Word: schepisi
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Given this, it is surprising how fresh and purely elemental a Western Barbarosa is Director Schepisi (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. The Devil's Playground) is Australian, so instead of being overwhelmed by the burden of a cinematic and cultural past, he strips away the accumulated layers and gets at the core of Western legend. In this respect Barbarosa's strength and vitality recalls the poignant Westerns of another outsider. Sergio Leone, but without their cutting edge of nastiness...
Directed by Fred Schepisi...
...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 suggesting the irony of a professional in the twilight of his career. He is too old and lonely...
...Thus Schepisi lulls the audience into the colonists' state of mind. They are sympathetic to Jimmie Blacksmith's plight, and yet they want him to defeat this system on its own terms. He finally finds decent employment and marries, he shuts himself off from his Aborigme heritage, and yet' there's that impenetrable look in his eyes...
...scare the audience. Unlike Straw Dogs, or a Deer Hunter, the film does not manipulate the audience by quick cuts to gruesome scenes, so that one fears every sudden change of scene. That, in effect, is manipulated terror: one fears what gore might come next. In Jimmie Blacksmith, however, Schepisi imbues his simple close-ups with increasing echoes of horror. Slowly these scenes draw the audience into an ever-widening circle of violence. Sometimes the scenes are frightening. Sometimes not. It is the randomness one fears. One cannot hear a baby scream, or watch someone mixing soup for dinner, without...