* * *
A New Mexico town forms a posse to go after a rancher who robbed another rancher; none of the ranchers are jolly by the end.
Starring Broderick Crawford, John Derek, Charles Bickford, Wanda Hendrix
Written by Seymour Bennett, Connie Lee Bennett, Kenneth Gamet
Produced by Harry Joe Brown
Duration 73 minutes
When I was at school, I think it was in Year 9 English, we had to come up with questions for a survey and use them to poll our classmates. Probably we had to then write up the results into some kind of discursive essay, I don’t remember. What I do remember is that my survey was about films (natch) and it included finding out which genre of film was the most popular.
Seeing that this was the mid-’90s, I'm certain that I didn’t put ‘superhero’ as a choice – ah, sweet, merciful nostalgia. But among the actions and romances and comedies and horrors, western was in there. And came in rock bottom.
Westerns were old. Westerns were slow. Westerns were boring. My student polling came post-DANCES WITH WOLVES and UNFORGIVEN, and although I’m certain I had seen and enjoyed those award-winning movies by then, my views that day still concurred with my peers’.
Westerns were used to clog up the afternoon TV schedules, always skipped straight past when channel surfing. No one played ‘Cowboys and Indians’ in the playground when I was little. My generation was the one that was supposed to flock to WILD WILD WEST in 1999 – what were Barry Sonnenfeld, Jon Peters and Will Smith thinking?
Today, having widened my cinematic pallet, I know better. I know that just like any genre, the western has its good and bad entries, its different stylistic eras, its straight and skewed interpretations. Nevertheless, I still approached THE LAST POSSE with trepidation; happily, my caution turned out to be unwarranted.
The film starts off with the titular posse returning to town. The sheriff was among their party and "looks half-dead". There's a prevailing sense of everything not having gone as planned.
"What happened out there?" the town’s judge asks.
Well, the early reports are that four people were killed, the desert "changed all of us" and they didn't even get ahold of the stolen money which was whole point of mounting up in the first place. Plus, the remaining members of the posse aren’t too keen for the sheriff to make a full recovery, lest he reveal more of went on during that dusty journey.
"What's all this about?" someone else asks.
Thus commences flashbacks to show why the posse was necessary and then what happened when it rode out. Some kind of cattle dispute led to a saloon punch-up and then more than a hundred grand (surely millions today!) got swiped and scarpered off with. It’s established that the now-comatose sheriff is a drunk, but his drinking is clearly spurred on by the kind of guilt that only comes from possessing a strong moral compass, something that puts him at odds with the rest of the men who set out on their horses. And it turns out that the lawman knows a lot more about his fellow posse-mates than they’re comfortable with.
Ultimately, THE LAST POSSE is a THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE-style tale of the corrupting power of money, and the lengths to which man’s greed will take him. The flashbacks and flashforwards are pretty sophisticated for 1953, although I guess CITIZEN KANE had been out for more than a decade at that point. Its multiple-perspective structure makes this another RASHOMON-inspired flick, with the Kurosawa classic having been released three years earlier.
It's pacey, with the hour-and-a-quarter runtime leaving little fat on the bones, and the structure is employed confidently to generate suspense, surprises and pathos. It actually feels more like a noir than a western, with its moody tone, double-crosses and duplicitous characters, not to mention the choice to film in black and white.
I don’t know if THE LAST POSSE would have changed the minds of my Year 9 English classmates, but I certainly wasn't bored. It's not even really a ‘typical’ Western, but maybe that speaks to the whole fallacy of the idea of ‘genre’ in the first place.
Three stars out of five.
Valid use of the
word ‘last’? Debatable. After all the kerfuffle this
time, it might be a while before the town puts a new posse together. But they were so keen to go in that direction that it seems unlikely they’ll be able
to resist next time there’s troubled occurring.
What would a movie called THE FIRST
POSSE be about? The first
one I came across was Mario Van Peebles' 1993 effort, titled simply POSSE.
Well, I remember the video cover, anyway.
Previously: RAMBO: LAST BLOOD
Next time: THE LAST KEEPERS
Check out my books: Jonathanlastauthor.com
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