Westerns In March: Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

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In 2019 HBO released an excellent series called Watchmen. It was not an adaptation of the groundbreaking comic of the same name by Alan Moore but it was set in that universe. The series opens with a depiction of the Tulsa Race Massacre, a historic event in which a group of white men burnt an affluent black neighborhood to the ground after a black man had been accused of assaulting a white woman.

The internet was abuzz about the episode because most of the United States had never heard of the massacre. I grew up in Oklahoma, not thirty miles from Tulsa. I had heard of the massacre but never studied it in school. I believe my Oklahoma History textbooks included the event, but it was never discussed in class. If I’m being generous I’d say that was because we covered the state’s history in chronological order, and we didn’t have time to get that far into it before the school year was up.

I was completely unaware of the Osage Indian Murders until David Gran’s book Killers of the Flower Moon was released in 2017. It makes one wonder how much of our history has been whitewashed or completely erased. Considering what is currently happening in the United States I fear even more will disappear before too long.

Martin Scorsese adapted the book in 2023. My hometown was buzzing with the news of the filming and I tried multiple times to become an extra in it, to no avail. There were Facebook groups that breathlessly reported on every day’s shootings and multiple people showed up every day taking blurry photos of the film’s stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro, and Lily Gladstone.

I could not wait to see the film. I caught it opening weekend at Tulsa’s wonderful independent movie house the Circle Cinema. I loved it. It was one of my favorite movies of 2023. I’ve been meaning to watch it again ever since. But it is a long movie and I just now got around to it.

After years of being kicked around the Osage were finally settled on a hard-scrabble chunk of worthless land in North West Oklahoma. It was literally land that no one wanted.

Then they discovered oil.

Amazingly the Osage were able to retain their rights to the land and maintained what were known as headrights. This allowed them to keep their land whilst giving the oil companies the right to drill underneath it. In return, the oil companies gave the Osage regular payments. This made them some of the richest people per capita in the world. For a time.

As it is their way, white men quickly found ways to cheat the Osage out of their money. The government created a system in which Osage could be declared incompetent, allowing white men to oversee their money and decide how it was spent. Naturally, they found ways of spending that money for themselves. Corruption was rampant. A great many Osage were declared incompetent for ridiculous reasons. I read that at least one woman was declared incompetent because she wasn’t spending enough of her money, and therefore didn’t understand its value. Plenty of white folks moved into the area selling goods and services at ridiculously high rates.

And then they started murdering the Osage. At least 60 full-blood Osage were killed between 1918-1931. Killers of the Flower Moon focuses in on one conspiracy led by William King Hale (Robert DeNiro) and his nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio).

As this is already long I’m gonna skip most of the plot details. The basics involve Ernest marrying an Osage woman named Mollie (Lily Gladstone) whose family owns a fortune in headlights. Led by King Hale, Ernest hires various other men to murder most of Mollie’s family pushing more and more money into his control. By the end, he’s poisoning Mollie by adding something nefarious to her daily insulin injections.

It is a horrific, true story about racism, white supremacy, and greed.

The book it is based on is plotted like a murder mystery. We don’t know who is responsible for the murders until the end. It is also a story about the burgeoning Bureau of Investigation, a precursor to the F.B.I.

Originally Scoresese’s movie was going to follow in those same tracks. It would be a mystery, and DiCaprio was set to play the F.B.I. man. but along the way, they realized this was really a story of the Osage. But Scorsese, a rich, white, Catholic Italian from New York is smart enough to realize he is not the person who can truly tell their story. At the same time his privilege as a rich white man, and a decorated director at that, allows him to tell such a tale. In all likelihood, an Osage filmmaker would never be given the funding to make it.

You can feel that tension throughout the film. Scorsese took great pains to consult with many Osage tribespeople, trying to be respectful of their culture and tell their story as best he could. But he also centers it on Ernest, he tells it from his perspective. At the end of the film, Scorsese does something that directly indicates that this is a story told by a white man. Stories like this are important to tell, but we should always be aware of who is telling them.

DiCaprio is brilliant as Ernest. He’s not a particularly intelligent man. To put it bluntly, he’s an idiot. And easily manipulated. King Hale regularly talks him into doing his bidding. There is a question at the heart of the film about whether Ernest loves his wife. I think he does. Of a sort. In DiCaprio’s performance we see him genuinely care for her. Yet he also loves money. On multiple occasions he literally states this. At one point he declares he loves money almost as much as he loves his wife.

I think he is able to compartmentalize the horrible things he is doing and separate them from his feelings for Mollie. He’s also a blatant racist. So killing Native Americans is no big deal to him. Killing Mollie’s sisters is just killing some more Osage and that’s okay. The fact that they are Mollie’s kin, that she loves them, and that their deaths pain her is somehow separated in his mind.

We eventually see some regret rise up in him. He’s willing to poison Mollie because that will “slow her down” and keep her from discovering the truth. But slowly he realizes he’s killing her. Slowly he sees the effect all this murdering has on her. I mean, he’s still a horrible human, but just slightly better than King Hale who has no remorse at all.

Lily Gladstone is nothing short of brilliant. She doesn’t have a lot of lines, but she makes every scene count. Watch her face and notice how she’s hiding her emotions and thoughts, but look closely and you can see everything underneath. It is a subtle, fantastic performance.

This has grown too long. The film is long. At 3.5 hours you have to have patience with it. It isn’t a perfect film, that tension between the story that needs to be told and the one that Scorsese is able to tell sometimes falls on the wrong side. But it is a great film. One that tells a hugely important story in meaningful ways.

Westerns in March – Buchanan Rides Alone (1958)

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Actor Randolph Scott and director Budd Boetticher made seven movies together, all westerns. I’m a big fan of all of them and this weekend while looking for another western to watch I landed on this one. Mostly because I knew it to be lighter fare than the others and my wife tends to not like dark and serious films.

Buchanan Rides Alone is the silliest of the films they made together, and probably my least favorite. Scott plays Tom Buchanon a drifter returning from Mexico with a lot of money in his pocket. He’s headed home where he’ll buy a plot of land and finally settle down.

He stops at a strange little border town called Agry where he quickly learns everything – a glass of whisky, a room for the night, a well-cooked steak – costs ten dollars exactly. He sits down with a bottle only to have it taken away from him by a drunk named Tom Agry. Moments later a young man named Juan (Manuel Rojas) charges into the bar and kills Tom.

The Sheriff and several other men round Juan up and beat the living tar out of him. Buchanan steps in to lend a hand. Naturally, this lands him in jail.

Nearly everybody of importance in the town is named Agry. The leader of the family Simon runs the town with a tight fist and is also a judge.

There is a trial, and a breakout, and lots of gunfights. It is all light-hearted and fun. There are a few attempts to be actually funny, but mostly it is just breezy and slight. Most of the other films Scott and Boetticher made together are much more serious in nature and have something to say. This is pure entertainment.

It isn’t bad at that, but I can’t help but compare it to films like The Tall T and Ride Lonesome (both of which I reviewed here), and this film just doesn’t compare.

Westerns in March – Day of the Outlaw (1959)

day of the outlaw poster

One of the things I love about Westerns is how they deal with taming the wild frontier, and how they depict small societies forming miniature communities. As Europeans settled across the Western United States they formed embryonic societies outside the confines of the Eastern cities. Certainly, they brought with them Western ideas of society (while destroying many of the native cultures around them) but they could literally create their communities in the ways that they saw fit.

The television series Deadwood does an amazing job of bringing forth what I’m talking about.

Obviously, Western movies take a great many liberties with history and the societies that they depict are often in the shape of (what was then) modern ideas, but it is still a fascinating concept.

Day of the Outlaw begins with a man, Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) who helped found and make safe the tiny, isolated community of Bitters, Wyoming. He killed and ran off various outlaws and badmen from the area to make it safe for women and children. He figures that gives him a say in how things are run now.

But while society sometimes needs men like Starrett, it likes to forget them once their jobs are done. Homesteaders have come to town, farmers, and they want to put up barbed wire fences (someday I want to do a study on the use of fences in Westerns) to keep their livestock from running away. Starrett runs cattle across the open land and fences get in his way.

It is this conflict that the film begins. Starrett has come into town to either force the homesteaders to not put up their fences or kill them. It doesn’t help matters that the head homesteader is married to Helen Crane (Tina Louise) whom Starrett loves. Just as the fight is about to happen Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives) and his band of outlaws bust in.

They are on the run from the cavalry but need a place to button down for the night. The men are raring for a good time and figure copious amounts of whiskey and a few turns with the women would be just about right. Bruhn is a tough man, and not opposed to murder when it suits him, but he forbids the men from indulging their basest instincts. Not so much because he has a soft heart for the women but because he knows the men will wind up fighting over the small number of women in this burg, and that’s not good for anybody.

Director Andre de Toth ratchets up the tension as the outlaws grow increasingly impatient and Starrett learns to become the good man. Matters take a turn for the worse as storms blow in making it nearly impossible for anyone to leave.

Cinematographer Russell Harlan fills the screen with wide vistas of the on-location snowy mountains. The stark black-and-white photographer emphasizes the isolation and frozen hardness of everything.

Robert Ryan and Burl Ives are terrific as two hard men sizing each other up in an impossible situation. It all comes to a boil with Starrett leading the men through the mountains in a suicidal trek that he hopes will at least keep the townsfolk safe.

I liked it a lot and I recommend it to one and all.

Westerns in March: A Reason To Live, A Reason To Die (1972)

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This movie is basically a Western version of The Dirty Dozen with James Coburn playing disgraced Col. Pembroke who surrendered Fort Holman to the Confederate Army without a single shot being fired. We’ll eventually find out why, but as the film begins he’s disgraced and considered a coward.

After he breaks out of Fort Holman, where he is being held as a prisoner of war, he makes his way to another Union Fort and makes a deal with its commander. He’ll take a handful of men and retake the fort, reclaiming his good name. The commander figures if Pembroke actually accomplishes this then he’ll get a promotion and if he doesn’t then good riddance. For his team, Pembroke rescues a group of deserters and cutthroats about to be hanged. This includes Eli (Bud Spencer) who he already knows.

As soon as the men are on their way they begin to grumble and plot to ditch Pembroke and regain their freedom. Pembroke has his own reasons for going back (and it isn’t just to clear his name) but he tells the men there is hidden gold and if they succeed then they will all be rich in Mexico.

The Fort is considered impenatrable (which is all the more reason Pembroke is considered a coward for having surrendered so easily) but naturally our heroes find a way in. Telly Savalas plays the new commander. There is a big battle with lots of explosions. Some of our heroes die, but only the ones you don’t really care for.

It is pretty paint-by-numbers and it really does borrow a lot from The Dirty Dozen. The action is well done and it moves along rather quickly. Coburn is good as is Bud Spencer (whom I only know from that Robert Altman take on Popeye). Savalas sometimes attempts a Southern accent, but mostly feels like he’s playing in some other movie. I read somewhere that he wanted to portray the character as gay (which was still a big no-no in 1972) which may account for his odd mannerisms.

All in all it is a decent film, worth watching if you like westerns or Coburn, but still a bit of an oddity.

Westerns in March – Hombre (1967)

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As it is March the 15th and I haven’t written about a single western I’ve clearly been remiss at tackling my Westerns in March theme. My apologies for that. It has been quite a month, but I’m gonna try and make the back half of March full of cowboys.

Westerns have always struggled with their depictions of Native Americans. For decades they were generally depicted as nameless savages out to rape the womenfolk and massacre the men. Even when Hollywood started to be more sympathetic they often chose white actors to portray the Native American characters with more than a few lines.

I had all that in mind when Paul Newman shows up in Hombre with tanned skin, long hair, and dressed like an Apache. My immediate thought was, “Oh no. Not this again.” But Hombre has something different in mind. Newman plays John Russell a white man who was stolen and raised by Apaches. But he was treated well enough that when his real father found him as a teenager and took him home he ran away to join back with his tribe.

As the film begins he is living on a reservation. A Mexican man comes to tell him that his father has died and left him his boarding house. The man suggests that Russell should clean himself up and live a nice life as a white man. He does clean himself up, gets a haircut, and puts on white man clothes (makes himself look like Paul Newman) but he has no intention of living at the boarding house. The lady who runs it, tries to make him a deal, says she’ll still run the house that he won’t have to do anything and he’ll make a nice living. But he decides to sell it. He takes the money and joins a stagecoach out of town.

There are a couple of fancy-pants riders on the coach, one of who used to be the US Indian Agent for the reservation (Fredric March). Since Russell now looks like Paul Newman the Agent (and especially his wife, played by Barbara Rush) takes a shine to him, but once they learn he used to live on the reservation as a native they immediately force him into riding up top with the driver.

There is a lot of that in this film. Paul Newman was one of the most handsome men on the planet, and with his blondish hair and blue eyes, one of the whitest. But the moment anyone finds out his character lived with the Apache they hate him, and they treat him like garbage.

For his part, Russell doesn’t play the Indian with a heart of gold. He’s full of righteous anger. The story inevitably leads them to a situation in which Russell has to save the racist white people but it plays out in unexpected ways. It isn’t a perfect film and I can’t say that all of its racial moralizing works, but it sure is interesting. It is also a fine bit of genre filmmaking as well. I’ve made it sound like more of a morality play than it really is.

That situation I alluded to finds one of the coach riders with a box full of (stolen) cash and some outlaws trying to steal it. The film takes all of that stuff and makes it quite thrilling to watch beyond the fascinating takes on Native Americans and how the white man treated them.

Highly recommended.

Westerns In March: All the Movies

the searchers poster

For the last couple of years, I’ve tried to watch and write about Western movies in March. I couldn’t think of a clever title for this theme, but I’ve enjoyed partaking in it. Even if I don’t seem to write as many movies as I’d like to each time.

Here’s the full list of films I’ve covered.

The Big Trail (1930)
Blood on the Moon (1948)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
The Cariboo Trail (1950)
Cheyenne Autumn (1964)
Day of the Outlaw (1959)
Django (1966)
The Great Train Robbery (1903)
Hombre (1967)
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Major Dundee (1965)
The Naked Spur (1953)
A Reason To Live, A Reason To Die (1972)
The Searchers (1956)
Stars: in My Crown (1950)
Vera Cruz (1954)
The Wild Bunch (1969)
Young Guns (1988)

Westerns In March: The Great Train Robbery (1903)

the great train robbery

If you’ve never watched a Western before you’ve still probably seen scene from this one. An iconic moment shows a dusty old man with a hat and massive mustache stare at the screen, then point his gun at the audience and shoot. Any discussion of film history will bring up this scene.

It is a scene that has no real place in the film. It was shown either at the beginning or the end of the movie, depending on the projectionist’s whims. It is just a cool little moment. Sometimes it is said that audiences watching that moment, unfamiliar with cinema as they might have been in 1903, actually ducked for fear of actually being shot. This seems to be apocryphal, made up to show what rubes people used to be.

It is also sometimes called the very first Western movie, or the first film that told an actual story. This, also is pure nonsense as there were many Westerns that came before this one, many of which told a real story. The Wikipedia article on the film is pretty funny as the editors over there seem to be actually angry over these errors.

What The Great Train Robbery actually was, what in fact most likely caused it to be called all of those superlatives, was really popular. It was a huge box-office success. It is also rip-roaring fun to watch.

The plot does exactly what it says on the tin, and with a run time of just 12 minutes, it does nothing more. Some outlaws board a train, rob it at gunpoint, and then are captured by a posse of lawmen.

While it might not have significantly influenced or advanced the Western as a genre (as Wikipedia notes with a certain amount of glee) it still uses the tools of the time most effectively.

It uses wide shots, camera pans, and matte paintings to great effect. While on the train in the foreground, we see the outlaws doing their thing but in the background, through an open door, we see the mountains whiz by, making incredible use of rear projection.

There is also a great use of smoke and some hand colorization of certain items which I always find amazing.

The film is in the public domain and as such is widely available all over the Internet, including YouTube. It is well worth watching if you are a fan of cinema history. I’m surprised it took me so long to get to it.

Westerns in March: Vera Cruz (1954)

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In my review of Blood on the Moon I talked a little about how the Western slowly changed from a genre about moral absolutes to one that sometimes lived in the grey. That film does have some grey tones to it. Robert Mitchum’s character is someone with a dark past, who contemplates destroying a family for money. But ultimately he chose the path of righteousness, and if we’re being honest, we always knew he would.

Anthony Mann and James Stewart would team up for five westerns (the first and probably best – Winchester ’75 came out in 1950) that explored the darker sides of men living in wild, lawless times. As the 1950s rolled along the genre changed in other ways too. They became more violent and dirty. Oh, Westerns had always lived by violence – gunfights and brawls are staples of the genre – but for decades the violence had been rather bloodless. But as times changed, as the culture changed, this violence became more explicit, more real.

Vera Cruz is often cited as a lynchpin for this change. All of its characters are amoral, cynical, and aggressively violent. At one point Burt Lancaster’s character threatens to murder several children if he doesn’t get what he wants.

Set just after the Civil War, Vera Crus follows Ben Trane (Gary Cooper) and Joe Erin (Burt Lancaster) as they look for work. Both fought during the war and now they aren’t cut out for much more than that. They head to Mexico because they’ve got their own war going on (the Franco-Mexican War). Ben has at least some sense of a moral code, those he’s still willing to kill for money, whereas Joe (and his band of cutthroats) is willing to do just about anything if the price is right.

They are recruited by both sides of the war – the Juarists and Emperor or Miximillian – but they get with Maximillian since he has deeper pockets. They are charged with escorting Countess Duvarre (Denise Darcel) to the city of Vera Cruz. Naturally, there are complications including the discovery of gold hidden in her stagecoach.

It is a dirty, cynical, violent film and both Cooper and Lancaster are good in it, but something about it just didn’t hit with me. I suspect part of the problem is the way it sits somewhere in between the Classic Western and the Revisionist Westerns that would follow in its wake. It has a classic structure to it, and while it is certainly more violent than those films, and its characters are more morally reprehensible, it never goes quite fully into those darker motifs. As such it feels a little out of sorts.

Or something. I really don’t know exactly why I didn’t love it, and to be honest I watched it a couple of weeks ago and its already faded in my memory banks. I’d say it is worth watching if you are a fan of the genre or those two actors. But it isn’t necessarily a must-see for everyone.

Westerns in March: The Searchers (1956)

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When we went to visit Monument Valley I knew I’d be watching a John Ford western soon after, I just wasn’t sure which one it was going to be. Ford made some half a dozen films there and it was really those movies that made the location famous. There is even a spot in the Valley called John Ford Point.

He shot at least a couple of scenes on that point, but I couldn’t remember which ones so I decided to watch my favorite Ford Western, The Searchers.

In some ways, The Searchers was John Ford and John Wayne’s response to many of the previous Westerns they made together. Like a lot of Westerns at the time their previous films depicted American Indians as deplorable enemies – faceless, nameless, and utterly brutal. In The Searchers the Native Americans aren’t exactly kind and generous, but the white folks are just as brutal.

Wayne plays Ethan Edwards an independent loner. The film begins with one of cinema’s most striking images. Matha Edwards (Dorothy Jordan) stands in her doorway. The camera sits inside her house which is dark and small, it looks outside into the wild, expanse of the West. In the distance rides Ethan, small and alone. This image will be bookended at the end of the film with Ethan standing just outside the door, always on his own.

He fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederates. He still wears the uniform and takes pride in having never surrendered. It’s been three years since the war ended, but he’s just now returning home. He’s got gold in his pocket and it is hinted that he got it by ill-gotten means. The way he looks at Martha, his brother’s wife, indicates he’s in love with her.

When a neighbor’s cattle are stolen by someone – probably Indians – Ethan rides off to help. When he realizes that the cattle were a diversion, that the Indians were really a “murder party” he heads home but too late. His brother, wife and one of their children are dead. The older daughter Lucy and the youngest Debbie (played by Natalie Wood later in the film) have been abducted.

Ethan and Lucy’s fiancee Martin (Jeffrey Hunter) spend the next many years pursuing the tribe. Soon they find Lucy murdered (and by implication, raped) but Debbie remains with the tribe, taken in as one of their own.

We soon realize that Ethan isn’t tracking her as a rescue mission, but aims to kill the girl, as living as an Indian is worse than being dead in his warped mind. Martin stays with him, acting as something of a moral compass, but mostly there to keep Ethan from doing what he’s set out to do.

It’s fascinating to see Wayne in this mode. He’s so often played the hero. Here his actions are often very similar to what he’s done in previous movies – killing Native Americans with a vengeance – but The Searchers allows the audience to view those actions in a different light. We see the black heart of racism deep inside his character and it’s chilling. It’s also one of Wayne’s finest performances.

Ford shoots it beautifully. The western landscapes, especially those of Monument Valley are uncanny and utterly beautiful. This is the West of the movies, and it has never looked better.

I’ve seen The Searchers three times now and I’ve liked it more with each viewing. On the surface level it is a terrifically told Western adventure, but a closer look finds Ford really digging deep into the mythos of the Old West and what it meant for Native Americans and the Europeans who conquered it.

A terrific movie all around.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Bone Tomahawk (2015)

bone tomahawk

There aren’t a lot of Western/Horror hybrids for some reason. I don’t know why as it would seem like the barren landscapes of the West and the isolated communities filled with all sorts of outlaws would lend itself to horror, but I guess not. Maybe the audiences for those two genres are considered too far apart to make bringing them together worth it.

Controversial director S. Craig Zahler gave it a pretty good shot with his debut film Bone Tomahawk. Storywise it is primarily a Western but its graphic use of violence and impending sense of doom give it a good dose of horror.

In discussing the Western Genre I’ve not spoken much about its depictions of Native Americans (though we did have a good discussion in the comments section a while back). Generally speaking, the Western’s depiction of Native Americans has not been good. They were usually depicted as nameless, faceless savages attacking, raping, and murdering the pure and righteous white people who had come to the new land to save them from their savage ways.

Zahler (who also wrote the script) tries to work his way around this problem within the genre by having an Indian character (Zahn McClarnon) state that the film’s villains aren’t real Indians, but Troglodytes, cannibalistic savages that belong to no tribe. And thus hand waiving the whole problem away. But this is a Western set in the American West and the villains sure do look a lot like Indians, and they sure are savage. If you can get past that (and the really, truly, gruesome violence) then you are in for a bit of a treat.

A stranger (David Arquette) stumbles into the small town of Bright Hope. He buries his ill-gotten treasure before wandering into a bar. The town’s Back-Up Deputy Chickory (Richard Jenkins) spies the bag burial and tells Sheriff Hunt (Kurt Russell) about the suspicious nature of it all. They question the man who pushes Chickory down and tries to escape, getting shot in the leg by Hunt for his trouble.

They call in the doctor’s daughter Samantha (Lili Simmons) to take the bullet out of the stranger’s leg. Somewhere in the night our villains sneak into town and kidnap the stranger, a deputy, and Samantha.

In the light of day Sheriff Hunt, Chickory, Samantha’s husband Arthur (Patrick Wilson) who has a broken leg, and a dandyish gunslinger named John Brooder (Matthew Fox) all head for the valley where the enemy camps.

All of this is fairly standard Western stuff. Zahler gives it a lazy energy in the first half which is punctuated by some wonderful dialog and terrific performances by all involved. As they finally come to the enemy camp things turn horrific as the bad guys are truly abhorrent. I won’t go into details but let’s just say cannibalism isn’t their worst trait.

I’ve seen a lot of horror films in my day so I’m fairly immune to graphic violence, but this gets pretty intense. I do appreciate a film that doesn’t shy away from the realities of violence. Westerns have a tendency to have bloodless gunfights where the worst that happens to a man when he gets shot is that he falls off a building. Real violence is full of blood and gore and is horrible in every way. There is something to be said for a film to show that.

If you can stomach the violence and the hand-waiving away of the genre’s casual racism, Bone Tomahawk is a rather terrific bit of genre filmmaking.