Film

...Back to the Future A fresh and imaginative reworking of an old conceit: A boy in late adolescence travels back to the mid-1950s, becomes involved in the lives of the people who will later be his parents, and grapples with opportunities to influence subsequent events...

...A brilliant exploration of the tensions between acting and being, change and stasis, reason and madness...

...the powerless—Native Americans, blacks, Hispanics, women, gays—were subject to continuing oppression, and the American empire, up to its nuclear stockpiles in international chicanery, had little claim on the Western's moral righteousness...

...0 Hits and Misses The Emerald Forest A sometimes eccentric but more often visionary film by John Boorman (Point Blank, Deliverance), shot on location in the lush Brazilian rain forest...

...The film is realized with wit and unfailing taste (even in the treatment of incest) by director Robert Zemeckis, a promising young American filmmaker...

...The film augments these tired formulas with occasional bits of humor, and attempts to provide a contemporary touch by presenting its archvillain as a despoiler of the glorious natural environment...

...For proof, we need look no farther than the current revival of the classic movie Western, as represented by Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider and Lawrence Kasdan's Silverado...

...The landscape was being paved over for highways, Howard Johnsons, and suburban sprawl...

...I can't help but agree...

...The traditional Western—John Ford's My Darling Clementine, for example—was optimistic and reassuring...

...But it will take much more than a couple of movies to make it so...

...Moreover, the principals tend to play out their roles as if conscious of the fact that they are imitating situations from movies they saw as children...

...Look here, these films declaim, America is America again...

...Henry IV A generally faithful adaptation of the Pirandello masterpiece, deftly directed by Marco Bellochio with a compelling performance by Marcello Mastroianni in the title role...

...By the late 1950s, no one could pretend that this idealized Western image bore any correspondence to contemporary reality...

...Like Pale Rider, Silverado employs heroic musical scores (with prominent brass), is filmed in wide-screen format, and dazzles with awesome vistas of the rough and wide-open West...

...The answer, I'm convinced, is nothing—or, at least, nothing that is true...

...But this tends to work against Kasdan's "unabashed embrace of the values of the old Westerns...

...The Magnificent Four band together, after some earnest soul searching and much physical abuse, to deliver deadly revenge and install frontier justice...

...Filmmakers responded by reworking the genre, creating "revisionist" Westerns that signaled the end of the frontier (Lonely Are the Brave, The Last Hunt) and the corporate takeover of the West (McCabe and Mrs...

...Kasdan's Silverado unites four former drifters (Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, Kevin Coster, Danny Glover), all in search of a sense of family and, coincidentally, all heading for the town of Silverado, where a tribe of lawless cattlemen and a corrupt and murderous sheriff hold sway...

...He deliberately stuffed the film with an encyclopedic array of what he calls "the archetypical western situations": a gate-doored saloon managed by a woman with a heart of gold, a posse chase over the prairie, a wagon train fording a river, a cattle stampede, a cleverly executed jailbreak, a secret outlaw hideout, and a climactic series of gunfight showdowns...

...It invariably depicted strong and worthy defenders of the powerless...

...It reveled in the American landscape, suggesting an eternal frontier that could be tamed and civilized...

...In apparent answer to the prayers of a fifteen-year-old girl, a mysterious horseman arrives from afar to save some independent gold prospectors from the avarice and violence of a politically connected mining baron...

...triumph in Vietnam, Pale Rider and Silverado try to persuade us that we have never lost the simple and straightforward values of the mythic Old West...

...the frontiers had been pushed to the Pacific...

...By the time the rider gallops off toward the horizon, retribution has been exacted, wrongs have been set right, and the young community has been left free to enjoy the benefits of the American dream...

...It promoted the notion that the good, brave, and competent would inevitably triumph over evil...

...We wanted this to be almost like a primer of Westerns—to teach kids and remind adults," writer-director Kasdan has said...

...The underlying theme is the destruction of primitive life and values by encroaching civilization and high technology...

...Just as Sylvester Stallone's Rambo: First Blood Part II lets us finally enjoy the spectacle of U.S...

...Miller), represented the maligned Indian as tragic hero (Cheyenne Autumn, Little Big Man, Soldier Blue), and occasionally exploited the surface features of the Western to develop themes that had previously been foreign to it (Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar, which is both feminist and anti-McCarthyite...

...Like Kasdan's The Big Chill, the most spurious movie representation of former New Left activists, Silverado is laced with sophisticated dialogue...

...Pale Rider borrows heavily from the memorable Shane and High Noon, superimposing on them the "Man With No Name" persona Eastwood established in Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns...

...FILM Michael H. Seitz Men on Horseback In a recent article in CineAction!, Robin Wood, one of the most perceptive critics of mainstream filmmaking, declared that our time "is proving to be the most impoverished, the most cynical, the most reactionary, the emptiest, in the entire history of Hollywood...

...Although based on the true story of a kidnapped boy and the father who spends years searching for him, the film is symbolic rather than documentary in style...

...If the classic Western had nothing credible to say to us in the 1960s and 1970s, what can it say to us today...

...In deference to the 1980s, Kasdan provides a proto-feminist love interest (Rosanna Arquette, in the film's most underdeveloped role), and a heroic black gunslinger (Glover) who combats Jim Crow along the frontier...