MASTERPIECE! Check out STAGECOACH, another MASTERPIECE!
What a beautiful work! A young Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, Ward Bond, Walter Brennan chewing up scenery, a young John Ireland and dear God, the camera work!What do you all think about this film? John Ford films?Speaking of Ford, there's a good Leone connection to Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," which has Lee Van Cleef and Woody Strode in the cast. Naldo
Vikar wakes with a start on the couch. “. . . check it out,” he hears a voice, “some wicked shit on the tube tonight.” Vikar’s prisoner is still tied to the chair, watching the TV. “My Darling Clementine,” the burglar is saying. Vikar realizes he’s fallen asleep, and that in his sleep he’s been hearing the other man’s voice as though there’s been no pause in the conversation, as though the burglar has been talking the entire time. Vikar tries to clear his head and wipes his eyes. “John Ford’s greatest movie,” says the bound man, “now I know what you’re going to say. . . .” It’s four in the morning, hours since Vikar called the police. “. . .Stagecoach. Right? The Searchers. Well,” the burglar continues, “Stagecoach was a distinct landmark in the genre, no getting around it. But that shit hasn’t aged well--“ “Uh.” “—though no one wants to cop to it, while The Searchers is one wicked bad-ass movie whenever my man the Duke is on screen, evil white racist pigfucker though he may be. I mean he may be a racist pigfucker, but he’s bad in The Searchers, no getting around it.” “Bad?” “I can see I need to choose my words more carefully,” says the burglar. “I mean Duke gives a performance of terrifying intensity and sublime psychological complexity, whether by intent or just natural fucked-up white American mojo. The Searchers loses it, though, whenever Jeffrey Hunter and Vera Miles come on—Ford, he couldn’t direct the ladies for shit, unlike my man Howard Hawks where all the ladies are fine and kick-ass on top of it, even if they’re all versions of the same fox, or as William Demarest puts it down in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve, ‘Positively the same dame!’” The burglar stomps his foot and laughs, pleased with himself. “I mean Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not actually has some of the same exact lines as Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings. But now My Darling Clementine here, it’s practically noir Western, all moody and shit, Ford’s first after the War and all the concentration camps and maybe he wasn’t in his usual sentimental rollicking drunk-Irish jive-ass mood. Check out my man Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp and, dig it, Victor Mature as Doc Holliday and, dig it again, Walter Brennan as Pa Clanton! I don’t mean no Grandpa McCoy from TV, I mean in My Darling Clementine Walter Brennan is one stone fucked-up killer, you hear what I’m saying? ‘When you pull a gun, kill a man!’ Damn! My Darling Clementine, it’s got the inherent mythic resonance of the Western form but in terms post-War white folks understood, figuring they were all worldlier and more sophisticated than before the War. Ford’s creation of the archetypal West, laying out codes of conduct that folks either honored or betrayed—and I’m just trying to give the motherfucker due credit, not even holding against him, not too much anyway, the fact that he played a Klansman in that jive Birth of a Nation bullshit—anyway Ford’s view of the West was so complete at this point that Hawks, Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann, they could only add to it, you hear what I’m saying? But of course the Western changed along with America’s view of itself, from some sort of heroic country, where everybody’s free, to the spiritually fucked-up defiled place it really is, and now you got jive Italians, if you can feature that, making the only Westerns worth seeing anymore because white America’s just too fucking confused, can’t figure out whether to embrace the myth or the anti-myth, so in a country where folks always figured you can escape your past, now the word is out that this is the country where you can do no such thing, this is the one place where, like the jive that finally becomes impossible to distinguish from the anti-jive, honor becomes impossible to distinguish from betrayal or just, you know, stone cold murder . . . what are you doing?” Vikar unties him from the chair. “Don’t break into my place again,” he says. The burglar looks almost hurt, but he stands from the chair slowly, a bit painfully, and arches his back and rubs his wrists. “O.K., man,” he answers quietly, “solid.” “I’m sorry about your head,” Vikar says. The burglar’s eyes return to the movie. “It’s cool. Occupational hazard. Hey, uh,” there’s a slight pleading in his voice, “can I just see the rest of this?” “Well.” Exhausted, Vikar is due on the Paramount lot in five hours. “There’s this scene coming up where Henry Fonda is having a drink in the saloon and,” the burglar starts laughing, “he says to the saloon keeper, ‘Mac, you ever been in love?’ and Mac answers, ‘No, I’ve been a bartender all my life.’ Oh man!” the burglar slaps his thigh. “I’m tired,” says Vikar. “I’ve been a bartender all my life!” “I—“ “Hey, go ahead and get some sleep. It’s been a long night.” Vikar looks at the room around him. “Hey,” the burglar says, “on my honor as a foot soldier in the armed struggle against the white oppressor, I’m not touching anything. Go ahead and get some sleep. I just want to see the end of My Darling Clementine. What do you say?” Vikar returns to the couch. In his sleep, he hears sirens again. When he wakes two hours later to daylight coming through the window, the other man is gone and so is the television.
