More new home video purchases...
Three from the good folks at Criterion...
Stagecoach (John Ford / 1939)
Walker (Alex Cox / 1987)
Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch / 1995)
Stagecoach, of course, is the film that vaulted John Wayne to superstar status and made director John Ford a name to be reckoned with. Just a terrific movie, exquisitely crafted, with a wonderful story and characters. In particular, Claire Trevor and John Wayne serve as strong anchors for the film, in terms of their characters and their performances. And that big chase sequence with the Apache chasing down the coach has had plenty of imitators over the years, but is still without peer after all these years! That stunt work remains completely insane, to this very day. Just off the charts...
Amazingly enough, Alex Cox's splattery gonzo historical epic
Walker was actually filmed in Nicaragua in 1987... on Universal's dime! Quite amazing to think that this movie even
exists. This completely insane yet absolutely true story tells of the misadventures of William Walker, the American soldier of fortune who actually rose to power and became dictator of Nicaragua in 1853. Ed Harris turns in a very edgy and eccentric performance in the title role. I actually got into this movie because I was a fan of Alex Cox's
Repo Man and
Sid & Nancy. And Cox's book
10,000 Ways To Die was of invaluable assistance to me as I was getting into the Spaghetti Western genre. So I was eager to see what sort of work he could do in the Western (or
quasi-Western) department. This movie definitely has some of the outrageously anarchic sensibility of Sam Peckinpah, and the screenplay was actually written by Rudy Wurlitzer, the man who also wrote Peckinpah's
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The movie might be off-putting to some people, not just because of its irreverent and barbed politics, but because of its post-modern use of anachronistic imagery, including Zippo lighters, Coke bottles, magazines, limousines and helicopters - all in an 1850's setting! But of course I am also a fan of the films of Ken Russell and Derek Jarman, whose historical films and biopics make use of similar kinds of anachronisms. (I'm also reminded of Julie Taymor's Shakespeare adaptation
Titus from 1999.) Good score from former Clash frontman Joe Strummer, as well!
And going even further out into the post-Western hinterlands, we have Jim Jarmusch's
Dead Man. There is, of course, no other movie
quite like this one. Very unsettling and dreamlike exercise in monochromatic psychedelia, with vivid black-and-white cinematography, a movie for which the word "oneiric" might have been invented for lack of a better descriptor. (For the record, it means "of, relating to, or suggestive of dreams.") We're not in the usual dust-and-tumbleweed Wild West here but a kind of mutated industrial hellscape not dissimilar to that of David Lynch's
Eraserhead. I'm also reminded of a line from Ned Beatty's character Bobby in John Boorman's
Deliverance:
"I think this is where everything finishes up!" I don't even know where to begin, but Johnny Depp gives a wonderfully unsettled, almost sleepwalker-ish performance as the put-upon protagonist William Blake. The score by Neil Young is also quite beautiful, and I understand that much of it was actually semi-improvised on the spot! The incredible supporting cast is just a mind-boggling assortment of really cool performers, including Gary Farmer as the misfit Native American Nobody (who else is fleetingly reminded here of a certain Terence Hill character?), Robert Mitchum as the tyrannical industrialist John Dickinson, Lance Henriksen and Michael Wincott as sinister bounty hunters (one a man of few words and the other of too many) and Billy Bob Thornton, Iggy Pop and Jared Harris as a trio of borderline-psycho fur traders. Also watch out for Gabriel Byrne, John Hurt, Alfred Molina and Crispin Glover in bit parts here and there.
(BTW, to my mind
Dead Man has an interesting kinship with a 1967 Spaghetti Western by the name of
Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot! - directed by one Giulio Questi - largely in that both movies deal with protagonists who are shot and then nursed back to health by Native American characters. The two movies are very different in most respects, but they both have a weirdly idosyncratic and surreal sensibility. Who else has been struck by the similarities between these two films?)