McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

McCabe & Mrs. Miller is high on most lists of the greatest westerns of all time, especially as a prime example of the so-called revisionist western.  As a fan of western movies, I would be remiss if I didn’t experience it.  In honesty I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as the sprawling, adventurous westerns that tend to be my favorites, but I had an open mind.  My resulting experience was actually much more disappointing than expected.  In its favor it is well-made and well-acted.  On the other hand, there’s nothing at all to actually like about the film, at least for me.

Setting: a Pacific Northwest mining town in the wet, dark Pacific Northwest winter.  Characters: McCabe is a selfish, amoral idiot who thinks he’s a smooth business-man and Mrs. Miller is a self-important prostitute.  The rest of the characters are solely concerned with drinking and whoring, are whores themselves, or are greedy businessmen.  There is nothing in the story, characters, or environment that strikes me as worthy to be put to screen.  Leonard Cohen’s score would be nice if it were applied to a different movie.  His earthy, slice-of-life songs bring to mind a poetically sympathetic every-man who is perhaps on the path to tragedy.  It is true that the characters are on the path to tragedy, but there is nothing poetic or sympathetic about them.

Out of curiosity I’ve read many reviews in an effort to understand what people are enjoying about this movie.  What are they getting out of it?  I gather that it mainly boils down to this: it eviscerates the western genre, as if the traditional western was pathetic and low-brow, out-moded and needing to be taken to the glue factory.  For instance, McCabe & Mrs. Miller tops Timeout London’s top westerns of all time at #1, and they put it this way: “By the early 1970s, the western had boxed itself into a canyon…. It was only by breaking the western down and reassembling it bit by bit that it could break new ground.”  I disagree, but you gathered that already.  It later goes on, “It’s also an extraordinarily beautiful film. Altman offers a portrait of the west that’s dingy, grimy, hazy, stinky and chilled to the bone.”  However, to me those last two juxtaposed sentences don’t mesh with each other at all.

Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy some revisionist westerns, but McCabe and Mrs. Miller takes revisionism to the extreme.  Wide expanses and beautiful scenery?  Substitute a dark, cold, wet, miserable environment.  Characters who have – or grow to have – nobility or responsibility?  Substitute characters with nothing redeemable or attractive.  A story with meaning or morals?  Substitute a story with nothing to be drawn to, appreciated, or learned from.  Truth is, I have a hard time seeing this as a western at all.

I can understand not enjoying traditional westerns, for whatever reason.  Perhaps many can be seen as formulaic or sappy.  But I feel that to enjoy McCabe & Mrs. Miller requires an active hate for Westerns, which fuels one to sit through two hours of ugliness.  I’m sure this isn’t true, but it’s the only way my tiny brain can rationalize it at the moment.

 

Doc (1971)

There’s a lot that can be said for this movie, but I doubt that any of it can be good. Released right at the peak of the Revisionist Era, Doc goes so far as to be a deconstructionist film, and by that I mean a trend of self-righteously deconstructing all of the western tropes and standards; not necessarily the philosophical theory of Jacques Derrida.

Although it’s titled Doc, it’s really a story about the Vietnam War and the hippies versus the authoritarian capitalists. If that doesn’t make a person want to watch a western I’m not sure what would, right? In all seriousness, that approach might be fine if a writer wanted to create some characters and then an allegorical story, but in using Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, it’s not only insulting to them but to the audience member.

Very little true history is left by the time the final product hits your senses for reception; it isn’t as bad as Dirty Little Billy, but it’s still one of the least impressive movies I’ve seen. The problems start with the want-to-be spaghetti western caricatures that everyone must have been directed to portray. Doc and Wyatt are the worst, speaking almost every line through barely moving teeth, with a monotone cadence that just slightly exceeds a whisper. It’s like every line was meant to be delivered as though they just thought of a malevolent plan and needed to keep cool while explaining it.

The absurdities abound, such as Doc winning Kate in a card game with Ike Clanton, or Wyatt telling Doc, seriously not cynically, that “We are bad men”. But on the plus side, I think they did a good job casting Stacey Keach. He has an actual hairlip which was a feature of Doc Holliday’s, even if it was covered up by a mustache. And I really think that Keach did a good job of playing sickly, but not too sickly. As much as I love Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday, he was so darn cool that I almost forget sometimes that he was sick. And in Wyatt Earp Dennis Quaid was so sick that I expected him to shave his hair and tell everyone he was dying of cancer. Both were great performances, and way better movies than Doc, but his coughing fits seemed very well timed and presented, and probably the best done element of this film.

Even with a few notable turns by Stacey Keach this movie is still not worth the time. I finally made myself sit down and watch it just to see if there were any nuggets to take away, and the answer was a resounding no.

One-Eyed Jacks (1961)

Marlon Brando’s first and last directing effort could probably be fairly classified as the beginning of the Revisionist Era, or, if one prefers, as the launching point of the soon-to-come spaghetti westerns. The pace is somewhat slow and plodding, which to some may read as boring, but it is a character driven story with a lot of changing moods.

Right from the start we have two primary characters that could each be the good guy, or could each be the bad guy. We’re not given a lot of, if any, redeeming qualities to assess them by. As the movie goes on, this doesn’t change much. We’re given plenty of reason to think that both the lead and the secondary protagonists are really just selfish a-holes (which is a hallmark of many spaghetti westerns).

This movie isn’t about fighting for justice, or for a small town that’s been wronged by somebody who doesn’t understand the correct way to apply his power. This is a straight up revenge story. It could very well be a precursor to the Good the Bad and the Ugly, to be completely honest. With the Mexican village, the sand swept scenery, and the desperate sweaty faces of the men seeking to kill each other, it strongly carries an aesthetic that became typified in the Spaghetti Westerns and other revisionist era movies.

One thing that is a bit of a stand out in this movie is it’s setting. The majority of the movie takes place on the California coast. This is pretty unusual for a western, but it certainly works well, especially when you see the town on the coastline and the ocean in the background; it really has a pleasant effect. Another bonus was how real the characters felt, primarily the Mexican compatriot of Brando’s. This movie just seemed to lack a lot of the standard characters that we might come to expect from most westerns.

A final note of interest was the small connections to Billy the Kid’s story. I don’t want to give too many significant spoilers, but anyone with an above-average knowledge of the Kid’s story would probably be able to pick up on these things. I wouldn’t go so far as to make the argument that the writer was trying to re-tell Billy’s story, but elements are there for the student of Billy Bonney.

Over all, I really enjoyed this movie and think it’s a great one to check out when you can. It’s almost two and a half hours long, so for me it was the perfect Sunday afternoon flick after a nice bar-b-que .

Dirty Little Billy (1972)

Dirty Little Billy is not a movie I talk about because I want to, but because I feel that if this post can help even one person to not do drugs, then it’s worth the time thinking about it. You see, I do it because I care. I care about the viewer who doesn’t know, I care about Billy the Kid, and I care about the old west. And that’s why I write this post.

This is probably my least favorite western I’ve ever seen; there’s problems all over the place. The lighting is bad, the characters are bad, and it prides itself on being a true look at Billy the Kid. Not to mention simple logistical items that seem ridiculous.

Let’s start with the logistical. In the revisionist era of westerns it became important to show how dirty everything was. Nobody ever swept. Nobody ever dusted. And according to a lot of these movies, people who lived in the 1800’s seemed to think that splattered mud was an attractive look. Dirty Little Billy supports this notion by having Billy and his family arrive in town and proceed to walk straight up a mud sloshed road, going in up to their knees, when they could have easily moved left by about six feet and walked on solid dirt. Clearly the director had them do this for effect, but it was extremely silly watching them struggle through the mud, making a point of getting dirty, when anyone with half a brain would not even alter their course, but begin it on the sensible path.

Almost any scene shot indoors is a challenge to discern. I understand there wasn’t electricity at the time, but if you overcame that by using a modern camera to shoot the film, then you could probably also do the same to find away to allow us to see the indoor scene clearly. I’m not certain, but I’d be willing to wager that this was another effort by the director to show just how dark and dismal the west was, on top of being a mud-hewn mess.

Other than a simpleton named for William Bonney there weren’t really any characters tied to the true life of Billy the Kid. He hero-worships a fella named Goldie and then the story spirals down from there. Since this Billy is so far from the actual Billy the Kid, you could watch it and just consider the name a coincidence, but it still isn’t worth the time. Michael Pollard, who plays Billy in this movie, is a fine actor in a lot of roles (he was great in Roxanne) but he ends up playing the Kid as a half-brained nit wit. If this Billy the Kid was in your high school you automatically know that he would be in the special class, bordering on hanging out with the full on mentally handicapped students. It may sound like a facetious joke, but this a sincere effort to give context. It was bad.

From the movies promotional efforts: A more realistic, based-on-reality, unsensationalistic portrayal of the gritty early years of one of the most famous Wild West outlaws in history, Billy The Kid.  They’re very wrong.