Trundling On Through November

[poliphilo]

A lot of people are putting their Christmas decorations up- and I'm feeling the urge myself- but resisting it for reasons I can't quite articulate. The closest I can come is that it would feel like cheating.

I'm interrupting the Dickens marathon to read Josiah Bancroft's wildly inventive The Books of Babel- or rather the three volumes of the projected tetralogy that are currently available. My eldest son recommended it to me. I like fantasy- but only if it takes me places I'd never have got to under my own steam- which this does.

I was watching Commanche Station yesterday- a movie made shortly before it dawned on filmmakers that wild men wandering about in the deserts of the old west might not have bothered to visit the barbers regularly. It's the last of the westerns Budd Boetticher made with Randolph Scott- an actor who makes John Wayne look demonstrative. The racial and sexual politics are of their time- but what else can one expect? On the plus side it's beautifully written (by Burt Kennedy) staged without fuss and shot entirely on location in glorious cinemascope.

Comments

[cmcmck]

A lot going up here too although it's something we don't do because it's a major trigger for me.

I suspect it demonstrates the waving of two chunky fingers at 'them' however defined and at covid.

[poliphilo]

Anything to keep our spirits up in the dying months of this most peculiar year.

[sovay]

Randolph Scott- an actor who makes John Wayne look demonstrative.

I've actually seen him be quite good, but I think it helped that he was cast against type: in Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962).

(I did have to change my opinion about revisionist Westerns in the years since that review, since I forgot that as soon as a genre exists, someone will start trying to deconstruct it; also I have seen many more Westerns since. But I still like the way the movie takes itself apart and puts itself back into something much more weird and real.)

[poliphilo]

Ride The High Country is the only Peckinpah western I've never seen. It's a weird omission since I have a copy lying around somewhere- and The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid are among my favourite movies.

Scott isn't bad in Commanche Station- simply rugged and opaque- which works fine in the context. He co-produced the Boetticher movies so I reckon they were tailored to his persona and abilities.