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My Week in Movies March 19-25, 2033

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butch cassidy and the sundance kid poster

I watched ten movies last week, seven of which were new to me. Two of which were westerns that I will talk about later this week in more depth.

The Wild Bunch (1969): Sam Peckinpah made several westerns before this one, but this is his masterpiece, the culmination of his thoughts on the genre. It is brutally violent, dark, cynical, and pretty fantastic. I’ll have more thoughts on it when I write my full review.

Small Town Crime (2017): A small, twisty, noir-tinged thriller starring John Hawkes as a disgraced, alcoholic former cop who discovers a body on the side of the road. He convinces the girl’s father (Robert Forster) to let him work the case as a private detective. The case gives him a new lease on life to actually do something besides drink himself into an early grave. The plot is pretty standard stuff, but it is done well and Hawkes is great as usual. I’d love to see him in an HBO-type series where he solves crimes every week.

Double Indemnity (1973): A television remake of the classic film noir with Richard Crenna in the Fred MacMurray role, Samantha Eggar taking over the Barbara Stanwyck part, and Lee J. Cobb as Edward G. Robinson. It follows the original script pretty closely (though it does edit parts out to cut down on the total time), but pales in comparison.

But it isn’t as bad as it’s been made out to be. It is a perfectly serviceable TV movie. If the original didn’t exist this would be, well it would be completely forgotten as it isn’t good enough to really be remembered, but if you picked it up in the $2 DVD bin you wouldn’t think it was a waste of your money.

But since the original does exist there is no real reason to watch it other than to make you realize how perfect the original is in every way. I watched it because it came as an extra on my Blu-ray of the original and I was curious about it.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969): One of my favorite westerns. It feels like the opposite side of the same coin The Wild Bunch comes from. This is a lot more fun to watch and Paul Newman and Robert Redford have never been more charming.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927): Alfred Hitchcock’s first big hit and his first truly Hitchcockian film has been a gaping hole in my cinematic knowledge for far too long. I remedied this week and I can’t really fathom why it took me so long.

The plot follows a London family after they have taken in a mysterious lodger who might just be a Jack the Ripper-style killer. It is full of creeping dread and suspense while utilizing what would become many of the director’s trademark styles. Even without sound, he proves himself a master of camera placement and movement, and editing.

Barbarian (2022): A pretty terrific little horror film that I talked about in my Friday Night Horror piece.

Sabotage (1939): The Lodger got me into the mood for another early Hitchcock film. I’d seen this one before but it is so worth watching again. It is about a man who is enlisted by foreign agents to commit acts of sabotage in London. It follows his wife and a young police detective as they try to determine whether or not that’s actually true.

Strangely, this one doesn’t seem all that beloved by Hitchcock fans and classic movie nerds, but I love it. It is full of that classic Hitchcock suspense and it makes great use of its setting (the family runs an old movie theater.)

Excalibur (1981): I have this distinct little memory of my mother renting this movie when I was a kid. I was very excited to watch it because it had knights in shining armor and wizards and it looked really cool. But Mom watched it before me and decided that the nudity, sex, and violence were not appropriate for little old me. I was so disappointed.

That memory has stayed with me, but I somehow only got around to watching the film now. What a strange, long, freaky movie it is. The plot is a retelling of the King Arthur myth. It looks great, the set design is wondrous and the lighting and camera placement are all really interesting. But the story just plods along and the action is clumsy at best.

John Boorman directed it. He made Zardoz a few years earlier. It is just as weird and stylish but it‘s actually good.

Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933): Joan Blondell and Dick Powell star in this wonderful little musical with choreography from Busby Berkeley. The film opens with Blondell, Ginger Rogers and a host of chorus girls decked out in dresses made of gold coins singing “We’re in the Money” and it just gets better from there.

Every Secret Thing (2014): Two very young girls are convicted of kidnapping and then murdering a baby. Years later, just after they are released from juvenile correction another little girl goes missing. The story moves from the first crime to the next connecting how what we did in our past influences who we are and what we can do in our present and future.

Did you all watch anything interesting this week?

Westerns In March: The Wild Bunch & Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

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While the western was a hugely popular genre (some figures have the genre comprising up to 1/5th of the total output from Hollywood through the 1950s – call it the MCU of the classic era) it declined sharply in the 1960s. About that time the Europeans, especially the Italians, picked up the western handle and made many more films in the genre – some were great like Sergio Leonne’s Man with No Name Trilogy, but many were pretty terrible.

But in America, the western pretty much died out. Oh here and there a new western would pop up, but they were no longer the preeminent genre and have never regained that title.

Somewhere between the peak of western popularity and the death of it, there began a new kind of western, call it revisionist western. Where classic westerns tended to side with the Europeans in things like Manifest Destiny and treated the natives with contempt – making them faceless, nameless hordes of blood-thirsty monsters – revisionist westerns saw things differently. They dealt in shades of gray instead black and white.

Last week I watched two revisionist westerns from 1969. While they both subvert the classic western tropes, they are vastly different in the stories they tell and the tone in which they take. Call them two sides of the same coin. I thought it would be fun to talk about them both in this post.

The Wild Bunch is a pessimistic, dark, and violent film. It begins with a group of children watching with glee some scorpions get devoured by a million ants. A little later they will set them all on fire. In between those moments, we watch The Wild Bunch (led by William Holden and Ernest Borgnine) rob a bank. A posse (led by Robert Ryan) hired by the railroad to stop the Bunch opens fire as soon as they come out. They kill some of the gang, but a bunch of innocent citizens as well.

The movie, as directed by Sam Peckinpah, seems to announce, This is Not Your Daddy’s Western. Classic westerns were violent – there was plenty of gunplay and death – but they tended to not be particularly bloody. When a man was shot rarely do you see a bullet hole in his clothes, much less blood spurting out. I reckon half The Wild Bunch’s budget was spent on squibs and fake blood.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid begins with a card game. Sundance (Robert Redford) is winning but is accused of cheating. Butch (Paul Newman) tries to tell him to just let it go, but Sundance can’t. The confrontation ends with Sundance literally shooting the pants (or the belt, rather) right off his accuser. It is a completely unrealistic maneuver (the bullet would easily go through the belt and into the man, but doesn’t) but it sets the playful, humorous tone of the entire film.

Butch and Sundance spend most of the film wisecracking and generally having fun being outlaws. The Wild Bunch often laughs, but it is a desperate laugh, the laugh of men headed toward their demise.

Not to spoil both films, albeit ones that are more than 50 years old and such a part of the cultural zeitgeist you likely know how they both end, but all of these characters are headed toward their demise. None of our heroes live out their lives in peace and prosperity. Part of what revisionist westerns often did, and these two films in particular definitely do, is recognize that life in the Old West was often short and very violent. They also act as codas of sorts to the western genre itself.

It is fascinating how these two films are saying similar things but in such different ways. The Wild Bunch is realistic, dark, and gritty. Butch and Sundance is a light, buoyant, and joyful. I love them both, but on any particular day I’m gonna reach for Butch Cassidy far more often than The Wild Bunch.