The Western rehabilitated

Rating: 8/10 (29 September 2009)

Once the staple of Fifties cinema-going, Westerns have gone out of fashion. The Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns started a trend towards stripping them West of glamour, and filmmakers in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate oil-price inflation disillusioned Seventies soon picked got in on the act. Mud and misery, disease and everyone more or less in rags became the norm. Cowboy heroes were no longer incorruptible men in white hats, but just as savage as their nominally bad adversaries. Life in the new order Western was hard and brutal, and the only concession Tinseltown allowed was that the heroine was still desirable, unlike the women photographs of the era show us. Film heroines, after all, are film heroines and we can't have them being though ugly. By the Eighties anyone trying to raise money to make a Western was given short shrift by the financiers. There were, of course, the few brave exceptions, such as Unforgiven, the TV series Lonesome Dove and, more recently, the excellent The Assassination Of Jesse James etc., but they, too, embraced the new orthodoxy of a depicting a brutal, bloody, muddy and miserable West, and The Assassination etc, was perhaps not even a Western in the accepted sense. Neither, for that matter, was Altman's McCabe And Mrs Miller. So remaking 3.10 To Yuma was a brace decision and director James Mangold has come up trumps. But before I lay on the praise, I must vent my one gripe: the transformation of utterly ruthless killer Ben Wade (an excellent Russell Crowe) into a man who does, after all, have a streak of humanity doesn't convince. Well, it doesn't convince me. I watched this on DVD and re-watched it listening to Mangold's commentary in which he says he tried to get away from the idea of 'the villain' and wanted to portray Wade as a more rounded character. Well, it is true that he does, yet I cannot buy Wade's almost altruistic transformation. And as that, after all, is one of the film's main themes, it is quite a large faultline. Wade is utterly, utterly ruthless, a man for whom life means nothing. He kills without compunction and shows no remorse of any kind. The only kind of character who might behave as director Mangold wants us to believe Wade behaves would be a sociopath, and that was exactly the kind of character (according to the commentary) Mangold did not want to create. We are given a kind of explanation for Wade's complete lack of scruples - after his father died, he was abandoned by his mother as an eight-year-old, but that, in itself, is rather too pat, if not to say rather too glib, and explanation. We are also shown that he has an artistic streak - he likes sketching - and it is obvious that he is intelligent and self-aware. He even has a dry wit. But surely to goodness none of this even goes a little way to explaining is about turn when he assists Dan Evans (an also very good Christian Bale) against his own gang to deliver him to the train which will convey him to the gallows. Well, not for this viewers it didn't. There is one coda which might provide and explanation: as the train with Wade on board trundles on its way to Yuma, Wade whistles and his horse (I should imagine, although if it is his horse, it has changed colour) runs off to accompany the train. Wade has previously claimed that he has escaped from Yuma twice before and that often judges, guards and lawmen have helped him escape simply because they like him. The implication is that he will manage to do so again. And it is true that there is something - almost inexplicably - likable about this ruthless killer. That interpretation would, at least, be in keeping and, aesthetically, would stay in harmony with the rest of the film. As I say, Wade's apparent redemption - he even guns down the remainder of his gang - his my main gripe, although an important one. Two minor gripes are that in the final dash to the station, he loses his handcuffs. The keys were thrown away by Dan Evans earlier on. Perhaps they were taken off when he first entered the cell in the train, because that is when you first see him without them. They must have been taken off pretty damn fast and there would have been no reason to do so, anyway. Wade is, after all, a ruthless killer. So why take any chances? Then there is the surprisingly fast recuperation of Peter Fonda from being shot in the stomach. Uncredible just isn't the word. But having got those those points off my chest, I am bound to admit that, otherwise, Yuma scores on every level and then some. The plot is less than straightforward, we have an admirable hero in Christian Bale, whose determination and motivation to live up to his promise to deliver Wade to Yuma against all odds rings very true, we have a great coming of age performance by Logan Lerman as his son, there is plenty of ambivalence to satisfy even the most ardent modernist, the action sequences, though undoubtedly the result of clever editing, have none of the artificiality of too many other action movies - cut, cut, cut, and you haven't a clue what's going on - and it is only fair to say the Mangold comes up trumps. One last point is worth mentioning: neither Bale nor Crowe is American, and I do wonder whether that might have contributed to them bringing something fresh to their parts. Also convincingly and irredeemably nasty is Ben Foster as Wade's No 2 Charlie Prince. Finally, Peter Fonda turns up: I though his career hit the buffers years ago, but here he does a great job as, in his own way, an equally nasty Pinkerton's Agency mercenary. But boy does he look old, which means, unfortunately that so, probably, do I.