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.

FOND-LEE REMEMBERED

Christopher Lee was the last of them.

Fans of classic horror movies will know who I mean by “them.” First there was Lugosi, then Karloff, then Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine, and around midcentury came the rise of Vincent Price, and then, more or less starting with the same 1957 movie, came Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Some might exclude Carradine from the list, and some might include, say, Peter Lorre or Lionel Atwill. But essentially I think that these seven guys—Lugosi, Karloff, Chaney Jr., Carradine, Cushing and Lee—represent the true superstars of old-school, classic horror in English-language talkies.

And now they’ve all passed on.

Of course when Lee and Cushing became horror stars, with Hammer’s ’57 Curse of Frankenstein and the following year with Dracula (called Horror of Dracula in the U.S.), they didn’t seem old-school, but rather new-wave, with Hammer’s amped-up gore and cleavage, usually in lurid color. But within a decade or so, Hammer and its stars and style and imitators had been fully admitted to the canon of horror as Boomer-era, Famous Monsters of Filmland-reading fans would recognize it.

Lee, who started as a movie actor shortly after his WWII service (he was an uncredited spear-carrier in Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet) and who even made a couple of movies with Karloff—he played the grave-robber Resurrection Joe in the Karloff chiller Corridors of Blood—never really faded away. Though still probably most remembered for playing Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, the Mummy and many other scary parts in the Hammer and other British films of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, Lee remained relevant as a character actor until his death, at 93, earlier this month, appearing in The Wicker Man and The Man With the Golden Gun and Airport ‘77 and in the title role of the Pakistani biopic Jinnah, and in the Star Wars movies and Peter Jackson’s Tolkien adaptations and Tim Burton’s flicks and TV miniseries and video game voices and so on.

For my birthday this year I got The Christopher Lee Collection, a pretentiously-titled DVD box set featuring four fairly low-rent films Lee made for producer Harry Allen Towers, three of them directed by Spanish sleazemaster Jesus “Jess” Franco. So I recently caught up with Lee in two ‘70s quickies I’d never seen before—The Castle of Fu Manchu and a tawdry historical melodrama called The Bloody Judge. They’re terrible movies, but the star is effortlessly authoritative in both of them.

In 1970’s The Bloody Judge (hilariously retitled Night of the Blood Monster for the U.S. market) Lee plays an actual historical figure, the original “Hanging Judge” George Jeffreys, who notoriously presided over the treason trials after England’s Monmouth Rebellion in 1685. Franco’s version of this story is full of quite unsavory violence and sexual exploitation, but there in the middle of it is Lee, trying his best to give a textured performance as the haughty but conscience-haunted Jeffreys. This was his fate throughout much of his long career, and he seemed good-humoredly resigned to it.

Anyway…

Monster-of-the-Week: Obviously Lee should get the nod this week, but which of his roles to choose? For a lot of fans, there would be no contest; many regard him as the greatest screen Dracula of all time. I’m a Lugosi loyalist myself, but there’s no doubt of the sexual charisma and imposing physical threat Lee brought the role, even when, as was most of the time in the Hammer Dracula films, he was ridiculously underused—in 1966’s Dracula, Prince of Darkness he doesn’t even say a word in his beautiful deep rumble, and in several of the others he speaks only a handful of lines.

So let’s acknowledge him, this time, for the title role in Count Dracula…

…a low-budget 1970 non-Hammer production, again produced and written by Towers and directed by Franco. It’s not an entirely successful film by a long shot, but it allowed Lee to play the Count as he had long wanted to, in a manner highly faithful to Stoker’s novel.

RIP, sir. You’ll be missed.