Longtime character actor
René Auberjonois died over the weekend. While best known for his television stints on
"Benson",
"Star Trek: Deep Space Nine", and
"Boston Legal" he was in three films that are eligible for our MoFo Westerns list.
The first is well known, one of the jewels of the Revisionist canon, and sure to make many ballots. In Robert Altman's
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) Auberjonois plays Sheehan, the saloon owner in the snowy town of Presbyterian Church. While the interlopers of the two title characters in Warren Beatty's gambler John McCabe and Jule Christie's madam Constance Miller are the focus of the narrative and the hired killers led by Hugh Millais' Butler are crucial to the plot, René Auberjonois is often the most highlighted of the town's denizens, and it is through his confusion, suspicion, congeniality, and horror where the audience can feel the fragility of survival on the frontier.
Alex Cox's
Walker (1987) is...something. Cox is an interesting character himself. His first two films
Repo Man (1984) and
Sid & Nancy (1986) were cult hits. His third film was
Walker and pretty much ended his getting anywhere near mainstream money and distribution for his movies. It purports to be the true story of real-life figure William Walker who in the mid-nineteenth century led a small band of heavily armed men into Nicaragua where he took over the country for two years before being executed. Cox's film is a stylized, satirical polemic, filmed at the time of the Iran-Contra scandal. Cox infuses intentionally anachronistic elements into his film to underline the connections between the 19th and 20th century actions in Nicaragua. Even apart from those touches, historical accuracy is jettisoned by and large. Whether or not this approach works for you it certainly did not work for most critics nor audiences in 1987.
But it
is something to behold, even if you wind up hating it.
René Auberjonois plays Major Siegfried Hennington, one of Walker's (Ed Harris) loyal soldiers.
The third is little-seen but a movie I like a lot. Maggie Greenwald's
The Ballad of Little Jo (1993) got little distribution or attention, but it's a darn good film following the journey of Josephine Monaghan (Suzy Amis) who winds up disguising herself and living as a man in order to survive the horrors of westward expansion. Auberjonois is in the very first section of the film playing Streight Hollander, a traveling salesman who takes Josephine under his wing for a while. But he isn't as benevolent as he first seems and this is where things go horribly wrong, driving the transformation into the quiet Jo.
This one is definitely worth tracking down.