Word: frontier
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Consider, for example, Altman's 1971 film, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. In one scene, a young, rangy, buck-toothed cowboy (Keith Carradine) who has just spent the night in McCabe's frontier whorehouse, starts across a footbridge to purchase supplies for his trip home. He is confronted by a young gunman, one of three sent by a business conglomerate to coerce McCabe into selling out. The gunman, blond, boyish, and innocent-looking, asks Carradine what kind of gun he has. Carradine tells him, sheepishly admitting that he really doesn't know how to use it. "Come...
This scene lasts only two or three minutes, yet, like the movie as a whole, it fatally undermines the American romantic vision of the frontier West. Carradine's half-drawn gun technically fulfills the requirements of frontier etiquette, but it's a false fulfillment--a fraud. And so, Altman is suggesting, are the conventions of the Western. Justice didn't triumph on the frontier, brutality and greed did, and that's the real story of the growth of America...
...Altman has rendered ludicrous some overused Hollywood techniques of establishing mood and tone, he has developed and refined others. His use of color is particularly striking. The monochromatic brown shading of McCabe and Mrs. Miller conveys the cold bleakness of the northwestern frontier, and the blue tones of The Long Goodbye are appropriate to the twilight world inhabited by Philip Marlowe. Perhaps Altman's most effective, moving use of color to establish mood is in Thieves Like Us (1974), a beautiful, elegiac story of innocent young love in the Depression-era South. He saturates his images with green and yellow...
...ever had. Henry Moon, the film's Texas outlaw hero, can take his place alongside Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou, John Wayne in True Grit and Jason Robards in The Ballad of Cable Hogue. A good-hearted rogue with slovenly personal habits, Moon is the essence of frontier vulgarity. He gobbles meals in a single bite, guzzles booze as if it were mother's milk and addresses women with a courtliness so exaggerated that it comes out obscene. Nicholson's repertoire of dumb grins and crazed laughs is as amusing as ever, but what makes the characterization...
...called Fishhook region south of Mondolkiri province and a strategic bulge of Cambodia from Cheom Ksan to the Mekong River. They are now fighting for control of Parrot's Beak, where the U.S. invaded in 1970 (see map). Vietnamese troops are massing in Laos, near the Cambodian frontier. When the monsoon ends in October, clearing skies will make air support possible for a major Vietnamese push south from Laos and north from South Viet Nam. If that offensive takes place, most military analysts believe Hanoi could easily take Mondolkiri and Ratanakiri provinces in a drive to dominate all of Cambodia...