Sat 12 May 2018
A Western Movie Review by Jonathan Lewis: LAWMAN (1971).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western movies[5] Comments
LAWMAN. United Artists, 1971. Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, Lee J. Cobb, Robert Duvall, Sheree North, Albert Salmi, Richard Jordan, John McGiver, Ralph Waite. Director: Michael Winner.
Brutal and cynical, Lawman certainly isn’t a genial Western where the good guy takes on a villainous cattle baron, wins the love of a beautiful girl, and restores the equilibrium of the world to be on the side of justice. Rather, this Michael Winner film is a character study of an aging, brooding lawman so obsessively committed to his personal code of honor that all he is able to do is bring death and misery to all those he encounters.
Burt Lancaster, in a role that allows little for his personal charm to shine, portrays Jared Maddox. Sporting a black leather vest and a holster, Maddox rides into the town of Sabbath. We learn through a conversation that he has with the town’s marshal Cotton Ryan (Robert Ryan) that he has come to Sabbath for a very specific reason.
Several months ago, cowhands working for the stoical cattle baron Vincent Bronson (Lee J. Cobb) had ridden into a town by the name of Bannock and shot up the place. Although they were drunk and merely looking to blow off steam, an old man died at the hands of one of their bullets. And Maddox intends to bring the men back to Bannock to face trial.
This sets in motion a series of violent confrontations between Maddox and the wanted men, as well as anyone who dares stand in his way. Maddox is so tied to the cause of “justice†– indeed, to his very identity as a “lawman†– that he’s increasingly blind to how much unnecessary death and misery he is bringing in his refusal to budge even slightly from his personal code.
In that sense, Lawman stands in the tradition of those tragic Westerns in which a protagonist has outlived his time. Maddox belongs to an earlier era, in which the law was good and the outlaw was bad. Such binary demarcations are outdated in Braddock. Even the “bad†cattle baron seems to have more insight and compassion than Maddox.
But does this mean we are supposed to not root for Maddox? Or are we supposed to be somewhat detached spectators watching Maddox make one bad decision after another? Unlike Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) in Death Wish (1974), a film Winner directed several years after Lawman, we never get to see how or why Maddox was forged into a stone cold killer.
It’s the absence of a backstory that makes Lawman a far less compelling character study than it could have been. By the end of the film (SPOILER ALERT), when Maddox shoots a man in the back, we finally get the message. Maddox is as much a villain as a hero. And the real lawman in the film, the one we should admire is the quiet, thoughtful Cotton Ryan.
May 13th, 2018 at 8:04 am
To me what seemed detached was Michael Winner’s direction. I’ve never seen any film of his that struck an emotional chord on the screen.
May 13th, 2018 at 8:51 am
I believe the concept of Law and Order is one of purity and that in responsible hands, Lancaster’s character would have, and should have been played, and written, as an individual of heroic proportions, rather than flipping that role to the insipid compromiser. Too modern, progressive, insipid and weak for me.
May 13th, 2018 at 9:00 am
One further thought: the situation that brings Lancaster to town equates to variation of moronic terrorism. And there can and should be no indulgence. When the drug dealers, another form of terror, and their thirty or more priors are arrested the good guys do not burn their own town down, as witness Baltimore and Ferguson.
May 14th, 2018 at 1:03 am
I agree with Barry on this movie, this, like Larry McMurtry’s LONESOME DOVE, is anti-historical, a modern sensibility transferred to the old West, denying the truth (don’t start me on the sheer bull-shit in McMurtry’s Westerns), and rewriting legends to suit a world view that did not exist then in the Old West.
The type lawman Lancaster represents here often stood alone against incredible odds. They were not modern police officers, but town tamers, not law officers, but the law embodied. This tendency to twist the past to fit modern sensibilities is a historical lie perpetuated to make points that simply are not valid in that setting or context, and it is a greater lie to perpetuate the myth that the Old West was coming to anything like an end as the end of the Century approached. The last gunfight in the West wasn’t until 1915 (lawman Ben Thompson was killed in Dennison, Texas, Masterson lived until 1927, and Earp until 1929), and as a child I knew aging legends from the the twenties and thirties who had traded gunfire with Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd who were just as ruthless and dogged as the lawmen of the earlier era.
Roy and Gene’s Singing Cowboys and Modern Westerns were more historically accurate than films like these.
The Western can be used to make many points that are still valid today within historical context, but LAWMAN is less a picture of reality than a Quick Draw McGraw cartoon. It would have been more in context set in 1939 than the late 19th Century.
To see this done right within the historical context, and making the same point without lies or political cant watch the reimagining of the O.K. Corral, WARLOCK, with Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, and Anthony Quinn based on Oakley Hall’s fine novel. It tells the same story only with actual psychological depth and within the framework of the time period it is set in.
I come from a much different political perspective than Barry, but I resent bad film-making and historical fantasy about a period that is still fairly close to those of us who are only three generations away from the Old West and who knew or knew others who actually knew the kind of men and the mindset of that era.
A little research would not kill anyone trying to write a Western film. Maybe I’m a little sensitive on the subject because my Great-Grandfather was one of those lawmen, gunfighter, Texas Ranger, Pinkerton,gambler,head of security on the King Ranch, and friend of Earp and Masterson and the like. As my Grandfather, his son-in-law, was wont to say of him: “Finest man I ever knew, meanest son-of-a-bitch who ever walked.” That was who they were, good family men and cold blooded killers, and it was what they were admired for because it was what it took to survive.
Police today are not and should not be the same, but that type certainly existed, and still does in certain highly trained military situations. When someone points a gun at you Burt Lancaster shooting him in the back is more comforting than Robert Ryan reasoning with him, fortunately in today’s world police (the ideal if not the actuality) are taught to walk that line, because they are not Hickock, Earp, Masterson, Thompson, Walker, or my Great-Grandfather and this is not the Old West however close it still is in some parts of the country.
May 17th, 2018 at 11:02 am
Grand piece of writing, thinking and reasoning. David, could be we have more political affinity than anyone — you, would like to admit.