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Ode to scorpions (cf. Buñuel's L'Age d'Or), dance of the Gatling gun. "My, what a bunch! Big, tough ones!" The illusory past, no match for Modernism's devastation: Children are sadists, soldiers are outlaws in disguise, John Ford's favorite hymn is something mimicked by a bloodthirsty half-wit in the middle of a robbery. (The opening credits announce a work of engravings.) The world as the West as a dusty sty, Texas and Mexico, the vortex of Sam Peckinpah's machismo. Aging desperado (William Holden) and faithful lieutenant (Ernest Borgnine), quarreling brothers (Ben Johnson, Warren Oates) and committed campesino (Jaime Sánchez), plus Edmond O'Brien as Walter Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. On their trail is a posse of cutthroats, assembled by the railroad baron (Albert Dekker) and grudgingly led by his "Judas goat" (Robert Ryan). "We must start thinking beyond our guns. Those days are closing fast." An encompassing torpor mingled with the continuous threat of explosive violence, a symphonic approach. Aldrich's Vera Cruz is a key forerunner, Emilio Fernández's influence (from, say, Un Dorado de Pancho Villa) is registered in his turn as the dictator south of the border. Peckinpah's despair of breakdown alongside his joy in creating forms, in luxuriating in vivid-raunchy textures on a barbarous widescreen. His famed slow-mo looks back to Stroheim's sense of duration, and with both artists a brutal "realism" is really the apex of aestheticization—the stretching and splintering of a cowboy falling off a roof or a horse smashing through a window or riders plunging from an exploding bridge offer a spectacle at once voluptuous and self-questioning. The ultimate treasure is being able to choose how you die, vultures and jackals help themselves to the landscape after the Armageddon. "I'd like to make one good score and back off." "Back off to what?" Cinematography by Lucien Ballard. With L.Q. Jones, Strother Martin, Bo Hopkins, Dub Taylor, Alfonso Arau, Chano Urueta, Jorge Russek, Fernando Wagner, Aurora Clavel, and Elsa Cárdenas.
--- Fernando F. Croce |