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Monte Hellman's West opens on a stagecoach, naturally, only the wagon is a distant speck contemplated by a pair of bandits atop a crumby hill, the first of many fresh perspectives. The ensuing robbery—outlaw grousing about his carbuncle, dozing passenger roused by gun blast, log leisurely dragged away from the trail—beautifully announces the style as a procession of haikus. The camera pans left with a trio of saddle tramps on spooked horses and then dollies back to reveal a body dangling from a noose, their dialogue is pure sagebrush Beckett: "Two, three days. Oh?" "Yeah, something like that. This ain't no country to be set afoot." "Man gets hanged." A posse can't tell cowhand from desperado, the conventional hero figure (Tom Filer) is promptly killed, the weathered wrangler (Cameron Mitchell) and the sardonic sidekick (Jack Nicholson) push through the Utah landscape with vigilantes right behind. Where Dwan in Silver Lode tackles McCarthyite persecution as a pursuit in a flag-festooned hamlet, Hellman envisions the fallout of guilt by association as a march into the barren valley. Holed up in a tiny farmhouse with a sullen ingénue (Millie Perkins) and her parents, the fugitives pass the time playing checkers, listening to the iambic pentameter of an off-screen ax smacking a tree stump, and coming face to face with the emptiness of their lives. It ends in bullets and sorrow, Nicholson vanishing in a cloud of dust to become the gunfighter he was accused of being, maybe the one who haunts The Shooting. (Viewed from a rectangular window inside the bandits' darkened cabin, the images of horses and shootouts irresistibly suggest a Western projected inside a dilapidated theater.) Mallarmé's "memories of horizons" (Toast Funèbre), an astringent naturalism perpetually on the verge of the hallucinatory. With Harry Dean Stanton, Katherine Squire, George Mitchell, Rupert Crosse, John Hackett, and B.J. Merholz.
--- Fernando F. Croce |