LOBO TO ME

On the weekend of Our Nation's 250th anniversary, Your Humble Narrator once again had the honor to introduce this week's edition of Reel West Sundays at Western Spirit: Scottsdale's Museum of the West, and lead the post-movie discussion. The selection was...

Rio Lobo (1970)--In the last film that Howard Hawks directed, John Wayne plays a Union army colonel in charge of moving a shipment of gold at the end of the Civil War. Confederate raiders rob the train, and after the war ends, The Duke goes west to get even with the traitors among his men who betrayed the mission.

This was the third Hawks western starring Wayne in just over a decade, after Rio Bravo in 1959 and El Dorado in 1966, all written or co-written by Leigh Brackett. But the similarities run deeper than that; the three films seem almost like loose remakes of each other. All three feature The Duke and his allies guarding a prisoner in a besieged jailhouse from corrupt forces who would like to free him. There are other devices that pop up almost obsessively--prisoner exchanges, dynamite used as a weapon--and all three feature a crotchety old sidekick and a plucky young sidekick; in Rio Lobo the youngster is the lively Christopher Mitchum as "Tuscarora" and the oldster is Jack Elam, having a high time as Tuscarora's maniacally giggling father.

The glamour comes from Wayne's hunky second lead, the Mexican star Jorge Rivera as the leader of the raiders, and from Jennifer O'Neill, one year away from fame in Summer of '42, who looks every inch the Cover Girl model she was. She rocks her leather pants and feels very 20th Century, as do her female co-stars Susan Dosamantes and Sherry Lansing; they come across more like the women in a Beach Party movie. But however anachronistic, they do follow in the Hawks tradition of self-directing, non-subservient women.

Rio Lobo is the least of this odd trio of films, maybe because the seige part doesn't start until the homestretch of the film. Until then it feels a bit aimlessly structured and rambling. But it's still pretty entertaining; Wayne is at his most likable and the movie is full of terrific, reliable supporting players including, among others, David Huddleston, Mike Henry, Victor French, Robert Donner and even a glimpse of George Plimpton, of all people, among the heavies.

BUFFING IT

A week ago today, at Western Spirit: Scottsdale's Museum of the West, Your Humble Narrator had the honor to introduce the afternoon's movie selection...

The White Buffalo (1977)--Charles Bronson plays Wild Bill Hickok, opposite Chief Broom himself, Will Sampson, as Crazy Horse, in this tall-tale weird western. Both men have been plagued by nightmarish visions of the title ungulate, and have decided to try to hunt it down. Eventually their paths converge, and though they're both staunch racists, a tense alliance forms between them. Based on a highly researched, floridly written novel by Richard Sale, who also wrote the screenplay, this was a rare flop for Bronson, though he brings it the same confident bearing he had in his other western roles.

Directed by J. Lee Thompson, a long way from The Guns of Navarone, the movie is terrible, but entertainingly, sometimes hilariously so, and it has a cast of veterans that's hard to resist: Jack Warden as Hickok's crabby sidekick Charlie Zane, as well as Kim Novak, Clint Walker, Slim Pickens, Ed Lauter, Martin Kove, a young Richard Gilliland, and the venerable Douglas Fowley (Roscoe in Singin' in the Rain) as a train conductor. Stuart Whitman and Cara Williams are ignominiously served in their brief roles, and John Carradine plays an undertaker, because of course he does.

White Buffalo are a very real part of the religious beliefs of many indigenous people in America, usually seen as a positive omen, an auspicious harbinger of peace, prosperity and blessings. It would take someone more knowledgeable than I am about such cultures to say if the treatment in this movie is offensive--or rather, just how offensive it is. The animal, one of the clumsier and less convincing creations of the great Italian creature-maker Carlo Rambaldi of Alien and E.T. fame, is treated here basically as a monster; probably Executive Producer Dino De Laurentiis was thinking of Jaws, less than two years earlier, and hoped the movie could cash in on the killer animal vogue, along with the likes of Grizzly, Orca and Tentacles. Even so, especially in his Moby Dick Waterloo at the finale, you may feel a pang of sympathy for the poor beast.

I also enjoyed moderating the lively post-movie discussion...

The movie was presented as part of Museum of the West's excellent ongoing Reel West Sundays film series, in connection with their exhibit Still in the Saddle: A New History of the Hollywood Western, which runs through December 31 of this year (the 2 p.m. Sunday flicks are free with regular museum admission; $10 just for the movie). Still in the Saddle includes artifacts of The White Buffalo, like a dinky little jacket that the apparently very slight Bronson wore in the film...

Before the event, Chief Curator Andrew Patrick Nelson took me to lunch, along with film historian Richard M. Roberts...

...at The Frybread Lounge, a native-owned cafe in Old Town Scottsdale, where, to prepare myself for the task ahead, I had a bison burger...

..."Rez style," that is, on frybread instead of brioche. A seriously lean and delicious burger; if you're in the neighborhood, I highly recommend.

ONE SADDLE AFTER ANOTHER

Last week Your Humble Narrator had the huge honor to introduce a showing of one of my very favorite movies, the Mel Brooks classic Blazing Saddles...

...at Western Spirit: Scottsdale's Museum of the West, and to lead the post-movie discussion. I'm delighted to say it seemed to go over great; the surprisingly large audience that turned out on a Thursday afternoon to watch a movie from 1974 laughed hard and left happy. Admittedly, a large majority of the crowd, based on a show of hands, had already seen it.

Here are the notes I prepared for my intro:

The danger in discussing Blazing Saddles with people who have never seen it is that of overselling it. It doesn't need to be taken as anything but a very silly, strange and surreal low-comedy send-up of Western movies, especially of the "socially conscious" 50s-era sort like Broken Arrow and Johnny Guitar, with dashes of other classics like Destry Rides Again. The jokes are TV sketch comedy in style, heavy-handed and brash, at times almost childlike. Even the potty-mouth profanities and obscenities, scandalous at the time, and the racial epithets--far more scandalous nowadays--have the quality of adolescent showing off.

But I love the film, because of its heart. It's not as confident and well-made a piece cinema as the next Brooks film, Young Frankenstein, which came out later that same year. But great as Young Frankenstein is, i think the more ragged Blazing Saddles is funnier, and more moving, because it engages with racial conflicts that are painfully perennial in American society. These jokes were as relevant in 1974 as they would have been in 1874, and they're still infuriatingly relevant to our time. The freewheeling use of epithets can be hard on the contemporary ear, and today's audiences may also squirm at the gay stereotypes near the end. But while I'm not remotely comparing the stature of Blazing Saddles to that of Huckleberry Finn, the two works have this much in common: they never use those words for any reason other than to make racists look idiotic.

Finally I would like to mention that the film is full of wonderful acting. Brooks has said that Cleavon Little wasn't his first choice the hero Bart; he wanted Richard Pryor, who worked on the screenplay. But great as Pryor would likely have been, Little's warmth and openhearted cheeriness is irresistible. The supporting players, from Harvey Korman's sneering villain Hedley Lamarr to Brooks himself as the befuddled Governor to Alex Karras as the eloquent Mongo to Slim Pickens with his hilariously aggrieved line readings to the great David Huddleston, who memorably enacts the exact moment when a lifelong bigot finally gets tired and gives up on racism.

But two members of the cast are transcendent: Gene Wilder gives one of the most relaxed and lovable expressions of his persona, that peerless combination of gentleness and strangled volatility. And Madeleine Khan is angelic as the Dietrich-esque chanteuse Lilli von Schtupp; her marvelous number "I'm Tired" may be the high-water mark of her career. And now that I've thoroughly oversold it, here, from Warner Brothers in 1974, is Blazing Saddles.

I would also note that a middle-aged guy in the audience, alluding to my mention of the uncomfortable--though obviously affectionate--gay stereotypes in the film, dismissed the concern with "Nah, I'm gay and I love them."