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"The Phantom of the Desert" is not the camel in the horse race but the geriatric ex-marshal riding into the frontier town, moments later he's almost run over by an automobile. He's played by Joel McCrea with all the righteous associations of his Tourneur lawmen, his estranged partner is Randolph Scott in a conscious subversion of his Boetticher persona, bilking rubes at the carnival in Buffalo Bill whiskers. "Showing your age, aren't you?" (The insistent theme pervades the opening credits, autumnal landscape hues contemplated by the craning camera.) The question is how to hang on to values (or to a friend) in "the days of the steady businessmen," Treasure of the Sierra Madre is brought to bear on the ride to the mining camp with a load of gold and a callow hothead (Ron Starr). A Viking funeral for the Western as well as a raid on the genre's Manichaeism, the most striking case of a young filmmaker's obsession with growing old since The Magnificent Ambersons, just Sam Peckinpah coming into his own. Tents in snow and gravel nearly a decade ahead of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the groom (James Drury) awaiting the Bible-thumper's runaway daughter (Mariette Hartley) is part of a brutish brood out of Ford's Wagon Master. (An agitated POV gives the heroine's dawning horror during the wedding at the bordello, where frowzy prostitutes are done up like flower girls.) Warren Oates' drenched wrath following a forced bath, Edgar Buchanan's sloshed rambling about "good marriage," L.Q. Jones' fatally wounded glance at the brother collecting his rifle. Peckinpah's low angles turn codgers into giants for the last stand, the Old Guard totem pole is toppled all the same. "So long, partner." Into The Wild Bunch it goes, of course, though not before Hawks has his say in El Dorado. Cinematography by Lucien Ballard. With R.G. Armstrong, John Anderson, John Davis Chandler, Jenie Jackson, and Percy Helton.
--- Fernando F. Croce |