What the *&#! Is This About?
In the town of “Signal,” Wyoming in 1963, two ranch hands arrive and are put to work by a rancher (Randy Quaid) whose sheep need to pasture on “Brokeback Mountain.” The camp tender, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) doesn’t say much to his new partner at first, only that he used to come from ranch people. The herder, Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the son of a rodeo rider. As time passes, the two men grow more comfortable with each other. Jack confides that his father was actually a well-known bull rider, but he kept his expertise to himself and never came to see Jack ride. Ennis reveals that his parents died and after a year of high school, he struck out on his own. When Jack complains about having to sleep up on the mountain with the sheep, Ennis offers to switch jobs with him.

Drunk and bunking down at the campsite, Ennis takes shelter with Jack in the tent to get out of the freezing cold. During the middle of the night, Jack initiates what escalates into an intense bout of sex between the men. “This is a one shot thing we got goin’ on here,” Ennis tells Jack the next day, adding “You know I ain’t queer.” Jack responds, “Me neither.” As the summer draws on, the experience turns out to be anything but a one shot deal, but when the job is over, Ennis forces himself to part ways with Jack. He marries his fiancée Alma (Michelle Williams) and starts a family. Jack drifts back into rodeo, where he catches the eye of Lureen (Anne Hathaway), a hotshot circuit rider whose father owns an equipment company.

Ennis receives a postcard from Jack, who drops by on his way through Riverton. Alma catches her husband greeting his old friend intimately, but keeps this to herself for the time being. Taking off on what become annual fishing trips to Brokeback Mountain, Jack fails to convince Ennis to go in with him on a ranch somewhere where they can live together. Ennis shares a childhood memory of “two old guys ranched up together” and what ended up happening to one of them. Even after Alma divorces him, Ennis keeps his feelings for Jack private. When Jack asks for how long they have to go on like this, Ennis replies, “As long as we can ride it. There ain’t no reins on this one.”

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Following the publication of her third novel Accordion Crimes in 1991, Annie Proulx found herself drawn to writing about life in small town America, specifically Wyoming, where the author had moved in 1994 after living in Vermont for thirty years. Proulx recalled, “I am interested in landscape, folkways and rural problems. There is an endless conflict of values, lifestyles, the way people make their livings and social networks. I find the lives of country people far more interesting than the lives of city folk who are less connected to landscape and the natural world.” In 1997, Proulx started writing a short story she doubted would ever be printed; it concerned two young ranch hands in 1960s Wyoming whose sexual and emotional relationship spans twenty years. Published in the October issue of The New Yorker, Brokeback Mountain would ultimately be named an O. Henry Prize Story and win a National Magazine Award.

A couple of years prior, Larry McMurtry – the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Lonesome Dove – was recuperating from heart surgery in the home of a friend named Diana Ossana. McMurtry wrote his 1993 novel Streets of Laredo on Ossana’s kitchen counter, which she keyed into her computer and edited. McMurtry had received offers from Steven Spielberg, John McTiernan and others to write various screenplays and had rejected them all, but when Warner Bros. contacted the author about scripting a movie about gangster Pretty Boy Floyd, Ossana jumped into action. She recalled, “I went out and did a bunch of research on it. I had ten legal-sized pages of interesting facts about Pretty Boy, and sat down with him and said, ‘These are all the reasons that you ought to write this script.’ He was kind of amused by that, and by the time I was done reading him that list, he said, ‘Ok, I’d like to write the screenplay, but will you write it with me?’”

By October 1997, McMurtry & Ossana had written a script for Pretty Boy Floyd as well as two teleplays based on McMurtry’s work: Streets of Laredo and Dead Man’s Walk. The duo was back in Texas, where a friend gave Ossana a copy of that month’s issue of the New Yorker, which featured Brokeback Mountain. Ossana recalled, “Two-thirds of the way through reading the story, I began to sob, and I sobbed all the way to the end. I was floored.” Ossana took the magazine to McMurtry, who recalled, “I don’t read fiction much anymore, so I was reluctant. But in her tenacious way, she asked that I humor her and read it. After I was finished reading it, the first thing I thought was that I wished I had written it. It was a story that had been sitting there for years, waiting to be told, and Annie finally wrote it. It is one of the finest short stories I’ve read. The place, the landscape, the men and the way they speak are drawn precisely and convincingly.”

Diana Ossana recalled, “He read it and said it was the best short story ever published in the New Yorker. ‘Well, do you think it would make a screenplay,’ I asked. And he replied, ‘I think it might.’ And I said, ‘Why don’t we write Annie a letter?’ And he said, ‘Okay.’” Within a week, Proulx had optioned her short story to the writing tandem. Paying her out of their own pockets, McMurtry & Ossana started writing and three months later, finished a screenplay. Producer Scott Rudin would option the script and ultimately brought Gus Van Sant on board to direct. Despite interest from Joaquin Phoenix to play Jack Twist, McMurtry believed that actors were getting cold feet. “They’d say it was the best thing they’d ever read, and then they’d waver and anguish. Their agents were afraid and steered them away from it.” Unable to lock a cast, Gus Van Sant had to pass on directing Brokeback Mountain.

In 2001, producer James Schamus took out an option on Brokeback Mountain. Schamus presented it to his longtime collaborator, director Ang Lee, who read the short story, felt the screenplay was a great adaptation, but opted to direct The Hulk instead. Schamus had no luck getting a studio to take a chance on the material. He took a job developing films for Universal’s specialty unit Focus Features, where it dawned on him that now, he had the cache to greenlight Brokeback Mountain himself. By this time, Ang had finished The Hulk. The director recalled, “Two years later, I asked James, ‘What happened with Brokeback Mountain? Did it get made yet?’ He said, ‘We haven’t been able to make that movie.’ Lucky for me. I said, ‘You know, it’s stuck with me over the years. I can’t get it out of my mind.’” Ang continued, “James got the rights, and I started thinking about making the movie right away. Before I knew I could physically do it, I jumped on. I just knew, in the bottom of my heart, if I let it go, I would regret it for the rest of my life.”

With Ang Lee behind the camera, a cast for Brokeback Mountain quickly fell into place. Jake Gyllenhaal had met Gus Van Sant about taking on the role of Jack when he was only 16. The actor recalled, “I was immediately drawn to Brokeback Mountain because love stories haven’t been told this way in a long time. Movies I’ve seen in recent years have avoided the struggles and the trials that it takes to actually be in love and keep that going. When I heard that Ang Lee was going to make it, I thought, ‘I have to do this movie.’” Heath Ledger committed to the project without meeting or even speaking to the director. “I trusted that story in Ang’s hands. I loved the script because it was mature and strong, and such a pure and beautiful love story. I hadn’t done a proper love story, and I find there’s not a lot of mystery left in stories between guys and girls. It’s all been done or seen before.”

Diana Ossana elaborated on the writing process. “Adapting Annie’s story was extremely easy and yet extremely difficult. It was easy in the sense that we had the blueprint right there with her writing – of the story itself, of the characters, of the specific way they speak, of the specific place they were from, and the landscape that formed them. The difficult part was to stay true to all that while turning this into a feature-length film. First we scripted the entire short story, and then we imagined and proceeded to flesh out the female characters so they would have depth and a presence on-screen. We also continued to build upon the stories of Ennis and Jack, many times creating an entire scene based upon a single sentence in the story.” On the strength of the screenplay, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway, Linda Cardellini and Anna Faris all joined the cast in supporting roles.

Shooting commenced May 2004 in Alberta, Canada on a budget of $12 million, Ang’s least expensive since making Eat Drink Man Woman in Taiwan. Impressed with his work for Alejandro González Iñárritu, Ang hired cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. Production designer Judy Becker was also hired. She recalled, “Ang and I, and Rodrigo, talked about how the towns would be a strong contrast to the mountains – colorless and cluttered. We didn’t have the resources to build a huge amount of the sets. The biggest challenge was finding the right locations.” She added, “I looked at imagery of small towns. One thing that struck me, which Ang and I discussed early on, was that although the movie takes place mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, the towns still looked like they could be in earlier decades. We went to Wyoming and Texas to do some research and, even now, so much detail and architecture is left over from pre-World War II. Change happened very, very slowly in small towns in the West.”

Following screenings at the Venice, Telluride and Toronto film festivals, talk in Hollywood was whether paying audiences would have any desire to see a movie about the love between two men. Diana Ossana recalled, “As human beings we tend to put labels on everything as a way to sort of categorize and feel safe about something. ‘That script is about gay cowboys, well, I’m not going to give that thing the time of day. I’m not going to waste my time on it.’ It’s a way to reduce it to something very simple, when it’s something that isn’t simple at all. At one point I remember somebody saying to me, ‘You know, Diana, this movie would get made a heck of a lot faster if it were about a man and a woman.’ That wouldn’t make any sense. You wouldn’t make that movie.”

Opening December 2005 in the U.S., critics greeted Brokeback Mountain with near universal acclaim. Anthony Lane, the New Yorker: “This slow and stoic movie, hailed as a gay Western, feels neither gay nor especially Western: it is a study of love under siege.” David Ansen, Newsweek: “There’s neither coyness nor self-importance in Brokeback Mountain – just close, compassionate observation, deeply committed performances, a bone-deep feeling for hardscrabble Western lives. Few films have captured so acutely the desolation of frustrated, repressed passion.” Marjorie Baumgarten, the Austin Chronicle: “It’s possible to point to some weak spots in Brokeback – its seeming multiple endings, the lack of clarity about certain images, some digressions – but there is no movie this year that has moved my heart more than Brokeback Mountain.”

Not every community in the world was ready to embrace Brokeback Mountain. The Chinese government refused to add it to a list of foreign films deemed suitable to be shown in mainland theaters. Despite the fact that the city’s two major newspapers carried ads, the late owner of the NBA’s Utah Jazz franchise – Larry Miller – withdrew Brokeback Mountain from exhibition in the Salt Lake City suburb where he owned an entertainment complex. Many conservative Christian groups in the U.S. – anticipating noisy protests would only help promote the film, as they had in 1988 with The Last Temptation of Christ – stayed quiet, predicting that rural audiences would likely reject the subject matter anyway. Strongly favorable word of mouth and eight Academy Award nominations instead had the opposite effect. Brokeback Mountain was propelled to box office receipts of $83 million in the U.S. and $95 million overseas.

The month of its release, Annie Proulx was asked whether straight men would watch Brokeback Mountain. The author replied, “They are watching this movie. Of course, why wouldn’t they watch it? Straight men fall in love. Not necessarily with each other or with a gay man. My son-in-law, who prides himself on being a Bud-drinking, NRA-member redneck, liked the movie so much, he went to it twice. Straight men are seeing it, and they’re not having any problem with it. The only people who would have problems with it are people who are very insecure about themselves and their own sexuality and who would be putting up a defense, and that’s usually young men who haven’t figured things out yet. Jack and Ennis would probably have trouble with this movie.” She added, “It is a love story. It has been called both universal and specific, and I think that’s true. It’s an old, old story. We’ve heard this story a million times; we just haven’t heard it quite with this cast.”

Should I Care?
Ang Lee, Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana and composer Gustavo Santaolalla all won Oscars, while – in yet another awards show “moment” – the racial melodrama Crash was voted Best Picture, but one of the more lasting impressions made by Brokeback Mountain is that instead of angling for awards or trying to send a message, the film reveals genuine empathy for its characters and their experiences, portraying both realistically without Hollywood glamour or spin. It’s not a film that casts judgments its characters, in spite how the politics of the time may or may not have judged the movie, developing a timeless quality by depicting its setting with honesty, and its emotional range with complexity. In the process, it cuts deep through just about every demographic to leave its mark as a great love story.

With Annie Proulx’s short story running 11 pages, Brokeback Mountain doesn’t cover a whole lot of ground, but the power of what’s on film is hard to ignore. The opening scenes convey the beauty and solitude of the country as memorably as any of Larry McMurtry’s movie adaptations, particularly Hud. Material is rarely matched so perfectly to the sensibility and skills of a particular director as this story is for Ang Lee. The combination of writing and directing obviously attracted one of the finest casts assembled in recent memory. Each time I watch the movie, I come away thinking another actor gave the best performance: Michelle Williams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Linda Cardellini, Anne Hathaway. There’s nothing more to say about Heath Ledger except that his work as Ennis Del Mar passes into legend.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Ang Lee’s Brokeback Explores ‘Last Frontier’” By Anne Thompson. The Hollywood Reporter, 11 November 2005

“Annie Proulx discusses the origins of Brokeback Mountain” By Sandy Cohen. Associated Press, 18 December 2005

“New Cultural Approach for Conservative Christians; Reviews, Not Protests” By John Leland. The New York Times, 26 December 2005

“Annie Proulx Interview” By Deepanjana Pal. Time Out Dubai, 23 March 2009

Brokeback Mountain – Production Notes. Focus Features

Brokeback Mountain – 2-Disc Collector’s Edition. Universal Studios Home Video (2006)

Synopsis
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Harvard College graduating class of the year 1870 – which includes James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) – assembles in a massive auditorium to hear a speech by their class orator, Billy Irvine (John Hurt). Irvine rejects the high-minded ideals mapped out by the reverend doctor of the university (Joseph Cotten), and advises his classmates to merely rise no further than each of them is capable. Twenty years later, Averill arrives by train in Casper, Wyoming after transporting an immigrant woman to St. Louis to be hanged. Averill is now sheriff of Johnson County, mountainous and pristine territory in which more settlers – mostly Polish, German or Ukrainian immigrants – are pouring into every day.

Averill can’t help but notice Casper is teeming with mercenaries. By the time he drops by a saloon operated by his friend John Bridges (Jeff Bridges) in the town of Sweetwater, Averill has learned that the local cattle association, led by the unscrupulous Frank Canton (Sam Waterston) has drawn up the names of 125 settlers suspected of cattle rustling or troublemaking and put them on a death list. The most efficient of the assassins is Nathan Champion (Christopher Walken), who roams Johnson County hunting down and executing immigrants who’ve stolen livestock. Averill returns to his pastoral home and to his girlfriend Ella Watson (Isabelle Hupert), who manages a bordello and accepts stolen cattle as payment.

After adjourning to the town reception hall – Heaven’s Gate, which hosts music and roller skating – Averill asks Ella to leave the county, not wanting to tell her that her name is on the death list. Champion – who in addition to being one of Ella’s customers is in love with her – offers to take her away under the protection of his men (Geoffrey Lewis and Mickey Rourke). She rejects both offers and chooses to stay. Three of the killers make their way to Ella’s bordello and rape her. Averill arrives in time to dispatch the men with his pistols, while Champion rides to Canton’s camp and kills the mercenary who planned the raid. After debating the matter, the town chooses to stand their ground and repel the invasion.

Production history
In 1971, a filmmaker no one in Hollywood had heard of – putting his pictorial eye and camera skills to use in New York directing commercials for Kodak, Pepsi and United Airlines – wrote a screenplay titled The Johnson County War. The screenwriter was Michael Cimino and his script was loosely based on a range war that took place in 1892 between cattle ranchers and settlers, many of them immigrants, who flowed into Johnson County, Wyoming after passage of the Homestead Act. Producer David Foster set the project up at Fox, only to have production head Jere Henshaw put it into turnaround in 1972. Henshaw later told American Film, “It looked to us like a pretty downbeat story at a pretty heavy cost.”

An idiosyncratic caper Cimino wrote titled Thunderbolt and Lightfoot fared much better, with Clint Eastwood enjoying the script enough to gamble on the first time director. Co-starring Jeff Bridges, the picture was very favorably reviewed and a modest box office hit in the summer of 1974. Four years later, Cimino was riding a tidal wave of industry buzz for his second film, an ode to brotherhood and sacrifice set against the Vietnam War titled The Deer Hunter. Among those in Hollywood who were high on the movie was David Field, a production executive for United Artists. “We saw an advanced print of Deer Hunter – I don’t know how many weeks before it was released – and we were blown away.”

Cimino’s agent submitted a package for his client’s next film – The Johnson County War – to United Artists. UA’s head of production Danton Rissner read the script in August 1978 and was cool to it. His story department concluded: “If it were not for Cimino, I would pass.” What distinguished the script from the typical western was its assertion that the U.S. government had sanctioned the range war in what amounted to ethnic genocide. Rissner remained dubious that theater exhibitors would welcome such liberal revisionism of a fading genre. But by September, UA agreed to a pay-or-play package of $1.7 million for The Johnson County War: $250,000 for Cimino’s script, $500,000 for Cimino’s directing services, $100,000 for Cimino’s producing partner Joann Carelli and $850,000 for Kris Kristofferson to star, all to be paid whether the movie was made or not.

Cimino continued to tune his script. He inserted a prologue introducing the characters of Averill and Billy Irvine at Harvard twenty years before the events in Wyoming, and added a brief epilogue, taking place 10 years after the range war. Averill is moored in a yacht off the coast of Rhode Island, still haunted by the events of the film. The script concluded with the quote, “What one loves about life are the things that fade.” Cimino had also arrived on a new title, and in April 1979, one week after The Deer Hunter won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, principal photography began on Heaven’s Gate. Glacier National Park at Kalispell, Montana had been selected as a filming location and a release date of December 1979 set. The accelerated schedule dictated a budget of $11.5 million, $15 million at most.

Recalling Cimino’s exacting work methods, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond stated, “It was very unusual the way he worked. He would actually paint by selecting extras and put them in the right place in a set. It was like a painter would paint them. He painted by picking up people and put them into the right place. Then, once we started to shoot, you know, sometimes we would go for three takes, sometimes you would go for ten takes. And many, many times you had to go for forty takes.” In the first six days of shooting, Cimino had fallen five days behind schedule, with roughly 90 seconds of usable footage in the can. After twelve days, Heaven’s Gate was ten days behind schedule.

In his book Final Cut, former United Artists head of worldwide production Steven Bach recounted the expenses that accumulated: “It was true, as later press reports informed, that Michael Cimino was building sets and rebuilding them, hiring 100 extras, then 200, then 500, adding horses and wagons and hats, shoes, gloves, dresses, top hats, bridles, boots, roller skates, babushkas, aprons, dusters, buckboards, gun belts, rifles, bullets, cows, calves, bulls, trees, thousands of tons of dirt, hundreds of miles of exposed film, and all this mattered economically. But what mattered most was that what he was adding was takes and retakes and retakes of the retakes. And retakes of those. Michael Cimino was taking – and retaking – time. Getting it right.”

To get it right, Cimino was shooting many, many, many takes of shots and printing nearly every one, burning through $200,000 a day and $1 million per week. Actor Brad Dourif recalled, “I’m not used to seeing 57 takes. I’m really not. I’m not used to doing a minimum of 32 takes. He wanted to try a bunch of different ways. It was like workshopping on film, you know, we did the happy version, we did the crying version, we did the furious version. I mean, each scene was taken to these degrees, beyond which you weren’t going for the ultimate take, you were going for a lot of choices.” At its current rate, Heaven’s Gate was on track to exceed its budget by 500% and end up costing United Artists a then stellar sum of $35 million.

United Artists got its first peek at Heaven’s Gate on June 6, 1979 when Bach and David Field made the trip to Kalispell to view about thirty minutes of the film. Bach recalled, “The footage was ravishing. There was nothing that anybody on Earth could say to criticize the footage, so we knew it wasn’t the case of a production that was falling apart. We never thought it was a case of Michael sitting in his trailer eating chocolates and watching television when he should have been out on the set. That was never the issue. The issue was we didn’t agree that you could take this much time to achieve perfection. And if you continue to take this much time to achieve perfection, you’re going to break our bank and there’s not going to be any company to release the picture.”

Jeff Bridges recalls, “From somebody on the outside it would look like it was almost too much, but it never appeared that way to me. It was like, this guy really cares.” But with John Hurt due to start work on The Elephant Man in October and the mountain roads in Montana closing for winter, Cimino heeded United Artists’ pleas to pick up the pace. UA pushed the release of the film back a year, settling on Christmas 1980. The studio planned exclusive reserved seating 70mm print engagements in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto for November 1980. Heaven’s Gate would then expand to additional cities in December before a general release in February 1981 to benefit from the many Academy Award nominations the film industry would bestow on the picture.

On June 26, 1980, after eight months of editing, Cimino was ready to show United Artists the film. Studio executives assembled in Los Angeles for a private screening. Bach recalls, “I thought Michael looked exhausted, truly, truly depleted. I remember asking, ‘How close are we to a final cut?’ And he said, ‘It’s a little long. I can lose maybe fifteen minutes.’ And we sat down and we watched the movie. And the movie that we saw was 5 hours and 25 minutes long. The battle sequence alone was as long as most feature motion pictures. I was angry, I was angry, I was angry. The company had been put through turmoil … And the internal hope that had kept us all going for those two or three years at this process now – which was that it was going to be a masterpiece, and that would justify everything that we had gone through – was suddenly gone.”

By mid-October, Cimino had Heaven’s Gate down to 3 hours and 39 minutes. No one at United Artists bothered to see his cut until its public unveiling in New York one month later. Jeff Bridges recalls “I can remember going to the first screening, the premiere in New York, and we were all very excited and Mike was quite anxious because I don’t know if he even saw the film before it was shown, you know, it was wet right out of the soup. He had just put it together and just barely made the deadline to get it all together. And the movie comes on. I remember my first impression of seeing it was, you know, kind of the splendor of it was wonderful, but the rhythm of it was so unusual and so kind of slow and not what you expected to see that the audience certainly was frustrated. And you hear that [smattering of applause] terrible applause at the end. Ugh, it was terrible.”

The next morning, Cimino, Joann Carelli and Bridges were on their way to Toronto for the next screening when they picked up a copy of the New York Times. The opening paragraph of Vincent Canby’s review read: “Heaven’s Gate … fails so completely you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the Devil has just come around to collect.” Brad Dourif recalls, “Well I read Vincent Canby’s – I don’t read reviews, that’s the first thing – I read Vincent Canby’s because it actually had the line in it, ‘like being given a four-hour tour of your own living room’ and I just wanted to see how bad a review could be and it was really scathing. Angry review. I mean, basically, everything that people hated about the direction of film was piled onto Michael.”

Interviewed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1982, film critic Pauline Kael defended the stoning Heaven’s Gate took in the mainstream media. “I did think Canby’s review was rather brutal. On the other hand, the fact is the picture does not have one good scene, or one good character, and it goes on for several hours. I think it’s very interesting visually, but there is nothing that can carry it with an audience. If the company had thought that the critics were wrong, they would have put in millions in advertising and they might have recouped on the picture. A lot of terrible movies get by if the companies believe in them … But they were dismayed because they could see the justice of what the reviewers were saying, that there was nothing there.”

Steven Bach disagreed. “I think the critics were reviewing the production history. They were rewriting their reviews for The Deer Hunter, which they thought they had over praised. They were getting back at what they perceived as hostile treatment from the director. I think they were slapping United Artists for having allowed this to happen. But I never felt that there was a real serious attempt to see what is this picture trying to do and does it succeed on its own terms. It didn’t succeed on the terms they wanted to lay on the picture and that was what they were writing about, was their terms for the picture, not the picture’s terms.” After playing for a week in New York, Cimino took out ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter asking UA to withdraw the film from release so he could rework his 219-minute cut.

A 149-minute version of Heaven’s Gate opened in 810 theaters nationwide in April 1981. But audiences ignored it completely, buying $3.4 million in tickets in the U.S. Tom Brokaw introduced a segment on Heaven’s Gate for the NBC Nightly News by proclaiming “a $40 million film from an Oscar winning director may be the biggest bomb in Hollywood history.” The loss to United Artists was tabulated at $44 million. Within a month, Transamerica decided it was done with the movie business and sold UA to rival studio MGM. Michael Cimino and Kris Kristofferson were at the Cannes Film Festival in May when the news broke. UA’s new president Norbert Auerbach maintained that while Heaven’s Gate had not been directly responsible for the collapse of the prestigious 62-year-old studio, it hadn’t saved it either.

Naturally, the first audiences to appreciate Heaven’s Gate were French. In December 1982, celebrated film magazine Cahiers du Cinema sponsored a screening of Cimino’s 219-minute cut in Paris. Word reached Los Angeles, where Jerry Harvey and Fred Grossbud of pay cable’s Z Channel persuaded MGM/UA to let them air the long version of Heaven’s Gate starting on Christmas Eve. It marked the first time a wide audience had been permitted to see the film at its original length. In the Los Angeles Times – whose film critic Kevin Thomas had been one of the few to submit a rave review of Heaven’s Gate while it was in theaters – Charles Champlin wrote, “Not a damn thing was gained economically by forcing Cimino to eviscerate his work, but audiences were denied the chance to see fully whatever it was that Cimino had in mind.”

In August 1983, England’s National Film Theatre booked the long version of Heaven’s Gate for six performances, with Cimino on hand to introduce the film. Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian: “The full version, I can assure you, is quite an experience – an extraordinary attempt to make a major American movie at a time when only the minors held sway.” The long version was released theatrically at the Plaza 2 theater in London, but its box office was so negligible that MGM/UA nixed plans to re-release the uncut Heaven’s Gate elsewhere. Michael Cimino – who has not directed since 1996 and refuses requests to discuss his infamous magnum opus – had this to say in 1990: “I would respond to Heaven’s Gate the same way Jack Kennedy responded to the Bay of Pigs. I’d take full responsibility and all other questions are answered by the film itself.”

Opinion
Some academics still accuse Heaven’s Gate of vaporizing the Golden Age of the director and putting the controls of Hollywood back in the hands of the studio, a process that was under way long before Michael Cimino ever got to Montana. What ultimately matters here is what’s on screen and what isn’t. On that basis, it’s time to call Heaven’s Gate what it is: the last great American film of the 1970s. It has nothing to live up anymore – making a fresh eyed and open minded reappraisal a win-win situation – but the movie is really that good. For all its excesses, what Cimino does is capture a lyrical beauty virtually missing in filmmaking since the days of David Lean. Heaven’s Gate is all at once one of pictorial brilliance, almost unparalleled scope, terrific performances and haunting grandeur.

Micahel Cimino’s screenplay not only visualizes the Old West in a way I imagine it really was – crowded and sparse, violent and peaceful, ugly and beautiful – but features dialogue of surprising depth and pathos. The cast featured no stars, but Kristofferson, Walken, Huppert, Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, Brad Dourif, Sam Waterston, Mickey Rourke, Richard Masur all do outstanding work. Few films recreate a bygone era with the detail of this one, assisted by majestic cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond and a heartbreakingly beautiful musical score by David Mansfield. Unlike so many cinematic turkeys of the last 30 years that truly qualify for “worst ever” status, for all the money spent on Heaven’s Gate, there’s never any question of where those bucks ended up.

@ Joe Valdez

Sources
Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate by Steven Bach (1985)
Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate (2004), directed by Michael Epstein

Synopsis
Jack (Jeff Bridges) and his Indian buddy Cecil (Sam Waterston) pass the time in Montana shooting cattle and sawing them up on the spot with a chainsaw. Rancher John Brown (Clifton James) and his wife (Elizabeth Ashley) – who sold a chain of beauty parlors to buy the “B-Bar Lazy” – decide to break the monotony of western living by declaring “war” on the penny ante cattle rustlers.

Trying to think big, Jack and Cecil kidnap Brown’s blue ribbon seed bull from a livestock show. The Browns pay off and are directed to a hotel room, where the boys have stashed the 2,600-pound steer. Brown’s droopy ranch hands Curt (Harry Dean Stanton) and Burt (Richard Bright) are sent to find the rustlers, but after meeting Jack and Cecil at a saloon, decide to name them as the thieves so they can go back to goofing off.

Jack proposes they work together, masterminding a plan to steal a truck full of Brown’s cattle. Stock detective Henry Beige (Slim Pickens) has been hired by Brown to find the rustlers, but can barely walk and doesn’t appear interested in doing much detecting. Curt becomes infatuated with Beige’s foxy niece (Charlene Dallas), while Jack amuses himself with the wild daughter (Patti D’Arbanville) of a man with a Lincoln Continental Mark IV.

Production history 
After three novels – The Sporting Club, The Bushwacked Piano and 92 in the Shade – 34-year-old Thomas McGuane had been inaugurated by critics as a new William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway. Noted for his mastery of language, acidic commentary on American culture, and blundering anti-heroes, the author was soon offered work in motion pictures.

McGuane had sold the film rights to The Sporting Club and bought a ranch in Paradise Valley, Montana. Located at the northern gate of Yellowstone National Park, the valley’s natural beauty and isolation attracted fellow hard living mavericks Sam Peckinpah and Peter Fonda. McGuane used the country as the setting for a screenplay he’d written in two weeks called Rancho Deluxe.

Frank Perry was hired to direct. Extremely literate, Perry had scored a box office hit with Diary of a Mad Housewife in 1970, then adapted Joan Didion’s nihilistic novel Play It As It Lays in 1972. Perry had refused to soften Didion’s bleak Hollywood tale for the masses, and on Rancho Deluxe, prohibited the actors from deviating from McGuane’s text. The film was ignored by audiences and critics at the time, but has surfaced as a cult classic today.

Opinion 
Rancho Deluxe never aspires to be a great drama, western, or satire of either. Somehow, it ends up being all of the above. McGuane seems to have written this script purely out of a desire “just to keep from fallin’ asleep” – Jack’s definition for capitalism – but there’s a difference between a movie that flounders and one that drifts. This one drifts magnanimously. If the object of a movie was to be as low key and goofy as possible, Rancho Deluxe would be a masterpiece.

Jeff Bridges gives an early variation on the societal goober he’d play throughout his career, but Sam Waterston (it’s strange to see this dude not wearing a tie) is sublime, playing a Caucasian looking Indian who could either be the smartest character in the film, or the dumbest. Slim Pickens and Elizabeth Ashley are also a hoot in less screen time, while Harry Dean Stanton and Richard Bright are so affable, they could have been featured in their own spin-off movie.

The film features gorgeous picture postcard lighting by William Fraker and a honkytonk score by Jimmy Buffet (McGuane’s brother-in-law, pre-Parrothood). I can’t argue that it all seems a bit pointless, but the film’s look and sound are so comfortable, Perry gives the audience space to arrive at a “point” at their own leisure. If you’re a fan of ’70s cinema, or of Bottle Rocket, Rancho Deluxe is absolutely worth checking out.

Mark Zimmer at digitally Obsessed says, “While the film seems to have been set up as a sex comedy, even the prurient will find little interesting here, especially since the gorgeous leads, Ashley and Dallas, keep all their clothes on throughout. As Brother Jeff Ulmer might say, we have a serious lack of fan service.”

“There’s nothing so hapless as a movie made in the wrong style, especially when the director doggedly insists on that style to the bitter end,” said Roger Ebert in his January 1, 1975 review in the Chicago Sun-Times. He gave it 1 and 1/2 stars.

CPe at Time Out London says, “In keeping with the audience it is aimed at, the film is self-consciously cynical and insolent, and at the same time fundamentally romantic and seeking to be liked. The combination works surprisingly well, thanks to good ensemble acting, even if Thomas McGuane’s script sometimes veers towards sentiment and smart-ass observations.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
In 1949, John Grady Cole (Matt Damon) learns that the family spread in San Angelo has fallen into the hands of his estranged mother. She intends to sell the land to an oil company. “It’s a sorry piece of business, but son, not everybody thinks that life on a cattle ranch in West Texas is the second best thing to dyin and goin to heaven,” her sympathetic lawyer (Sam Shepard) tells him.

John sells his friend Lacey Rawlins (Henry Thomas) on the idea of seeking adventure in Mexico. Lighting off on their horses, the young men inherit a tagalong named Blevins (Lucas Black) who’s run away with a horse and a pistol worth too much for him to handle. They cross the Rio Grande, and Blevins’ horse escapes in a storm. The kid steals it back, while John and Lacey are hired on at the ranch of horse breeder Hector de la Rocha (Ruben Blades).

John gains el jefe’s trust with his horse breeding acumen, but trouble arises when he falls for the boss’ headstrong daughter Alejandra (Penélope Cruz). Her aunt (Miriam Colon) warns John to keep away from her. Luisa sleeps with him anyway, and John is dragged off with his buddy Lacey by a police captain (Julio Oscar Mechoso). In jail, they’re reunited with Blevins. Since they last saw him, the kid has shot and killed three men.

Production history 
Cormac McCarthy’s 1992 novel All The Pretty Horses was the first work in the author’s Border Trilogy, which later included The Crossing and Cities On The Plain. MGM/UA head John Calley purchased the screen rights for Mike Nichols. Ted Tally adapted a screenplay, but in typical fashion for Nichols, he decided he didn’t want to direct it. Calley suggested Billy Bob Thornton for the job, and on the set of Primary Colors, Nichols gave the script to the actor.

Thornton wasn’t familiar with the book, but loved westerns. He brought in Tom Epperson to rewrite the script and met with Leonardo DiCaprio about starring. But Thornton was nervous about the cost; he’d shot his directorial debut Sling Blade for $1 million and was concerned that a production budgeted at 50 times that would be taken away from him. Columbia – who was now producing – wanted an epic prestige film for the holidays. They told Thornton not to worry about cost.

With Matt Damon in the lead, shooting wrapped in June 1999. Thornton edited the length down to what he felt was a presentable length and screened it for Calley and Nichols. The movie ran 220 minutes long. Dennis Rice called it “the most self-indulgent director’s cut I’ve ever seen.” Test screened by Columbia at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, the audience scores were disastrous. But Thornton refused to alter it, and the film’s Christmas 1999 release came and went.

Miramax Films held options on Thornton’s next three films as director and Harvey Weinstein had brokered an equity stake in All The Pretty Horses. Sensing they had a disaster on their hands, Columbia traded domestic distribution with Miramax, in exchange for the international rights. Thornton was now Weinstein’s problem. The studio chairman forced the director to cut the picture from 220 minutes down to “a Cliff Notes version” of 115 minutes.

Finally released on Christmas Day 2000 on 1,400 screens, All The Pretty Horses received respectable critical notices, but bombed with audiences, grossing only $15 million in the U.S. When approached by Weinstein with the opportunity to release a director’s cut for the DVD, Thornton turned him down, reportedly over not being allowed to restore the original musical score by Daniel Lanois. Thornton hasn’t directed a movie since.

Opinion 
Whatever vision Thornton had about unrequited love on a horse ranch in postwar Mexico lies in an editing bay somewhere. The 115-minute version has a great performance by Matt Damon – who broods and mutters like a Texan – but the rest of the cast is reduced to superficial cameos. All The Pretty Horses makes as much sense as an elegant novel that’s had 105 pages ripped out. What’s left is a sad, orphaned film in need of restoration. Miramax: Free Billy Bob!

“All The Pretty Horses isn’t bad, per se; it’s just a film you have to be in the right mood to see. Deliberately slowly paced, it’s not for the faint-hearted. Or the sleepy. Or those unimpressed by repetitious slow motion cuts and meandering storytelling,” writes Rose “Bams” Cooper at 3BlackChicks Review.

Michael W. Phillips Jr. at goatdog’s movies says, “The book was like a daydream of a hazy, distant past. Something about trying to recreate that dreaminess on film seems like an exercise in futility. Thornton tries, fails some of the time, and succeeds often enough to make the film worth watching.” He gives it 3 out of 5 goats.

“It’s apparent early on that this is as much an ode to simple life on the unspoiled range as it is a film with a story to tell. And this is a good thing, as the storyline is easily the film’s weakest element,” writes Brian Webster at Apollo Movie Guide.

© Joe Valdez

17-year-old Lonnie Bannon (Brandon de Wilde) hitches a ride across the Texas plains. Arriving in town, he sets out to retrieve his Uncle Hud. There’s no sign of him, just the damage Hud inflicted the night before; broken glass outside a bar, his big Cadillac parked in front of a strange house, and a woman’s shoe in the yard. Lonnie rousts Hud (Paul Newman) with news of trouble at the ranch.

Hud’s cattle rancher father Homer (Melvyn Douglas) is worried by the unexplained death of one of their cows. He wants to call the state vet. Hud could care less, he just wants to get back into town to cavort. The vet suspects an outbreak of foot and mouth disease. Hud urges his old man to sell their herd before the results come back, but the upright rancher is pained his wayward son would even consider that.

When his advances are spurned by the barbed housekeeper (Patricia Neal), Hud is so desperate for company he takes Lonnie into town. Uncle and nephew bond by participating in a saloon brawl. The impressionable youth is drawn to Hud’s dangerous charm, but Homer cautions his grandson, “You’re just going to have to make up your own mind one day about what’s right and what’s wrong.”

Paul Newman and director Martin Ritt had already worked together on three pictures when they struck a partnership to produce films together. Newman felt that his screen performances in the Tennessee Williams plays Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth had been softened by the censors, and was eager to appear in something even more provocative.

Newman and Ritt chose to adapt Horseman, Pass By, the 1961 debut novel by Larry McMurtry. It was a thematically rich, sexually explicit variation on Catcher In The Rye told through the eyes of a teenager on a cattle ranch in Texas. Hud was the antagonist, but Newman and Ritt were attracted to the idea of building the film around his morally unredeemable character.

Husband and wife screenwriters Irving Ravetch & Harriet Frank Jr. adapted the script. They made a number of changes – relocating the story from North Texas to the Panhandle – but McMurtry would later comment, “The screenwriters erred badly in following my novel too closely.”

Right from the credits – which unveil Texas in the splendor of a black and white, widescreen frame, accompanied by Spanish guitar playing a folk melody – Hud is pitch perfect. Paul Newman gives one of the iconic performances of his career, playing a derelict bastard right up there with Clint Eastwood in Play Misty For Me or Steve McQueen in Bullitt.

Larry McMurtry’s characters possess an inner depth and complexity that contrasts beautifully with their “aw shucks” appearance, and the scripted dialogue between them is so good, honest and frequently witty. I’m typically bananas for any black and white movie shot in anamorphic widescreen, but James Wong Howe’s lighting is some of the most evocative of the period. I’d highly recommend this just for the cinematography alone.

Hud was nominated for seven Academy Awards. Well deserved winners were Patricia Neal for Best Actress, Melvyn Douglas for Best Supporting Actor, and James Wong Howe for Best Cinematography, Black and White. Elmer Bernstein composed the sparse but outstanding musical score. The film was shot partly in the town of Claude, 20 miles east of Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle.

Hud made the cut of The Greatest Films at the award-winning Filmsite.org.

DVD Beaver gives Hud mad props and supplies technical information for all you fans of bitrate.

Guy Movie of the Week explores the parallels between George W. Bush and Hud Bannon.

Cattle rancher “Bick” Benedict (Rock Hudson) arrives in Maryland to buy a prized stallion. He becomes enamored with the horse breeder’s strong-willed daughter Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor), who lays eyes on Bick and stays up all night studying her Texas history. She later tells him, “We really stole Texas, didn’t we? I mean, away from Mexico.” Despite wounding Bick’s state pride, the couple elopes, and Bick brings her back to his 595,000-acre Reata Ranch in the desolate Texas Panhandle.

Leslie goes out of her way to talk to the Mexican ranch hands and servants, despite Bick’s warning, “Here, we don’t make a fuss over those people. You’re a Texan now.” His tough sister Luz (Mercedes McCambridge) runs the ranch, and is immediately threatened by Leslie’s presence. Leslie is coveted by a cocky ranch hand named Jett Rink (James Dean), who also desires the wealth and power of his employer.

Leslie oversteps her boundaries by sending the family doctor to the Mexican settlement to treat a sick child, and refuses to mind her place in a political conversation the men are having. Leslie and Bick have three children, but their relationship becomes strained, and she decides to take them back to Maryland. Meanwhile, Jett comes into possession of land, but refuses to sell out to Bick. The upstart begins pumping for oil.

Edna Ferber based much of her epic 1952 novel on Robert Kleberg’s massive King Ranch in West Texas. She had been a guest there, and when her book was published, Kleberg considered it a betrayal. He hated Giant so much there was even threat of a lawsuit. For this reason, and the fact that a film version would be expensive, none of the studios went near it.

Director George Stevens and Edna Ferber and a former Paramount executive named Henry Ginsberg formed a partnership, teaming with Warner Brothers to make the picture. None of them took a salary, and Stevens worked on the $5.4 million film for four years without pay.

Audrey Hepburn was offered the lead, but turned it down. Grace Kelly was considered, but she was under contract to MGM. 23-year-old Elizabeth Taylor called Stevens, and though seven months pregnant, she assured him she would be ready to work in three months. Though they lacked the marquee value of William Holden and Robert Mitchum, Stevens took a gamble on the younger, lesser known Rock Hudson (29) and James Dean (23) to play opposite Taylor. It became Dean’s final film role.

The legendary reputation Giant has attained – particularly in Texas – matches its magnificence. This is a great film on so many levels. Instead of just being an entertainment, the screenplay adaptation by Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat was one of the first to address racism. Segregation between Anglo and Mexican is still an institution in many parts of Texas, and this movie deals with that in a subtle, but substantial way.

Along with Mercedes McCambridge’s daring character, Elizabeth Taylor – who received top billing – plays an intelligent, compassionate, yet resolute woman who refuses to be a subordinate to men. This was the mid-1950s, and portrayals of independent women were extremely rare to come by in movies. But instead of feeling like this was part of a political agenda, it’s just one vivid contrast in a film full of them.

The novel opened in Texas, but the movie begins in lush, green Maryland. We only see the flat, sun scorched Texas when Leslie does, and the way Stevens puts that on screen is potent. Luz takes one look at the wilting Leslie and states, “Your blood’s too thin. That’s the trouble with a lot of Easterners.” This story is brimming with strong drama. East versus West. Master versus servant. Husband versus wife.

There are no heroes or villains here. Instead, the characters all have fallacies. Along with that, George Stevens used an understated style. The camera angles and editing don’t call attention to themselves, but Stevens demonstrates total command of image and its emotional capability. There’s no dialogue for the first four minutes, yet the story absorbed me from the start, and many sequences of the 201-minute film resonated with me emotionally.

Great epics have the ability to capture both sweeping panoramas and the intimate interactions between human beings with equal beauty. Lawrence of Arabia does this, so does The Godfather Part II. Giant belongs in that elite class. Dimitri Tiomkin composed the tremendous musical score, and received one of the film’s ten Academy Award nominations.

Giant is a must-see for film lovers. It’s a close second for my favorite film either about the Lone Star State, or shot there. Cast and crew spent two months on the plains outside Marfa, filming around a Gothic house designed by art director Boris Leven. Only the front and sides were constructed, and all the interiors were filmed on soundstages in L.A. Little if anything of the location remains today.

In Cibolo County, Texas, hunters discover the body of an illegal named Melquiades Estrada (Juan Cedillo). Authorities – including a brusque sheriff played by Dwight Yoakam – act like they’re doing a favor for ranch foreman Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones) by notifying him, not realizing that besides employing Melquiades, Pete was also the immigrant’s friend.

We’re then introduced to border patrol agent Mike Norton (Barry Pepper) who’s moved to West Texas from Cincinnati. Mike gets carried away chasing down a pair of illegals and breaks the nose of a young woman (Vanessa Bauche), earning a polite reprimand from his superior.

Mike offers to buy his bored wife (January Jones) a Nintendo to keep her entertained during the day in their trailer. She eventually befriends a waitress at the local diner (Melissa Leo), who moonlights as a prostitute frequented by both Pete and the sheriff.

While the sheriff shows no inclination to investigate Melquaides’ death and has him hastily buried, Pete learns the bullet pulled from the body matches the AR-30 round used by the Border Patrol. Mike has admitted to his superiors that he fired the shot, but in self-defense. He’s traumatized by this, but the sheriff does not intend to press charges.

Pete has other ideas. He abducts Mike at gunpoint and takes him to the cemetery, where he orders him to dig up Melquaides’ body. Fulfilling a promise he once made, Pete intends to take Melquaides back to his wife and family, in a place in Mexico no one seems to have heard of called Jimenez. Mike and a mule come along for the journey, with the authorities in pursuit.

Directed by Tommy Lee Jones and written by Guillermo Arriaga, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada combines elements of the Old West and New West oaters Jones is well known for, as well as magical realism, foreign film (Jones speaks Spanish throughout) and finally, the mesmerizing structure of 21 Grams and Babel, which Arriaga authored, skipping backwards and forwards in time.

Jones – who made his theatrical debut as director and shot extensively in Big Bend National Park – isn’t interested in making a crowd pleaser or a revenge B-movie, which may account for why it didn’t sell a lot of tickets. Instead of going that route, Jones distributed copies of Albert Camus’ The Stranger to his cast, and made an A-film exploring alienation and redemption on both sides of the border.

There are frontier non-sequiturs here that reminded me of Sam Peckinpah at his best. These include encounters with the illegal whose nose was broken and who turns out to be a medicine woman with little in the way of bedside manner, a group of vaqueros watching an American soap opera, and a blind Gringo (Levon Helm) who feeds the Jones and Pepper and then asks them to kill him.

Everyone in the cast – even January Jones, the American Wedding thespian of no relation to the director – do fine work, and I admired the magical realism inserted toward the end of the film. Ignored at the Oscars, Tommy Lee Jones and Guillermo Arriaga were awarded Best Actor and Best Screenplay at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. Chris Menges, who lit The Killing Fields and The Mission provided the striking cinematography.

In Poland of 1850, recently ordained, sweet natured, ice skating rabbi Avram Belinski (Gene Wilder) – who is apparently not well liked at his yeshiva – is sent to lead a congregation in San Francisco. He arrives in Philadelphia and learns that his transport to California has encountered gold rush fever and set sail without him.

Avram is quickly robbed of everything but his clothes and Torah. He crosses paths with some farmers he mistakes for brethren, but closer inspection reveals them to be Amish. They give the rabbi train fare, and his next encounter is with kind hearted bank robber Tommy Lillard (Harrison Ford).

Wandering the countryside without a clue, Avram endears himself to Tommy, who decides to take the rabbi to San Francisco, where the rabbinical council promised him a pretty bride. Whether encountering Indians, a posse, or the desperadoes who ripped him off, Avram sticks to his Orthodox teachings as he travels through the wild west.

Directed by Robert Aldrich and written by Michael Elias and Frank Shaw, The Frisco Kid – while not a success at the box office – seems to have endeared itself to many over the years, whether kids who grew up with HBO and recall it fondly, or with those who welcome a comedy without crude jokes or profanity. If released today, this would be marketed as a family film.

While Elias had a screenwriting credit on The Jerk and Shaw had a background writing for Bill Cosby, I didn’t laugh once while watching this. Not intentionally anyway. Known for hard edged action films pitting man against the establishment, this is the only comedy Aldrich ever really attempted. He quickly proves to be an abysmal selection.

Not that this business would have been good if only Carl Reiner had directed it. The story is just a series of random episodes – Wilder and Ford fall off a cliff on their horses, Wilder and Ford captured by Injuns – and lacks any cohesion. The opening moments are set in 19^th century Poland and feature old men shouting in Yiddish – without subtitles – so to say this takes a while to get going would be an understatement.

There’s a gag where Avram refuses to ride a horse on Saturday, pointing out “It’s difficult to explain why a Jew can’t ride on a Saturday,” but that’s the only thing about Judaism he does explain. It was never clear what the rabbi’s work in America was going to entail, or what the significance of his Torah was. Pairing an orthodox Jew with a rube would have been the perfect opportunity for the filmmakers to expound on his faith, but I guess Gene Wilder will not advance my knowledge of Jewish culture.

Wilder gives a measured, sometimes charming performance, but Ford is hilariously uncomfortable here. This was before Indiana Jones made him a leading man and enabled him to pick his projects. It’s hard to tell what was more awkward for Ford, wearing a cowboy costume, or spending nights on the plains with Wilder. I’ll save the context for someone who enjoyed the film.

Other than a brief appearance by Vincent Schiavelli as a monk, the supporting cast is absent of performers who can step up and make the running time expire quicker. It’s hard to really hate the movie though; it’s bad, but it means no harm. Watch it only to see what Harrison Ford’s career might have looked like if Tom Selleck was cast in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

During the Mexican Civil War in 1866, Benjamin Trane (Gary Cooper) is one of the many soldiers of fortune and criminals wandering south to sell their services to the highest bidder. Riding alone, Trane’s horse is injured, and he offers to buy another from a man he comes across, a gunslinger with a nefarious grin named Joe Erin (Burt Lancaster, who also produced).

The men are chased by French troops bearing lancers. Erin reveals this may be due to the fact that the horse he sold to Trane belongs to the troopers. Making it to safety by jumping a ravine, the gentlemanly Trane gets the drop on Erin and takes his horse.

Trane meets up with a band of American mercenaries including Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson (billed as Charles Buchinsky) and Jack Elam, friends of Erin’s who believe the only way Trane could have taken his horse was to have shot him in the back. Erin shows up and saves Trane’s neck, learning that he’s from Louisiana and fought for the Confederacy.

A classic Mexican standoff between Juarista rebels, the mercenaries, and troops led by the Marquis de Labordere (Cesar Romero) ensues, which Erin defuses by threatening some children. He decides to sell his services to the higher paying Marquis. Escorted to Chapultepec Palace, Trane and Erin prove their worth to the Archduke Maximilian by shooting out torch flames with a Winchester.

The Marquis hires them to help escort the Countess Duvare (Denise Darcel) through rebel territory to the port of Vera Cruz. Trane and Erin compete for the French lady’s affection, then forget about romance when they discover her carriage holds $3 million in gold coin. Maximilian intends to use the booty to buy more fighters, but the Countess has schemed to sail away with the gold herself. Double crosses, ambushes and more shootouts ensue.

Directed by Robert Aldrich, written by Borden Chase and Roland Kibbee and James Webb, Vera Cruz was one of the first major Hollywood pictures to be shot fully in Mexico. It was a hit at the box office, but Mexican officials were not happy about it, possibly due to the fact that the Mexican characters with dialogue – save Sarita Montiel as a pickpocket who catches Trane’s eye – were all played by gringos.

Some consider Vera Cruz to be a forerunner of the spaghetti-styled western. The film is cut fairly quickly for something made in the 1950s, and at 94 minutes, moves at a clip. The body count was also deemed excessive at the time, but so were most action films or westerns being made during the death rattle of the Hays Code.

The story, and the presence of Borgnine and Bronson as supporting heavies, makes this sound a lot better than it really is. Cooper is so laid back that a few of his line readings feel like they’re being read off cue cards. He generally doesn’t seem with it. Lancaster has a Han Solo vibe early on, and his mercenary cynicism was a departure for the genre, but he carries on to the point of camp, flashing his pearly whites way too often.

Aldrich does turn in an entertaining buddy action flick. Hugo Friedhofer’s musical score is thunderous. I liked the Mexican standoff, as well as a bit where Lancaster dispatches a rival with a behind the back quick draw. Sarita Montiel gives a firecracker performance with what screen time she’s afforded. Denise Darcel however, has no chemistry with anyone. And the massacre that ends the movie is absolutely ridiculous. If this was an early run at a spaghetti western, I’d call it a scrimmage.

Restless 18-year-old October “Tobe” Sommers (Evan Rachel Wood) spends her spring break in the San Fernando Valley looking after her neglected 13-year-old brother Lonnie (Rory Culkin). Her father Wade – played by the terrific David Morse – is a corrections officer. He’s rarely home, so his daughter has developed an acute sense of independence.

On the way to the beach with her friends, Tobe meets a charming drifter (Edward Norton) who pumps gas at a filling station. He tells her that he’s never been to the beach. Taken in by his polite, “aw shucks” manner, Tobe invites him to go with her.

He reveals his name is Harlan Fairfax Carruthers. Pieces of his history are revealed as the story progresses. He says he was born in South Dakota and has worked as a ranch hand, mainly in California. Tobe devours him, but Lonnie is also won over when Harlan takes him down to a concrete river basin on a horse, where they shoot bottles with real .45 caliber six-shooters.

Wade gets a look at Harlan and doesn’t like what he sees. The cops detain Harlan and Tobe over a dispute with a rancher (Bruce Dern) who claims Harlan took off with one of his horses. Wade tells his daughter she’s not to see him again. When Harlan comes back to apologize, dad runs him off by putting one of his prized antique pistols to the cowboy’s head. Tobe and Lonnie remain mesmerized by him, but it becomes clear that Harlan is not who they think he is.

Written and directed by David Jacobson, Down In The Valley was the sophomore feature from the native of Van Nuys. Shot on an $8 million, independently financed budget, it received generally favorable reviews, but only a limited release. While decidedly noncommercial, the only thing that disappoints me here is that it didn’t receive visible promotion from its distributor, ThinkFilm.

For all the talk from certain filmmakers about how enamored they are with the golden age of ’70s cinema, Down In The Valley beautifully succeeds at recreating the character driven, experimental vibe of that era, without being a tribute act. There are echoes of Midnight Cowboy, Badlands and Taxi Driver here, but only to the degree a film nerd can detect. Jacobson wrote an original, contemporary script about isolation, and a delusional charmer who craves a simpler, more civil world.

Edward Norton. What’s brilliant about him this time around is how we’re never sure if what Harlan is saying is true, or complete bullshit. He could either be a real gentleman, or a degenerate con artist, we’re never really sure. Evan Rachel Wood, who was 17 when this was shot, reminded me a lot of Nicole Kidman – back when she was acting – and is luminescent. Morse and Culkin are the best character actors for their age groups out there and prove it here.

Director of photography Enrique Chediak – who lit Boiler Room – frames the picture in some of the most gorgeous widescreen anamorphic shots I’ve seen in a long time. Just check out the screen captures posted here. Spellbinding. The musical score is by Peter Salett, who performs several low key folk songs on the soundtrack. His music goes a long way in lending an introspective, melancholy mood to the film.

The script does feel a bit underwritten. Generally speaking, it’s more of a question mark than a period and asks the viewer to set the table in a lot of instances. Morse and Culkin’s characters are sketches, while Elizabeth Pena, who is credited among the cast, must have had all of her scenes deleted because I never spotted her at all.

It was interesting that, like Fight Club, Norton’s character is again excluded by the modern world and uses fantasy to try to create his own sense of order. This film demands a certain patience too, but is equally rewarding. Briefly featuring Geoffrey Lewis as a cop, and Kat Dennings – the teenager from The 40-Year-Old Virgin – as Tobe’s punchy friend. Highly recommended.