NP Re: Warlock (1959)

[jbor at bigpond.com]

Excerpts from:
'The Design of the West' (review of _Warlock by Oakley Hall) by 
Geoffrey O'Brien.
_Artforum_ 12.4 (Bookforum supplement). New York: Dec 2005/Jan 2006, p. 
47.

America's great cowboy epic consists of a hundred thousand simulacra 
(cast in forms ranging from novels and movies to model kits and lunch 
boxes) of an imaginary original. At that primal point where other 
cultures find their Ramayana or Iliad or Le Morte d'Arthur, we make do 
with rumors and fabrications, replicas of wanted posters and tintypes 
of miners' shacks, Owen Wister and Zane Grey, and the deathless 
ideogram of a man on a horse crossing an empty space [...]

So successfully does Warlock enact the necessary moves of the classic 
western that it was itself turned almost immediately into a very 
effective movie (directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Henry Fonda 
and Richard Widmark) which, though it drops significant chunks of 
Hall's convoluted narrative [...]

The hiring of a celebrated gunslinger -- Clay Blaisedell, with his 
goldhandled Colts, an enigmatic character already half-legendary thanks 
to the efforts of a burgeoning dime-fiction industry -- to defend the 
town against the cowboys initiates a series of violent confrontations 
and brutal reversals of loyalty that at each turn promise the town a 
redemption that never quite arrives.

It's the kind of town where men are given to saying things like, "I'm 
going out and drink some of the meanness out of me," or, "Never heard a 
man make such a fuss over getting shot." The desultory dialogue that 
fills the long stretches of waiting between sudden bursts of violence 
plays a choral role in this novel, which at times feels like some long 
and strange stage play. [...]

Warlock lives by its language, which sustains a through-line of pulp 
narration and a heightened version of B-western repartee ("You are like 
a hellfire-and-damnation preacher gone loco on bad whiskey") [...]

best

On 15/04/2006:

> Yes, there's really no comparison between the two. _Warlock_ is an 
> easy and enjoyable read, but the dialogue is wooden and the 
> characters, particularly the female characters, are cardboard cutouts. 
> There are some interesting sub-plots, but overall it's rife with the 
> sentimentalism and melodramatic clichés that are typical of the pulp 
> western genre it belongs to.
>
> The movie's better than average if you like westerns. Watch out for 
> "Bones" McCoy.
>
> best
>
> On 14/04/2006:
>
>> I wasn't going to say it first, but I agree.  The book's a better 
>> than average western, but not Great.  Blood Meridian is FAR superior.
>>
>> Ghetta
>>
>>> From: jbor at bigpond.com
>>>
>>> The book's OK too, as far as pulp westerns go. Overrated here, 
>>> however.
>
>