From
showdowns to gundowns, even unfortunate encounters with automobiles, it is difficult
to imagine a western worth the name in which at least one major character didn’t
bite the bullet – or mosey up to Boot Hill in some other fashion. Any student
of memorable mortalities in the western would be spoilt for choice – here are
ten of our favourite last hurrahs (yeehaws?) from the genre’s halcyon days.
(Spoilers yonder.)
JIMMIE
RINGO, THE GUNFIGHTER
Reconciled
with his wife and child, reforming gunman Ringo (Gregory Peck) vows he’ll see
them next year, and prepares to start a new life. A trio of vengeful brothers
is after his blood but as Ringo departs, Marshall Strett intercepts them, thus
granting Ringo the prospect of a future without the burden of his fearsome
reputation. As he mounts his horse, barbershop braggart Hunt Bromley (Skip
Homeier) plugs two shots into Ringo’s back. Strett orders the coward arrested
but Ringo, with his dying breath, bestows a more poetic punishment on Bromley –
let him see “what it means to have to
live like a big, tough gunny”. As
purgatory for back-shooting Ringo, Bromley must, like his victim, eke out his
existence with hellhounds on his trail. In his most resonant western role, Peck
unveils the anxieties of a man desperate to escape his disreputable past but
for whom a violent reckoning was inevitable. Clark Hodgkiss
BRENDAN
O’MALLEY, THE LAST SUNSET
Learning
that Missy, the girl he has fallen for, is his own daughter, Brendan O’Malley (Kirk
Douglas) is racked with shame by the incestuous liaison. Abandoning plans to
elope to Mexico, he elects to go up against Dana Stribling (Rock Hudson), who
is primed to serve him an arrest warrant. Doggedly, O’Malley strides towards
confrontation. Razor-sharp edits cut between the two men, building kinetic
real-time tension until they reach an empty railyard. O’Malley checks the
barrel of his Derringer. Cut away as a gunshot rudely interrupts Missy’s
romantic musings. O’Malley lies in the dust. As Missy and her mother, Belle
(Dorothy Mallone), race to the scene, Stribling opens O’Malley’s gun – it was not
loaded. By taking his fate into his own hands, O’Malley has sacrificed himself
less because of guilt than to preserve his unaware offspring’s memory of him as
a kind-hearted man. From swagger to soul-crushing despair, Douglas methodically
captures a solitary man’s tragic downfall.
JONAS, THE
HELLBENDERS
Jeff (Gino
Pernice), deviant son in the curious brood fathered by Jonas (Joseph Cotten),
has killed an Indian chief’s daughter and the tribe have come for him. Ben
(Julian Mateos) barters the contents of the coffin they are transporting – more
than one million stolen dollars to reignite the Confederacy – but others would
rather see their brother die than relinquish their spoils. Tension escalates to
a gunfight – Jonas, wounded himself, watches as his three sons fall. He lugs
the coffin to the river demarking North and South. Too heavy; it cracks open to
exhibit the grotesque death mask of an outlaw – they dug up the wrong box!
Director Sergio Corbucci conflates images of a dying madman on a mud bank and a
Rebel flag dragged under cascading water to describe the bathetic conclusion to
one man’s Utopian dream. Jonas’s death is choreographed to Morricone’s
brass-heavy lament, sympathy stripped away by its ironically celestial chorus.
BILL
‘NIÑO’ TATE, A BULLET FOR THE GENERAL
Chuncho
(Gian Maria Volonté) has unwittingly steered gringo assassin Niño (Lou Castel)
to the stronghold of deified revolutionary General Elias, whom Niño shoots
dead. Devastated but seduced by gold pesos, Chuncho aims to leave Mexico with his
new mentor. Niño recounts his subterfuges with some amusement, but his
arrogance transforms Chuncho’s demeanour: “I like you Niño, shame I have to
kill you.” Niño is bewildered. Why? Chuncho takes out his gun. “Quien sabe? I
only know I must kill you.” He shoots the American in the gut. As the train
pulls out of Ciudad Juarez, Niño slouches, dead, and his former dupe erupts
into delirious laughter. With this
generative milestone for the spaghetti western, director Damiano Damiani wears his
red heart proudly on his sleeve. Niño’s death, symbolic of the overthrow of
imperialist interventionism, and Chuncho’s rapturous cry of, “Don’t buy bread –
buy dynamite!” encapsulate the left-leaning zeitgeist of Italian cinema at the
time.
RICHARD
MARTIN, BANDIDOS
Hands
crippled by Billy Kane’s bullets, dapper gunfighter Richard Martin (Enrico
Maria Salerno) becomes a bedraggled sideshow barker, moulding a drifter (Terry
Jenkins) into the trick shooter ‘Ricky Shot’. Martin’s real purpose is to have ‘Ricky’
take vicarious revenge on Kane (Venantino Venantini), his former protégé. When
his plans go awry, Martin tracks Kane to a border town, firing with a shotgun
from the shadows in the saloon. He thinks he has felled his enemy but his
ageing eyes have deceived him – Kane is alive, taunts him, lets him reload.
Martin is a beaten man. He throws down the scattergun, turns away in tearful
resignation, takes a drink at the bar. Kane shoots him in the back... Salerno was
not always this understated, but he weighs Martin’s emotions with subtlety and
precision, from fleeting elation to utter deflation in a heartbeat – one of his remaining few. Massimo Dallamano directs with commensurate restraint. Kevin Grant
CLINT (AND
JOHN?) FOREST, FOR $100,000 PER KILLING
John (Gianni
Garko), bounty hunter, and Clint (Claudio Camaso), outlaw, are estranged
half-brothers. (Could there be more emblematic protagonists in an Italian
western?) John has spent ten years in prison for killing their father –
actually Clint’s doing. His dying mother’s plea not to shoot Clint on sight has
stayed John’s hand, together with residual filial loyalty. Now, having seen off
the various partners Clint has betrayed, the duo confront their destiny in a
ghost town, a dust storm – no subtle symbolism here – swirling around them.
Shaking with emotion Clint fires, wounding John, who gets in two shots. They
stagger towards each other, director Giovanni Fago inflating the melodrama of
the moment, lingering on the brothers’ anguished faces. Clint collapses into
his sibling’s arms: “Take me… home…” An ambiguous final image shows both men in
younger, happier times, riding together along a beach. Have they been reunited
– and reconciled – in death?
SILENCE, THE
GREAT SILENCE
Snow Hill,
Utah. An eerily quiet night. Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant), scourge of
bounty killers, is badly wounded. Even so he must answer a summons: face Loco
(Klaus Kinski), the hunters’ leader, or a group of captive ‘outlaws’ – really social
outcasts – will be eliminated. His gun hand maimed – a typical Sergio Corbucci
touch – Silence walks the streets, stops outside the saloon. Snow falls gently.
A bullet strikes Silence’s left hand. Loco emerges. Silence fumbles for his
pistol. As Morricone’s score reaches a tragic apogee, another shot hits the hero.
Loco finishes him off unemotionally with a bullet to the head. Silence falls in
slow motion. The hostages are massacred anyway… Silence is no white knight, but
in conditions skewed towards the venal and the merciless, he is the only hope
of justice. That dies with him. Pessimism of the highest order, or cynicism of
the lowest? Corbucci would argue that, in the light of recent history, he was
simply being realistic.
CABLE, THE
BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE
Like the
lizard blasted apart in the opening scene, water prospector Cable (Jason
Robards) is a creature of the desert, a misfit in the urbanising West of the
early 20th century. When he decides to give up sandy self-exile for a new life
in the city with Hildy (Stella Stevens), a cheerfully materialistic prostitute,
fate intervenes with impeccably ironic timing. Accidentally run over by Hildy’s
fancy automobile – always a harbinger of ill fortune in a Peckinpah western – Cable
greets the turn of events with equilibrium. He turns his business over to an
ex-partner (Strother Martin), forgiving him his treachery, and has his deathbed
carried out into the sun. His lecherous preacher friend (David Warner) gives
him an apposite oration: “Take him Lord, but knowing Cable I suggest you do not
take him lightly.” Plenty of characters met spectacularly violent ends in
Peckinpah’s mighty canon; Cable’s tragicomic demise, in the director’s gentlest
work, is one of the most affecting.
JOHN McCABE,
McCABE AND MRS MILLER
Despite
exhortations from Mrs Miller (Julie Christie), entrepreneur McCabe (Warren
Beatty) resolves to “make a stand” against the Harrison Shaugnessy mining
monopoly. The townsfolk, engaged in extinguishing a church fire, don’t see the
hapless man trundle through heavy snow, straining to preserve his (and their)
dreams against the company’s hired assassins. A wounded McCabe seeks respite,
but a shotgun blast hits him square in the back. Butler, a towering English
gunman, walks towards him; McCabe springs up and fires into Butler’s forehead.
Mortally wounded, McCabe buckles. As Mrs Miller chases the dragon in an opium
den, her lover’s body is slowly shrouded by a snow blizzard. Egotistical
battles between director Robert Altman and Beatty notwithstanding, an accord
was, at least, struck that the tragic death of this unlikely hero represented
small business devoured by big corporations; their message seems as resonant,
and pessimistic, now as it did in the Seventies.
JB BOOKS,
THE SHOOTIST
Eroded by
terminal cancer, ageing gunman John Bernard Books (John Wayne) spends his last
week fending off jackals and vultures. Self-contained to the last, he engineers
a departure befitting his way of life – gun blazing, eliminating three
miscreants in a pre-arranged showdown in a fancy saloon. Bathos intrudes upon
glory – badly wounded, he is blasted in the back by a no-account bartender, who
is then felled by Books’ young protégé, Gillom (Ron Howard). When Gillom throws
away Books’ pistol in disgust, the gunfighter smiles with approval and dies in
peace – here endeth the lesson. Wayne’s swan song was an unabashed tribute to
its star and to his patriarchal stature in the American western. The actor
wouldn’t cheat cancer as Books had – the disease claimed him three years later.
Under Don Siegel’s direction he did, however, write his own epitaph, capping a
long screen career with a performance low on swagger, but rich in dignity and
dogged courage.
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