André Bazin once stated that various aspects of the Western allowed it to identify with the essence of cinema. Writing in the 40s and 50s, Bazin saw in the classic Western films of that period a simplicity in morality and a reformist style that resulted in a genre that had no reason to excuse itself for its black and white, good and evil, and more or less accurate portrayal of an important period in American history. He also noticed a progression within the genre but his death in 1958 did not allow him to witness an even further evolution throughout the 60s and 70s. How interesting it would have been to know his assessment of what the Leones, Peckinpahs and Altmans did to the Western genre.

Personally, I believe they did it a lot of good and infused it with a much-needed dose of realism and freshness. I recently surprised a Cinephile friend of mine for stating that Red River (48) had left me unimpressed (as do most films with John Wayne). And as I explained in this post, most traditional Westerns, while stimulating our imagination with their exploration of a mystical historicity, have a tendency to nonetheless deal with aspects of human nature that probably shouldn’t be so unabashedly revered.

Enter The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a brilliant take on the Western genre by Andrew Dominik, who previously directed the very entertaining Chopper (2000). Bashed by many for being overly self-conscious, this film defies many of the criteria that Bazin identified 60 years ago regarding the Western. It contains little action, blurs the line between good and evil and asks us to connect for two and half hours to bandits with sometimes little to offer in terms of principles and decency. Like McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Assassination of Jesse James depicts a gray, cold and unforgiving West (or more accurately in this case, Mid-West) where life does not revolve mainly around patting the wife on the behind, eating beef stew with the mates around the campfire and shooting Indians in the back. Andrew Dominik’s film is a slow, atmospheric, beautifully shot, exploration of a death dance between two men. Jesse James, played remarkably well by Brad Pitt (who always seems to do much better when he can play unusual or slightly offbeat characters, as in 12 Monkeys, Fight Club, Kalifornia, Snatch….) is the very intelligent, crazy, menacing and tired killer hero who has fabricated an elaborate plan to ensure that his name will live on forever. Robert Ford, played by Casey Affleck in a performance that earned him a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, is the young neglected man who idealizes Jesse James and who wants to be one day as or more famous than his idol. The dissolution of the James gang serves as a background for a ballet between the two men’s fears, delusions and objectives. The Assassination of Jesse James is not an action film and probably not even a Western. It is a well acted and well scripted period drama wrapped in a heavy stylistic blanket that can either warm one’s sensibilities or that can turn one off in the same way that the films of Terrence Malick or Wong Kar Wai can exasperate some people. But if one were to insist on calling The Assassination of Jesse James a Western, then I would say that it is one of the best Westerns ever made.

As Peter Biskind pointed out in Seeing is Believing: how Hollywood taught us to stop worrying and love the fifties (1983), it is naïve to think that the ideology of Hollywood in the 50s was a fixed and uniform set of political beliefs and values. While many films did reflect common themes with a strong push towards consensus and the need to stick together in the face of adversity (and the enemy, whatever that enemy may be), many also betrayed underlying disagreements within the established and traditional dominant view of society.

It is commonly assumed that most films from the 50s are issued from the same mould, that of conformity and right-wing bourgeois suburban ideology. Yet, High Noon, which received two Oscars in 1953, is usually understood to be a left wing film, one that goes against the norm and the mainstream. After all, John Wayne and Howard Hawks, dismayed by this straying aside in a genre that they believed to be the casket of American family values, remade High Noon a few years later, as Rio Bravo.

Read more »

This film won’t dethrone Once upon a Time in the West as my favourite western but it comes very close.

John Ford may have brought an almost boring perfection to the western genre (with Hawks, Sturges and Zinnemann adding very little in terms of novelty), but Leone (and Peckinpah) took it to a new level, one that distances itself from its predecessors through a more aggressive and much less romantic and conservative style.

Gone is the John Wayne regulated, regimented, black and white republican view of the West. This is an American West where the bad guys and the good guys are the same people, where Darwinian and animalistic forces dominate in an unforgiving and harsh environment.

Van Cleef is absorbing to watch and Wallach simply astonishing, while Eastwood’s stoicism has never looked more appropriate. The cemetery scene where Wallach looks for the tombstone remains one of my all-time favourite.