Alex Cox recently published a piece in The Guardian saying that the western, as a movie genre, was dead. Cox should know, having made an unspeakably awful spaghetti western of his own, Straight to Hell. But this is not a new idea: the ideals of manliness and the supposition of white supremacy that underlay many classic westerns are gone with the wind, and the days of John Wayne riding roughshod over any opposition (and not a few women) were certainly killed off by the stylised moral vacuum of the spaghetti westerns of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
But there is perhaps something like a post-western: what about Michael Winterbottom’s The Stand, or the forthcoming Australian outback western The Proposition, with a script by Nick Cave? And then there’s Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (Directors’ Suite). It does all the odd things a Jarmusch film does, as well as giving a little more afterlife to the western genre.
Johnny Depp plays William Blake, not the Romantic poet — though a Native American he meets will think he is. Blake is a clerk sent a long way to a small frontier town, to take a job that doesn’t exist. He gets shot but survives, or rather survives long enough to be told (by the aforesaid Native American) that he is to all intents and purposes already dead, hence the movie’s title.
The fun Jarmusch has with this idea is typical of his kind of off-beat humour and the surreal world he creates, as Blake wanders his way towards death. The pace is intensely slow, with short scenes fading in and out. The black-and-white cinemato-graphy is exquisite, as is Neil Young’s solo improvised soundtrack.
Look out, too, for delightful cameos from Robert Mitchum (in his last role) and Iggy Pop (in a dress).
No extras, though.
ALSO ON THE SHELF
Gosford Park
Who’d have thought it would work? That is, the collision of freewheeling multi-narrative director Robert Altman and the very English country-house murder mystery. Yet, in Gosford Park, work it most assuredly does. The presence of scriptwriter Julian Fellowes (who later got an Oscar for it) on set, helping with the ad libs and assuring accuracy, must have helped. The cast is the cream of British acting talent, led by Michael Gambon and Maggie Smith, and it all comes together very satisfyingly indeed. Good bonus features, too. — Shaun de Waal
The Producers
With a movie of the musical of the 1968 movie about making a musical having been recently released, it’s a good time to check out the original. But what seemed hilariously madcap the first time I saw it (two decades ago), now looks distinctly limp and forced. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder are the producers of the title, aiming to make a packet from a Broadway bomb. Worth it for the staging of Springtime for Hitler, though. — SdW
The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover
Peter Greenaway’s movie title has passed into the reference bible of headline-writers; the 1989 movie itself still disturbs and enthralls. It’s a colour-coded aria about greed, sex and power, simultaneously chilly and overheated, restrained and dripping with excess. There’s nothing else quite like it. — SdW
All these and other art releases on DVD are available at mid-price from Classics and All That Jazz. E-mail [email protected] for information