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Barbarosa
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Surely one of the most tired of all film-journalistic clichés is the Death of the Western – the genre reportedly having hit the dust somewhere in the late 1960s – swiftly followed by its comeback (in another guise) as the Revisionist Western. But the Western has unceasingly been subject to revision throughout its entire history! Blacks, women and native peoples in Westerns, self-critique and melancholia in the Western, anger and subversion in the Western … In varying degrees and intensities, these seeming ‘alternative revisions’ have always been in play as possibility and actuality. (Advice to pedagogues: never even utter the word revisionist in your film-genre classes, because your students will never be able to get off that handy bandwagon that is so flattering to the contemporary sensibility.) But look at this: one of the most colourful, intelligent Westerns of the 1980s, directed with great skill by Australia’s Fred Schepisi (still putting a lot of energy into this, his first USA assignment) – and it’s neither Dead nor Revised. In fact, it’s a remarkably pure illustration of the type of narrative that demonstrates what René Girard theorised as mimetic or eye-for-eye violence in a small Western community. This aggression escalates for decades until it creates an outlaw – Barbarosa, i.e., Red Beard – who possesses a mythic, Christ-like persona. The leads provide a stunning contrast of two styles of character acting: Willie Nelson (as Barbarosa) emulating the Old Hollywood school of pure screen presence; and Gary Busey (as Karl, a young, on-the-run buck who teams up with the older mentor) radiating the mannerism of New Hollywood. (Nelson is, I feel, an undervalued actor: check out Jerry Schatzberg’s splendid Honeysuckle Rose [1980] for his best showcase.) It takes some effort to recall the time when Fred Schepisi was known for the vivid clarity and punch of his directorial approach – the time of his Roeg-like episode “The Priest” in Libido (1973), followed by The Devil’s Playground (1976) and The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1978). Plenty (1985) began his path to more comfortably literary adaptations and, eventually, the lumpy, old-folks-recollecting stuff like Last Orders (2001). There were bright exceptions along the way, such as the lively (if thematically muddled) Six Degrees of Separation (1993); but the final stretch of his career is, by and large, pretty depressing (his last work to date, the dire Words and Pictures, is from 2013). No wonder that, once resettled in Australia, Schepisi (now 84) so often spoke of wanting to make a tough, youth-oriented road movie, no doubt to tap some of that earlier, inspired energy … Alas, the project never came together. © Adrian Martin August 1990 / September 2024 |
