Old Henry (Shout! Factory, 2021)

Very good

I’ve wanted to see Old Henry for some time. It’s been up on Amazon Prime but unfortunately Amazon is too mean or too lazy to offer it in the original language here in France where I live (Netflix is much better in that regard and also doesn’t have confounded advertizing), so I put it off. I understand French alright and will happily watch a French film in French but I want to see an American film in American English. You lose so much in the dubbing: the accents, the vocabulary, even sometimes the characterization (the part of the son Wyatt is made much younger with the French voice). So all in all, 2 out of 10, Prime. But in the end I watched it anyway.

In writing this review, I have a basic conundrum to start with. Do I reveal the ‘surprise’ plot twist about the true identity of the title character? I will, though, because (a) any Westernista reading this blog will definitely already know at the outset, as I did, who a certain Henry McCarty is likely to turn out to truly be, (b) the picture is three years old now and we all know anyway, and (c) there’s another surprise at the end which I won’t reveal, thus my conscience is clear, ha ha.

So, yes, you already got it, Billy the Kid did not die under Pat Garrett’s gun in Fort Sumner back in July ’81. He survived to run a remote (and rather ratty) pig farm in Oklahoma in 1906. There’s has always been quite a little sub-genre of ‘the one that got away’ Western, in which famed outlaws did not perish as generally thought but escaped death and lived on. We think of Sam Shepard’s Butch Cassidy in Blackthorn, for example. William H Bonney (let’s call him that for the moment) often got away with it. This was especially true in cheaper programmers but even in bigger-budget versions Bonney does not die. In the first extant version, MGM’s 1930 picture, Garrett deliberately misses and gives Billy and his lady-love a horse to escape on. And as for the utterly trashy The Outlaw in 1943, well, let’s not even go there.

Old Henry is in fact very good. Non-Western-loving film critics (for some such career failures do exist) knocked it for rehearsing many Western clichés but they should understand that this is exactly what endears the picture to us. And in fact they aren’t clichés: they are more affectionate quotations.

It stars (and he’s outstandingly good) Tim Blake Nelson, playing the title character tough and straight, without a touch of his previous Oh Brother/Buster Scruggs humor. His whiskers alone deserve an Oscar.

He’s holed up on a remote rural homestead, his wife buried up on the hill, his teenage son getting to the bolshie stage (reminding me a little of the boy in the 3:10 remake). Gavin Lewis did very well in the role, I thought, despite the bad dubbing. He’s generally mild and obedient but when push comes to shove (and it sure come to shove) he is less docile. Henry’s past remains hidden from this son – literally, in a secret compartment of the shack – newspaper cuttings, an old pistol and so on. The lad doesn’t know who his father was.

The father and son’s daily pig-feeding grind is interrupted one day when they find a riderless horse (Michael Curtiz would have called it an empty horse) with blood on the saddle, and, riding out, Henry finds a badly wounded man (Scott Haze) and brings him back to the farm for some prairie surgery. He also finds a satchel of money and (after hesitating) brings that back too. Into the secret compartment it goes.

He’s suspicious of the fellow, though. Is he the lawman he says he is? His name is Curry. Of course I thought of outlaws. Henry’s even more suspicious when three heavily-armed men wearing badges turn up looking for Curry. But these guys don’t feel right either. They don’t look like lawmen to Henry. Their garrulous and arrogant leader, especially, who goes by the name of Ketchum, does not seem a law-abidin’ chap at all. His name, Ketchum, should also have been a clue. And this introduces the noir/whodunit vibe to the tale, which becomes increasingly strong.

This chief villain is played by Stephen Dorff, in his first Western. Mr Dorff has won the ‘Best Villain’ prize at both the MTV Movie and Blockbuster Entertainment Awards – who knew there even was such a thing. But he is pretty villainous in Old Henry, and, in the last reel (if movies these days still have reels) he is also pretty reluctant to die.

I also thought Ketchum’s sinister tracker (Max Arciniega) was pretty good, in his long white coat. I counted him the second-most dangerous of the (later larger) posse, and I thought Henry should have gunned for him first when the showdown came.

The first fake lawman to bite the dust is fed to the pigs in a way reminiscent of Mr Wu in Deadwood. But the others return with reinforcements, eight, I think, and if so, one too many, seven being, as we know, the Mystical Western Number. They have brought along Henry’s brother-in-law, Al, whom they have tried to intimidate into blabbing but he is bloody but unbowed. Now this was a bit of a surprise for me because Al was played by Trace Adkins – a surprise because I’m afraid I have not been too complimentary about Mr Adkins in Westerns before, and indeed he has been in some pretty cruddy ones, notably the worst-ever version of The Virginian in 2014. But here he was really rather good, I thought, in his small part.

Henry now sets about demolishing the entire gang. We’ve seen before, in other genres too, how a seemingly mild character has hidden depths and, once riled, will single-handedly dispose of any number of opponents with great efficiency, and that’s the case here. More I shall not say.

The picture is very nicely shot (as modern pictures so often are) in Tennessee locations by John Matysiak, his only Western. Though a small (and, I would guess, modest-budget) picture with limited cast and sets, it does have decent production values, and the characters in their clothes don’t look like historical re-enactors in costume, as they so often do in modern Westerns.

It was written and directed by Potsy Ponciroli (who apparently also has a couple of other Westerns in pre-production). It wasn’t only the use of Nelson that gave his film a slight Coen brothers tinge, I think, though Coens without the (dark) humor.

The picture was premièred at the Venice Film Festival. I don’t know what the intellectuals going back to their hotels in gondolas afterwards thought of it. But I’d go so far as to say that this is a must-see, at least if you are even half a Western fan. I look forward to seeing it in English.