Watching the Culpepper Cattle Co. this evening was a real time trip, not so much back to America's expansionist, frontier days but to aimless, anxious days of my youth. I'm thinking that that meandering passage through my young adult years could have used a bit more Wild West than tamed frontier, but that's hindsight speaking.There was a familarity of tone, a sense of belonging that I couldn't quiet place my finger on while I watched the action unfold. But by the time the credits rolled I was finally able to tune into the emotional time and place that the movie was working so had to take me to. I walked downstairs and drifted outside, stool in the cool spring air and breathed deep. Hmmm. No scent of gravelly dust, no hint of eucalyptus or rancid popcorn oil in the air. And there were no chances of stumbling over the discarded wrappers of oversteamed tamales or oven charred hotdogs, either.
Looking across the way at the glistening strands of the Pacific that made their way up into the inlet I knew I was as far from Pacific Theater's Harbor Blvd Drive In as a man could be, but for one fantasy filled moment I felt I had just gotten off my evening snack bar shift. Was it the movie itself or the tone that it tried to set that I tuned into, that allowed me to go back to my Schwinn riding days? Whatever it was it worked. Maybe it's time for me to reestablish my connection with drive in movies. But one thing for certain: instead of chowing down questionable pizza and overpriced candy from the snack bar this time around I'll be sure to truck it in, instead.
The Culpepper Cattle Co was just one of many seventies revisionist Westerns to make the outdoor theater circuit after the surprising success and infamous excess of The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah threw us all off balance, that's for sure. We finally saw the Wild West as the dusty and cruel place that it really was and there was no going back after that. Certainly we had seen it coming. John Ford's and Howard Hawks' sanitized version of the untamed West moved to the right when Anthony Mann's noirish take on good and evil blew into town, but then even Tony had to bow to the power of Clint and Sergio and all the rest of the auteurs that ruled during the early sixties Spaghetti Western craze. By the time The Professionals came around the old white hat/black hat West that we once knew was dead. Long live the longhaired Wild West!
Whenever I see flicks like CCC I tend to flash back to the older, fairly crazed San Fernando Valley of the early seventies. Maybe it's the sepia tones, the heavy browns and tans, that those films always seem to employ in the opening credits, the kinds of colors that really hip movie people always seemed to have in their homes. Maybe it's the feeling I get from watching all the familiar faces, the character actors who always make me think of fern bars, Ren Faire and smoggy Laurel Canyon afternoons. Maybe it's because the actors up on the screen, guys I would run into at the local U Totem Mart on beer runs, men who look so comfortable playing sociopaths or worse are all winking, letting us know in their grizzled, worn chap way that they're having a lot of fun riding horses and shooting guns and getting paid for doing it, too. Frankly, a lot of them look an awful lot like old friends of my father, tough he man kind of guys straight off the back lot. I wouldn't be surprized if a bunch of them hung out with my uncle Eddie, the stunt guy. He was a horseman, too.
Watching the Culpepper Cattle Co. was a bit like going home.
I suppose John Ford had his good times with his stock company when they hit Monument Valley, but if I had my choice I would have rather hung out on the sets of those lesser known but in my eyes even more important films. There was a sort of spirited joy at work there, something gritty, freewheeling, more Topanga Canyon than Dodge City but still, a slice of real Western life. The cinematic world will always be a better place thanks to the likes of Stagecoach and Red River and High Noon. But it is movies like The Culpepper Cattle Co. that took to another place that lived outside of the fairytale of manifest destiny and the Warner's back lot. It took us to a world where cowboys did what they did because they didn't know how to do anything else.
I walked outside and all at once missed that special, passing world of movie houses that sit perched atop hardtop asphalt, where screens arch to the tops of the sky and silvery light issued forth and reached across jammed parking lots and into our whitewashed collective conciousness, into our collective dreams. The west as it was portrayed on the silver screen had been a pipe dream, too. Culpepper and movies of it's kind were a sort of waking nightmare to the cinepurists, a hard sweaty wakeup call, a bruiser that was all too happy shaking up the complacent Tom Mix fueled beds of our forefathers.
Movies like Culpepper was happy making it clear that we don't live in a world of clearly defined options, that our frontiers are only as vast and farreaching as our minds allow them to be. It also made me realize how nice it was to have access, on a regular basis, to hot and cold running water. Revisionist or not, the old West looked to be a sordid, stinky and violent world, one that I was happy to miss. And if I found that I missed it I could always catch the next screening.
Action!
Movie review: Culpepper Cattle Co.:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068435/
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