Tonight I rewatched a film I hadn't seen in "maybe 15 years" - which on its own, is probably the longest amount of time I've ever spent in between viewings of a film.
Tonight I rewatched a film I remembered nothing about except the twist ending.
Tonight I saw a twist ending unfold on screen that, in the intervening years, I had completely misremembered, basically getting the entire thing backwards.
And tonight I thought back and realized it had actually…
Really lovely: definitely deserves to be placed in the same category as Ray's more famous films.
And yet I can't quite shake the feeling that the Criterion booklet kinda gets the film wrong, or at least focuses on a very surface-level interpretation. At its heart, this isn't a film about the relative benefits of one form of civilization over another, and I don't even read it as being committed to a critique of the West per se. The argument scene…
Stepping out into a light rain in Greenwich Village after watching a communist movie may well be the fulfillment of all my left-wing NYC hipster-cinephile fantasies.
But in all seriousness, this would have been a near-perfect film if it had a better ending. The final scene leaves a surprising amount up in the air, and after becoming very invested in the 196… storyline, I really needed more closure than the vague implication that "everything's gonna be alright" - especially since nothing that the characters do in that scene up until the final shot suggests that everything actually is going to be all right.
An anti-capitalist western where a badass female rancher repeatedly saves Randolph Scott's bacon… what's not to like? After viewing this from a nitrate original, I really want to research Cinecolor a bit - the color palette it provides is completely unlike anything I've ever seen, and while it can muddy the image a bit (probably one of the reasons it never caught on) it's an absolutely perfect look for a western, making almost every scene look like it's taking place in dawn or dusk, sunrise or sunset.
