A Retrospective Review
By Cesare Augusto Directed by: Walter Hill Starring: Prentice “Print” Ritter – ROBERT DUVALL Tom Harte – THOMAS HADEN CHURCH Nola Johns – GRETA SCACCHI “Number 3”/Sun Fu – GWENDOLINE YEO Hec Gilpin – SCOTT COOPER “Number 4”/Ye Fung – OLIVIA CHENG Ed “Big Ears” Bywater – CHRIS MULKEY Captain Billy Fender – JAMES RUSSO Apart from the likes of Sam Peckinpah, John Woo, and even Shane Black, there’s no other filmmaker as adept at creating classic macho male camaraderie than Walter Hill. A genre director whose specialties include cop thrillers and westerns, Hill is also renowned for his strong contribution to the “Buddy film”, the sub-genre with the time-honored convention of characters bonding and standing loyal to each other when trouble arises. However, unlike other movies where cute friendships are forged almost immediately, Hill’s characters start out as anything but buddies. They borderline hate each other first. In the Depression-era crime story Hard Times, bare-knuckle brawler Charles Bronson barely trusts shifty conman James Coburn, who sneakily appoints himself as Bronson’s “manager.” The Warriors may stick like glue as Coney Island’s baddest street gang, yet two of its toughest members size each other up to vie for their leadership. Nick Nolte’s boozy cop has no choice but to rely on the assistance of Eddie Murphy’s slick convict to nail a vicious pair of killers in 48 Hrs. And in a similar scenario, steely Soviet detective Arnold Schwarzenegger begrudgingly tolerates wise-ass Chicago flatfoot Jim Belushi as they pursue an evil Russian drug lord in Red Heat. Notice a pattern yet? Walter Hill first builds scathing antagonism between his heroes before even a glimmer of trust develops before they eventually work together to meet their goals, often under showers of smoking-hot lead. Hill also extended his Buddy film formula to two of his Westerns, The Long Riders and Broken Trail, albeit with a different approach: the heroes aren’t strangers-turned burgeoning friends, but strained family members whose relationships deepen while embarking on cross-country journeys. The Long Riders is based on the real-life notorious 1800s outlaws the James-Younger Gang, made up of disorganized and highly dysfunctional brothers who hit banks and trains across America. The film itself contains the novelty of having real-life actor siblings cast as the gang, like the Carradines, the Keaches, the Quaids, and a mess of others. While a visually-stunning and action-packed picture, The Long Riders is a standard noisy Western shoot-em-up that glorifies the outlaw brothers as folk heroes despite their sibling rivalries. It’s a movie that’s sure to thrill the genre’s fans, but offers others very little room to breathe in between shootouts and bouts of mayhem. Broken Trail takes a subtler, more unique spin on Walter Hill’s Buddy Western. The film, which was originally released as a made-for-TV miniseries in AMC, is split into two tales: one about a massive horse drive undertaken by veteran cowboy Print Ritter (Robert Duvall) and his estranged buckaroo nephew, Tom Harte (Thomas Haden Church). The other focuses on the plight of five innocent young Chinese women about to be sold to doomed lives of slavery and prostitution. Theirs is a grim but true throwback to a dark period of American history, as thousands of real female Chinese immigrants were forced into this horrific way of life in the Old West. The five Chinese women’s story soon intertwines with Print and Tom’s horse drive excursion. The two parties, while initially wary and distrusting of each other, learn to depend and ultimately trust one another as their bonds dramatically changes their lives. Robert Duvall is certainly no stranger to the Western. He seems at home portraying rugged, rawboned cowpokes who’ve seen plenty of action and mayhem over the years, and live to tell about them at ripe years of age. In Trail, Duvall’s Print Ritter doesn’t fit the bill of a stereotypical grumpy Old West codger. Print is wise, observant, hardworking, and unafraid to use his Winchester rifle to protect those he deeply cares about. He reunites with his estranged nephew Tom Harte (Thomas Haden Church) as Print bears good and bad news. The bad news is Tom’s mother (Print’s sister), who Tom has not seen in years, has died and left Print the executor to her will (consisting of her land and a small fortune), leaving Tom with nothing. The younger cowboy glumly surmises that since he left home to work as a professional buckaroo, Tom was written out of his mother’s will. The good news is that with the fortune he inherited from his deceased sister, Print decides to buy 500 mustangs and drive them from Oregon to Wyoming where the horses will be sold to the British army. Print asks Tom to join on the drive and, after being coaxed out of branding cattle for the rest of his life, Tom agrees. Having mostly played contemporary comedic or dramatic performances (especially with his Oscar-nominated turn in the critically-acclaimed 2004 independent comedy Sideways), Trail marks Church’s only second authentic Western foray. Fans should also remember his small but memorable turn as Billy Clanton, member of the notorious Cowboys gang in the classic 1993 hit Tombstone. Despite his limited experience in the genre, Church makes a very convincing weather-beaten buckaroo, and hardened gunslinger. Though we learn very little of Tom’s past, his laconic manner and lethal proficiency with six-shooters tell us of the man’s varied experiences surviving in the American frontier, all of which Church delivers superbly well. During their horse drive, Print and Tom encounter numerous folks of differing backgrounds and intentions. They meet and recruit Hec Gilpin (Scott Cooper), a noble fiddler from back East to join their ranks. Later, they come across Captain Billy Fender (James Russo), a drunk, uncouth fella dragging a carriage carrying the five Chinese women. Print, Tom, and Hec sense something is very off-kilter about this Captain Fender, and correctly so. They discover Fender’s job of selling the five women as sex slaves to mining camps. Tom kills Fender, and our horse drivers reluctantly become the ladies’ protectors, their knights in rawhide leather, if you will, from further dangers on their trail. As their journey presses eastward, we learn more about the personal lives of our motley crew of travelers. Print, Tom, and Hec gather by the campfire the way old-time cowboys would and discuss the mysteries of life, including about the fairer sex. Print, being the oldest, longingly examines the frailties of the male psyche. He is more than aware of the crushing feeling of loneliness, and that only the touch of that right woman can cure it. It is with these quieter scenes that give Duvall some of his finest performances. The poignancy of his reaching out to Church’s Tom leads to both characters to shed their rougher exteriors and creates pure male bonding, thankfully without falling into the trap of cheesy, over-sentimental sappiness. Western fans might also recognize the relationship of Print and Tom as comparable to that from another pair of fictional frontier drivers, Thomas Dunson and Matt Garth, played respectively by John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in the Howard Hawks’ Red River. Both groups are made up of cowboys of different age ranges and personal beliefs that butt heads over their drives should be done. And yet, Print and Tom, like Dunson and Matt, are determined to fulfilling the jobs at hand, and devoted to watching each other’s backs like true men should. If Walter Hill and Broken Trail’s screenwriter Alan Geoffrion made this as an intentional reference to the Hawks film, remains to be clarified, but I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised if its true. But the film’s hardest-hitting dramatic punches come from the five young Chinese ladies. Because of the language barrier, the women are unable to tell their names, so Print nicknames them accordingly by numbers, from “Number 1” to “Number 5.” Understandably, the women are at first terrified of the horse drivers. They know very little of the American culture and fear for their futures in such a dangerous land. Yet as the trip continues, the five ladies slowly develop a rapport with their cowboy rescuers, especially with Print as they affectionately refer him as “Honkle Pren.” This rapport alone takes the old Walter Hill “Buddy Film” to deeper lengths than previously seen in the director’s vast list of directorial efforts, and it works incredibly, touchingly well. The leader of the ladies, Sun Fu, or “Number 3” (Gwendoline Yeo), even builds an attraction to Tom, to which the hardened buckaroo mutually obliges. The growing spark between Sun Fu and Tom is undeniably strong, despite their culture clashes. Despite the cowboys’ best efforts to protect them, problems still befall on the Chinese women, as Ye Fung (“Number 4”, played by Olivia Cheng) suffers from insurmountable trauma from being previously sexually-assaulted. Cheng’s performance teeters between hopelessness and despair, giving the film its saddest, most tragic performance. Adding another deep dimension to the film’s cast of characters is Nola Johns (Greta Scacchi), the aging prostitute who seeks refuge with the horse drivers. Nola had a bad run of luck with some truly awful men, including one vicious desperado named Ed “Big Ears” Bywater (Chris Mulkey, a regular in Walter Hill’s acting repertoire). Big Ears is hired by sleazy lady bordello proprietor “Big Rump” Kate to retreive the five Chinese women she intended to purchase from Captain Billy Fender. Intially Big Ears is uninterested in the job, only to sign on when Nola, the object of his past disgusting desires, flees with Print’s party. Nola and Print would soon carry on a romance of their own, lighting the fuse of a deadly rivalry between the veteran cowboy and dastardly killer Big Ears. In classic Walter Hill Western tradition, the heroic horse drivers head to their guns-blazing showdown against Big Ears and his crew of killers to further protect their adopted family from a bullet-ridden death. Broken Trail was AMC’s first original film, and what a great one to make it as the network’s debut. It received four Emmy Awards: for Outstanding Miniseries; Outstanding Casting for a Miniseries, Movie, or a Special; Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Movie (for Duvall), and Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie (for Church). All four wins were well-deserved, especially for the two acting leads. Unfortunately the five Chinese actresses did not receive any acting nominations, but they damn well should have. Their combined acting talents effectively conveyed strength and courage at the face of certain danger, invoking that right amount of audience empathy to their dreaded plight. The film’s highest selling point is its fantastic, heart-warming character development, coupled with some thrilling frontier action sequences. Broken Trail takes Walter Hill’s vintage Buddy Film formula to deeper, more profound lengths, and it may just be his best film by a country mile. See the original trailer here! https://youtu.be/prJVjnlZRRQ
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About Yours Truly
Unearthing great forgotten and criminally underrated pop culture mediums is my specialty! Whether the topic be about cinema, television, music, or other fun bits of obscure minutiae, I love analyzing and unleashing these lost treasures to the unwitting public! Archives
October 2020
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