The Ballad of Cable Hogue opens with a hilariously deflationary inversion of the famous opening to director Sam Peckinpah’s previous film, The Wild Bunch. While that scabrous cosmic moan of a film famously begins with children maliciously treating nature’s brutality as entertainment, Cable Hogue saunters into a gentle, quiet conversation between a man and a lizard, coaxing it into a humane death that affirms their mutual value on this earth. The animal is to be food, certainly, and this is a no less brutal version of survival, but Peckinpah plays it not as a wicked triumph of nihilistic glee but an unfortunate reality of interspecies relations. The man is Cable Hogue (Jason Robards), and this is his compassionate desert pragmatism. Just as he is about to quietly kill the animal in an act of poetic, tragic necessity, a gunshot blows the lizard into pieces as bloodied as they are useless. When Hogue ponders the value of such an action, he seems to be proposing a counter-narrative to Sam Peckinpah’s whole oeuvre. This sort of murderous brutality is, the film suggests, just a tad bit gauche when all is said and done.

Hogue himself is a mystifying creature. His lizard conversation is a kind of cosmic communion, a natural respect for the sacrifice the lizard is making for his survival, and he continues the film with a similarly good-natured penitence to nature’s cosmic continuity. Talking to God, Hogue self-amusedly but very seriously notes “ain’t had any water since yesterday Lord, getting a little thirsty, just thought I’d mention it, amen,” not solemnly offering a prayer but suggesting a casual reminder to an old friend. He speaks in a spirit of warm-hearted minimalism, a kind of spartan humanism embodied in every moment of Peckinpah’s tough-minded but unexpectedly generous film. Hogue even gets his own credits sequence, a ballad-backed constellation of moving and stilled images that uses the similarly stop-start rhythms of The Wild Bunch to an antithetical purpose. While The Wild Bunch viciously metallizes and bleaches-out its Western archetypes, cutting into their motion, deconstructing it, and revealing the acid emptiness beneath, Cable Hogue playfully ricochets many simultaneous images of Hogue around the screen, serio-comically elevating his everyday trials and tribulations. The former is an image of heroes exposed as fraudulent brutes. The latter is an everyday man uplifted as an accidental poet of humanity. He has no pretensions to greatness, but the film treats his mundane ethos of workaday survival and epicurean pleasure as an undyingly human spirit of ramshackle beauty.

In its surprising, almost disarming generosity, The Ballad of Cable Hogue proposes a quiet rebuke to both the classical Western’s ethos of moral certainty and mythological majesty and the revisionist Western’s spirit of recalcitrant brutality and skeptical deconstruction. Both Hogue, unusually for Peckinpah, both are merely two sides of the same coin, seeking refuge in revelation of essential truths and the promise of moral certainty. Hogue neither celebrates nor excoriates but takes the arguably more difficult, less self-congratulatory perspective that the West cannot be summed up as any one thing. The film is an act of divine perplexity, a film that treats curiosity itself as a worthwhile mode of being. Much like Hogue himself, his titular film doesn’t seem to know where it’s going, and it finds pleasure it whatever comes its way.

It is the very fogginess of this vision that paradoxically casts such an unusually clear eye on the shadow of the West in the American imagination. The Ballad of Cable Hogue is set in 1905, twelve years after historian Frederick Jackson Turner lamented the demise of the American frontier. In his view, the land was a natural deposit at once energized and empty, pregnant with great potential and yet essentially available for human manipulation. This paradoxical vision of a landscape that was complex and value-laden yet essentially docile projected a canvas teeming with human futures, raw matter for fashioning new selves.

By Hogue’s release year of 1970, the ambivalence Turner felt was largely seen as passé. American media had mostly come to accept writer D. H. Lawrence’s view that “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” If men and women of the 19^th century “lit out” for the territories, the revisionist Western line has typically been to expose the violence of this vision, to look to the shadows cast by America’s divine pretensions of Manifest Destiny. Responding to view of the West as a sublime potential of inert matter awaiting human mastery that not only invited but demanded “strenuous” activity, to use Theodore Roosevelt’s term, the newer, tougher breed of American cinema revealed the cruelty masking as energy and exposed the mental enervation dressed up as physical vigor.

Peckinpah’s films certainly participated. They cut down Western mythologies by the dozens, sparing no one in the process. But Hogue suggests that this tactic may risk reiterating the very “hard, isolate, stoic” soul it strives to unmask. After all, if Americans were supposed to be paradigmatically touch, taciturn, and realistic, what could embody that ethos more than revealing the grubby underbelly of the nation’s fantasies of idealism and grace?

It is thus ironic how un-ironic Hogue is. The plot, such as it is one, begins when Hogue finds water underground and sets up a desert spring. On the verge of dying, he digs in the dirt for water that is, essentially, mud. In any other Peckinpah film, this would be a self-consciously grotesque gesture, a cold-blooded reminder of the fundamental depravity of the human will. Here it’s a conversational engagement, a friendly opening-up to uncertainty and circumstance that is not quite a determined plea for survival. Asking “Lord … you call it” as he smiles, he receives the muddy water as both manna from Heaven and, simply, the vagaries of chance. His face drenched in muddy water in the ground, he coarsely laughs with a quietly boastful “Told You I was Gonna Live.” But his self-aggrandizement is humanistic, rooted in shared equality rather than hierarchized distinction. He is not an apex of humanity but a singularity of it, a fabled hero who embodies its foibles and frustrations and a stubborn determination that borders on grace. When he tries to get a deed to build a spring out of the water for parched passers-by, he can only gather a measly two and a half dollars. When asked if he has anything else to add to the value, he marshals, in a line tossed-off like an on-the-spot improvisation and a channeling of almost celestial wisdom,  “Well, I’m worth something, ain’t I?”

Uncharacteristically, Peckinpah’s film believes he genuinely is. Or, perhaps, it might be more accurate to say that the film is interested in the proposition that he might be. This is an unusually generous portrait of human existence for Peckinpah, one in which a series of mostly well-meaning characters struggle to etch out their lives. It is also, atypically, not really asking much of these characters, other than that they exist, and keep going. What emerges is a kind of bildungsroman of an already formed man, a wanderer who never exactly learns anything, but always seems to be paying attention to new truths that might arise if he looks hard enough. Robards is wonderful, a prickly, protective man who confronts the world as an earthen poem. Speaking in simple, taciturn sentences – “I got to mark my boundaries, build me a claim monument.” – he nonetheless radiates humane warmth, celebrating, and embodying, a poesis of raw dirt.

And, indeed, a man willing to get his hands dirty, even though he is unusually hesitant to do so compared to the men he is confronted with. Throughout the film, he has been involved in a many-years-long engagement with two men who he, theoretically, seeks revenge on, not that he is trying especially hard. Near the end of the film, they inconvenience him again by putting him in a situation where he finds his gun uncomfortably necessary. The color of his soul, and the caliber of the Old West, seems to be on trial here. Just as he is about to shoot the man, however, a “horseless carriage” – car – arrives. The man on the bad end of the gun treats this beacon of modernity as his manna from heaven, but while the car momentarily stops the film’s climax, it just keeps on going. Laughing at the two men and their simultaneously monumental and pyrrhic conflict, this modernity treats the Old West and its elemental drama as a roadside attraction to mock rather than an enigma to wrestle with. In his cunning, curt demeanor, Hogue looks on just as bemusedly, remarking “that’ll be for the next guy to deal with” as he makes sure to set up his would-be victim with a fate worse than death: taking over his spring, sitting in wait for modernity to come to him while Cable can go live a new life as a perennial traveler on the road. The car, a dark emblem of an uncaring modernity, catalyzes a kind of epiphany for him, suggesting the pettiness of their grievances, even as it implies the littleness of the life of those moderns in the car, and the beauty and terror of Hogue’s.

Of course, Peckinpah’s point is that Hogue was probably always going to save the man on the other end of his gun, working to end a years-long retribution arc on the path to a more wholesome and full-hearted existence. The film, in the very nature of its ambulatory and discursive narrative structure, acknowledges this revenge is much less important than the characters make it out to be, more a pest than a pestilence. What really matters is the fact of the spring, the feel of the water, the sense of the space, and the time shared with local prostitute Hildy (Stella Stevens), who becomes a kind of displaced love interest who comes and goes, and itinerant preacher Joshua (David Warner), who has more interest in women than anything else but does not seem to oppose this to a genuine faith in the lord.

It is this spirit, Hogue’s welcoming ethos of taking life as it comes, not getting too wrapped up in pretensions of divinity or significance, that matters to a film that encroaches on a sense of grace that feels truly Thoreauvian in its willingness to appreciate the renewed physical and mental sensation of engaged receptivity with the earth around you. Of course, Peckinpah also mocks this deflationary ethos as itself a kind of American fetish for rugged, simple living. At one point, a preacher laments “The Devil seeks to destroy you, with machines,” for “inventions are the work of Satan,” and the film doesn’t exactly treat this rhetoric as a generous sensibility. The film doesn’t really agree with the man, but it understands Hogue’s adjacent version of it as a kind of everyday pragmatism that is also, essentially, mythical. That’s pretty American, admittedly, and The Ballad of Cable Hogue mostly appreciates the peculiar mixture of circumstance and effort that defines the belief in Western possibility that Peckinpah’s earlier The Wild Bunch so brutally excoriates and sets ablaze. It’s an aspirational ethos, but Hogue is not a celebratory or worshipful film so much as an intrigued one, a film that looks for beauty in unsuspecting places, even those that we have grown to dismiss. The film taps the Western landscape in the same exploratory spirit Hogue does when he sums up how he discovered and cultivated his water supply: “I found it where it wasn’t.”

When he chooses to leave his water supply at the end of the film, to become someone else rather than be wedded to his personal property, Hogue recalls naturalist and everyday experimenter Henry David Thoreau’s own eulogy for his time living off the land: “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there.  Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.” In a genuinely moving conclusion, Hildy returns, and just as she and Hogue are about to venture into another film, the car she rode in on runs him over. He lays out in bed, to die where he lived, in the desert. The preacher Joshua returns on his own gas-powered vehicle, and, at Hogue’s request to witness his own funeral, he delivers a meditation on the passing of the West played not as riposte or a lament or a eulogy but as a serio-comic inquiry. In its final moments, the film reflects on itself, on its own acts of self-mythologization. Hogue “came stumbling out of the wilderness like the prophets of old,” a figure who was God’s “dim reflection,” a man who might transfigure a spark of divinity but who himself wanders between Heaven and Hell.He might not be a hero, the film supposes, but he “lived and died here in the desert, and I’m sure hell will never be too hot for him.” He was, in the parlance of the Wild West, himself.

But also not himself. He only exists, the film suggests, in America’s bedtime stories about its own past, as a congealed archetype of a nation’s historical inheritance. The spring at the center of the film is an almost comically literal embodiment of the West’s promise of rejuvenation and Biblical redemption, its mantra of personal grit and hardship as the wellspring of a civic religion of self-creating, self-surpassing individualism of the type Hogue himself embodies to an extent that is both self-parodic and entirely sober.

Naturalist John Muir wrote four years prior to this film’s setting of the “Thousands of nerve-shaken, over-civilized people” who were “beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity,” bespeaking a desire to conserve not only the land but the spirit that he and Turner both felt was rapidly petering out. In asking men and women to dive back into the water of natural replenishment, they implied not only a physical necessity but a moral imperative, an injunction that was, of course, paradoxical. The West celebrated escaping from civilization and it necessitated “civilizing” the region one escaped to. It worshipped natural primitivism and justified the very technological triumphalism that made the former impossible.

This is to say that “the West,” as an idea, roped together so many horses riding in so many directions and attempted to obfuscate the tensions in these paths through sheer force of will. The relatively easy thing for a film to do would be to dismiss these paradoxes. Hogue tries to inhabit them. Rather than mock or dynamite its genre’s central confusions, Ballad is usually immanent in its critique. Its hero is as pure an archetype of the Western hero as you could imagine, and the film’s most deconstructive maneuver is to expose how contingent and unclarifiable his core really was, how the archetype tenuously congealed around a core that was ultimately molten, able to mean many different things to many different people. It offers an entirely deflationary conclusion about Hogue, but also one that is essentially meaningful in its seeming meaninglessness: “he wasn’t really a good man, he wasn’t a bad man. He was a man.” The point is that the West was always working against itself, and it couldn’t not do that. How to appreciate its ethos of spartan self-making, Hogue’s everyday atmosphere of living on and living through, and to recognize the violence done in its name – to see that its sense of affable humanity was also the engine of impossible suffering and terror – remains the essential question of the most American film genre reckoning with the contradictions of its national past. Hogue’s ability to give a name to the essential in the inessential, to find beauty in the ambulatory and seemingly irrelevant life of one man while also suggesting that he may not really be worth saving anyway, answers that question with another question. How could it do anything else?

Score: 10/10

Near the beginning of Antonio Margheriti’s And God Said to Cain, a man is suddenly told that he is free from a decade-long sentence in a murderously oppressive prison camp. The camera zooms in, a blinding light taking over his face. Freedom comes like a gift from God, but also a profound opacity. His life has been restored, but we sense that he can’t determine what that even means. He can only see manna from Heaven as an excuse to become Biblical Wrath, or to enact his own.

The man is Klaus Kinski, whose face was like an Expressionistic abyss, a tormented canvas that resonated inner anguish better than any before or since. When the light blinds this face, it also binds it. This is freedom overtaking a human void, but it is also the creation of a darkness incarnate, one laminated in divine vengeance. Kinski, a man who would soon create his most famous roles with Werner Herzog as, among others, an inhuman hell-spawn (Nosferatu) and a pitiful human who fashioned himself as an arbiter of the divine (Aguirre, the Wrath of God), conjures one of his cruelest cinematic creatures here.

In Aguirre, Kinski’s titular character framed himself as a benevolent light for those he understood to be in darkness, but he was really just obfuscating his own blindness, unable to see his idiom of natural mastery as a fallacious Western construct born in an imperialist fantasy. Margheriti’s Western offers no such pretense: Kinski is an angel of darkness, a movie creation born within the contours of the film and set loose by the film to send others to hell, but there is very little sense that anyone in this world is or could be “correct,” or even think of themselves as such.

Kinski plays Gary Hamilton, arrested a decade ago for a robbery committed by his ex-partner Acombar (Peter Carsten), who intentionally framed Hamilton for the crime. When Hamilton arrives back in town, he self-consciously refashions himself as a “a ghost returning,” a specter who takes up a kind of residence in a cave system underneath the town Acombar has turned into a fiefdom. Acombar plays a different sort of blinding God, a false idol, and Hamilton has no interest in offering a different one. His interest is in doing the devil’s work: using cunning, contingency, and tricksterism, he blots everything out like a gathering darkness.

Italian Westerns were always among the most willing to treat the American West as a transparently metaphysical contrast, a poesis of raw imagination with little tangible historical reality. Their interest was not in replacing the myth with a construction of “the real” but in mutating the mythology in increasingly exploratory, and often self-critical, dimensions. If the Wild West in American mythology is a canvas on which to enact escape into the future, Margheriti infuses it with a Gothic texture, where figurations of freedom are haunted by a not-so-dormant past. In exacting his revenge, Hamilton turns himself into a wraith undoing the town from below, a phantasm hunting the present from the caverns of the past. He takes up residence in a literal underground cave system, and in a particularly pregnant maneuver, And God Said to Cain allows him to peer up through the house of God, mocking the pretension of heaven in such a hellish place, and the idea that anything he will do throughout the film could meaningfully be called “redemptive.” 

Margheriti’s film also figures Hamilton as a distinctly cinematic revenant, though, a man-become-cinema. He seems able to appear anywhere, to evaporate at will and teleport wherever he needs to, to edit himself into any frame via a filmic underground to manipulate to his liking. When his antagonists demand to “stop him, once and for all,” Acombar is backed by a many-sided mirror, a perversion of the cinematic Western hero as a noble pillar of transparent certainty via a many-sided mirror that refracts him to himself, that makes him the victim of his own ego. When Acombar accidentally shoots his son Dick (Antonio Cantafora), who is sympathetic to Hamilton’s cause but not enough to turn on his father, and then willingly kills his wife Maria (Marcella Michelangeli), Hamilton has turned Acombar into a light so blind he can’t even see himself, molded his mirrored vision into an insular, paranoid prison. A prison that Hamilton, late in the film, will finally turn into a conduit for his own metastasizing body, more a force than a human. This is a vanity project turned into a horror hall of mirrors turned into a cinematic shattered glass.

When one character, then, jokingly tells another to be afraid of “raspberry syrup,” it actually becomes a clandestine cinematic mission statement: artifice has become a weapon. This congealed liquid, so easily a fake blood for a classic film, can hurt perhaps more-so than the real thing. Art, and Hamilton’s capacity to weaponize a chthonic art of subterfuge against Acombar’s pretensions of order, strategically mobilizes his artificial illusions – Hollywood’s illusions of grandeur and moral righteousness – to undo them. When a preacher, freshly shot for hiding Hamilton, decides with his last breath to play an organ from hell that resonates all over the extra-diegesis, echoing throughout the world of the cinema, he seems to be becoming-cinema himself, turning his moral vision into raw art. As Hamilton leaves at the film’s end, he says that there is enough gold beneath the wreckage he has wrought to “find more than enough to rebuild your town.” This is, of course, blood money, in every sense of the term. He leaves a cinematic gift and a moral void, the detritus of a cinematic ground-clearing. He leaves not as a force for good but as, simply, a force, an emanation from the desert designed to return unnatural edifices to the ashes from whence they came.

Score: 8/10

While the received wisdom about the Western genre presents it as an assured space of spiritual solitude or a canvas for self-betterment through restorative strenuousness, you’d be hard-pressed to find a Western more worried about its own beliefs than John Ford’s The Searchers. The only thing really working against the film is how thoroughly its reputation precedes it. Its self-critical nervousness has paradoxically been suppressed and composed over decades into a vision of the solemn, self-assured object imperially judging its forebears. This is a supposed masterfulness that the film itself may not need, nor ask for. But, of course, that is the difficulty, and the paradox, of John Ford. The Searchers is entirely aware of the cultural baggage it carries. Far more than era-concurrent works like Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73, it self-consciously courts, and creates, the mythopoetics of the frontier space as a moral battleground –  rather than Mann’s amoral void – on which the fate of the proverbial nation is to be staked. Its screenplay by Frank S. Nugent, based on the novel of the same name by Alan Le May, is transparently freighted with the heavenly wisdom of the noble stranger archetype, the paradigmatic American: isolated in their heroic, if tragic, dignity while being able to fluidly move into and out of various social milieus without being “of them.” This is a film that seems to have recognized how important it was before it was released, something that usually spells death for a living, breathing work of art. Yet rather than solidifying itself into a work of serene self-criticism, the interesting thing about Ford’s film is how worried it seems to be that it hasn’t actually figured out what to say about the genre laid out before it. The genre, in Ford’s vision, is not a passive resource to be either churned into self-conscious mastery nor to be dismissed or depleted into a ruse, which of course would only be another way for the film to celebrate its own assurance that the genre was morally repugnant. The West, in The Searchers, is neither a landscape to excoriate nor to celebrate. It is a vast store of uncertainty, a wellspring of consternation.

That doesn’t mean The Searchers doesn’t court the favor of its genre. The film’s interest, unlike so many heroes of the classic West, is that it transparently can’t escape its history, which means it must draw on the very mythos it can’t figure out. Wayne’s Edwards, the Western wanderer, is clearly the most capable man in the film, but he is also the most dangerous. He remains the film’s icon figure, like any good Western, but he is also the vortex around which the film distorts itself and the precipice it must confront but cannot fully peer into. While Wayne’s famous character introduction in 1939’s Stagecoach projects an imposing, all-consuming monolith overcoming a figurative landscape which he himself apexes and dwarfs, here he enters the film strolling in from a landscape that still seems to consume him, into a door that cannot fully protect him. While Stagecoach literally enacts the triumph of human over landscape in that moment of charged, almost phallic agency, The Searchers is a world in which humans seem essentially trapped in a tide of violence and vengeance that defrays the teleological, progressive structure that Manifest Destiny was predicated on. This is a not a man erected as a savior and defiler of a material, almost anthropomorphized abundance, but a lonely fellow who has come in from the cold, only to find that he imperils the very domesticity that he claims to protect.

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Watching a Nicholas Ray film, it’s hard to feel good about the state of mainstream cinema in the 2020s. Ray never shows off. He doesn’t arrogate the full force of his talent to specific, privileged scenes. His films don’t explode off the screen. Instead, they achieve a kind of surface tranquility through the many febrile currents teeming within. His films superficially comply with the accepted forms of mid-century Hollywood, drawing out their inner plasticity and complexity without ever trying to make a show of exceeding them. In an early scene, aging yet apparently accepting ex-rodeo star Jeff McLoud (Robert Mitchum) returns home to his Texas birthplace after 18 years of itinerant stardom. The old man who lives there now recognizes him as the child from long ago, and they comically commiserate about the vagaries of achievement and the limits of desire.

The problem with “books on success,” the older man intones, is that they are written by “successful” people rather than “written by a failure.” In a long-shot, Ray holds on the older man on the right, shuffling around in the background with his normal routine. On the left, in the foreground, is McLoud, Mitchum letting his eyes loose on the part of the room we can’t see, seemingly taking in a vision of his past that the film does not afford us, a corner of the room that remains invisible to everyone but McLoud who, we intuit, has simply never stopped hustling for long enough to recognize that he has a past. This is a phenomenally suggestive image, Ray looking on at the two men who are sharing a story (and a mental framework) while also surviving within two entirely different registers. For one man, the house is a question of existence, and for the other it is an existential question.

Yet Ray has to insist on nothing, exposing layers of emotional reality without the characters speaking a word. This, more than anything, is what Jean-Luc Godard meant when he famously said “cinema is Nicholas Ray.” Reader, this is such a simple scene, such an apparently basic visual composition, but when do we see movies that actually even think about character blocking anymore?

The Lusty Men, in this fashion, is a quietly desolate film, the kind of piece about wayward, astray people who are so caught-up in the moment that they don’t even really understand themselves as being unanchored. In this modern-set Western, people are trapped by the vortex of the past and unfulfilled anticipations of the future, lost in a present that cannot fulfill them, or that they cannot allow to fulfill them, lest they give up on their self-imposed narratives of future, forever-deferred success. A Ray film is caught up in itself this way, aware of its energy but unable to stop it for more than a second at a time. The Lusty Men, then, is a film that knows how to kick up dust and to acknowledge the dust in its eyes, that aspires to and cowers before its own hell-raising. It thrives on the vitality of its ragged men and women, but it understands this raggedness as both a friction and a premature death. Ray was what we might call a weirdly expressionist naturalist, his cinema too hot and heightened to hold onto a reality bucking underneath it and too cold and sober to not recognize how tenuous its grasp really is. His cinema projects the fantasies his characters survive on, and it has a drink for the detritus of their being.

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There’s a scene in Forty Guns where the protagonist Griff (Barry Sullivan), finding himself in the middle of an impromptu high noon standoff, chooses not to draw his gun but instead to walk straight up to his antagonist and paralyze him in his tracks. As filmed by renegade writer-director Samuel Fuller, it’s not a beautifying celebration, a poetic coalition between gunslinger and camera-wielder, but a sudden invasion by a force that is too big, too insoluble, for the film screen to contain. He is assaulting the distance between camera and audience, and turning us to stone. This is a man who, with just his eyes, visualized so menacingly and brutally in pulverizing Cinemascope that he achieves a kind of Leone-esque abstract menace, not only commands the screen but exceeds it, cannot be contained in it, tries to rupture it with the sheer charisma of his uncontainability.

Fuller directs the way Griff walks. His style is both brazenly minimalist and bracingly direct, willing to state everything it needs to and never desiring to say more. At one point, a trial is initiated and concluded all within a single shot, a tacit admission of the limitations of the judicial system on the frontier conveyed, a visual travesty of justice that the film needs no other scenes to explain. Fuller gets right to the point here, while also arguing, with withering, savage grace, that the point has very much been avoided.

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You can feel Day of the Outlaw grappling with itself from the first, forlorn shot of a snow-struck limbo as two men silently wander from left to right. Unlike many classic oaters, they don’t seem to order the screen at their command as virile archetypes of stoic masculine reticence. Rather, they seem like they seem to ride less above the land, superior to it, as atop it, at odds with it.   The snowbound setting can’t but bring to mind McCabe & Ms. Miller, Robert Altman’s amazing, soul-shattering cosmic moan where the West is a demonic ground and a tragic, aching slow-motion catastrophe. In the intervening years, the self-critical version of the genre has increasingly felt like a parody of itself, an arbitrarily nihilistic approximation of depth rather than a genuinely exploratory attempt to inhabit the genre generously, from within its terms, to critique it.

While many of these subsequent Westerns self-consciously explore the genre’s violent origins out of a kind of kind of half-hearted expectation, Day of the Outlaw is a legitimate, forgotten premonition of McCabe:a Western that felt like it was earnestly exploring the American frontier not out of a forced expectation or a conscious desire to interrogate established rules but through the violent indecision of inhabiting the genre so thoroughly that it can’t but grapple with its contradictions and feel out the limits it may not actually want to trespass on. There’s no mission statement with Day of the Outlaw other than a general desire to give us more than we bargained for, to take a set of themes we expect the film to ease into and instead to malform them by recognizing their own potential for disruptive complexity. Day of the Outlaw is a film continually in the process of discovering a radical otherness within itself.

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Aficionados of Lucio Fulci, perhaps the most savagely lurid of the most savagely lurid of the Italian horror giallo maestros and the least willing to sanctify his violence in a beatifying aura poetic abstraction, might be surprised to know that he did not fully commit to being a horror specialist until his sixth decade on this earth. His genre classics, which dare to descend into the darkness of the human soul at its most unvarnished, are cruel conduits for seemingly arcane, voracious forces that seem to congeal out of an unclaimed past. Yet even when he eschewed the formal trappings of the horror genre, Fulci seemed to tap into devious currents nonetheless. His was a cinema charting the existential breakdown of enlightenment ideals, an intrepid explorer of the darkness of the light. His greatest films merely use horror as a canvas on which to the frayed boundaries of reason and the murkiness of faith in progress avail themselves before us. His films, sloppy and with awkward edits that seem to come from some frayed corner of the mind, are dark impastos that stare at what we’d rather look at with downcast eyes, portraits of human abjection as vicious and primordial as cinema has ever produced.

Case in point: his downright malevolent travesty of an Italian Western, Four of the Apocalypse. While Italian filmmakers like Sergio Leone had exalted the genre as a hallucinatory canvas for piety and blasphemy to battle it out, and plenty of other Westerns essentially understood the genre as a boundlessly open space of anarchic creativity, Fulci’s Western is a shadowy vision of disgruntled sociality captured with Fulci’s primeval immediacy and narrative inexplicability. It begins with four characters in search of an exit, condemned souls who are, in a ruthlessly wicked gesture, only saved from a vicious massacre by their imprisonment. It ends with one interloper who found and lost a family set adrift in the desert sea to probably repeat this story time and time again. In the intervening span, Fulci turns the inviting landscape of the West into an unforgiving, unfathomable vortex that is also a cosmic abyss, a landscape that seems to extend for eons and to coagulate into a portrait of celestial nothingness.

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