An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Ed Harris.
Cast: Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Renee Zellweger, Jeremy Irons, Tom Bower, Lance Henriksen
Description: The small New Mexico mining community of Appaloosa is under the thumb of ruthless, sadistic rancher Randall Bragg and his men, who gun down anyone who dares to challenge their supremacy - even the local sheriff and his deputies. In desperation, some of the businessman hire city marshal Virgil Cole and his gun-slinging partner Everett Hitch to restore peace to the district, using their trademark brand of tough justice to beat Bragg into submission. However, their heavy-handed tactics don't have the desired effect and when Virgil falls under the spell of sassy piano player Allison French, he provides Bragg with the perfect target to drive the new city marshal and his deputy out of town for good.
Country: US. 2008. 115mins
A taste for conflict: Ed Harris as Marshal Virgil Cole, Renée Zellweger as Allison, Viggo Mortensen as deputy Everett Hitch and Jeremy Irons as greedy rancher Randall Bragg
Keeping it wild: Community spirit in Appaloosa
Westerns are seldom on the menu these days, largely because the audience for them has mysteriously fled. When they do arrive they tend to be revisionist affairs such as Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.
However, to its credit, Ed Harris’s film, based on a novel by Robert B Parker, makes little attempt to fashion something new out of the genre. It is much more concerned with paying tribute to it — and suggesting that you can see through westerns the whole history, past and present, of America itself, and hopefully understand its complications a little better.
It is shot, for instance, in widescreen by the great Dean Semler and thus looks marvellous in a thoroughly old-fashioned but totally convincing manner. Howard Hawks and John Ford would like the way New Mexico stretches out before them as Harris, playing Marshal Virgil Cole, and Viggo Mortensen as Everett Hitch, his deputy, sign up to bring justice to Appaloosa.
It’s a small 1880s town where the greedy rancher Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons) has had the previous lawmen shot in order to pursue his own nefarious interests.
Our two heroes prove their value to the townspeople by successfully dispensing with a trio of Bragg’s hostile henchmen, after which Bragg himself visits them for an explanation. When he’s told in no uncertain terms that they’ve come to get rid of him, he says icily: “Maybe you aren’t good enough.”
Perhaps they aren’t. Virgil and Everett make an odd couple who clearly have a chequered history together but display a hard-won respect for each other because of it. Their banter is largely a matter of mutual self-defence and one thing Harris as director achieves is mixing a pawky humour with the excitement of the drama.
The only thing that comes between them is the awkward business of sex, since Allison (Renée Zellweger), a newly arrived and rather hoity-toity teacher at the local school, attracts them both and clearly plays men as well as she strums the piano.
She is by no means the usual western woman, faithfully tied to domesticity, and sometimes the actress finds the part a little difficult to manage as convincingly as the two principals, who dovetail so well together.
Virgil, whose previous experience with women is limited to “whores and squaws”, falls unwisely for her, while Everett, though he fancies her too, suspects that she has an awkward line in personal ambition and isn’t necessarily to be trusted. His instincts prove to be right on the button.
If the film has a moral at all, it lies in the often fine distinction between enforcing the law and simply killing those who get in the way of the community’s attempt to live decently. This is an old western compass point but it’s never laid out before us too forcibly. The story is the thing and it’s expertly worked out.
“Feelings get you killed,” says Virgil at one point and later, when a villain proclaims that nothing scares him, comments through scarcely gritted teeth: “Aren’t you afraid to die?” And then, pulling out his gun: “Good, because you go first.”
Were it not for the sense of humour that covers much of the film, this would seem a little on the brutal side. However, though it’s full of sometimes violent but always well-managed action, Appaloosa manages to steer its way past that sort of criticism.
Much of the dialogue is lifted piecemeal from Parker’s novel, with Virgil trying to sound more educated than he is, especially when faced with the menacing pomp of Irons. There’s even Timothy Spall as the town mayor, desperately trying to maintain a thoroughly British propriety under impossible circumstances.
This, though, is not so much a comedy as a western with the ironic undertones that someone like Hawks would appreciate while telling a story such as Rio Bravo.
This doesn’t, of course, measure up to that masterpiece but it certainly proves that Harris is not only a fine actor — with four Oscar nominations to his credit — but a director whose impressive biopic of Jackson Pollock was clearly no fluke.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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