This weekend I solved one of the mysteries of modern cinema, which is why they can’t seem to make good Westerns anymore. By accident, after wading through the recent 2-disc special edition for the Howard Hawkes/John Wayne classic Rio Bravo, arguably the most sheerly fun of Hollywood’s classic Westerns, I ended up seeing the next day the recent remake of 3:10 to Yuma. And the one thing that jumped out immediately was that characters in modern Westerns just can’t shut the hell up.
Westerns were once defined by laconic men of action like John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott, Jimmy Stewart and Clint Eastwood. Eastwood, in one of the most non-actorly moments in movie history, not only made himself a star but created an entire subgenre and national cinema by traveling to Italy to make Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars and, first thing there, X-ing out entire pages of verbose dialogue Leone had written for him. Had Eastwood not been as canny as he was, the movie may well have bombed, and never launched his star career, the Spaghetti Western genre, and much of European (and certainly Italian) commercial cinema for the next decade or two.
Tradition has it that actors jealously scan their scripts, even counting up words to make sure they have more than their fellow thespians. Stars will demand that juicy lines of dialogue be reassigned from supporting characters to their own. It’s ironic, now, because stars mean less in the movie world than ever before. Concepts reign supreme now, and it’s a rare actor like Johnny Depp who can actually (sometimes) bring in a sizable audience just by appearing in a film.
Still and all, the star system is still riding along on fumes, and after producers lay out the millions and millions of dollars required to rent the services of a name actor or two, they further seek to make them happy by catering to their wishes. In Wayne’s day, scripts were designed to please the audience. Today, they are designed to ‘service’ a big name actor, should the producers be (arguably) lucky enough to draw one.
3:10 to Yuma is a case in point. What a mess. (The recent Seraphim Falls also sucked, although its most pressing problem was a half-assed descent into ‘deep’ surrealism and Artiness by the end of the picture.) I half-remembered the film getting decent reviews, and sure enough Rotten Tomatoes shows it getting an astounding 88% positive rating. All I can say is, wow, do I disagree. The film is lame for the first half, and then completely tanks in the second, accumulating marked suck momentum as it meanders to one of the most retarded climatic set-pieces I’ve seen in a while.
A remake of an old Glenn Ford flick, and based on a short story by notably laconic writer Elmore Leonard (heaven knows what he thought of this gabby mess), this is basically the flip side of Rio Bravo. That film was fun, and said what it had to say (which is more than is initially apparent) in as few words as possible. 3:10 to Yuma apparently feels it has to ‘mean’ something, and to spell things out over and over again. While Christian Bale’s role isn’t nearly as talky as that of the endlessly jabbering Russell Crowe, even he is provided with several monologues that spell out exactly who this guy is. So much for show, don’t tell.
In Rio Bravo, jabbering is a trait assigned to comic characters, most pertinently perennial goofy sidekick Walter Brennan and ethnic comic relief actor Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez. Although most critics seem to have disagreed with me, I can only wish that Crowe and Bail, both fine actors, had taken a page from Eastwood and torn out entire swaths of dialogue. Certainly it’s no coincidence that the only great Western of the last several decades was Eastwood’s own The Unforgiven.
Rio Bravo is a leisurely film that assumes the audience will wish to spend time with its characters, and it’s correct. Many modern viewers, no doubt, will gape in bewilderment when the film pauses to let co-stars Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson take a musical interlude, but what can I say, I think it’s great stuff. And although taking its time and lasting well over two hours (it’s longer than Yuma, although it sure doesn’t seem like it), it’s never boring, and the always interesting and asuming character scenes are ably punctuated with great action scenes. In the end, it’s the perfect movie length: Exactly as long as it needs to be.
Yuma has action scenes too, but like most such stuff today, they are hopelessly overblown. Dozens and dozens of characters are mown down throughout the film. In fact, I’d say there’s a good chance more people are murdered in the film than were actually murdered in the real Old West. The action also makes little sense. Depending on what the script requires, characters are ridiculous deadeye shots for most of the picture, and then can’t hit crap when when (of course) shooting at the stars. Rio Bravo‘s action scenes are realistically brief, but genuinely exciting. Yuma‘s seem to last for tens of minutes at a stretch, until you’re just saying, “Oh, c’mon.”
Yuma also attempts to present a more ‘realistic’ version of the old west, but offers only a thin veneer of grit in lieu of Bravo‘s more obviously Hollywoodian version. Yuma characters are dirty and swear and there’re *yawn* truckloads of Moral Ambiguity to spare. Who are the real bad guys, blah blah blah. In the end, Yuma is fully as artificial as Bravo, and just as pandering to the tastes of its day. Only in Bravo‘s time the emphasis was on the audience’s tastes, and now it’s on those of filmmakers themselves. Maybe that’s why Bravo was a huge hit and remains a beloved movie fifty years later, still earning itself a souped-up special edition with input from prominent modern critics and directors, while Yuma bombed and will quickly be regulated to haunting video shelves.
I don’t know, most of the critics seemed to love this film. Just reading the Rotten Tomato blurbs makes me think I somehow saw a different film than they did. (Did they see the one where a guy gets gut-shot with a .45 at point blank range, and then is back on his feet and pretty much fully functional a couple of hours later? Because, man, I was laughing every single time that guy came on camera.) Certainly it was a disservice to watch Yuma right after Bravo. Even so, if the latter represents what today would be considered quality filmmaking, then Hollywood is in even bigger trouble than I thought.
In contrast, Rio Bravo remains a monument to when Hollywood really knew how to entertain. It’s one of the most assured films Howard Hawkes made, which is saying something; Wayne is at his peak; starlet Angie Dickinson was sex-on-a-stick hot; Brennan is hilarious (Gonzalez Gonzalez less so); Dean Martin is suprisingly good, a potentially pretty good actor who soon gave up on real roles for some reason and stuck to creampuff pictures; and even Ricky Nelson, who seems like a kid pretending to be an adult, isn’t all that bad.
The special edition DVD is terrific. The film itself looks great, there’s a split commentary by film historian Richard Schickel and John Carpenter (who oddly doesn’t mention that his first professional film, Assault on Precinct 13, was a riff on this very film), and the second disc features a pair of quite good documentaries, one on Hawkes himself and another the making of this particular movie.
