Print the legend but don't mention Coppola!

[Paul Mackin]

This is a trivial question but was On the Waterfront "much more popular"
than High Noon. Might have made more money (don't know) but both  movies won
a huge nuimber of awards (academy and otherwise). Plus everyone remembers
the famous theme music from High Noon (do not forsake me o my darling). All
I remember from Waterfront was that "coulda been a contender line" which was
admittedly great coming from Brando's mouth. Not saying I liked either film
that much or any other made in the U.S. in the 50s . It's been said before
that John Wayne wouldn't have asked the townspeople for help. And everyone
knows Elia Kazan used Waterfront to try to justify his own naming of names.
I do of course agree with Paul that the settlers vs Indian theme so
recurrent in Westerns reenacted American's formation. Would wish also to add
that many other quintessential American issues were also present. Effete
Easterners vs manly Westerners. Farmers vs cattlemen. Cowmen vs sheepmen.
Law vs order. Individual vs society. Civilization vs Barbarity (not
necessarilty Indian).

I'm just babbling. Hated Westerns after the 40s.

        P.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Nightingale" <paulngale at supanet.com>
To: <jlundy at gyk.com.au>; <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, October 08, 2001 1:50 PM
Subject: MDMD: Print the legend but don't mention Coppola!


> Thankyou John. Your reference to High Noon reminds me of a film that came
> out at roughly the same time, the flag-waving/union-bashing On The
> Waterfront. Much more popular. And Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers managed
to
> be ambiguous, at least to those too blind to see. The western remained the
> most subversive genre, I feel, precisely because it claimed to be about
> where America came from: sometimes the cracks showed. Pat Garrett and
Billy
> The Kid was a great Vietnam film and this was probably why the genre went
> into decline in the 1970s; it had become impossible to make such films
> without reference to the developing world (which was how the 'wild west'
had
> always been portrayed). We still hear people blame Heaven's Gate for
killing
> off the western. Again its revisionist account of the C19th range wars was
> unacceptable. In fact, Cimino's first cut (before the studio took the film
> away from him) was five hours plus; the battle sequence alone, refusing to
> be a celebration of violence, lasted about 90 minutes and (apparently, see
> Steven Bach's far from sympathetic account of the making of the film,
Final
> Cut) left little to the imagination - dangerous stuff!
>
> So where the hell does Pynchon come into all of this? I said earlier that
GR
> could only have been written in, and was therefore about, the period when
> elected governments (in the US and Western Europe) were being challenged
by
> popular dissent. Pynchon is clearly a writer of dissent, in terms of both
> content and form, in everything he has produced (I can't off-hand think of
> anything that should be of comfort to the political right or conservative
> elements in society generally - but then you only have to think of Reagan
> and Born In The USA to know how risky it is making such a statement).
>
> Pynchon, and also Coover and Delillo, and Donald Barthelme, belong to a
> generation of writers who took popular culture seriously. It's interesting
> that, as Hollywood discovered counterculture-politics, the literary novel
> discovered 'trivia' - one of the characteristics of postmodernism. In M&D,
> we have serious historical figures being treated as a music-hall
double-act:
> this is as far from great-man history as it's possible to get.
>
>