Film Review: The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972)

By 1972 the western, as a film genre, was in palliative care, done in by a deficit of original ideas and by the public's growing taste for cop and disaster movies. European directors like Sergio Leone had taken westerns as far as they could go in terms of epic scope and allegory, while Hollywood countered with a stream of gritty, realistic westerns, the so-called revisionist westerns. Titles that fall under the latter category include Will Penny, Little Big Man, Soldier Blue, Bad Company, and, to a lesser degree, The Wild Bunch. The hallmark of the revisionist western is the debunking of the heroic, American expansionist ideal of John Wayne westerns. Revisionist westerns are sympathetic to Indians, show cowboys as skanky and feral, and present settlers and townspeople as racist and greedy.

The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid is firmly in the revisionist camp. The writer and director was Philip Kaufman, who'd go on to greater fame with Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Right Stuff. The title raid was the last bank robbery of the James-Younger gang, but Kaufman's focus isn't so much on the robbery as it is on more contemporary issues. In 1972 the U.S. was still waist deep in the Vietnam War and its inner cities were becoming war zones. In Raid, Kaufman offers up a thesis that America's taste for violence has deep roots. The gang and the townspeople of Northfield are shown to be equally callous and bloodthirsty. Jesse James murders a kindly old woman just to acquire her clothes for a disguise, and after a posse of Northfield citizens accidentally gets in a firefight with a posse from another town they take pride in having inflicted casualties on the other posse. The philosophy of the film is summed up beautifully during a baseball game that's half brawl, half sporting event. One of Northfield's leading citizens tells Cole Younger that baseball is now America's national sport, and Cole politely corrects him by saying, "Shooting is America's national sport and always will be." Cole then blasts the baseball out of the air, immediately ending the game.

Raid has an appropriately gritty, dirty look, and the gang members range from sociopathic to feeble-minded. Jesse James (Robert Duvall) is presented as a scheming psychopath who has a bottomless hatred for Northerners. Cole Younger (Cliff Robertson) is the brains of the gang, and has, despite his hardcore criminality, a very American innocence and delight when exposed to new sights and marvels. The acting is excellent throughout. It's no surprise that Duvall is good, but Robertson's acting is a bit of surprise. Robertson was always the bland utility infielder of leading men, but here he gives a charming, eccentric performance that's a perfect counterpoint to Duvall's homicidal Jesse James. The film's main drawback is a series of cutaways to a railway car full of Pinkerton men who've been hired to hunt down James and Younger. These scenes are badly shot and turn out to be irrelvant to the plot. I was going to attach Raid's trailer to this review, but it's absolutely stuffed with spoilers. Instead, here's a still from the film showing the aftermath of the raid.

Film Review: The Outfit (1973)

I've written previously about the Parker novels by Richard Stark on this blog (you can read the post here), and this early 1970s adaptation of the novel by the same name comes closest to capturing the flavour of Stark's writing. Point Blank is the best film made from a Parker novel, but it's not really true to the spirit of the books. And although The Outfit feels more like its source material, it still manages to miss the boat. It's entertaining, but there's some wonkiness that's hard to overlook.

The first oddity is that short, balding Robert Duvall is cast in the Parker role. Now Duvall can play tough, but he just doesn't appear tough (why does he hold his gun in that odd way?), and Parker is certainly described as looking rangy and menacing. The second oddity is that his character is called Earl Macklin instead of Parker. I can't even guess why that change was made. Joe Don Baker plays Macklin's sidekick and he would have been a much better choice for the Parker character.

The story is one that Stark would recycle in Butcher's Moon: the Outfit has killed Macklin's brother in retaliation for he and Earl having robbed a bank a few years previously that was controlled by the Outfit. Macklin goes to the Outfit's boss and demands a payment of 250k as a penalty for killing his brother (such brotherly love). The Outfit refuses, and Macklin and his sidekick begin knocking over Outfit properties until they agree to pay the "fine." They try to double-cross Macklin and that turns out to be a bad idea.

And now a word about the Outfit. The Outfit is a feature of the old Parker novels, and it's one that now feels somewhat dated. To a certain degree it plays the role that SPECTRE did in the James Bond novels. Both are highly organized criminal enterprises with interests in all kinds of criminal activity. The Outfit is essentially the Mafia, only it seems to be run entirely run by WASPy types. In Parker's world, every city has a parallel criminal economy, and it's all run by the Outfit.

The scenes of Macklin knocking over Outfit properties are done very well, and a lot of Stark's terse, muscular dialogue makes it to the screen to great effect. The acting is equally fine, which isn't surprising given that cast is stuffed with veteran character actors, everyone from Elisha Cook to Robert Ryan. Some parts are more uneven. Bruce Surtees is the cinematographer (he shot a lot Clint Eastwood's films) and he gives some scenes a nicely gritty look, but a lot of other scenes just look like a made-for-TV movie. Macklin's relationship with his girlfriend, played by Karen Black, is pointless and has an unpleasantly abusive aspect. The ending is the biggest disappointment. It feels hastily assembled and finishes on a jokey note that is very un-Parker.

The Outfit is worth watching, but I wouldn't go out of my way to track it down.

Film Review: True Grit (2010) vs. True Grit (1969)

After recently seeing the Coen brothers True Grit for the second time (on DVD), and having seen the John Wayne-starring version on numerous occasions, I can definitely say that...I'm not sure which is better.

Let's begin with the stars.  Jeff Bridges is a masterful actor, better than John Wayne ever was, but in this role he gives a rather predictable performance. He talks in a gruff, growly monotone, and basically tries to let Charles Portis' brilliant dialogue do the work for him. Wayne, to be honest, hammed it up. He set the John Wayne dial at 11.  Bridges creates a more believable character, but Wayne extracted more entertainment value out of the role.

Moving down the cast list, Matt Damon and Hailee Stanfield are a quantum improvement over Glen Campbell and Kim Darby. Campbell shouldn't have been allowed in home movies let alone feature films, and Darby I found irritating instead of determined. When it comes to the minor characters, however, the older version wins hands down, with A-list character actors such as Robert Duvall as Ned Pepper, Dennis Hopper as Moon, and Strother Martin as Stonehill, the horse trader unlucky enough to barter with Mattie Ross. For the sake of comparison, check out Martin's scene with Mattie and compare it with the Coen version using an actor named Dakin Matthews. The two sequences are virtually identical, but Martin turns the scene into a small comic gem. Matthews just reads the script.

The 1969 True Grit has a conventionally pretty look to it. The Coens make their True Grit look, well, gritty. And that's a plus. The Portis novel was a de-romanticized version of the Wild West, and the Coens remain true to that idea by showing us buildings and people that almost give off the smell of manure, sweat and tobacco. This tough look also makes Mattie's journey into the wilderness seem that much more daunting and dangerous. The 1969 version made the trip seem like a bit of a holiday.

The backbone of any western is the action sequences, and in this regard the Coens fall flat. Henry Hathaway, the 1969 director, had been directing westerns and action movies since the advent of sound, and it shows. His action sequences are fluid and energetic. The Coens, on the other hand, have a static, unimaginative approach to action. This may be where their committee approach to directing lets them down. The scene in the dugout cabin where Rooster Cogburn questions Moon and Quincy is a good comparison point.  Hathaway builds tension in the scene by having Moon become increasngly agitated due to his leg wound.  He also parallels this action by having Quincy become more violent as he cleans a turkey carcass (the Coens omit the turkey), while at the same time he's showing us Mattie becoming more distressed by the rising tension and anger. When violence suddenly erupts it's like a hissing boiler suddenly exploding. The Coen version has Moon talking in a flat montone up until he's mortally wounded by Quincy. The whole scene is shot with a minimum of fuss and a minimum of excitement.

The winner? Both. I just wish Glen Campbell hadn't been in the original and that the Coens could have had a coaching session from John Woo.