Howard Hawks’ western is competent, light, entertaining, and currently on MAX. The film also sports a few surprises, the most enjoyable of which is the performance of Dean Martin as the shaky alcoholic deputy trying to go cold turkey. It’s a hell of a dark and moving turn from a guy who you normally think is all easy-breezy, no heavy lifting.

Other notes.

1) If you have Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson in a movie, they’re going to sing, and while it’s a little bit clunky when they do, the tunes are still a lot of fun. It would’ve been better if they just had Nelson playing guitar and Martin and Nelson singing together in the live shoot, but I presume the sound obstacles were too great, so they used a studio track and lip-synched instead. The dissonance between the music and the normal soundtrack is dramatic, but I imagine audiences in 1959 didn’t give two hoots.

2) I laud Martin’s performance, but Nelson is pretty damn good too as a youthful medium cool gun hand. He’s not asked to do much, but what tasks are given, he fulfills well.

3) Wayne made the picture in part as a rebuttal to the more cynical High Noon. Per Wayne, “A whole city of people that have come across the plains and suffered all kinds of hardships are suddenly afraid to help out a sheriff because three men are coming into the town that are tough. I don’t think that ever happens in the United States.”

4) Other than The Quiet Man, this is the only film I can remember where John Wayne is a romantic lead. It half works. Wayne smartly plays flummoxed, and Angie Dickinson’s magnetic performance nearly carries the day (when she kisses Wayne the first time, and he is stunned, they kiss again, and she says to him, “it’s even better when two people do it”).  Romance works a little better in The Quiet Man, because Wayne was not asked to woo Maureen O’Hara so much tame her, an endeavor that seemed a lot like breaking a colt.

5) If my recollection is correct, Kevin Spacey modeled his performance in L.A. Confidential on Martin’s here. You can see it. 

6) Trigger warning. Back to Angie Dickinson – va va voom! 

My father introduced me to The Magnificent Seven when I was 7 years old.  We were channel flipping, and we sat back on his big red sectional and settled in with a bowl of candy corn and circus peanuts.  He told me the music was Elmer Bernstein doing Aaron Copland (he used to wake me and my brother up with “Fanfare for the Common Man” blasting from the hi-fi speaker set tailored made for a newly divorced man) and that the picture was based on a Japanese film. These tidbits were of no particular interest to me at the time. I was too busy trying to figure out who of the seven gunmen I wanted to grow up to be, and as the film progressed, I became increasingly alarmed at the potential demise of any or all of them. Indeed, as aptly put by one fan, “This is the sole reason we spent half of our preadolescence prancing around our houses with plastic guns, cowboy hats and an overwhelming desire to become heroes. Just like them.” 

50 years later, I have come to the somewhat disheartening realization that I grew up to be none of the characters.  Certainly not Yul Brynner, the cool as a cucumber King of Siam refashioned as a man in black.  Nor Steve McQueen, the steady, wry “talker” of the crew (I can talk, but rarely in McQueen’s pithy homilies). 

I never neared the lanky, laconic quick draw that was James Coburn, who utters the coolest line in film history

It gets no better than that, at 7 or 57.

Nor was I the brawny, decent Charles Bronson; the gold-greedy, laugh-having Brad Dexter; or the hot-headed kid who idolizes the crew (Horst Bucholz).  Now, there are times I have felt as cowardly and unsure as Robert Vaughn, but in reality, I ended up being none of those dudes. 

Half a century later, where mowing the lawn and an occasional campout are as close as I get to the frontier, I feel more like bad guy Eli Wallach, who runs into seven hired guns and damned if they didn’t all find Jesus at the same time. Wallach is a middle-management crook who steals what he wants from the peasants but otherwise, seems affable enough. And he can’t comprehend his bad luck. His last words, to Brynner:

“You came back for a place like this. Why? A man like you? Why?”

If you don’t know the film, the plot is simple.  Six professional gunmen and one wannabe sign up for a pittance to protect a poor Mexican town that is being repeatedly ransacked and worse by a band of thugs led by Wallach.  It is the best of 60s Hollywood.  Strong characters, tight dialogue, solid action, sweeping cinematography, a rousing score, liberal sentiments (“You think I am brave because I carry a gun; well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility, for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground”) presented in conservative reality (“We deal in lead, friend”), and, to boot, a girl and a boy fall in love

Two asides.  First, one has to hand it to director John Sturges for dexterous casting.  A Russian Brynner plays a Cajun, and proud sons of Berlin (Bucholz) and Red Hook (Wallach) play Mexicans. Ah. Simpler times.

Second, they loosely re-made this picture and the result was a filmic carbuncle.

On Hulu and sporadically, everything else.

Paul Newman is ridiculous as an Apache but it’s as if he senses that fact in the first 10 minutes of the movie and just concludes, “Fuck it. I’ll just be Paul Newman.”  That’s just what he does, and thankfully,  from that point forward, all is well again in this Stagecoach-ish Martin Ritt western.

Newman and a group of misfits (including Martin Balsam doing his best Eli Wallach as a Mexican) share a stage to Bisbee and they are set upon by thieves/killers. Newman rises above the racism of his traveling companions (when they find out he is an Apache, they make him ride outside of the stage) and works to get them out of the jam.

It’s a tight script (based on Elmore Leonard story), it’s cynical, the ensemble is decently fleshed out, and it travels pretty well. 

John Ford’s classic alternates between deft commentary on social strata, hypocrisy and manners and, for its time, jaw-dropping action (the chase scene at the end almost certainly had to result in many a broken bone, if not worse).  Orson Welles studied the picture obsessively prior to Citizen Kane, and the film’s influence is evident in everything from Eastwood’s westerns to Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight.  As Eastwood correctly observed, “There’s something about the way he approached his subject that broke down clichés of the era.”

In the vein of these dimwitted times, you can leave it to Tarantino to lodge the standard p.c. indictment:  “I hate him [Ford]. Forget about faceless Indians he killed like zombies. It really is people like that that kept alive this idea of Anglo-Saxon humanity compared to everybody else’s humanity—and the idea that that’s hogwash is a very new idea in relative terms.”  Regardless, as is evident in Tarantino’s last film, which expertly apes and updates Ford’s socially diverse discourse, Ford’s influence is inescapable even if Tarantino believes himself immune to his charms.  An excellent rebuttal to Tarantino’s juvenile approximation of Ford can be found here and properly notes:

His films don’t live apart from the shifts in American culture and the demands of the film industry, but in dialogue with them. Do those films provide the models of racial enlightenment that we expect today? Of course they don’t. On the other hand, they are far more nuanced and sophisticated in this regard than the streamlined commentaries that one reads about them, behaviorally, historically, and cinematically speaking, and the seeds of Ulzana’s Raid and Dead Man are already growing in Fort Apache and The Searchers. Is Ford’s vision “paternalistic?” I suppose it is (and that includes The Sun Shines Bright and Sergeant Rutledge), but the culture was paternalistic, and holding an artist working in a popular form to the standards of an activist or a statesman and condemning him for failing to escape the boundaries of his own moment is a fool’s game. Maybe it’s time to stop searching for moral perfection in artists.