the groundhog day project

This month of Westerns is coming to an end. Just two more days after today. I will have watched 42 Westerns in 32 days. I will have driven over 2000 miles, visiting Tombstone, Arizona and Lincoln County, Roswell and Fort Sumner, New Mexico. (Wanted to go to Monument Valley as well, but that would have added another 400 miles or so.) Got a nice sense of the openness of the West while out on the road. Open Range was filmed in Canada, but it's got a nice openness to its early shots, before Charley (Kevin Costner, for the third time this month) and Boss (Robert Duvall, for the second) head into town to retrieve Mose (Abraham Benrubi). It goes right back out into the open after just a few minutes in town. Oddly, this makes it stand out from a lot of Westerns; so many Westerns for decades have centered themselves in the town, dealing in the civilizing parts of said town in conflict with forces of chaos from outside, often in the form of Cowboys, outlaws. The conflict here is more bet...

(I considered including Dances with Wolves but decided not to, even though it did win Best Picture at the Oscars, because it's basically a ripoff of A Man Called Horse but for the re-inclusion of the soldiers as villains in the final act. So, we'll move on past it into the '90s.) The fun Western didn't last long. Like that final bit of Young Guns II , with Billy recognizing that all those deaths were his fault, the Western had to realize it was far darker than it had been pretending to be. All those casual deaths, all that violence--that doesn't come without consequence. The brothel in that film was burned to the ground, its women run out of town. Here, we begin in a brothel, sex and violence twisted together to start us off. We get a clearer image of the status of prostitutes in Young Guns II (as trash to run out of town) and Unforgiven (as property that can be damaged without monetary (or the equivalent) restitution only), than in many a previous Western. ...