Take One (Jul-Aug 1971)

HANNIE CAULDER A Paramount release (1972). 85 minutes. Director: Burt Kennedy. Producer: Patrick Curtis. Executive Producer: S. Tony Tenser. Screenplay: Z.X. Jones, based on characters created by lan Quicke and Bob Richards. Director of Photography: Edward Scaife. Music: Ken Thorne. Editor: Jim Connock. Cast: Raquel Welch, Robert Culp, Ernest Borgnine, Strother Martin, Jack Elam, Christopher Lee, Diana Dors. After exchanging shots with a stagecoach driver they ambush, the Clem ens brothers — Jack Elam, Strother Martin and Ernest Borgnine — scuttle down a rocky ridge. ‘“What’s your plan?” whines Martin, as only he can whine. “It’s called stayin’ alive,” grunts Borgnine, lumbering for all he is worth toward his horse and the sunset. Staying alive is a bizzare business in Burt Kennedy’s Hannie Caulder, a film that attempts to move between two levels Kennedy has kept separate in his work till now. On one level we have the gross comedy of Kennedy’s recent Support Your Local Gunfighter and Dirty Dingus McGee. On another level we have the bloody relentlessness of Kennedy’s The Deserter. The problem is that the Elam-Martin-Borgnine gang have to carry both levels. Hannie Caulder begins with the Clemens brothers’ unsuccessful, bloody and comic robbery of a bank — a robbery that sets the stage for the disconcerting jumps from broad comedy to bloody violence. Elam, Martin and Borgnine, an unsettling trio to which we are never sure how to respond, soon kill a rancher, steal his horses, burn his home and rape his wife (not in that order). The wife (Raquel Welch) survives and goes after the trio, bent on revenge. She quickly picks up a bleak gunfighter/teacher, played with uncharacteristic reserve by Robert Culp in grey beard and rimless glasses. The film then moves episodically from Welch, Culp and their pupilteacher. relationship to the Clemens brothers’ ineffectual career of crime, and their all-too effective avocation of mayhem. The scenes with the Clemens brothers wandering around the nameless, bleak landscape of Peck inpah-land concentrate on horseplay and gross verbal humor, including the inevitable reference to sex in Sonora which appears in every Kennedy western. At the same time, we are constantly reminded of the brutality of the trio. They are animals without morality. As playful animals, they are amusing. As animals seeking to satisfy their needs for food, sex or survival, they are brutish and frightening. In contrast, we see Welch, whose lines (verbal) and reactions are wisely kept to a minimum by Kennedy as she pursues the trio. If the Clemens brothers exist in an amoral Peckinpahland, Hannie and Luther (Culp) are presented in a more leisurely, expansive Sergio Leone-land: their slow coming together in the desert; their pilgrimage to Mexico to get her a ‘“‘special’ gun; Culp’s languid training sessions by a truly beautiful seaside; the improbable gunfight against a dozen attacking Mexican bandits, complete with trick shooting and, in keeping with the Leone tradition, a minimum of blood and a maximum of corpses. The killings by Culp are depicted as professional — essentially bloodless, ritualized, cool, even indifferent. The Clemens killings, in contrast, are horrible — red-splashed and disconcerting. The difference is that between Leone’s dreamy myth of the West, and Peckinpah’s American urban nightmare. The critical/moral question arises as to whether it is more effective to show blood and violence in the hope of ‘frightening the audience into awareness of its real horror, or whether it is more effective to bloodlessly pile up the bodies in appalling indifference. Kennedy, intentionally or not, tries to do both. When Hannie tracks the Clemens brothers down she has changed (as much as it is possible for Raquel Welch to change) from a frontier housewife to a consciously sexual, tight-pantsed, cool, wise-cracking killer. She has learned from Culp the terrible lesson of not seeing her opponent as a human, but as a target. In a sense, her confrontation with the brothers is reminiscent of Japanese samurai films in which a ronin has vowed to control his emotions and devote himself to a lifetime of revenge against those who have killed his master. In achieving the professionalism to kill his enemies, the samurai runs the risk of losing his humanity as, in many ways, Hannie does. The slow motion dispatch of the last brother, while far from original, and directly referring to Peckinpah, does shock us and Hannie with the horror of death. We are left with a question which, to his credit, Kennedy does not try to answer: Is Hannie and Luther’s cold, inhuman approach to death and violence any less horrible than the ElamMartin-Borgnine animal response? Kennedy's innovative use of slow motion accents the feeling of powerlessness and pain. Culp and Borgnine engage in a duel with a knife and gun. a duel which echoes the gun vs. knife confrontation between James Coburn and Robert Wilke in The Magnificent Seven, which in turn evokes the slow motion battle in the field between the thin samurai and the braggart in The Seven Samurai. Kennedy, however, slows the action before the moment of impact. It is not the slowly falling body we watch in suspended time, but the drawing of the gun and the inevitable flight of the knife toward the hero. We are helpless and, possibly, shocked. The final shootout between Welch and Borgnine in a deserted prison in the desert is a beautiful evocation of unheroic loneliness: the animal brutality of the West embodied in Borgnine, and all that he represents of America’s violent history, against Welch’s cold, efficient beauty. At the very end of the film, a sleek, black-clad gunfighter appears to ride off into the sunset with Hannie after he has mysteriously helped her — for reasons which are obvious (Kennedy and Welch will never be accused of over-zealous devotion to the cause of women's liberation). The gunfighter’s appearance, and his shooting the knife out of Borgnine’s hand to even the odds, is a visual throwback to the Western of several decades ago, when myths were simpler and the hysteria and brutality of the street didn’t seep as overtly into the darkness of our movie theaters as it does in Hannie Caulder. Stuart M. Kaminsky Stuart Kaminsky teaches at the University of Illinois in Chicago, has written five novels, five detective stories, a screenplay, anda book on Don Seigel (portions of which were reprinted in our Vol. 3 No. 4). <n ag