BEFORE: I keep forgetting to mention that after watching "Solo" I appeared on a podcast with my friends James and Adam, where I was the token "Star Wars superfan" weighing in on the new film. I had a lot of fun doing this, and it seems to be getting some good attention in the social media. If you would like to hear my super-geeky Star Wars musings in audio form, please visit:
https://wrongreel.com/podcast/wr390-solo-a-star-wars-story-han-shot-first/
There are some spoilers in that podcast, so please be sure to go see "Solo" first, otherwise proceed with caution.
One of the things I mentioned there was how much "Solo" reminded me of a Western movie, which makes sense when you consider that the first "Star Wars" film was pitched as a Western movie, only set in space. George Lucas combined the tropes of Westerns with the setting of a "Flash Gordon" serial, and also threw in a bunch of stuff from Japanese movies to make the original film. (And trust me, nobody at the time realized how well it was all going to work.)
But after watching that sci-fi film that reminded me very much of a Western film - in particular the shots of Han entering the bar and approaching the card game, and then later the close-up of his hand hovering near his holster seemed STRAIGHT out of an old film with Gary Cooper or something - now I'm going to follow that up with a REAL Western film, as Clint Eastwood carries over from "Heartbreak Ridge". (just imagine, John Williams' "Star Wars" music paired with that Ennio Morricone whistling/wah-wah track from "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly"...)
THE PLOT: A Missouri farmer joins a Confederate guerrila unit and winds up on the run from the Union soldiers who murdered his family.
AFTER: While I don't think that if you've seen one Western, you've seen 'em all - I do kind of believe that if you've seen 20 or 30 of them, as I have, then you've essentially seen 'em all. They all borrow from the same stories, cobbling together this bit or that bit from other movies, and the end result is usually (more or less) the same. But you can say that about any genre, from musicals to sci-fi to documentaries. What you end up judging is the WAY that any movie puts the things you've probably seen before together, does it do that in a new, or at least interesting, way?
In many ways this is the ultimate Western, because with a running time of 2 hours and 15 min., there's room to include a lot of the things we've come to expect, and stitch them together into some kind of coherent whole. There's the peaceful Native American sidekick, but also a bunch of Comanches that are more warlike. There's the Civil War veteran who's still bitter about not only the war, but the way that the Union soldiers looted his land and killed his family before he signed up. (Heck, wouldn't you be?) OK, so the Union soldiers are the bad guys here, and that may not be PC any more, but this was made in the 1970's and people were still flying Confederate flags then and saying that the South would rise again. Umm, yeah, still waiting on that one, except that the KKK and neo-Nazis were back in the news this year, and that's probably not what anyone had in mind.
The Union soldiers promised to treat the ex-Confederate soldiers fairly in this film, and then proceeded to do the exact opposite. The first option was to kill them with kindness, and when that didn't work, they tried using real bullets. And this was AFTER they surrendered and pledged loyalty to the Re-United States. Then the Union General (senator?) claimed he was doing them a favor by killing them, so they wouldn't have to go through life as the losers of the war, or something like that. Which is a bit like crapping on their heads and then making them thank them for the new hat. Since Josey Wales refused to surrender and take the pledge, he managed to avoid getting executed, but this made him an outlaw on the run. And OF COURSE the unit of Union soldiers sent to track him down is the SAME ONE that killed his family, would you expect anything less?
So he heads for Mexico, and picks up various companions along the way - first it's a fellow Rebel soldier, then the older Indian, then he liberates a squaw from indentured servitude at a trading post, and then there's a dog who joins the gang at some point, but I'm not sure how. Well, anyone looking for a lone outlaw might not notice a guy traveling with so many friends, at least. Eventually there's a family heading down to a border town that they rescue from some Comancheros, and these people are headed for what they believe to be a prosperous mining town, only guess what, it ain't so prosperous any more. But by the time Josey and his crew arrive, with their supplies, he's essentially the richest man in town, so it's as good a place as any to lay low for a while, avoiding both the Union soldiers and the freelance bounty hunters.
It's only when he accidentally crosses paths with a carpetbagging snake-oil salesman that the heat gets put back on him, and that leads to a final showdown with the Union soldiers, because it turns out you can negotiate with the Comanches for peace, but the boys in blue are just never going to let things go - so therefore they all deserve to die. Umm, right. Why not just go the extra few miles into Mexico and set up the homestead there, just out of their jurisdiction? Does it really mean so much to you to live in Texas? If the Texas town's not all it's cracked up to be, why not cross the Rio Grande to be on the safe side? Kudos, by the way, for not making the Indians the villains, they turn out to be so much more reasonable about things than the U.S. government is.
This film does appear on that list of "1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", and despite some changes every year, I believe it's still there. So I've now seen 414 of those films, despite the fact that they keep removing some every year to make room for new ones.
Also starring Chief Dan George, Sondra Locke (last seen in "Sudden Impact"), Bill McKinney (last seen in "The Parallax View"), John Vernon (last seen in "Topaz"), Sam Bottoms (last seen in "Seabiscuit"), Geraldine Keams, Paula Trueman (last seen in "Dirty Dancing"), Charles Tyner (last seen in "Harold and Maude"), Woodrow Parfrey (last seen in "Sam Whiskey"), Joyce Jameson (last seen in "Show Boat"), Sheb Wooley (last seen in "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers"), Royal Dano (last seen in "The Trouble with Harry"), Matt Clark (last seen in "A Million Ways to Die in the West"), Will Sampson (last seen in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"), John Quade (last seen in "High Plains Drifter"), John Russell, William O'Connell, Len Lesser (last seen in "Bells Are Ringing"), Buck Kartalian, Doug McGrath, John Mitchum, Bruce M. Fischer, Robert F. Hoy, Madeleine Taylor Holmes, Cissy Wellman, John Davis Chandler, Kyle Eastwood, with a cameo from Richard Farnsworth (last seen in "The Straight Story")
RATING: 6 out of 10 pounds of beef jerky
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