Civilized Violence by Hansen-Miller David

Author:Hansen-Miller, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2011-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

A History of/in Quotation

The film’s heavy use of ‘quotation’, its collection and representation of scenarios, scenes and types drawn from across the history of the genre, was always part of the story team’s (Sergio Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento) original intent. British and American critics did not exclusively condemn the imitative form, but occasionally found some tongue-in-cheek amusement within it. The New Republic’s otherwise lukewarm review was appreciative of ‘the brilliant Leone’ who recognized that the ‘the Hollywood Western, as a genre, is a realm of fantasy’ and that ‘Once Upon A Time In The West is … a fantasy superimposed on that general fantasy’.27 For others the film was derivative, which was the inevitable result of the transatlantic exchange in genre production. Still, some unease about the legitimacy of so much borrowing continued to surface for years.

The popular American film critic Leonard Maltin qualified his review by stating that the plot is ‘admittedly lifted from Johnny Guitar’, before moving on to call the film ‘exciting, funny and reverent’.28 Similarly, a heavily illustrated coffee-table book, Cowboy: How Hollywood Invented the Wild West, is sure to identify the film’s ‘visual, thematic, and/or character references’ to ‘High Noon, Johnny Guitar, Shane, The Iron Horse, The Searchers and Winchester ’73’.29 It further states that the film is Leone’s ‘unique’ and ‘ambitious’ ‘homage’. One must also note the credulity in the line, ‘Leone later said the film was comprised of “quotes from all the Westerns I love’”, as ‘later’ at least raises the suspicion of a retrospective justification.30

Frayling’s partial catalogue of Once Upon’s quotations includes: ‘The Iron Horse, Shane, The Pursued, The Searchers, Run of the Arrow, Fort Apache, Winchester ’73, Warlock, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Man of the West, Man Without a Star, Rio Bravo, Western Union, Jubal, The Magnificent Seven, Cemetery Without Crosses’, Leone’s own films For A Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Monument Valley settings, and some minor cast members in homage to the oeuvre of John Ford.31

Within the question of legitimate and illegitimate borrowing, the issue of quotation implicitly asserts the possibility of a discernible origin for those repeated themes and motifs constituting the genre. This is not to suggest that the film does not borrow outright from other Westerns, but it is important to question the discursive assumptions that would drive an attempt to discern the authentic texts within the genre. For most of us the very distinction of a ‘bad’ Western is marked by an inability to differentiate it from so many other Westerns. And then, how many of us are sure which of those two films was The Wild Bunch and which was The Magnificent Seven, High Noon and Gunfight at the OK Corral? How many of John Wayne’s Westerns simply bleed together in the memory of those who have seen them? The difficulty of differentiating the style and content of Westerns is also displayed in Will Wright’s famous structural analysis of the genre. In 1975 he broke

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