The bottom fifty of MoFo’s Top 100 Westerns rounds out with two more modern day Westerns. The first is Tommy Lee Jones’ theatrical debut as a director (he previously helmed the Western TV-movie
”The Good Old Boys” and afterwards directed
The Homesman) working with a script by Guillermo Arriagam (Alejandro González Iñárritu’s
Amores Perros, 21 Grams and
Babel). It tells the story of 21st Century rancher Peter Perkins (Jones) whose friend, the undocumented Melquiades Estrada, is mistakenly killed by a U.S. Border Patrolman (Barry Pepper) who has newly arrived in Texas. When Pete figures out who killed his friend he kidnaps him at gunpoint and forces him to dig up the body and transport it, via horseback, to Estrada’s small hometown across the Mexico border for proper burial, as he had once requested. Race relations, honor, and guilt drive the narrative, but it is Tommy Lee Jones’ steady hand in front of and behind the camera that make it sing.
Three Burials was on six ballots with three top ten votes: a fifth, a seventh, and a tenth.
George Stevens’
Giant is a three hour and fifteen-minute epic drama blockbuster adaptation of Edna Ferber’s best selling novel about ranchers and oilmen in Texas featuring an all-star cast of Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Mercedes McCambridge, Carroll Baker, Chill Wills, Sal Mineo, Dennis Hopper, and James Dean in his final screen role. Dean starred in three films before the car accident that killed him at the age of twenty-four:
East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and
Giant. He died just a week after he wrapped on
Giant (with the movie still in production) and one of his scenes had to be looped by another actor (Nick Adams) in post production. Those two years before his death were so full of work and promise that he became the first actor to get a posthumous Oscar nomination, first as Best Actor for
East of Eden and then duplicating that the next year when he was nominated as Best Actor again for
Giant. He won neither – Ernest Borgine won for
Marty the first time (Spencer Tracy was also nominated that year for
Bad Day at Black Rock) and Yul Brenner the second time for
The King & I. Co-star Rock Hudson was also nominated as Best Actor.
Giant was nominated for eight other Academy Awards including Best Picture and it won Best Director for Stevens, his fourth nomination and second win.
Like
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,
Giant also deals with prejudice and discrimination against Mexicans in Texas, more as one of its subplots, though pretty frankly and honestly for a mainstream 1950s Hollywood product. The main plots follow the Benedict family on Reata, a gigantic half-million acre cattle ranch covering several counties of Texas as well as a rival (Dean) who winds up with a piece of the ranch where he strikes oil. Two generations of feuding and loving, with Taylor’s Marylander who Hudson marries being the catalyst for much of the tension and envy. If you’ve never seen it and think it sounds kinda like the 1980s primetime soap
”Dallas”, that’s no accident. The creators of that show were clearly inspired by the novel and film. Unfortunately we didn’t find James Dean in the shower revealing his death had been just a dream.
Giant was on seven MoFo ballots. Only one top ten vote, a fourth placer, but an impressive 91 points. It had the same number of votes as
Three Burials but it’s fourth place top vote was one higher than Tommy Lee’s fifth.
We are officially halfway there!
The bottom half of the list was comprised of eleven movies each from the ‘60s and ‘70s, ten from the ‘50s, five from the 2000s, four a piece from the ‘80s and ‘90s, three from the ‘40s, and a pair from 1900-1929.
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