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Outsiders 1977
Insurgents and interlopers, laying claim to the land while the old traditions wither on the vine, neglected at the margins. Struggles for power are routed through the guise of opposing religious systems, which were not designed for this purpose, but can be adapted to serve it nonetheless. Exhibits how these kind of conflicts have been playing out long before the scourge of European colonialism even fully took root, history forged through the opposition and eventual fusion of dueling forms. The…
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Apache Drums 1951
Another one of those spindly B Westerns that lays out the psychotic American agenda of genocide and settlement with stunning starkness. Faceless and nameless (aside from the one good former Apache, who’s turned toward the light), the Natives here are a Freudian symbolic horde, the primal resurgence of the land’s inherent qualities, which can never fully be conquered. An attempt is made to cast out violence, with the cowboy enforcer exiled into the waste, a gesture toward civic cleansing that…
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Human Desire 1954
Everything significant here is summed up by, and contained between, two key bits of dialogue: the prostitute’s ‘all women are the same, they just have different faces’ speech and Vicki’s plea for mercy at the end. Within this sliver we get a stifling portrait of narrow lives as restrictively defined as a train car passageway, the typical Lang fatalism but with a more pointedly feminine perspective. Glenn Ford plays his usual milquetoast, who here dips a toe into the possibility…
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