THE LAST MOVIE (1971, Dennis Hopper)

 * * 

An American movie crew finishes shooting in Peru and then this one guy hangs around for a bit instead of going home.

Starring  Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Kris Kristofferson, Michelle Phillips, Dean Stockwell

Written by  Stewart Stern

Produced by  Paul Lewis

Duration  108 minutes

 

Bruce Willis, HUDSON HAWK. Eddie Murphy, HARLEM NIGHTS. John Travolta, BATTLEFIELD EARTH. Mariah Carey, GLITTER. Steven Seagal, ON DEADLY GROUND. Michael Flatley, BLACKBIRD. Sylvester Stallone, PARADISE ALLEY. Vanilla Ice, COOL AS ICE.

You know what's fun? Listing movies that were embarrassing vanity projects. Especially BLACKBIRD. Wow.

Yes, this is when stars get so big that they are given carte blanche to make their dream project. Of course, they headline it. Often they (supposedly) contribute to the writing. Certainly they have some kind of producer's credit, and many make it their directorial debut: for the likes of Murphy, Seagel and – yes – ‘the Lord of the Dance’, it's been their sole turn behind the camera.

Research suggests that the ultimate vanity project is Jackie Chan's CHINESE ZODIAC (2012). According to Guinness World Records, it has the most credits for a single person in one motion picture, with a staggering 15. Chan is credited as writer, director, actor, producer, executive producer (?), cinematographer, art director, unit production manager, catering coordinator (??), stuntman, stunt coordinator, gaffer, composer, propmaster, and theme tune vocalist.

(Chan's movie – and truly it is his – also holds the title of Most Stunts by a Living Actor. Presumably the record for dead actors is a lot less hotly contested?)

All the vanity projects I mentioned above were critical and/or commercial disasters. But that's not always the case. Think Robert Duvall's THE APOSTLE, or Kevin Costner's DANCES WITH WOLVES. And Prince with PURPLE RAIN, although he did push his luck by subsequently directing UNDER THE CHERRY MOON. Um, wait a sec ... Costner went on to make THE POSTMAN. And Duvall later released something called ASSASSINATION TANGO, for a meagre box office return of $1.013 million. Maybe the trick is to only cut the ego loose once and then rein it back in.

Anyway, that brings us to THE LAST MOVIE. In 1969, Dennis Hopper, alongside fellow counterculture icon Peter Fonda, unleashed EASY RIDER upon the world. It was an instant classic, defining a (dying) cultural movement with insight and cynicism, and raking in a whopping $60 million from a budget of $400,000.

EASY RIDER was Hopper's directorial debut, and with that level of success (it made 150 times what it cost) he had Universal Pictures clambering to throw $1 million and full creative control at him to make whatever he wanted.

What he wanted to make was THE LAST MOVIE.

Dennis Hopper directed seven films in his lifetime. That's enough to be considered a body of work. Of course, he was an actor first and foremost, with over 200 credits. His directorial debut came at the relatively young age of 33, after only a handful of movie role and certainly before any as the lead. The final film he directed was 25 years after the first.

And yet despite this, I don't think many people think 'Dennis Hopper: the Director'. It's kind of hard to imagine him actually doing it, to be honest. You can accept EASY RIDER as a wild and loose one-off that didn't need, didn't want a steady hand. But I struggle to picture the spangled photographer in APOCALYPSE NOW or unhinged Frank Booth from BLUE VELVET as the calm, accountable figure in charge of running a movie set.

So, you'd assume THE LAST MOVIE is going to be bad, or at least a mess. Potentially as calamitous a follow-up as Duvall, Costner and Prince managed after their own lauded debuts. And for years, its iffy reputation suggested exactly that.

But wait. There's a twist. THE LAST MOVIE is one of those films that's had a critical reappraisal. No one rated CITIZEN KANE, BLADE RUNNER or THE SHINING on first release. THE THING was a flop. HEAVEN'S GATE was a disaster. Each is now held in high regard. (All correct except for HEAVEN'S GATE, which is still boring. And just for the record, I like THE POSTMAN.)

As ever, I had to watch this thing myself and make up my own mind. And it's fair to say that THE LAST MOVIE didn't convince me.

The signs weren't promising from the get-go. It starts by dropping us into an interminably long parade on the streets of a Peruvian town. Dennis is there, in the lead role (natch), and the poor sod looks as confused as we are as he wonders around among all the chanting and, um, parading. I'd say that the film has lost the plot, but that would be inaccurate, since there's not yet been any sign of one.

Somehow, it feels a bit like a Sam Peckinpah movie in this early stretch, the beginning of THE WILD BUNCH especially. Come to think of it, Hopper's image was pretty similar to Peckinpah's: the hard-drinking, drug-taking, live-wire rebel. He also looks as dishevelled and out-of-sorts as vintage Big Sam, and shares his affinity for shooting south of the border.

And in fact, now that I'm warming up to this kind-of hypothesis: since here our Dennis is playing a filmmaker, maybe THE LAST MOVIE is really some kind of indirect Peckinpah biopic? There's even some of the punctuating moments of slo-mo that the great man loved. And here's something else Peckinpah was known for: westerns. Which THE LAST MOVIE basically is. The dusty, wood-building town. Those shoot-outs. Horses. Hats and ponchos.

But, um, it’s also not. After all the western imagery, we pivot to funkadelic 1970's disco dancing. Someone gets their ear pierced. There's a general free-love, hippy vibe, with much singing along to acoustic guitar – sometimes as strummed by Kris Kristofferson.

Then I realised: the western bits are just the movie that Dennis's character is shooting! Oh right, OK, got it now. The town they're filming in looks like it's from a bygone era, but maybe that's just because it's Peru? Wait, wasn't Peru where Butch Cassidy and Sundance were trying to get to? Is that significant? Probably not.

But this isn't some kind of film-within-film thing. Because after 25 minutes of (pretty interminable) screen time, the movie being filmed wraps and the crew buggers off. Except for Dennis's character, who seems to have fallen in love with a local girl. They go for long walks in mountains straight out of THE SOUND OF MUSIC, including stopping off to romp under a waterfall where we are, um, treated to the sight of our director/star's bony white bottom. Thanks for that, Dennis old chum.

So he gives up his career as a ... whatever job he had on the film crew, to hang around with her, decked out in his ever-present hat/poncho combo. Mostly this involves the couple wandering around town or more mountains while holding hands. It goes on like this for quite a while. 

And as for the last hour of the film, I'm going to let Wikipedia do the work for me:

 

He [Hopper] thinks he has found paradise, but is soon called in to help in a bizarre incident: the Peruvian natives are 'filming' their own movie with 'cameras' made of sticks, and acting out real western movie violence, as they do not understand movie fakery.

It's kind of an interesting idea, I guess? If a bit patronising. But it doesn't really go anywhere. Instead, some vacationing Americans come to town and it becomes a hangout movie. Hopper and his lady start to argue, trouble arriving in paradise. He takes solace in helping the locals make their fake movie. I guess he's retreating into fiction to avoid facing a less-than-perfect reality? Is that the message?

That would probably be giving THE LAST MOVIE too much credit. Because suffice it to say, this is 100% another disastrous vanity project. And in terms of sophomore efforts, sadly director Hopper's is no PULP FICTION. Or THE TERMINATOR. Or SEVEN. Or, I don't know, even UPSTREAM COLOR or THE TOWN or something like that.

Two stars out of five.

 

Valid use of the word ‘last’? Clearly not, either for Hopper or wider culture.

What would a movie called THE FIRST MOVIE be about?  It was that one with the rocket hitting the moon, right? Or the train coming towards the screen and making the audience lose their shit?

Previously:  LAST DANCE 

Next time:  I’LL ALWAYS KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

THE LAST HARD MEN (1976, Andrew V McLaglen)

 

* * * 

The retired sheriff who put away a violent criminal must again track him down when the man escapes.

Starring  Charlton Heston, James Coburn, Barbara Hershey, Jorge Rivero, Michael Parks, Larry Wilcox

Written by  Guerdon Trueblood   

Produced by  Walter Seltzer, Russell Thacher   

Duration  98 minutes   

 

What are the great cinematic face offs? What about FACE/OFF itself? Nicholas Cage and John Travlota: the battle of the scenery-chewers. That turned out pretty good.

Still, there were plenty of missed opportunities, back there in 1997. The obvious one was Arnie vs Sly, but Van Damme vs Seagal would also have worked; ditto Bruce Willis vs Mel Gibson. But if I had to choose, I’d’ve gone for Danny DeVito facing off against Bob Hoskins. Short and bald vs bald and short.

Alright, fine, but THE LAST HARD MEN is a western. Well, there have been plenty of one-on-ones in that dusty territory. My limited knowledge of the genre means that I’m not about to trawl through IMDb to come up with multiple examples; let’s just mention Russell Crowe and Christian Bale in the 3:10 TO YUMA remake (2007) and Pierce Brosnon and Liam Nesson in SERAPHIM FALLS (2006) and be done with it.

And so that brings us to Charlton Heston vs James Coburn. Pitting them against each other? Sure, makes sense. Couple of rugged stars with genre bona fides. OK, sure, but this movie makes a pretty bold claim. What could have inspired their casting not just as men, but as hard men – and the final ones, no less?

Let’s see, then. First of all, is there anything in the pair’s private lives to suggest they were hard, and is it clear which of them was, indeed, the hardest?

Well, they were both in the army. But while Charlton served for two years as a radio operator and aerial gunner aboard a B-25 bomber, probably wincing from the sounds of planes blowing up all round him while risking his own skin, James had a more low-key time of it: he was a truck driver and a DJ on an Army radio station in Texas. Hardly life-threatening, unless you hate country music.

On the other hand, Coburn was a close friend of Bruce Lee’s and learnt Jeet Kune Do from the master. Heston doesn’t appear to have got any comparable training; the closest comparison is his stint as the president of the National Rifle Association from 1998 until 2003, which is far less impressive.

So, honours even so far. How about their experiences on screen, prior to this film?

Well, blimey. Heston was only bloody Moses, in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956)! You don't go about parting the red sea without some moxy. He’s no slouch in his other most famous Biblical epic BEN-HUR (1959), either. And in PLANET OF THE APES (1968), he delivers the classic "Get your stinkin’ paws off me, you damned dirty ape!" to his primate captors – on their planet! (Except – spoiler alert – it’s actually not.)

Coburn obviously can’t beat his rival for iconic manly roles. But still, he was one of only three who managed to actually escape in THE GREAT EACAPE (1963); he played a smooth Bondian spy in OUR MAN FLINT (1966 and a sequel the following year); and he was the one blowing everything up in Sergio Leone’s A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE (1971).

Hmm. So it’s actually rather difficult to choose from the two when it comes to being hard.

What about during THE LAST HARD MEN itself? Well, the younger actor at first has the edge. Coburn enters as part of a chain gang out in the desert, laying railway tracks. He grabs the guard’s shotgun and blasts him in the chest; now left unsupervised (one guard?), he goes about setting everyone loose.

"What I think up here," he tells his accomplices while tapping his forehead, "I’m two or three minutes ahead of you. And that’s what counts." So, he's a hard thinker, too.

The getaway includes hanging onto the bottom of a moving train and later stabbing a disloyal accomplice in the back, right after showering the man with compliments. Brutal.

And the whole escaping thing was just so he could get his revenge on Heston’s character, which he does by kidnapping the man’s nubile daughter (Barbara Hershey) and holding her hostage with his predatory gang out in the hills, in a bid to lure his foe into an ambush.

Heston, meanwhile, is not immediately promising. He’s a retired sheriff who sports an impressive moustache and mutton-chops combo, so that’s a plus, but he also lets the current sheriff, a baby-faced Michael Parks (FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, KILL BILL), smartmouth him.

But he soon snaps back into form and shows everyone who’s really the boss when Coburn re-enters the scene. Charlton’s the man who sent our James down, you see, and he wants to repeat the trick. "I ain't dead, I'm retired," he growls.

Turns out his is more of a simmering rage, kept dormant for a while and now about to erupt. And so, battle commences.

It won’t surprise you to learn that the right side of the law prevails. But does that mean Heston was truly harder? I have to say, just about. He gets shot like six times by Coburn before flinging his adversary off a cliff, and yet seems to survive. So, let’s say it’s a win on points.

Still, in the annals of cinema, Coburn did come back 20 years later with one of the hardest characters ever: Nick Nolte's abusive, alcoholic father in 1997’s AFFLICTION. Put him against the Heston character in THE LAST HARD MEN and I think the outcome would have been very different.

Three stars out of five.

 

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  Not really – many more hardman actors were still to come. Heck, even in 1976, there was plenty of work going for Clint Eastwood, Robert Mitchum (whose son Christopher is in this film), Charles Bronson, Steve McQueen …

What would a movie called THE FIRST HARD MEN be about?  Well, Louis Cyr, a Canadian bodybuilder who died in 1912, was known to be ‘the strongest man who ever lived’. You certainly wouldn’t accuse someone like that of being a big softie. (And he presumably had plenty of hard mates, too.)

Previously:  LAST PASSENGER

Next time:  THE LAST DETAIL

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

LAST TRAIN FROM GUN HILL (1959, John Sturges)

 

* * * * 

The death of his wife at the hands of an old friend’s son puts a lawman on a collision course with his former pal.

Starring  Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, Carolyn Jones, Earl Holliman, Brad Dexter

Written by  James Poe

Produced by  Hal B Wallis  

Duration  90 minutes

Here we go! John Sturges. One of the great western directors, up there with John Ford, Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, Sam Peckinpah and Howard Hawks. THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, anyone? GUNFIGHT AT THE OK CORRAL? Not to mention that Bank Holiday perennial, all-star WWII epic THE GREAT ESCAPE. Stephen King even named the town in The Dark Tower: Part 5 ‘Calla Bryn Sturgis’ after Sturges, acknowledging his book’s similarities to MAGNIFICENT SEVEN.

Now, I’d never heard of Sturge’s LAST TRAIN FROM GUN HILL, which is nestled somewhere in the middle of the great man’s career. But I was certainly familiar with its leads.

Kirk Douglas has one of those iconic cinema faces, seemingly carved out of marble. SPARTACUS is, for me, Stanley Kubrick's weakest post-THE KILLING film, but man that's a legendary role for Kirk. (Side note: PATHS OF GLORY, the pair’s other team-up, is one of Kubrick’s best.) My favourite Douglas performance is in Billy Wilder’s black-as-coal media satire ACE IN THE HOLE, and he has no trouble being convincing in locales as diverse as ships on the sea (VIKINGS) and ships in space (SATURN 3). And he lived until 103, the bloody trooper.

Then you’ve got Anthony Quinn. I’ll always think of him as a comedy mobster in LAST ACTION HERO and for portraying a much more menacing villain as the cuckolded husband in Tony Scott’s REVENGE, but he too had a storied decades-long career, winning two Oscars and popping up in the likes of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, THE GUNS OF NAVARONE and LA STRADA.

Here, the two titans play former friends who are now on opposite sides of the law. It’s a solid dramatic setup, also used for William Holden and Robert Ryan in Peckinpah’s THE WILD BUNCH, and again with Nick Nolte and Powers Booth in EXTREME PREJUDICE from another westernphile, Walter Hill.

In LAST TRAIN FROM GUN HILL, Douglas is the good guy US Marshall, first seen joking around with the local kids outside his cop shop. His mood worsens considerably when his own son turns up, distraught. The lad tearfully leads pop into the woods, where his mother/Douglas’s wife has been raped and murdered by a couple of whisky-swigging cowboys. 

Not only that, but one of the rapist-murderers turns out to be the son of Tony Quinn’s wealthy-but-dodgy cattle baron. So, Douglas jumps on a train to Quinn’s ends, Gun Hill, and arrests the boy – but when Tony stands in his way, he has to pivot into a local hotel and wait it out with his hostage until the next train arrives, putting the two old buddies into a tense standoff. Douglas’s only ally in this hostile town is Carolyn Jones's feisty dame, a bitter ex-lover of Quinn and the only Gun Hillian willing to stand up to the man who effectively runs the whole place.

Douglas’s granite determination to see justice done in the face of passive local authorities is well-matched by Quinn, who has the more complex role. He retains a fondness for Kirk from all the years they’ve known each other and actually views his own son with distain – in general, for a lack of character, and specifically for his recent abhorrent actions. And yet family is family, so the crooked rancher is driven by loyalty to protect his offspring from what he knows the boy deserves morally; added to this, Tony can’t lose face in the town that shudders before his name.

The story is elegantly simple and doesn’t mess about, all taking place in less than 24 hours and with Douglas’s determination to get his prisoner onto the final train of the day providing a ticking clock. There’s a thrill in seeing this man commit to his task with laser focus and steely resolve, like the Terminator with a badge. "You, you're breaking the law!" one cowardly citizen splutters at our hero. "I am the law!" the Marshall spits back. (The creators of 2000 AD's ‘Judge Dredd’ were clearly taking notes.)

All in all, while LAST TRAIN FROM GUN HILL may not be one of Sturges’s better known efforts, it’s a compelling tale with suspense to spare that can hold its head up high among its more celebrated peers.

Four stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  Absolutely: the film literally ends with the train pulling away.

What would a movie called FIRST TRAIN FROM GUN HILL be about?  A lot more on what Douglas got up to on the journey into the town. The newspaper crossword puzzle, maybe? Did they have them back then?

Previously:  I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER

Next time:  THE LAST MAN ON EARTH

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

LAST MAN STANDING (1996, Walter Hill)

 

* * 

A drifter gets caught up in gang warfare in an isolated Prohibition-era town.

Starring  Bruce Willis, Christopher Walken, William Sanderson, David Patrick Kelly, Bruce Dern, Michael Imperioli

Written by  Walter Hill

Produced by  Walter Hill, Arthur M Sarkissian

Duration  101 minutes

When I first watched LAST MAN STANDING, on video at some point in the late ’90s, I had no idea it was based on anything. I’d never heard of Akira Kurosawa, and while I knew that Clint Eastwood had starred in some films labelled ‘Spaghetti Westerns’, I hadn’t seen any of them either and didn’t know from what they had drawn their inspiration.

In the end, I ended up travelling the path of the films that lead directly to LAST MAN in reverse order. I started to get more into Westerns and went through Sergio Leone’s Eastwood-starring so-called ‘man with no name’ trilogy, noting that A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS’ plot seemed awfully familiar. Then I tracked down a copy of Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO and thus completed my journey at the start. Well, not quite – I haven’t read Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, which is believed, albeit not universally, to have inspired the 1961 Japanese film.

Let’s talk for a moment about Walter Hill. Why isn’t he better known? In my mind, he’s comparable to John Carpenter, in terms of style (economical yet thematically rich), sensibility (men being men and fighting the system) and love of Westerns. I guess Hill never had a hit that birthed a neverending franchise, like HALLOWEEN, or any flops that became cult classics, like THE THING or BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, or one that has joined meme culture, such as THEY LIVE.

A couple of years ago, I attended an all-night John Carpenter marathon at London's famous Prince Charles Cinema, where they screened, in order: THEY LIVE, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, THE THING, PRINCE OF DARKNESS and IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS. On the first train home Sunday morning, I mused in my sleep-deprived state about which other directors deserved the same treatment; Hill came to mind straight away. I would definitely hit the Red Bulls to watch a five-movie programme of, say, THE DRIVER, THE WARRIORS, SOUTHERN COMFORT, 48 HRS. and EXTREME PREJUDICE.

But wait, no LAST MAN STANDING in that line-up?

Well, here’s the thing: diminishing returns. YOJIMBO is great. FISTFUL OF DOLLARS is also good, but definitely the weakest of its trilogy and Leone’s least accomplished movie overall (not that I’ve seen THE COLOSSUS OF RHODES.) And LAST MAN …

It’s a curiously empty film. It should have a lot of atmosphere, with its 1920's cars and clothes and the dust creeping through a sinisterly rundown town. It should be exciting, with a perfectly cast Willis playing two sides against each other and running a gauntlet of double-crosses and attempts on his life. It should be thrilling, with its John-Woo-goes-West sensibility, arming Willis with two Colt 1911s that magically fire 20+ bullets per clip and have the stopping power to launch people 30 feet in the air through plate glass windows. But instead, it’s oddly lifeless and even dull.

Is the problem style over substance? Sure, but that imbalance doesn’t have to be an impediment. I wouldn't call Michael Davis’s SHOOT ’EM UP (2007) a classic, but something like that does at least know what it’s got to offer and doesn’t try to overreach its grasp. Ditto DESPERADO (1995), which came out a year before LAST MAN and strongly resembles it aesthetically. So, maybe the issue here is that the movie takes itself too seriously – that it doesn’t lean into being an exercise in cool sets, frenetic action and hardboiled dialogue, but misguidedly attempts to express a weight that isn’t actually there.

There's definitely too much plot – much of it delivered courtesy of Willis’s mumbled voice over – and not enough story. It's easy to lose track of the betrayals and switched allegiances and sink into apathy, especially since the characters are only archetypes (stoic loner; tough-but-vulnerable dame; powerless sheriff; bickering gangsters) and the protagonist himself is a blank slate. All that's left is to bide your time between shootouts and wait for second-billed Christopher Walken to finally turn up. It's worth the wait, naturally, especially for those who enjoyed his cameo in TRUE ROMANCE and were itching for more of the same, except with his hair dyed ginger this time since he's an Irish gangster, instead of a jet-black Sicilian.

In fact, the supporting cast is the biggest plus and goes a long way towards holding the viewer’s interest. William Sanderson delivers exposition in his distinctively quirky way while compiling himself an audition tape for Deadwood. David Patrick Kelly simmers with little-guy menace. There’s a pre-Sopranos Michael Imperioli and a pre-Mrs Apatow Leslie Mann, and Bruce Dern has fun as the town’s lawmaker who keeps himself well away from all the trouble.

In the final analysis, I was reminded somewhat of 1999’s similar and superior PAYBACK, which was itself based on existing material (Donald E Westlake’s novel The Hunter and 1967 neo-noir POINT BLANK). The difference with the Mel Gibson film is that writer/director Brian Helgeland throws in a lot of dark humour, something the po-faced LAST MAN STANDING could have done with like a shot of whiskey for a thirsty and beaten-down drifter.

Two stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  Practically everyone except Willis is dead by the end, so it gets a pass. 

What would a movie called FIRST MAN STANDING be about?  I guess a retelling of the book of Genesis? Zac Efron is ... Adam!

Previously:  THE LAST WITCH HUNTER 

Next time:  LAST DAYS IN THE DESERT  

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

THE LAST POSSE (1953, Alfred L Werker)

 

* * * 

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 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 broadened 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 is among the 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 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