Entries associated with the tag "The Searchers":

Last week at the Cinematheque Top 5 Project, site proprietor Kevyn Knox posted the results of his best westerns poll. No surprises among the top five finishers (save number three—The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly??), though when it comes to handicapping oaters I'm the last person you'd ever want to rely on.

Let's see ... it's probably Bud Boetticher's Ride Lonesome (1959) in my number one slot (for the minimalist desolation, a hardscrabble dry run for Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, all broken waste and laconic cowboy palaver), then Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962) at two (for the austere classicism—horse, rider, sky, mountains, piney breaks—with sudden pointillist spurts of color, e.g., in the mountain mining camp, to counterpoint the Zen-like stripping down), and ... then what?

3. Not The Searchers. Not that I have anything against John Ford, but the stylization's too schizoid for comfort: e.g., all that naturalistic Monument Valley rhetoric (shades of Sergei Eisenstein, in the heroic up-angle shooting) versus the boxy studio artifice of Natalie Wood's Indian encampment. If The Sun Shines Bright (1953) were even remotely feasible as a western—and to me it does actually feel like one—I'd unreservedly put it third (click here for Jonathan Rosenbaum's warm appreciation). But the river that says yes to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and The Long Riders and even The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (!) unfortunately says no to Kentucky. So y'all go figure.

4. The Ruse, William S. Hart (1915). Because something by or with this silent-era icon has to be on the list, and since (shame, shame) I haven't seen Hell's Hinges ... Come to make fun, then go away astonished: as an early modernist study in the psychology of underplaying, the guy's at least 30 years ahead of the competition.

5. The Phantom Empire (1935). With, gulp, Gene Autry—which probably isn't anyone's idea of a "good" western, or even a good serial, a singing cowboy chapter play that takes place mostly underground. Like a Max Ernst bricolage, in the thematic mating of misaligned elements—but aside from Cameron Menzies's Things to Come and Powell/Berger/Whelan's The Thief of Bagdad, no movie sparked my childhood imagination more. And where would The Mole People be without it!

This isn't Alphaville, this is Zeroville! —private eye Lemmy Caution, as quoted in Steve Erickson's Zeroville

Which is pretty much where I've been the last couple months myself—disabled, mostly movieless—but when you can't score the hard stuff, the raw rush of celluloid, then arguably you go looking for surrogates. Like novels about films and filmgoing, that reproduce the cinematic mentalite, the cloistered sensation of sitting and staring in the dark. Not the sort of thing I'd normally care to indulge—since movies and novels work from opposite ends of the brain, deliver different kinds of frissons, one imagistic and spatial, open to interpretive whim, the other more conceptually prepackaged—but it's an emergency, so what the hell . . .

Steve Erickson, longtime SF/fantasy novelist and film writer, is fond of the big alpha-omega statement, the kind of expansive, universalizing claim—"The movie is in all times, and all times are in the movie. . . . All scenes anticipate and reflect each other," etc—that evaporates on inspection, and in Zeroville (Europa, 2007), his eighth long work of fiction, he's frequently on the verge of swallowing his own rhetorical tail. Not that there's anything wrong with that necessarily—e.g., Wittgenstein's devilishly deadpan "The world is everything that is the case" comes as near to saying nothing as saying something can ever get—and Don DeLillo follows a similar strategy in his '82 novel The Names (his masterpiece, I think), where words rather than films hold the arcane secrets of universe. But DeLillo convinces through the effects he achieves, his claims the product of the writing, not a starting point for it. Language, history, movies, economics, Jesus—change the metaphor and it's a party game anyone can play. But whether there's anything solid behind the rhetorical bluff and patter—an Archimedean point of rest, a lever and a place to stand—is another matter entirely.

There's also the problem of Erickson's auteurist preferences, which will only seem fresh and provocative if you haven't read much film criticism (specifically the Sarris-induced kind) in the past 40 years or so. Long, familiar riffs on Now, Voyager's talismanic cancer sticks, or on Hawks's Red River and Ford's The Searchers, with worshipful nods to the 40s hucksters and studio studs who dared redefine "masculine" sociopathy as aaarrtt (shades of Veit Harlan—or of Soviet-era class-revenge fantasies, with tractors running to fists, etc): we know what that's about, even with thieves and ex-theology students as duly authorized spokesmen. Not to mention the meticulous, shot-by-shot analysis of Stevens's A Place in the Sun, less the immortal object of Erickson's retelling than a lugubrious monstre sacre, which arguably sets its mark on film posterity in all the wrong ways (x shot = y emotion, everything overdetermined and literal, etc). Just a nominal voice of protest amid the fan-boy flights, from Zazi, Zeroville's least articulate character, but in Erickson's cinematic heart of hearts, it's Viking Man's megalomania that gets the best lines.

More successful as emergency cinema substitute is Stephen Graham Jones's Demon Theory (MacAdam Cage, 2006), which masquerades as a trilogy of screenplays (with continuity arrows, abbreviational markers, and other expendable chaff) while paying deconstructive homage to the Wes Craven brand of schlock commercial horror. Not that I've much stomach for this sort of thing, but the intensity finally gets to you—the flayings, guttings, and gougings, the decapitations and mutilations, with endless limbs wrenched from disobliging sockets, etc. Like a trip to an animal rendering plant or a pathological cut-and-paste weekend with Marina de Van. ("In my skin"?—more like under and out of it.) And if all the characters are unapologetically pasteboard—love, terror, honor, pain, stoicism, endurance . . . so what else you got for me?—then even pasteboard has its uses, if only as neutral aesthetic foil to the baroquely proliferating grue. Which somehow puts me in mind of A.O. Lovejoy's great chain of being (or maybe in this case nonbeing), the way every imaginable existential gap is filled to bursting, with bodies and beasties and physical mutations that drip, pustulate, and ooze. Medieval horror vacui in action!

Not to ignore the "scholarly" apparatus at the end, with hundreds of free-associating footnotes that beg to be read as a kind of parallel text. If Erickson loves le cinema, what then to make of Graham Jones's more visceral attachments? Just about every exploitation movie of the last 20 years makes a cameo appearance here. But whoever Demon Theory's editor was, I wish he/she'd caught more of the typos. A maverick commitment like this deserves something better.