Both movies were made in 1969--the year I got my drivers license. Both are set at the end of the 19th Century and represent the end of the frontier and "The Old West." They are the farthest extremes of the cowboy movie genre and represent the end of cowboy movies. Traditional Good Guys and Bad Guys were out of fashion.
In The Wild bunch, three groups are set against each other in this movie. All of them are bad. All of them end up slaughtered in the final Sam Peckinpah gun fight or shortly after. There are no good guys. The group we follow through the movie are bank/train robbers. They are pursued by a vile, incompetent set of vigilantes led by a former member of the gang, and in Mexico they fight against and ally with a Mexican rebel army led by a bandit general.
By contrast, in "Butch Cassidy" nobody is bad. Butch and the kid are robbers, but they are amiable, honorable and kill only when threatened. The posse that pursues them is relentless, again honorable men upholding the law. The rest of the Hole in the Wall Gang are decent men. When Butch and Sundance escape to Bolivia, they rob banks and are pursued by Bolivian police and soldiers who are also decent men. No bad guys.
The final scenes are a stark contrast. In both the robbers at the center of the drama are killed in a hail of bullets. But Butch and Sundance die off camera. The gang in the Wild Bunch die on camera surrounded by the bodies of their enemies. At the nearly everyone is dead, except the Mexican villagers oppressed by the rebel general. They come to the scene of the carnage and collect the guns to protect themselves from other bandits.
Neither movie is anywhere close to the white hat hero versus the black hat outlaw of the traditional cowboy genre. At the end of the 1960s, America was protesting war. There was violence in the streets. The top movies of the following year, 1970, were anti-war war movies. Nigel and I will be watching these also: "M*A*S*H," "Kelly's Heroes," "Catch-22," "Tora! Tora! Tora!" and "Patton" debuted during the first year of the 1970s.
"Patton" may not seem like an anti-war movie, but the character of General Bradley is a foil to Patton--the General who cares vs. the General who dares--at the expense of his men.
The return of Good Guys and Bad Guys would be the 1977 movie Star Wars--which used every trope of the traditional cowboy movie right down to the bar scene to bring back the Good Guy/Bad Guy Hero/Villain theme to the movies. The full title of that 1977 movie is "Star Wars--A New Hope" a title more appropriate than ever looking back over almost five decades.
Movie one of Corona Festival was Midway which I wrote about here. Nigel and I will watch the 1976 version starring Charlton Heston.
Movie two was Ford vs. Ferrari, which I first saw in Paris in November with the title "LeMans 66." I was so taken with the movie I visited LeMans, France, a few days later and the museum at Circuit de Sarthe where the race is held.
No comments:
Post a Comment