05/10/2015
Cowboy- Not everyone in west was gunfighters, they had cattle men too.
Your movie lesson for the day. Don't watch Cowboy staring Glen Ford and Jack Lemmon expecting a light comedy! It is far from the usual cute fluff you would expect from a story of a Chicago hotel clerk going west. Filmed in 1958 the Technicolor picture is crisp and clear but don't expect the same from the plot! I guess they were too close to the sixties to have a cut and dried, good guy bad guy scenario. Instead it is an interesting portrayal of how humans shape one another, without even realizing it. Just don't go into it expecting a Roy Rogers and I think you will enjoy it.
Recently there have been a lot of westerns come out that try to present an “authentic” picture of the old west Appaloosa, True Grit, and Assassination of Jessie James for example. I have a real problem with these, it seems to me that their makers watched to many black and whites when they were growing up and their parents forgot to mention to them that it was the limitation of film not to have color, not the limitation of that time! I know it may seem petty but that is one of my major pet peeves with modern westerns, they have so very little color. But don't get me wrong I have nothing against black and white, if you want to film in B/W then fine! But if you film in color make it look like the real world. Trees were still green, the sky was still blue, and if women bought material for curtains and dresses do you really think they bought only black and brown! For goodness sake purple dye was around 1500 Before Christ! Forgive me I begin to rant. I think the reason they do it is because nowadays access to western era props is so limited and expensive. If they shoot a western today they have to come in and set up the whole town from scratch, there are no set and waiting western towns like there were in the 40's and 50's. So its cheaper to just go through with a truckload of brown paint and make all the buildings the look the same. And as for the décor inside, they don't even bother most of the time. People back then liked nice colorful things just as much as we do now. Probably they liked them more because they appreciated them and didn't take them for granted like we do today. Open Range points this out slightly
about the tea set. Remember the Indians sold their lands and their spirit for bolts of calico and pretty glass beads.
So what am I trying to say with all of this? Well Cowboy is an unusual film for the time. They were trying to present the west with a little less hollywood and a little more realism. For that day in age that was a really novel idea and my hat goes off to them. Riding 20 hours a day does get a little old, even if it is “across the purple sage under a never ending sky” There were days the cowboys swore to themselves once they reached town they would quit cowboying, take up shopkeeping and never look at another beef! The cows were wild, most of the horses mean, the work long and the nights cold. A lot of the boys lived from one paycheck to another, they lived hard and as a result many of them got hard. Cowboy shows this and yet the towns don't all look like creepy ghost towns, they are alive, bustling with the energy. The rooms are furnished in the colorful fashion of the time. Those who notice props will have feast for their eyes wallpapers, lamps, fixtures, fabrics and nicknacks just like they were really lived in.
In short Cowboy presents a different side of the west than you usually see in movies, one that maybe wasn't so appealing. Is everything in the movie accurate? Give me a break! Especially when he gets in the train car to help the cows get up. I was raised around cows and I promise if you want them to get up you don't grab them by the head and twist, thats what you do to put the cow on the ground! Instead you grab their tail and twist that! But who cares it was a touching part of the movie and they were making a movie not a cow handling instruction manual. So next time you don't know what to watch give Cowboy a try, don't go expecting a shoot-em-up but a deliberate plot, decent acting, a look at human nature and a window into another time, you won't be disappointed.
