Monte Walsh (1970)

There’s an elegiac tone to this story of aging cowboys. The glory days are over for the men who used to ride the open ranges, and now they are hanging on to whatever work they can find in a shrinking rural economy. Distant corporate owners make the decisions about how the ranches are run. What used to be “money” is now “capital.”

Plot. Monte Walsh (Lee Marvin) and Chet Rollins (Jack Palance) are old saddle pals, resisting the changes being ushered in by the new century. Monte’s identity is inseparable from the riding and roping horseman he’s been all his life. A sharp shooter with a pistol, he can still ride an untamed horse, though it demolishes corral fences, knocks down porch roofs, and overturns a water tank.

Just like the old days, he enjoys a good drunk and a good fistfight. He also enjoys the company of a saloon girl (Jeanne Moreau) who cancels her “appointments” when he’s in town for a midnight call. She’s been holding out for a marriage proposal from him, and he’s been waiting to put enough “capital” together to properly provide for her.

Lee Marvin

Chet is cut from the same cloth, though he’s willing to hang up his spurs to marry the widow of a hardware shop owner and help run the store. The transition doesn’t trouble him so much, as he’s getting too old to be spending all day in the saddle.

Matters worsen when a corporate boss orders lay-offs, and their friend Shorty (Mitch Ryan) is let go with two others, simply because they are the youngest cowboys in the outfit. Desperate for a dollar, they try rustling, and then a hold-up attempt at the hardware store goes bad. Chet is killed by a shot from Shorty’s gun.

The losses mount up sharply for Monte, as death takes not only his pal but also his girlfriend, who is felled by poor health, consumption we assume. And he is left to a final confrontation with Shorty, whose hard-luck life has led him into a world of trouble.

Jack Palance

Comment. Monte Walsh is more a character study than a story, as if to say there are no more stories to be told of the frontier. The time of adventure is long over, as Jumpin’ Joe (Bo Hopkins) laments. Reduced to fixing fences, he finally puts an end to his misery with a spectacular ride on his horse over the edge of a sharp slope.

It’s a melancholy portrayal of westerners who have outlived the Old West. Dorothy Johnson tells a similar story in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” For Monte, it is one loss after another, but he sustains them with a kind of dignity and fortitude. In the end, he is not quite alone. There is still his horse, which we last see him talking to as they ride off into the sage.

Wrapping up. Based on a novel by Jack Schaefer, this is a beautifully photographed film, the wide-screen exteriors shot in Arizona. The realistic costuming is dusty and sweat stained. Marvin’s hats are especially true to the period. His slouch-brimmed Stetson is pushed up in front, and he trades it for a brand new, undented Boss of the Plains to wear to a funeral.

Lee Marvin and Jeanne Moureau

The performances are fine. The three lead actors seem well suited to each other. Palance is a warm and friendly presence. As saddle pals, the two men are like a pair of old, well-worn boots. Moureau and Marvin are believable as long-time lovers, as when they lie together in a post-coital glow and her arms keep getting in the way as he tries to roll a cigarette. Their final scene, as he sits by her deathbed, is a simple but tenderly moving farewell.

William Fraker, best known as a cinematographer, directed. The opening credits are shown over pen-and-ink renderings of Charles Russell paintings. Then as if to pin this faithful replica of the past to not one but two points in time, we get an echo of another era in the title song, sung by Mama Cass. The film was remade for TV in 2003 with Tom Selleck in the title role.

Monte Walsh is currently available at amazon and Barnes&Noble. For more of Tuesday’s Overlooked Movies and TV, click on over to Todd Mason’s blog.

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Source: imdb.com

Coming up: Harry Leon Wilson, The Lions of the Lord (1903)

Commentary: Family values in the western

Two westerns have been on my mind lately: Elmore Leonard’s Last Stand at Saber River (1959) and Louis L’Amour’s The Quick and the Dead (1973). Add to that another, Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1949). All of them concern small nuclear families on the frontier that are being menaced by villains.

In Schaefer’s Wyoming, the villain is a cattle baron who simply wants settlers off his open range. The mysterious stranger Shane, takes up residence with a settler family, the Starretts, then defends them by killing the cattleman’s hired gunslinger. The story is told by a boy, who has only a boy’s understanding of conflict and danger, so the violence is muted.

A decade later, Leonard’s novel, set in Arizona, whittles this story down to a long confrontation between a settler and a whole family of villains. Civil War veteran, Cable, has been off fighting for the Confederacy. After being wounded several times, he is sent home. There he finds that Union sympathizers have taken over his house and pastures. He has to evict them by force in chapter 1, and for the rest of the novel he must defend family and property. It’s kill or be killed.

L’Amour blends these two stories and sets his short novel in Colorado, where his family, the McKaskels, is protected from a nasty gang of villains by a Shane-like frontiersman and gunman, Con Vallian. The atmosphere from the start is another one of kill or be killed. While the killing in Shane takes place at a saloon in town, Leonard and L’Amour bring it right to the family’s doorstep.

Fiction, including westerns, is a product of the time when it was written. And put in chronological order, from 1949 to 1973, these three westerns make an interesting progression. While the central situation is the same—family vs. menacing villains—the escalation of violence from Schaefer to L’Amour is notable.

Shane. I have come to read Shane as a postwar story in tune with the reentry of WWII soldiers to the homeland. Trained to kill, many of them survivors of fierce combat, these returning veterans were not all successful making the transition to peacetime. We know now from modern psychology, especially after Vietnam and with wars in the Middle East, that the stress of life-and-death conditions can be traumatizing.

Shane can be read as a return from the killing fields to hearth and home. Like the combat veteran, Shane has a history he does not speak of, and he attempts to leave it behind by becoming another kind of man, a farmer like Starrett. Unlike the film, which preserves Shane’s identity as a gunman, Schaefer has him actually put away his gun belt, like a past he wants to disown.

The lesson of the story is that Shane is forever marked by his past. Like the returning veteran forever changed by his experience on the battlefield, he’s fated never to settle down into family life and the workaday world. Most of all, he can never find peace.

There is sadness and a sense of loss as he rides off at the end, but only after there is no longer need for his services as a gunman. His job is done. For Starrett, the range war and the killing are also over, and the novel ends with him at the center of stability and restored order—husband, father, and respected community leader.