Word: badman
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...same rare gift for making heroic tales from small-town street sweepings is on view in his new novel. Pretty Boy Floyd (Simon & Schuster; 444 pages; $24), written with McMurtry's screenwriting partner, Diana Ossana, is a lesser story, loosely tethered to the life and death of the renowned badman Charles Arthur Floyd (1904-34). But like Lonesome Dove, it beguiles the reader with a golden haze of lovely lies...
...second villain appears from over another horizon -- that of the future, perhaps. He is Mox Mox, not so much a Western badman as a modern serial killer who likes to burn people. And Garza, the bank robber, is shown to be as shrewd and ruthless as Call in his prime, and much quicker. Ranger or not, Call is really too old for this kind of thing...
...likes of "the Great MacDaddy" ("Got a tombstone disposition and a graveyard mind"), who would turn white values on their head by being the "baddest nigger." In the 1960s black militants used such folk heroes as role models; Black Panther Bobby Seale named his son after a famous badman of 19th century ballads named Stagolee, "a bad nigger off the block...
...notable exceptions, have been background music. The reason is not simply that Paul Newman and Robert Redford make a lovely pair, cuddly though they are. It is a matter of social realities and society's perceptions. A male actor can fly a plane, fight a war, shoot a badman, pull off a sting, impersonate a big cheese in business or politics. Men are presumed to be interesting. A female can play a wife, play a whore, get pregnant, lose her baby, and, um, let's see ... Women are presumed to be dull...
...another film from Czechoslovakia, made by Oldrich Lipsky, is a parody of an American western. Filmmakers of all countries seem to go through a period where they have to imitate old films. This one not only has a character named Lemonade Joe, but also offers Winifred Goodman, Horace Badman, and Tornado...