Word: westernness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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John Wayne, D.F.A., actor. He is the Western Hero, the reincarnation of all the men who brought strength and stability to an expanding nation...
Among other absurdities, this western has pretty cloud effects, photographed through such dense filters that it is hard to tell whether the scene is day or night. The tired bloodshed of the plot about gringos and greasers-as the script tastefully refers to Texans and Mexicans-is a vehicle for England's Terence Stamp, Cheapside accent and all. Would you believe that he plays a gunman raised from childhood by a band of Mexican brigands...
...Portis has succeeded in creating in Mattie Ross a triumphant character, with true grit and sand, an original piece of Americana-sort of a Portrait of Whistler's Mother as a Young Girl in Indian Territory. And he has most vividly produced a true mock western: one in which blood flows with the same impact as real tomato soup suddenly gushing out of an Andy Warhol...
Charles Portis, 34, is an Arkansas newspaperman who has fashioned a pop anti-western in the best tradition of Cat Ballou and the Ballad of Dingus Magee. For openers, his hero is a heroine: Mattie Ross, a sassy, 14-year-old Arkansan whose chief protective girdle is a dry Bible-belt faith, and who is out to avenge the murder of her daddy back in the 1870s...
...attitude. It is all rendered from the self-righteously smug "That's the way it was" point of view of the heroine half a century later. Thus the violence is imbued with a bigger-than-camp Bonnie and Clyde quality: the stock two-dimensional figures of the familiar western landscape become disfigured here with a three-dimensional reality as limbs are chopped off and buckshot imbeds itself painfully beneath facial skin...