MOVIE CHRONICLE
233
dreams, our two-reelers used the new technique of the screen to parody
the vacuous heroics of stage melodrama. But in recent years John Ford,
particularly, has turned the Western into an almost static pictorial
genre, a devitalized, dehydrated form which
is
"enriched" with pastoral
beauty and evocative nostalgia for a simple, heroic way of life. The
cliches we retained from childhood pirate, buccaneer, gangster, and
Western movies have been awarded the status of myths, and writers
and directors have been making infatuated tributes to them.
If,
by now,
we dread going to see a "great" Western, it's because "great" has come
to mean slow and pictorially composed. We'll be lulled to sleep in the
"affectionate," "pure," "authentic" scenery of the West, or, for a
change, we'll be clobbered by messages in "mature" Westerns (the
message will be that the myths we never believed in anyway were
false). Kurosawa slashes the screen with action, and liberates us from
the pretensions of our "serious" Westerns. After all those long, lean–
hipped walks across the screen with Cooper or Fonda (the man who
knows how to use a gun is, by movie convention, the man without an
ass), we are restored
to
sanity by Mifune's heroic personal characteristic
-a titanic shoulder twitch.
The Western has always been a rather hypocritical form. The hero
represents a way of life that is becoming antiquated. The solitary
defender of justice is the last of the line; the era of lawlessness is over,
courts are coming in. But the climax is the demonstration that the
old way is the only way that works-though we are told that it is the
last triumph of violence. The Westerner, the loner, must take the
law into his hands for one last time in order to wipe out the enemies
of the new system of justice.
Yojimbo
employs an extraordinary number
of the conventions of the form, but takes the hypocrisy for a ride.
The samurai is a killer with a code of honor and all that, but no system
of justice is supplanting him. He's the last of the line not because law
and order will prevail, but because his sword for hire is already anachron–
istic. Guns are coming in. One of his enemies is a gun-slinger, who
looks and acts a parody of American Method actors. That ridiculous
little gun means the end of the warrior caste: killing is going to become
so easy that it will be democratically available to all. In
Yojimbo
good–
ness triumphs satirically: the foil at the point of the sword is a huge joke.
The samurai
is
not a man with a poker face, and he's not an execu–
tioner who hates his job. He's a man of passion who takes savage
satisfaction in his special talents. Violence triumphs whoever wins, and
our ideas of courage, chivalry, strength, and honor bite the dust along
with the "bad" men. The dogs will have their human fodder.
