Close-Ups on the Outcasts
Arthur Penn discusses the first “revisionist” Western and Bonnie & Clyde’s link to the genre.
By: Henry Cabot Beck 05/01/2008
Although director Arthur Penn made only three Westerns, his ranking is secure as one of the genre’s greatest interpreters.
Actually, Penn’s first feature film was a Western. Penn cast newcomer Paul Newman as Billy the Kid in The Left Handed Gun (1958), a misnomered film (the Kid was actually right-handed) that many feel qualifies as the first “revisionist” Western, years ahead of its time.
Penn’s film was an odd combination of the more literate and sociological type of TV drama that was common at the time and the Western, which was entering its peak TV period. He and author Gore Vidal were anxious to say something interesting about media and mythmaking, as it applied to Billy the Kid in his day, and as it existed in the first great decade of TV celebrity. In a way, the film is an interesting companion piece to Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957), which dealt with similar issues.
Twelve years later, Penn directed Dustin Hoffman as Jack Crabb in Little Big Man (1970), based on Thomas Berger’s novel, which still shows up in many critics’ all-time favorite Westerns lists. This outrageous comic spectacle, a completely reconfigured version of the mythical West, is told from the perspective of a 121-year-old white man who lived a great part of his life among the Cheyenne but who also operated as a gunslinger, mule skinner, scout, drunk, snake oil salesman and boy toy. This tremendous political satire premiered when even the hardest hawks were beginning to grow disillusioned with the war in Vietnam.
Penn’s final Western, The Missouri Breaks (1976), paired the recent best actor Oscar winner Jack Nicholson (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) with the original bad boy of cinema Marlon Brando. As the hired assassin Robert E. Lee Clayton, Brando took an obvious delight in making the bulky and effeminate Clayton a bizarre, and thoroughly despicable, figure. Nicholson, meantime, played the leader of a gang of horse thieves who saw his friends being picked off one at a time, as his era was grinding to an end. The movie, a good one when it premiered, keeps getting better with age.
Arthur Penn talks to us just as Warner Brothers releases two slightly different two-disc editions of Bonnie & Clyde (1967), which is certainly Penn’s most famous film. The second disc in both cases contains a considerable amount of bonus material, but the “Ultimate Collector’s Edition” also contains books, press kit reproductions and other goodies. About the only thing missing is a vocal commentary track by Mr. Penn and the usual scholars. When I asked him why he wasn’t making an appearance on the disc, he replied, “They didn’t ask me!”
Post A Comment