CINEMA: Fabius Burger
AT a recent Hollywood party, Jodie Foster jumped on Mel Gibson’s back and rode him like a horse — apparently their way of showing that Maverick, their upcoming western, will be politically correct. Women, no longer loving wives frying corn fritters back at the homestead, now also brandish the whip.
But two new westerns, Tombstone and Bad Girls, keep the genre firmly macho. In these movies, “post-feminist” means either being just like the guys — tough, hard-riding and quick on the trigger — or settling down at the homestead.
Tombstone is gleeful about being a western, to the point of melodramatic comedy: everyone’s dressed in black and sports large handlebar moustaches, making it difficult to work out who’s who.
Director George Cosmatos has stressed that the film follows the facts about Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) and Doc Holiday (Val Kilmer) pretty closely. I wouldn’t argue with that, but visually the movie leans more towards Saturday matinee myths than history. The dialogue is quick, comical, full of send-up hindsight; the movie itself is a happy compendium of just about every western ever made.
For those who feared westerns were drowning in sappy new-age fables about Native Americans, like Dances with Wolves, the famed gunfight at the OK Corral comes about halfway through, and the rest of the film is an extended, violent shoot-out, a gunfight de luxe without any redeeming feature except that it’s fun to watch.
The filmmakers were very conscious about being macho. Kurt Russell even praised television star Jason Priestley for accepting the role of Breckenridge, a young deputy sheriff who doubts his own courage: “It’s a role that any young actor would shy away from — a character referred to as `Sister Boy’.”
At the end of Tombstone, Earp promises Josephine (Dana Delany) true love and stability, with lots of room service. In My Darling Clementine, John Ford’s version of the Earp legend, Henry Fonda could ride off, undiminished, into the sunset. Kilmer’s camp, rakish performance as Doc Holiday sends up the genre; now a Earp, going soft, betrays it.
For idealised macho you’ll have to go to Bad Girls about four prostitutes (Madeleine Stowe, Drew Barrymore, Mary Stuart Masterson and Andie MacDowell) who hit the trail after one of them shoots an unruly client.
Bad Girls is a mirror-image of the male western. The girls do everything the guys do except chew tobacco: they are seen in silhouette in sunset and philosophise around campfires where they cook snakes and swig whisky. Coyotes howl in the background, which sounds very nice on the cinema’s stereo sound system.
The film is more concerned with getting the girls to be guys than dealing with the role of women in the Old West. When Cody is raped and horse-whipped, the camera’s not there. The film is polite about women: when the heroines swim nude, the camera doesn’t ogle but keeps above shoulder-height.
In fact it’s too polite: these bad girls aren’t bad. Basically they only want to get rich and settle down. And the film glorifies macho conventions and standard western myths. At the final shoot-out, care is taken to frame the women as a sort of magnificent four. When Cody draws on a villain who doesn’t have any bullets left, she gives him one and says: “Die like a man!”
The movie would be fun if it didn’t take itself so seriously. It lacks the sly playfulness with genre that Tombstone has. It also thinks in cliches: women are soft beneath tough exteriors; men are crude villains, gentlemen or nerds. This isn’t a revisionist western like, say, A Thousand Pieces of Gold (available on video) about a Chinese woman in the frontier west who observes the era’s crudity and violence through different eyes.
On the other hand, Bad Girls stays superficial, so one doesn’t have to take all this genre stuff too seriously. Rather, take along the popcorn.