The Decline of the Western: Leone, Peckinpah, Penn, and Cimino

Mexico is an almost fantastical playground and psychic escape hatch in Peckinpah’s works, but it had been a consistent concept since The Magnificent Seven transposed Kurosawa’s feudal world there. Still ruled by iron fists, death cults, and machismo, Mexico is in such films the anarchic Yang to America’s iron-horse and greenbacks Yin. Here the machine of American progress and its eternal opponents the frontiersmen and outlaws, come to a halt at the Rio Grande, before a land rigid in poverty and long in memory of sorrow, with a culture entirely dedicated to the tragic transience of existence, the code which the Wild Bunch pursue half-realized. A leitmotif is Mapache’s mariachi band which plays all the time, even when they and soldiers are being shelled, and later during the Bunch’s march to death; a pure distillation of this sense of life. They have found it in an older world, where the monstrous forces are not implacably masked by capital and machinery but parading still in uniforms with medieval showiness.

When driven by implacable forces to a dead end, The Bunch get a chance to die noble deaths, going down like Spartans at ten-to-one ratio, momentarily turning the grotesque and hated technology of death – the machine gun – to their own advantage, but only revealing that the warrior identity has just come to an end in an over-efficient age. It is romantic and terrible and absolutely final, all at once.

Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid feels like the Kabuki remake of the The Wild Bunch. Many of the earlier film’s themes and flourishes of recur in the follow-up, a work that prefigures several interesting Westerns of the coming decade, though in itself dismissed upon release and misshaped by studio cuts. It attempts to combine the romantic nihilism of The Wild Bunch with the elegiac spirit of Ride the High Country and The Ballad of Cable Hough. It essays the same basic story – a pair of old friends have become set as implacable enemies, driven to a conclusive showdown. Deke Thornton in The Wild Bunch was forced by the world to hunt his ex-partner. Garrett does it by choice. Garrett has chosen the side of the world, for he knows his future is within it, as Billy is still dedicated to the outlaw life. In this way the film recasts the drama of Billy’s death. The traditional motif of the Outlaw tale, so well personified by William Bonney, is the inevitable fate of the transgressor, where we will not spare him no matter how much we sympathize with his reasons and impulses because he is ultimately too dangerous. This film presents Billy, who has in the past fought for the men of power such as the cattle baron Chisum and whom he still harries with useless fury, now set against them too completely in mind and spirit to ever contemplate a return, as sealing his fate in social rather than moral terms. In this frontier land, the Law is not, as in a fully developed bourgeois society, a clear-cut set of guidelines for the imposition of morality and order, but a selectively enforced, bought-and-sold force. The Law is Power, and Power is based in guns, which is why gunmen seem to swap sides of the law easily until they become, as Billy has, a famous figure marked for destruction for opposing Authority.

Billy is not exactly a hero. He kills without concern with only interest in his own skin. Yet nor is he a villain, as we observe his impossible position and sense his moral disdain for the world, and, when Chisum has Billy’s friend (played by Emilio Hernandez) tortured and his daughter raped for no apparent reason other than helping Billy (perhaps another victim of editing), and Billy tries to save them, we understand his impotent frustration with a land ruled by despots. Tellingly, this scene causes Billy, who has set out for Mexico, to return to his inevitable death; the fantasy land is dead and there is only in unavoidable reality. Garrett’s lot is equally ambiguous. Increasingly hardened by his chase, committing harsh acts of violence all the way, such as when encountering a whore once both partial to him and Billy, he slaps her around to gain Billy’s whereabouts, before bedding her and a bevy of other prostitutes, swinging from one pole of almost dutiful violence to sensual self-indulgence. The hunt becomes a self-indictment for Pat. He is cut off from the wild and sensual world, frozen in his capacity for feeling. He chases Billy as much because he cares for him as because he is angry with him for killing his fellow lawmen. He knows Billy must be stopped, yet wanting the coup-de-grace to be brought by someone who loves him rather than the shadowy tough guys sent by the state. Pat shoots Billy down with swift lack of ceremony at the end, then refuses to let Billy’s body be mutilated. Finally he rides off, pelted with stones by a small boy, in silent certainty that he has bought his future comfort by killing his passionate self.

Beyond this critique of authoritarianism, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a fitful, often funny film that plays out like the fifth act of a severed epic. All the rules, plays, and necessary ends of the scenario are in place at the start, and we watch them click into place. We are introduced to Garrett informing Billy he has joined the law, and shortly after Garrett joins Chisum and others in ambushing Billy’s hideout. From here on the film is a series of small and select beauties, brief moments of transcendence and horror on a journey to a certain conclusion; these include Billy’s young boastful sidekick, played by eternal victim Charles Martin Smith, discovering a certain stoic grace on the point of death; Slim Pickens, reeling away full of holes from a gunfight, faces his tough wife Katy Jurado, and their silent, mournful recognition he is dying; the tight-smiling amicability Billy and Pat give each-other when Billy is temporarily captured; Billy’s blank, dutiful extermination of two lawmen when he escapes, one with a warning and the other, a religious fruitcake who bullied him, without a second thought. Peckinpah’s fascination with the moods of a fin-de-siecle landscape is the whole purpose here; old friends carelessly kill each other; rape and violence are casual; the more law comes to the land, the more violent and perverse a place it becomes.

Of curious status is Bob Dylan’s nervous, wiry presence as a youthful blacksmith, without an identity, calling himself Alias, who drifts through the film both as protagonist and watcher; the songs on the soundtrack may well be the character’s later commentaries on what he had seen, a chorus. His character votes his moral choice and gravitates towards Billy as a beautiful force of anarchy, and seems to celebrate Billy’s capacity for snatching brief joys before death. Rarely has film score been so well tied to the film it has been written for as Dylan’s music, swelling throughout, articulates the unspoken emotions and epiphanies of the characters.

Ultimately a woozy and sorrowful film, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is still a fascinating attempt at myth-deconstruction. It eschews melodramatics and causality for a mood of total, beautiful desolation, one where human warmth becomes more, and not less, important, where a woman’s skin and a friend’s smile are forces of redemption not to be disdained on the gallows’s trap. Where The Wild Bunch saves its heroes from the worst of fates – death by ignominy rather than glory – and gives Deke Thornton one last tilt at honor by heading off with the Villa rebels, Pat Garrett is tragically stuck in our world. Having, as even the bravest usually are, been forced to compromise with the rotten world, he is alive but a shell, his capacity for sensuality and joy finally sucked out.

Beyond The Wild Bunch the Western had thematically run into its own cul-de-sac. Without heroes, without trust in either the civilization myth or their eternal-outsider heroes, the Western looked both retrograde and formless in the cosmopolitan air of the ‘70s. The best Western of the decade, arguably, was Scorsese and Schrader’s Taxi Driver, where inside the common sociopath vigilante spirit of the time they located the beating heart of the cowboy hero; or perhaps the other way around, for in a contemporary context the heroic qualities of Western protagonist suddenly look anti-social, dangerous, even repellent. Not even the Wild Bunch repel us as Travis Bickle does; in fact the Bunch we come to like despite their brutality, perhaps because they want to get away from it and our sad certainty of their doom. Bickle represents the complete septic maturity of the Western code’s rot and refusal to take society for what it is.

Arthur Penn’s experimentations with trying to capture the humor and homespun quality of folk songs and oral tradition, of populist mythology and underground history, began with Bonnie And Clyde (written by Bad Company’s Robert Benton and David Newman), which captured the folk-myth mood of a dream remembered by a million people. This continued through Alice’s Restaurant and Little Big Man, two quirky, counterculture-inflected American elegies that championed social outsiders, the peacenik sensibility, the transcendence of the radical. With a certain historical viability, recently continued by the TV show Deadwood, modern radical movements such as the Hippies are pictured as having roots in the West and its brand of ambling individualism, of natural communion, of good-natured lawlessness; and Penn’s world is Peckinpah’s world as enacted by Yippies.

The Missouri Breaks, Penn’s follow-up to Little Big Man and an expensive flop, is an irresponsible film, which presents to a public salivating at the combination of Penn, Jack Nicholson, and Marlon Brando, a lilting, almost action-free, determinedly unspectacular film. It is more interesting, less higgledy-piggledy than Little Big Man, continues Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid’s ironic inversion of the moral scheme of the Western, and disgraces it even further by refusing to take it seriously at first and then by not forcing the mood or pace when things become decidedly grim. As the laughing, slightly foolish band of rustlers discover their lives are worth far less than a bunch of horses, they respond by killing one of their persecutors. Ranged against them is the ailing paterfamilias David Braxton (John McLiam) and his hired gun, Robert E. Lee Clayton, who as played by Marlon Brando in one of his few character parts (despite top-billing), is an original and bizarre villain. A range-riding, accent-faking, long-distance killer, Clayton moves with smiling deliberation, apparently absurd, then destroying people as he does animals, with ruthlessly playful precision.

The film becomes a lake around a raft upon which Brando and Nicholson practice their craft. Nicholson gives a masterful performance in a sly and subtle key, knowing he won’t win against Brando in showmanship – what other actor of such stature would enter a film hanging sideways from a horse? One magnificent moment has Nicholson, upon realizing Brando has killed one of his friends, confronts the man in a bathtub, trying to provoke him out, but is faced only with Brando’s blubbery back and avoiding blather, an inspired piece of grotesquery. Whilst certain moments suddenly compact into urgency, as when Brando, who has pegged Nicholson as a nemesis, practices a little marksmanship-intimidation, others, such as Nicholson’s various scenes with Kathleen Lloyd as Braxton’s wilful, tomboyish daughter, weave a delicate spell. Nicholson’s characterization offers what little cohesion the story has, particularly in his late shift into dark revengeful mode, and his final act of revenge upon Brando is a chilling moment.

But it would be asking too much for a film like The Missouri Breaks, so utterly divorced from what general audiences went to Westerns for – or even to major, artsy productions for – to be a success. It did, finally, define the no man’s land the western had traversed since The Wild Bunch; what stories were there to tell in this setting, that weren’t the usual range of gunslingers and rustlers? The Western, long a vessel for the escapist fantasies of many kinds, from macho fulfillment to Aquarian devolution, was becoming irrelevant as a suitable conduit for any of these.

IV. Cimino and Heaven’s Gate

Heaven’s Gate needed to be a giant hit upon first release to justify its cost and studio-busting stature. It was a victim of circumstance – United Artists had long been heading for bankruptcy and it became a hot potato in negotiations for the studio’s sell-out to MGM – and then of cultural climate – audiences of 1981, and their appointed ministers of taste in the critical realm, were not in the mood for expansive, revisionist visions. They were flocking to Rocky II, Star Trek II, just about anything with a “II” in the title. It’s conceivable Cimino was given just enough rope to hang himself. The film’s star, Kris Kristofferson, is today blunt in his opinion that the film was a target for its unabashedly radical stance – hardly an offence a few years earlier, but verboten in the early Reaganite era, when radical fantasies were being subsumed into sci-fi parable, as in the Star Wars films. More importantly, it was an excuse to end the uneasy reliance by Hollywood on the Auteur model of film-making that had regenerated it, allowing it to proceed voraciously into a brave new world of blockbuster mass-production. It is worth noting that another big-budget, financially unsuccessful Western from the same time, William A. Fraker’s waste of Lew Grade’s money, Legend of the Lone Ranger. But that film wasn’t anything to upset the applecart, it was just crap.

And yet Heaven’s Gate is a superb film. There have been many films which, deliberate in form, have been hacked down with no care for rhythm, so the works become shapeless and confusing. Beyond this, the criticisms levelled at the film have become in retrospect quite lame. If the good guys and bad guys are too obviously pronounced (yes, the townsfolk seem a touch Fiddler On The Roof on occasions, and Sam Waterston’s mustachioed, fur-clad villain is bit comic-opera, but darn it, he does nasty well), then any number of films can be castigated for the same reasons. Despite accusations it had no plot, the film has a solid narrative, and actually fulfils the problem presented by The Missouri Breaks, in combining that film’s evocations with a solid and purposeful story. It simply does not provide Titan heroes and myriad sub-plots. It experiments with story-telling in a manner more like much smaller, modest films, with carefully-caught moments of character interaction, and well-textured pageant-like explosions of communal action, as with the opening Harvard graduation celebration and the wonderful scene where the Johnson County folk, following the lead of a brilliantly physical fiddler, make celebration on new-fanged roller-skates.

Whilst The Deer Hunter was a commercial success, it abandoned the first half’s inspired accumulation of detail, and passed up the chance to create a rare work of art based in honest visualization of people within their milieu. If Cimino had not had such a strong grasp of the conventions of Hollywood filmmaking, he might have made something very special. Heaven’s Gate is a more consistent and successful realisation of his style, screwing its narrative detail and momentum along a slow arc, until the final act explodes. The main character is the decent but psychically defeated James Averill (Kris Kristofferson), sheriff of Johnson County, an aristocrat by birth and training but for whom, like Robin of Locksley, his definition of aristocratic responsibility means protecting and sheltering his citizens against the Baronial assumptions of the Cattlemen’s League, led by Waterston’s Frank Canton, and whose number includes Averill’s equally dissipated, disappointed school chum Billy Irvine (John Hurt).

Their gentlemanly, classically educated style looks increasingly ineffectual compared to the rapacious greed of Canton’s kind and the robust, freedom-hungry immigrants. The aristocrats can no longer rule and mediate in this free-for-all modern world, this gilded America. Averill competes with young, identity-challenged gunman Nate Champion (Christopher Walken), for the hand of local Madame Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert). Nate, himself a second-generation immigrant, works for the Association, dispatching rustlers with brutal efficiency.

In the spectacular, realistically chaotic finale, the marauding Cattlemen’s encampment is attacked, ringed by dust clouds, punctuated by fallen horses, writhing bodies, and gunfire. It’s hard to think of a more heroically American vision of grassroots resistance. The film’s mournful coda reveals Averill’s eventual relapse to death-in-life when, having returned to the East robbed of his love, resumes a life of worthless riches. Averill’s kind is on the way out, and left to always be wistfully, romantically looking backwards on a lost beauty, whilst the future is claimed by the new Americans he aided.

Composed 2005; revised 2009