Word: yuma
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...smart, violent, defiantly quirky No Country for Old Men, coming in November. Or when a director with a hit movie on his résumé charms financiers outside the studio. That's how James Mangold, fresh from Walk the Line, got to remake the 1957 western 3:10 to Yuma, with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale...
...these national parks that we had 350 rangers watching every move if we step on one indigenous plant." Hollywood has also lost its teeming cavalry of saddle-up stars and stuntmen. Peter Fonda, who directed the fine western The Hired Hand in the 1970s and appears in the new Yuma, recalls that before shooting began, "they had what's called cowboy camp. A lot of the younger actors hadn't shot a pistol, didn't know how to ride horse. You know, it's hard to make a horse hit a mark...
That's the appeal of 3:10 to Yuma, which opened Sept. 7 and was the box-office champ of its first weekend. Like the 1957 film, it's about Dan Evans (Bale), a family man on a failing farm who lost a leg in the Civil War. He sees a payday, and a chance for redemption in his son's eyes, by escorting the killer Ben Wade (Crowe) to justice. Screenwriters Michael Brandt and Derek Haas have opened up the action to include a trek in which Wade outsmarts or just kills most of his captors; and there...
...ever-present notebook. We are drawn more to his insouciant spirit than we are to the earnest, hard-pressed (and well-played) Dan. When the rancher, desperately needing the $200 fee, signs on to escort the captured outlaw through hard country in order to catch the 3:10 to Yuma where a courthouse, a trial and, doubtless, a necktie party await Ben, we know where our moral interest is supposed to lie. But the road agent is a really cute and seductive guy, steadily luring Dan into reluctantly bonding with...
...seen one or two comparisons of 3:10 to Yuma with Unforgiven. These are not entirely apt. Mangold's offering lacks the blackness and absurdity of Clint Eastwood's great film. It is more in the vein of Anthony Mann's westerns of the 1950s - trim, efficiently paced, full of briskly stated conflicts that edge up to the dark side, but never fully embrace it. That's quite all right. 3:10 to Yuma reminds us that well-made westerns - precisely because they are such a ritualized and conventionalized form - have an ability to isolate moral conflicts in spare, essentially...