FIRST IMPRESSIONS IN WESTERNS

ETHAN EDWARDS, THE SEARCHERS
EXTERIOR, HOMESTEAD (DAY) Blackness. Martha Edwards opens the door from inside, painting the screen with the majestic yellow light of Monument Valley, the camera trailing her as she walks outside. The desert appears empty. Then, there comes a horseman, clad in a faded Confederate uniform. One by one, the family file onto the veranda. The dog barks at the newcomer. “That’s your uncle Ethan!” exclaims Lucy, the eldest daughter, to her brother. Ethan approaches Martha, who grasp his shoulders as he leans to kiss her forehead. But they cannot maintain eye contact and he must walk away... Ford had a knack for the powerful image; the languorous, ominous approach of Ethan, flanked by the magnificent buttes of the director's most cherished location, stirs up a dust storm of competing emotions that swirl with even greater vigour in the film’s famous closing shot. Ethan’s homecoming, like his eventual departure, is exultant yet tragic, hinting at suppressed mutual passions, at the conflict in the character’s soul. Given a role that would test his range to the fullest, John Wayne nailed it. Clark Hodgkiss

FRANK, ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST

EXTERIOR, McBAIN RANCH (DAY) The sound of gunfire subsides. Young Timmy McBain runs out from the family ranch. The bodies of his father, sister and brother lie outside, freshly slain. Morricone’s music swells, conveying a terrible grandeur on the scene. From the dust and the brush five gunmen advance. They stop. The camera circles round to focus on the leader, partly in profile. Cut to close-up – “Jesus Christ, it’s Henry Fonda!” The shock of recognition – magnified when he shoots the boy, smiling in the act – was central to the director’s master plan. Not that Fonda foresaw this. He arrived in Europe with dark contacts and a ‘villainous’ moustache, camouflaging the blue eyes and Mount Rushmore features that Leone knew, from Fort Apache and Warlock, could connote cruelty and callousness as much as nobility and integrity. Fonda’s involvement forged a link with the western’s heritage (in a film replete with quotations, it is as if Wilson, not Shane, had ridden up to the Starrett farm), and ranks among the most audacious bits of casting in screen history. Kevin Grant

ROBERT E LEE CLAYTON, THE MISSOURI BREAKS

EXTERIOR, RANCH (DAY) Long shot of two horses, laden with baggage, proceeding down a hill towards a homestead. The rancher’s daughter, Jane Braxton (Kathleen Lloyd), watches them from the porch. They stop before her and, without warning, a man’s face pops out from behind the first animal’s neck. “Lee Clayton,” he announces routinely, as if riding a horse by clinging to its flank were the normal way to travel. Jane is taken aback. “All I could see was your horse.” “That’s all you were meant to see.” Marlon Brando drove cast and crew to distraction with his improvisations and idiosyncrasies – dressing in drag, romancing his steed. Occasionally, however, one can appreciate the method behind the madness. His entrance is not merely eccentric but suggests a survival instinct shading into paranoia: for a hired gunman, subterfuge of this kind (if not necessarily transvestitism) would have been essential – or at least secured him an advantage. Kevin Grant

SARTANA, IF YOU MEET SARTANA… PRAY FOR YOUR DEATH

EXTERIOR, DESERT (DAY) Heat waves. A cloud of dust. In the medium distance, a dark rider appears (on a pale horse, suggestively), head down, frock coat billowing. He’s shadowing a buggy. “I feel as if a ghost were following me,” comments the elderly female passenger to her husband. Shots ring out. The passengers are killed, the rider slides from his horse. Men approach the buggy; their boss, Morgan (Klaus Kinski), looks on. Close-up of a boot crunching a twig, then a full-body shot of Sartana (Gianni Garko), very much alive (unless the woman was on to something), side on to his attackers. “I am your pallbearer,” he announces, before slaying the men with pocket pistol and rifle – dramatic low-angle insert. Later films would introduce Sartana with greater visual aplomb, but the essentials are established here – the sinister bearing, the inexplicable ‘resurrection’, the uncanny dexterity, the ironic aura of absurdity. The scene is, additionally, the perfect entrée to the comic-book world of director Gianfranco Parolini. Kevin Grant

DOCK TOBIN, MAN OF THE WEST

INTERIOR, REMOTE CABIN (DAY) Link Jones (Gary Cooper), escorting two fellow victims of a train robbery through the outback, enters a cabin to seek shelter. the interior is dark, dank, manned by three shifty grotesques. An oil lamp is lit, throwing oppressive shadows. Link is interrogated, but remains cagey. A voice pipes up from behind a filthy Mexican blanket: “He'll be dead by tomorrow morning.” The curtain is thrown back to reveal a man, greying, stooped, vagabond wardrobe. Ice rips through Link’s soul – it is Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb), the twisted, morally perverse uncle who once taught him how to steal and murder. Tobin considered Link his “right arm”; his words are loaded with recrimination as he stalks the claustrophobic cabin like an ailing panther: “I was so mad I could... push your guts right out you back.” Cobb gives a consummate method performance, intensely physical, issuing a disquieting welcome into Anthony Mann’s psychologically unsettling western-noir universe. Clark Hodgkiss

BLADE, A MAN CALLED BLADE

EXTERIOR, MARSHLAND (DAY) A man attired in mud-slicked furs races through a bog, tracked by an unseen man on horseback. Eerie, dense fog suffocates the scene; slow-motion photography and the echoing sounds of man and beast conjure an abnormal ambience. Gasping for breath, the hounded man backs against a tree, trying to detect his pursuer. Like a phantom, the rider materialises from the mist. The cornered man draws; the rider throws an axe; its spinning trajectory ends when it severs the gunman's shooting hand. A blood-freezing scream is followed by a close-up of the axe man's emotionless eyes... The spaghetti western plunged into parody in its later years but, on rare occasions, that pattern was disrupted. Director Sergio Martino, prolific in the giallo genre, capitalised on that experience with Blade. Maurizio Merli, in his only western, makes an efficient and ruthless bounty hunter tormented by his past. His relentlessness is evidenced in this highly stylised pre-credits sequence; by keeping him barely visible, however, Martino ensures an air of mystery is retained. Clark Hodgkiss

BRITT, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

EXTERIOR, RAIL YARD (DAY) Surly cowboy Wallace (Robert Wilke) bets his friends he’s faster with a pistol than knife expert Britt (James Coburn) with his blade. He approaches the latter’s lean figure, reclining against a fence, hat over his eyes. Wallace demands a ‘duel’. Reluctantly, silently, Britt accepts the challenge. They both draw; it is inconclusive. Wallace loudly insists he won. “You lost,” drawls Britt. He resumes his supine pose. “Let’s do it for real,” snarls Wallace, firing at his opponent’s feet. Close-up on Britt’s face, the merest hint of irritation. They face off; his blade finds Wallace’s chest before the latter can fire. Of all the vignettes that introduce John Sturges’ stand-ins for the Seven Samurai, this one distils the essence of the character most succinctly – for Seiji Miyaguchi/Kyuzo’s haughty, phlegmatic bearing, read Coburn/Britt’s rangy nonchalance. It took a few more years for Coburn to acquire iconic status – the next stepping-stone being Sturges’ The Great Escape – but his performance here marked the birth of a new kind of cool. Kevin Grant

ANGEL FACE/RINGO, A PISTOL FOR RINGO
EXTERIOR, TOWN (DAY) Four scowling gunmen arrive in town: “We’re lookin’ for somebody they call Angel Face.” An elderly Mexican advises them to desist. Cut to a close-up of booted feet, hopping along a hopscotch grid. This is the title character – not a hard-bitten pistolero, but an overgrown child. “You sure are the strictest players I ever saw,” he grumbles to the youngsters observing him. The villains call him out. “All right kids, step aside and keep your eyes open,” says Ringo. “New game – more fun than hopscotch.” Mid-hop, he whirls round, blasting his opponents with lightning speed. Giuliano Gemma’s sunny disposition and insouciant manner signal a radical departure from the Leone school of Euro-westerns – in place of mystique he offers mischief, although he remains as cynical as they come. Duccio Tessari roots his first genre piece in the middle ground between American B-westerns and their rougher Italian cousins – a feat that many directors attempted after him, few with such finesse. Kevin Grant

BAD BOB, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JUDGE ROY BEAN

EXTERIOR, TEXAS BADLANDS (DAY) A wraithlike rider, garbed in black with unruly white hair, kicks and tears towards the town of Vinegarroon, gun blazing. Rampage! The citizens flee in panic; undertakers hide in coffins; one unlucky resident has a toe cut off. This is Judge Roy Bean's fiefdom, and Bad Bob – a virtuoso cameo by Stacy Keach – has come to call him out, to “burn his eyes out and feed them to the buzzards”. With his leather duds, bleached mane and taste for raw onion, the albino killer is the most unhinged of director John Huston’s grotesques, exploding into town like an elemental force. Psychopathic and outrageous he may be; he ought, even so, to have known better than to goad Bean (Paul Newman) by insulting the hallowed name of Lily Langtry. Bob’s audacious demise, in keeping with the absurdist mood, both emulates and satirises the most violent aspects of Seventies westerns, while taking a cue from Tex Avery. Clark Hodgkiss

DJANGO, DJANGO THE BASTARD

EXTERIOR, TOWN STREET, (DAY) The camera hovers above a black-clad figure proceeding measuredly down a deserted thoroughfare. There are shots from other angles: a close-up of his boots; side views from distance through the spokes of a wagon wheel and wooden slats, as if the camera is cowering. He halts before a house and thrusts a wooden cross into the ground, its marker engraved with that day’s date and the name ‘Sam Hawkins’. A man watching through a smeared windowpane wonders, “What the devil?” – an apposite choice of phrase, as it turns out. As Anthony Steffen’s dour countenance is revealed beneath the stranger’s hat brim, Hawkins and his men are dispatched in a melee of bullets, frantic edits and oblique camera angles. Euro-western protagonists routinely announced themselves with murderous élan; rarely with such sinister connotations. The adjective ‘lifeless’ is often thrown at Steffen’s acting – even his detractors would have to concede this pseudo-supernatural revenge film was the ideal vehicle for his gifts. Kevin Grant