How The West Was Won-Again-The Film Adaptation Of Cormac McCarthy’s “All The Pretty Horses” (2000)-A Review

How The West Was Won-Again-The Film Adaptation Of Cormac McCarthy’s “All The Pretty Horses” (2000)-A Review

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sam Lowell

All The Pretty Horses, starring Matt Damon, Henry Thomas, Penelope Cruz, directed by Billy Bob Thornton, based on the novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy   

Unlike another tale, a coming of age tale if you like, of the modern American West, of the Texas west,  The Last Picture Show, where I read the novel by Larry McMurtry first then the film I have seen the film under review the adaptation of Cormac Mc Carthy’s All The Pretty Horses without having read the novel. But after watching the film I will make it my business to read the novel which deals with a different aspect of the West, the cowboy West when ranch life goes south on its main characters and they are left to fend for themselves. A task which in true Western fashion has them groping to stay alive, although that was a close thing.   

John Grady Cole (hey that is the way he introduced himself to one and all), played by Matt Damon, was career-less, cowboy career-less after his grandfather died and his mother decided to sell the ranch leaving this young cowboy with horses in his blood with no place to go. No place but to go looking for work south of the Rio Grande, south of the border down  Mexico way with his longtime fellow cowboy Lacey played by Henry Thomas.     

Whatever adventure, whatever expectations they had about making a living as ranch hands down in Mexico were disturbed along the way when they met a vagabond Blevens who was strange to say the least.  Along the way Blevens loses his horse and then finds it again at a ranch. This brings in the factor of horse-stealing which will drive a lot of the action in the film, and which is as heinous a crime in modern day Mexico (and Texas too) as in the old days when horse thieves were strung up in an age when to take a man’s horse was to take away his livelihood, his means of travel and his manhood. Along the way because John Grady and Lacey are tarred with the same brush as Blevens they will see just what that meant. They were able to get work at a huge ranchero where John Grady got special recognition by the owner for his keen eye for horse flesh. Along the way as well they wind up because of Bleven’s actions in custody and eventually in the “you don’t want to go there” penitentiary after a corrupt Mexican cop wasted the unfortunate Blevens while John Grady and Lacey watched helplessly. They survive the prison ordeal somehow and Lacey decides to head home. John Grady decided he had some unfinished business and was staying to pursue that.       

That unfinished business was as to be expected getting his girlfriend to go back to Texas with him. This girlfriend Alejandra, played by fetching Penelope Cruz, a firebrand and well worth taking some grief for was unfortunately for John Grady the daughter of the ranchero owner and so they were fated to part, fated in part because the price of getting John Grady and Lacey out of that “you don’t want to go there” prison was that she would not see him again, certainly would not go away with him. That was that.

On his way back home across the border with his horse, Lacey’s and the late Bleven’s in tow as some sort of symbol of the experiences he had down south of the border he is stopped in Texas and essentially accused of that same horse-stealing charge. He got out of trouble  once he told his story to a judge and then meandered back to Lacey’s place with those three damn horses. Yeah, the modern West is a tough dollar for a cowboy loving man just like in the Old West. See this one for the pretty horses, pretty scenery and pretty Cruz.        

Once Upon A Time In Texas- “No Country For Old Men”- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film No Country For Old Men

DVD Review

No Country For Old Men, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, directed by the Coen Brothers, written by Cormac McCarthy, Miramax Films, 2007

Cinematic studies of murderous psychopaths have a long and honored position in film history. Early on in the gangster movies of the 1930s, in such films as The Petrified Forest (with Humphrey Bogart as Duke Mantee) and, perhaps more famously, White Heat with true stone-killer mad man James Cagney ready to blow up everything (and throw an off-hand grapefruit or two), audiences got to confront truly banal (thanks Hannah Arendt) evil characters. Remorseless, if not always efficient. The psycho (played understatedly by Javier Bardem)in No Country For Old Men carries on that tradition, although as we are now a little more inured to mass murders and odd-ball methods of killing on the screen that those earlier audiences, the methods have been ramped up. In short, take no prisoners. None. Moreover, the Brothers Coen want to, around the murder and mayhem, squeeze in a little tale about how this country (well, Texas, great American West country, Larry McMurtry Last Picture Show country, anyway) has gone to hell in a handbasket since the old western frontiers vanished into, well, civilization.

Of course no savage tale of the New West, the border New West, would be complete without some drug deal going south (no pun intended), going south badly. The action of this film is centered on a discover of some dough, some serious dough, just waiting to be plucked like taking it from the low branches of a tree by the first guy (played by Josh Brolin) who comes on the scene, the first hungry, break-out hungry guy who comes along. Now if you or I, maybe not hungry enough, came upon a desert scene with a bunch of stone shoot-out dead bodies, a truckload of dope, and a satchel of dough, we would walk, hell, run away, right. There would be no story then though. So our lonesome hungry cowboy grabs for the brass ring. Unfortunately said dough belongs to those who have hired a bad-ass stone killer ready, very ready, and very willing to exterminate whatever number it takes to get said dough back. And throw in a few innocent by-standers and others for laughs.

But this is Texas remember and so once the chase is on the local law, in the person mainly, of one wised-up, old-timey sheriff, played by Tommy Lee Jones, a little out of his element in these new times when there is no honor among thieves (there really never was) and the crimes pile up more quickly and haphazardly than in the old days, is on the hunt. But age and world-weariness have taken their toll and old Tommy Lee is always about a step, maybe two steps, behind the central action. Needless to say things cannot turn out well here, and they don’t. Ya, this is no country for old men. Got it.

***In The Matter Of The Zen Western- Johnny Depp’s Dead Man- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Johnny Depp’s Dead Man.

DVD Review

Dead Man, starring Johnny Depp, Robert Mitchum, eerily edgy music by Neil Young, Miramax 1995

Sure, I have taken plenty of shots at variations on the great American West, past and present, from Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove to The Last Picture Show from The Wild Bunch to Crazy Hearts and everything in between. As well, I have always been glad, glad as hell, to review any movie starring Johnny Depp that might come my way. So here we have the combination of Johnny Depp as, well, Johnny Depp as usual (except maybe for those seemingly endless Pirate sequels) taking on an edgy role that less talented or more timid male actors would have walked away from, way a way from.

No one doubts that the old Hollywood (and dime store novel) vision of the old John Wayne "howdy, partner" American West is long gone. And with the ground-breaking work of The Wild Bunch back in the 1970d we have seen, well we have seen, more plausibly views of that old time West, including some pretty unsavory characters in search of fame and fortune around the edges of the great frontier before it melted at the turn of the 20th century. That pasting of the frontier, of course, did not stop anybody with the least carefree spirit or who was just plain tired of the “civilized” East from heading by anyway they could to the great expanses of the old-time West. And that is where William Blake (played by Johnny Depp), no not the 18th century mad man English poet and supporter of the ideals of the French Revolution (although that mistake plays a part in the plot), but an accountant, for god’s sake, enters the story.

William Blake’s transformation into a man of the West complete with notches on his revolver, seemingly in slow-motion at times and all in black and white, is what drives this curious film. We have an educated “savage," Native American, savage white man bounty-hunters, a twisted rich land-owners (played by the late Robert Mitchum) and every mangy "old dog" who made it, or did not make it in the West. And every pathology known to humankind showed its face in this fierce portrayal of the West but also, a very surprising positive portrayal of Native American culture and its demise with the advance of the white man. William Blake, accountant, is one of Johnny Depp’s edgier performances, no question, and if you can stay with the zen aspect of the thing a very well done performance. Not for everyone, and certainly not for those who might still be clinging to some John Wayne idea of the West.

A Jeff Bridges Retrospective-The Taming of the Old American West-“Bad Company”- A Film Review

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DVD Review

Bad Company, Jeff Bridges, Barry Brown, directed by Robert Benton, Universal, 1972

No, I am not going to start off this piece by going on and on about how Jeff Bridges’ Oscar-winning performance in Crazy Hearts as down-and-out country singer/songwriter Bad Blake was merely an extension of him as a modern young Texas dude, Duane Jackson, in Peter Bogdanovitch’s film adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show. Although, now that I think about it, I could. Rather, though I want to use my time to look at this film, Bad Company, as an example of that then (1972) fairly new look at the old American West through other than rose-colored glasses.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller and The Wild Bunch are probably better known, and rightly so, for breaking down the black and white view of the old wild West that those of us who came of age in the dawn of the television era (black and white television, to boot) of the early 1950s and formed our view of the “cowboys and Indians” from the seemingly endless Westerns that ran on Saturday morning (and Saturday afternoon at the movie house, alternating with scary horror or monster movies). The good guys wore white, the bad guys black and the Indians, well, it was kind of left unsaid but the only good one was a dead one. The above mentioned films, this film, and writers like McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy helped to bring some realism, some naturalism to the layers of myth and mis-history.

Take the plot of Bad Company. A young man (Barry Brown), the hero of the film or rather better the anti-hero, of good Ohio family, aided and abetted by that family, is furnished with the means to avoid being conscripted into the Union Army during the later stages of the American Civil War. Said naïve young man learns the lessons of survival in the rough and tumble West before he even gets past Missouri. From there, aided by roustabout and ne’er-do-well Jeff Bridges (being, well, prankster Jeff Bridges), and his gang, he pushes on trying, trying against all odds to keep on the right side of the law (read: frontier justice, not necessarily the same thing). In the end, he does what he has to do to survive. Old Gene Autry, old Hop-along Cassidy, old Roy Rogers might not have been able to fathom that, but you and I can.