Westerns and Crime Films

HUM 3280: Narrative FilmFall 2014

Dr. PerdigaoOctober 15-22, 2014

Defining the Western• Origins in late 19th century stories, dime novels, and journalistic accounts of

the wild American West (Corrigan and White 346)

• The Great Train Robbery (1903) as early example

• Characteristics of genre:-characters, almost always male, whose physical and mental toughness

separate them from the crowds of modern civilization-narratives that follow some version of a quest into the natural world-stylistic emphasis on the open, natural spaces and settings, such as the

western frontier regions of the United States (346)

• Search for justice, peace, adventure, freedom, treasure (346)

• Rugged individualism

• Loners or mavericks

• Violent confrontations, test of individuals (346)

Defining the Western• Epic, existential, and political westerns, developments of subgenres (Corrigan

and White 347)

• Mass appeal in early twentieth century

• Epic western: action and movement, development of heroic character “whose quests and battles serve to define the nation and its origins” (347)

• Dances with Wolves (1990)

• 1950s, rise of the existential western: introspective, traditional western hero troubled by his changing social status and his self-doubts; frontier becomes more developed and civilized and self-assurance and righteousness of hero begins to suffer; idea of purpose challenged, problematized (347)

• The Searchers (1956), Shane (1953), The Unforgiven (1992)

• 1960s and 1970s, political western: contemporary and critical western; ideology and politics of genre questioned; heroism and use of violence naturalized in westerns called into question (347)

• There Will Be Blood (2007), No Country for Old Men (2007)

Defining the Western• Western: not good versus evil but wilderness versus civilization (Dick 133)

• Individual versus the community, nature versus culture, West versus East (133)

• Freedom/responsibility, self-concern/commitment, ignorance/education, the desert/the garden (134)

• Quest or journey, trek across inhospitable terrain (135)

• Ritualistic aspects: gunplay, confrontations, modes of dressing, returns, departures, burials (136)

• Nostos, as homecoming—back to The Odyssey—here, with American contexts (137)

Changing Views• 1960s shift in westerns in response to polarization felt during the Vietnam

War (Dick 138)

• Vietnam avoided in film during the late 1960s and early 1970s but westerns “became a metaphor for an ugly war as well as a mirror of an America that the civil rights movement had made more sensitive to the portrayal of minorities” (138).

• 1990s Vietnam-inspired western had run its course; demythologized West in its place, no longer “a metaphor for an ideal America”; gone was John Wayne’s West (138)

• Different ideas of what America was and what it could have been (138)

• Revisionism, even in John Ford’s The Searchers with Native American points of view (138), yet caveat that Apaches spoke Spanish, less progressive than it could have been

Revisionist Histories• Little Big Man (1970) challenges legend of George Custer and his last stand

(Dick 139)

• Dances with Wolves (1990) as revisionist western, reversing representations of the American Indian and civilized white man (139)

• Antimyth where original myth is parodied, turned inside out: Clint Eastwood’s films Pale Rider (1985) and Unforgiven (1992)

• Antiheroes represented rather than just dark side of the hero (139)

• Nameless men who “appear out of nowhere, looking like prophets of doom; who kill their rivals, go off with the gold or ransom money, and clean up the town, leaving a trail of bodies behind them—not just the villain’s corpse, as Shane did” (139).

Defining the Crime Film• Origins in Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes

stories to 1920s pulp fiction (Corrigan and White 355)

• Characteristics of genre:-characters who live on the edge of a mysterious or violent society,

criminals or individuals dedicated to crime detection -plots of crime, increasing mystery, and often ambiguous resolution-urban, dark and shadowy, settings (355)

• Deviance as “barometer of the state of society” (356)

• Outsider characters in horror films as “what we most physically and psychologically fear and repress” while outsider characters in crime films “describe what we socially subject as upholders of the status quo” (356)

• The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1974): story of 20th century America and transformation of Michael Corleone from respectable son and war hero into mob boss (356)

• Familial dedication, loyalty, and vicious thirst for power, representation of American society

Defining the Crime Film• Idea of freedom in crime films (Dick 142)

• Production Code (present until 1968) prevented glorification of crime (142)

• Like in western, gun as icon (144), projection of user’s neurosis or sexuality

• Setting: back rooms, bars, diners, sleek cars, mean streets, sleazy hotel rooms, speakeasies, nightclubs, tenements, gaudy apartments, mausoleum-like homes (144)

• American dream of success, wealth, and fame but they also represent our “dark side” (144)

• Prison film as subgenre

Casting• The Searchers (1956)

• Director: John Ford• Screenplay: Frank S. Nugent• Novel: Alan Le Mayn (author of The Searchers and The Unforgiven)

• Ethan Edwards: John Wayne• Martin Pawley: Jeffrey Hunter• Laurie Jorgenson: Vera Miles• Debbie Edwards: Natalie Wood• Chief Cicatriz/Scar: Henry Brandon• Charlie McCorry: Ken Curtis

• John Wayne (Marion Morrison) (1907-1979), met John Ford, starred in Stagecoach (1939), True Grit (1969), Ford’s cavalry trilogy: Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950)

• Wayne appeared in 250 movies

Casting• The Godfather (1972)

• Director: Francis Ford Coppola• Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo• Novel: Mario Puzo

• Don Vito Corleone: Marlon Brando• Michael: Al Pacino• Sonny: James Caan• Tom Hagen: Robert Duvall• Kay Adams: Diane Keaton• Connie Corleone Rizzi: Talia Shire

Thematic Elements• Representation of home, homecoming

• Ethan, Michael Corleone

• Place for heroes within new American society

• Ambiguity and uncertainty

• Question of traditional values, the roles constructed within this society

• Idea of justice—go to Don Corleone, Ethan Edwards?

• What is just in this new society?

• Don Corleone—introduced by voice first, outline

• Idea of power, presentation of power

• Place of violence, necessity

Thematic Elements• Don Corleone’s introduction

• Asked for justice, for murder

• “That is not justice. Your daughter is still alive.”

• Daughter’s wedding, exact violence for another daughter

• Patriarchal order

• Place of women

• Inside/outside

• Wedding/office

• Light/dark

• Kitchen/office

The Crime Film• Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967)• Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983)• Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987)• Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990)• John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood (1991)• Mario Van Peebles’ New Jack City (1992)• Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992)• Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994)• Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002)• Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006)

http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi686883097/

The New Western • George Lucas’ Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope (1977)• Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990)• Ron Howard’s The Missing (2003)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338188/ • Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0266697/ Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)

• Joss Whedon’s Serenity (2005)• Ethan and Joel Coen’s No Country for Old Men (2007)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477348/