Woody goes wild in the west

CLINT Eastwood once observed that "the Western movie is one of the few art forms that Americans can lay claim to, next to jazz". It is not a genre in which outsiders have ever specialised.

This makes the choice of Stephen Frears as director of The Hi-Lo Country all the more surprising. Frears may have tackled period drama (Dangerous Liaisons) and gangster films (The Grifters) before, but he served his apprenticeship in British TV, and it is a long way from the Dublin of The Van or the London of My Beautiful Launderette to the wide open spaces of New Mexico.

What must have made his task even more daunting was the knowledge that he was inheriting a project originally earmarked for Sam Peckinpah. When Max Evans wrote the 1961 novel on which the film is based, Peckinpah was first in line to try to bring it to the screen.

Scale is crucial to The Hi-Lo Country. With its cattle drives, blizzards and shots of vast, open prairies, this is the kind of film that has to be seen on the big screen. The story unfolds in the 1940s, when the old west is more under threat than ever. There is the same elegiac feel here as in Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch - the cowboys are men out of time, and property speculators, land-grabbers and industrialists are slowly stifling them.

Not that a maverick like Big Boy (Woody Harrelson) is going to let progress' or a small matter like world war two affect his way of life. Likewise, Frears seems determined to make as traditional a Western as possible. He takes the rugged machismo of his lead characters at face value, and never tries to make ironic points at their expense. "A good horse is like a good woman all bottom," ruminates Big Boy, without anyone looking askance.

The storytelling has a classical simplicity. Big Boy and Pete (Billy Crudup) are best friends, but a woman (Patricia Arquette) threatens to come between them. Her husband is the foreman to Jim Ed Love (Sam Elliott), the big, bad local tycoon who wants to drive all the small-time cowboys out of business.

The Hi-Lo Country is a slow-burning but beautifully crafted Western with a real sense of majesty. Frears' affection for the movies of Hawks and Ford is evident throughout, both in his use of landscape (cattle drives against vast backdrops) and in the casting: the film is full of wiry, wrinkly faces familiar from the old movies. Katy Jurado (Grace Kelly's rival for Gary Cooper's affections in High Noon) appears as a Mexican fortune-teller, while the veteran character actor James Gammon (sporting a grey moustache which makes him look disconcertingly like Jimmy Greaves) plays kind-hearted old- timer Hoover Young.

Occasionally, however, Frears seems to be caught between two stools. On the one hand he wants to give the film an epic grandeur; on the other he is dealing with characters who wouldn't look out of place in the most claustrophobic film noir. This is as much a film about sexual jealousy and family bitterness - a sort of modern-day Lust In The Dust - as it is a celebration of the old west, but the temperature never rises quite as high as it ought to.

Still, Harrelson excels as the fearless, charismatic Big Boy, a character who comes from a family in which the menfolk are expected to die violent deaths. (Whoever would have believed that the feckless barman from Cheers would one day step into the boots of Wayne and Cooper?) Crudup, meanwhile, is equally convincing as his laconic friend.

There is a sense that they are more obsessed with each other than with the woman who threatens to tear them apart, but this is too much of an old-fashioned Western to delve too deeply into such territory.

Patricia Arquette reprises the femme fatale she played in David Lynch's Lost Highway effectively enough, but you still can't help but wonder why Crudup is so bewitched by her when his own girlfriend Josephina (Penelope Cruz) is every bit as alluring.

Cruz is far too magnetic a screen presence to be second fiddle to anyone.

The Hi-Lo Country comes complete with baccy-chewing old-timers, poker games, saloon brawls and spectacular feats of horsemanship.

Frears was born in Leicester, not New Mexico, but you'd never guess it.

Geoffrey MacNabb

Copyright 1999
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