By Oscar O’Sullivan

Monday – The Magnificent Seven

This remake of the Japanese classic Seven Samurai is a strong case study in the fundamental similarity of the Western and Samurai genres, as well as their key differences. Both films follow a mismatched group of seven warriors who come together to protect a poor village from bandits. In the original film, the heroes are wandering samurai who have all been displaced by the collapse of the feudal system. Some of them help the village out of an ingrained, selfless duty, some join up because they’re so hard up they can’t turn down the pitiful reward, while some are just looking for their next hit of action. Magnificent Seven offers a similar range of motivations for it’s cowboy heroes, but the different cultural context of the story puts them in a different light. Part of the drama of Seven Samurai was that their place in society had been overturned and eroded – from feudal warlords to hired blades working for food and board. The wild west gunslingers were always outsiders living job to job, so the conflict of them taking the job becomes purely monetary. It also makes the altruism of Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen’s characters more unusual than it was for their original counterparts. This change in circumstance also makes the relationship of the Seven to the villagers less complex. Here, the dynamic is very straightforward – the villagers obviously mistrust the mercenary gunmen before slowly getting to know and accept them as part of the community. The original film has a much more layered power dynamic – in times past, the samurai would have been honour-bound to protect the village as a matter of course, so having to pay even a pittance for their aid fosters resentment, while the samurai in turn are rankled by the frosty attitude of the commoners who would once have worshipped the ground they walk on. What remains the same is the ending – the surviving heroes realising that they’ve risked everything to gain very little, while the villagers will go on living as they had before with or without them. It’s a bittersweet conclusion that works equally well in both contexts. The Magnificent Seven is a heavily simplified telling of one of the greatest action stories ever made, but it doesn’t fall all that short. The score is incredible, there’s a strong visual language that seems to have taken some cues from Akira Kurosawa’s work blended with classic Western stylings, and the titular characters are played by a superb ensemble cast (special mention to James Coburn doing a spot-on impersonation of Seiji Miyaguchi from the original). Why choose between the two when you can just watch both? 8/10.

Tuesday – North to Alaska

Calling this a Western feels a little bit tenuous. John Wayne wears a hat and rides a horse, there’s bar brawls and log cabins and precisely one gunfight. What it is not is set in the American West (if the title didn’t give that away for you). A romantic slapstick comedy about Alaska gold miners warring over land and women, this is a refreshingly unique entry in the John Wayne canon. That said, it’s largely a very standard romantic comedy, a misunderstanding between Wayne and leading lady Capucine resulting in a stubborn love triangle and all the drama and laughs that entails – think of it as an old-timey Anyone But You. What really stands out here is the opening and ending of the film, two exceptionally entertaining fight scenes that last multiple minutes each and are operating on an entirely different wavelength than the rest of the film. Punches send extras sliding across tabletops, bottles are smashed casually over heads, a man is hit in the face and his bowler hat is lifted up on a wire and lowered back onto his head complete with slide-whistle sound-effect. Windows shatter of their own free will, goats invade the battlefield, a seal claps and boos, and all of this is scored by a contraption playing demented carnival music until it too is smashed to pieces. It’s cartoonish anarchy, and it’s delightful, feeling like a prototype of the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker parody films of the 80s and 90s, where the only rule was ‘will it get a laugh?’ North to Alaska offers very little of it’s best quality, but what’s there is excellent, and the rest is solid enough to make the ending worth waiting for. 7/10.

Wednesday – The Misfits

In watching all of these Westerns recently, I’ve found it interesting to follow how the genre changed decade by decade. While it’s never completely homogenous, there are definitely wider trends in the genre as it tries to keep up with the times. The 40s was a decade of traditional Westerns, while the 50s attempted to break the critical stigma around the genre with the first revisionist Westerns. With financial success for the genre rapidly dwindling, the 60s seems to be torn between recapturing the glory of classic Westerns or going further with the deconstruction. The Misfits took things a step further again – here we have a post-Western. Almost unrecognisable as a Western due to it’s contemporary setting with cars and diners and radio, it’s instead a reflection on the themes and ideals of the genre and their incompatibility with the modern world. As is often the case with genre autopsies, the casting plays a big part in selling the intention. The male lead is a lonesome cowboy, his rugged individualism and rejection of society acting as a shield against his own self-hatred – he couldn’t make it in the modern world so he hides away in a delusional Wild West fantasy. While Clark Gable wasn’t especially known for Westerns, he was the face of an older, dying era of movies, lending an extra poignancy to the characters fear of being obsolete. There’s also the matter of the style of performance – Gable was an old-school theatrical actor, externally-minded and rigid in his technique, while the rest of the cast were students of the “Method”, who built out their character’s inner life before anything else and improvised freely. Marilyn Monroe is deeply moving in her final completed role, a woman who’s lost her sense of self falling for the allure of an older, more assertive masculinity. Her journey from depression to freedom to horror is fully realised and beautifully portrayed, and when she’s happy, she radiates such an otherworldy joy that the speed at which every man in the film falls for her feels completely truthful. Everything is captured with stunning black-and-white photography, shot with an objective eye with brief flights of romantic fantasy, emphasising the theme of the Western dream being swallowed up by the realities of the modern world. It’s streaming on Amazon Prime at the moment, so I’d definitely recommend it if you’re interested in this era of film. 9/10.

Friday – The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Another example of the 60s indecisiveness over what to do with the flagging Western genre, Liberty Valance is at once a traditional throwback to the early studio Westerns, but also an “end-of-an-era” post-mortem by perhaps the most legendary director-star duo in the genre. While sources can’t seem to agree on whether the look of the film was intentional or a limitation of the budget, it completely fits the story at hand. While Ford was famous for his “Monument Valley Westerns”, technicolour epics shot on the open plains, Liberty Valance sees him return to an older, more stripped-back toolkit. Shot in black-and-white on studio sets, it feels like a relic of a lost age, fitting for a story framed as the rememberings of an old man. The simplicity of the construction breeds perfection – light and shadows perfectly balanced, characters blocked expertly within the limited space, the illusion of a wider environment created through clever angles and the density of objects and movement. Another case of a happy accident in the production is the casting of John Wayne – mandated by the studio as a box-office draw, there almost couldn’t have been a better choice for the part. His character is a cowboy perfectly cast in the mythic mold that Wayne himself popularised in the 30s and 40s – charming, independent, brash, quick on the draw but not violent unless provoked. But the film deconstructs him by placing him alongside a very different kind of hero, played by Jimmy Stewart. Stewart represents the New Masculinity – sensitive, peaceful, highly educated and law-abiding. Within the setting of the Old West frontier, he seems pathetic next to Wayne’s domineering rancher, but it becomes clear to both the audience and to Wayne that only one of them has a future in the changing America, symbolised by their competition over Vera Miles. Stewart wins the girl and the hearts of the people, leading them into the modern world and rising to high office. Wayne is left behind, unable to change himself with the times, retreating into his own isolation and bitterness until, by the time he dies, he’s been completely forgotten by the town that once considered him a local hero. But even though the New Man wins the day, there’s one thing he’ll always have to reckon with – he’s not the man who shot Liberty Valance. All of Stewarts preaching and resolve would have come to nothing, smashed to bits against the immovable force of the cruel outlaw, if not for Wayne’s intervention. Though his ideology replaces that of the cowboy, it’s still built on the violence of the Old World. Critics at the time considered this a lesser work from Ford, a regression to the simplicity of his early Westerns and a low-budget rush-job with aging stars. For me, this is Ford’s best, the master of the Western stripping back all the flash and distraction to cut to the core of the genre and tell a near-perfect story. 10/10.

Saturday – Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

It’s fascinating how quickly the Wild West became mythologised in the American consciousness. The lawmen and bandits of the 1800s are revered in fiction the same way that other nations mythologize the warriors of the middle ages and antiquity. Of course, the relative recency of the Wild West era means it’s much more comprehensively documented than other “mythological” eras of history. This means there’s more fuel for the fire of the endless storytelling, and it also means that much of the revisionism is much more wilful than the romanticisation of, say, Arthurian Knights. Take this film, one of a half dozen adaptations of the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Portrayed here as an expertly choreographed five minute free-for-all with seven men gunned down and scores of shots fired, the real-life showdown saw about thirty shots fired in as many seconds with three fatalities. Of course, that wouldn’t be as entertaining, now would it? Look also at the figure of Wyatt Earp – played here by Burt Lancaster, using all of his physical intensity to portray the lawman as being so virtuous that it’s painful. While Earp was definitely involved in the famous gunfight, he was less central to its organising and execution than the myth would have you believe. He was also much less squeaky-clean than this film would have you believe, but the virtuous lawman makes for a better story. The real Earp lived into the 1920s and consulted on the first Hollywood Westerns, which goes a long way towards explaining why the white-washed image of him is so ingrained in the popular consciousness. I’m not disparaging the inaccuracy of this film, far from it – this is an excellent film by any measure, turning mundane reality into a gripping epic, and now I think every movie should have a theme song that a really passionate man sings at regular intervals throughput the story. 9/10.

Sunday – Zatoichi’s Cane Sword

Excalibur. Anduril. Brisingr. Zirael. The Dragonslayer. A hero is only as good as their weapon, which is why it’s such a common drama for these legendary blades to be lost or broken. That trope kicks off the fifteenth Zatoichi film, which sets out to ask – what is he without his sword? Warned by a blacksmith that his unique cane sword is irreparably damaged and will shatter the next time it is used, Zatoichi calmly accepts that his days as a roving gambler are at an end. Leaving his blade with the old blacksmith, Zatoichi takes up residence in a local inn and, for the first time in the series, earnestly tries to live a simple life. He plies his trade as a masseur and tries to mind his own business, but trouble follows him as always, and soon it’s clear that once again Zatoichi is the only one who can sort out what is troubling the people. Even though this is the most peaceable we ever see Zatoichi, it’s clear to see that he’s not completely defanged – he batters some thugs handily with his cane, and uses his classic brand of smiling intimidation to hassle some crooked gamblers. Far from being grateful for the chance to leave violence behind, Zatoichi grows more restless as the film goes on, until he has no choice but to take up his cane sword again. Even knowing that the next strike will be the last, he’s resigned to his fate, willing to end his story for the sake of saving others one more time. Zatoichi’s character development has been surprisingly consistent across the barely connected films – with each entry, he seems more and more resigned to his lot in life. The Zatoichi of the early entries could have conceivably left his cane sword behind and disappeared, but the Zatoichi we know now is in this life forever. 7/10.