The Decline of the Western

...But this tale of rawhide revenge soon becomes a subsidiary plot, and the real protagonist eventually proves to be Ella Connors (Jane Fonda), the owner of a neighboring ranch, who reluctantly involves Frank in her long-running feud with J. W. Ewing (Jason Rob-ards), a ruthless land baron intent on acquiring her property by means fair or foul...

...His shots of grey clouds looming over the range, with snow-capped mountains rising in the background, masterfully convey a feeling of human insignificance before the forces of nature...

...The cinematography is just as much a hodgepodge as the script...

...She therefore enlists Moon's reluctant assistance in the two struggles-with the help of a clause in the town ordinance stating that criminals saved from hanging must obey their wives or return to the scaffold...

...In some scenes this grotesque impersonation succeeds, as when he sits down for his first taste of Julia's home cooking-rubbery boiled chicken...

...It begins by using the same kind of pop Freudianism Penn employed in his "adult" version of the life of Billy the Kid: Ella's aggressive independence and her land battles supposedly stem from her unresolved relationship with her father, who died suddenly years before after learning that his daughter— the "son he never had"-once had a brief affair with J.W...

...Other so-called "revisionist" Westerns of the last 20 years have generally altered the formulaic plots and characterizations...

...Just as he is about to be hanged by the irate citizens of Longhorn, Texas, Moon is unexpectedly granted a new lease on life...

...one typical maneuver has been merely to invert a convention, such as making the "bad guy" a hero...

...Pakula and Clark's single nod in this direction was setting Comes a Horseman in the postwar years...

...But the character drawn for her is a peculiar combination of an anachronistically liberated cowgirl and a sexually repressed schoolmarm...

...Almost all of J. W.'s dealings, for example, take place inside his mammoth ranch house...

...In addition, Nicholson has allowed John Belushi to deliver a buffoonish and patronizing performance as Hector, the town's Mexican deputy...

...I can't recall a single striking shot...

...The fault ultimately belongs to Pakula, who has recently been obsessed with shadowy and mysterious figures and plots...

...I never did figure out what it was supposed to mean or to whom it referred...

...The effect is to make J. W. look like the Godfather of the Wild West...

...Unlike Nestor Almendros' work in Days of Heaven, deliberately stylized to resemble paintings and still photographs, Willis' exterior shots in Comes a Horseman are beautiful examples of heightened realism...

...Moon is also an inconsistent character, but it is not clear whether the problem here is the writing, Nicholson's acting, or his direction...

...I have rarely seen a director indulge his star perfomer so senselessly-even when the two are the same person...

...Regrettably, they give us only confusion...

...On the other hand, when it comes to her sexuality the comic possibilities of having an outlaw at the mercy of a lady are ignored, and instead she is made stereo-typically submissive...

...Dennis Lynton Clark's screenplay -a somewhat improbable cross between Arthur Penn's The Left Handed Gun and Peter Handke's The Left-Handed Woman-is even murkier...

...Worse, Clark for some reason adds a strange complication to the plot: Far from being a real tycoon, J. W. is beholden to Atkinson (George Grizzard), an oil company executive eager to develop both J. W.'s and Ella's land...

...Possibly to disguise the simplemindedness of this notion, Clark presents his story in a fragmented style more appropriate to postwar Europe than the postwar Wild West...

...A Western scarcely lends itself to being filmed like a thriller...

...Is the horseman in question Frank Athearn (James Caan), the World War II veteran trying to establish his own cattle ranch in Montana...

...Since I also can't remember reacting so negatively to Almendros' work for such talented directors as Truffaut or Rohmer, I attribute his lackluster to Nicholson...

...As a technician, Willis was merely following orders in using his camera to make such crude intimations of menace...

...About half of the photography shows why Gordon Willis is regarded as one of the country's leading cameramen...

...The title of Pakula's film is a pretty fair indication of the obscurity of the whole enterprise...

...So it would seem from the opening 15 minutes of the movie...

...Thus Ella could be regarded as the horseman of the title...

...A fight scene between Moon and Julia turns into a bout of lovemaking that ends with her tied spreadeagled to the bedposts and begging for more-a dramatically unmotivated and unlikely development inconsistent with most of the other scenes...

...And he is apparently the only land baron who can't afford electricity, since the faces of the occupants are always bathed in dramatic shadows...

...Hence very early in the film Ella and J. W. have a confrontation that initially portends a gunfight, with the two squaring off at 20 paces and glaring menacingly at each other...

...The outlaw was obviously intended in the script to be a comic figure, and Nicholson mugs outrageously-rolling and popping his eyeballs, wrinkling his nose, and affecting a strange nasal speech pattern...

...Shades of Leslie Fiedler...

...After a hired gun seriously wounds him and murders his partner, Frank vows vengeance for the bushwhacking...

...and Nicholson's Moon is an outlaw, but he is every bit as scruffy as Humphrey Bogart's Charlie Allnut...

...Veronica Cart-wright is much better as Hermine, Moon's old girlfriend...

...I suspect that the clash of style with content is attributable to Pakula's unsuccessful attempt to give a "new look" to an old genre, both literally and figuratively...

...Their weapons, though, turn out to be not guns but cryptic comments about Ella's past-punctuated by pregnant pauses -and by the time these are explained an hour later, they require quite an effort to remember, much less care about...

...With his equally odd shuffle, unkempt hair, grizzly beard, and baggy outfit he looks like that old codger, Gabby Hayes...

...This atmospheric approach was appropriate to The Parallax View and All the President's Men, where the subject was conspiracy...

...Naturally, after "meeting cute" and overcoming their (considerable) differences in the face of shared adversity, Moon and Julia progress from a marriage of convenience to True Love...

...Perhaps from the desperation they must have felt at the prospect of resurrecting such a tired plot, the screen writers (John Herman Shaner, Al Ramrus, Charles Shyer, and Alan Mandel) try to provide some surprises...

...Nicholson has fared considerably worse with the technical crew than with his actors...

...Yet the nature of Atkinson's hold over J. W. is never satisfactorily made clear, nor is it apparent why the story needs another villain, especially since J. W.'s lengthy struggles with Atkinson distract from his feud with Ella, presumably the main focus of the movie...

...At least when it comes to bad movies like Goin' South or Comes a Horseman, directors apparently have every bit as much control as the auteurists have always claimed...

...Under a town ordinance enacted because of the shortage of eligible males resulting from the Civil War ("Wim-men was beginnin' to chew up the grass," explains one character), a condemned criminal can be spared if a local woman offers to marry him...

...Goin' South is little more than a Wild West version of The African Queen...

...In fact, by the second hour of the film, J. W. almost begins to look like the tragic protagonist, a veritable Macbeth in buckskins, as he is driven by his empire-building ambitions to murder first Atkinson and then Hoverton (Macon McCalman), a local banker who makes the mistake of standing up to him...

...For instance, Steenburgen, who looks and sounds like Jane Alexander, is charmingly offbeat and deadpan in her screen debut, a perfectly droll foil to Nicholson's frenzied antics...

...Unfortunately, I can offer little more than discouraging words about the two latest examples of the genre, Alan Pakula's Comes a Horseman and Jack Nicholson's Goin'South...

...On the one hand, Julia is pictured as extremely determined in her mining enterprise as well as resourceful in her dealings with the representatives of the railroad and particularly with Moon...

...I expect any day to see Chicano pickets in front of theaters showing Goin'South...

...Although Moon seems a little embarrassed by this, the screen writers were apparently even more embarrassed by the prospect of injecting an element of genuine adult, female sexuality into their vision of the unspoiled Southwest...

...Most of the time Nicholson's tomfoolery arouses the same suspicion provoked by Marlon Brando's clowning in The Missouri Breaks: that he is having the biggest laugh on audiences foolish enough to pay to see the movie...

...But in an unsubtle counterpoint, the interior scenes are unnaturally illuminated and expressionistic...

...One could forgive the star of Animal House if he were merely parodying the stock movie Mexican, but his acting has that nasty National Lampoon edge that deprecates what it pretends to have affection for...

...Henry Moon (Jack Nicholson) may be the mangiest outlaw ever to ride the range...

...Steenburgen's Julia is not a missionary, but she is initially just as prim and spinsterish as Katherine Hepburn's Rose Sayer...

...By contrast, Goin' South is very much in this tradition...

...In a feeble climax, he finally tries to dispatch Frank and Ella by trapping them in a burning building...

...This view is supported by Fonda's riding and roping, as well as by her weatherbeaten face, exaggerated masculine mannerisms and speech patterns-perhaps an intentional contrast to the creamy-complexioned Caan, who plays Frank like a starlet maniacally smiling through her first screen test...

...Moon's savior is Julia Tate (Mary Steenburgen), who is ornery enough to make him wonder if his salvation is really punishment in disguise...

...She is in the middle of a battle with the railroad company, which has claimed her land by right of eminent domain, and spends her days digging for gold in a mine that her late father (a geologist from Philadelphia, no less) had begun...

...Nestor Almendros' cinematography is totally undistinguished...