The sky is filled with coral and amber blushing against torn clouds edged in a metallic glow. The horizon slices the landscape in half, carving the bottom into a harsh, beautiful surface to be appreciated if not traversed. Through this old, familiar rectangle on the wall walks Brad Pitt as Jesse James. A while later, Russell Crowe and Christian Bale bring their own dry and haunting environment, dusting ghostly behind their horses. Soon Tommy Lee Jones will be here as well, fighting to hold on to his dignity against bad men and bad weather.
Tom and Gene and Roy all walked this road and so did John and Clint. The Western is back on the screen and I am happy to see it.
“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (maybe the longest title I have ever seen) brings us Pitt and a memorable Casey Affleck brooding across amazing scenery in a study of fame and misfortune.
“3:10 to Yuma” offers up Crowe as a not-so-vile villain opposite Bale’s one-legged decent man in a morality play first penned by then-Chicago ad agency copywriter Elmore Leonard. Peter Fonda gruffs through the first half as a Pinkerton agent who is so tough he takes a gut shot and refuses to die. But Ben Foster steals the show with his pinched face and more pinched voice.
The Cohen brothers (“Oh Brother, Where Art Thou” and “Fargo” to name a few) will release Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country For Old Men” in November. I have always wanted to see the Cohen brothers take on a McCarthy story, with its contradictory page-long sentences of sparse
language and chapters of raw violence.
Westerns are like American comfort food. A camp stew of characters who are all familiar yet always attractive. In our collective minds, few of us who saw them can forget minute details of Eastwood and Morgan Freeman in “Unforgiven,” when the act of killing a man is put into a single sentence that sums it up better than anything I have ever heard. I can see Val Kilmer saying, “I got your Huckleberry” in Tombstone. I can still see Clint spit that tobacco juice on the medicine hawker’s white suit in “The Outlaw Josey Wales.” I can shut my eyes and see Graham Greene in mental conflict in “Dances with Wolves” and recall Costner, not as the AWOL Union soldier, but as Jake in the earlier “Silverado.” And if you can’t remember Redford and Newman jumping off the cliff in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” then you need to tap Netflix right now and see the most successful Western ever made.
I don’t have enough room here to drag you through all of the great Westerns that have been made, but there are plenty. And oddly, foreign markets appreciate them better than we do. Ever seen the Japanese Western “Sukiyaki Western Django”? The actors speak English phonetically. John Ford would be proud.
Several years ago, I was on a Hollywood backlot. The old Western sets were all gone, scrapped for more modern subjects. “Nobody wants to see a Western anymore,” said the young guide.
Under my breath, I whispered, “I do.” I wasn’t alone.
There are a few good ones out there right now. And I am enjoying them all the way to Yuma.
