Old Henry

Year 15, Day 88 - 3/29/23 - Movie #4,389

BEFORE: Tim Blake Nelson carries over from "Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio", and I felt bad for cutting today's film from the line-up a few months ago, so when I moved "The Pale Blue Eye" from April to May, that opened up a slot here in late March.  I remembered that "Minari" could slip in-between two other films with T.B.N., and this way my schedule is still full, and my count is maintained - it's kind of all about which film lands on those big "century" numbers, and one is coming up. 

It's Day 29 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Dance" (before 8 pm) and "Documentaries" (8 pm and after.) Hey, I've watched a few documentaries. Here's the line-up: 

11:00 am "Meet Me In Las Vegas" (1956)

1:15 pm "The Story of Three Loves" (1953)

3:30 pm "Shall We Dance" (1937)

5:30 pm "The Red Shoes" (1948)

8:00 pm "The Fog of War" (2003)

10:00 pm "Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt" (1989)

11:30 pm "Woodstock" (1970)

3:30 am "Harlan County, USA" (1976)

5:30 am "Battle of Midway" (1942)

Another off day for me, I've only seen "Shall We Dance" (this is the Fred Astaire movie, not the Richard Gere one...), "The Fog of War" and "Woodstock", of course.  Another 3 seen out of 9 takes me to 148 seen out of 329, down just a bit to 44.9%.

THE PLOT: A farmer takes in an injured man with a satchel of cash.  When a posse comes for the money, he must decide who to trust.  Defending a siege, he reveals a gunslinging talent that calls his true identity into question. 

AFTER: You see my reasoning, right?  There are so few actors in this film that I feel I just HAD to make room for it here, otherwise, how am I ever going to watch it?  Sure, it links with "Minari", but that one doesn't link to many other films, either.  So it feels like it's almost now or never, unlike tomorrow's film, which has such a big famous cast that I could probably fit it in lots of different places - it seems it's either feast or famine around here where linking is concerned. 

Westerns are a tricky thing, though - the genre's so played out, how do you make sure that your Western stands out, or has something that people haven't seen before?  Because if it's just all about the fact that the railroad's coming to town soon, and the corrupt mayor's buying up all the land, and also there's a gunslinger who hasn't been beat, well, I've seen all that before.  

This one honestly seemed very ho-hum, since it's just about a widower / farmer raising his son who just wants to keep to himself, but he gets dragged into a conflict when he finds a man who's been shot, next to a bag full of cash.  Well, sure, he saves the man's life, but he's also pretty sure that sooner or later, somebody's going to come looking for the man or the cash, or both.  He figures he needs to learn who this man is and whether the cash is stolen and get out ahead of this thing before it bites him in the ass. 

That's how the film starts, where it ends, though is another matter entirely.  I'll admit I didn't see it coming, but once it arrived, it sure was welcome.  I think the late twist elevated this one about the normal blandness of the genre, it was something unusual and dangerous.  No spoilers here, of course. But maybe if you're REALLY up on your Western history, you might figure out the twist before you're supposed to, who can say?  

Also starring Scott Haze (last seen in "Jurassic World: Dominion"), Gavin Lewis, Trace Adkins (last seen in "The Lincoln Lawyer"), Stephen Dorff (last seen in "A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III"), Richard Speight Jr., Max Arciniega (last seen in "Haywire"), Brad Carter (last seen in "White Boy Rick"). 

RATING: 6 out of 10 newspaper clippings