the groundhog day project

The opening scene of Rio Bravo plays a bit like the opening of West Side Story , choreographed like there's a dance number coming. Instead, Chance (John Wayne) tells a guy he's under arrest. The Western has moved indoors over the last few films. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral , 3:10 to Yuma , The Left Handed Gun ... it's remarkable how we think of Westerns as being about big, wide open spaces yet so many of them are a whole lot of dialogue until the situation explodes into violence. In a way, the more the Western stays confined to town, the more it plays like other genres, gangster films (or gang films more recently)... like West Side Story without the songs. Then again, I've argued before that all movies are basically the same. Genre is just details. Which is a weird thing to say when I'm only a week into this month of Westerns. Trying to build it up but I just can't help bringing it back down a little... How about a little Wright to set things right? (I ...

Wright (1975) doesn't deal with 3:10 to Yuma at all even though its plot seems like an update on High Noon . Like High Noon before it, this Elmore Leonard story-based film is built more on dialogue and unarmed standoffs more than action or violence. When the remake came half a century later, Roger Ebert said it "restores the wounded heart of the Western and rescues it from the morass of pointless violence." As we'll see soon with this month of Westerns, things turned particularly violent by the 1960s, and as Ebert points out in his review, "The Western in its glory days was often a morality play, a story about humanist values penetrating the lawless anarchy of the frontier... but the audience's appetite for morality plays and Westerns seems to be fading." Or maybe it's long gone. Really, I think we love morality plays, we just don't like them to come as deliberately as Westerns like High Noon or 3:10 to Yuma , or even Gunfight at the O.K. Co...