Author Topic: Once Upon a March in the West - 2021  (Read 10068 times)

Dave the Necrobumper

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Re: Once Upon a March in the West - 2021
« Reply #60 on: March 09, 2021, 03:36:27 AM »
"Someone who always looks and acts like his hobby is turning the horses he rides into jerky" is a great line. Brought a big smile to my face as I read it.

smirnoff

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Re: Once Upon a March in the West - 2021
« Reply #61 on: March 10, 2021, 06:58:15 AM »
Monte Walsh (2003)

I'm not quite as enthusiastic about this one. Though it has the qualities you mentioned such as it's unique perspective on cowboy life in a world beginning to undergo industrialization, and I did appreciate that, it seemed to lack some emotional heft for me. It's hard to say quite why. The tone stays on the light side. The action is a swashbuckling romp and the banter is only sharp enough to cause bruising and not bullet holes.

It is a film in a tough spot I think. I like the story it's trying to tell (the dying of the cowboy way of life, and old cowboys trying to ride out the clock), because I think it's ripe with potential for good melancholy bittersweet scenes. But the film feels pressured to "entertain". It creates scenarios where these cheeky old timers can have a rowdy but safe time... feed Monte some easy wins and get him some old-timer badass credibility. I came away from it feeling similar to watching Space Cowboys. An excuse to have some geezers crack wise and show they still got it.

It's tough... they had to inject story, I get that. It's not a doc. A person ought to watch Sweetgrass from 2009 if "last ride of the american cowboy" is their primary interest. But this is Monte's story, so more has got to happen than just a trip to Canada and back again with long takes of a grazing herd and unscripted musings.

The weakness of the "villain" is partly responsible. It gives a unlikable face to the pressures which Monte as a cowboy is facing, but that unlikability is a distraction from the truth of Monte's situation. If Monte were confronted with a respectable and respectful person, he would be forced to deal with economic realities instead of simply rebelling against a man. And that confrontation presents much more difficult questions, which might be more poignant to the viewer. It's romantic that monte gets to ride off into the sunset without us having to ever see him face his decline, but that reality is still coming for him.

This story could be a metaphor for the modern day truck driver, given the approaching reality of self-driving trucks. A whole nation of drivers will face diminishing work and wages because their skills simply won't be needed any longer. Monte Walsh could be a bittersweet cautionary tale which might speak to that situation.

Monte briefly entertains the idea of a career change. To get into show business, but it's too bitter a pill to swallow. Too humiliating. Morally distasteful. It makes me think back to the scenes in Shawshank Redemption of Red or Brooks working in a grocery store. It's hard, it's exhausting, they are overwhelmed. Those scenes are so powerful. They lived so long one way, and it's too much for them trying to adapt. Monte may not have been in prison, but the difficulty of a person having to adapt to change is still a thing many will face. Are we willing to just let that situation play itself out? How many will choose Brooks' path?

The film pushes the idea of destiny. That Monte can't change who he is. That it's something almost primal, as if he were born to be a cowboy. It presents the idea that his not wanting to get into show business isn't really even a choice, so much as a barrier of nature. It's more romance... the idea that a person can be so born to a thing. It's not bad to want to identify as what you do, and to be good at that thing. But there's no law of nature that supports it... there's just the unpleasant truth that change is tough. That starting over is humbling. It's not wrong choosing not to do it, but it's not necessarily right of the film to celebrate eschewing it either. That again felt like too easy a win for Monte.
« Last Edit: March 10, 2021, 07:01:26 AM by smirnoff »

1SO

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Re: Once Upon a March in the West - 2021
« Reply #62 on: March 10, 2021, 11:45:59 PM »
Monte Walsh (2003)

I can agree with these criticisms, though I’d say this story walks a very fine line of being a Western about the decline of the West without having the tone of a funeral. Monte Walsh is one of the last of his kind, so do we want to spend two hours watching progress slowly chip away at him (glass half empty) or watch those qualities that make him and his endangered species worth remembering (glass half full). You want more melancholy, and the movie could probably benefit from more of it, but I’m okay that it leaned more into rowdy adventure.

The suicide stays in my mind, mainly because it's oddly toned for a moment where someone decides death is best. It’s an energetic moment and the other cowboys look on almost jealous. It’s easy to be judgmental about the scene, but the way everyone reacts to it feels right for the characters.

You suggest a desire for Monte to realize what’s coming, perhaps be more practical about it, but I think we follow him because of his living in denial. Even his relationship with Countess is part of this fairy tale life he’s created, he uses mischief as distraction. It’s what drives him to never change, while everyone around him tries to. They often have trouble or outright fail, which for Monte supports his perspective

Corndog

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Re: Once Upon a March in the West - 2021
« Reply #63 on: March 12, 2021, 02:35:19 PM »
Criterion Channel has curated a month of Black Westerns. I haven't seen any, but I found it interesting and thought I'd bring it here for those subscribed and interested.
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Eric/E.T.

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Re: Once Upon a March in the West - 2021
« Reply #64 on: March 12, 2021, 02:51:10 PM »
Criterion Channel has curated a month of Black Westerns. I haven't seen any, but I found it interesting and thought I'd bring it here for those subscribed and interested.

Subscribed and interested. If only they had a curated lists of westerns directed by indigenous people, that'd be great, too!

The Learning Tree is in here, which doesn't quite strike me as a western, is it just being 1920's Kansas that allows it to be labeled that way? Doesn't feel very frontier-sy. I dunno. I've seen that and Rosewood, the rest of the list is new to me. Buck and The Preacher will probably be my first from that list.
A witty saying proves nothing. - Voltaire

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Re: Once Upon a March in the West - 2021
« Reply #65 on: March 12, 2021, 05:29:38 PM »
Posse is a good inclusion, though mileage will vary. It’s all style and energy with a very 90s cast that never thought they’d ever get to touch a Western.

The Skin Game is a major disappointment.

MartinTeller

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Re: Once Upon a March in the West - 2021
« Reply #66 on: March 12, 2021, 05:40:21 PM »
Buck and the Preacher is pretty great. Ruby Dee!

Eric/E.T.

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Re: Once Upon a March in the West - 2021
« Reply #67 on: March 12, 2021, 11:59:36 PM »
Sooooo, I saw Buck and the Preacher.

Maybe since I honestly hadn't watched many westerns in my life prior to last year, and have been taking on a lot of greats over the last 12 months, I'm taking the masters and masterpieces of the genre for granted. Save the white-washing of the frontier for a second, and we are talking about directors like Ford, Leone, Hawks, etc., utilizing all of the daunting scenery of the West and putting together perfect sets for their pictures. Buck and the Preacher switched directors to Sidney Poitier after the initial results were bad, so maybe he salvaged this from being a wreck, but to me it looks like a TV movie with bad character acting nearly across the board. Only Poitier and Ruby Dee seemed really game; Belafonte is some awful cartoon character, his Preacher so grating, talk about chewing scenery, and every one of the white characters seems trapped in one western trope or another. The visual cheapness of this film was the thing that bugged me most about it. It's cut coherently enough, but a lot of the gun fighting is mediocre, let's hide around this rock, stupid guy comes around a corner, jump out and smoke him kind of thing. After watching Charles Burnett perfectly film a $10,000 slice of life in Watts, I'd only wished Poitier and his crew had 1/100th of the vision, really had any ideas of how they wanted to use the space in which they filmed, because thematically, this is such a vital piece. You have a story probably a lot of people don't know or hear about the Black people that headed west after slavery was abolished to truly be good and free, a group called Exodusters. It's not a story I can really say I know, so I'm happy to have encountered this film just for that. You also have a coalition between the indigenous people and Black people that, while it certainly begins quid pro quo in nature, ends up being about solidarity in the end. And it's not about finding the redeemable white man. There is only one, and we'll just say he's not central to the production. In this regard, everything is so lined-up for me, this is what I want to see, minorities telling vital stories that everyone should know. But it still has to be good cinema. To me, this is not.
A witty saying proves nothing. - Voltaire

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Re: Once Upon a March in the West - 2021
« Reply #68 on: March 14, 2021, 09:58:01 PM »

Written & Directed by Burt Kennedy




Young Billy Young (1969)
“Let me give you some advice. The next time you have a job for a boy,
don't send for a man. And don't you ever send for this man.”

Been reading up on Burt Kennedy, who wrote nearly every western directed by Budd Boetticher. Some considered Kennedy the finest writer in the genre at the time, with a stripped-down simplicity and leads with a moral code compared to Jean-Pierre Melville, especially Le Samourai. When the projects didn’t work, it was usually because nothing was elevating the story, making everything seem too simplistic, dumbed down. As a director, his two biggest hits weren’t written by him. 1967’s The War Wagon had the star power of John Wayne AND Kirk Douglas and 1969’s Support Your Local Sheriff!, a clever and witty crowd-pleaser. Kennedy had three releases in 1969. I just wrote about The Good Guys and the Bad Guys. This is the one that suffers in comparison.

It’s certainly not a bad movie. It’s got Robert Mitchum playing a well-seasoned pro who waits for others to figure out what he finds obvious if it gives him a laugh. (In the screenshot above, he enjoys his coffee while Billy’s mule slowly sinks into the soft mud.) Robert Walker Jr. is fine as Billy, though this isn’t his film. This is one of those plots that needed something to support the minimalism besides long sequences of people travelling. Angie Dickinson also stars, but most of her scenes involves either changing clothes, taking a bath or dancing in the saloon.
RATING: ★ ★ ½



Welcome to Hard Times (1967)
”We’ve got a well and a cemetery. That’s a beginning.”

Adapting a novel by E.L. Doctorow, this is an unusual Western with a lot of potential, but Kennedy’s direction fails him so completely you might think it was either his first film or that he was given no money. (It even looks like a murky exploitation film, and I watched it in HD.) Story is about a bare-bones town, the psychopath (Aldo Ray) who rides in to drink, kill (people and horses), rape and ultimately burn everything to the ground, and the Mayor (Henry Fonda) who encourages everyone to not take action, and ultimately stick around even though it's certain the psycho will return one day.

This could be an interesting take on masculinity and the taming of the wild west, but the beginning rampage is unpleasant and the stranger’s violent actions are so relentlessly grim it becomes comical. A terrific supporting cast, including Warren Oates, Lon Chaney Jr., Janice Rule, Elisha Cook Jr. and Keenan Wynn, but the only performance worth mention is Edgar Buchanan in a genuinely funny scene as a representative of the territory making notes of the town’s assets and handing out government jobs. Even star Henry Fonda seems to be keeping his head down, hoping you won’t notice he’s here.
RATING: ★ ★

Sandy

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Re: Once Upon a March in the West - 2021
« Reply #69 on: March 16, 2021, 12:35:24 AM »