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Now if there were a Western Hall of Shame…
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On this blog we’ve talked from time to time about the British Western. Everyone knows about Italian Westerns but not everyone is aware that other countries, like France, Germany and yes, Great Britain, had their own traditions of making Western movies.
It’s easy to be superior about non-American Westerns. I am, very superior, about spaghettis. And indeed, sometimes they didn’t get it right at all, even when they were using American Western stars. Occasionally these movies were good and true to the Western tradition. Take Shalako, for example, a very European film version of a Louis L’Amour story. It’s rather well done and Sean Connery, especially, makes a surprisingly convincing Western lead.
But…
There were some real turkeys among them too. The Singer Not the Song was distinctly odd (and needed a comma in the title). Catlow was pretty well junk. And Lawman and its successor Chato’s Land were absolutely awful. Worse, they were exploitative pulp with no understanding of the genre.
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Pulp
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Yet Lawman had some great Western actors in it. The first four names in the billing were: Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, Lee J Cobb and Robert Duvall. Well, you’d want to see a Western with that line-up, wouldn’t you?
Nope.
Superficially, you have good Western actors and a fairly standard Western plot. Burt Lancaster is an implacable lawman come to arrest some cowboys for shooting someone in his town. Lee J Cobb is the big rancher who resists. OK. Burt and Cobb could both overact, especially Cobb, but they could be alright too. A straight rip-off of the Last Train from Gun Hill plot. That would work.
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Washed-up sheriff and implacable lawman
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Robert Ryan is the washed-up sheriff. Sounds good. Robert Duvall is one of the fugitives. Fine. And there’s a nice bit of Mexican scenery shot by Robert Paynter (though a lot is filmed ‘in town’). We get satisfactory if undistinguished, rather overdramatic music with a Mexican tinge by Jerry Fielding. None of this, yet, is actually bad.
The trouble comes from the direction and the writing. The movie is a series of clichés, right from the opening scene when Lancaster comes in, Tin Star-style, towing a dead man on a horse. Western lovers might like the references, were they affectionate quotations, but you just get the feeling that these are not: they are cynical rip-offs.
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Wyatt Earp he ain’t
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The continuity is dreadful and shows a lack of respect for the viewer.
It’s unpleasantly violent, in a spaghetti-western way (and indeed Lawman is heavily influenced by the Italian western). But it’s violence that appears just gratuitous; it has no point or message. It’s there to be gory.
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Trashily violent
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The script (Gerald Wilson) is abysmally clunky and wooden. It comes across as plain amateurish. Ryan, post The Wild Bunch and in his very last Western, is the only one who manages to overcome it and shine. The others, even Lancaster and Cobb, just can’t do anything with such dire words. You get the feeling that Sheree North is just there to get into bed with Burt and show her breasts. It all looks cheap and 70s trashy. The ending is utterly implausible, even by 1970s Western standards. No, sorry, but it just won’t do.
Direction was by Michael Winner, a Londoner who wrote a column as a restaurant critic for a British newspaper and liked films. He is best known for the later series of pulp Death Wish movies with Charles Bronson, which was probably a more suitable destination for him. His favorite actor, and a friend, was Marlon Brando. Brando didn’t understand Westerns either.
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Michael Winner. Shoulda stuck to restaurants.
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His writer was Gerald Wilson. Not the jazz trumpeter. Come to think of it, the big band leader would probably have written a better Western.
The Color by De Luxe has faded on my DVD and the sound is none too hot either. But I can’t imagine anyone ever wanting to remaster the print.
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Been there, done that
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It just comes over as a money-making exercise with no desire to make a good Western. Wilson and Winner made the cheesy Chato’s Land the following year, with similar results. That one had Charles Bronson in the lead. That’s probably where they got the idea for Death Wish. Winner and Wilson show no understanding, affection or respect for the genre. If there were a Western Hall of Shame, they should be inducted into it.
Lawman wouldn’t even make my top 1000.
Hold on. It might. For Ryan. 999.
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8 Responses
That is an absurdly negative review of a genuinely interesting Western. As I saw it, the whole point of the film is that the leads are written against type – the cliche (which you accuse it of peddling) would have been if Lancaster’s marshal had been out-and-out likeable and Cobb’s big cheese rancher out-and-out villainous: I’ve seen dozens of Westerns that work through that sort of good-v-evil confrontation, which ends up with the big rancher being given his deserved come-uppance and the good guy marshal triumphing against the odds. That they’re both much more complex characters makes the conflict a great deal more interesting, and the script has a richness to match. You are totally wrong about this film – the most off-base I’ve seen, and I’ve read plenty of your reviews, which are often very good.
Fair enough. Glad you like it. We’ll just have to disagree on this one!
I bit harsh. I prefer 50s westerns to 70s, as you imply, a bit contrived, but aren’t clichés partly what we love about oaters?
It’s a question of affectionate quotation vs cynical rip-off. I hate this movie.
I have a more amateur version of the same slightly insane, unachievable completist compulsion that has driven you to create this marvellously encyclopedic website, and in particular wanting to tick off any Western featuring great luminaries of the genre – and in this movie we get several including Robert Ryan who has to be very near the top of my all-time favourites list. So I’ve long known I would see this one eventually.
But at the same time, I’ve always dreaded that moment finally arriving because…… Michael Winner.
So now I’ve seen it, what of the movie? Hear me out – I don’t hate it on it as much as you, I think it has two points of interest. One, the leads all give as good a performance as circumstances allow- Ryan’s always good of course, and I like Lancaster in this phase of his career, more subdued and world-weary than in his more rambunctuous youth, and Cobb is actually good as well on this occasion. Two, I agree with your correspondent Alan Watt above that there’s a decent quite interesting premise lurking inside the movie, of the Cobb and Lancaster characters being partially role-reversed in terms of where your sympathies lie, potentially making for an ambivalent twist on the old conventions.
But, and it’s a But the size of a solar system, those good aspects are well and truly sunk by the writing not being very good, and the direction being totally terrible. None of the characters are written with any of the depth they definintely could have been, so the good acting has nowhere to go, and the dialogue lacks quality, to put it kindly. A good director could still have made something out of all of that but nothing Mr Winner made in his decades in the business suggested he even knew what good direction was, or cared to. The pacing of this is poor but what particularly grated on me is something I always hate, and feel is a sure tell-tale that you’re in the hands of a bad filmmaker – the camera doing stuff that there’s no good reason for it to be doing. In this case the plethora of zooms – many of them ridiculously fast and none of them with any good excuse for being done at all – is off the charts!!
I’ve yet to see Winner’s other Western effort, Chato’s Land, and am not in a huge hurry…
I know some people don’t think LAWMAN is that bad but I think it’s junk despite the excellent actors. Winner hadn’t got a clue and I agree that the film was hopelessly badly written and directed.
In later life, Mr Winner became a bit of a fixture on the British chat show circuit. The Brits do like their ‘characters’ and he was one, a bumptious right-wing philistine with a taste for the high life – and a cheerful fellow who seemed to go through life unburdened by embarrassment or self-doubt. Rather enviable in a way – but a mystery why people kept giving him money to make films when he had no talent or taste. I still think a director who did could have made something out of Lawman, and that great cast, even if saddled with the same sub-par script. I get why you hate it, I just mostly disliked it.
I didn’t know that about the bumptious talk-show creep but it doesn’t surprise me. I agree that a director with more talent (i.e. pretty well anyone) might have made a decent film out of it.