More Westerns

I have been trying to find time to watch as many westerns as possible so that students have more choices to write about it. Here are some I've viewed recently.

Comanche Territory (1950)
This movie begins with Jim Bowie and a Trader being captured by the Comanche because they have violated the treaty and entered the Comanche land. The latest treaty is being broken, though, because the signed version was stolen from the Trader. Bowie is there to “sit in counsel” with the Chief about the situation, assuring him that the white government wants to uphold the treaty. Bowie teaches the American Indians how to make the Bowie knife. In the movie, the chief is dressed very extravagantly, way more than he would have been in daily life. The Indians appear to be plains Indians complete with teepees and ponies, but the landscape is very western with rock mountain ranges. Bowie discovers that a local business owner and her brother are scheming to keep the treaty from being renewed so that the settlers can mine the silver from the Comanche Territory. Bowie tells Katie that she “doesn’t act or dress like a lady.” When he is startled by Katie’s behavior, he tells us that back in Louisiana, “when we run across pretty ladies, we make love to them,; we kiss them, spank them on occasion, but we never go around shooting them.” She puts on a dress and tries to impress him, and in fact, she is eventually persuaded by Bowie to “do the right thing” by helping him stand against her brother and the other settlers. The movie is not that impressive, but some of the things a paper on this movie might explore include race, treaties, gender roles, and clothing.

War Wagon (1967)
This comedy western is described with the following: “John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Howard Keel. An ex-convict and his partner eye an armored stagecoach fitted with a Gatling gun and full of gold.” It is based on a book called The Bad Man. The introduction to the movie tells us that Douglas did all of his own stunts in this film, his 11th western. He wanted this cowboy to be different and to stand out so in the movie he wears a flashy ring on the outside of his gloves, and he mounts his horse in a different way each time. So, about the movie, the war wagon is an armored wagon, iron-plated with 33 guards. Wayne plays a recently paroled man who is after the wagon for the ½ million that is on it. He gets five “hired guns” together and makes a plan.
One of these hired guns is an American Indian who spends most of his lines talking about the “dumb Indians” who should do as he has: “Learned to live in a white man’s world. Do as they do. Grab all you can anytime you can.” Another interesting character is in the film but for a few short clips when one of the outlaws falls in love with her and we learn that she is already married to a guy twice her age because she was “bartered” for $20 and a horse. A paper on this movie might write about saloons, gambling, gender roles, women’s rights, Indians, racism.

El Dorado (I'll have to check on the year)
El Dorado is Spanish for “the golden one.” The trailer for the film says “It’s the BIG ONE with the BIG TWO: The story of two close friends who didn’t need any enemies to start a war.” John Wayne and Robert Mitchum team up with Charlene Holt who plays Maude, “a fine figure or a woman who stretches friendship to the breaking point,” to form “a beat up band of misfits with nothing to lose but their lives.” The movie is about a rich rancher who hires guns to drive off smaller land owners. This cattle baron tries to hire Wayne, but instead Wayne’s character teams up with the town and its sheriff to stand against him. Papers on this movie might write about gender roles, hired guns / mercenaries, the idea of the rugged individual, Hispanics or Mexicans, or the American notion of good over evil in the nineteenth century.

“Spaghetti Westerns”
So, what is a spaghetti western? Wikipedia defines the term: “Spaghetti Western, also known in some countries in mainland Europe as the Italo-Western, is a nickname for a broad sub-genre of Western film that emerged in the mid-1960s, so named because most were produced and directed by Italians, usually in coproduction with a Spanish partner.” I’d imagine the term is derogatory, and I won’t use it again. Wikipedia also tells us, “The best-known and perhaps archetypal Spaghetti Westerns were the Man With No Name trilogy (or the Dollars Trilogy) directed by Sergio Leone, starring then-TV actor Clint Eastwood and with musical scores composed by Ennio Morricone (all of whom are now synonymous with the genre): A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Atypically for the genre, the last had a relatively high budget, over one million USD. Leone's next film after the so-called "trilogy" was Once Upon a Time in the West, which is often lumped in with the previous three for its similar style and accompanying score by Morricone, although it differs by the absence of Clint Eastwood in the starring role” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_western). I did watch these movies, though, and I was not impressed. In fact, I’m not sure that individually one could write a very good paper on them, though a paper on the genre itself might be okay. Specifically, consider For a Few Dollars More. The introduction tells us: “A man with no name and a man with a mission hunt a Mexican bandit for different reasons.” The entire movie is Eastwood and the other character chasing a bad guy to kill him. There is no sub plot and very little dialogue. It was boring. I guess one might write about law and order in the west, or one’s sense of justice, but that would be pushing it. To read more about the genre, check out http://www.wildeast.net/spaghettiwestern.htm.

The Last Challenge (again, I'll have to verify the year)
The movie reads: “An upstart outlaw baits a legendary gunslinger, now a Marshal in love with a saloon keeper.” This Glenn Ford movie is similar in theme to The Shootist, without John Wayne and the cancer. It’s about a poor guy who can’t retire in peace because everyone who wants to make a name for himself keeps showing up to challenge him to a new gunfight. I don’t know that there is much to write about, but there are interesting depictions of black servants and “ladies of the night,” in addition to western notions of law and order and gunsling-ing.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
This movie has a lot to write about, but most of it is peripheral. Let me explain.
This movie with Paul Newman and Robert Redford is described with: “When a persistent posse chases two outlaws, they decide to take their act to Bolivia.” In Bolivia, they continue their outlaw ways, and the posse catches up to them, and they go down in a blaze of glory. That’s not that interesting. However, I watched an intro about the movie on TCM that put it in a different light. It said that the movie was a “kinda partly true story” so one could certainly research the real outlaws and make comparisons. More interesting, though, was that the intro defined the movie as a reflection of a specific time period: The story, according to TCM, is in the 1890s, but the “attitude is purely 1960s” when the movie was made. It is “very much a new kind of Western for a new era” where “bad guys are the good guys” they’re outlaws but mostly they’re non conformists.” TCM continues, “They live outside the system. They answer to nobody and live completely on their own terms, and those terms involve robbing banks.” Now, I can imagine a good paper on that topic!

More to come, I'm sure . . .