in white supremacy, knocked Native Americans as “selfishly wanting to keep all the land to themselves,” and stated that “we can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks.”
For anyone who remembers Wayne as a living actor, or has read even a brief bio, the only surprise here was social media suddenly discovering Wayne’s bigorty after it has been well-known for fifty years. As a political spokesperson, Wayne has long fell out of favor… until fellow draft-dodger Mango Mussolini made vilifying Native Americans fashionable again, along with broad bigotry against non-WASP males. January 6, 2021, Mussolini unlocked the trailer park gates and let loose his band of Jerry Springer-styled terrorist thugs who fancied themselves patriotic cowboys, chanting “1776!” As we all know—and some are hoping that we will soon forget—the result was five cold-blooded murders, including one law enforcement officer, with Mussolini’s Senate accomplices letting the inciter-in-chief off the hook. These parodies envision themselves as Duke wannabes, wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. That cartoon redneck parody is an image that is all too often broadly assigned to the mythos of the American West.
I recall film and art students saying they were open to any genre, as long as it wasn’t a Western. That perception is easy to understand, but it is as erroneously stereotyped as anything the self-styled “Nationalists” drum up. The genre is much more complex and egalitarian. Even Wayne himself, as ignorant and mean-spirited as he could be, wasn’t so black and white. That complexity can be found even more in John Ford, who, with all of his artistic and personal flaws, was and remains in the top tier of American filmmakers. Ford was a card-carrying Democrat, which reportedly lead to countless arguments with his favorite leading man, Wayne (although both were bona fide supporters of the Vietnam War).
With The Searchers (1956) we see Ford’s evolving perspective taking shape and influencing his art. The result is what a lot of cineastes believe to be the quintessential Western, if not the greatest of all American films (the BFI currently lists it as the seventh best film of all time). Film critics are more divided, with Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael well-known (partial) dissenters. Occasional lapses into sentimentality, groan-inducing macho humor, racism and misogyny, a lumbering plot, overt characterizations (especially Hank Worden as Mose, the Shakespearean jester) Continue reading PROGRESSIVE WESTERNS: JOHN FORD’S THE SEARCHERS (1956)