Why The Great Train Robbery isn't a Western.

         

The Great Train Robbery (1903)

1903’s The Great Train Robbery is often credited as being the first film in the western genre. Although it shares many conventions with the genre; including horses, trains, and bandits, it isn’t really a western, but rather a contemporary film for its time.

          Edwin S. Porter’s film was billed upon release as a, “Faithful imitation of genuine ‘hold ups’ made famous by various outlaw bands in the far west”. This is of course in the present tense. Westerns are period films dealing with the old west. The Great Train Robbery is an account of events that were still happening at the time. Train robberies were still common place in the early 1900’s, most famously the Fairbank Train Robbery of 1900 in Arizona. The film features characters dressed in styles of the time in response to actual occurrences of the time. This makes The Great Train Robbery more of a heist film than a western.

          Another argument for it being a film of its time is the number of true westerns that take place in the same time period as The Great Train Robbery’s release. These include such films as The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Shootist, and True Grit.
         A film must be working within a genre, and there were genre films of the time, such as comedy and actualities. The Great Train Robbery, a milestone in editing and filmmaking in general, isn’t one of them. 

Hal Ashby in the 70's

Hal Ashby started out as an editor for films such as The Russians are Coming The Russians are Coming and In the Heat of the Night before making his directorial debut with 1970’s The Landlord. He directed a total of 7 films in the 1970’s, becoming one of the defining auteurs of the New Hollywood Cinema. His films are socially conscious in the vein of Robert Altman or John Cassavetes rather than the more violent films of Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma and Francis Ford Coppolla.

                The Landlord, starring a very young Beau Bridges, is about an upper-class white man who becomes the landlord of an inner-city all black apartment building. The film is probably Bridges best role. His work is down to earth and humorous. Like many Ashby characters, he feels alienated and out of place among his peers.  Lee Grant almost steals the movie as Bridges’ prejudiced mother, for which she earned an Academy Award nomination. The film stands out to me because of its realistic portrayal of African Americans. Previous to this film, any black actor whose name wasn’t Poitier played strictly stereotypical roles. The following year saw the beginning of the blaxploitation boom with the release of Shaft and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, showing that Ashby was slightly ahead of his time by having a mostly black cast.

                Ashby followed up with Harold and Maude (1971), a dark comedy dealing with the May-December romance of the titular outcasts. It has since became one of the greatest cult films of all time and is Ashby’s best film in my opinion. Bud Cort plays Harold as dead pan and very removed emotionally from the rest of the world. He strives for attention from his society obsessed mother, another recurring theme for Ashby. Cort’s performance here should have made him a huge star, but unfortunately he has been relegated to small roles in films by directors such as Wes Anderson and Kevin Smith, mostly out of nostalgia for this film. Harold is finally able to connect with someone upon meeting Maude, whose outlook on life is 180 degrees from Harold’s. Maude is played by the great Ruth Gordon in her most fun and spirited role.  The polar opposite personalities, ages, and classes allow for the two to balance out and find happiness during their short romance. The score by Cat Stevens perfectly accompanies the film’s free spirited attitude.

                With two films under his belt, Ashby was able to attract star power with Jack Nicholson for The Last Detail (1973). The film cast Nicholson as “Badass” Buddusky, a Naval Petty Officer, who escorts Randy Quaid’s kleptomaniac Seaman from Norfolk up the east coast to the brig. Buddusky’s partner is Otis Young’s Mulhall, another example of Ashby’s color blind casting. The film serves as the most accurate portrayal of Navy life I have seen on film, at least when it comes to shore duty. Nicholson turns in one of his signature loose screw performances while also portraying genuine compassion to Quaid’s martyr prisoner. Like Harold’s uncle in Harold and Maude and his later film, Coming Home, Ashby manages to savagely satirize the military, a counter cultural response to the still open wounds of Vietnam.

                Shampoo (1975) and Bound for Glory (1976) were the low point of Ashby’s 70’s films. They aren’t bad films (Both were nominated for Oscars, Bound for Glory for Best Picture even); they just lack the unique voice of his other 70’s films. Shampoo was written, produced, and stars Warren Beatty and comes off feeling more like Beatty’s picture than Ashby’s. It is a pretty straightforward sex comedy and doesn’t seem to have much on its mind besides a poorly executed allegory to the Nixon administration. Bound For Glory is a Woody Guthrie biopic that suffers from star David Carradine’s lack of charisma in the role of Guthrie. 

                 Ashby returns to form with Coming Home (1978). The film was the closest Ashby ever got to winning an Oscar for best picture, barely being beaten out by another film about the aftermath of Vietnam, The Deer Hunter. Coming Home is less about Vietnam than it is about how people change over time and grow apart from loved ones and closer to others as they mature. Jon Voight does the best work of his career in this film as a paralyzed war vet, who is given a reason to move on through Jane Fonda’s hospital volunteer. Voight manages to make his character both loveable and an asshole at the same time. The movie really belongs to Fonda. She starts as a conservative officer’s wife and through her relationship with Voight, becomes liberated and empowered. Bruce Dern rounds out the perfectly cast film as Fonda’s husband. Dern’s portrayal of a man suffering from PTSD is one of the earliest in film alongside Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter.  The film’s score consists of a sampling of nearly every popular song from the late 60’s. It gives the film a slight feeling of ADD and is sometimes distracting.    

                Being There (1979) closed out the decade for Ashby. The film is a satire of presidential politics and is still pretty relevant today. Peter Sellers gives one of his final performances as Chance the gardener, a mentally handicapped savant who through several misunderstandings is brought in as an advisor to the President of the United States and captures the public’s imagination. Sellers plays the part with a child like quality. His character befriends Melvyn Douglas’s political man behind the curtain and their chemistry is amazing. Shirley MacClaine costars in the type of no-nonsense role that she perfects in the decade following.

                Ashby’s mental health declined in the 1980’s. He directed a Rolling Stones documentary and some television pilots as well as a handful of lesser successful films. He died in 1988, but his films have continued to gain stature as the years have passed.   With his themes of racial and social equality, he was a pioneer of auteur filmmaking in the United States.  

Peeping Tom

                Along with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) is considered to be the grandfather of the slasher film. Psycho contains a man in costume and a killer who slashes people with a kitchen knife, but Peeping Tom features more of the aesthetics that would go on to be associated with the horror subgenre.

                The most obvious of these visuals is the point of view shot. The killer here is filming his murders as they happen and we the audience gets to see these films within the film. The opening murder of the prostitute shows a long tracking POV shot that shows up almost 20 years later in John Carpenter’s Halloween before being ripped off in almost every subsequent slasher, almost to the point of comedic proportions in the Sleepaway Camp films.

                There is also the stand in’s murder scene at the film studio. She enters the sound stage to meet up with Mark, unaware he is a killer. The studio seems empty and is eerily quiet. She calls his name a few times, with no answer. Suddenly spot lights come on, pointed at the actress. She is blinded by the light and can’t see Mark. After toying with her a bit longer, he finally appears to continue his game of cat and mouse before killing her. The buildup to the murder in slasher films is often much more suspenseful than the murder themselves. The audience knows people are going to die, it’s the when that builds tension. This scene in Peeping Tom set this device to be used many times over.

                Psychology plays a large part in Peeping Tom. Mark, played by Carl Bohm, was abused by his father at a young age by being constantly scared by him while on film. His father used these films as research to write a book on the psychology of fear. Due to this, Mark grows up feeling that his place is behind a camera and uses it as a security blanket. When a date insists he leave his camera behind, he becomes anxious and fearful at not being able to escape behind the lens when confronted with other people.

                The larger psychological effect is that he believes the camera should be used to capture fear. His murders are almost sexual and he has a fetish for fear. Bohm, playing mark, reminds me of a blond Peter Lorre. The both are able to capture the perverse and the fear of that perversion at the same time. Like Lorre’s murderous child killer in M, Bohm conveys a sense of being out of control and hating himself for it without having to say a word of dialogue. His eyes say it all. This sympathy towards the killer is what makes the film truly disturbing.

                Unlike the later wave of slasher films, this film actually has something important to say. It is a comment on the voyeurism of viewers and the complicity they (we) have in the images of horror films. The killer is only sympathetic because we sympathize with him.  Doesn’t this make us as perverse as the titular peeping tom?

Carl Bohm in Peeping Tom (1960)

The Tingler

                William Castle’s The Tingler, released in 1959, is one of the most well known examples of the gimmick films of the time. Many films were released in 3D or had skeletons fly through the theatre during the movie in hopes of adding excitement to an otherwise mediocre fright flick.  In the case of The Tingler, buzzers were attached to theatre seats that would go off whenever a scream was heard during the film.

                While these gimmicks could be fun, I believe The Tingler would have been a better film without it. The opening introduction by Castle warning the audience of the devices is only effective to audiences of the time. Now, it is distracting and serves as a way to remove the audience from the film. This is a shame, because for the most part, the film is not as bad as its reputation.

                The plot involves Vincent Price doing his thing as an obsessed, jealous mad scientist.  While performing autopsies on the bodies of executed criminals, he comes across the discovery that they have an additional attachment to their spine. His hypothesis is that this was caused by fright. He continues to experiment on people and discovers that the attachment is actually a separate organism, dubbed The TIngler.  Price manages to remove one from a body and it escapes, leading to a chase climax.

                The majority of the film plays as a low budget David Cronenberg predecessor.  Price’s mad scientist is similar to the Jeff Goldblum Character in The Fly. (Vincent Price was the star of the original version of The Fly, released in 1958) The Tingler creature itself calls to mind the odd centipede type bugs of Naked Lunch. It’s easy to imagine this was an influence on Cronenberg.

                The unique aspects of the film are severely over shadowed by the gimmickry, however.  The creature eventually is let loose in a movie theatre, obviously an excuse to turn the audiences’ buzzer seats up to 11. The film limps to an ending that feels detached from the rest of the film as an apartment is suddenly possessed and a body comes back to life. This closing has nothing to do with the preceding events and feels like a letdown, most of all because Price is no longer in the scene.

                Seeing so many horror films remade these days, this is a movie that could actually benefit from an update. With less gimmicks and better effects, I think a filmmaker such as Cronenberg or Guillermo Del Toro could do a lot with the concept.

Vincent Price in The Tingler