Arts
Wild dogs and westerns
Clancy Sigal
Blue Sunshine and The Pack (Warner West End) Although there are more arty and pretentious new releases about this week, the two films that reach down deepest into our collective unconscious are both cheapies which many patrons will enjoy while feeling slightly ashamed of themselves for doing so.
Don't see Blue Sunshine (X) if you're bald or nervous about medical matters or ever took LSD. The title refers to a bath of bad 'acid' cooked up and sold to Stanford University students in the 1960s. A decade later, some former buyers, now pillars of the California establishment — a Congressional candidate, a police lieutenant, etc — turn into homicidal maniacs because the drug has kicked back on them.
It's a furiously.good idea, including the slightly comic horror sight of the respectable murderers losing all their hair just before they freak out. Which of us has nOt worried about the latent after-effects of all that dope — in the form of miracle drugs, pills and pain-killers — our doctors casually prescribe to us? Blue Sunshine plays cleverly on these anxieties of 'a time bomb in the chromosomes', but is tripped up by the lousiest lead actor of all time (Zalman King) and Jeff Lieberman's shallow script which settles for a few chills when, with, just a bit more care, it could have been corking good.
Similarly, The Pack (AA) cuts through our civilised defences to the most primitive fears, A surprisingly watchable and competent Joe Don Baker — the violently avening hero of Walking Tall — organises this small, isolated island community by barricading them in his house against a gang of wild, abandoned dogs. In the best tradition of disaster films like Earthquake and Towering Inferno, the drooling, lunatic pooches strike down only those characters who have in some way defied the film-makers" concept of our morality.
At first, I assumed this was a doggy version of those old 1950s standbys, the Hell's Angels-trap-a-frightened-town (The Wild Ones) or that other domestic comforter, the bad guys-hold-a-decentfamily-prisoner-in-their-own-home (The Desperate Hours). But two scenes convinced me that the roots of The Pack are much older and deeper. One shows the rabid raiders silhouetted threateningly along a skyline like Sioux warriors; I should not have been surprised to see one of them (Crazy Dog?) get up on its hind legs and shoot the hero with a bow and arrow. The other is a final close-up of Joe Don Baker, having killed the invaders, tenderly feeding crackers to the only dog left on the island, a meekly sweet mongrel who (perhaps because he was tied to a tree stump) did not join his blood brothers. The pacifist mutt, of course, is a 'good Indian', and The Pack is an only slightly modified western.
It might not have picked up so fast on this if I had not just finished reading Philip French's recently re-issued and updated monograph, Westerns (Seeker and Warburg, Cinema One series, L1.90). French, Britain's most serious student of the western as an art-cum-political form, demonstrates in his sensible and witty book just how pervasive the cowboy tradition is. 'There is no theme you cannot examine in terms of the Western, no situation which cannot be transposed to the West, whether it be the Trojan War turned into a Texas range conflict . . or King Lear as a prairie land baron,' he writes. 'The Western is a great grab-bag, a hungry cuckoo of a genre, a voracious bastard of a form . . ready to seize anything that's in the air from juvenile delinquency to ecology.' The Pack neatly fits this definition, right down to a fashionable rationale for the mad dogs' behaviour.
With a wealth of pithy detail, Philip French shows how basic to AngloEuropean (and even eastern) film-making the westerns really are. Not only can they be made from other genres (gangster movies like Kiss of Death and The Asphalt Jungle became The Fiend That Walked The West and The Badlanders), but can themselves be switched to other locales and times. French makes a convincing case for the western as the inspiration of many Nixon-era police (Dirty Harry) and vigilante (Death Wish) films. Sometimes movie-makers get too big for their western breeches, with hilarious results. French cites a western dreamed up in 1943 by the novelist Sinclair Lewis and MGM producer Dore Schary. Called Storm in the West, it was supposed to be an allegory of events leading up to the second world war. Stalin figured in it as Joel Slavin, a Civil War veteran from Georgia (where else?), who teams up with Churchill (Walter Chancel) in a popular front against Hitlerite outlaws who have gunned down Chuck Slattery (Czechoslavakia). MGM moguls rejected it as 'too political', maybe because the script called for a close-up of a hammer and sickle hanging on the back of Joel Slayin's covered wagon'.
But other nutty ideas have made westerns, An Italian company made a frontier version of Hamlet (Johnny Arnleto), and Delmar Daves's Jubal is probably based on Othello. At one of the Hollywood studios where I used to work the story editor regularly commanded me to pound out western treatments from the Bible (David and Saul are infinitely transferable to sod-bustin' territory), James Joyce (Ulysses in silver rush Nevada) and especially from authors in public domain like Dumas and Maupassant. Almost anything, I found, makes a western — though not necessarily a good one. Despite its enjoyable detective work in tracing basic western plots back to their (sometimes) classical roots and also the western influence in so many other kinds of movie, French's study is fairly rigorous in insisting on just a few fundamental ingredients for the true western. It is male, action-oriented and almost invariablY 'hawkish'. French's premise is that the Cold War period gave the old-fashioned western a new lease on life, and that while 'the Western is ill-equipped to confront complex political ideas in a direct fashion' it was the perfect forum for airing controversy other wise frowned on in America in the conformist 1950s. McCarthyism became all excuse for right-wing (Arrowhead) an,' left-wing (High Noon) allegories. Public debate over whether to pursue the Korea!' (and later Vietnamese) Reds into thel1 privileged sanctuaries influenced mall; westerns like Aldrich's Ulzana's Raid. Mu of course the liberal, anti-racist cyc.le (Devil's Doorway, Broken Lance) is still with us (Little Big Man, A Man Called Horse). In my more malicious moments I sometimes think that Gay Liberation movement began with pictures like The Last Sunset and Gunfight at OK Corral. For both serious devotees of the western and for those who want a lucid, entertaining replay of their misspent youth watching anyone from Tom Mix to Clint Eastwood, Philip French's Westerns is heartily recon'y mended.
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