Screen
Alleva, Richard
CLINT'S DARK VISION EASTWOOD'S 'UNFORGIVEN' With the Westerner, it is a crucial point of honor not to "do it first"; his gun remains in its holster until the moment of combat.. ..The Westerner...
...Here it is little more than a gimmick, one that quickly grows tiresome, and neither Jake nor his women, as he and we see them, have much substance...
...It is an atmosphere in which the confusion of the adults (Marvin, Whizzer, Trina, Marvin's psychiatrist Mendel, who courts Trina), their distrust of and compulsion about commitment, makes Jason's adjustment all the more difficult...
...And what do superb script and direction add up to...
...It's a still, almost painterly shot with the digger a silhouette against a gorgeous golden horizon...
...then a train's whistle sounds, smoke appears on the horizon, and both men suddenly know that the news will carry...
...I postponed going to the new show because Falsettoland, which I reviewed in these pages (December 21, 1990) was so relentlessly lively that it seemed to trivialize both the coming-of-age play (Jason's accepting his father's homosexuality and 22...
...We know better...
...The horrible account of a murder is rendered all the more horrible for being told by a sweet-faced girl...
...Supine, shot in the stomach, the wicked villain Daggett looks up into the face of the equally wicked hero Munny and mutters, "I don't deserve to die like this...
...In a superb scene, Munny, perched on a crag, aims very carefully down at Davy, who, disabled with a broken leg, tries to drag himself to the safety of some rocks...
...Thus the new theater season limpingly began...
...I will turn instead to two holdovers from last season—at least, they are holding on as I write this—which I did not review when they were new...
...Munny looks not so much remorseful as exhausted, limp, disgusted...
...It is to collect a bounty placed on the heads of two cowboys who have reputedly mutilated a prostitute in a flimsy little simulacrum of a town called Big Whiskey...
...Count Vronsky sang those lines—or lines very like them—to Anna Karenina when, no longer able to contain her supposedly seething passion, she turned up at his apartment...
...who is a loyal friend to his black comrade, Nate...
...This lyric was the ludicrous high point of a new musical that makes a foolish hash of Tolstoy's novel...
...The deputies loading their guns in the jailhouse make such a clangor that we think of swords and armor as well as bullets and shotguns...
...The Westerner could not fulfill himself if the moment did not finally come when he can shoot his enemy down...
...I kept waiting to hear the choppers coming in so that the characters could scramble into action and do something more important than chatter about Jake's ersatz angst...
...The mother-in-law was right...
...What sort of a hero is this...
...who is genuinely concerned that his wretched little town grow into some semblance of prosperity or even civilization...
...And, fined in horseflesh (thoroughbred horses surrendered to the brothel's whore-master), the youth brings an extra mount to the girl herself, hoping that she will forgive his role in the maiming...
...The pimp assures Little Bill that news of the bounty won't reach as far as Texas...
...The titular "March of the Falsettos," an eerie, almost expressionistic number, is at once comic and frightening...
...The troubled five characters of the first act are joined by a cheerful lesbian couple who are there mostly for laughs, although they sound the first AIDS warning in "Something Bad Is Happening...
...There seems little reason to dwell on this disaster although one might wonder what it was doing at the Circle in the Square and why so much grant money went into the making of it...
...And, since the script is a subtle one, so is the direction subtle...
...Although "Father to Son," the curtain number of the first act, suggests that Jason is beginning to sort out his problems and that Marvin is less of an aging adolescent than he usually seems, the play—if it stopped here—would remain open-ended, carrying the suggestion of complexity that marks most of the act...
...We smile at this, for surely Munny will be played by Clint Eastwood and how could any overcivilized mother-in-law be expected to understand Clint as anything but a beast...
...He has become a master...
...Such balancing and counterpointing of traits is characteristic of David Webb Peoples' s complex, dextrous script: the madam is both a caring woman who defends the dignity of her girls, and a screaming harridan who flings clods of mud at the repentant cowboy...
...And, a moment later, when the cry rings up from the canyon, "You murdering bastards, you killed our Davy boy...
...Surprisingly, since it dates from the innocent gay days before AIDS was clearly perceived as the horror it has become, the first act is darker, tougher, funnier, more inventive than the later work...
...But because that moment is so thoroughly the expression of his being, it must be kept pure...
...For that reason, I was unprepared for the force of the first act of Falsettos, which is presumably March reborn...
...9 October 1992 Commonweal the death of Whizzer, his father's lover) and the AIDS context in which the action takes place...
...who resumes gunslinging only to make enough money to save his failing farm and feed his children...
...Jake is a writer (novels not plays) who conjures up his women—his present wife, his dead wife, his daughter at two different ages, his sister, his psychiatrist—and creates the scenes he plays with them...
...When he pauses in flogging Nate to interrogate the tortured man, it is with the concerned air of a high school principal calling a truant student on the carpet...
...but his hand has her wrist in a vise...
...Falsettos is a Broadway musical that William Finn and James Lapine put together from their earlier, short off-Broadway pieces, March of the Falsettos (1981) and Falsettoland (1990...
...Even the last moment here, Mendel's return to "Welcome to Falsettoland" which opens the act, is almost a throwaway line, not quite casting a retrospective irony over the act's sprightliness as happened with Fasettoland when I first saw it...
...I have no quarrel with the success of Falsettos, but the first act suggests that Finn and Lapine could have produced a more sardonic work...
...And, sure enough, Munny-Eastwood is soon characterized as a reformed gunslinger turned pig farmer who is devoted to the memory of the wife who reformed him...
...At such times, it's hard to dislike Little Bill...
...I do not like assassins or men of low character," Daggett dictates to his cut-rate Boswell and we can almost see his ego swell up like a frog's gullet as he achieves what he considers to be a lapidary phrase...
...And what kind of a villain is Sheriff Daggett, whose legal arbitrariness initiates the violence and who is certainly brutal enough to earn our hatred...
...Nate is a lovable comrade, a wise counselor, a skillful surgeon—and a man who jumps at the chance to be an assassin because he misses the adventuring of his youth but doesn't realize, until too late, that he no longer has the stomach for killing...
...Director Eastwood cuts back and forth between an extremely close view of the agonized, crawling body and a medium close-up of Munny coolly, almost meditatively taking aim, missing, aiming again...
...who is a teetotaler because his wife had him swear off the stuff...
...We know that the words of Unforgivens prologue are meant ironically and that the mother-in-law will be refuted...
...Its sheriff, Little Bill Daggett, a megalomaniac who is drunk on his power to dispense justice, has only fined the offenders, so the brothel's enraged madam has offered blood money...
...I hesitate to call Unforgiven the first Calvinist Western because I don't know enough about Calvinism, but somehow the tag sounds right...
...Nobody's easy to figure out in this movie...
...Perhaps that is why the show has caught on with such a large and diverse audience...
...But he does...
...Then he kicks a man's head half in or beats a woman for information and we detest him...
...Eastwood stops shooting and cries out, "For God's sake, give him some water...
...The mechanics of the Western endorse the hero's violence and thereby absolve us from guilt at enjoying it...
...His the scrupulosity in killing...
...In other hands and with other intentions, the device might have been able to play philosophically with the creative proCommonweal cess and with the way imagination impinges on reality...
...Deserve has nothing to do with it," sneers Munny...
...His cowboy friends, pinned down by gunfire, are too frightened to succor him...
...GERALD WEALES...
...I won't shoot...
...In Gene Hackman' s superb performance, brutality of action is swathed in an avuncularity of manner which somehow makes the action all the more repellent...
...ours the exhilaration in watching the just kill...
...RICHARD alleva FALSE NOTES 'FALSETTOS' & 'JAKE'S WOMEN' iss me as hard as you dare./l have to know that you're there...
...We have seen the knifing of that poor whore and Munny hasn't...
...We can rest assured that when this man finally reverts to violence it will be only to kill eminently killable varmints in utterly fair fights undertaken in an entirely just cause...
...Robert Warshow, The Westerner...
...hat we see first in Unforgiven is a man burying his wife...
...One cowboy did indeed, scar the girl, but his friend Davy, hardly more than a boy, at first held the girl down, then immediately repented and tried twice to save her from the brute, only to be hurled aside...
...Clint Eastwood is no longer a surprisingly good director...
...the visual rhythms are always in sync with the needs of the story...
...This can be seen not only in the often frenetic company numbers, but in "I'm Breaking Down," a solo forTrina, who loses Marvin to Whizzer, and in Whizzer's "The Games I Play...
...Jake's Women is another of those Neil Simon plays, like Chapter Two, in which bits of autobiography adhere to an uneasy mixture of comedy and soap opera...
...What is that just cause...
...Death...
...There is a running gag about his writing their lines, even when they appear to break away from their potted speeches to puncture him with sharp one-liners...
...On the train from Philadelphia the other day, a suburban couple exchanged information with a group of equally suburban ladies and all of them were on their way to see Falsettos...
...who refuses to boast of his violent past to a wide-eyed youngster...
...Every shot expresses the momentary intention of the writer...
...Clint Eastwood has turned "the last gentleman" into a monster...
...I'll see you in hell, Munny...
...While quieting down the protesting madam, Daggett softly inquires, "Haven't you seen enough bloodshed, Alice...
...who is cheerfully and ineptly trying to build a porch onto his house so that he may sit peacefully and enjoy the view...
...The tone— despite Whizzer's death—is noticeably upbeat and not simply in the Jason plot...
...Surely the honorable Munny won't deliver this repentant, blue-eyed boy to Mr...
...Eastwood (even in his urban cop movies) has been for our time what John Wayne and Gary Cooper were for theirs: the Westerner, the justified killer so well described by Warshow...
...I did not see March of the Falsettos in its initial production...
...It is presumably a form of therapy which will allow him to save his second marriage by putting his first one to rest...
...who comically catches a glimpse of immortality when a dime novelist quizzes him on his experiences and opinions...
...Yet Little Bill is also a brave man who faces armed opponents without flinching...
...The Westerner is the last gentleman...
...But Falsettos moves on to the second act, and the chirpiness of Falsettoland takes over...
...Commonweal Eastwood, accompanied by an old pal, Nate, and a young wannabe shootist, the Schofield Kid, takes on the assignment...
...He will not violate the accepted forms of combat though by doing so he could save a city...
...Finally, a bullet finds the mark and Davy lies dying, pleading for water...
...Yeah," agrees the good family man, and proceeds to blow his helpless enemy away...
...who is an indulgent father who only mildly censures his little boy for cursing...
...The appeal of the play probably lies in the fact that Alan Alda is playing Jake with the self-deprecating sincerity for which he is celebrated...
...But wait...
...Their grandmothers would have been on the way to see the Lunts in O Mistress Mine...
...Then words scroll up the screen telling us that this man's mother-in-law could never comprehend how any daughter of hers would marry someone like Will Munny, "a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition...
...Running through the act is the insistence that love can be as painful as it is fulfilling...
Vol. 119 • October 1992 • No. 17
