A calculatedly nostalgia-infused town-taming Western, 1939's Destry Rides Again out-sparkled Errol Flynn's contemporaneous light “oaters" and anticipated noir-tinged classics like My Darling Clementine (1946) and The Gunfighter (1950).
Although it followed on from the previous hits Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949), Rio Grande found director John Ford suffering from straitened finances.
After his two mysterious, tightly-coiled and idiosyncratic first features, Neighbouring Sounds and Aquarius, the masterful Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho lets his hair down with an exhilarating, all-guns-blazing venture into genre.
A Fistful of Dynamite and Once Upon a Time in America are Sergio Leone’s films with the most explicit political underpinning. Indeed, given recent events, A Fistful of Dynamite is a thoroughly pertinent film, asking how we might achieve social change when the only human resource to hand is venal and self-serving.
The canonical town-taming Western High Noon brought Gary Cooper the 1952 Academy Award for Best Actor (his second).
French director Jacques Audiard is a master at genre with a twist, most famously the prison drama A Prophet, but also a number of crime thrillers with atypical settings or themes, including The Beat that my Heart Skipped (classical music), Dheepan (political refugees) and Read My Lips (office politics). Audiard turns genre templates upside down, sometimes merges them, invariably with excellent results.
A cannily crafted biographical docudrama about the Lakota Sioux broncobuster and horse trainer Brady Jandreau – playing himself as Brady Blackburn – The Rider will resonate with anyone whose dreams have gone up in smoke. Jandreau was 20 when, on April 1, 2016, a horse stomped on his skull, fracturing it in three places, severely damaging two regions of his brain, and penetrating it with bone fragments caked in manure and sand. Defying doctors’ orders, he walked out of hospital shortly after having life-saving brain surgery. Six weeks after returning home he began training horses again. The video footage of Jandreau/Blackburn pulling staples out of his head is real.
The Chinese-American filmmaker Chloe Zhao got to know Jandreau when she was making her promising 2015 debut feature Songs My Brothers Taught Me about life on the impoverished Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Seeking a way to build a new movie around Jandreau, she was inspired by his recovery from his catastrophic accident, only five months after which filming began. Jandreau gives an affectingly low-key performance as the melancholy, laconic Brady Blackburn.
At the heart of The Rider is the sombre recognition that, for many poor young men in the West, not least Native Americans, becoming a rodeo rider is the only way of escaping a hand-to-mouth existence. With a metal plate holding his head together, Brady dare not enter the arena on horseback again though, at one point, temptation proves too much.
Zhao’s direction is cool and objective, scarcely lyrical. Jandreau’s affectionate, learning-impaired teenage sister Lilly plays herself movingly; their father Tim portrays himself as a gambler, harsh and selfish. Jandreau’s childhood friend Lane Scott, a one-time bull-rider who was paralysed in a car accident, also appears. Brady twice visits Lane in his care facility and helps him with rehabilitation exercises, such as rocking on a saddle – haunting scenes that are testament to the human spirit but also indicate Jandreau’s comparative good fortune. Correlative to Brady’’s recuperation – and perhaps to Lane’s – is his tender breaking and training of a volatile wild horse that heartbreakingly comes to grief.
One extra only accompanies The Rider's DVD release – and it’s riveting. Jandreau participates, with British psychologist Dr Chloe Paidoussis-Mitchell, in a 45-mimute post-screening on-stage interview that reveals his charisma as a smart, optimistic young cowboy more truthful than Hollywood would ever allow. Happily, he wants to act again.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Rider
Realistic open world games need the little touches to convince you of the reality within which you play. Perhaps it’s your character’s beard that grows a little more each day, maybe it’s the way mud builds up on his boots during wet weather, or how he makes a cup of coffee and talks to members of his 20-strong gang in the morning.
The “portmanteau” form of film-making is almost guaranteed to deliver patchy results, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coen brothers’ six-pack of tall tales from the Old West (screened at London Film Festival), can’t quite avoid this age-old trap. But it gives it a helluva good try, and even its less successful portions offer much to enjoy.
Even for those with only a passing acquaintance with Irish history, the Famine – or the Great Hunger – looms large, when British indifference to the failed potato crop in large parts of Ireland resulted in the deaths or emigration of nearly a quarter of the country’s population in the 1840s and 1850s.