The American dream is over
by Paolo Valassi
The Western: no film genre has been able to better tell the life, death, ethics, morals, feelings and values of the human race.
And in particular I have always been fascinated by three films that I like to consider as a single, wonderful fresco representing the evolution and death of the American dream.
The first film (the first episode, we could even say) is Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) by Sergio Leone. Leone's westerns represent the first, true moment of rupture compared to the epic and optimistic ones by John Ford.
Once Upon a Time in the West is a great tribute to the epic of the frontier sung by Ford but at the same time represents the final act of the legend and the passage to a new era, characterized by technology (trains), by new, more cynical, less idealistic characters who no longer romantically believe that to fix things all it takes is "a good gunshot".
John Ford was the singer of the birth of a world, while Leone tells of its death.
The colors of Ford's Monument Valley are sunny, clear and endless, while Leone's are blinding, dusty and claustrophobic. The color of Once Upon a Time in the West is the sepia of a vintage photo.
Even the enormously dilated time of the film is functional to evoke a long agony, the agony of a world that Leone does not seem to want to abandon because he knows it will never return.
As Leone himself said: "Ford's hero looks out the window to see the horizon, the bright future. My hero, if he looks out the window, risks getting a bullet in the forehead...".
The American dream is not dead, just the rules have changed.
The second stop on this extraordinary virtual journey is The Wild Bunch (1969) by Sam Peckinpah.
First of all, it is necessary to remember that Peckinpah, by his own admission, could not have made The Wild Bunch without A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More.
Violence is in fact the stylistic feature of the work. Violence that Leone spread liberally in the two aforementioned films and that Peckinpah multiplies to the nth degree so much so that the news tells us that in 1969 many spectators left the cinema halfway through the final massacre scene unable to bear the sight of it.
Set in 1910 at the time of Pancho Villa, Peckinpah's film has some absolutely epic moments, in the "Fordian" sense of the term, but at the same time it writes the epigraph of the myth of the frontier, that is, recounting the tragic epilogue of the efforts of those who conquered the West.
It does so on a formal level with a frenetic editing of 3643 shots, some of which are even fractions of a second, and with the use of slow motion for all the shootings. In this choice, in addition to a certain provocative aesthetic fascination with death that destabilizes the viewer, there is the director's desire to dilate some moments in which the human body reacts at a speed higher than normal.
On a thematic level, the film shows a corrupt, violent world, without hope, honor, justice and virtue that can only be defeated through even more ferocious violence. The famous final slaughter is therefore an enormous catharsis in a world without rules or dignity, far from the mythical society of the Frontier. But on the other hand, Peckinpah celebrates the value of friendship (coincidentally, the value of classic western cinema) as that primordial feeling capable of binding men to each other and giving them a reason to live. The Bunch goes to save his companion held prisoner by the Mexicans (thus starting the final massacre) but with a clear sense of disillusionment and fatalism, as if their death were an unavoidable event.
The old world is dead. The American dream is dead? Maybe not, maybe there is still a little hope.
The circle closes with Heaven's Gate (1980) by Michael Cimino.
Costing 30 million dollars at the time (10 more than expected) it only grossed one and a half, leading the production company United Artists to bankruptcy and, in practice, decreeing the end of the director's career.
But the reason for the total fiasco of the work (a masterpiece, let's say it right away) is easy to understand: the American dream is here definitively buried.
The landowners of a Wyoming county hire a group of mercenaries to get rid of a community of Slavic immigrants falsely accused of stealing cattle. They then issue a list of 125 people who must be eliminated. The Slavic immigrants, who live in the city of Sweet Water (coincidentally the same name as the city founded by Jill-Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West) and who usually meet in a place called Heaven's Gate, are defended by a sheriff, a very rich Harvard graduate, Jim Averill, played by Kris Kristofferson, who has chosen to defend the rights of the weakest. The inevitable final battle sees heavy losses on both sides but the army intervenes to ensure impunity for the mercenaries. Averill, in love with Ella, a French prostitute played by a very young Isabelle Huppert, is about to leave with her but some of the mercenaries kill her.
At the end of the film we see Averill many years later, on his yacht, disillusioned and defeated.
Already from this very brief summary it is clear that the American dream, that is, the belief of living in the best of worlds and of being able to realize any project, no longer exists. The film tells the traumatic awakening in a reality made of violence and injustice, where the arbitrariness and arrogance of those who hold economic power prevails over individual abilities, where the rich and powerful can crush with impunity not only the weakest but also the "different". In fact, the theme of racism is very present in the film: the community of farmers comes from Eastern Europe and is the expression of a migratory flow that follows the original Anglo-Saxon one of the ranchers.
If the three previous works constitute a sort of sacred trimurti, I would also like to remember another film: Butch Cassidy (1969) by George Roy Hill. Inspired by the true story of the legendary bandits Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, played respectively by the two superstars Paul Newman and Robert Redford (and this explains the origin of the name of the film festival organized by Redford), the film was a huge success with the public. And it is easy to understand why: it is certainly one of the most beautiful western films about the end of an era, with the director, George Roy Hill, capable of also formally characterizing the story of an era that is passing by by photographing many scenes in sepia tones. But it is also a romantic comedy, in a certain sense a-problematic: the two nice and carefree protagonists know that their era is about to end and so they look for, as we would say today, "new markets" and emigrate to Bolivia to make some good moves. In the end, however, they cannot escape their destiny and pay with their lives for their timeless choice.
An anarchist-68 film par excellence (and therefore also for this reason much loved at the time) it is embellished by the music of Burt Bacharach and the very famous song Raindrops keep fallin' on my head. I like to mention it, I was saying, at least for a couple of reasons: first of all because it came out shortly after Once Upon a Time in the West and The Wild Bunch and shares the same theme with them (tackled with a very different style, as seen, and not possessing the same depth).
Secondly, and this is history, Butch Cassidy and Sundance were the leaders of a gang of bank robbers who carried out the longest string of bank robberies in American history.
The gang was known as The Wild Bunch.
