|
The opening adjusts Wyler's The Westerner to the age of Jodorowsky's El Topo. just the launching pad for John Huston's send-up of the "revisionist" Western. The legal tome in the bordello "for whores to piss on," Roy Bean (Paul Newman) claims it after bloody vengeance and the bank robber crowns himself judge. Ruffians are knighted marshals for the Law West of Pecos, "no illegal dyin' here," a spacious carnival complete with guest stars in riotous vaudeville turns. Anthony Perkins as a prairie preacher and Tab Hunter swinging from the noose, Roddy McDowall as the fancy-pants locked in a cage with the beer-soaked bear and Huston himself in growling tribute to his father. "A whole graveyard of previous cases" for the crackpot in the courthouse, suspended between the mortal angel of the local señorita (Victoria Principal) and the unattainable muse of Miss Lillie Langtry (Ava Gardner). The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are taken stock of, Stacy Keach tears through as the leonine albino who illustrates why a gunslinger shouldn't duel on an empty stomach. "There is nothing worse than a harlot turned respectable" (cf. Chinatown). A most acrid John Milius screenplay, Huston gives it a mellow reading, told as if around a campfire. In "the generation of vipers" of a new century, the last stand amid oil fires alongside the resolute daughter (Jacqueline Bisset). The posthumous visit, a trace of grace. "His boots will be forever empty." A lolling vagabond of an autumnal work to be gawked at by young eyes. (Anderson and Tarantino adduce notes of it for There Will Be Blood and Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood.) With Ned Beatty, Anthony Zerbe, Steve Kanaly, Bill McKinney, and Matt Clark.
--- Fernando F. Croce |