Shadowplay Goes West

Two more video essays —

For Arrow, I wrote and narrated and Stephen C. Horne edited a piece for the MAJOR DUNDEE restoration, entitled inevitably I suppose MOBY DICK ON HORSEBACK. If R.G. Armstrong’s famous phrase causes you to picture a top-heavy, untenable situation on the brink of collapse, that would not be entirely inappropriate. MAJOR DUNDEE is major Peckinpah but universally acknowledged to be flawed. But Peckinpah’s flaws are always interesting.

The main thing I wanted to avoid with this piece is weighing in too heavily on whether Peckinpah’s vision of the film would have resulted in a triumph had he been allowed to finish it the way he planned. I always get a bad feeling when anyone pretends to know whether footage none of us have seen would transform a film. It’s legitimate to ask whether perhaps the Indian raid intended to open the film was poorly filmed owing to time pressures, but unless you have awfully compelling witnesses — and even then — I don’t think you can draw any conclusions for sure.

My other western vid essay is on JOHNNY GUITAR, as contrasting a subject as you could hope for. Chase Barthel is editing this one. I was in the process of planning this one when I woke up one morning from uneasy dreams, mulling over how I was going to make Plasticine models of the characters. As I slowly woke up fully, I realised this would be madness.

A little while later, I decided to do it.

Well, Truffaut calls JOHNNY GUITAR “a dreamed western.” This will be in part a dreamed video essay.

Here comes the cavalry

Stephen C. Horne and I collaborated on a video essay for Neil Snowden’s production of Arrow’s release of MAJOR DUNDEE. A fun job! Farran Nehme has contributed a booklet essay which I can’t wait to read, and Glenn Erickson is on commentary duty.

Went into it absolutely sure I was going to tell Charlton Heston’s story of being provoked to the point where he murderously charged Peckinpah on horseback, but then figured it was going to be covered everywhere else. So I found other things. The hardest part was adjusting back to the twenty-minute form after making a feature-length piece for WEIRD WISCONSIN: THE BILL REBANE COLLECTION. But it’s impossible not to have some fun in the mad world of Peckinpah: vicarious insanity.

Wild Laughter

FACT: Peckinpah’s legendary four-and-a-half hour cut of THE WILD BUNCH consisted of an hour of dialogue, half an hour of action, and three hours of RAUCOUS GUFFAWING. The 145 minute version now available to us, on the other hand, has an hour of dialogue, half an hour of action, and seven hours of RAUCOUS GUFFAWING.

I exaggerate for comic effect. I’ve always been impressed by the film’s acting and action, but a little dubious about the points its making, but this time round I was more impressed by all of the above — it’s more coherent than I gave it credit for. Though cohesion isn’t necessarily what I look to Peckinpah for. But this one hangs together, is more than a selection of spectacular/beautiful/horrifying set-pieces. Though we do see quite a lot of Ernest Borgnine, irrepressible gap-toothed comedian, and his epiglottis, during the lengthy scenes of bawdy laughter, it’s nevertheless a film of some poetic grandeur.

For the first time I remembered to watch out for and recognize Albert Dekker and Edmond O’Brien. I never clocked Dekker before because we never get to see his bald head, and I never recognized O’Brien because we never get to see his bald face. Also he is playing Dub Taylor’s role in MAJOR DUNDEE, in the manner of Dub Taylor in MAJOR DUNDEE, so I spent three of the two-and-a-half hours thinking he was Dub Taylor. If he’d given us a few bars of “Rock Around the Rockpile,” I’d have known him in an instant.

William Holden periodically doesn’t look recognizable either: his aging, his face-fungus, his manner — part of it is he’s really playing someone different. Though I noticed this gesture repeated from the end of STALAG 17, made a thousand years earlier when he was still a golden boy:

I was surprised at how un-bleak the post-climactic scenes were. I’d forgotten all about Robert Ryan’s rather sweet ending. And as he rides off with a new, slightly milder bunch, I suddenly felt that this was all a metaphor for the life of the filmmaker, swapping gangs but keeping on the go. It won’t be the same, but it’ll do.