First off: two things. If you can enjoy a hard boiled detective pulp, done without flaw, then you will enjoy this film. Second the story about this film is worth the entire trip. To begin with there was a book.
It is called "Red Harvest" and is by the father of the hard boiled detective par excellance Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett. It tells the story of a gunman who comes into a town with a war mob war going on. He sells his services . . . to both sides. You can see the potential for drama, right. The problem was that the folks who came to make this story never heard of the book. They knew about a film called
A great western about a gunman who comes into a town to find that it is in the midst of a war, and he sells his services to both sides. Sound familiar? Well, the producers went to Leone's people to get rights to remake it, but they thought it would make a great gangster film. Leone's crew told them that, actually, they had based their film on an Akira Kurasawa film entitled "Yojimbo,"
about a samurai who enters a town in the midst of a war and, yeah, you get it, and that's who they would have to contact. It was well into filming that Kurasawa's family contacted them and let them know that their film was based on the American Gangster novel. Talk about finding the root of a story without really knowing it.
Luckily the film sticks to the heart and soul of what made the tale such a classic. The hero arrives, doesn't like what's going on, sees his opportunity, gets shot, gets beaten up, shoots a hell of a lot of bad guys, get beaten up worse (it's part of the anti-hero mystique), does some good deeds and kills the bad guys.
It is Greek tragedy, without the Greeks (the bad guys are Irish and Italian, mostly - - as was the stereotype of the Hammett period). If there is a "Hero Cycle" as typified by "Star Wars," then this is the perfect "Anit-Hero Cycle." (And no jokes about banana seats and big wheels, please!)
Here is some of the cast:
Bruce Willis . . . John Smith
Bruce Dern . . . Sheriff Ed Galt
William Sanderson . . . Joe Monday
Christopher Walken . . . Hickey
David Patrick Kelly . . . Doyle
Karina Lombard . . . Felina
Alexandra Powers . . . Lucy Kolinski
Leslie Mann . . . Wanda
There is not a week performance here, the film is visually powerful and the music is by Ry Cooder. If the violence doesn't exclude you (and yes, there is a lot of graphic violence, make no mistake about that) then there is nothing that should keep you from having a great time watching this one.
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