Two Westerns: 3:10 to Yuma (2007) and McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1973)
3:10 to Yuma
I didn’t get it. You read the summary and you know that the movie’s about the unlikely relationship formed between the outlaw (Russell Crowe) and the honest, penniless farmer (Christian Bale) who escorts him to jail. But, as good as Crowe and Bale are - one brooding and romantic, the other simmering and laconic - I wasn’t feeling it. When each does wild sacrifices for the other, I just didn’t feel that they were properly set up. I also didn’t get it when the bounty hunters were escorting Crowe to jail and, even in chains, he was still able to kill them one-by-one. I understood that, but I didn’t understand why not a single bounty hunter even suggested “why don’t we go ahead and kill this guy and save our lives?” Aside from those two issues, “3:10 to Yuma” is a splendid, direct western, with brutal gunfights and a dreamy-eyed psycho played by Ben Foster, who matches wits with Peter Fonda’s walk-off-a-gunshot-to-the-gut bounty hunter.
117 min, R - Directed by James Mangold, starring Russell Crowe, Christian Bale, Ben Foster, Gretchen Mol, and Peter Fonda.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Altman has a way of making movies I intellectually recognize as great, yet I feel little personal connection to them. I don’t have anything bad to say about “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” and I could even argue that it’s Altman’s best movie, but it doesn’t hit me the way a “great” movie should. Maybe after I let it gestate a few years I’ll feel differently. Anyway, Altman’s sepia-tinted anti-Western has held up better than, say, “Little Big Man” because it’s filled with people and not just propaganda. Sure, it overturns Western conventions and myths by showing the frontier as being built by dirty alcoholics and whores instead of noble gunfighters, but the movie has affection for these swine and is a good movie besides that. I also like that the whores and the townsfolk are on equal moral footing throughout; holier-than-thou prostitutes are just as tiring as one-dimensional crack whores. McCabe (Beatty) is a gambler who turns a mining outpost into an actual town. He’s cleverer than everyone else there, but not as clever as Mrs. Miller (Beatty’s girl-of-the-moment Christie), who comes along to run the whorehouse. Eventually the West ends, the way the West always does in Westerns, and the robber barons want McCabe to die with it. But that’s not what interests Altman, as he openly admits in the DVD commentary; he’s more interested in building his own mining town from the ground up, filling it with actors, and making a documentary (practically) of what happens.
121 min, R - Directed by Robert Altman, starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonios, and William Devane.