At the Ends of the West

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: written by William Goldman; directed by George Roy Hill; starring Robert Redford (The Sundance Kid), Paul Newman (Butch Cassidy), and Katharine Ross (Etta Place) (1969): Pitch-perfect Western dramedy gives us terrific, charismatic performances from Redford and Newman and lovely supporting work from the under-rated Katharine Ross. The musical interlude set to "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head" doesn't seem so weird now that every film and TV show sets at least one scene to a pop song.

A distinguished member of a long line of Westerns that are also requiems for the Western, with this one set at about the same time as the dark and apocalyptic The Wild Bunch. William Goldman's script and George Roy Hill's direction keep everything zipping along merrily, even in the direst moments. The cleverest stylistic touch is the use of both period and fake-period photography and footage as chapter markers in the story. Highly recommended.


Shane: adapted by A.B. Guthrie Jr. and Jack Sher from the novel by Jack Schaefer; directed by George Stevens; starring Alan Ladd (Shane), Jean Arthur (Marian Starrett), Van Heflin (Joe Starrett), Brandon de Wilde (Joey Starrett), Jack Palance (Jack Wilson), and Ben Johnson (Chris Calloway) (1953): George Steven's elegy to the end of Western expansion, and the attendant end of gunslingers and open ranching, holds up pretty well: the things that might annoy us now also annoyed Francois Truffaut when it came out. Stevens loves having animal behaviour comment on the human proceedings, a love that sometimes borders on unintentional comedy. Well, he did cut his directorial teeth on Laurel and Hardy!

The other flaw, the annoying Brandon de Wilde as Joey Starrett, the boy who idolizes Alan Ladd's melancholy gunslinger Shane, sometimes make one long for a CGI-corrected version of the film with someone less strident as the boy. So it goes. The adults are all great, from Ladd's noble gunslinger to Van Heflin's naturalistically played farmer and Jean Arthur's hopeful wife to Van heflin, all the way to the grimy land baron and his ruthless mob and, at the end of it all, Jack Palance as the menancing hired gun brought in to drive the farmers off land the rancher wants for grazing. Looming above all the action are the majestic Grand Tetons, setting the affairs of humans against the Sublime and indifferent arc of geological time. Recommended.

Time Loop

Looper: written and directed by Rian Johnson; starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Joe), Bruce Willis (Old Joe), Emily Blunt (Sara), Paul Dano (Seth), Jeff Daniels (Abe), and Pierce Gagnon (Cid) (2012): Rian Johnson's Brick was an idiosyncratic gem, a high-school drama played like a hard-boiled film noir, complete with 1940's inflected dialogue and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in his first defining dramatic role after years on Third Rock from the Sun. Johnson and Gordon-Levitt re-team here for another genre-buster. Looper is at least nominally science fiction, but it's also a Western. And another crackerjack film noir.

The major influences for Looper seem to be Shane and that terrific modern noir of the early 1990's, After Dark, My Sweet (though that film was based on a Jim Thompson novel from the 1950's). Then throw in time travel and, um, telekinesis -- more specifically, Jerome Bixby's Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life." This is nothing if not a mash-up.

Organized crime in the 2070's sends its targets back to to the 2040's to be killed by a 'Looper.' Why? Something about bodies being difficult to get rid of in the 2070's. Frankly, this is the shakiest part of the premise. Some of the other problems with this use of time travel could be explained by the disintegration of organized government, which would explain why there aren't Time Cops running around the 2040's. But then, who's discovering the bodies in the 2070's?

We'll give them this as a starting point. The rest of the movie is pretty smart, with nice background details that sketch in the decaying America of the 2040's without throwing it in one's face. There's also an automated flying crop-duster that made me smile -- it looks like the country cousin of the Imperial Probe Droid from The Empire Strikes Back.

But having seen Brick before seeing Looper also helps explain certain things, as Looper is equally stylized and non-mimetic, if not anti-mimetic: for one, the stuff with Blunderbusses and Gats seems more like a commentary on movie gunmen than a realistic categorizing of weaponry. Because these guys are all carrying big guns with which they're only intermittently able to hit something other than their own feet.

The movie plays out with some deft twists, turns, and at least one major reset button. Time travel is a tricky thing. Bruce Willis, as Joseph Gordon-Levitt's future self, is tough and ruthless; Joseph Gordon-Levitt pulls off the difficult feat of playing a monster who develops a soul. He's developed into a fine actor. Pierce Gagnon does some fine child acting, and Emily Blunt pulls off an American accent. Time folds in upon itself. The rules the movie sets out for time travel make a sort of sense right up to the climax, at which point...well, you'll see. Recommended.