In Stock at Asylum - Westerns

While there are certainly better Westerns, you'd be hard pressed to find any that starred two tougher hombres. Wayne and Mitchum are an incredible on-screen duo who nail the action scenes as perfectly as you'd expect. But it's the humor that is the real surprise and the reason "El Dorado" stands out. The four main characters have great chemistry and an easy, natural way about them. The jokes really pop and haven't lost much these many years later. (Except, of course, for alcoholism and bad Chinese impersonations, whose humor rarely ages well.) So what ends up as a fairly limited and familiar plot is elevated by the actors involved into a Western classic.

Not only is this - by far - the best movie Clint Eastwood ever directed, it's one of the finest Westerns ever made. It has a sophistication that the genre usually lacks, especially in its views of war, justice and Native Americans. Ten Bears tells Josey his words carry the "iron of life and death," meaning a weight and a power. There is iron in this film, along with the usual action and humor, that makes it such an impressive achievement.

While set in modern times, this outstanding movie is most definitely a Western. Director and leading man Tommy Lee Jones infuses every inch of it with a classic Western sensibility and gives its protagonist the rigid code of honor shared by cinema's greatest cowboys. His determination and absolute belief in the necessity of his quest to give his friend a proper burial keeps you from questioning its validity as he begins and his sanity as it ends.
I'm not sure how much the non-linear structure at the beginning helped, especially since it was all but abandoned as things progressed. The movie only really got its hooks in me a half-hour in as the men mounted up and headed to Mexico. If the film had begun there and unspooled the mystery with flashbacks, it might have been even more effective. As it is, it remains a quiet little gem of a film.

I think I like the idea of this movie more than I like watching the actual movie.
The backdrop is fascinating. As the country moves toward modernization (symbolized by the town of Big Whiskey, where houses are in need of porches and you check your guns at the door), we meet a couple of old gunslingers. Already, the glamorized myth of the Old West is beginning to grow, while those who lived it remember the blood-stained truth. And Eastwood playing the lead lends some sort of meta layer to the whole thing, as he basically undercuts his own career as the hard-as-nails cowboy.
The execution just doesn't do the idea justice. While it is well-constructed, like any Eastwood flick the pace is sluggish and there are too many scenes where the characters sit and talk about who they are and what they're feeling instead of using the plot to show us their development.
It ends up being a better comment about Westerns than it is a Western.