Date: Fri, 06 Feb 1998 16:20:52 -0500 From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> Subject: Re: M-TH: "A fisher or hunter is averse to society" Zarathustra Goldstein: > You are so desperate to return to your cocoon of a world comprised >of black hats and white hats that you are even distorting Marxism. Class >analysis is a little more complicated than a John Wayne movie. > You have a point here. Just last weekend I was up at my mom's house in the Borscht Belt and I tuned in "El Dorado", with the Duke, Robert Mitchum and James Caan. Directed by Howard Hawks, this 1967 movie defies many of the western conventions that Hawk's counterpart, John Ford, drew upon. Mitchum plays an alcoholic sheriff. In a wild, comic scene, Caan, an expert with a knife named "Mississippi," concocts a folk-medicine that would cure Mitchum's hangover and, more importantly, stave off any future taste for booze. This is important because the Duke needs Mitchum's help in a shootout with a gang led by Ed Asner(!). They pour the stuff down Mitchum's throat, while he is passed-out drunk. As soon as he awakens, he takes a swig of some whiskey (what I used to call the hair of the dog that bit me) and gets violently ill. The Mitchum character is highly reminiscent of the Lee Marvin character in "Cat Ballou", but is less overdrawn and, therefore, more effective. Meanwhile, the Duke has periodic loss of control in his shooting hand because of a bullet that is lodged near his spine. All in all, this is one of his superior performances. He is clearly an old man, so there is no attempt to kid the audience into thinking that he is in his prime or even some kind of sex-symbol. By the same token, he has not become the iconic figure of the last few films which tend toward nostalgia for the age-wracked actor. "The Cowboys" certainly suffers from this. The Caan character is dysfunctional in his own way. Though an expert with a knife, he has never learned to shoot properly. When he fails to hit a rather large target in his one lesson with the Duke, they improvise a solution. They fit him with a sawed-off shotgun. The Duke assures him that he won't be able to miss even if he tried. So the three men--a semi-paralytic, a recovering drunk and a novice to gunplay--go out to confront a bunch of bad guys. It is very possible that Hawks had internalized and remythologized frontier symbols for the troubled period of the Vietnam war. The American president had demanded that the troops bring the coonskin home, but the NLF would not accomodate. Vietnam as Little Big Horn. Tomorrow I look at "The Emerald Forest," a fascinating film on Amazon Indians versus predatory corporations, a 1985 film directed by John Boorman. Louis Proyect --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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