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About What's happening. (Eugene, OR) 1982-1993 | View Entire Issue (Aug. 8, 1985)
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The subsequent New Mexican horizon is as grand as a John Ford vista. The attendant musical score booms with enthusiasm, does more than necessary, and is ultimately forgettable. These ele ments foretell the style and range of Silverado, a western with much action and some fine characteriza tions within a traditional frame work. The story of Silverado is your basic good guys/bad guys con flict. Four men are brought together by necessity and the two kinds of luck. Emmett (Scott Glenn) is the survivor of the early gunfight. He finds Paden (Kevin Kline) prone on the desert sand, abandoned with nothing but his faded red underwear. Paden, who has philosophically accepted his fate under the sun, now accepts his fate as wherever Emmett and his spare horse will take him. Mal (Danny Glover) makes his entrance as a thirsty traveller who is denied a shot of whiskey in a saloon. His crime is the color of his skin, but Emmett's testimony keeps the man out of jail. Instead, he is merely kicked out of town. The fourth good guy is Jake . (Kevin Costner), Emmett's very energetic younger brother. Cost ner's character, while less impor tant than the others, is the most interesting to watch. He is frisky and bold, more like a youngster's cowboy fantasy than the strong, silent stereotype. It is Jake's jail break that brings the four together as they ride to the town of Silver ado. The rest of the film is a display of tried and true episodes. There is REVIEW the wagon train, the prettiest member of which is conveniently widowed. There is the evil cattle baron, intent on running all would-be farmers off the land. There is the professional gambler with the derringer up his sleeve. Toss in a cattle stampede, a nasty sheriff, and some family revenge, and you've got the makings of just about every western that Holly wood has made. The difference that Silverado offers is director Kasdan's smooth and natural style. Some of the bits would come off as worn cliches under lesser guidance. When Paden laments his lost hat, or kisses his beloved horse, for exam ple, there is neither pretension nor silliness. Kasdan and Kline make these seem perfectly natural ac tions for a believably sentimental cowboy. Kasdan also knows when to hold the camera back, as for those luscious views of the New Mexico landscape, and when to bring it in. The close shots of saloon keeper Stella (marvelously played by Linda Hunt) allow for more expression than a pageful of passionate dialogue. There are a few lapses in the Kasdan script. When Jake is car ried off beaten and bound, but turns up expediently in the heat of battle—healthy, smiling, and shooting—it is pushing credibility too far. The same is true of Em mett's miraculous recovery after being nearly trampled to death by a villain's horse. Perhaps Kasdan expects that enough action will obscure any plot oversights. For fans of the genre, he is probably right. As in his earlier screenplay, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Kasdan keeps the excitement high and the pace fast. There are enough touches of hu mor and tenderness to keep the adventures from getting mono tonous. If anything gets old, it is the mounting body count. Don't expect the good guys to miss their mark, and don't count on the bad guys hitting theirs. Unlike Raiders, which was much like a cinematic comic book, Silverado includes main characters with a fair degree of depth. Kline, Hunt, and Brian Dennehy, as the bad sheriff, give very fine performances. Their co stars do generally good work, as well. If you like westerns, and can live without Clint Eastwood, you won't find much better than Sil verado. It is made to watch and to enjoy, and then to store in that portion of memory where all the other cowboy fantasies reside. —Michael Sussman BOOKS Out Where the West Commences Lonesome Dove By Larry McMurtry, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1985. Perhaps the greatest pleasure of Lonesome Dove is the way McMurtry takes a genre that is a stronghold of stereotypes and twists and turns them, pokes holes into them, looks through and around them—the way he does it casual like, like somebody setting up a beer can on the fence post and idly taking shots while sitting in the shade of the porch. He makes those stereotypes jump for him like a beer can when die bullet pings it. The Western genre shows no sign of dying out—having out lasted many times the length of the era in our history from which, it emerged. That brief era of open ranges and long drives of Texas beef on the hoof lasted less than a man's lifetime—only 20 years from the first of the long drives to barbed wire fences and the Winter of '87 which devastated the herds. But that era has been part of our American psyche ever since and gave us John Wayne and Gary Cooper casting 30 foot shadows on the silver screen, larger than life, and the towns they walked through, always brave, always right. They loom in our imag ination big as the presidential heads of Mt. Rushmore. Augustus McCrae and Wood row Call are two ex-Texas Rang ers who have formed the Hat Creek Cattle Company, an unpro fitable enterprise in the scruffy one bar border town of Lonesome Dove. Gus has a taste for life's pleasures, for whiskey and women and talking and tilting back his rope-bottomed chair on the porch to survey the oncoming evening. He has been known to talk to a pig or a stump if no human is available. His partner, on the other hand, is a man of few words, a workaholic. "Call would work until slap dark if he could find anything to do, and if he couldn't he would make up some thing. . . ." Their old campanero, Jake Spoon, rides in 10 years after having left, telling about Yellow stone and Montana, fortunes to be made now it's almost over for the Indians. ’The minute they're licked there's going to be fortunes made in Montana. Why, it's cattle land like you've never seen, Call. High grass and plenty of water." What follows is rustling Mex ican horses over the Rio Grande, where they meet a group of va queros driving Texas horses in the other direction and they get those as well. And they do head north with over a thousand head of cat tle. Call and Gus do make it to Montana but not without heavy losses. It's often said Larry McMurtry is one male writer whose women characters are convincing. He does indeed have a skill to see and portray women as full human be ings. In fact, it is with his women that Lonesome Dove takes on an extra dimension of liveliness and catches us up most deeply. Lorena has been harshly treated by the men in her life and silence has become her response. "It was part of her, like the scar, and, like the scar, it drew men to her even though it made them deeply un easy. . . . Silent happened to be how she felt when men were with her." Her great desire is to live in a place where it's cool. "Of all the places she had heard men talk about, San Francisco sounded the coolest and nicest, so it was San Francisco she set her sights on." There is Clara, whom Gus had courted for years—a strong, high-, spirited woman who marries a dullard, goes off to Ogallala, Nebraska with him and gives birth to five children. She seldom sees another woman. But she likes to read the magazines ordered from the East or from England which arrive every 2 or 3 months in the mail. "Reading stories By all the women, not only George Eliot, but Mrs. Gore and Mrs. Gaskell and Charlotte Lounge; she some times had a longing to do what those women did—write stories. . . . Her characters would have to be the horses and the hens, if she ever wrote, for the menfolk that came by -weren't’ interesting enough to put in books, it seemed to her. None of them capable of the kind of talk men managed in English novels/’ After a time she stopped reading the magazines. "How could people talk that way and spend their time going to balls and parties when children died and had to be buried?" Lonesome Dove catches the size and stretch of the land and the hardship of those days. It shows us believable men and a variety of them. Even rarer, it shows us believable women. —Maia Penfold
