"The old masters -- by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford."
-- Orson Welles, on which directors he most admired

A few years ago at GenCon SoCal, I was asked by someone (ptevis? macklinr?) to provide a basic "Westerns 101" list; the Westerns you needed to have seen in order to have done the reading. After the show, I wrote it up in an email, as the tenor of our conversation may have left us prone to ethylated amnesia on this, and other, topics. Ever since, I've had to go back and fish through my emails if I wanted to reference that question, so here it is, for my convenience and the edification of the interested, in the permanent glory that is an LJ post.

The Four Gospels:

High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952)
Shane (George Stevens, 1953)
The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)

The Two Commentaries:

Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks' 1959 response to High Noon)
Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood's 1992 response to Shane)

The Two Heresies:

The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)
The Outlaw Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood, 1976)

The Epistle From The Virtuous Pagan Samurai:

The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960)

The Weird, Hallucinatory Apocalypse:

The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1967)

Note: This is not the Ten Best Westerns of All Time, although there is a good deal of overlap. This is a primer on the Western as art and myth. Advanced students will likely scoff good-naturedly or nitpick assiduously, as advanced students will when seeing an introductory curriculum in any subject.

So to celebrate my birthday yesterday, I went up to the North Side and ate pho and saw Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django, a hugely enjoyable mashup of chambara and spaghetti-Western films into an explosion of weird, postmodern spectacle that at times looks more like Baz Luhrman than Takashi Miike, with costumes blending designer post-apocalyptic, 1970s-era Western, and Harajuku.

The movie concerns the war of the Heike (Taira) and Genji (Minamoto) clans, but the characters often refer to it as the War of the Roses, and the head of the Heike clan even renames himself "Henry". It's set in "Nevada," the subtitles explain, as they show the Japanese lettering on the wind-eroded Western sign over the town. The Reds and Whites have two giant Japanese tea-houses as headquarters, in the middle of a Western town straight outta Don Siegel.

The movie itself sets you up; almost the first line of dialogue after the credits (there's an extended tribute to the sound-stage Western tradition at the beginning, starring Quentin Tarantino) is something like "Best not get any ideas about playing Yojimbo on us, man." A sloppy, freewheeling remake of Yojimbo (out of Fistful of Dollars) immediately ensues, with occasional thefts from (or nods to) Corbucci's original Django among other movies.

But is it actually any good? This is the question posed by really great mashups like this that are, nonetheless, magpie nests or Frankenstein art: for example, the Venture Brothers. Even the crummiest spaghetti-Western knockoff, or cheesiest pop song, or lamest piece of French Academy historical painting, is saying something. Are mashups saying anything, or are they just commenting "I like Sergio Leone and samurai," or "Hey, 'Genie in a Bottle' has the same beat as a Strokes song." And where is the line -- is Kill Bill a mashup, or a reinterpretation? Is Grindhouse a mashup, or a tribute, or just cynical exploitation? And who's to say that cynical exploitation can't be art -- someone out there was moved by Monkees songs, after all, and I can attest to the saving power of the Sex Pistols. On a slightly more elevated note, does anyone really think that Shakespeare cared as much about The Merry Wives of Windsor, a ground-out Falstaff sequel to order, as he did about Henry IV, Part Two, in which Falstaff achieves uttermost heights of drama? Is there a difference between Falstaff and Django? I don't know. I know that I believe that Art comes from somewhere, and can come out in the oddest places. But I think we need (at least) two different kinds of awesome, to differentiate Django from "Django," and Jonny Quest from Venture Brothers, even though (or especially because) Venture Brothers is way more awesome than Jonny Quest.

I'm not sure the concept of "spoilers" applies to 3:10 to Yuma. If I tell you, "Hey, that milk's gone bad," and you drink it anyway, did I spoil it for you? If I tell you, "This movie was scripted by the gifted team behind 2 Fast 2 Furious," doesn't that warn you that the script will insult you on every level, from narrative to plot to motivation to moral content? How is that less spoiler-y than just telling you what I mean by my title above? And I'm not even going to get to moral content in this piece, because mollpeartree has covered it so well in her review, which I have convinced her to leave unlocked because it is just that good.

And yet, us conservatives, we conserve, even if it makes no sense, so the explanation of all this is:

( Behind the cut )

The really terribly unfair thing about it is that in order to appreciate what a tremendous job of physical acting Russell Crowe does throughout, you pretty much have to see the original 1957 3:10 to Yuma so that you can recognize Crowe's awesome assumption of Glenn Ford's carriage, gait, and sheer physicality. But of course, if you've seen the (entirely unexceptional) original, you will also know exactly why you should reject this film and all its works. You'll also recognize every good line and shot in the script. (It was hilarious to hear the whole theater go "oh" and cheer at Halsted Welles' 50-year-old lines, which for all I know came right from the original Elmore Leonard short story.)

And it's really irritating to me because you know that the only reason this movie got green-lit is that somebody somewhere in Columbia Pictures just really, really likes Westerns, because God knows they don't make money. But whoever that wonderful person is, they either haven't seen the original, or they haven't seen this one -- or, terrifyingly, they've managed to become illiterate in a visual medium. (I'm inclined to be more charitable to reviewers who like the movie -- movie reviewers should love Westerns, and such love can make you overlook the most godawful problems. Cf: Anyone who watches SF.)

This movie does have a decent batch of other acting, especially a standout Peter Fonda as the Pinkerton bounty hunter Byron Mackelroy, Alan Tudyk (yay) as "Doc Wash," and Dallas Roberts doing his best-ever Val Kilmer impression as Butterfield. James Mangold's direction is uninspired, but so was Delmer Daves' original; cinematographer Phedon Papamichael shoots the green-and-rust Old West beautifully, albeit in a way that makes nonsense of the presumed drought the region suffers under in the movie. And Marco Beltrami's Morricone-esque score clangs away enthusiastically at all the right, and many of the wrong, places -- it's the musical equivalent of a British actor in a bad movie.

A final genre-form note: The original is interesting not just for Glenn Ford's acting, but for being a kind of revisionist Western in that it ends with the hero reconciled with not just society but Nature Herself. Almost Biblical in a way. That would make this version almost Dianetical.

* Many thanks to kaynorr for gifting me with the new King Kong DVD. The movie looks great in its restored condition, and the documentary on the life of Merian C. Cooper is just gobsmacking. Guy fought in three wars, invented the "nature movie," and was instrumental in the development of Technicolor and wide-screen film. Plus running Pan Am. He loved the airplanes -- his cameo role in King Kong is as the pilot of the plane that brings Kong down. Oh, and he *also* produced the second-greatest movie of all time, The Searchers.

* And speaking of The Searchers, is there some sort of rights problem holding up a Criterion DVD? Or is Warner just holding off for the 50th anniversary before they release a worthy version? Right now, I could buy it on bare-bones DVD for $10, but that's like buying William Blake in Wordsworth Classic reprint. I understand the laserdisc had a bunch of good stuff on it, and there was a terrific Nick Redman documentary, A Turning of the Earth: John Ford, John Wayne, and the Searchers that his_regard and I saw in the theater that would make a dandy feature on a good DVD.

* TCM, meanwhile, showed a very interesting documentary on underrated Western director Budd Boetticher last night; worth checking out, as are Boetticher's Randolph Scott Westerns in general.

* I have only just now read any of Diana Wynn Jones' Chrestomanci series. Man, what my ten-year-old self missed! Still great fun, too. Possibly something for the Genius Niece next Christmas.

* And in a development of particular interest for mearls, Steve Kenson, and Patrick Kapera, my new "Best of Breed OGL Corebook" Out of the Box column is up.

* Off to make burritos, and then to write my Christmas "Suppressed Transmission" -- A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Perhaps I am being irrational about this.

Today marked the beginning of the University of Chicago's Doc Films Wednesday series, The Revisionist Western. The first film, as you can tell by following the given link, was Shane.

This is not unlike going to a lecture series on "The Heretical Gospels," and being presented with the Gospel According to St. Luke. Shane is, as I have been saying (apparently once too often) to the long-suffering mollpeartree and jovianconsensus, if anything, "visionist." It's one of the three or four clearest examples of the Ideal Type of the Western. A similar argument could, and in fact, will, be made for the October 29 film in the series, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which is, essentially, "Westerns 101" for the new viewer. I have been heard to make similar noises regarding Clint Eastwood's The Unforgiven, which for years served as my touchstone for film critics -- if they referred to The Unforgiven as "revisionist," they were idiots.

Perhaps that is too harsh. Such critics may be wise in the ways of integral calculus or tax preparation or combine repair, but as guides to film they were and are useless. Look, this is not a hard art form. I consider myself capable of intelligent critical discussion of five art forms: architecture, comics, the horror novel, roleplaying games, and the Western film. I listed those in order of decreasing complexity. We're not talking about a hieratic mode like porcelain tinting, or a completely foreign one like Javanese shadow plays, or a deliberately occulted one like post-dadaist modern art. For me, much of the genius of the Western is its clarity, its accessibility, its purely demotic origins. For God's sake, even the French seem to understand it.

The Western is, and has been since before its birth, about the essential conflict inherent in the following axioms: You must pick up the gun to defend civilization against barbarism. Those who pick up the gun are barbarians.

A truly revisionist Western would either question the values or the very existence of civilization (as The Outlaw Josey Wales, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly do, respectively), endorse pacifism as the way to defeat barbarism (no major example that I can think of within the Western genre), exalt the gunman within civilization (which is the usual resort of the action movie, the cheap and pathetic heir to the Western), or exalt barbarism (as Dances With Wolves tried to, but failed by simply reversing the standard "sides" without reversing the core Western values). However, even such a "revisionist" treatment of the genre winds up paying tribute to the fallen God -- both of the examples I mentioned earlier do, as does The Wild Bunch, another one of the few actually "revisionist Westerns" in the upcoming series -- and defining itself against the Standard Western John Ford Template.

John Ford, by the way, did not invent the template; I was amazed at the degree to which it sprang full blown from the dime novels, in such films as The Toll Gate (made in 1919). James Fenimore Cooper may have invented it, but I'm not sure I want to read that much Cooper. The Greek myths have some of it (the outsider hero, who usually defeats Chaos by brawn, but cannot reap the fruit of his victory), but being premodern, don't offer the choice that the Western does. Or it might have actually sprung from the real, live, West -- Wyatt Earp famously shot nobody until the O.K. Corral gunfight (which was triggered by his brother's enforcement of Tombstone's gun control ordinances), and once he went "vigilante" saw his career destroyed.

I'm very glad Doc is running this series; Doc Films is one of the best reasons to live in Hyde Park, and God knows jovianconsensus can only benefit from this intensive course. But is it too much to ask that a film group know anything, at all, about the films they show?