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On December 30th, one Robert Knight (not the WBAI host) wrote this
comment under my review of True Grit: “Sounds like communists just
don’t know how to enjoy a good cowboy movie.”
Off the top of my head, I named these cowboy movies as my favorites in response:
1. Shane
2. One-Eyed Jacks
3. Unforgiven
4. Magnificent Seven
5. Johnny Guitar
6. High Noon
7. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
8. Ride the High Country
9. The Wild Bunch
10. McCabe and Mrs. Miller
I have one more to add to the list, the infamous “Heaven’s Gate” that
destroyed director Michael Cimino’s career and, according to Steven
Bach’s book “Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s
Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists” was responsible for the
collapse of the production company launched by Charlie Chaplin and
other actors in an attempt to control over film-making against the
ham-fisted studio system.
I want to say a few words about each of these movies, but want to
explain right off the bat why there’s nothing by John Ford on the
list. As for Ford, I respect his genius but I really have big problems
with traditional “cowboy and Indians” movies. One of his greatest,
according to critics and film scholars, is “The Searchers”, a film
that is based loosely on the Comanche wars in Texas in the 1800s.
According to most critics, it is a “revisionist” work that decries
racism against the Indians. If I ever find the time to do a survey of
popular and high culture (especially Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood
Meridian”) on the Comanche wars, I will probably revisit this movie
but will likely be less generous than other critics.
There’s also Howard Hawks’s 1948 “Red River” that pits John Wayne, an
ex-Confederate warrior, against Montgomery Clift in what some critics
regard as a homoerotic story with the two men suggestively exchanging
pistols at one point. Clift, of course, was a closeted homosexual. I
saw the movie long ago and could not help but shake the feeling that
it was cliché-ridden. This was probably a function of having seen so
many cattle drive movies in the 1950s that were obviously derivative
of Hawks’s movie, not to speak of the staple television shows of the
time, including “Bonanza”.
Let me start with “Heaven’s Gate”. This film was trashed mercilessly
in the press when it came out in 1980. Vincent Canby of the NY Times
wrote:
The point of ”Heaven’s Gate” is that the rich will murder for the earth they
don’t inherit, but since this is not enough to carry three hours and 45
minutes of screentime, ”Heaven’s Gate” keeps wandering off to look at
scenery, to imitate bad art (my favorite shot in the film is Miss Huppert
reenacting ”September Morn”) or to give us footnotes (not of the first
freshness) to history, as when we are shown an early baseball game. There’s
so much mandolin music in the movie you might suspect that there’s a musical
gondolier anchored just off-screen, which, as it turns out, is not far from
the truth.
”Heaven’s Gate” is something quite rare in movies these days – an
unqualified disaster.
The movie closed before I had a chance to see it, a victim of such
reviews. I am not sure when I got around to seeing an abridged
version, but I was anxious to see anything described in these terms:
“the rich will murder the earth they don’t inherit”.
The best way to describe “Heaven’s Gate” is as Cimino’s homage to
Italian Marxist film: Visconti, Pasolini and Bertolucci. It is based
on historical events, the Johnson County Range Wars that pitted
ranchers against immigrant small farmers. Kris Kristofferson, who
played a sheriff who crossed class lines to join the farmers, had this
take on the movie’s failure at the box office:
The film was about a dirty piece of American history that was the
Johnson County Wars, where the money people, the Cattlemens’
Association, had a death list, had an army of mercenaries that was
okayed by the US government to go in and wipe out these citizens that
were supposedly poaching their cattle. They were primarily immigrants.
Unfortunately the film came out right when Ronald Reagan came in
office and it was – I remember Alexander Hague had a meeting of all
the studio heads right before Michael’s film was screened and he said,
“There will be no more films made with a negative view of American
history, like ‘Heaven’s Gate’”. And there was 100 per cent negative
reviews of – I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve done 82 films.
The director’s cut (219 minutes) can be rented from Netflix today,
thank goodness.
Okay, proceeding to the rest.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/01/07/this-commies-favorite-cowboy-movies/
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