Author: Mat Brewster
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Westerns In March: Cheyenne Autumn (1964)
John Ford made some of the greatest westerns ever made. From Stagecoach (1939) to My Darling Clementine (1946), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962) to The Searchers (1956) Ford proved over and over again to be a master of his craft, and of telling stories about the wild west and the men (and women) who tamed it.
Unfortunately, like so many western filmmakers at the time his films were not always kind to the Indians. All too often the Native Americans in western movies were faceless savages bent on raping and killing the white man. They were rarely made into full characters and very little attention was paid to the fact that the white man was invading the Indian’s territory and homeland.
In later years Ford seemed to have recognized his flaws in this area and at least in some ways he tried to make amends. In The Searchers John Wayne plays a pretty repugnant racist and his quest to rescue his niece, who has been captured by some Comanche Indians, allows the film to raise questions about the inherent racism of Manifest Destiny and America’s unrelenting quest to capture the entire country.
With Cheyenne Autumn, Ford’s last western and his penultimate film as a director, he depicts the historical event of the Northern Cheyenne Exodus in 1877 where a group of Indians decided to move from Oklahoma Territory back to their homeland in Wyoming. His depiction of the Indians is sympathetic and demonstrates just how awful the American government treated them.
Unfortunately, the film is overlong, rather dull, and still a bit racist. The two main Indian characters, Red Shirt and Little Wolf are played by Sal Mineo and Ricardo Montalban respectively – two very much not Indian actors (Mineo was of Italian descent and Montalban was Mexican born). The film’s focus likewise is on the white characters with the Indian characters playing second fiddle in their own story.
I could be more forgiving of most of this if the film was actually any good. Instead, it is slow, plodding, and contains one of the most unnecessary side stories I’ve ever witnessed.
The film begins with the Cheyenne on a reservation in Oklahoma. The land is arid and infertile. The people are sick and starving. Some delegates from Washington are supposed to meet them and discuss what can be done. But they don’t show and the Cheyenne decide to go home.
The trip is long and arduous. They must travel in desolate areas so as to not be seen by one of the many Army Forts along the way. Starving, some of them decide to turn themselves in at one of those forts. Though the Captain is sympathetic to their needs he has orders to turn them right around and send them home. Sickness, starvation and the brutal winter weather be damned.
There is some business about the press drumming up hysteria by printing falsehoods about the number of Cheyenne on the march and their ill intentions. Many of the soldiers on the ground (led by Richard Widmark) tend to be sympathetic to the plight of the Cheyenne but have their hands tied by forces in Washington.
Etc. and so on. Ford shot some of it in and around Monument Valley and Arches National Park and he gives the scenery his usual widescreen glory. But the story just never congeals into something interesting.
At one point, out of nowhere comes a scene with James Stewart playing Wyatt Earp and Arthur Kenney as Doc Holiday. It has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the film and is completely comic in tone (the rest of the film is utterly dramatic) and then it just ends and we never see them again.
Somewhere buried in there is a film that could have been great. The story of the Cheyenne’s exodus is a fascinating one and could make an excellent film. This is not that film and what we’re left with is the thought that Ford’s legacy left a whole lot of other films that are far greater than this one.
Westerns in March: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Seven Samurai (1954) is one of my all-time favorite films. It would easily make my Top 5 list. It is full of adventure and action, romance and comedy. It has some of the best camerawork of any film and its themes of loyalty and justice, honor and duty speak directly to me. Its plot – that of a poor farming village hiring a group of masterless samurai to protect them from thieving bandits – has been the template for countless other films.
Its Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa, was greatly influenced by American cinema, especially the westerns of John Ford and Howard Hawks so it makes sense that an American, John Sturges, would turn the Seven Samurai into a western.
The Magnificent Seven (1960) turns the samurai into cowboys who are hired by poor Mexican farmers to protect them from some thieving bandits. It loses some of the thematic weight of Kurosawa’s film but it has a great cast (Including Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, and Charles Bronson), a fantastic soundtrack from Elmer Bernstein and its a lot of fun to watch.
Hollywood seems to do nothing much anymore but make comic books movies and remake their own films and so naturally they remade The Magnificent Seven in 2016. If the original The Magnificent Seven is a pale imitation of Seven Samurai, then the remake is a paler imitation of the original.
It is kind of boring. No, that’s not the right word as there is a lot of action. It is forgettable. I watched it a week or so ago and I’d be hard-pressed to give you any detail about the film.
It follows the plot of the original, more or less. In this one, the bandits are robber barons, or rather robber baron (singular, played by Peter Sarsgaard) and his hired hands. The village is a frontier town and our villain isn’t raiding it for food, but has built a mine nearby and has more or less enslaved them as workers.
Denzel Washington leads the Seven. He’s good, as he is good in everything, but his character has none of the moral center that Yul Brynner’s version had. Brynner played it like a man who simply had to defend the village, but Washington’s character is in it for revenge.
Chris Pratt plays the Steve McQueen part. I’ve liked Pratt in other things but here he only proves that there will only ever be one Steve McQueen. The rest of the cast (including Ethan Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio) are fine, but mostly not that interesting (it took me a minute to realize D’Onofrio was even in the film he looks so different than he usually does, but his character is probably my favorite.)
It isn’t that this film is bad, it is that it is so completely unnecessary. If you want to watch a great film with a similar plot go watch Seven Samurai. If you want to watch a really enjoyable version of this film then watch the original. There is no reason to waste your time on this one.
Westerns in March Stars: in My Crown (1950)
Jacques Tourneur directed one of the great Film Noirs Out of the Past (1947), and one of the eeriest horror movies of all time, Cat People (1942). I’ve seen a few of his other films and they are all good, so I was excited to see what he could do with a western. Stars in My Crown isn’t bad, but it’s not all that great either. It is a slice-of-life film that’s a bit too sentimental and feels like it borrows a little too heavily from To Kill a Mockingbird. Though that can’t be true as it came out years before that book was written. In fact, Harper Lee has noted that she was partially inspired to write her famous novel after watching this film. But she did it much, much better.
Joel McCrea stars as Josiah Doziah Gray who shows up in the little town of Walesburg just after the Civil War, walks into a saloon, announces he’s the new preacher, and starts his first sermon. When the saloon customers laugh at him, he pulls out his pistol and makes them listen.
Soon enough he becomes well-loved in the community. The film watches him as he gets married, has a child, and enjoys inviting the local atheist to church.
The town doctor dies just as his son (James Mitchell) comes back to town, having just graduated from medical school. He has none of his father’s bedside manner and feels people ought to just do what he says because he’s got the schooling to know what he’s talking about.
When typhoid breakout the preacher inadvertently passes it on to the schoolchildren and gets yelled at by the Doctor for not taking precautions (I’ll leave you to ponder how very familiar that sounds).
Later a free slave (Juano Hernandez) is harassed by some miners who are also Klansmen. This is where the film feels like a half-baked Mockingbird but it is much more sentimental than that story.
McCrea is enjoyable, in fact, everyone is good. The story is fine and the direction alright. It’s like an episode of Little House on the Prarie or some such thing. Fine enough to watch, but nothing particularly special.
My Week(s) in Movies: March 5-18, 2023
I seem to have forgotten to write a movie journal last week, which is ok because I didn’t watch that many this week as I wound up binge-watching a show. Still, I’ve got a lot of movies to get through which means’ I’ll just touch on each one briefly.
The Mystery of Mr. Wong (1939): There is a lot of talk these days about representation and appropriation and with movies like this it is perfectly understandable why. In the 1930s there were a number of film series about Asian detectives who were inevitably played by white dudes. The three main ones were Charlie Chan (initially played Warner Oland then Sidney Toler and later Roland Winters), Mr. Moto (played by Peter Lorre), and Mr. Wong (Boris Karloff).
I don’t have time to get into all the ins and outs of why this was a popular genre back then, so I’ll just move on to this particular film. As I say that I realize it has been so long since I watched it and the film was so unmemorable that I don’t actually have much to say about it. It involves a jewel theft and some murders which take place during a house party where some folks enact a bad play. I’ve seen a couple of Wong mysteries and none of them are great. Karloff plays the character pretty stiffly, unlike Waner Oland as Charlie Chan who is at least somewhat humorous.
Stars in My Crown (1950): A movie I should have already talked about in my Westerns in March series. Joel McCrea plays a preacher in a small post Civil War town. There isn’t much to it, just a slice-of-life kind of film that’s a bit sentimental but also sweet.
The Little Foxes (1941): A bitter, brutal little film about awful rich people who will do anything and everything to get even richer. It is based on a stage play and the filmmaking doesn’t really do anything to expand it. Better Davis plays the lead, a conniving woman who married for money and is willing to stab everyone she comes across in the back to stay that way. She’s terrific in it and the entire film is quite wonderful.
Major Dundee (1965): I did write about this one for my Westerns in March series, you can read it here.
Gone in the Night (2022): Winona Ryder is good in this undercooked mystery. She spends the film trying to find out what happened to her boyfriend after he disappears one night that they spent in a cabin in the woods. The mystery isn’t particularly interesting and the twists can be seen coming from a mile away. But Ryder demonstrates why she’s been a star for a decade and Demot Mulroney is also pretty great as a guy who helps her solve the mystery.
Hell of the Living Dead (1980): I wrote about this one in my Friday Night Horror Movie post.
Young Guns (1988): Also wrote about this one in my Westerns in March series.
The Magnificent Seven (2016): Gosh darn it, I have been slacking with my Westerns in March series. I’ll do better this week, I promise. This film is a pale imitation of the original The Magnificent Seven (1960) which was itself a pale imitation of The Seven Samurai (1954).
Disappearance at Clifton Hill (2019): A pretty good little mystery about a woman who tries to solve the kidnapping she witnessed as a little girl. The twists in this one are pretty good and it has a nice moody tone to it.
The Retaliators (2022): A not-very-good horror movie that I reviewed over at Cinema Sentries.
The Banshees of Inisherin (2022): A wonderful film from Martin McDonagh. On its surface, it’s about a guy (Brendan Gleeson) who is so tired of another guy’s small talk (Colin Farrell) that he’s willing to chop off his fingers just to get him to shut up. But really it is about the Irish Civil War and the true value of art. Gleeson and Farrell are terrific as is Kerry Condon.
The Bob’s Burgers Movie (2022): Bob’s Burgers is one of those shows that I love when I’m watching it, but don’t actually follow. I think it started about the time we cut the cord so it wasn’t something I’d sit down and watch every week and I believe it only streams on Hulu which is a station we only subscribe to periodically.
I had originally planned to not watch the movie until I had caught up with the series up to the point the movie originally aired, but decided that was dumb as this is not the sort of show you need to know everything about in order to watch the movie. The film is like an extended version of the film, but a little spiffier, all of which is to its detriment. It is still hilarious, but I found that it overstayed its welcome and the better-looking graphics only made it look weird.
Little Women (1933): I’ve seen multiple adaptations of the book by Louisa May Alcott, and even ran lights for a musical production in college. To tell the truth, I don’t actually love the story, but my wife does and so I periodically throw it on as something we both can watch. This one stars Katharine Hepburn as Jo and she’s delightful.
Final Destination (2000): A pretty dumb horror flick from the early 2000s. I wrote a full review here.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986): A completely nutso sequel to one of the all-time great horror movies. I wrote about it for my Friday Night Horror feature.
Piranha 3D (2010): I didn’t have high hopes for this film, but I liked director Alexandre Aja’s adaptation of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, and Crawl (2019) was kind of fun in a dumb way, but this was terrible. It might have been fun had I seen it in a crowded theater on a late Saturday night, but watching it alone in my bedroom I found it to be dreadfully stupid and an utter bore.
Cheyanne Autumn (1964): Yet another western I need to write about. This one was John Ford’s last western and it centers on the plight of the Cheyanne Indians and their harrowing flight to their homelands. It is overlong and rather dry, but I’ll have more to say about that soon.
The World’s End (2013): Every single film in Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy gets better with repeat viewings. This has long been my least favorite of the three, but it continues to grow on me. The beauty of these films, and what makes them work on repeat viewings is that the jokes build on themselves. Things happen early in the films that get payoffs later and that’s the sort of thing I don’t notice on first (or second, or third) viewings but that make me keep coming back.
Final Destination (2000)
A group of American high school kids boards a plane headed for Paris for a few weeks. One of them, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) falls asleep before the plane takes off and has a vision of the plane exploding mid-air. He awakens with a fright and freaks the heck out. One of his classmates, Carter (Kerry Smith) aggressively tells Alex to chill out and a fight ensues. In the aftermath Alex, Carter, and a few others including Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), Billy Hitchcock (Sean William Scott), and their teacher Mrs. Lewton (Kristen Cloke) are all kicked off the plane.
Sure enough, moments later the plane takes off and then explodes killing everyone on board. Since Alex told everyone the plane was going to explode before it did, the FBI thinks he must have been involved. Everyone at his high school just thinks he’s a freak. Only Clear Rivers believes him.
Soon enough some of the others who survived the explosion begin to die under mysterious circumstances. A visit to the morgue and a chat with Tony Todd reveal that when you cheat death, death comes at you. Surmising that the kids are now dying in the order they would have died on the plane (by using the seating plan and extrapolating where the explosion occurred) Alex figures out who will be next and tries to save them.
He’s not very good at it.
I knew this movie was gonna be dumb, but I had no idea what dumb depths it would dumb down to. I don’t usually nitpick movies over little details. I don’t mind small plot holes. But I was shaking my head over this one within the first few minutes.
The whole point of these movies (and there are a lot of them) is to create larger and more complex methods for the kids to be killed – call them Rube Goldbert deathtraps. I’ve not seen any of the sequels, but apparently, they get really ridiculous. Here they are pretty fun, but not particularly impressive. The last one goes over the top in a way I won’t spoil, but that I found really enjoyable to watch.
I don’t know why I’ve never seen this film until now. I was totally on board with the post Scream cycle of self-aware horror films and this came out at a time when I watched just about every movie that came to my local cineplex, but I must have missed this one. I’m glad I was able to catch up with it now, and I’ll probably eventually get to the sequels, but I can’t say I’ll be in a hurry to do so.
The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)
The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the best horror movies of the 1970s. It is gritty, dirty, and full of Texas sweat. Like a lot of films from that decade, it is documentarian in style, not realistic exactly but textile, you can feel it in your bones – the heat, the dirt, the blood.
In contrast, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is totally ’80s in every way. It is a neon, day glow, music video of a film that doesn’t take anything seriously except for its attempts to have serious fun with the material.
It stars Dennis Hopper as Lt. Boude “Lefty” Enright the uncle of two of the victims of the first film. The movie is set thirteen years after the original film and an opening scrawl informs us that the crazed chainsaw-wielding cannibals from the first film are still on the loose and on the move. We see them chase down a couple of frat boys driving recklessly on the highway and cut them up.
The boys were on the telephone with a local radio DJ, “Stretch” (Caroline Williams) when the attack occurs and she recorded the entire incident. She takes the recording to Lefty and the two of them go on the search for the killers.
Before long they are trapped inside an underground funhouse full of leftover amusement park junk, skeletons, skulls, and dismembered corpses.
Leatherface (Bill Johnson) falls in love with Stretch, while his family members chop up humans and turn the meat into chile to sell for the famous Oklahoma University vs Texas football game.
It is hard to explain just how over-the-top nutso this film really is. It is intentionally ridiculous, verging on camp. For the first twenty minutes or so I was really annoyed by it. I love the original film and this seemed like a terrible parody of it. Then I realized that was kind of the point and learned to sit back and enjoy myself.
More or less. It really is a bit too much. I can handle my gore pretty well, and I’m not opposed to using excess to create comedy. But eventually, it becomes boring. I was exhausted by the end.
At least Dennis Hopper seemed to be enjoying himself.
Last Weekends Pickups
We hit up a couple of second-hand shops last weekend and I got some good stuff.
The Retaliators was actually something that arrived randomly in my mailbox. Normally the review material I get for Cinema Sentries comes by request, but every now and again PR people will just send me random stuff in hopes I’ll cover it. I did write a review of this one and you can read it here.
Batman is probably my favorite comic book character (although I might also say that of the X-men). I’ve read more of his comics than any other line. Knightfall introduces Bane as an enemy and he immediately makes things interesting by opening Arkham Asylum up, releasing most of Batman’s Rogues Gallery onto the city. I’m about 1/3rd of the way through the book right now and so far I’m loving it.
Sometime in the late 1990s the American Film Institute released its top 100 list of the best American movies ever made. They did a big television show about it with lots of cool talking heads discussing why those movies were chosen.
I was in college at the time and just becoming a true cinephile so that show was like catnip to me. It introduced me to all sorts of films I’d never heard of. I printed out the list and began seeking out as many of those films as I could find and watching them.
Yankee Doodle Dandy came in at number 100 and it is one of the few films from that list that I still haven’t seen. I found it on sale for $1 and figured it would make a good blind buy.
Sports Night was the first TV series created and run by Aaron Sorkin. It isn’t as good as The West Wing but it has a lot of that show’s DNA in it. There is lots of great, sparkling dialogue and the actors are just wonderful. I’m not a sports guy but I still like this.
I think I’ve mentioned my love of Maigret, the great detective created by Georges Simenon before. Every time I go to a used bookstore I always look for more books from him. This time I found two.
What have you picked up lately?
Westerns in March: Young Guns (1988)
I was 12 or 13 when I first watched Young Guns. I can’t remember now if that first watch was in the theater or when it came out on VHS tape. Wherever it was, I loved it. I watched it many times after that first viewing as a young teen and even into my college years. It was probably the first western I ever watched. Me and my friends endlessly quoted it.
I remember my uncle, who was a huge western fan (he used to always tell us that we liked westerns too – because Star Wars was just a western in space) did not like Young Guns. He didn’t like it because it wasn’t historically accurate and it portrayed Billy the Kid as a hero and he was really an outlaw and a vicious killer.
At some point, I stopped watching it. Never intentionally, I don’t think, just one of those things. I bought it and the sequel on DVD but let it gather dust on my shelves. Somewhere in my cinephile film snob years I did rewatch them both and decided they were bad, that they were not good movies.
But this being Westerns in March month I decided to dust it off and give it another try. On a technical level, it isn’t great, but it is still a pretty fun ride.
My uncle was wrong. It is surprisingly historically accurate. At least on a plot level. Billy the Kid was taken in by John Tunstall and his regulators. Tunstall was murdered by the Murphy gang and this did cause a war between the two factions. The regulators were deputized for a time and then became outlaws. I’m not a historian and I’m sure there are any number of embellishments, but from what I’ve read it gets the basic story right.
The movie mostly comes from Billy’s point of view which naturally makes us root for him, and Emilio Estevez is too charming an actor to make him a villain. But it doesn’t shy away from his ruthlessness. When Billy and the regulators become deputies and are supposed to arrest the men responsible for Tunstall’s murder, Billy gets his revenge in blood. At one point he shoots a man at point-blank range and the camera moves in close to Charlie Sheen’s face (he plays Billy’s compatriot) as the dead man’s blood splatters all over it. Billy often seems unhinged and takes great glee in violence (his friends periodically note that he seems quite crazy).
As a teenager, I overlooked these things and will admit to finding him heroic. But watching the movie now I recognize the film doesn’t look away from his violent tendencies.
It is avery 1980s western. Some call it the Brat Pack western as it stars the aforementioned Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, plus Lou Diamond Phillips, Keifer Sutherland, and Dermot Mulroney. The soundtrack is filled with synthesizers and big guitars, and there are some bright filters used in the credit sequence. All of this feels quite dated and the writing doesn’t do it any favors (though it is quite quotable.)
So I guess I’ve come full circle on it. I loved it as a teenager, hated it as a younger adult and now I can recognize its flaws but also appreciate it as an enjoyable entertainment.
Poirot: Series 9
I love a good cozy television mystery. There is something comforting about sitting down on the couch and watching a smart detective solve a murder week after week, episode after episode.
I’m not actually the biggest Agatha Christie fan, at least not in terms of actually reading her actual books. But I do enjoy many of the films and television series that have been based upon her works, and Poirot, the BBC series starring David Suchet is one of the best.
Suchet so perfectly embodies the Belgian detective I find it difficult watching anybody else play the role now I’m pretty sure Series 9 was the first time I really sat down and watched this series. It was definitely the first time I ever reviewed one (I’ve reviewed a few others since then.)
You can read that review here.
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