Movie Mahal

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Will Penny is a Western that I always had in my rear-view mirror. And I was really surprised by how good it is. It is arguably a revisionist, if not, Twilight Western, made in the late 1960s when the genre was about to explode into a million different pieces with Peckinpah’s deconstructive approach, and released a year before The Wild Bunch immortalised slo-mo violence as chic radical punk cinema. Written and directed by Tom Gries who had a prolific output in American television, the story about an aging cowboy and drifter who doesn’t quite fit into a changing society has a familiar ring to it. Along the way, Gries introduces various sub-plots such as a vengeful redneck marauding family of outlaws headed by Donald Pleasance, and a stoic travelling woman and her young son journeying to California.

The ensemble cast is really brilliant and includes Bruce Dern, Ben Johnson and Anthony Zerbe. It also features one of Heston’s best performances, conveying both an awkwardness and repressed violent past that makes him both obsolete and volatile. In fact, the real star is Lucien Ballard’s gorgeous cinematography, Peckinpah’s regular DoP, and which strives to capture the rugged wilderness of the West notably the wintry Sierra Nevada milieu with an unreserved aplomb. Gries strikes the right tone throughout, one of melancholy, loss and the passing of an era that was never to return. If the ending recalls Shane, then it does so in an equally moving manner. Add this one to the genre’s forgotten last hurrahs.