The Fine Art of Tactical Retreat

11:06 am - Terror In A Texas Town (1958)

While the name of the little town Prairie in Texas shows a distinct lack of imagination, what is going on in it is has certain aspects of a fever dream.

Once a peaceful place, Prairie is now on the brink of the special brand of lawlessness the laws of capitalism bring. A certain McNeill (Sebastian Cabot) has somehow finagled himself into possession of the land grants for most of the outlying farms around town, never mind that the so-called squatters have been living there for decades. Now, McNeill wouldn't like to be called unnecessarily cruel, so he pays off the farmers to make them leave and lets his men burn down a farm or two if their owners aren't compliant.

That's not enough to get rid of the core of the local farmers, especially the Swedish immigrant Hansen (Ted Stanhope) and his friend and neighbor Pepe Mirada (Eugene Martin), so McNeill decides that it's necessary to make an example out of someone.

He hires an old acquaintance, the run-down gunman Johnny Crale (Ned Young) to do the deed. Crale himself is at the end of his own line. Psychotic, bitter and nearly made obsolete by the the changing times, he obviously sees McNeill's job as a last chance, but as a last chance to what is never really clear. It could be dying, or it could be getting rich, and I don't think Crale himself knows. The gunman is traveling with his girlfriend Molly (Carol Kelly), who loves him as much as she hates him and herself and would like nothing more than see her man give up on the outlaw business once and for all, but he is never going to listen to her.

Crale kills Hansen without much trouble. The old man tries to defend himself with the harpoon he used in his earlier life as a whaler, but to no avail. Without Crale's knowledge, there were witnesses to the murder. Mirada and his little son have seen everything. They have also found out why it is that McNeill is willing to pay people off instead of just driving them away - there's oil on the land!

Mirada's pregnant wife convinces him to keep his mouth shut about everything he has seen. She prefers to have a living father for her baby.

A week or so later, Hansen's son George (Sterling Hayden) arrives in town. He's just coming to visit his father, but when he hears of the old man's death, and sees how little the sheriff - who is of course owned by McNeill - or the other locals do about the murder, he decides to stay. At first, the inquiries of the somewhat slow seeming stranger don't lead to much, yet his stubbornness and honesty do finally lead him on the right track. McNeill tries to pay him off, but he could as well try to stop a train with his little finger.

In the end, there will be another duel between harpoon and gun.

In an earlier review, I called Joseph H. Lewis a director who had obvious talent, but didn't manage to use that talent well enough to actually make completely satisfying movies with it. After seeing Terror In A Texas Town, his last film, I have to take that back.

Based on a pseudonymous screenplay by the black-listed Dalton Trumbo, Terror is as good as a film in the B-Western sub-genre of the High-Noon-alike gets. As someone who is less than enthusiastic about the original, I'd even say it surpasses High Noon effortlessly. But I would say that, wouldn't I?

Terror removes the whininess and the loud moralizing inherent in the High Noon formula and replaces them with characterization of surprising depth. It's not just that the characters are psychologically sound, which is certainly nice and all, but also potentially boring, it's that they all are highly interesting, dragging some of the more beloved cardboard character types of the Western into the third dimension. The lack of moralizing here is just exceptional, giving a sympathetic view not only of the film's hero, but also of the sadistic monster that is Crale and the Western's favorite victim, "the fallen woman".

Additionally there's the human and decidedly non-racist portrayal of non-Anglo Americans, usually characters at best degraded to comic relief or ignored. You could start to believe America was built by a bunch of immigrants.

All of this is made even better by the fact how just plain peculiar the film dares to be, in small plot details like Crale's non-metaphorical iron fist as well as in bigger ways like its deconstruction of the High Noon formula that is less trying to be cynical than to put the emphasis on the character types who usually don't have a voice.

On the visual side, Lewis applies every camera trick he can afford, using everything from close-up shots of sweating people that prefigure the Spaghetti Western to unusual camera positions to make his film a slightly disorienting experience - at least seen in context of a more typical American B-Western style.

For once, everyone in the cast seems to be in on the sort of film they are doing, and acts as if his or her life depended on it. You could probably criticize Sterling Hayden's Swedish accent, but I don't think that's of too much importance for the big picture.

"The big picture" being this: Terror In A Texas Town is a brilliant, one of a kind film.

10:03 am - Bride of Three Films Make A Post

House of Bugs (2005): Part of a series of short movies based on horror manga by the glorious Kazuo Umezu. This one was directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (whose tone is usually quite the opposite of Umezu's) and tells the story of a broken marriage that climaxes in a metaphorical or not so metaphorical bug transformation by way of Kafka and Rashomon. It is very much a Kurosawa film with his typical subtle aesthetic and the director's usual themes (alienation, the inability to empathize, broken families etc) and therefore quite excellent.

The Bounty Hunter (1954): The story of an infamous bounty hunter played by Randolph Scott coming to a small town to catch three robbers about whom he knows next to nothing and making the whole town more than a little nervous in the process feels a little slight, even though it has its share of darker flourishes. The plot just works out a little too pat, making this most certainly not the best cooperation between director Andre de Toth and actor Randolph Scott. Not that it would be a bad Western, it's just that de Toth and Scott seem to be coasting on their talents instead of straining them.

Dead & Breakfast (2004): A bunch of dweebs on the way to a wedding strand somewhere in Texas. "Comedy" ensues, until the locals get possessed by demons and zombified, which leads to the sort of gory "comedy" that would very much like to see itself standing in the tradition of early Peter Jackson or Sam Raimi, just with the minor drawback that it is about as funny as Bela Lugosi meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. At least I have a new example now when trying to explain the phrase "painfully unfunny". Oh, and the people who compare this to Shaun of the Dead will be taken care of soon, a dark and ancient power promised me.

10:25 am - A Lawless Street (1955)

Calem Ware (Randolph Scott) is the marshal of Medicine Bend, a frontier town just a few steps away from becoming part of actual civilization. As it is now, with the Oregon still a territory instead of a state, and justice still decided by the drawing of a gun, Calem is the only one who truly stands between the town and barbarism.

The aging gunman knows this very well, as he knows that one day one of the outlaws who regularly come to town to better the living legend he has become will kill him. Perhaps it will be someone who is just faster with his gun than the marshal, or it will be Calem's own guilt for all the people he had to kill in the course of his life that will defeat him.

Calem would have to be less tense - and certainly less lonely - if more of the people he is trying to protect would be of help to him, but those who don't hide behind him when trouble arises, are passing the time making bets on his death.

Things come to a climax when Calem learns that some of the good people in town seem to be paying the gunmen who are trying to kill him, for a town without law would be a lot more profitable for them.

At the same time when his estranged wife, the dreadfully untalented showgirl Tally Dickensen (Angela Lansbury) who is still in love with her husband yet can't cope with Calem's dangerous lifestyle or the things that lifestyle does to him, comes to town, the marshal's enemies acquire the services of his old enemy Harley Baskem (Michael Pate). For once, there is someone in town who is just as dangerous as Calem Ware.

When one thinks of great American Western directors, one usually does not think of Joseph H. Lewis. Lewis wasn't a bad director at all, but most of his films are a small yet decisive bit shy of excellence. A Lawless Street is probably as close as Lewis ever came to making a true classic.

Lewis, whose direction style is often a bit pedestrian, here finds a nice and dynamic way to present the film, with some very tensely filmed scenes early on and a lot of intelligently framed shots. Mostly, Lewis is doing his best to emphasize the work of his actors and the strong script.

Seeing how strong most of the actors acquit themselves, this is a excellent decision. Scott gives one of the best performances in a career full of great ones, as always a performance defined at once by humor, a sparseness (not lack, mind you) and nuance of emotion and knowledge of the importance of small gestures that is so typical for him. The bad guys of the film, Michael Pate as Calem's nemesis and Warner Anderson and John Emery as the not so morally upright pillars of community who want the Marshal gone are given a little less to do by the script than Scott, but are doing some impressive acting anyway. The only sore spot in the ensemble is Angela Lansbury, terribly miscast and prone to a shrill melodramatic tone completely at odds with everyone else in the film.

Kenneth Gamet's script is quite successful at talking about the old theme of barbarism versus civilization, while keeping everything character-based and a lot more honest about its characters' inner life than many American western manage to be. Really, how many films of the era or the country do you know in which a marshal and his estranged showgirl wife are discussing divorce? Or in which adultery (by the wife, no less) is something a marriage can survive without anyone committing suicide?

Despite the script's copious strengths, it is the same script that lets the film down in the end. A Lawless Street's conclusion is incredibly hastily handled, quite anticlimactic, of course cursed with a less than believable total Happy End, and very much at odds with the thoughtful consideration it gave its themes until then. It's as if someone had suddenly decided that the careful riffing on (the hateful) High Noon, the nuanced characterization and the comparative subtlety with which the film considered its themes just wasn't good enough anymore and instead opted for his old friend, the sledgehammer.

Which is of course an excellent way to demonstrate the difference between a classic and a near classic. Poor Joseph H. Lewis (unless it was his fault).

04:49 pm - In short: Billy the Kid versus Dracula (1966)

A vampire (John Carradine, in his drunken stupor phase) travels through the American West. When he's hitch-hiking on a stagecoach, an older woman makes the mistake of showing him a photo of her daughter Betty (Melinda Plowman). Obviously, Carradinpire suffers from that old vampiric malaise, the wanting to make any young woman whose photo you see your vampire bride sickness, and "cleverly" arranges an Indian attack on the coach to kill the woman and her traveling companion, whose role as the "long lost relative from the other coast" he's going to assume to get into Betty's knickersfind eternal happiness with the true love of his existence.

It's just too bad that Betty has a fiancee - Billy the Kid (Chuck Courtney), trying to live a new life without violence as a ranch hand, loved by almost every person of authority he meets (if they wouldn't love him, Courtney would have to act, and we really can't have that).

Billy soon enough understands (alright, is told by German immigrants who lost their daughter to Johnny the rubber bat) the truth about the kindly uncle and is most surely not willing to lose his woman to an undead guy with a goatee.

This is William Beaudine's sister movie to Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter. It's just a shame that it is far less entertaining than its sibling. Where the other film wins the hearts and minds of right thinking viewers through copious amounts of glorious wrongness and a grotesque but loveable performance of its lead actress, Billy the Kid's adventures in the supernatural mostly fall flat. The whole vampire business here is realized as rote and boring as possible, never trying to do anything with the genre mash-up potentials of Western and vampire movie. It is most assuredly not improved by Beaudine's flavorless as usual direction, the eventless script or the godawful (in a charmless way) acting.
The film's theoretical star Carradine totters through it as if his vampire tended to only suck the blood of alcoholics, blabbering his lines and giving the same bug-eyed semi-Lugosi stare whenever he is told to emote, thereby reaching the elusive plateau of being so bad that it's just annoying. And yet, he still is the only thing I'd call even remotely memorable about the film. Unless you have never seen a rubber bat before. In this case, you'll also love the rubber bats.

In a sense, it is quite an achievement how painfully boring the film is, still I'd recommend you ignore the siren song of its title or its genealogy and just watch Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter for the tenth time instead. I wish I had.

10:25 am - The Burrowers (2008)

The American frontier, 1861. Two families are attacked, some of them killed, the women kidnapped. Everyone is sure that the deed was done by a group of Sioux from the reservation close by, because killing farmers and kidnapping women as their future wives is what Indians do, right. There's just the small matter of details like the strange, round holes in the vicinity of the farm and the even stranger wounds that killed the farmers - single cuts in their necks - to ignore. A posse consisting of a cavalry troop under the command of a certain Henry Victor (Doug Hutchison) and a few interested private citizens, the experienced John Clay (Clancy Brown) and Will Parcher (William Mapother), as well as Coffey (Karl Geary) who was just about to propose to one of the missing women and Dobie (Galen Hutchinson), the teenage son of the woman Parcher is trying to woo.

The soldiers abduct the first Indian they see and start with the torturing at once. Of course, the poor guy doesn't know much, and without the torturing, he would probably have told them what he knew. The civilians are less than impressed by the way Victor handles the situation, or by the fact that he's obviously a sadistic maniac with a very short fuse. It's not that these aren't violent and hard people, they just don't get off on senseless cruelty like Victor and his men do.

The only thing their captive can tell them is that they are looking for "the burrowers", plainly no Indian tribe anyone has ever heard of. That's no reason for Victor not to want to ride further into the Indian reservation to finally get himself some killing done again. The civilians remain skeptical, even more so after four of Victor's men just disappear while they are on guard duty. For Victor, it's a clear case of desertion. Parcher, Clay and the others don't even bother to tell him of the holes that have appeared around the camp anymore.

Instead, they split from the soldiers and let them go about their business of genocide, while they go and try to find out where following the strange holes will lead them.

Soon after Victor's black cook Callaghan (Sean Patrick Thomas), glad to find a reason to get away from a racist madman like his former boss, has joined them (and no, he's not going to sacrifice his life bravely so that our white heroes can go on), they make a terrible discovery. A girl, paralyzed, conscious and buried alive, bearing the same wound as the dead back home. The man slowly begin to understand that they are not hunting anything human at all.

The Burrowers is a very fine movie, the kind of film that does nearly everything right, marrying the revisionist Western and the horror film so deftly as to make it look easy.

Usually, I try to avoid using words like "gritty", but for once it is the right way to describe a film. From the start, the film strives for the dusty and muddy naturalism, showing the West not necessarily as it was, but very much in a way it really could have been, with all the cruelty and racism this implies. Yet director and writer J.T. Petty mostly (Henry Victor is the exception, and very much the sort of exception you make when you want to make a political point) eschews demonizing his characters as much as glorifying them. Clay and Parcher, for example, are hard men, willing to do most anything to survive, but they aren't cruel, or more violent than is necessary for them. Petty also gets some excellent performances from his actors, some of whom obviously relish the chance to do some real acting this time.

I find it remarkable how well the film fits the basic horror of life on the frontier, where the slightest misunderstanding can lead to the death of someone who just doesn't deserve it, to the even greater horror of the burrowers. As a revisionist Western, it talks openly about the terrors people inflict upon themselves and so needs monsters that are even worse, and made even worse by the way people relate to them.

Besides this, the film is also one of the coolest monster flicks of recent years, utilizing a surprisingly effective mixture of CGI and physical effects. At first, we only get enticing glimpses of the burrowers, which escalate into moments of greater violence and greater visibility, slowly building up to a very grotesque finale.

Speaking of finale, it's been a long time since I have seen a film with an ending that has such a tone of cruel absurdity, which is perfectly fitting for this story.

The Burrowers is a beautiful example of the sort of film I wish more American horror directors would start to make again. A film with adults, about adults, interested in something besides gore without ignoring it completely, intelligent and thoughtful enough without trying to hit the viewer over the head with its own cleverness, very nicely photographed, edited with a sense of craft, but still very much a film inside the genre. Just not one willing to ignore the interesting things one can do within a genre; or, as is the case here, by letting to genres collide.

03:33 pm - El Latigo contra Satanas (1979)

A small Mexican or Guatemalan town way out in the wilderness has more problems than can be fair. If you ask me, living beside a vulcano that is just starting to get active again should be enough trouble for one community. Alas, parallel to the promise of a fiery death, a weird group of halfnaked satanists in spandex trousers holds regular meet-ups in the ruins built on the vulcano. From time to time they ride down into town to attack and burn someone.

An unpleasant mixture of religious fanaticism and plain stupidity runs high, and the less educated part of the town's population has need for a scapegoat - for the vulcanic activity as well as the satanists, which the people take to be demons from hell. Their spokesman, a certain Ramiro (Noe Murayama), finds them a fine scapegoat without problems in the daughter (Yolanda Ochoa, I think) of one of the richer people in town. I'm sure his declaring of her as a witch and the fact that she had refused his love and had escaped his attempts at sexual assault have nothing at all to do with each other. It can't help that she's often acting like a classical oracle either.

Just as the good people of the town are starting to string her up on a tree besides a crossroad, a stranger (Juan Miranda) comes to town. He seems to be your typical snake's oil salesman (if a little bit weirder dressed than most), but when the need arises, he dresses up exactly like Zorro and gives evildoers whatfor with his trusty whip. El Latigo, as he is known when in costume, doesn't take too well to attempts by supersticious nutcakes to murder women, and goes to the rescue.

Rescuing women isn't the real reason El Latigo is in town, though. He is looking for a man (what the realtionship between the two is, is something a certain obtuseness in the movie and my bad Spanish decided to keep as their little secret) who has been murdered by the satanists. Of course, being a masked hero and all, El Latigo isn't going to stand for satanic murders and sacrifices to vulcanos.

Between the evildoers and the supersticious townsfolk he's going to have to whip a lot of people into submission. At least the local priest (Ruben Rojo) turns out to be quite helpful.

As a film about a Zorro variant fighting against a satanic cult, El Latigo contra Satanas wouldn't have needed to do much of interest to find my approval. Director Alfredo B. Crevenna, who has 150 films in his IMDB filmography, seems to have had one of his more ambitious weeks when flying out to Guatemala to film this one, though. Crevenna is keeping the film surprisingly fast-paced, even dynamic.

The action scenes might be a far cry from even a mediocre Shaw Brothers production, but work out quite nicely in the enthusiastic style of old serials, even though someone in postproduction seems to have forgotten to add soundeffects to them. The film even utilizes some classical cliffhanger moments, complete with a certain amount of cheating when it comes to the way it keeps its hero alive.

The true core of the film however are some creatively staged and lighted scenes from the pulpier edge of gothic horror, utilizing a set of moods Mexican popular cinema by 1979 had mostly discarded.

Candles, bava-red and bava-green and various multi-coloured fogs in combination with excellent location shots (if you ignore the unwillingness of the film to stick to one time of day for any given scene) of Guatemalan ruins give the film a unique look I haven't seen much of before.

I was also positively surprised by the acting, especially Murayama and Rojo give very rounded performances, working from a script that is willing to give its characters a little more depth than strictly necessary, making their fate that small but important bit more interesting.

All in all, the movie is an impressive and entertaining mixture of Mexian western, pulp-style adventure and gothic horror I wouldn't have thought the director of La Furia De Los Karatecas had in him.

02:09 pm - The Stranger Gets Mean (1976)

aka Get Mean

The always weirdly grinning and mugging gunman we only know as the Stranger (Tony Anthony) returns. And what a return it is! He is being dragged behind a riderless horse into the dustiest Western ghost town in all of Spain, um, I mean America. There he meets a bunch of people I can only describe as gypsy pirates. They have been waiting for him as the promised hero who shall return their princess Elizabeth (Diana Lorys) back to Spain and help her regain her throne from the invading barbarians. While our dubiously heroic hero is still haggling about the price of his services, a group of black clad cowboys led by a Viking attack. The Stranger disperses these guys pretty fast and it does only take a little line on a map until the he and the princess arrive in Spain. Once there, they witness a bizarre battle between the barbarians (a bunch of people with melee weapons, dressed as Persian, Vikings, traditional Spanish courtiers, or just in the pelts of movie barbarism) and Elizabeth's people (who are white Moors? Spaniards?), wearing either the gypsy pirate style things or movie Moorish clothing circa from the Crusades era, as well as anything else the director thought he could get away with (that is, everything). By all rights, Elizabeth's guys should win, what with them having firearms (and bows) and such, but the barbarians have a secret weapon. It's an early version of a tank in form of a cart carrying four cannons on a turning disk and it makes short work of Elizabeth's army.

Well, so much for the good guys. Afterwards, the leaders of the barbarians go for a little chat with the Stranger and Elizabeth. It turns out that Elizabeth's tendency to tell everyone, even the leaders of her enemies, who she is and the Stranger's helpful explanation of her monetary worth can only lead to trouble. So Elizabeth ends up kidnapped while our hero sees the world hanging from his feet while the barbarians are shooting their cannons at him.

This is where the plot (such as it is) starts to get complicated with a nonsensical series of double crosses between the leaders of the barbarians (Diego-who-dresses-like-Genghis-Khan-and-is-dubbed-with-a-near-impenetrable-accent, The Gay Courtier, and Richard III's number one fan) and the Stranger himself, kidnappings, escapes, and a little questing for a hidden treasure.

Among the further indignities that are visited on our hero are:

• invisible ghosts hitting him and possessing him into imitating wolf howls (very badly, at that)
  
• a black face bomb
  
• people stuffing an apple into his mouth and trying to roast him on a spit
  
• the local semi-lesbian warrior women trying to do him sexual harm until they are distracted by each other's awesomeness

and more insane shit than one could possibly list.

For those among us who thought The Stranger's outing in Japan was weird, Get Mean is a true eye opener. Its glaring and completely conscious ignorance of things like logic, characterization, history (if not time itself) and plain human sanity is bound to show everyone what the word "bonkers" really means. It is surprisingly unmysterious how the film came to pass, though (and yes, I am passing wild speculation based on my intimate knowledge of Italian filmmaking by way of watching way too many Italian films as fact here). You see, director Ferdinando Baldi and his star Tony "Mugging Mug" Anthony promised their producers to make a Western only to find that they didn't have any Western costumes except for the single one that was part of Tony's private wardrobe. Buying or making some was completely out of the question after most of the budget had already been invested in drugs during the script writing phase (a wild party in Baldi's house during which no script was written), but what luck! Baldi still had some moth-eaten rags "borrowed" during his stint as director of peplums and historical adventure films stashed away in his cellar! Nothing was more obvious than to just put them all on random actors and improvise something along the lines of Maciste's adventures in China, just with a gunman instead of Maciste and even less of an idea when exactly the damn thing was meant to take place.

Which brought this film into existence, a real prime piece of what the hell filmmaking that for once is as fun as its elements promise. There was most definitely neither a real script nor a plan nor any sane idea involved, but damn, this thing is moving along with nary a minute that is not filled to the brim with stupid, inappropriate and goofy scenes of inexplicable meaning, be it the indignities inflicted upon our hero or just a mass of dubious details (like the silver spheres which seem to observe the beginning and the end of the film, or our hero's love for the taunting of dead enemies or or or).

This just might be the film the Italian movie industry was made to create. Thanks, God!

02:11 pm - In short: Captain Apache (1971)

Indian US cavalry Captain Apache (who knows if he has a real name, he's played by Lee van Cleef in any case) is sent to the border between America and Mexico to solve the murder of the local contact between Indians (who knows which tribe?) and the US government. The man's last words was the mysterious sounding phrase "April morning". Apache is not the only one bound to find out what that means. There is also the local big man Griffin (Stuart Whitman), the woman of dubious character (Carroll Baker), a freshly crowned Mexican bandit general and various freaks and geeks. All seem to be tangled up in something big and mysterious.

Captain Apache is one of the weirder Euro Western. A British-Spanish co-production, it does its best to look as much as a Spaghetti Western as possible - there's mud, eye-squinting, an obvious lack of personal hygiene, Lee van Cleef, the works.

The film also sports a gloriously silly disregard for logic and sense that would make even the writers of the The Stranger movies proud. I don't think they left any possible bad joke about a Western cliché out.

Fortunately, the actors are game and play the whole mess just short of breaking out in giggles - I've never before seen van Cleef so close to a plain grin (and really, what would you do if you had to wear the absurd leather jacket with fringes and fur collar he sports for large parts of the movie?).

Just add to this mess two outrageously bad songs sung by our lead actor himself and a complete disconnect in dialogue, tone and direction style, and you have yourself a winner.

Winner of what, I'm not sure.

01:23 pm - Coroner Creek (1948)

A stagecoach is robbed by a group of renegade Apaches led by a mysterious white man (George Macready) who does not like witnesses a single bit. So he not only kills all the passengers, but later his gang as well.

Chris Denning (Randolph Scott), a man whose past we know nothing of and whose motives we'll learn just at the end of the movie, tries hard to track down the killer. His only clues are a spotty description and some assumptions about the habits of his prey which turn out to be exactly on the mark.

That's more than enough to keep someone with enough hatred going. After months, Denning finally finds his man. He now goes under the name of Younger Miles and has bought himself quite a position in the fine community of Coroner Creek as the owner of the biggest ranch in the area. Miles has also bought himself a trophy wife in Abbie (Barbara Reed) who is so unlucky in their marriage she has become an alcoholic and his own sheriff (Edgar Buchanan) - incidentally also Abbie's father.

Denning's not the man to just walk up to Miles and shoot him. The hatred has opened a rich vein of cruelty in a basically decent, even nice, man and he decides to first make Miles lose control before he seeks a direct confrontation. He finds a fine way to go about this without even looking for it - Della Harms (Sally Eilers), the owner of the other big ranch in Coroner Creek, and Miles are fighting a low-level war for control which Della is losing. Not surprising, since the female farm owner isn't a schemer without a conscience but a group of gunfighters like Miles.

She desperately needs a new foreman for her farm and Denning is just the man to do the job.

The path to Denning's vengeance is of course paved with the corpses of a lot of other people. Not even the love of hotel owner Kate Hardison (Margeruite Chapman, a competent, intelligent woman in a Western!) can convince Denning to just let the past and whatever Miles has done to him rest.

Coroner Creek is an excellent B-Western whose only real weakness lies in the direction of Ray Enright. It's not that Enright was a bad or sloppy director, he just was more of a craftsman than an artist and has to live with the comparison with someone like Budd Boetticher whose string of darkened films with Randolph Scott are some of the best the genre has to offer.

But I am a little unfair here - Enright might not have been visually inventive, yet it's obvious that he knew a good script and a good actor when he saw them and more or less kept out of their ways to let them do their thing.

And that they did. I shouldn't have to say much about Randolph Scott, seeing that the man was one of the most perfect Western actors on the face of the planet. His portrayal of Chris Denning is note perfect - he is at once a man capable of great compassion yet also capable of despicable cruelty. Scott is rather frightening in some scenes - the scene in which he breaks the trigger finger of one of Miles' goons who earlier did the same to him and the one in which he uses another one of them as a human shield against his boss (who of course shoots anyway) are moments you won't forget soon, if only for the intensity in Scott's gaze.

The rest of the actors does their job equally well putting to rest the bizarre notion of "Western equals bad acting" some people are still supposed to have. Macready's sociopath now gunning for social approval and Marguerite Chapman's woman who can take care of business (the film does not disapprove of this!) do especially fine work.

As the plot description already made clear, this is a rather less naive Western than some might be used to and quite progressive in its notion that vengeance and violence are not necessarily a good answer to violence, a film clearsighted enough to be interested in the effect justified hatred has on the person doing the hating. On the other hand, Kenneth Gamet's script isn't so cynical as to deny the existence of positive human traits as some Spaghetti Westerns would later do.

There is just the last fifteen seconds of the movie for the modern viewer to cope with, a so obvious "make the world all right again for the censor" ending that I can't help but imagine everybody behind the camera smirking cynically, rather like Clint Eastwood in Leone's Dollar trilogy.

If you are at all interested in the American Western in its (often more interesting) B-movie version, this is nearly as good a movie to start with as the films of Andre de Toth or Budd Boetticher.

02:07 pm - Day of the Outlaw (1959)

The film takes place at the beginning of winter in the Old West, in a very small frontier town in Wyoming, right at the End of Trails (I think the mythical qualities of the snowy landscape warrant the use of a mythical term the film itself also uses, although probably without the capitalization). For years, the place has been dominated by the rancher Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan, mixing the mythical dimensions of his character and the way it feels being an actual human being in an incredible performance), who is mainly responsible for the relative peace and stability in the region - he "cleaned" the place with his own gun, more or less.

But in the last year or two, farmers have begun to settle in the place, bringing with them a different notion of civilization and law as well as fences that make Starrett's life more difficult (and in his worldview presumably less free) than it used to be.

Matters aren't helped by the fact Starrett had an affair with Helen Crane (Tina Louise), the wife of the farmers' spokesman Hal Crane (Alan Marshall). She ended the affair and decided to stay with her husband, but seems to love both men, if in different ways. Starrett definitely still loves her and knows he can't have her as long as her husband is alive, giving him one more reason to want to see Crane dead, even if he never would admit this to himself.

Everybody knows that Crane hasn't got a chance in hell in a gunfight against Starrett. The showdown between the rivals comes unexpectedly fast. Or would come, if a gang of bandits wouldn't ride into town right when the shooting is about to start and turn the film into something quite different from what the beginning made me expect.

The bandits have no trouble in disarming the surprised townies - after all, the few armed men around (and the town is so small one has trouble calling it one) were lining up in the saloon to kill each other.

These bandits are of the unpleasant type that would later become dominant in the Spaghetti Western, sadistic maniacs who are more interested in the maiming and raping, but less in the pillaging part of their jobs. Still, they only plan on staying for a day to rest and find treatment for their leader "Captain" Bruhn (Burl Ives, in another great performance, seeming at once sympathetic and the cruel bastard who can keep the kind of men he employs in check), who was wounded in their last business excursion.

Bruhn knows very well that his men are maniacs and keeps them in line by pure force of will. Unfortunately he's so badly wounded the town's only doctor - a veterinarian - doesn't give him much time anymore.

What follows are some of the things you might expect, yet played out with the emphasis not on the moments and concepts you might expect. Starrett and Crane, for example, are not slowly growing to be friends, instead some very subtly done scenes between Starrett and Helen let him take a look at his motives for hating her husband so much and, as the film puts it "not liking what I see".

As already mentioned, much praise has to go to the actors who, while Ryan and Ives are especially impressive, all do some excellent work in showing their inner life more through small gestures than through dialogue.

It is of course quite possible that none of those gestures had made it into the film without director Andre De Toth, whose Western are products of a technically very proficient director without the kind of showoffishness that puts itself before the movie. Day of the Outlaw is a very strictly composed film, full of quiet and slow beauty and a passion that shows itself especially when not much seems to be happening on screen. There is a method to show the psychological dimension of occurrences through the rhythms of editing and the way the camera moves or sometimes doesn't move and De Toth seems to me to be one of this method's main protagonists in the Western movie, showing a confidence in his approach that leaves me in something like awe.

Over the whole running time, I didn't see anything on screen that wasn't supposed to be as I saw it. I don't use the word "perfection", unless I describe something as "perfectly awful", but Day of the Outlaw puts me on the brink of using it.

11:04 am - In short: Last of the Badmen (1967)

The weirdly named Kitosch (George Hilton) works as a ranchhand for a certain Don Jaime (Eduardo Fajardo) on a farm close to the Mexican border. His real specialty aren't cows; he rather has a thing for married women. Don Jaime takes this mostly with good cheer and lots of lashings of Kitosch's backside. Kitosch himself seems to be perfectly alright with this kind of treatment. Things change when Don Jaime finds his whipping boy in a, well, let's say problematic situation with the Don's own wife (Pamela Tudor). This time the Don isn't quite as amused by Kitosch's antics, which are for once not what they look like, and decides that branding the cowboy's ass with his brand is a fitting penalty.

After this, Kitosch doesn't really want to stay on the ranch anymore (what a surprise). Alas Don Jaime doesn't take kindly to Kitosch's wish for a change of employer and does his worst to make the man stay.

After some minor cat and mouse games and severe beatings, Kitosch escapes, only to get arrested by the corrupt Sheriff of the next village.

There's a nice rope already waiting for him, when Black Tracy (Frank Wolff) - an infamous bandit and killer - comes to town and has his own little run-in with the Sheriff and his men during which Kitosch saves his life.

A sort of friendship develops between the men and soon both are robbing gold and taking revenge on some friends of Tracy's who once betrayed him.

The longer they are together, the more obvious it becomes (even to the somewhat slow Kitosch) that Tracy is a psychopath, a sadist and an epileptic (which Kitosch finds worse than his friends other problems). Even worse: Tracy is not what I would call a dependable friend.

It doesn't take long until the rather less bloodthirsty Kitosch and Tracy come to blows. In the end, only one of them can survive.

One shouldn't underestimate the ability of a typical Italian journeyman filmmaker like Nando Cicero to make a damn good film when the possibility shows itself.

His direction of Last of the Badmen certainly isn't flashy or all that creative, but he does quite a nice job in letting a well written script do its thing.

An added bonus are the fine performances of Hilton (who is a much more believable gunman than I had expected) and Wolff that really let the film become a fine exploration of moral shades of gray (of course one of the big themes of the Spaghetti Western).

Current Mood: sleepy

02:30 pm - In short: Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)

A stranger comes to the Old Western town of Nevada (at least that's what the subtitles tell us the Japanese town sign says). He is as Japanese as everyone around him, but do not be afraid, person too dumb to read sub-titles! He and everyone else (even the cameoing Quentin Tarantino) speaks English, sort of. Most of the time it's even comprehensible.

Nevada the town has a problem, well make that two problems, in form of two hostile clans, the Genji (aka "The Red") and the Heitei (aka "The White"), both graced with leaders madder than the proverbial hatter, both with an unhealthy love for color-coded Western/Mad Max chic. These groups are both on the lookout for a legendary gold treasure that is said to be hidden somewhere in the area.

But we all know what happens when a lone stranger rides into a town like this, so there's no need for me to tell you.

I don't know how Takashi Miike does this stuff, but he does. What should by all rights be a silly, badly tied together knot of clichés, played by actors who had to learn their dialogue phonetically, turns out to be one of Miike's best films.

Sukiyaki Western Django is as much a homage to the Italian Western as it is a loving parody (sometimes even critique) of its clichés and blind spots. It is one of the films that shows so much love for its chosen genre one has to have a heart of stone not to love the film back for it. Every element of the films of the two Sergios (Leone and Corbucci) is lovingly reproduced, sometimes to be twisted, sometimes to be broken and sometimes to be laughed at; often all three things at once. Amazingly, most of those elements suddenly feel new and vibrant again when they are used by someone from a very different culture than they initially came from. In this way, Miike does with the Italian Western what the Italian Western did with the American Western; looking at things from a perspective they haven't been looked at from in quite this way (the influence Chanbara and Italian Western had on each other notwithstanding).

Of course the film is also extremely silly and loose, while still keeping more coherence than Miike sometimes bothers with.

One of the most loveable aspects of Miike's work for me has always been his ability to be at once absurd, gruesome, silly, cliched and emotionally poignant; Sukiyaki Western Django is no exception.

Plus, there's lots of shooting, you know.

Current Mood: sleepy

10:10 pm - The Horror!? 78: Jesse James meets Frankenstein's Daughter (1966)

Jesse James we understand
Has killed many a man
He robbed the union trains
He stole from the rich
And gave to the poor
He'd a hand and a heart
And a brain

A small village somewhere at the border to Mexico is slowly turning into a ghost town. Only an older pair and their daughter Juanita (Estelita Rodriguez) still live there in the hope their son might still come back from the castle of Maria Frankenstein (Narda Onyx) and her brother Rudolf (Steven Geray). But word gets down to them, that their son, too, died of "a highly infectious illness" the doctors Frankenstein weren't able to cure.

While the Lopez flee from town, we learn that the poor guy was the victim of Maria's continuation of her grandfather's work (Jesse James meets Frankenstein's Granddaughter wouldn't have been an acceptable title, it seems) of implanting an artificial brain in a fine new body. Unknown to her, her brother slyly sabotages her experiments by injecting the subjects with poison (from a bottle with a big white skull and crossbones the good woman must be blind not to see). So she thinks the real problem have to be her victims subjects, as "mere children" completely inferior to "big, strong man". She needs "a real brute".

Soon, she will find one, since at the same time Jesse James (John Lupton) and his partner Hank Tracy (Cal Bolder) - a big, strong man - are learning some sad truths about the life of an outlaw - people want to kill you, some, like Lonny Curry (Rayford Barnes), a traitorous member of the Wild Bunch will even betray you to get on the good side of the law.

Jesse and Hank barely escape from Curry's trap, but not before Hank receives a grievous wound.

While they are on the look-out for a place to hide and a doctor, they meet the Lopez family. Juanita instantly falls for Jesse's expressionless face and his manly mustache and agrees to lead the men to the Frankenstein estate (without a word about possible dangers, but oh well).

There, they make Maria Frankenstein very happy - not only does she get the big, strong man she always wanted to play with, but also the hope to make Jesse her partner, when she will finally build an empire with the help of an army of one not exactly bulletproof creature.

At least her experiment succeeds and Hank, whose new brain makes him her obedient slave, can take to his new role in life, as well as his new name - Igor.

I can't possibly imagine why the good Doctor doesn't let him wear a shirt.

I think it is possible that I discovered a slight sado-masochistic subtext in the film. Could it be possible?

Anyway, I wasn't aware at all that films that looked and felt so very much like classic Poverty Row movies were still made in 1966. Well, director William "One-Shot" Beaudine had made quite a lot of films on poverty row, and I can't say he had learned anything since then.

But when you're talking about a film depicting the meeting of Jesse James and Lady Frankenstein, this isn't such a bad thing. Beaudine obviously knew a lot about letting his actors do their worst - the male actors, especially our hero, of course, are as wooden as they get, while our female leads (glorious, glorious, evil dominatrix-scientist Narda Onyx!) are completely over the top in each and every moment.

You can't do anything but love a film where the mad genius is a woman who rechristens her servant Igor, talks her own brother into subservience, and rants and casts melodramatic looks around permanently.

All of this is obviously terribly silly, but at the time so...beautiful you just have to love the movie and its true heroine.

Darling of the Day:

"You are no longer Hank Tracy! You are now - Igor! Do you understand? Igor! That is how you will be known! I am Maria Frankenstein! As I think, you will think! We are one! I will command, you will obey! You will live as long as I will it! You will die when I command it! Remember, you are always under my control! You are now Igor! I command you to arise! Igor! I am Maria Frankenstein! I created you! I created you! I command you to get up! Get up, Igor!"

Current Mood: amused

12:48 am - The Science!? 08: Radio Ranch (1940)

Gene Autry (playing himself) is quite brilliant in making enemies. Surprisingly, the people who hate him in this film aren't disgusted by the stupidity of his songs, but have problems with the location of his Radio Ranch, his brand new broadcasting center and a kind of predecessor of Michael Jackson's Neverland. Firstly there are a shady scientist and his henchmen, who are searching for a huge radio deposit and the ruins of the underground civilization of Mu, and won't even stop at framing Autry for the murder of his two main sidekicks' (he has a whole horde) father. Secondly there is the still very much alive underground city of Murania and its elite troop, the Thunder Riders. They want to kill Autry because of his immense popularity that draws the eyes of the world on their home. And nobody would care if they killed him!
Oh well. Radio Ranch is the movie cut of the 1935 serial The Phantom Empire. Very typical serial stuff and relatively fun thanks to its wacky concept.
Your enjoyment will depend on your tolerance for really bad country music. We are not talking Hank Williams here, to be sure, more the Western brother to bad Vaudeville.
Autry is the film's biggest problem anyway. His acting is not just bad, he is also incredibly uncharismatic, making a less than convincing two-fisted hero.

Current Mood: blah

04:51 pm - Django (1966)

Poor Sergio Corbucci was always standing in the shadow of that other Sergio, who happened to be at his best when making western too. And I can see why. Corbucci's films always looked a lot cheaper, not necessarily in a bad way, but in the kind of way mainstream critics can't cope with: sound stages that look like sound stages, plots that aren't stolen from Kurosawa, instead from the B-western next door, women that are a little more complex than Leone's rape fodder, actual compassion for human beings. And show me an ending more heartbreaking and heartbroken than that of Il Grande Silencio.
I think in Corbucci's greater compassion with his characters lies their higher emotional resonance for me: Where Leone's (and of course he was a great director who made great movies) characters are more or less part of the scenery, Corbucci's are (slightly cardboardy) people. And I never cry for shrubs.

( People. Guns. Dust. )

05:36 pm - The Living Coffin

I very much wanted to like this film, but except for very few atmospheric shots near the beginning, there's not much to like here.
It's a cross between the kind of western in which the hero's horse is billed just slightly below the hero himself and Mexican gothic horror, made hardly watchable by an extremely unmysterious mystery plot and the never helpful tendency to explain everything supernatural away with stupid "natural explanations". Things like that drain the fun out of everything.
And as if this wasn't bad enough, the movie we have to endure a hero so clean-cut that a typical Gene Autry character would be a decadent monstrosity next to him and the kind of OCR (Odious Comic Relief, for the uninitiated) that just isn't excusable. Further features are sloooooow paaaaaaciiiiing and some sub-standard action scenes (even for 1958). So it isn't much as a serious movie and most of the time just not trashy enough to be funny.
Big exception and personal favorite is when our hero waddles into a swamp and is rescued by a well thrown rope. Thrown by his horse, that is.
Fortunately there are better movies about the Weeping/Crying Woman to see. 

Darling of the Day (so early in the film that you are still looking forward to nice gothic horror):
"The unburied wander through the dark forests and the only way to get them away from the house where they died is piercing a clock with a knife on the hour of their dead."

Current Mood: lazy