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THE REIVERS *½/**** Image A Sound B starring Steve McQueen, Sharon Farrell, Will Geer, Michael Constantine screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., based on the novel by William Faulkner directed by Mark Rydell
TOM HORN **½/**** Image A- Sound A- starring Steve McQueen, Linda Evans, Richard Farnsworth, Billy Green Bush screenplay by Thomas McGuane and Bud Shrake directed by William Wiard
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The oldest, most tired story to beguile the male artist is the Moment at Which Innocence is Irretrievably Lost. Most writers try their hand at it at some point, and I really wish they wouldn't: it suggests they'd rather be stupidly oblivious to not just the pains but also the rewards of adulthood. It's a boring default trauma, but at least when William Faulkner did it (in The Reivers), it was a boring default trauma with genius digressions that occasionally distracted from the emptiness of the narrative line. Not so Mark Rydell's big-screen adaptation of The Reivers, from which all of Faulkner's background about the landscape and the history and his characters' desperate lives has been excised, leaving the innocence-losing adventures to hog the spotlight and make you wish you were watching something that aspired to dissipation for a change.
However unworthy of the writer who gave us Light in August and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner's version has the decency to live and die by its images. While the 1905-set book opens with hired hand Boon Hogganbeck (Steve McQueen in the film) bursting into an office and knocking us off our bearings before we can figure out just what the hell happened, the film's prologue isn't nearly so piercing: knowing it's got a period to represent, it begins with a genteel Southern town and a train pulling into a station, thus introducing a) the MacGuffin of an eminently-stealable Winton Flyer automobile, and b) that we're dealing with a sealed-in-plastic milieu and not something we might have a shot at relating to. A bad, obvious sign.
But not as bad and obvious as what follows. Rambunctious Boon swipes the car as an opportunity to whisk Lucius (Mitch Vogel), the 12-year-old grandson of the big boss man, on one of those picaresque extravaganzas beloved by sentimental writers. With black stablehand Ned McCaslin (Rupert Crosse) tagging along, trouble is their destination–except that it's not. The trio's arrival at a whorehouse should trigger all manner of churning, mixed emotions (which it did in the novel), but although Lucius is rightly befuddled, The Reivers treats things like they're in the town from Pete's Dragon. In the Faulkner novel, people seem like they're on the cusp of falling from whatever tenuous post they hold; here, everybody gets a nametag and serves a securely-held purpose.
So Ned swaps the car for a horse, triggering a climax involving Lucius riding the latter in a race to win back the former. Though just as lame as it was in the book, the movie sucks whatever juice there was from these developments because there's no supporting material to flesh things out. You're also unpleasantly unprotected from the annoying patronization of Ned and the other blacks, though it's all so annoying and patronizing that this barely elicits a grunt. Too, The Reivers features a lush score by John Williams that no true "reiver" (Scottish for "thief") would ever tolerate, likewise Burgess Meredith's flatulent narration. Faulkner believed (somewhat delusionally) in the wildness of his characters, and the movie nips their awakening in the bud by sanding the edges off their corners. It can't afford to lose its innocence: God knows it hasn't got much else to offer.
Released 12 years later and McQueen's penultimate film, Tom Horn is a revisionist western that goes so far with the revisionism that it becomes a regular western again. Where films like The Wild Bunch and McCabe and Mrs. Miller railed against the lie of western purity, this one rails against the disbelievers of the lie: anyone who challenges the myth of the taciturn macho is basically a corrupt city slicker looking to destroy true American virtue. It's a revision of a revision, landing right at the tail end of the cycle as unironic westerns were being recycled as science-fiction (the High Noon redux Outland, for instance), and in rhyming with those refurbished genre pieces, it's simultaneously up-to-date and completely out of touch. Though not badly handled for what it is, how much you get out of it depends on how much you buy into everything the anti-western tried to debunk.
Pointedly, the film takes place in the early 20th century, when the frontier was officially kaput and its standard-bearers were rendered obsolete–rather like the myths that a decade's worth of deconstructions had rendered null. Its real-life protagonist Tom Horn (Steve McQueen) was an enforcer and Indian fighter who struggled for a place in the new world order–and seems to regain it when he's hired (through kindly Richard Farnsworth) to repel some notorious cattle rustlers. Unfortunately, Horn hails from a time where, as the DVD copy puts it, "a man's word was only as good as his fists," meaning that his brutal (though cinematically downplayed) tactics embarrass his employers. Of course, this calls for a conspiracy, with a 15-year-old boy murdered specifically for pinning the rap on our man.
Structurally, this is par for the revisionist course: a lonerish hero punished by the system for being too subversive. But the protagonist is no whoremaster like Altman's McCabe or murderer à la Peckinpah's Billy the Kid–he's someone who upheld traditional two-fisted Yankee values only to see them supplanted by sophisticates with selfish agendas. And the betrayal doesn't call those values into question, instead merely mourning their passing and yearning for their return. Horn's total incomprehension of the modern world (as in a scene where he fails to negotiate the alien concept of cooked lobster) is treated as innocence, as though he never ate from the tree of knowledge and can thus know no sin. The film subverts subversion even as it co-opts its form, making it the all-time champion for caginess.
It's somehow the right reactionary coda for a genre rendered obsolete at the beginning of the Reagan era. It knows the kids won't tolerate its brand of Americana, but it's going to cling to it come hell or high water: this is the kind of movie that provides its hero a schoolteacher love interest (Linda Evans, pre-"Dynasty") to show that he's a real nice guy deep down. And true to its school, it rides with its hero straight into the grave, presumably thinking Better dead than doing whatever the randy young whippersnappers are up to. Defiantly anticlimactic and out of step with just about everything, this one-of-a-kind elegy inspires admiration for sticking to a program that by 1980 even neo-cons had left in the dust. Tom Horn isn't exactly good, but like some chanced-upon mash notes from a bygone era, it's endlessly fascinating.
THE DVDs Paramount's DVD release of The Reivers, one of the studio's budget titles, is more than adequate. The 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen image is surprisingly vivid, boasting excellent saturation and fine detail in most scenes. Despite occasional bleed-through problems on the odd shot, it's a creditable transfer. Alas, the 5.1 Dolby Digital remix is so frontally centred that it sounds more like 3.1; nevertheless, it's frighteningly sharp and crystal clear. There are no extras.
Warner's DVD release of Tom Horn marks the first time the film has ever been available in widescreen on any video format. The 2.40:1, 16×9-enhanced image is just a hair off in the definition department, but it's smooth sailing otherwise as colours are vibrant and well-saturated. The Dolby centre-channel mono sound is equally fine, perhaps not exceptionally potent but sharp enough to lend zeal to the gunshots. The only extra is the film's trailer.
The Reivers 106 minutes; PG-13; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English Dolby Surround, French DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Paramount
Tom Horn 97 minutes; R; 2.40:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 1.0, French DD 1.0; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Warner
