the m0vie blog

This article begins with a massive disclaimer. I keep a pile of salt in my backyard because I need to take every planned project from Quentin Tarantino with a grain of salt. It build up after all the Kill Bill, Vol. 3 and Casino Royale rumours. Anyway, Tarantino has a new project planned – a Western. But, being the man he is, it certainly isn’t going to be your average gun-slinging morality tale:

I’d like to do a Western. But rather than set it in Texas, have it in slavery times. With that subject that everybody is afraid to deal with. Let’s shine that light on ourselves. You could do a ponderous history lesson of slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad. Or, you could make a movie that would be exciting. Do it as an adventure. A spaghetti Western that takes place during that time. And I would call it ‘A Southern.’

It’s certainly a novel take on the genre, right?

There are two kinds of people in the world: John Wayne people and Clint Eastwood people...

In fairness, it wouldn’t be the first time that Tarantino has worked within the confines of a Western. Ignoring the fact that most of the cast of Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs would look at home in boots and a poncho, there’s a more obvious influence on his more recent work – Inglourious Basterds is a Western set amid the Second World War, a fact alluded to by the amazing aborted poster and the title of the first segment (you can’t get more Sergio Leone than ‘Once Upon a Time In…’). Going back slightly further, Kill Bill has an epic scope recognising the director’s capacity to look both to the East and to the Western for inspiration. The two films (hopefully to be reunited as The Whole Bloody Affair in the not-too-distant future) recognise the common themes among the Western and Asian revenge flicks, fusing the two into a surprisingly harmonious epic.

I think it’s safe to say that the era of the Western is over – at least in its core form. Sure, we get an occasional nod to the classics with 3:10 To Yuma or even a few international revisionist takes like The Proposition or The Good, The Bad & The Weird, but the studios aren’t putting them out with consistency any more. Arguably the best Western of the last decade was broadcast weekly on HBO as Deadwood. Does that mean the Western is dead – or certainly dying? I’m not so sure.

The popular imagination has always tied the genre to location. It has to be a desert. It has to be the past. It has to be six-shooters and men carving up America. It’s really the only genre so ridiculously defined by audience expectation. Dramas can be set anywhere or anywhen. Science fiction can explore the world that is, that could be or that must never be. Romance transcends time and space. Comedy is timeless. Even noir, as demonstrated by Chinatown, can take place in the scorching sunlight. The Western, however, must involve a sun beating down upon an arid wasteland in a time when men were men.

Other genres are characterised by more abstract attributes. Romances are about love in all its forms. Comedies are funny. I’d argue that if you attempt to boil down the Western to its core attributes – stories about harsh and violent men in a harsh and violent world – the genre is alive and thriving. I’d consider No Country For Old Men a modern Western, and not just for its locale. If you look at it that way, Tarantino has been making Westerns for decades. It doesn’t matter that they rarely involve pistols at dawn or saloon doors.

Still, his exact idea still sounds more than a little interesting. A “Southern”? The history of slavery is, understandably, still a subject that America is less than comfortable with and the rest of the world hasn’t really come to terms with. Films about the subject are very much standard, carefully choreographed drama – like The Colour Purple or Armistice or Amazing Grace. I think it’s safe to say – when he uses the term ‘slavery adventure’ – this would be none of those things.

Given the controversy that Tarantino courted with his handling of the Nazis (having a bunch of Jewish suicide bombers burn them alive inside a locked room) and – as Cinema Blend have pointed out – the on-going row with Spike Lee over his use of the n-word, it’s hard to see this going particularly smoothly. I can imagine this being even more difficult to finance that a historically revisionist Second World War Western.

On the other hand, the underground railroad – a secret channel for transporting freed slaves to the North – is a subject ripe for exploration. The only real reference I can recall to it in a major motion picture is the fact that Wayne Manor from Batman Begins is built on a particular set of tunnels used. It’s an interesting aspect of that turbulent period of American history that deserves a bit of exploration.

I think Tarantino is mature enough to deal with something like this. Unless he’s gratuitously offensive – and, to be honest, he isn’t Lars Von Trier – I think Tarantino could handle it. Now, the movie itself has as remote a chance of actually happening as any other Tarantino pipe dream, but it’s  great idea – and a natural progression for a director who is certainly open-minded when it comes to branching out.

But let’s not start counting our chickens.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: film, inglourious basterds, Movies, quentin tarantino, southern, the underground railroad, western |