I would play Sally Puddin’ all day if I could. But the lords and muh wife wouldna take it very good. So I fiddle when I can and I sacrifice when I should, or at least gotta. Thank god i’m a Magdalaboy.
Okay. Westerns, as in the genre of film particularly.
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First, a couple of lesser known classics of the 1950s golden age.
Especially remarkable in that the top billing is shared between Marilyn Monroe and the estimable Robert Mitchum.
This one belongs to the impressive Richard Widmark as Johnny G.
Anthony Quinn provides a strange and queer dynamic and “perhaps the most open depiction of homosexual love in the classic Western”. Well … open by the standards of the fifties maybe.
It also features Henry Fonda at his most complicated, and that even includes his turn in:
Once Upon a Time In The West (1968)
After Sergio Leone put the Western down for its long dirt nap with that one in the year that the assassinations peaked, it was left to a new generation of filmmakers to reinvent the form into something else, often in geographies other than the older classic southWesterns.
An early example:
I offer a new term for this one; it’s a northWestern. Which has the frontier-town ingredients—guns, saloons, hustlers, mining money—but the rain, mud, evergreen wilderness, isolation, and vaguely uncanny atmosphere shift it into something closer to proto-Twin Peaks. “The resemblance is especially strong in the way the town feels both mundane and mythic: everybody is building a little artificial world in the wilderness, while the landscape seems to regard them with indifference”.
By the way.
This film came out when I was ten years old.
I’ve never seen a better explanation of how real life within ‘civilization’ truly works, and has always worked.
You fight for your life.
While everyone you know is texting back and forth about putting out a fire in a church.
Or ice cream or the ins and outs of their 9-to-5 what a way to make a living, or … something.
That’s just the way it is.
No use cryin’.
I’m not cryin’.
See also in this regard Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995). “Another revisionist Western that gradually becomes an atmospheric, almost metaphysical journey through a landscape that feels less like ‘the West’ than an oneiric Pacific Northwest frontier. Its black-and-white cinematography, funereal pacing, absurd humor, and sense of civilization thinning out into forest all rhyme with Altman, even though Dead Man is much more explicitly an ‘acid Western’.”
Down by Law (1986) was written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. A swampWestern, maybe barely a Western anymore at all. I won’t object if you’d rather call it a southern-gothic docudrama. To me, it’s the true story of what happens to the hope and promise of Jill’s town once it has had a hundred years of the rot of Civilization run down its pipe like corrupt and poisonous whiskey.