![]() ![]() The first half is a straight drama following Burns as he rides into a small town and reunites with Jerry (Gena Rowlands), the wife of one of his best friends. The only thing he can’t figure is how to escape from the world he’s worked so hard to avoid. He knows how to instigate a bar-fight without throwing a punch, how to break out of a prison, and how to survive a good beating. His idea of a hearty meal is six fried eggs and coffee, and his preferred mode of transportation is a skittish horse named Whiskey. He carries no identification, no draft card, and roams as he pleases, pausing in one place only long enough to cut the barbed wire fences castrating the endless prairie. ![]() “Jack” Burns ( Kirk Douglas) doesn’t care much for society. Instead, it follows a character who could literally have walked off the set of a Howard Hawks cattle drive picture as he rides into 1960s New Mexico. Lawmen archetype, accusing the very civilization so lauded in the era of John Ford and Anthony Mann as the same one that drives the desperate to crime.īut David Miller’s Lonely Are the Brave (1962) takes a different approach to the neo-Western. David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water(2016) updates the Outlaw vs. Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men(2007) finds the Western’s traditional definitions of “good” and “evil” lacking, suggesting that the white-hat heroes of yore are no match for the amoral chaos of twentieth century modernity. Usually these themes-Manifest Destiny, the struggle between wilderness and civilization, man’s ability to decide his own fate-are then found wanting. Usually when we refer to neo-Westerns, we mean movies that transplant the themes and iconography of the Western genre into modern day settings. ![]()
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