Word: guns
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...wrong to think that Westerns were flights from Cold War reality or the political issues of the day. The form attracted serious young writers, like Gore Vidal, a graduate of TV's Golden Age of live drama, who wrote The Left-Handed Gun, a Billy the Kid film that one critic called "Freud on the Range." There were plenty of mature, psychologically complex Westerns. In the original 3:10 to Yuma, the career killer and decent farmer hole up in a hotel room and have an extended existentialist conversation - like Sartre or Beckett, but at gunpoint. In Anthony Mann...
...movies, the work of the Western was to reconcile the individual and civilization, the man with the gun and the pretty school teacher. For the hero to be the best shot was also to say that the little people in the community were safe as long as it had a strong, armed protector - a one-man army, a preternatural policeman, the Old Testament God - on their side...
...audience needed a rooting interest, and because Clint was so damn cool, he established the new mode: hero by default. The good guy was the one with the fastest gun, the meanest scowl and top billing. And that perpetual three-day beard that Toshiro Mifune had worn in the same role in Yojimbo; in Hollywood Westerns, the hero's visage was typically hairless, while villains sported a dastardly mustache. Eastwood's scruff became a fashion statement that lives today on the carefully unshaven faces of pop stars and young actors. And his surliness, transposed to the Dirty Harry Callahan character...
...Leone's Fistful of Dollars). Leone followed up with For a Few Dollars More--surely the most honest title ever given a sequel--and the spaghetti western craze was born. Django, director Sergio Corbucci's bleak riff on Fistful, with its hero lugging a coffin that has a machine gun inside, spawned at least 50 movies named Django. The most recent, Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django, which played to rapt crowds at the recent Venice and Toronto film festivals but has no American distributor, is a wildly imaginative pastiche in which all the Japanese actors read their lines...
...feel?" says Novick. The answers make a much chronicled war fresh, real and heartbreaking--an elderly woman weeping like a child about being shipped to an internment camp or Senator Daniel Inouye recalling rifle-butting a German prisoner who was reaching, it turned out, not for a gun but for some family photos. "That's war," Inouye says grimly...