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The introductory shots evoke Ford's remarks about knowing when to place the horizon low or high in the frame, a soldier's funeral succinctly situates this Old West at the end of World War II. The heroine is a taciturn Montana rancher (Jane Fonda) struggling to keep her home from being engulfed by the land baron (Jason Robards), the returning vet (James Caan) joins her and the elderly cowhand (Richard Farnsworth). "Well, we got us one old man and a banshee woman boss. Feel like a fart in a wind storm." Reviving Bazin's "superwestern," Alan J. Pakula seeks the wide open spaces to escape urban claustrophobia and instead finds reflections of it. (Majestic panoramas are studded with lonely graves, oil lamps flicker in cavernous, pitch-black interiors.) The continuous dialogue with the genre's past reveals Caan's Joel McCrea side and draws on Fonda's evocation of her father's wry tightness (in The Ox-Bow Incident, say), saloon brawls and hoedowns and stampedes are meticulously laid out while the terrain is dynamited. "Heartland, cattle country," oil is the encroaching industry, the Seventies irony is that even the villainous individualism of "one of the last of the great empire builders" is under siege by the new corporate system. The Stevens of Shane and Giant is the main tributary, with a nod to the early comedies in the awkward first meal between the protagonists. Along the way Pakula takes note of Chinatown, and films Farnsworth's last ride in an unbroken take at dawn so that Gordon Willis' cinematography can capture a flash of lightning in the distance. Fires and new beginnings, the windmill that again turns. "When it comes to land over the needs of the people, I think I'd have to take people anytime." Eastwood brings it all into the new decade with Pale Rider. With George Grizzard, Jim Davis, James Keach, and Mark Harmon.
--- Fernando F. Croce |