Overdue Movie Reviews #10 - High Plains Drifter (1973)

A stranger (Clint Eastwood) rides into the town of Lago, and within a matter of minutes, guns down 3 men who were hassling him, and rapes a woman. Curiously, rather than insisting on his arrest, the leaders of the town send the sheriff to offer the stranger a job: protect Lago from 3 other men, about to be released from prison, who swore revenge.

The stranger agrees, for a price. The price turns out to be the townspeople's dignity and self-respect as much as anything. He takes, and takes, and takes, and they bear it, because the alternative is to fight for themselves, or to simply take the revenge they've got coming.

My dad would say this is definitely a '70s Western, and he'd say it in the most scornful tone possible. Basically everyone is an amoral scumbag, constant betrayals, backstabbing and abuse. Promises are made with no intention of honoring them. There's no loyalty to anyone or anything, all that unites the townsfolk is the idea they can always put off the point when payment will come due. Two rapes, because I'm hesitant to define what happens between the stranger and Sarah Belding (Verna Bloom) late in the film as anything other than that. He not only takes over her bedroom, but drags her along with him, then kisses her when she tries to stab him with scissors, and things progress from there. The movie certainly frames it as Mrs. Belding being into it once they got started (and does the same with the first as well), but I'm not really prepared to make that allowance.

There's no real good guy. Mordecai (Billy Curtis) isn't an awful person, but once he figures out the stranger at least tolerates him (or finds him a useful prop to humiliate the townsfolk), he milks it for all he's worth, just like the stranger. Sarah seems to have a conscience, but she has, as her conniving lickspittle of a husband points out, kept quiet about it for a long time. She wasn't happy, she could have left Lago and that useless bastard anytime. He wasn't going to abandon his precious hotel to chase her.

The closest thing to a good person would be the marshal, who we only see in flashback (sort of), because he got whipped to death in the street by Stacey Bridges and the Carlin brothers while the entire town looked on over a year before the movie begins.

I'm curious why they decided on whipping him. It wasn't to terrify the townspeople, the townspeople hired them to do the killing, so he wouldn't blow the whistle about the town mine being on government land. Why not just shoot him?

I guess because whipping is more brutal, and the movie wants to be brutal. Wants to provide a reason for the stranger to whip one of the Carlin brothers to death. Because otherwise, there's no real difference. Shot or whipped, the marshal died because he was going to insist on following the law, and that would have hurt the townspeople's economic status, so he had to go. And it allows for one of the two moments where Eastwood isn't scowling or smirking, when he first arrives in Lago and whips around at a whipcrack.

(The other moment is when the stranger, having ordered all other guests out of the hotel, hears the preacher promise they'll find shelter in the homes of the townspeople - at regular hotel rates, of course. Eastwood does this surprised jerk, almost a spasm, as though even he can't believe they sink that low.)

Of course there's the supernatural element, the stranger riding out of the heat waves coming off the desert, giving the impression he materialized from the air, then departing the same way at the end. The creepy intro music, I'm guessing that's a theremin, really helps establish an odd atmosphere, along with the first 5+ minutes of the film having no dialogue. Like we've entered a land of the dead.

There's also the stranger's ability to seemingly cover a lot of ground quickly and without notice.  His brief attack on Bridges and the Carlins in the rockpile, where he seems able to move from one side to the other within seconds, but also when the men attempt to ambush him in his hotel room. The time between when Callie slips from the room to when the men charge in couldn't have been more than a few seconds, yet he got out the window with all his clothes, and had a stick of dynamite ready. Also, when Callie first tried to kill him herself, she fired 4 shots into a little metal tub where he was submerged, and somehow didn't even scratch him. Which doesn't seem possible, but it's almost like once he went under the water, he was gone until he chose to stick his head back out.

It's a little like Charles Bronson's Harmonica character in Once Upon a Time in the West constantly appearing by stepping from behind something (a door, a pillar, a train.) Suggesting that in their quest for vengeance, they've transcended human capabilities somehow.

It's, I wouldn't say a happy end to the movie. The stranger leaves, satisfied his work is done. The marshal is going to have an actual grave marker. Seems strange they wouldn't have done that already, if just for appearances' sake. Sarah Belding is indeed, getting the fuck out of Lago. Not that there's much left of Lago. Most of the town was burned down by Bridges, what's left is painted bright red. A bunch of townspeople are dead, at either the stranger's hands or Bridges', the remainder look like war wounded, watching the stranger leave with shell-shocked expressions.

Back in 2009, I wrote a post wondering if the stranger spent all that time prepping the townspeople to defend their town because he wanted to give them the chance to clean up their own mess for once, or if he knew they never had a chance and just wanted to humiliate them a little more. It's hard for me to picture him being satisfied with Bridges dying at their hands, so I suspect it was one more prank he pulled. There's never any indication the practice is having an effect; their aim is no better, they're still counting on him to take care of business. They're just going along with this because he insisted and they want to keep him happy and willing to solve their problems.

This isn't the kind of film where people confront their fears and triumph, it's one where they keep running until their fears trample them into the dirt.

Overdue Movie Reviews #9 - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)

Sure, I've written about this film before, but never what I'd consider a real review of the entire thing. And this might very well be my favorite movie of all time, so 1-2-3, let's jam.

A bandit (Eli Wallach) with a price on his head. A bounty hunter (Clint Eastwood) with a scheme to make some dough. A hired gun (Lee van Cleef) trying to track down a man who knows the location of $200,000 in gold coins. Tuco learns the name of the cemetery where the gold is hidden, Blondie, the name of the grave. And the race to the money is on.

In the barest bones of the plot, there's not a lot there, yet the movie is nearly 3 hours long. Leone takes his time, right from the start, the slow build of the three men marching towards each other down an empty street, only for all three to charge into a saloon and gunfire to erupt. It's 20 minutes before Eastwood shows up, around a half-hour before "the good" appears on screen beside him, in what is more than a little tongue-in-cheek, given he's in the middle of betraying Tuco and stranding him in the desert.

But Leone fills the film with smaller set pieces and odd characters. The scam Tuco and Blondie run, Tuco constructing himself a new pistol. Tuco's painful reunion with his brother the priest. The prisoner of war camp, although this does serve to bring Angel Eyes into the chase more directly. The drunken captain commanding the Union forces trying to take the bridge.

The build-up to violence is long, the violence itself brief. Nobody gets shot, only to stagger back to their feet and keep shooting. No running gunfights where characters dive for cover. People draw their guns, someone fires first, the other person dies. Even in the Civil War battle scene, there's Tuco and Blondie's conversation about their respective pieces of information while rigging explosives. Then the bridge explodes, and a few seconds of cannon fire, impactful as two kids hurling insults at each other, and it's done.

The exception would be Tuco's beating at Wallace's hands in the POW camp. But it's non-lethal violence, a rarity in the film. Plus, Leone seems to have some fascination with main character(s) getting the crap beat out of them, as he used it in A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, though those beatings are administered by a gang, not an individual. And this one seems more brutal, maybe because Leone focuses more on Tuco's increasing distress. The choking noises he makes, the futile attempts to grapple with the bigger man, while one arm is shackled to the chair. Fistful might show Eastwood's battered face after the fact, but during, it's him staggering about, getting punched by whoever is closest. Or maybe it's that, in the other movies, those administering the beating are having fun. They're usually laughing, but Wallace isn't. I imagine he enjoys it, but it's also work, and he's got a specific purpose in mind: hurt this man until he talks. 

It was Roger Ebert's entry on his Great Movies list that clued me in to one quirk Leone maintains in this film: If the audience can't see something (because it isn't in the shot), neither can the characters. Right from the first seconds of the film, when a long shot of a distant ridge seamlessly becomes a close-up when a bounty hunter Tuco steps into view from off-screen, that's how things work. The world outside the camera is invisible to those within.

This plays out repeatedly. Tuco and Blondie ride up on the massive Union encampment at the bridge - where two battles take place a day - without knowing it until they're surrounded. In the cemetery, as Tuco claws at the dirt on Arch Stanton's grave, Blondie catches him by surprise, only for them both to be surprised by the arrival of Angel Eyes. Blondie's first appearance in the movie is him somehow walking up on Tuco and 3 other bounty hunters without any of them noticing until he speaks. While Blondie's distracted in the hotel by the men Tuco brought, Tuco was clearly sitting on the windowsill for several moments before announcing his presence. It's a curious approach, though it allows Leone to have repeated dramatic reveals and arrivals, and it may speak to these men's blinkered approaches to life. They're locked in on their desires, and when they sense it close to fruition, become blind to everything else.

Tuco would be easy to reduce to a comic relief character. His grandiose expressions and threats, the bluster. Hands tied and still creaming threats at Blondie. But Leone takes the time to list Tuco's crimes at both occasions of his hanging, many of which imply not just cruelty, but a level of planning, notably the one about getting paid in advance to lead a wagon train, then abandoning said wagon train on the Sioux hunting grounds. (Also, he's charged specifically with arson in a prison, which makes me wonder if it was part of an escape plan, or he just did it for kicks.)

And Eli Wallach gives Tuco enough cunning and sheer determination that he remains a threat. Sure, it seems unwise for Tuco to keep running his yap at Wallace, but he eventually gets the man's guard down and throws him off a train, then bashes his head against a rock to make sure he's dead. Tuco keeps his gun on him when he bathes, keeps it hidden until needed.

Tuco may appear the butt of the joke in the final showdown, unaware Blondie emptied his gun, but it speaks to how much of a threat Blondie considers Tuco. Initially, he had so little regard for Tuco he figured it was enough to leave him in the desert and ride off with the money. After only escaping death in the hotel via dumb luck, and nearly dying in the desert because Tuco wouldn't stop hunting him, Blondie knows better. He surely knows, as they near the cemetery, that Angel Eyes is out there, somewhere.

I doubt Blondie had the whole thing with the name on the rock planned, since the most planning we see from him is the scam he ran with Tuco, then "Shorty," but he must have figured there was a point it would come to shooting. And while Blondie seems confident he can handle Angel Eyes, he does not want Tuco in the mix. Whether because he can't trust Tuco choosing him over Angel Eyes, or he just isn't certain he can kill both of them, Blondie hedges his bets.

(He also decides Tuco's presence evens things enough he can go against Angel Eyes and his gang in the town being shelled. 6-on-1 was a no-go, but 6-on-2, where the 2 are Blondie and Tuco? Those are odds Blondie likes.)

And Tuco is the one who drives the story. It's his bounty that brings he and Blondie together, that leads to the betrayal, and ultimately the death-march. Which is how they meet "Bill Carson" in the desert and learn about the money. Minus Tuco, Blondie would have continued with his penny-ante scam of turning in criminals, then freeing them. Angel Eyes' plan to join the Union Army and scour prisoner of war camps would come to nothing, because Carson and everyone else who knew about the gold was a corpse in the desert. Tuco's also the only of the three we get any backstory for. He had wives - more than one if his remark to his brother is to be believed - and a brother, and two parents.

(Leone creates this trio, but tends to focus on duos. Tuco and Blondie as allies, then enemies, then allies again. Tuco and Angel Eyes briefly in the POW camp. Angel Eyes and Blondie as uneasy partners. When it looks as though it'll be Tuco and Blondie vs. Angel Eyes, the latter withdraws, leaving it a duo. And in the final gunfight, Tuco being unarmed means it's really just Blondie vs. Angel Eyes.)

One of my dad's complaints about Leone's films is there's no one who's good. Everyone is a scumbag, he says. While applying "the good" to Blondie seems sarcastic, and there's definitely a joke to the heavenly choir music that plays when Angel Eyes spots him at Tuco's second hanging and opines that a 'golden-haired angel' watches over Tuco, there are hints that Blondie has humanity or capacity for empathy the other two lack. The comfort he offers to the dying soldier in the burned out church, just prior to the final showdown. Covering the boy with his coat and offering a cigarette isn't much, but at least the kid doesn't die alone. The fact he asks Tuco whether he can save Shorty from being hanged, and apologizes softly to Shorty when Tuco says no.

Heck, it would have been simpler for Blondie to let Tuco hang, if he really thought their partnership had reached its logical endpoint. But he saved him, though we can question how seriously he meant it when he said he thought Tuco could make the 70-mile hike back to town. And he did leave Tuco half the gold, which Angel Eyes certainly wouldn't have (and I have my doubts about Tuco doing the same for Blondie, were their circumstances reversed.)

Leone sets the movie in the Civil War, yet the war is, at best, an impediment. None of the three characters have any investment in the outcome. Blondie regards it as a waste of lives. Angel Eyes uses it as cover to search for Carson, while lining his pockets by robbing the prisoners. Tuco puts on Carson's uniform because it makes it easier to demand treatment for Blondie. If he had recognized the soldiers riding towards them as dusty Union soldiers, he'd have thrown the Confederate uniforms away in a second, because their only use is as something to clear paths. They blow up the bridge simply so both sides won't have it to fight over, and will get out of their way. That those soldiers will be sent to fight and die elsewhere is not their problem. They don't notice the Union Army until they're captured because it wasn't in the shot with them, and it wasn't in the shot with them because they weren't giving any thought to it. All that mattered was crossing the river to get closer to the gold. 

It's not clear anyone else cares either. Carson enlisted to try and hide until it was safe to dig up the gold. Carson's the girlfriend, the 'fresh young whore,' as she's described by the legless soldier, is introduced as a wagon of drunk soldiers throw her into the street after having their fun. The hotel manager shouts support for Dixie, while muttering under his breath about the Confederates being cowards, and how he can't wait until they leave, so he can make money off the Yankees. Wallace is a goon, lording his strength over prisoners who can't fight back, rather than actual combat. Ditto for the Union guard who makes the prisoners play music while Tuco is beaten. The soldier Tuco taunts, who probably didn't get a penny for the arm he lost. The half-soldier sells any information he can, even if it relates to someone ostensibly on the same side as him. The captain of the Union forces at the bridge is a drunken wreck, hating his orders but unwilling to defy them. Just waiting for death, or someone who will do what he can only dream of.

The one guy who seems like a believer is the commandant of the prisoner camp, who believes prisoners should be treated with respect, and hopes to get Angel Eyes court-martialed. But he's dying of gangrene, making these vows sprawled on his back, while Angel Eyes smirks at him in unconcealed contempt. He knows he'll be long gone before this man could ever hope to prove anything. Of course, Angel Eyes expects to be rich, and instead ends up in Hell.

You really can't discuss The Good, the Bad and the Ugly without talking about Ennio Morricone's score. Unfortunately I'm not much good at discussing music, but the music is indelibly linked with the film in my head. (Also, fortunately, this Youtube video knows how to discuss music.) Morricone had some of the pieces ready before filming even began, and it's neat to watch how the music and the shots are interwoven. Tuco running among the graves, the names blurring as the music accelerates to match his pace, more instruments joining in as he darts from one row to another. The music is hopeful, Tuco thinking he's on the precipice of everything he wants, but also chaotic, the sheer enormity of the task of finding one grave among 5000.

And then the final showdown, with the guitar strumming signaling the beginning as Blondie sets down the rock. The castanets, and then the trumpets as the three slowly take their places in a long shot. A few shots of ambient noise before the music begins again, and Leone starts moving the camera closer, focusing on the expressions and twitches. Blondie giving Tuco a small smile and a nod, camera cutting between them like a signal. 'Hey, the two of us are a team, right?' Followed by a shot of Angel Eyes glance darting towards Tuco, reassessing his situation. The way Angel Eyes' hand starts towards his gun, then withdraws at a glance from Blondie. Tuco's fingers twitching, and Blondie's hand, perfectly still the whole time, even when everything else is speeding up. The cuts are coming faster, the music is building up, everyone's hands are starting to move, eyes are widening. But Blondie's impassive, just waiting for a conclusion that's foregone. 

Bird (1988)

In my continuing attempts to, I don't know, understand or appreciate jazz, the Charlie Parker (as played by Forrest Whitaker) biopic directed by Clint Eastwood. Probably futile on my part; I couldn't really discern anything wrong when Buster Franklin (Keith David) was playing nothing but B-flats in the scene where Charlie gets a glimpse of what rock n' roll is going to be like. And there were times I wondered if Charlie was playing off-key notes when he was clearly supposed to be killing it. Tone deaf, I guess.

The movie is set near the end of Charlie's life, starting with his attempted suicide by drinking iodine, with flashbacks to earlier parts of his career throughout. Eastwood doesn't spend much time on Parker's life prior to being a success. The opening shot is Parker as a child, blowing on a whistle as an older sibling tows him on a tricycle. A few shots of him practicing on the porch in the same neighborhood. His first encounter of Buster Franklin, where Charlie doesn't play too well and gets "gonged", and run off the stage.

But mostly it's the steady decline of Charlie Parker's career, set alongside his relationship with and his wife, Chan (Diane Verona.) Their meeting in clubs in New York, arguments, his health problems, his drug problems, the death of their daughter. Perhaps appropriately for a movie about a jazz musician, Chan and Charlie's relationship seems all about the things they don't say. Especially on Chan's end. Verona always seems like she's on the verge of saying something, but never does. And I don't mean something angry or hurtful necessarily. When he leaves the house in the countryside where they're staying to head into town for a possible recording gig, Verona looks like it's on her lips to tell him to be careful, to come back, maybe to not leave at all, because she's afraid he won't come back. But she doesn't. She hugs him while trying not to cry, and he drives off into a very different landscape from what he remembers.

There's a conversation between Chan and a psychiatrist at Bellevue, where Charlie ends up after the iodine drinking incident, where Chan refuses the suggestion of shock therapy because of Charlie's gift. That she isn't willing to sacrifice the musician for a husband. I don't think it's money concerns, so much as the musician is part of what she loves about him. But, again, that isn't said outright.

(Chan Parker gets thanked at the end of the film, I guess for providing a lot of information or acting as consultant, but it does make me wonder how accurate some of this is. Not like Charlie Parker was alive to give his side of things.)

Eastwood keeps Whitaker's face in a circle of light most of the time. When he's on-stage playing, the great musician people want to hear and meet, and when he's at home, having another tense conversation. In contrast, Verona's face is often in shadows, especially during those conversations with Whitaker. Like her life's been eclipsed by his, and so she's trying to keep him together so her life doesn't disintegrate along with him.

Whitaker plays Parker as this guy who is talented and witty and confident, but also so certain he's doomed that it sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. He's shown a body in the morgue of a guy who used heroin and ultimately died, and told that'll be him, but sooner because he started even younger. And he always seems to come back to that mindset. That his sand is running out, so he tries to push now. Make the folks in California appreciate bebop, make the tour, make the recording, make it now. And when it feels like he's stymied, his frustration boils over and he sinks back into drugs, or alcohol if he's trying to stay off the drugs.

The scene where he learns his daughter died and he spends an entire night, just calling Western Union to send telegrams to Chan, then hanging up, dialing again and ordering another telegram. Even after he's gotten strung out, he keeps making calls, keeps ordering telegrams that are alternately formal, personal, desperate. The part where there's a lady he picked up at a party that evening apparently there watching this the whole time, to the point she's crying at the sight of this guy wrecking himself physically to match how wrecked he is emotionally, gave it an element of the surreal I'm not sure was intended.

The Mule (2018)

An old man named Earl (Clint Eastwood), whose flower business went under, uses his extremely careful and conscientious driving skills to shuttle cocaine from Texas to Chicago for a cartel. On a largely parallel tangent, a DEA agent (Bradley Cooper) tries to bring down the same cartel.

Eastwood plays Earl as being fairly charming. He seems to quickly (although I don't know how long he was doing these drug runs) become buddies with the guys he picks up the drugs from. Joking around with them, promising he's gonna learn how to text before the next run. And it seems to work, even the guy sent by the cartel boss (played by Andy Garcia, though he doesn't get much to do) ends up liking Earl after a while. Earl's also more than a little racist, in that (if you're being generous) oblivious way. The bit where he stops to help a black family change their tire and refers to them as "Negros" made me groan.

I'm also not sure how clueless Earl is meant to be. Did he really not have any clue he was running drugs until he actually looked in the duffel bag they threw in the back of his truck?

But Earl, like most of Eastwood's characters, is bad about expressing his emotions towards his loved ones. His way of showing he cares is by trying to be the best "provider" he can be, even though this meant he was never around. He misses his daughter's wedding, and takes the initial drug run to keep his promise to pay for the cash bar at his granddaughter's wedding. He keeps making runs at least in part because he sees other people or places he cares about the money could help. The notion that his family would have been OK with a little less providing, in exchange for him being around, didn't seem to occur to him until it was too late*.

The movie stays heavily focused on Earl. There are brief cuts to Cooper's investigation. he and his partner leaning on the guy they've convinced to snitch. Generally being jerks to him. They keep using Mexican terms to refer to him, and when he points out he's Filipino, they respond that just means it'll be harder for the cartel to kill his family then. Or we get Cooper arguing to his boss (played by Laurence Fishburne, again not given much to do) for a little more time.

Hard to judge the passage of time, as we don't see changes in seasons or anything, but the point seems to be Cooper is neglecting his loved ones by focusing on his job the way Earl once did. Not sure it really works. Earl running a flower nursery for decades doesn't seem quite the same as working for the DEA. Also, we never actually see Cooper's family, so it's hard to get any sense of how important they're supposed to be him. Might have been simpler to not bother trying to draw that parallel, just focus on the fact Earl's time is running out in more ways than one.

* He's been going to that well for a long time. Since at least when he played the cat burglar guy in Absolute Power.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot

This was a bit of a strange movie. After a man barges into a church where Clint Eastwood is the pastor and tries to shoot him, the film spends the next 30 minutes on Eastwood and Jeff Bridges roaming across the western U.S., running into oddballs. I almost thought it was going to end up being one of those comedies about people having trouble trying to travel long distances, but there are two more guys after Eastwood that keep popping up.

Then it shifts into a heist movie, although it spends more time on the odd jobs they do to make enough money to get what they need for the heist than on the actual planning. That at least makes some sense in-story.

Eastwood (as Thunderbolt, or Johnny) spends most of the movie either faintly amused or mildly annoyed. He's just too tired for anything to get to him any more than that. Bridges (Lightfoot) is usually very glib and unconcerned with dangers. Constantly flirting*, always with some little saying or quip, enthusiastic about whatever he's mixed up in. George Kennedy (Red) is usually pissed off, mostly at Lightfoot once they meet, but in general he's very impatient and irritable. Early in the movie, I was impressed by how much he seemed to be playing a barely suppressed ball of rage, but as the story progresses, he's almost comical. He could kill Eastwood and Bridges, but wants to fistfight Eastwood, and the fight has to end because his asthma acts up. Then all four of them sit by a river and talk for a while. Dudes not knowing how to just talk about what bothers them.

The movie is like that a lot. It feels absurd - the heist centers on a 20mm cannon and Lightfoot dressing as a woman - and sometimes it gets played for laughs, and other times like it's serious. Maybe to emphasize the ridiculous aspect of all this.Thunderbolt, Red, and Goody ultimately can't move on, accept they gave it a shot and it didn't pan out, and just deal with. They just have to keep trying. Lightfoot is so used to just winging everything and getting away with it, he doesn't grasp the seriousness of anything until its too late. By the time he does, he's in for a penny, in for a pound, as he put it.

* I think my favorite scene was when he's driving a delivery van and catcalls a lady on a motorcycle next to him. She pulls a hammer from somewhere and just starts whaling on the side of the van with it while they drive down the highway.

Does The Reference Fit?

I keep seeing this scene from Christopher Priest's Deathstroke series online. A group of grieving mothers, their children killed by gun violence, have hired Deathstroke to kill the people responsible, which he is doing. The cop is frustrated by the fact nothing seems to get done to curb gun violence, and the reporter questions the wisdom of hiring a killer to kill killers. Both of which are fair points, but being me, the thing that grabbed my attention was neither of those things.

The reporter, and that's Jack Ryder, aka the Creeper, is getting his movie reference wrong. A Fistful of Dollars isn't about a town hiring a gunfighter. It's about a gunfighter entering a town of his own accord, and trying to play the gangs vying for control against each other for his financial benefit. The townspeople, such as they are, don't hire Joe. Silvanito, the innkeeper, tries to get him the hell out of town, figuring nothing good will come of his presence for anyone.

But ultimately Joe's actions weaken the Baxters and provoke the Rojos into destroying them. And then Joe kills the Rojos (for revenge for the ass-whupping they gave him or to protect Silvanito, take your pick). Granting a decent portion of the town burns down or is blown up, the few townsfolk we'd seen up to then are alive and free. Marisol is reunited with her family. I confess I don't know what those people will do for a living, but the Rojos' gun-running and the Baxters' liquor didn't seem to be creating many jobs, despite what I'm sure were very friendly tax rates (as in non-existent). Maybe more people needed to get in on the lucrative coffin-building industry. Still, I wouldn't say things worked out badly for the townspeople (excluding the crooks selling guns and booze), especially since they didn't waste any of their non-existent money hiring Joe to do this. Unless Ryder is counting the Rojos and Baxters as the townsfolk. I guess technically they would count, but the analogy definitely wouldn't fit in that scenario.

My best guess is Ryder is thinking of High Plains Drifter, where the cowardly, backstabbing townspeople hire the guy who killed three people and raped a woman his first half-hour in town to protect them. And he proceeds to take all their shit, let them humiliate and degrade themselves bending over backwards for him, and gets them to essentially help destroy their town. Although equating a bunch of moms who are angry and griefstricken over the loss of their children with a bunch of people who hired gunmen to kill a marshal to hide one crime, then framed the gunmen for theft to have them locked away, then hired more gunmen to protect them for when the first group of gunmen were released from prison, then hired the guy who killed the second group of gunmen for the same job, is a bit of a stretch.

The thing is, Christopher Priest seems like a pretty thoughtful guy, so I'm wondering if he got the reference wrong deliberately as some kind of point about Ryder, or he's just approaching it from a different perspective. Obviously the idea that hiring someone to kill people who killed others isn't going to solve the underlying problem of why those people took a life in the first place, or how they were able to have guns to do so. That there could be retaliation, escalation if the friends of the people Deathstroke kills figure out who pointed him in their direction and decide for some payback. Relying on killing to solve the problem of people killing people is not a sound strategy.

But going off either of those two films, what were the options? In High Plains Drifter, the townspeople could have opted not to mine on land they weren't supposed to, or accepted the punishment for doing so, or not framed Stacey Bridges for robbery. But having done those things, what were the options left if not to hire gunfighters? They did, at the drifter's urging, trying fighting for themselves, and failed miserably. They could have abandoned the town, scattered to the winds. Or they could have stayed and accepted whatever vengeance Bridges brought upon them. Fight, flee, suffer through it. None of those seem like viable options for the grieving mothers in the comic.

With A Fistful of Dollars, again, what's the option? None of the townsfolk have a prayer of confronting either of the gangs directly. The militaries of both the U.S. and Mexico use the town as a convenient meeting point for clandestine sales of weapons and booze. Neither of them is likely to step in and help. The sheriff is the head of the Baxter clan (and an incompetent boob to boot), so law enforcement is useless. I have no idea what political body they could appeal to, if any. It almost seems as though their best hope was to keep their heads down and hope that once one side won the struggle, things would get easier. But assuming that happens, and assuming it doesn't get them killed or their homes destroyed in the process, they're still living in fear of the remaining gang, which can now act with impunity because there's no risk of being attacked on an exposed flank if they overreach.

Maybe it shows that Ryder is well-aware of the limitations of the approach of using violence to eliminate violence, but has no viable solutions. Like me, he's good at picking out the flaws, but struggles to correct them. And hey, it's easy to criticize (fun, too). Or that he ignores the emotional element in this, the pain and frustration that would drive these mothers to this decision.All he sees is some vague way it could go wrong, not recognizing that from their perspective, it's already gone as wrong as it can.

This Is Necessary For Me To Function

I'm going to list my favorite lines from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Recent sports results have decreed I do this to avoid spiraling into a torrent of profanities. These are in no particular order, and there's no strict criteria, except perhaps how often I find myself repeating them. I'm going with 10, because that's the commonly accepted number.

'I'm looking for the owner of that horse. He's tall, blonde, smokes a cigar, and he's a pig!'

- Tuco's demand to the hotel owner the first time he catches up with Blondie. I'm just like the characteristics he decides are defining traits of his quarry, and how he spits the last one out.

'God is not on our side, because he hates idiots, also.'

- That moment when Tuco and Blondie realize those aren't Confederate soldiers riding towards them. That recognition that everything is going horribly wrong. Unfortunately, looking at the world leads me to believe God doesn't hate idiots, he hates everyone else, and the idiots are one of his forms of punishment, in much the same way as my grandmother used to tell me that ticks and mosquitoes were a way of punishing us for original sin. Not to be confused with the Jason Aaron-written Marvel event, though in either case, I'm not a fan of being punished for something I didn't even do.

'Sure, I'll go, I'll go. And while I'm waiting for the Lord to remember me, I, Tuco Ramirez, brother of Brother Ramirez, will tell you something!'

- I devoted an entire post to this scene between Tuco and his brother Pablo (played by Luigi Pistilli) some years ago, because I thought it was so well done, and this is my favorite line. The moment after Tuco's learned both his parents are gone, and his brother takes exactly the wrong approach, chiding him for his criminal life. So Tuco draws on the bravado, the sarcasm, and swings back. And I love how he emphasizes the second "brother", not just with his voice, but by poking Pablo in the chest with his finger as he says it.

'Doctor, can you help me to live a little more? I expect good news.'

- The poor drunken Union Captain (played by Aldo Giuffre). When my dad and I nearly had a fight earlier this year because he said some blatantly incorrect things about Leone's films, one of them was everyone was a scumbag, and I countered that Eastwood's characters usually show some small bit of decency that distinguishes them. I think the fact he actually told the Captain to hang and keep listening is one of those (so was comforting that dying soldier right before the big final showdown). He and Tuco could have just grabbed the explosives and gone on their way, but he took the time to let this guy know his dream was going to come true.

'More feeling.'

- This is from the scene where Tuco's getting the crap beat out of him by the fat corporal, while the prisoners play a tune. It's spoken by the Union soldier watching over them, and there's something so callous about it, the way he's sitting relaxed and casual, enjoying a smoke. Then he takes it out of his mouth, and utters that command, when he knows, and he knows they know, exactly what their music is the accompaniment to. It's a total dick move, impressively so.

'Every gun plays its own tune. And it's perfect timing, large one.'

- This is the point when, having both gotten out of the prisoner of war camp in their own ways, Tuco and Blondie's paths cross again. It's kind of interesting the Blondie recognizes the sound of Tuco's gun (especially considering it must be yet another pistol Tuco's cobbled together since the first was confiscated when they were captured). Also, Blondie is talking to a kitten he found that is playing around inside his hat. So, you know, Clint Eastwood playing with a kitten, not something you see that often.

'You see, there's two kinds of people in this world, my friend.'

- In this case, I'm generally thinking of the exchange near the end, about people with loaded guns, and those who dig. But it's a recurring theme, as Tuco uses it a couple of different times. And frankly, it doesn't often come up in my life that who digs is determined by which person has a loaded gun. When I was at my dad's helping look for his water leak, I did the digging because his back is trashed. However, I do tend to use the "two kinds of people" thing a lot. Usually the second group of people are idiots, and the first group is some description that applies to me, like people who recognize Hawkeye is awesome.

'Where's the rebel going?' 'To hell, with a rope around his neck and a price on his head.' 'Yeah, $3,000. That's a lot of money for a head my friend. I'll bet they didn't even pay you a penny for your arm.'

- That little exchange is between a wounded Union soldier, the corporal Wallace, and Tuco. I just really like Tuco's remark at the end. It's cruel, but they're making jokes about how he's going to be executed, so screw it. It's kind of a perfect example of his bravado, that even when he's surrounded by hostile soldiers, not to mention handcuffed to a guy who already nearly killed him, he still can't keep his mouth shut.

'People with ropes around their necks don't always hang.'

- I felt like I had to get a quote from Angel Eyes in here somewhere, but he didn't have a lot of lines that resonated with me. It was this or one of his insolent lines to the commandant of the prison camp. Plus, it ends up being very true over the course of the film. The fact he knows Tuco's got someone watching out for him, and picks that someone out immediately, reinforces how sharp he is (we've already seen how quickly he recognized there was a lot more money at stake than he'd been lead to believe). Also, his utter lack of concern at Tuco's list of crimes (this last time I watched it was the first time I remember hearing he was guilty of passing himself off as a general in the Mexican army, which I thought was hilarious), compared to the lady in the stagecoach's evident disgust. Because hell, Angel Eyes has done worse, if significantly more quietly.

'Such ingratitude after all the times I've saved your life.'

- Blondie's line after he dissolves the partnership with Tuco and leaves him stranded in the desert. I think about how bad an idea that was sometimes. Certainly he made the mistake Tuco warned of, betraying him without making sure to finish him, and this lead to his own near death in the desert. But that's how they found the dying Bill Carson and learned of the gold, sooooo, everything worked out?

There were a lot of other lines I could have listed, which is interesting to me. Leone thought American films talked too fast, and probably also too much. He liked long sequences with little to no dialogue. And English wasn't his first language (which I notice in the way certain dialogue is worded, where I think something would work more smoothly is you changed the order of things in the sentence). But Leone and his other scriptwriters (Luciano Vincenzoni, Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli) came up with a lot of good lines. Maybe they work as well as they do because I've watched it so many times, so I can focus on the delivery, the camera angle, the music, whatever.

When I watched the commentary for Duck, You Sucker, it mentioned that Rod Steiger spoke at a seminar about the film and said that it wasn't so much that Leone wrote great dialogue, but that everything else he did - how he composed a shot, the music, the cues for the actor's reactions - all combined to aid actor's in giving great performances (the commentary also mentioned that James Coburn accepted his role because Henry Fonda told him Leone was the best director he ever worked with which, considering Fonda worked with Hitchcock and John Ford, to name two, is pretty damn impressive). And that is a part of it, to be sure. The lines are indelibly linked with the actor's faces and body language as they spoke them, and it all comes together to make them memorable to me.

I'll Take Any Opportunity To Discuss Unforgiven

I don't remember where I read it online, but I saw someone talking about Unforgiven, and they mentioned how they felt the end of the film sort of undercuts the themes of the rest of the film.

The movie up to that point is generally exposing all the myths we see in Westerns and undoing them. Men win gunfights not because they're fast, but because the other guy was drunk, his gun was faulty, or because they fight dirty. Little Bill doesn't defend his town by squaring off with the evil gun-for-hire English Bob in the street at high noon in a showdown. He has his deputies surround Bob with their guns drawn, forces the guy to surrender his weapons, then beats the hell out of him. William Munny can't remember half the things he did in his wild days, and the things he can recall doing, he can't remember why he did them. But at the end, he strides into the saloon and guns down the lawmen all by himself and walks out unscathed.

So I see the point the person was making, but I tend to disagree. That fight at the end isn't like the one from the first few minutes of A Fistful of Dollars, where Eastwood's character kills 4 gunmen without any of them getting a shot off in his direction. At least 2 of the deputies - Andy and Fatty - empty their guns at him. Even Little Bill gets off a shot. But they all panic. There's something Bill says to Beauchamp during one of their discussions at the jail, to the effect it isn't simply about being fast, it's about keeping a cool head. Here's the quote: 'Look son, being a good shot, being quick with a pistol, that don't do no harm, but it don't mean much next to being cool-headed. A man who will keep his head and not get rattled under fire, like as not, he'll kill ya. It ain't so easy to shoot a man anyhow, especially if the son-of-a-bitch is shootin' back at you.'

And that's largely how it plays out. All the lawmen, even Little Bill, panic. I think Bill had accepted he was dead, up to the moment the shotgun misfired. Then he saw his chance to survive, and he lost his cool. You can see him struggle to draw his gun as he's snarling, 'Kill the son of a bitch.'  Even so, and even with Munny throwing the shotgun at him, he still gets his shot off at almost the same time as Munny. But he's rushing, so he doesn't react when Munny ducks.

Munny's calm, but I think it's mostly because a) he's drunk, and b) he doesn't care. Munny's pretty sure he's going to die after he shoots Little Bill, considering he'll be holding an empty shotgun in a room with 4 armed deputies, but it doesn't matter. He came to kill the man who decorated his store with Ned, and to kill the man who killed Ned. That's it. He's already made arrangement that the Schofield Kid will get Munny's share of the reward to his children, so that's taken care of. He's given instructions on what to do with Ned's share in the event Munny doesn't returns as well, so he's made his arrangements, such as they are. If he doesn't make it, at least his kids have that cash.

There's a scene in The Outlaw Josey Wales where Josey (Eastwood) squares off with a group of Union soldiers outside a general store, and kills 4 of them (one of his associates gets the other). Afterward, he's asked how he knew which to kill first, and he recites some spiel about what he saw in their eyes and their body language. In Unforgiven, after it's over Beauchamp starts asking what the order was he killed them in, and Munny can't say. Beauchamp mentions some nonsense about how experienced gunfighters will always go after the best shot first, and Munny replies he was lucky in the order, but he's always been lucky at killing. There was no thought process about which order. He killed Little Bill not because he was the most dangerous, but because Bill was who he was there to kill.

After that, he just goes in clockwise order, starting with the guy closest to him, the one-handed deputy, Clyde. Who just happens to probably be the next most dangerous. Then, he gets Deputy Andy, but not before Andy and Fatty unload several rounds at him from not 10 feet away. All of which miss, badly. I mean, they're taking chunks out of the bar that's 3 feet to Munny's right, because they aren't aiming in the slightest (Andy even has this ridiculous, terrified, "oh shiiiiiit" look on his face). They just drew and started firing. To be fair, Little Bill only told them to pull out their pistols and gun Munny down like the mangy scoundrel he is. He didn't say anything about aiming. Anyway, by the time Andy gets shot (twice, because he didn't really react to the first bullet), Fatty's had enough and turned to flee, only to be promptly shot in the back. Charley (played by future Adventures of Brisco County Jr. alum John Pyper-Ferguson) had already fled.

Munny doesn't win because he's fast, because he's clever, or because he had Lee van Cleef as a partner. He wins because all the people he was up against panicked, because they all wanted to live, but they couldn't control that and use it. Not against a guy who doesn't care either way, past a certain point. I think survival instinct is why none of the other members of the posse get involved. No concerned citizen tries to aid the lawmen, because Munny made it perfectly clear he's not interested in them. He gives them the chance to get clear when he shoots Skinny, and again when he prepares to kill Little Bill, and again when the shooting is over. They know the best thing they can do to survive is not give this pissed off drunk guy a reason to think he needs to shoot them, and that's the choice all of them make. If even one of them decides to help, Munny might end up dead. All it would take is one halfway decent shot, one lucky shot.

Speaking Of Unforgiven

How badly do you think Beauchamp mangled the story of what happened that night in Greeley's when he turned it into a dime novel? He was pretty clearly already writing it up in his head as soon as he was reasonably sure he'd convinced Munny not to shoot him. I just wonder, with his uncertainty about the order in which people died, and his curiosity about the Spencer rifle, whether the retelling would have in any way resembled the actual events?

Would he write the story with himself as an active participant, or from a (supposed) detached point of view, merely the person relating events as they were told to him? I'd think the fact he was present would add to the story, but perhaps readers wouldn't approve of the author placing himself in the story. Plus, Beauchamp would probably leave out the part where he started gibbering the moment Munny pointed a firearm at him. Would it become clear to him that Ned didn't actually kill that first cowboy, and if so, would he mention the circumstances of Ned's death? That he was whipped to death as part of an interrogation? Then again, audiences in the late 19th Century might enjoy such things. Would he leave Munny's line about being lucky in the order he killed people intact, to serve as a counterpoint to Little Bill, who made such a fuss about remaining calm?

It would be fitting if the story was warped beyond recognition. Munny himself has tried to desperately to forget all the stuff he did in his wild days. At least, all the stuff he recollects, which isn't much (or so he said). The stories are either lost to him, or some nightmare where he sees himself doing things without understanding why. Meanwhile, his friends remember, and spread the stories to their descendants, and all of them see these as great and impressive acts. it's the inverse of English Bob, where he presents himself as this noble gunman defending a dishonored woman, but in reality he was just some drunk, murderous jerk feeling proprietary over a woman. It would be in keeping with the rest if Beauchamp turns Munny into some almost heroic outlaw figure, while Munny would just as soon forget it happened, because all it reminds him of is how his best friend died for something he did.

Happy Clint Eastwood's Birthday!

How are you going to celebrate? I'm going to try and watch The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly again, Then maybe Unforgiven, and High Plains Drifter if I can. So a typical weekend.

I did have thought this morning while scrambling through the woods trying to beat the rain, that's there's a certain similarity between Callie Travers (played by Marianna Hill) in High Plains Drifter, and W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek) in Unforgiven. They both tend to latch onto the coattails of whoever is on top at the moment. Callie was apparently with Stacey Bridges when he was originally in the town of Lago. After he and the Carlins were framed for robbery and sent to prison, she took up with Morg Allen, who was sort of top dog in town now that the gunfighters were gone. When Bridges returned (and Morg had fled, leaving her behind), she tried to work her way back into Stacey's good graces, unsuccessfully.  This was apparently an obvious (or well-known) enough character trait of hers that the Stranger figured she'd overlook his raping her since he was clearly running things at that point*.

With Beauchamp, he makes his living writing up the stories of these aging gunfighters, and he starts off with English Bob. Then he learns the "Duke of Death" really is more of a Duck, and latches on to Little Bill instead. And ultimately, Little Bill's corpse isn't even cold (heck, he isn't even a corpse yet!) before Beauchamp is trying to get details of the gunfight out of William Munny.

I was trying to think if that kind of a character - not simply someone who feeds off another's success, but may use it for their own purposes - is common in Westerns, but I'm drawing a blank. There are the comic sidekicks, the Gabby Hayes and Rio Bravo's Stumpy, but for all their humor factor, they're still presented as good people out to help the hero. There are plenty of opportunistic businessmen and politicians in Westerns, but they're usually presented as being evil, out to manipulate the hero. Beauchamp and Callie are, the word that comes to mind is "pathetic", but that feels wrong. They're more survival driven than anything else, it's just the path they've chosen to that end is one that requires taking a subservient position to another, while constantly being ready to jump ship at a sign of weakness. It's one that demands an appearance of loyalty, or at least fealty, while really being entirely self-serving.

* I think he knew she was still pissed about that, and just didn't care. It was all part of his ongoing plan to let the citizens of Lago's own worst impulses destroy themselves.

You'd Watch Ride The High Country For Randolph Scott

Randolph Scott!

My dad doesn't think I have a proper appreciation for Randolph Scott. I don't think that's entirely accurate.

I didn't like To The Last Man, this is true, but it had to do with the theme of the pointlessness of revenge being poorly handled. Scott was not the issue.

My problems with The Spoilers were due to a) John Wayne covering his face with soot to rob a bank, making me wonder if "John Wayne wearing blackface" was an proper description, and b) the approach Wayne's character takes to dealing with women, which is a problem I tend to have with lots of John Wayne movies. I thought Scott played a rather good villain.

There wasn't anything wrong with Virginia City (other than they told Humphrey Bogart to play a bandito when he can't hold his terrible Mexican accent for more than two sentences in a row). I simply didn't agree with Errol Flynn's decision with regards to his mission to keep the Scott from getting that $5 million in gold to Jefferson Davis. I understood it, but I didn't think it was the smart play at all. Especially when it almost got him shot for treason by his own government.

At any rate, we wound up watching Ride the High Country, which I did very much enjoy. It reminded me a bit of Unforgiven, so that isn't terribly surprising. I think Scott, and Joel McCrea, each play characters who are the logical endpoints of the characters they'd played in Westerns for years, much as William Munny, Little Bill, and English Bob were the likely results for the sorts of guys you'd see in an Eastwood Western.

Gil (Scott) and Steve Judd (McCrea) were both lawmen at one point, one frequently serving as the other's deputy. Now they're older and things aren't going so well. McCrea's spent most of the last few years in crap jobs like bartender or bouncer. Scott's traveling in a fair, wearing as a disguise as he plays "Omaha Bill", who defeated any number of dangerous outlaws. Now he's running a crap shooting gallery, bilking yokels out of nickels and pennies. Gil has a partner, a kid named Heck, who tricks cowboys into racing their horses against his camel over a quarter-mile. Horses can't outrun camels over a quarter-mile, apparently.

But Judd's got a job now, bringing miners' gold from the camp in the mountains to the exchange in town. It's not quite as big a strike as he was originally told (for $250,000 to $20,000), but that's how things go, since as the exchangers put it, 'The day of the Forty-Niner is gone. The day of the steady businessman has arrived.' How horrifyingly dull.

Judd needs some help, so Gil and Heck agree to help bring the gold back safely. Along the way they stop at the farm of an extremely religious man and his daughter, Elsa, who would very badly like to get away from her protective father, and marry that nice Billy Hammond up at the mines. To say she has poor taste in men would be an understatement, though I don't know how many she knows, besides Heck and Billy, so we can chalk it up to not knowing any better. So there wind up being fights over Elsa, and conflicts over the gold, though not from the same direction. It all ends with the good guys squaring off against the bad, face-to-face, if not at high noon, at least in a nice afternoon sun.

My caveats are that I found Heck extremely annoying early on, as he tended to behave stupidly, and by so doing, create trouble for Judd and Gil. It reached a point where he was being insulted by the Hammonds, and I was actually surprised he didn't lose his cool. Still, he's a young man, and they're prone to acting stupid, especially where their pride or a woman is involved, so it makes a certain amount of sense, and provides a nice counterpoint to Judd and Gil, who have very different approaches for most of the film. Judd is very much about the letter of the law, Gil is more of a pragmatist. He may follow the law, or break it, but it'll be based on which is the best path to getting what he wants.

The other caveat is that Elsa has more than one close call at being raped, which I understand is pretty common in Peckinpah films. The whole sequence of her wedding plays like a nightmare, which is about what you'd expect for a matrimonial ceremony that takes place in a house of ill repute, presided over by a judge described as so drunk he 'can't hit the ground with his hat'. On the one hand, Peckinpah films it well, making it this dizzying, horrifying affair for the viewer, who's seeing it through Elsa's eyes. So it's very well done, but it's very unpleasant to have to watch, made worse when neither Gil nor Steve show much interest in getting involved (again, each for reasons consistent with their characters up to that point).

Aside from my squeamishness at that, and my early irritation with Heck, I'd highly recommend the movie.

Not Much Good Warning The Kid To Look Out When He Can't See

What is it with me and sight-related titles lately? I was thinking about Unforgiven recently, as I often do, and it struck me that Will Munny's advice to the Schofield Kid right before the climactic gunfight may not have been much use. Will tells the Kid 'You steer clear of folks you see. Be a lot of them out to hang you.' Except the Kid's eyesight is pretty lousy. That's why he plans to spend the money they made killing them two cowboys on fancy spectacles. Then I reminded myself of the time he opened fire on Will and Ned, which means he can distinguish the shape of a man on horseback at least, so if he assumes everyone is a likely foe, he might be OK. except it's likely they'll spot him before he sees them, and if he immediately takes off, that's bound to arouse suspicion. He must have made it safely though, since I assume Munny's part of the bounty is what facilitated his rumored move to San Francisco and subsequent prosperous dry goods business.

While we're talking about Unforgiven, I do love that final battle inside Greeley's. Not just because the whole movie had been building to the point where Will Munny takes up his old personality, there's a lot of little pieces to it. As much as I disapprove of Little Bill's strategy of beating up unarmed men while his deputies keep the person being beaten at gunpoint, I have to give him credit for how calmly he walked up to Munny and accepted he was gonna catch a shotgun blast in the chest.

I like how after Bill's been shot, he's laying on the ground, he raises his pistol again, but Munny whirls and steps on his wrist, wasting the shot. Earlier in the movie, Little Bill's found Munny in possession of a firearm inside city limits, and with his deputies keeping Munny at gunpoint, proceeds to beat the whey out of him. Unarmed, Munny drags himself up to the bar and reaches for a bottle sitting there. That's interesting enough, since Munny's resisted drinking alcohol thus far, but apparently sees no problem with using a bottle of it as a weapon. Little Bill pins his wrist against the bar with his foot before Munny can do anything with it. So a bit of symmetry there.

The one shot that always amuses me, even more than the casual way Munny shoots Ray with the Spencer rifle as he's leaving (doesn't even bother to look at him), comes right after the shotgun misfire that grants Little Bill a reprieve. As Bill snarls, 'Misfire. Kill the son of a. . .', he and his deputies draw their guns, as does Munny. There's a brief shot amongst that of two old-timers near the bar simultaneously ducking. Only lasts a heartbeat and then the killing starts. I always chuckle at that. They know what's coming, and a low profile is the way to go. And something about their movement suggests a resignation, like someone who has been through so many bombardments they only notice enough to take proper precautions, but not so much that it frightens them. They've seen it all before, and best to stay out of it.

That's one interesting things about a lot of Westerns. Even when a gunfight breaks out in a crowded saloon, it rarely seems like innocent bystanders get shot. Like how the Hulk used to be able to destroy an entire town, and nobody died (which has since been changed, which I don't think was a good move, but nobody at Marvel's asking me). It's always someone connected. Maybe they didn't draw a weapon, but they're a friend or relative of someone who is involved. It works out that way here. Everyone who died is connected to Ned's death in some way. Skinny let Little Bill set Ned up on display in front of his store, Little Bill killed Ned, the deputies all helped (plus they drew on Will with intent to kill). None of the other fellows in the store were harmed that we know of, which is pretty impressive. Especially considering how panicked the young deputy and the fat one were (witness their missing Munny repeatedly from only a few feet away). But they weren't guilty parties (though a few of them were probably involved in Ned's capture) so they survived.

Once Again We See That Greediness Gets You In The End

Return of the Jedi was running on TV this afternoon, and watching the early part of it I found myself thinking that Jabba the Hutt probably wishes Luke's Jedi tricks had worked on him. If they did, he cheerfully lets Leia, Han and the rest go, and there's no trouble. Instead, he gets choked to death, and then whatever was left of him gets blown up with skimmer/skiff/floating pleasure barge thingamabob.

There's a lesson in there, something about listening when people make polite requests. Or, in the spirit of the season, it teaches us if one doesn't get into the spirit of giving, sharing, and good will, they and all their friends will die horribly in a miserable desert. That was the lesson of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, too, you know. Blondie didn't give Tuco his cut on their last scam, so Tuco hunted him down and tried to death march him across a barren stretch of desert. At the end of the film, Blondie has learned his lesson, and leaves Tuco half of the gold, as was agreed upon.

*sniff* Acts like that restore one's faith in the ability of people to learn and grow. What a wonderful thing.

OK, enough of that. Have a Merry Christmas, or if Christmas isn't your speed, then have yourself a nice December 24th, or 25th if you're across the dateline. Talk to ya tomorrow.

It's Pretty Malicious Either Way

From some reason or the other I was thinking about High Plains Drifter again this last week. Specifically, about how The Stranger prepares the townspeople to try and defend themselves from Stacey Bridges and the Carlin Brothers. When the sheriff was trying to convince the Stranger to help them, he told the sheriff that all he needed to do was put a couple of people with rifles on that roof over there, some guys with shotguns over there across the street, a guy in the bell tower, and so on. He makes it sound so simple, and after a considerable bribe, agrees to help them prepare.

The joke is that when Stacey and the Carlins arrive, the Stranger has just left, and the townspeople fail to defend their town. I'm not sure any of them even fire their guns, preferring instead to drop their weapons and just run. So I'm trying to decide whether the Stranger set them up to fail, or whether he was actually trying to give them a chance to stand up for themselves.

What supports the former is that the Stranger is really a spirit here for some vengeance on these cowardly folks. He consistently plays on their fear - both of the impending arrival of Bridges and Co. , and of him - to do whatever the hell he wants. He shoots three men who were hassling him in the barber shop, and the townspeople do nothing. He drags that one rude woman (Carrie) into the barn and rapes her, and the townspeople do nothing*. Well, that's not true. They beg him to protect them, and allow him free reign over the town. The man running the general store is hassling some old Indian who was looking at the blankets, the Stranger gives the old man all the blankets, and they're free because the Stranger's doing it. He names Mordecai the sheriff and the mayor, when he has to know Mordecai's going to be insufferable now that he's not at the bottom of the social ladder. He makes the hotel owner kick all his other guests out, just 'cause. When the bad guys are nearly there, the two Mexicans who built the picnic table ask if they can stay for the fiesta, and Stranger tells them no. That suggests he knows this is going to go poorly and he wants them somewhere else, since they aren't targets for his vengeance.

Additionally, he had ridden out earlier to find one fellow who'd tried to kill him, and came across Stacy and the Carlins, and proceeded to shoot at them a bit, took one guy's ear, set off some TNT to send some rocks raining down on them, in general just piss them off. So Stacey hits town even angrier than he was already, convinced one of the townsfolk had ridden out and done that, and so he's likely even more vicious than he would have been otherwise. Viewed from that angle, the townspeople having a picninc set up, and a sign welcoming the boys back, then apparently being prepared to ambush them would only make things worse for the townsfolk, the knife twisting as you finish falling.

Still, I have this vague idea (hope, may be more accurate) he's trying to give the townspeople the opportunity to stand up for themselves, which has not been their strong point. This started when the Marshall they brought in to protect the town learned their profitable mine was on government property, and was determined to blow the whistle. Rather than suck it up and deal with the consequences, they hired Bridges and Co. to kill the Marshall, which they did. By bullwhipping him to death in the street while the entire town watched from the shadows**. Then, when their hired guns started throwing their weight around too much to suit the town, the town dealt with them by framing them for robbery, and the sheriff waited until they were drunk off their asses to arrest them. Knowing Bridges was going to be enraged by the betrayal, do they admit their error? Of course not! They hire more gunfighters to protect themselves, who by Dave Drake's own admission 'sat around drinking whiskey and acting snotty for a year', then were killed for hassling the Stranger in the barber shop. And we've already detailed how the town responded to that, though I guess it's worth mentioning that eventually a few of them get fed up and decide to sneak into his hotel room at night and beat him with sticks***.

These people have a consistent pattern of trying to avoid responsibility for problems they created, and when they can't duck it any longer, they either get someone else to handle it for him, or they try to deal with it in a underhanded method. So maybe the Stranger is giving them a chance to redeem themselves. So here come Stacey and the Carlins. They're irked about how they were tricked us, and looking to pay us back. There's no time left to find more gunfighters besides the Stranger, and he's riding. . . out. . . of town. Crap, guess it's up to us now. Time to stand up for ourselves, put on those adult pants, and deal with our own problems!

Yeah, that didn't really work. I don't think the second possibility is very likely, since I don't think the Stranger was really interested in helping the town of Lago atone for past misdeeds, as much as he just wanted to stick it to them as much as he possibly could. And seeing as how the town wound up basically destroyed, and I'd say roughly a dozen people (including pretty much all the major players) died, I'd say he was pretty successful at that. Still the idea of the last shot at redemption was another interpretation that I thought of, so I figured I put it out here, let you discuss it, if you'd like.

* Except for Carrie, the assaulted woman, who showed up while he was taking a bath and tried to shoot him.

** Gee, I can't imagine why that would fill a spirit with a desire for vengeance.

*** That didn't end well for those guys. Or for the hotel.

It's More Money Either Way, But Still . . .

At the end of A Few Dollars More, Colonel Mortimer is riding into the sunset, and Monco has loaded quite a few dead bank robbers into a wagon, and has begun riding in the opposite direction. As he does, he comes across the money Indio and his boys stole from the bank, which our two bounty hunters moved during the night. Monco pauses for a moment, then reaches over, pulls the satchel out of the tree, swings it over his shoulder, and resumes his course.

My question is this: Did Monco return the money to the bank, and take the $40,000 reward for it, or did he just keep the stolen money? I can't remember how much was stolen, so I can't weigh the amounts he'd get from one choice or the other.

On the one hand, he has to turn in all those corpses to get the reward money for them, and since bank robbery (and murder) probably upped their bounties, he would probably get asked about the money anyway, so it might be easier to just turn it in.

On the other hand, there was something about the way he deliberately pauses, looked at the money, then seemed to decide "Why not?" before reaching out and grabbing the bag, that suggests to me he decided to just keep it for himself. Anyone asks, he never found out where they stashed the money, as he was too busy killing a dozen guys* by himself**.

* For the record, I'm counting everyone killed in the big gunfight, plus Nino, who was stabbed by Groce, plus the fellow killed by Indio, and the fellow Indio framed for that, plus Wild, the hunchback that Mortimer shot earlier. But not the three that Monco killed during the bank robbery scene, since he couldn't really turn those guys in at the time.

** I imagine he would leave Mortimer out of it. If Monco mentions that he teamed up with somebody, and that somebody isn't present to collect their half of the bounties, that could be problematic for Monco.

Logic's Got Nothin' To Do With It

On this, a brisk fall day, that I have off, I spent the last two hours watching Unforgiven. Because I do so love Clint Eastwood westerns.

- I wonder though, what did Claudia see in William Munny? I know that's supposed to be part of the mystery, but I'm a comic book reader, and we want everything explained to us, don't you know. Not having any particular insights into the female mind, I can't say. Did she catch him on a good day, when he was sober, and in high spirits? Or did she come across him on a bad day, when he felt so low she seemed like a saving grace? He speaks of her reverentially (at least on the surface; there's a feeling to his repetitive comments about how she saved him, and cured him of violence and drink that suggests maybe he resents her for civilizing him. or I'm reading too much into things) enough to suggest that she found him when he was in bad enough shape to be amendable to changing his ways.

- What do you suppose William Munny was like after the end of his trip to Big Whiskey? Did he revert to his state from the beginning of the film? If he did, indeed, continue to care for his children, I doubt that he fell all the way back to what he was when he was a killer of everything that walks or crawled. Would he have still be a good father, but more prone to violence towards everyone else? I imagine fear could be an effective tool in the business of dry goods, if that is what he wound up dealing in. People will accept unfavorable terms from Wilson Fisk for the same reason.

- You know, the running joke of the movie is how bad of a carpenter Little Bill is, and it's true the man certainly couldn't build a roof, but he was able to make working sliding windows, and that has to count for something.

- Or maybe not. After all, he did kill Morgan Freeman. UNACCEPTABLE!!! Morgan Freeman improves movies by 23.7%; Gene Hackman only by 18.4%. This is a gross violation of movie law, cooler characters should not be defeated by less cool characters, which is why the end of The Jackal is such a load of crap. Richard Gere beats Bruce Willis? Bull {expletive deleted}! Though, credit to Little Bill for taking his death well. At least he didn't humiliate himself by begging.

- Kids must have been very self-sufficient in those days. William Munny took off and left two kids, who wouldn't have been out of elementary school if there had been one around, to run a hog farm in his absence. True, they could hardly do worse at it than Munny himself, but still.

- I love the final scene in the bar. All those shots the law got at Munny, and he walks out untouched. Plus, it dovetails nicely with the lesson on gunfighting Little Bill gave Beauchamp, regarding speed versus a level head. It's all put together so nicely.

- It probably hints at my general instability, but I always laugh at that sequence with Little Bill saying 'You just shot an unarmed man!', to which Munny responds 'Then he should have armed himself, if he's going to decorate his saloon with my best friend'. Maybe it's the same thing I was talking about in my review of the Punisher yesterday. It's so threatening, but said so matter-of-factly, that's it's just really amusing somehow. Not in the sense of the absurd tough guy talk in some action films, where you roll your eyes, more in the sense of it's so awesome I find it funny. I don't really know how that works. Maybe the laughter is a sense of giddy anticipation of the violence soon to come?

Random Movie-Post-Thought For Time-Day

*looks up at title* Yeah, I don't know what that's about either.

Seeing as there was absolute jack-all on TV, I popped an old favorite of mine into the Xbox (Which also serves nicely as my DVD player): High Plains Drifter. I love that movie. The eerie music (especially during the opening and ending credits), the miserable cowards who inhabit Lago, the way the blood is as bright red as the paint they use on the town, the way the drifter will appear suddenly behind a character, as if being off camera makes him as invisible to the other characters as he is to us. Plus, there's the exchange between "The Stranger" (Clint Eastwood) and the preacher after Clint has everyone else thrown out of the hotel:

Preach: You cannot do this, it is inhuman brother, inhuman.
Stranger: I'm not your brother.
P: We are all brothers in the eyes of "Gaw-d".
S: You mean all these people are your brothers and sisters?
P: They most certainly are.
S: Then you won't mind if they come over and stay at your place, will you? *settles back into chair, pulls brim of hat down over his eyes*
Preach *turning to the crowd*: Brothers, sisters, have no fears. We will find shelter for you in our own homes (pause) and it won't cost you one cent more than regular hotel rates.

The part that really makes it work is how after that, Eastwood abruptly jerks his head up, with a look on his face like "What the hell is with these people?" I laugh at that every time.

Anyway, in all the times I've watched the movie, this particular question had never occured to me before: What happened to the people of Lago after the movie ended? We know Sara Belding (by then the estranged wife of hotel owner Lewis Belding) is leaving town. But what of the others? SPOILERS from here on out!!!! The whole thing started because the marshall found out the mine that was supporting the town was on federally-owned land, and he was going to spread the word. Thus he was whipped to death in the streets by hired gunmen. Ouch.

But the town is still there and the people don't seem to be impoverished, so I figure the mine is still active, seeing as no one ever told the Feds. So did the people give up and leave? Having been confronted with all the crap they did to enhance their prosperity, did they ultimately flee the town and try and start over? The guys who were reps of the mining company, Morg Allen and Dave Drake, are both deceased, but if the mine is still profitable the company will send more. And the miners will need some place they can get supplies readily, which is probably the whole reason the town is there in the first place (thank you, History of the American West!). So I could see new people moving in, to fill the vacancies left by those who can't stay.

I guess the person I'm really interested in is Mordecai, who I doubt was allowed to retain his titles of sheriff and mayor after The Stranger departed. He'd been throwing his weight around pretty good while Eastwood had his back, and given the kind of people that seem to live in this town, I don't doubt they'd amp up their cruelty towards him, just to repay him for that. So I'm really hoping he got out of Lago somehow, or at least kept that shiny revolver he had, so he could cap anyone who tried to give him trouble. Not like that fat lump of a sheriff would be able to do anything about it.

Sadly, I'll never know. So I guess it's up to my imagination! *tries real hard to imagine Mordecai in a better place* Shoot, I can't really think of a place in the 1870s that would treat him any better. *imagines Mordecai stowing away on Doc Brown's steam-driven train time machine* That's much better!

The Idiot Box Has Got Me Thinkin' Again

Why is Lethal Weapon showing on Comedy Central right now? Sure Riggs is a Three Stooges fan, and Gary Busey is always good for a laugh (like when he put his arm, haha!, over that open flame, hahaha!, that was hilarious!), but I don't think of it as comedy.

Of course, they say Scrubs is a comedy, and I watched that yesterday and can't recall laughing, so maybe it's me.

Either way, it neatly distracted me (for about 30 seconds) from thinking about the Cardinals' bullpen crapping its pants last night... again.

So I'm watching For A Few Dollars More last night. Good movie, don't like it quite as much as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (I think Tuco adds a lot to that one), but I started wondering. Indio rapes Mortimer's sister, she reaches her husband's gun during the rape... and shoots herself. Why not shoot Indio? All you have to do is raise the gun about three inches higher and the bullet goes in his torso. Afterwards, if you still want to kill yourself and rejoin your dead love, you can, but at least deal with his killer first.

I know, I know, if she did that, then what's Mortimer's motive for doing what he does. Uh, a Frank Castle-style war on scum like Indio, but who are not Indio?

And yes, I may have just spoiled some of the movie for you, but come on, it's been out for forty years, why haven't you watched it yet? Seriously, go rent it now, or else the Baby Panda will cry.

Watched that new Fantastic Four cartoon last night. Hey Thing vs. Hulk, always fun, though I could have used more punching and less talking. But what stuns me is Reed Richards. He brings Banner into their home, knowing he's the Hulk, and doesn't tell his friends. Then when Banner has Hulked out and destroyed property, he apologizes for keeping his friends in the dark.

Well, I am shocked at this portrayal. It is completely inconsistent with Reed's portrayal in Civil War, which we all know is the defining character piece for Reed Richards. Everyone knows Reed can't be bothered to slow down and explain things to lesser intellects like Sue, Johnny and Ben, nor can he be expected to worry about a little thing like property damage if the Hulk goes rampaging. Furthermore, what was Reed doing trying to fix Banner? He should be either surreptitiously sending him into deep space, or trying to turn him into a weapon for Tony Stark. This is an affront to the heart of the character.

Sigh. My sarcasm works so much better if people can see my face when I'm speaking it. Webcam? Nah. I'd never subject you to the horror of my face in real-time.

So I finally watched Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl last night. Well, most of it. I kept switching to TNT to catch the "Neo vs. 100 Agent Smiths" fight. Anyway, the thing that struck me was that Jake was on the money when described Jack's actions from the first movie. Outwardly, he's a complete buffoon, but he really is thinking ahead, anticipating what the people he's working with are going to do, and factoring that in to what he does.

He actually reminded me of Vash the Stampede (Trigun). People are always trying to kill Vash, and he runs around, screaming and jumping, and firing wildly, and you can't even believe he lives past the first five seconds, but when it's over you realize the bad guys have been stopped, and while there's massive property damage, nobody died. The "buffoon" was actually in control the whole time, though that's rarely recognized by the people. They tend to chalk it up to dumb luck.

Back to the movie. I don't care all that much for Orlando Bloom (blame it on my mother raving about how cute he is, ugh), but Keira Knightley was cool, and a good time was had by me, and that's what counts, right?

So yeah, another lazy TV-themed post. What do you want, it's Sunday. Football's about to start in 30 minutes!

That Message Was Jumbled, Please Repeat

For what is likely the first and last time, I want to talk about the Shining Knight. I was watching the episode of JLU "Patriot Acts" (because Cartoon Network in the U.S. is way the hell behind the rest of the world, apparently), and something just didn't add up. Run with me here, OK?

So S.K. is criticizing Dirty Harry because in it, Clint Eastwood doesn't follow his captain's orders. S.K. says that dishonors his captain. But then he tells Eiling a story about how he didn't obey an order to destroy a whole village, because he knew it was wrong. And he tells Eiling that the idea that a soldier is supposed to follow orders no matter what is why this time is so screwed up.

So what was his problem with Dirty Harry's actions again? Harry recognized the orders he was given as being, well to be blunt, dumb. Coddling a person who enjoys killing as much as Scorpio did? Harry finds that to be a stupid order, so he ignored it. Granted, it wasn't so good to ignore rules about warrants or Miranda rights (though I did enjoy Harry stomping on the guy's injured leg), but ultimately, Harry was right.

I guess the best I can figure is they hadn't finished watching the movie yet, and maybe Shining Knight would have changed his mind farther along. I don't know, maybe I missed something. But I'm with Vigilante; Shining Knight needs to watch what he says about Mr. Clint Eastwood.