Forthcoming: "3:10 To Yuma"

From the moment that mankind developed a technique for creating moving images on strips of celluloid, it seems as though there have been actors dressing up in the legendary garb of the cowboys of the Old West in films.

There is no doubt that the era in which the Old West was explored and settled was a compelling time – a lawless age, where justice was questionable (at best) and men relied on their own personal moral compasses to define their character. It’s unquestionably rich – the sheer context of the time serves as a morally ambiguous character in and of itself. When you add the act of mythmaking that comes with creating a motion picture, you add so much more – for actors, it’s a chance to dirty up a little bit, ride horses, and generally play along with a childhood fantasy come to life. I mean, who wouldn’t want to act in a Western – to wear boots with spurs, and kick in the swinging door of a frontier saloon?

As an actor, being in a Western provides one with the chance to follow in the footsteps of iconic cowboy actors like John Wayne (whose turn in, among dozens of other Westerns, “Rio Bravo” cemented his status as a definitively moral voice of law and order in the West) and Clint Eastwood (whose roles in several 1960s “Spaghetti Westerns” – collaborations with the great Sergio Leone – practically single-handedly redefined the genre). Many have jumped at the chance; whether it’s Michael J. Fox as the time-traveling Marty McFly in “Back To The Future Part III,” or Leonardo DiCaprio as a teenaged gunslinger in “The Quick and the Dead,” the annals of movie history are filled with characters who have partaken of the legend of the Old West.

Since the heyday of the aforementioned “Spaghetti Western” in the 1960s, it seems as though every generation of actors has gone back to the well every few years and explored the Old West. In the later 1960s and early 1970s, it was the era of the so-called Acid Western, where counterculture-influenced actors like Dennis Hopper and Robert Redford fused their ideals with Old West sensibilities to create morality plays. In the 1980s, Westerns were essentially laughed at; films like “Silverado” played up the comic sensibilities inherent in the clichés of the genre. 1990s-vintage westerns like “Dead Man,” and most notably, “Unforgiven,” played up the moral ambiguity of the times – the biggest battles in these Westerns often occurred within the hearts of the heroes and anti-heroes that dotted the barren landscapes of the bleak, unsettled territories of the Old West.

Well, it seems like we’re upon another era of Westerns. This fall sees the release of two new Westerns to multiplexes. Later this fall, Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck star in “The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford,” which looks interesting. The Coen brothers, famed for quirky, independent-minded movies like “The Big Lebowski” and “Raising Arizona,” will put their postmodern imprimatur on Cormac McCarthy’s modern-day Western “No Country For Old Men” later in the year. First to screens, though, is the Russell Crowe and Christian Bale-starring “3:10 To Yuma,” based on an Elmore Leonard short story (and a expanded remake of a 1957 Glenn Ford Western). I caught a preview of this movie last night.

With little new ground to explore in the realm of the Western, “3:10 To Yuma” settles for being an amalgam of previous movies; it combines the moral ambiguity and personal dilemmas of more recent films like “Unforgiven” with the thrilling, “shoot-em-up” mentality of John Wayne-era pictures, with a miniscule infusion of humor and the gritty, gory realism of most modern violent films. It’s an interesting combination; unfortunately, it doesn’t particularly succeed.

The movie is headlined by tremendous actors; Russell Crowe and Christian Bale enter the first frame of film in “3:10 To Yuma” with phenomenal pedigrees – I mean, one’s the Gladiator, and the other’s managed to create iconic characters from Batman to (Patrick) Bateman. Unfortunately, they’re playing characters who don’t feel particularly well-formed. Bale is Dan Evans, the “good guy” of the movie, driven to do the right thing. Unfortunately, and I’m not sure whether this is the fault of Bale or director James Mangold, the audience never really comes to understand Evans’s motivations for doing the “right thing.” (There’s a bit towards the end where Evans reveals his hand; by then, though, it’s too little, too late.) As Evans, Bale is asked to be both inherently good and morally ambiguous – it’s ambitious, but never really succeeds. As “bad guy” Ben Wade, Russell Crowe is faced with a similar task – to be inherently bad and morally ambiguous. He comes closer to succeeding than Bale does, due largely to his unfettered charisma – the camera obviously loves Crowe, and he unflinchingly loves it back, which does add an interesting aspect to his murderous, duplicitous Wade. However, because “3:10 To Yuma” is in essence a “traditional” Western – it retains the story from a good-guy versus bad-guy story – it suffers a bit from having the bad guy be a more magnetic presence. Both Bale and Crowe suffer a bit for their character’s voices (both lead actors are foreign-born, and as such, have to obscure their natural accents) – they sound less like distinctive portrayals and more like whispery Clint Eastwood imitators, which is sadly unfortunate.

The supporting characters add an interesting dimension to this film; most notably, Ben Foster (previously known for his teenaged roles, including a part in the disastrously unfunny Dave Barry-scripted “Big Trouble” and a role in the third “X-Men” movie) is an absolute revelation as the psychotically unhinged Charlie Prince. You can’t take your eyes off him when he’s on-screen in this movie. Young Logan Lerman, playing Evans’s conflicted, stubborn 14-year-old son, also scores major points for his unflinching performance. Peter Fonda, Dallas Roberts, Vinessa Shaw, Gretchen Mol, and Alan Tudyk also provide solid, if unspectacular, support.

“3:10 To Yuma” is an interesting attempt at reinvigorating the Western genre for the first decade of the new century, but ultimately, it’s a noble failure because it offers nothing new and instead piggybacks too much on clichés from movies of the past. It will be interesting to see if the remainder of the year’s Westerns continue this trend or breathe new air into this type of film.

[“3:10 To Yuma” arrives in theatres on September 7. It will be showing in sneak previews across the country this weekend; check your local listings.]