Word: barbarosa
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...BARBAROSA FRED SCHEPISES NEW FILM, is a wonderfully subtle and sly exploration of the two basic elements that have always defined the great westerns, land scrape and legend. The vast desert expanses dwarf the figures riding across them, and likewise, the big myths of the West have always swallowed up the real actions of those figures Unfortunately, in recent Westerns both elements have been undermined. The legends have been pulled out of glorious iconic two-dimensionality and reduced to human levels, and the landscape have been deflated from three-dimensional grandeur into a series of all-too-familiar picture postcard...
...tough-guy movie hero these days, it doesn't matter whether he can dish it out; he has to be able to take it. He must be a Zen stoic who overdoses on pain in order to prove himself to himself. In Barbarosa, Willie Nelson lies placidly in his own new grave; he cauterizes his own stomach wound with flaming gunpowder; an enemy's bullet creases his cheek-not a word, not a whine, not so much as a flinch. In The Challenge, Scott Glenn dines on live eels and beetles; stands buried up to his neck...
...Both Barbarosa and The Challenge trace the search for a spiritual father who will teach the male lessons of energy and discipline. The films mean to display these virtues as well and get a head start toward that goal by casting, as the mentors, Willie Nelson and, in The Challenge, Toshiro Mifune, two sternly noble faces worthy of being carved on any cinematic Rushmore. Each man carries an aura of stolid grace and flashing moral strength...
Nelson is Barbarosa, an aging outlaw who has grown tired of living up to his 30-year legend. Gary Busey plays (engagingly, as always) a renegade farm boy who wants to be part of that legend and, if he can, extend it into Western myth. For all its genre trappings, Barbarosa is essentially a comedy about friendship; both the humor and the amity are infectious. Australian Director Schepisi (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith) uses his telephoto lens to caress the rugged vistas and visages of West Texas like a melancholy lover. Time-lapse shadows lope across a mountain range, eloquently...
...spring of Barbarosa's plot is an endless battle between the outlaw and a Mexican family he married into decades ago. There is a blood feud in The Challenge, too, as bloody as it is feudal. Two swords have been in an old Japanese family for six centuries. Now, in modern Kyoto, two brothers fight to the death for possession of those swords. Life, it would seem, is cheap in the mystic East, at least when an Occidental director like John Frankenheimer invades Japan to make a martial-arts movie. Glenn and Mifune invade the industrial fortress of Mifune...