POSSE
Kirk Douglas, Bruce Dern, Bo Hopkins, James Stacy. Dir. Kirk Douglas, Paramount, 1975THE LONG RIDERS
James Keach, Stacy Keach, Randy Quaid, Dennis Quaid, Robert Carradine, David Carradine, Keith Carradine, Christopher Guest, Nicholas Guest. Dir. Walter Hill, United Artists, 1980
As I probably ought to have noted in my writeup for FORT APACHE, the four revisionist westerns to which I devoted yesterday are: FORT APACHE, SHANE, POSSE, & THE LONG RIDERS. I'm skipping SHANE for the time being. I enjoyed it and am glad to get it off the movie bucket list, but my main response so far concerns itself with how much Eastwood's PALE RIDER borrows from it - virtually everything. PALE RIDER is about half an inch off being a straight-up remake of SHANE.
Until 18 months ago the only movie named POSSE I knew of was Mario Van Peebles's 1993 film featuring Big Daddy Kane, Tiny Lister, and Tone Loc. Based on the box office totals, that doesn't make me much different than most Americans in 1975, when this underrated gem from director/star Kirk Douglas came out. Which is a shame, because Douglas's film belongs in any conversation about the great '70s anti-westerns including, I'd argue, 1980's LONG RIDERS. (The late Mike McPadden's theory that the '80s don't begin for movies until summer of '82 is exactly right.)
Both films come from the pov of the outlaw, the usual villain in traditional westerns and both share a distrust of those on the law&order side of the equation. POSSE reserves its skepticism for political figures who use crime as an easy ticket to elected office, where THE LONG RIDERS trains its ire on the Pinkerton Agency, a for-hire police force whose excesses in pursuit of "justice" have been documented both in feature films and history books. The R-rated LONG RIDERS gets over on Peckinpah-style violence where Douglas's PG-rated picture compensates for its fairly tame nature with more pointed political themes. Both films, somewhat surprisingly for the times, eschew graphic sexuality (though Hill gives us about four seconds of Pamela Reed's bared ass and a little bit of side-boob.)
Of the two, POSSE takes the revisionism to greater extremes. The male cast, including Douglas, wear haircuts a bit longer and shaggier than would have passed muster in the late 1800s, and Dern's antihero, Jack Strawhorn, wears a Levi's denim jacket of the same style as my friends and I wore in high school in the early-mid '80s. Though earlier films like 1971's acid western, ZACHARIAH, more specifically targeted the hippie demographic, POSSE, released a year after Nixon's resignation and at virtually the same moment as our final withdrawal from Vietnam, speaks louder to that generation's political dubiety (ZACHARIAH, based loosely on Hesse's SIDDARTHA, avoided politics altogether.) Hill's film, on the other hand, feels less post-'60s than post-'70s-malaise, its characters all affecting a level of world-weariness difficult to imagine in men who robbed trains, banks, and most anything they could.
To anyone who waded through my recent, rambling writeup of A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS & KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, this piece may feel similar in that, while I recognize POSSE is a better-made - it's certainly better scripted - film than LONG RIDERS, I admire Hill's picture, with all its flaws, a little more. To a degree, that's unfair. I first caught THE LONG RIDERS on cable in the early '80s and it has haunted me ever since, whereas I first saw POSSE not 18 months ago.
I almost want to call Hill's picture a tone-poem, and I would except that I've never been quite sure what the definition of that term is, nor have I ever found anyone to define it who doesn't use the same term in their explanation. THE LONG RIDERS uses an episodic structure, linked as much by Ry Cooder's evocative music (his first commissioned score) as by the actual characters and plot. Hill's take on Jesse James's James-Younger gang stresses style and mood over linear sense, a movie thematically dark even in its brighter moments. As writer/producer/star James Keach said at the time, LONG RIDERS is more a Midwestern than a traditional western, set not in the desert but the rolling green countryside of Missouri and Minnesota. In its visual sense as well its music and characters, Hill's picture looks and feels almost Appalachian. Coming from an Appalachian family, I think I found RIDERS more immediately familiar than traditional westerns when I first encountered it.
THE LONG RIDERS, probably best known for casting real-life sets of brothers - the Keaches as the Jameses, Carradines as the Youngers, Quaids as the Millers, and the Guest brothers as the treacherous Charlie and Robert Ford - as movie-brothers, could have been sunk by the gimmick, but Hill makes it work, aided immeasurably by having such a talent-heavy group of siblings. It's always fun to see Randy Quaid before he lost his mind, and more fun to see him in a role where he does more than provide comic relief. Brother Dennis, fresh from his starmaking appearance in Peter Yates's BREAKING AWAY, looks even younger than in the 1979 coming of age picture. Watching the Carradines and Keaches, I always wonder how James Keach and Robert and David Carradine never became quite as famous or popular as their brothers Stacy and Keith. Robert starred in Sam Fuller's THE BIG RED ONE the same year as LONG RIDERS and deserves praise for both, though Warners' mangling of Fuller's passion project meant most viewers, including me, would not see him in the best light until its 2004 restoration.
As good as its cast is, if ever a movie needed a Director's Cut, THE LONG RIDERS is it. According to the Keaches as much as 30 minutes of scenes involving Stacy and Randy Quaid were cut by United Artists, which wanted a straight shoot-em-up rather than the bloody domestic drama the Keaches and Hill envisioned. Those missing scenes would go a long way, I suspect, toward making LONG RIDERS a less disjointed affair. All the more reason, then, to be thankful for Hill, whose stylistic sensibilities keep me invested even in his more tedious projects, like 1984's STREETS OF FIRE (sorry, cultists.) It's that sensibility which makes the film's climactic set piece, the botched Northfield, Mn. bank robbery which ended the James-Younger Gang's criminal reign, the other reason LONG RIDERS is remembered. Though Hill uses slow motion to different effect than Sam Peckinpah, critics were not wrong to compare the scene with THE WILD BUNCH's opening sequence. I won't say more, on the unlikely chance this piece convinces someone to seek out the picture, but it's a doozy, arguably a direct influence on the sniper sequence in Stanley Kubrick's FULL METAL JACKET.
I know - I've given POSSE short shrift in order to sing LONG RIDERS' praises, but I don't know how much more I can say of Douglas's film. More tightly focussed, its script based on a short story by cult director Larry Cohen, POSSE will go over well with fans of films like THE USUAL SUSPECTS, in which caging the suspect and allowing him to talk proves the authorities' worst mistake. Dern's Strawhorn does far more damage, at least to Douglas's Marshal Nightingale's political aspirations, during his brief captivity than in his entire train-robbing career. Fans of ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD may particularly want to seek out POSSE, as the newspaper editor is played by a post-motorcycle-accident James Stacy in a part Douglas had written specifically for the double-amputee actor to facilitate Stacy's comeback*. If that comeback came out to only another ten roles in movies and TV, it's a class move by Douglas, and Stacy earns it, being arguably the best character apart from Douglas and Dern (though Bo Hopkins and Luke Askew might have argued the point.)
The western tends to be an intensely male-driven genre - though I'd argue strong female characters in Hawks's RIO BRAVO and Eastwood's THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES are both those pictures' secret weapons - and if POSSE and LONG RIDERS are little different, Hill at least gives us veteran character actors Fran Ryan and Pamela Reed as a caustic Belle Star. Reed, best known as Schwarzenegger's detective partner in KINDERGARTEN COP, is one of my favorites from the '80s, her work consistently undervalued by the critics. Ryan, who played the woman Bill Murray leaves stranded in the cab at the start of STRIPES, plays the James' Brothers' mother with just the right mix of anti-authoritarian defiance and subsequent grief, looking every bit like the older women I used to see on family trips home to the mountains of Western North Carolina. POSSE's female characters, while fine, exist mostly as furniture.
Whether we call these films revisionist westerns, anti-westerns, or just damn good period actioners, it's tough to find many serious complaints with either. POSSE, for all its political acumen, is the lighter of the pair, LONG RIDERS a more somber affair even in its ultraviolent sequences. As noted above, something about THE LONG RIDERS has haunted me for 41 years. Had I seen POSSE at a similar point in time, I still doubt it would have the impact of Hill's film, the last shot of which - the mystery train carrying Jesse James's body disappearing around a bend as the color seeps out of frame - has lingered with me all this time. Taken together or separately, however, I find it difficult to imagine a contemporary viewer not being well-satisfied by either. Would that there were more demand for movies like these.
*For the - I'm guessing here - 5 or 6 Tarantino fans who don't know it, THE LONG RIDERS features RESERVOIR DOGS's Eddie Bunker in his second-ever movie role, as a new gang member during the Northfield sequence.
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