I’ve always disliked The Wild Bunch for what I see as its moral nihilism — a violation of the Western genre which it did so much to undermine, and of the very idea of humane art.  I don’t think art should make moral judgements or preach moral lessons, but I think it ought to reflect a world where moral questions are important and have consequences.

That’s a personal viewpoint, admittedly, based on my experiences in life, and on my evaluation of great works of art in general.  I respect other viewpoints, even if I don’t like or admire them.  The idea that human actions have no moral meaning, only a relative meaning based on individual will or style, strikes me as immature, puerile and destructive.  It’s defensible as a philosophical proposition, but I reject it, and I don’t think it has ever produced any great works of art.

I decided recently to revisit The Wild Bunch, motivated primarily by my respect for the opinions of my friend Scott Bradley (above), who can argue eloquently against the idea that The Wild Bunch is a work of moral nihilism.  I also read a few critiques of the film which take the same view.

The Western was losing its cultural prestige in 1969, when Peckinpah’s film came out.  The Vietnam war was making many people doubt the ideals America prided itself on, making them wonder if those ideals had always been fraudulent.  The Western, embodying a mythology which tended to affirm those ideals, was an obvious target for a revisionist view of such things.

The genre, taken as a whole, had always had room for moral complexity, for good guys who weren’t all that good and bad guys who weren’t all that bad, but it generally held that bad guys could be morally redeemed by honorable acts and that good guys who made bad moral choices would pay a price.  Vietnam made some artists, and a big segment of the audience, wonder if that formula, as applied to America in Westerns, was meaningless, and always had been.

As the 60s progressed, Westerns got edgier and darker, and more ironic.  Spaghetti Westerns leaned heavily on an irony verging on outright farce.  They tended to keep the moral distinction between good guys and bad guys, but they presented the conflict with a wink, suggesting the whole thing might be a joke.  Western fans beginning to doubt the genre could have it both ways, rooting for the good guys while not taking them too seriously.

In his 1968 film Once Upon A Time In the West, Sergio Leone cast Henry Fonda as a vicious killer, an unredeemed bad man.  It had a certain shock value, but it didn’t upend the moral dynamic of a traditional Western — we weren’t asked to root for the Fonda character, though we may have wanted to, given Fonda’s status as an iconic movie hero.  This created an interesting tension.

In The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah took things further.  His main protagonist was William Holden, another iconic movie hero, playing Pike Bishop, the leader of a gang of outlaws.  In the first scene of the film, the gang is robbing a railroad office.  A couple of hapless clerks and a woman are caught inside the office.  Bishop says to his men, gesturing to the clerks and the woman, “If they move, kill them.”

This is roughly equivalent to Fonda killing a child at the beginning of Once Upon A Time In the West — it has the same shock value — but the similarity ends there.  In The Wild Bunch as it unfolds we are asked to root for the Holden character, to admire him, a man who would murder an unarmed woman to commit a robbery.  To me, this takes us into the territory of moral nihilism.

Bishop is cool, with the bearing and the aura of an iconic Western hero.  He’s brave and competent, and loyal to his fellow outlaws.  His willingness to murder innocent unarmed people is treated as morally meaningless.  It’s something a hero can do if he wants to or needs to and still be a hero.

In a traditional Western, even a dark modern one like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, we would expect a vicious killer like Bishop to have a change of heart, to recognize his own moral nullity, to be given a chance to redeem himself.  But neither Bishop nor Peckinpah sees any need for redemption.  Bishop’s style and will and bravery are redemption enough.

There are, as I say, arguments against this view — centering on the idea that Bishop and his gang, when they flee into Mexico, are touched by the goodness of the Mexican peasants and eventually sacrifice themselves in the cause of the peasants’ revolt against their corrupt government.  I myself don’t see evidence for this in the text.

They certainly sympathize with the peasants and are disgusted by the corruption and viciousness of their oppressors, but they don’t think twice when the vicious and corrupt Federal general Mapache hires them to rob a U. S. Army train of the weapons it’s carrying, back on American soil, and deliver the weapons to him.  They’re completely fine with killing American soldiers to accomplish the robbery.

It’s true that they agree to given Angel, a Mexican member of the gang, a case of rifles to pass along to the insurgent peasants, but only in return for his share of Mapache’s money.  The wild bunch remain true to their nature — a gang of moral monsters, who will do just about anything, even the right thing, for money.

Bishop is not shown actually murdering an unarmed women, but in the opening he leaves the clerks and the woman in the railroad office as hostages in the charge of a psychotic gang member who does kill them when they move, trying to escape.  They die off-screen — perhaps because Peckinpah doesn’t want to show us the graphic consequence of Pike’s repellent indifference to innocent human life.

Angel is shown murdering an unarmed woman, a former lover he kills because she has betrayed him and taken up with Mapache.  There is no sign that any of the wild bunch has any moral qualms about this atrocious act.  Quite the opposite in fact.  At the climax of the film the gang sacrifices itself in an effort to rescue Angel from the Federales — a hopeless gesture which they know won’t succeed.  In essence, they commit “suicide by Federales”, preferring to go down fighting rather than endure the fact that their era on the frontier is coming to an end.

Their suicide walk is justly famous — it’s designed to portray the outlaws as heroic, even though there’s nothing heroic about what they’re doing.  Attempting to rescue “one of their own” is just a pretext for going out in a blaze of cosmetic glory.  It’s no more heroic than the 9/11 terrorists flying planes into The Twin Towers — sacrificing their lives “bravely”, perhaps, but in the service of an ignoble cause.

Peckinpah can’t even allow the bunch to commit suicide honorably — at one point in the climactic shootout Dutch saves himself temporarily by using an unarmed woman as a human shield.  She takes a bullet meant for him.  The perversity of this is extreme.  You get a feeling Peckinpah was expressing a deep contempt for the audience, mocking it as he was mocking the Western genre itself, because he could get it to root for such vile “heroes” as these.

I’ve read a “feminist” defense of Angel’s murder of his former lover, seeing it as a blow against the corrupt government that’s oppressing his people, a political act, motivated by Angel’s own self-hatred over his impotence in the face of that oppression.  This is plausible psychologically, but it avoids the moral issue of murdering unarmed people, which doesn’t seem to interest Peckinpah at all, any more than it interests Bishop.

Understanding Angel’s act, even sympathizing with it, is not an excuse for utterly ignoring the moral questions it raises — again, on a par with understanding the motivations of the 9/11 terrorists while totally ignoring the moral questions raised by their act of murdering unarmed people.

I’m not saying that Peckinpah had an obligation as an artist to condemn Angel — only that ignoring the full moral dimensions of Angel’s act, in effect trivializing them, is an exercise in nihilism.  In The Wild Bunch in general we are asked to cheer for some truly despicable men, to ignore their despicable acts, to revere them for their style and courage alone.  It’s a shabby, puerile view of the world, and makes for a shabby, puerile film.

Peckinpah was a more complicated artist than The Wild Bunch would indicate.  He loved showing the dark side of human nature without mitigation or pious revulsion, but he rarely presented that dark side as something to be laughed about, relished, celebrated as heroic.  His own dark side led him into a life of creeping, harrowing despair — he knew only too well the price of a dalliance with moral nihilism, and that knowledge informs his best work, gives it depth and complexity.  It’s entirely absent from The Wild Bunch.

So in the end, after revisiting the film with as open a mind as I could summon, I find that I still dislike The Wild Bunch intensely — for much the same reasons I outlined in an earlier post here.  The film traffics in images of heroism, albeit stirring images of heroism, that are cheap and hollow and repulsive.

I felt a sort of foreboding as this film opened, with its spare, moody, vaguely ominous music over the titles and an early scene featuring a mad-looking preacher spouting synthetic Victorian gobbledegook — Cormac McCarthy lite.  I thought it might be one of those arty Westerns for people who hate Westerns.

It turned out not to be quite that bad, but a failed Western all the same.  The dialogue stayed artificial and unconvincing, and much of the acting was mediocre, and while it had a story to tell — a pretty good old-fashioned Western story of revenge, of shame and injustice and honor redeemed — it decided not to tell that story.

It’s too bad, because the film had a couple of great things going for it.  The first was the landscape of northern New Mexico, filmed beautifully.  The second was January Jones in the lead role.  She’s a wonderful actress, with a face that’s beautiful and strong — she’s instantly convincing as a woman of pioneer stock.

[Spoilers below . . .]

When her character’s husband is killed by the homicidal preacher, you expect her to team up with an eccentric but honorable bushwhacker who arrives on the scene, a character played a little too eccentrically by Ed Harris, in order to right the wrongs done to her and to others.  It’s a traditional Western theme, found most notably in True Grit, involving a kind of surrogate fatherhood leading to the empowerment of the daughter figure.

Instead, the two never make a real alliance and the woman goes on a killing spree of disproportionate violence, in which one’s sympathy for her is gradually dissipated.  There is something satisfying about the woman’s unbridled rage, as there is about Medea’s, but it betrays an unspoken code of traditional Westerns — that violence must always be measured by moral justice.  When the woman starts killing unarmed people who pose no physical threat to her, we’re way outside the bounds of the traditions of the genre.

I really don’t know why filmmakers want to fuck with the genre this way — to push it past the expectations and the ideals of people who love Westerns.  You have to love Westerns yourself to make a movie like this, which gets so many things right before going off the rails.

As you can tell from their letters and from the transcripts of court testimony, people on the frontier often had a powerful and eloquent command of language, influenced by Shakespeare, The King James Bible and The Book Of Common Prayer.  Writers of modern Westerns should read those things if they want to place memorable words in the mouths of their characters, avoiding the post-modern gibberish of McCarthy, which is where Logan and Noah Miller, the writers of Sweetwater, seem to have picked up their notion of frontier talk, along with their Grand Guignol notions of Western mythology.  Bad move.

The film showed at Sundance but apparently wasn’t picked for national theatrical distribution.  Just as well — it would have sunk like a stone, Miss Jones’s considerable charms notwithstanding.

I just can’t get enough of them.

Click on the image to enlarge.

The Blu-ray edition of this 1952 film is the first release from Twilight Time that I found genuinely disappointing.  It’s a mediocre Western starring Tyrone Power given a mediocre Blu-ray transfer — the images don’t have the brilliance and depth that a Technicolor film from this era can and should have on Blu-ray.

The only real virtue of the release is the isolated score by Alex North, which is expertly crafted and sure-footed dramatically.  If you watch the picture with only the isolated score playing, and think of the images as merely illustrations to an admirable piece of program music, the experience is actually quite enjoyable.

Best described by one reviewer as “a film without a constituency”, The Lone Ranger works overtime to alienate any constituency it might have had in theory.  Within the first fifteen minutes we are shown The Lone Ranger and Tonto robbing a bank, and the man behind The Lone Ranger’s mask is established as irreligious.  Ha, ha!  The filmmakers want us to know right off that this is not going to be “your grandpa’s type of Western” — which is, of course, the only kind of Western anybody wants to see.

We still long for the moral values, for the heroic role models, that Westerns once supplied, and whenever a modern Western mocks those things, it flops at the box office — just as The Lone Ranger flopped.  (The film lost approximately $150 million dollars overall for Walt Disney Pictures.)

You can make a funny Western, a Western that pokes fun at Western clichés, without being cynical about the tradition, but being cynical about the tradition is the mark of hipness for a modern Western.  The only people who find this sort of cynicism amusing are the Hollywood hipsters who make such films.

There are some funny things in the film.  There are some beautiful shots that reference classic Westerns like The Searchers.  There are some thrilling action sequences — or action sequences that would be thrilling if they didn’t rely so obviously on CGI.  Directors with big budgets just never know where to stop with the CGI stuff — it’s like a drug.  Watching a man sit a horse well as he rides through beautiful country is always exciting, cinematically.  Watching a man sit a horse indifferently as he rides in front of a green screen is just not the same.

The people who made this movie made the delightful Pirates Of the Caribbean, which is also a goof on an old movie genre.  The Lone Ranger must have seemed like a cinch follow-up, goofing on a different old movie genre.  But people care about Westerns in a way they don’t care about pirate movies.  It was a fatal miscalculation not to understand this.

Those who want to brave a viewing of The Lone Ranger should know that it’s one of those movies that gets worse and worse the longer it goes on, and it goes on for two and half hours — time enough to get really, really bad, swirling deeper and deeper into incoherence and silliness, all at a breakneck pace.

Click on the images to enlarge.

This film, from 1939, is one of the most entertaining of all Westerns but one that’s very hard to categorize. At its heart is a sort of romantic comedy dynamic between Tom Destry, played by James Stewart, and Frenchy, played by Marlene Dietrich.

Theirs is the relationship in the film you care about, though it doesn’t develop in standard romantic comedy terms, and doesn’t have a romantic comedy denouement.

Stewart plays an idealistic deputy sheriff who doesn’t believe in gun play — Dietrich plays a hard-as-nails dance hall girl whose heart is touched by the sheriff’s decency and sly, insinuating machismo.

This was Stewart’s first Western and he was undoubtedly cast because he went against the Western hero type. His bashful, apparently harmless geniality is a perfect mask for the steel backbone Destry turns out to have.

As a cynical teaser and manipulator of men, Dietrich was cast precisely to type, though she played this role in an uncharacteristic way.  She seems to be having a total blast in the part, as befits the lighthearted tone of the movie, and her performance, even when things get dark, is an absolute delight to watch.

Dietrich performs in the dance hall, of course, and is given a number which has since become iconic — “See What the Boys In the Back Room Will Have”.  There’s a spirited cat fight between Dietrich and Una Merkel which has a oddly erotic quality.  It’s ended when Destry douses them with a bucket of water, which turns their clothing into vexing sheaths — mild stuff by today’s standards but it caused some problems with the censors of the day.

Despite the comedic tone, there’s a real Western narrative swirling around the lead couple, involving two coldblooded murders and a lot of unpleasant frontier skulduggery.  Things end in a semi-tragic way.

I kept getting reminded of McCabe & Mrs. Miller — there are times in their scenes together when Stewart’s youthful, feckless charm and Diterich’s world weary but still smoldering sex appeal call Warren Beatty and Juile Christie quite specifically to mind.  The mix of good humor and violence is also echoed in the Altman film.  Destry Rides Again doesn’t have the bleak ending of McCabe & Mrs. Miller — it goes out on a bittersweet but inspiring note — but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that Altman had Destry in mind when he was concocting his Western pipe dream.

This is a modest film from 1975 about the people who wrote pulp Westerns and made B-Western movies in the 1930s. It looks like a high-class TV movie but features an appealing performance by a young Jeff Bridges and treats its subject with genuine affection. If you love pulp Westerns and B-Western movies from the 1930s, you’ll enjoy it. If not, it probably won’t add up to much for you.

[Warning — SPOILERS below . . .]

I saw this film when it came out in 1971.  I was 21 then and didn’t like it much.  I was a film purist and was annoyed by all the zooms and telephoto shots, which were the clichés of “with-it” filmmaking at the time.  I also was annoyed, or unconvinced, by the optical snow effects in the concluding scenes.  All these things took me out of the movie.

I just watched the film again for the first time since 1971.  I’m still a film purist and was still annoyed by the zooms and telephoto shots and optical snow effects, which have dated the film terribly.  But I found many other things to love about the movie which I hadn’t fully appreciated in my youth.

The film is set in a frontier town that is growing.  Altman shot it in sequence, as the sets for the town’s expansion were being constructed, so you see the town growing, literally, as the narrative progresses.

The film was also shot in all kinds of weather, which gives a lovely sense of atmosphere.  (There was real snow falling as the final scenes were shot, though not continuously, which is why the optical snow had to be added.)

Warren Beatty gives a genial performance and Julie Christie a great one.  In the first hour of the film, which is basically a lyrical romantic comedy, their interactions are a delight to watch.  As in many romantic comedies, the female protagonist is smarter and stronger than the male protagonist, and we admire him just for keeping up with her — hoping he’ll prove his worth to her in time.

But then things start to go wrong.  Dark forces, representing the evils of corporate America, move into the town and threaten the idyll of McCabe and Mrs. Miller.  McCabe seems to get weaker and weaker and is repeatedly humiliated by the thugs.  A showdown is inevitable.

McCabe kills the thugs at the cost of his own life — Mrs. Miller, high on opium, doesn’t seem to care or even notice.  The film ends on a nihilistic note.  Very trendy for 1971, as the Vietnam War raged and people began to think that all American ideals, especially as portrayed in Westerns, were and always had been meaningless posturing.

Ho hum — all very puerile and cheap.  Still there is that town, that weather, those two appealing stars and much good humor.  The film, shot by Vilmos Zsigmond, is magically lit throughout, with filters and a slight flashing of the negative to give the effect of a turn-of-the-century Autochrome.  In between the zooms and telephoto shots there are many extremely beautiful images.  Altman had very much wanted to make a Western, and he almost made a very good one, but by the end, like Mrs. Miller, he seems to have retreated into a drug-induced indifference to the form.  Pauline Kael called the film “a beautiful pipe dream of a movie”, and there’s some truth in that.  The whole thing sort of drifts away like smoke, and leaves a kind of emptiness in the heart.