Jane Campion's The Piano

Re-watching this masterpiece today.  I'd forgotten just how bewitchingly beautiful and haunting this film really is--as are so many of Jane Campion's films.  Her most recent film, Bright Star, was one of the most moving love stories I've ever seen.

Warlock (1959)

I love Westerns, but I wasn't always so fond of the genre.  As a child, I sat glued to the tube watching the exploits of James West and Artemis Gordon in The Wild, Wild West--but that show was a campy masterpiece, actually more akin to Star Trek and Batman, than the traditional Western.  My dad watched Gunsmoke religiously; a show which I found insidiously boring at the time.  He was also an avid John Wayne fan, and that just seemed to confirm his "old man" taste to my young mind.  Of course, Wayne was a political lightning rod back then; and although the Vietnam War was very far from my consciousness, Wayne still seemed to be part of an old world that had little relevance to me.  Until I saw True Grit.  I fell in love with Duke after that.  True Grit, and I mean the FIRST True Grit, was a rough and cantankerous kind of a film.  It had a special lovable seaminess to it.  After that, I saw a whole series of what were known as revisionist Westerns: McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Jeremiah Johnson, Little Big Man, A Man Called Horse.  They were all wonderful; but again, very much different from what my mind understood by the term "Western".  I think I had some idea that a Western was a simple black and white melodrama with yodeling cowboys, and Snidely Whiplash type villains--and undoubtedly there were many, many Westerns that fell under that description.  As a young adult, I had no time for such silliness; unless, of course, it WAS genuine silliness, like Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles.  So I stayed away from Westerns for a good, long time.

Sometime in my college years I discovered the treasures of the Golden Age: John Ford's many wonderful Wayne vehicles--especially Fort Apache, Howard Hawks' Red River, George Marshall's Destry Rides Again, John Sturges' Magnificent Seven, Fred Zinnemann's High Noon.  I started to realize that the Western was a great genre, not because it simplified moral truths, but rather because it focused one's thoughts upon the complexity of moral truths by simplifying the stage of their performance.  Every rich and complex sentiment has been carefully and thoroughly catalogued in this genre; and the very best Westerns remain poised in the tensions of moral ambiguity, leaving their audiences with as many questions as answers.

It amazes me that after 47 years of avid film consumption, I still manage to find again and again masterpieces that I've never viewed before.  Edward Dmytryk's Warlock is a great example.  Made in 1959, Warlock features Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn, and Richard Widmark all pulling in some of their finest performances.  The story is clearly a loose re-adaption of the famous gunfight at O. K. Corral.  A rancher and his band of rowdy cowboys is filling the citizens of Warlock, Utah with fear for there homes, lives, and businesses.  They form a citizens' committee and agree to bring in big guns-for-hire, Clay Blaisedell (Henry Fonda) and Tom Morgan (Anthony Quinn), to clean up the town and bring back order.  But it becomes immediately clear that the new guns represent a threat to law themselves.  One disaffected cowboy, Johnny Gannon (Richard Widmark), breaks with his hoodlum friends, and bravely takes on a deputy's star--thus, effectively putting himself squarely in the middle of the fight.  So, who now represents justice in Warlock?  The dialogue is rich, thought-provoking, and mature.  The characters are multi-faceted, ambiguous.

 I'll finish this tomorrow evening!