A fine Western
Howdy again, e-pards. The revamped Jeff Arnold’s West is finally available. If you tap in jeffarnoldswest.com you should come upon the new format. Sorry we’ve been ‘down’ over the festive season. It took longer than I expected (that’s IT for you).
It’s still work in progress and I am aiming for further improvements but at least for the moment you can access the posts dating back to 2010. There are well over a thousand Western movies reviewed, for example. Click on Western movies near the bottom of the home page, then aaa WESTERN MOVIES AND TV SHOWS REVIEWED in the top right hand corner of the new page.
Western people at the bottom of the home page will take you to Western actors, both character actors and stars, and also to real Old West characters. I’ll be trying to refine this as we go on.
Anyway, today I thought that as it is still Christmas (there are supposed to be 12 days of it, right?) we might look at a Western set at Christmas in which a Christmas tree plays a symbolic part.
I myself have never been a fan of Charlton Heston in Westerns, as regular readers of this blog will probably know. I know he was a good actor and all but for me that was in other genres. Depending on your definition of Western, he participated in 12 features and 2 TV movies, between 1952 and 1995. Some of the early ones, such as Pony Express and Arrowhead in 1953, were downright bad, or they were rather dreary clunkers like The Far Horizons (1955). He largely stayed away from the genre in the 1960s, probably wisely, making only the admired/scorned Major Dundee for Sam Peckinpah in ’65 (I’m slightly in the scorned camp) until, in 1968, he made what is for me his only really good Western, Will Penny.
’68 was the year of the gigantic (I would say overblown) Once Upon A Time In The West but actually the better Westerns of the year were smaller, more intimate films such as The Stalking Moon and, in particular, Will Penny. The latter was a project spun off from an episode of The Westerner TV show, Line Camp (S1 E10, Dec 9, 1960), written and directed by Tom Gries. Gries was not a great figure as Western director; he helmed just four feature oaters, and only Will Penny and the fun 100 Rifles (the year after) were good. Mustang in 1959 was a romance with the wooden Jack Buetel and Breakheart Pass in 1975 with equally stolid Charles Bronson was more of a whodunit (and not a very good one at that) that happened to be set in the West. Still, Gries did a lot of Western TV work, being involved in one way or another in sixteen different shows, and back on the big screen he co-wrote The Bushwhackers in 1951 and was a producer on The Lusty Men, Nicholas Ray’s fine rodeo picture, in 1952. So he had some Western street cred. Trail cred.
One of the great merits of Will Penny is the casting. It benefited from superb acting in the supporting parts: as it is a cowboy film in the proper sense of the word, by which I mean a tale of cattle drovers and their life, Ben Johnson and Slim Pickens were perfectly cast and did a great job, as they always did, great riders and ropers that they were. Anthony Zerbe was very convincing as Dutchy, I thought, and Lee Majors solid as Blue. The cowboy scenes come across as authentic, and the distressed costumes and real nineteenth century firearms all help. We see how tough and harsh life on the frontier really was. There is no glamor. And it’s cold!
The late Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, always a perceptive critic, said, “What we forget is that fairly few people in the old West were engaged in striding down Main Street at high noon or shooting it out with Wyatt Earp. Most of the people in the West were cowboys, and most of their time was spent in the company of cows.” That is true, of course, and in Will Penny we feel we are seeing the real West.
Ebert continued: “Another fact — one that has gone unrecognized in every Western I can remember — was that most of the cowboys were new arrivals in America, and spoke with a variety of European accents. Dodge City was probably as much a polyglot collection of recent immigrants as the Lower East Side of New York. Will Penny occupies this land of ‘real’ cowboys most convincingly. Its heroes are not very handsome or glamorous. Its title character … is a man in his mid-40s who has been away from society so long he hardly knows how to react when he is treated as a civilized being.”
Bruce Dern is good, as always, as the psychotic hillbilly son of the mad preacher. Jon Gries, the director’s son, who played the young boy, said that he was genuinely frightened of Dern on the set and that was good – the terror shows!
The tough and tender are marvelously blended and neither overdone. With a rough cowboy (Heston) befriending a mother and child this could have become sentimental or mawkish. That it was neither is a tribute to fine acting by Joan Hackett as Catherine and Jon as her boy Horace, as well as the writing.
You so want Heston and Hackett to get together, you are willing them on. But the ending is right. Will Penny is a truly decent man. He has no graces, is gauche, illiterate and has, tragically, no experience of building and sustaining relationships. I don’t think Heston has ever done anything finer. He himself said that he thought it was his best performance. He once said, “The script for Will Penny was one of the best I ever read; it made a marvelous Western.”
Then again, the picture is visually splendid. With the great Lucien Ballard behind the lens and the Inyo National Forest in front of it you are bound to be in for a pictorially beautiful work and you are not disappointed.
The music is a bit ho-hum. But the only real weak point of the picture is Donald Pleasence. He overacted in a number of Westerns, including some spaghettis, and he sure doesn’t hold back in this one. His scenery-chewing performance as psychotic father-figure with almost as nasty sons seems to have been modeled on the Cleggs in Wagonmaster, only there it was well done.
The Christmas tree plays a part because it is when Penny and the boy ride out in midwinter in search of a suitable one to celebrate the festival that they truly bond, and we imagine that Penny, the boy and his mother will form a new family unit (they’ll probably then set off for California; they usually did in Westerns). The tree in the house symbolizes family, and also hope for the future. When the bad guys burst in so crudely, one of the first things they do is throw the sapling on the fire.
History.com tells us that in fact Christmas trees were seen as pagan symbols and not accepted by most Americans in the nineteenth century. The Puritans in Massachusetts had fined people for celebrating the sacred festival with ‘heathen’ symbols, and this disapproval lasted. But in England Queen Victoria and Prince Albert introduced the custom and in the latter part of the nineteenth century the Christmas tree gradually became ‘respectable’ in the US.
There’s a nice little reference to Shane at the end, and indeed the ending is quite moving – until the spell is broken by a trashy song warbled by Don Cherry. Never mind, it’s an excellent film and certainly the best offering of ’68. Put it on the must-see list.
14 Responses
Ir was only a supporting part, but Heston was convincing in The Big Country.
Our next-but-one review!
Jeff
Jeff, good write-up about WILL PENNY(filmed 1967, released 1968). At the NATIONAL COWBOY & WESTERN HERITAGE MUSEUM in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma at the entrance of the Dub & Mozelle Richardson Theater are two statues. As you go in this movie theater on the right is a statue of John Wayne and on the left is a statue of Charlton Heston. Heston is depicted as Will Penny.
Take care and stay healthy. Walter S.
Hi Walter
If I ever get to Oklahoma I’ll certainly visit that museum. I’m glad the statue-maker chose Will Penny to commemorate Heston’s Western contribution. (I can’t see anyone bothering to make a statue of him as Buffalo Bill).
Jeff
Jeff,
a nice, ‘new’ website now!
my best wishes for 2022!
Bart
Thanks! Happy New Year to you too.
Jeff
Give me one film where Donald Pleasence is not over acting !? PersonnaIly I like Heston in his westerns as much as in his other films and yes, I like Major Dundee ver much even slaughtered by its producteurs (I am french, nobody is perfect to quote-part Billy Wilder…) JM
The Great Escape. [SPOILERS] The scenes where he makes the shattering discovery that will prevent him from escaping with the rest of the pows, meaning he’ll be punished for their escape by being tortured and murdered by the Germans, and where he’s trying to convince the chief pow escape organizer that he’s really okay and can go along with them. Brutal.
Also, non-western trivia point: DP really had escaped from at least three POW camps during WWII and he was on his way to escape from the fourth when the war ended.
Some technical problems are impeding regular reader Jean-Marie from posting his comment, which he has sent me by e-mail. Here it is:
Give me one film where Donald Pleasence is not over acting !? PersonnaIly I like Heston in his westerns as much as in his other films and yes, I like Major Dundee ver much even slaughtered by its producteurs (I am french, nobody is perfect to quote-part Billy Wilder…) JM
Why is my comment still in moderation after several days? I was able to comment on the blog you apparently shut down in December.
Hope you can comment now. Some teething troubles, I’m afraid!
Jeff
My favorite Chuck performance. I think this fine film would make a good companion piece with MONTE WALSH (1970).
Great piece on an excellent film. The new Blu ray of this is fabulous.
I’ve heard it said of Will Penny that it “deglamorizes” the Old West. But is this true? Certainly, this film dilates on the harsh, coarse, unsentimental and dangerous aspects of the cowboy’s existence. As related in Will Penny, the cattle drive wasn’t exactly peaches n’ cream. The elements were pitiless, the work difficult and hazardous, and the recompense anything but lavish. The food wasn’t up to Brillat-Savarin’s standards, it was served by surly cooks, and your fellow cowhands stank to high heaven.
But is telling the unvarnished truth “deglamorization”? In point of fact, there aren’t many Westerns that actually glamorize the Old West. Now there are certainly quite a few that sanitize it somewhat. These films show little of the grime and the blood and the pain and the fear and the isolation that were surely common in this place and time. But prettifying something isn’t the same thing as glamorizing it. The Western genre has never pretended that life in the Old West was opulent, refined and beautiful–in short, glamorous. On the contrary, the genre has done a good job of showing life in the Old West as the dangerous, impoverished and nasty grind it so often was. But the Western generally did so in a reserved, somewhat oblique way. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not sure we gain much by witnessing Comanche tortures, men getting their heads blown off, and families living on the verge of starvation.
Will Penny, however, gets us a bit closer to the latter than most Westerns, and that gritty authenticity is definitely part of its appeal. But rather than deglamorization, this is deglorification. No great victories and prizes are won in this film. Charlton Heston’s character of Will Penny doesn’t pluck a motherlode of gold from a creek, he doesn’t fill his pockets with money at the end of an epic cattle drive, he doesn’t outgun the badman on Front Street at high noon, and heck, he doesn’t even ride off into the sunset with the beautiful girl.
Will Penny, this simple–but far from stupid–and humble man is an anonymous cowhand. That is his lot and his life. And in this picture, Penny does accrue no small measure of honor from his decent treatment of a young woman (Joan Hackett’s Catherine Allen) and her son (Jon Gries’ Button Allen) cut adrift in the western wilds. Penny’s protection of mother and son, both from the harsh elements of the high mountains and from a clan of deranged monsters–played by Donald Pleasance, Bruce Dern and Gene Rutherford–is the crux of the plot. And once Will has seen Catherine and Button through the worst of it all, rather than attach himself permanently to them as they would both like, eschews this potential domestic paradise because he fears he would do more harm than good to them. Penny says an agonized adieu to them and returns to his lonesome–but familiar–existence as an Old West cowpuncher. He sacrifices for Catherine and Button, but the sacrifice isn’t glorious, and it’s dam’ sure not glamorous. It is not even religious. Rather, it is the natural, but by no means automatic, result of the fundamental decency and honor of a nameless cowboy named Will Penny.
This film scores high with me and I suspect I will appreciate it even more upon further viewings. Heston is perfect. In a world where film sophisticates deigned to give the Western its proper due, he might have won an Oscar. The abortive romance between Penny and Catherine is handled very well. Unlike romance in too many Westerns, there are no hysterics or histrionics, and the female lead isn’t a rebarbative flake. Hackett, one of the daintiest and most delicate flowers ever to grace the silver screen, turns in a fine performance. Slim Pickens is also terrific as a testy but witty keeper of the chuckwagon.
Additionally, David Raksin’s score is marvelous. There was a certain type of music in the air at that time–1966 thru 1970–that wasn’t entirely classical or pop, and it had a certain ethereal wistfulness about it. Songs by Harry Nilsson, Burt Bacharach, and Jimmy Webb exemplified this sound, and Raksin’s score does, too. His music is used rather sparingly in Will Penny, but it meshes well with the film’s dreamy and slightly melancholy mood.
Will Penny, with the exception of febrile performances from Pleasance and Dern, is an austere, understated and unpretentious Western. It is also deeply and earnestly sympathetic to the common man of the Old West, the cowboy. Will Penny is, I dare say, something of a forgotten classic of the Western genre.