Emil Franzi:

WHY DEADWOOD SUCKS

HBO's latest is the Sopranos on horseback and it shows....
There is a bell curve of reality on westerns. On one ridiculous side we have Roy and Gene singing and never working very hard. The good guys never miss, always win and the bad guys beat rather easy. And they wear funny clothes never seen off a movie set or music stage.

On the other side you have the dark, grim world that peaked with the spaghetti westerns (which ended up being parodies of themselves with THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY.) At about that Viet Nam era there also were anti-army flicks like SOLDIER BLUE and post Peckinpah brutality tales like ULZANA'S RAID.

The grim side of the curve had one thing going for it that makes too many folks consider it closer to reality. It usually LOOKS real. Costumes, architecture and firearms are much closer to what really was used. But it's often as hokey as anything ever done by Lash Larue.

It's all in the timing. Along with the Viet-Nam War. the SpagWest came upon us about the same time the Italian firearms industry was making all those neat low-cost Civil War reproductions so matching that up with other stuff allowed those grubby sets to give their often implausible stories more credibility.

THE UNFORGIVEN and DANCES WITH WOLVES are both grim tales too, the former the more credible. There were places - and people - in the real West that were just plain nasty. Kinda like now.

The trouble with HBO's new series DEADWOOD is that like so many attempts to revise history it falls flat on its ignorant ass by attempting to graft today's values and mannerisms on another time. In DEADWOOD's case that even includes using today's obscenities. To use one that would've been understood 130 years ago, that's horseshit.

Deadwood in the series is depicted as a mean, vile town inhabited by mean, vile people. Nothing original there - try Clint Eastwood's HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER. They have a dissipated and detached Wild Bill Hickok and a large ungainly Calamity Jane, again something hardly ground breaking. What they do have is a transplanted vocabulary that sounds like it came off THE SOPRANOS.

Dudes who write this crap, listen up. They cussed back in 1876, but they used DIFFERENT WORDS. They had a different value system concerning obscenity. Hell and Damn were really big stuff then. Having 19th Century cowboys talk like 21st Century gangbangers is pure bullshit, a word I don't believe had come into wide usage yet back then.

The Deadwood of DEADWOOD is as phony as a Disney Theme Park and as bad an attempt to insert modern idioms and ideologies as another late TV series featuring Wild Bill as a character - THE YOUNG RIDERS. You all  remember that turkey? Wild Bill and Buffalo Bill Cody - and a black, a native American and a girl (disguised, of course, but a politically correct statement for primitive gender equity.) I expected the young Cody and Hickok to begin worrying about the depleted whale supply every time they lit a lantern. BARF!!!!

Because of the general historical ignorance and political bias of most movie critics, a flick like GODS AND GENERALS got panned for having people talk - and think - like they actually did. That generally worthy effort also failed on it's own due to excessive length - four hours. It was mini-series material, not movie sit-down stuff.

One of the truly great westerns of all time is LONESOME DOVE which is almost SIX hours long but rationed in manageable  nightly TV doses. And it's darker than Hell in many places, but that darkness isn't ultimately dominant. Larry McMurtry got the fight between good and evil about right and nobody screwed it up when they adapted it. Stuff like DEADWOOD barely recognizes the battle.

Want more of the real west?  Pay attention to the Golden Age from Randolph Scott and Gary Cooper to the Duke. Peckinpah was the last great western director and not for the realistic violence. There's more real morality in THE WILD BUNCH than you'll find at almost everything shown at today's cineplexes.

For real perspective, try the 1930 combination of Raoul Walsh directing John Wayne in his first epic, THE BIG TRAIL. The dialog is overly genteel but the air of reality hangs over it for the simple reason that many of the older actors were young enough to have actually participated in similar events and shared the portrayed lifestyles. The wagons lowered over the side of a cliff and forded through rushing waters weren't models or props. They still had folks who could do that stuff back then because at one time, they had to.

Likewise the scene in the John Ford/John Wayne SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON where Captain Brittles and Sergeant Tyree (The Duke and Ben Johnson) ride into the Arapaho village and Brittles talks with Chief Pony That Walks.* The Indian playing that Chief was in his 80's and could have BEEN at the Little Big Horn. Subtract Ford's love of shooting everything in Monument Valley, and he, screenwriter James Warner Bellah, and a little visual guideline from Frederick Remington gave us the greatest - and most genuine - frontier cavalry movie of all time.

We still watch them lower those wagons over 75 years later, and see the Duke in that Arapaho village, even knowing it was populated by Navajos. And that is more than will happen 75 years from now with BS like THE YOUNG RIDERS - and DEADWOOD.

*Played by John Big Tree born Isaac Johnny John. An Onandaga from upstate New York, he played in movies for 35 years and died in 1967 at 101. He is also the Indian on the Buffalo nickel.