Dark Horses

Mark Mushet compares two unforgettable anti-Westerns

In the popular mythology of Westerns, a riderless dark horse can mean many things. Sometimes it symbolizes a fallen warrior, or it can represent a ruined and conquered past. Most often, it is a reflection of tragedy or a portent of doom, or both. There’s something inherently unsettling about a powerful domesticated creature on the loose—it hints at accidents, chaos, loss.

I was struck by the symbol’s forceful presence in the repeating opening sequence of the HBO television series Deadwood, the first two seasons of which I watched on DVD this past year in a state of enthralled addiction. The introductory segment shows a horse emerging from flames, then running through a camp and forest before coming to a halt in the town. It fixes its impartial gaze on the camera while the already bittersweet theme music turns sombre. In the final image, an equine reflection in a puddle dissolves and vanishes.

Populated by an A-list of character actors giving career-defining performances, Deadwood is the most compelling, nuanced and grim tale of the forging of the American West ever made. Beautifully shot and written, it pushes the envelope in matters of language and in its overt depiction of the appalling vicissitudes of frontier life.

As the episodes unfolded, I was increasingly reminded of Robert Altman’s 1971 film McCabe and Mrs. Miller. By comparison, the movie is a modest, poetic tale in which two protagonists struggle against fortune and corporate thuggery in the frontier-era Pacific Northwest. A dark, riderless horse also appears, almost incidentally, cantering by McCabe in the showdown scenes as he struggles in the snow to escape assassins. This beautiful, sad work is perfectly complemented by songs from Leonard Cohen’s 1967 debut LP, which seem uncannily apropos of the mood and storyline.

I happen to have a personal connection to the film, since I was running around the meticulously crafted set when I was seven. It was shot in the Cypress area above West Vancouver’s Upper Levels Highway in the fall of 1970, and my then-commonlaw stepfather, character actor Wes Taylor, had been cast in the film as Shorty Dunn. He's the little guy who utters the movie's first word, “Evenin’,” as McCabe (Warren Beatty) first slinks into Sheehan's Saloon and Hotel for a game of poker.

Together with his acting partner, Wayne Robson ( later of Grey Fox and The Red Green Show ), and a slew of locally sourced actors and craftsmen, Wes helped to create the ramshackle atmosphere of the movie's zinc-mining town of Presbyterian Church, in which gambler McCabe and aspiring madam Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie) aim to escape their ignoble pasts.

Both Wes and Altman died in 2006, and this past December I re-watched the film as kind of homage to both men and their art. I began comparing it more closely with Deadwood , and realized that Altman's film was a precursor to the series in many ways. With their anti-heroic treatment of frontier life, the two productions may have been made a generation apart, but they are undeniably kin.

Both are atmospheric set pieces that show the creeping civilization and shockingly quick corporatization of turn-of-the-last-century North American outposts. Large ensemble casts deliver period flavour and allow for a varied and unvarnished view of human behaviour. Men are focused on personal opportunity and gain, while women are stuck in the roles of prostitute, servant or convenient bride. Basic hygiene is a rarely attainable feat, and death by lead shot, blade or untreatable illness a daily occurrence. Only opiates are available to dull pain, physical and spiritual. Ill-considered ambitions or alliances lead to overnight ruin or riches, and good people do bad things and vice versa. We see people tested in the maw of naked ambition and greed.

While McCabe’s Presbyterian Church is a fictitious, isolated enclave in the rain-soaked forests of the Pacific Northwest, Deadwood is modelled on a real gold-mining town of the same name located in the conflicted territory of what became South Dakota . The latter’s characters are based on real historical figures, including Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok, but the parallels are striking. Like McCabe, Hickok (Keith Carradine) has come to town to play poker in his waning days, still hoping for a new life while seeking a measure of escape and trying to “trade the game he knows for shelter” (as per Cohen’s lovely lyrics). As it happens, Carradine also appeared more than three decades earlier in McCabe as a naive cowboy, where he is also shot to death in a tawdry fashion.

More parallels are found in cowardly and duplicitous minor businessmen characters, such as Presbyterian Church’s saloon-and-flophouse-keeper Sheehan (Rene Aberjonois) and Deadwood’s slimy hotelier E.B. Farnum (played by William Sanderson). Either personality would sell you out in a heartbeat. Madams also hold prominent positions in both camps: Mrs. Miller brings critical business skills to her partnership with McCabe, while the head lady at Deadwood’s Bella Union Saloon, Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens), wields manipulative skills that give her joint a leg up on (or a leg over?) the rival Gem Saloon.

While McCabe continued Altman’s famously layered and shifting signature soundscape, Deadwood’s carefully scripted language really shines. Altman took chances with the delivery, while the Deadwood writers ladle out a wonderful and outrageous mix of immigrant accents and idiosyncratic turns of phrase. Typical of his milieu, the Gem’s proprietor, Al Swearengen, mixes florid Victorian mannerisms gleaned from period-newspaper editorial style with an endless flow of “cunt” and “cocksucker.” Deadwood’s profanity is thicker than the mud in Chinese headman Wu’s combination pigsty-and-body-disposal-pit. (Incidentally, Wu plays a notable speaking role, while McCabe’s Chinatown never gets a voice.)

Before seeing Deadwood , I’d thought that McCabe was uniquely local, capturing the essence of early rainforest settlements in a particular and engrossing way. The film resonates among us Northwest Coast types because it fully adopts the landscape and damp of our immediate surroundings. It feels like here. But now I realize that its themes are more universal. Like in Deadwood , personal violence or corporate forces often extinguish dreams and schemes—the threat of death is omnipresent. In this environment, men and women bluff to raise the value of their holdings to gain leverage as the company interests moved in; they are “reaching for the sky just to surrender” (again, Cohen’s fine lyrics).

In watching McCabe facing the hired guns of the mining companies, desperately reducing the price of his holdings to save his life, or Deadwood’s struggle between individual claim-holders and the monopolistic drive of incoming corporate heavies, I do see parallels between that era and the amateurishness and corruption of 20th-century Vancouver. Think of the bargain-basement sale of the Expo Lands to offshore investors, or the endless and near-complete destruction of our architectural heritage. Mrs. Miller may well have been addressing our city rather than McCabe when she said, “The trouble with you is you’re always thinking small!”

Presbyterian Church had zinc, real estate, prostitution, poker and opium. Deadwood had gold, real estate, prostitution, poker and opium. Today’s Vancouver has real estate, yoga wear, prostitution, electronic gaming and heroin. Get in early and sell high. Get out alive if you can.

Local author Michael Turner wrote an essay for last September/October’s Cinematheque program guide to accompany a much-appreciated 35-millimetre print screening of McCabe . As host of the presentation, he paired it with a documentary on the forced eviction of the squatters of North Vancouver’s Maplewood Flats in 1971. The squatters’ fate, he wrote, echoed the film’s frontier realities—people trying to forge an alternative life in the wilderness falling to capitalist interests. (As it happens, some of the film’s set carpenters lived in Maplewood Flats.)

Turner went so far as to ask: “Could it be that Robert Altman is Vancouver?” He was implying that Altman came here with an idealistic mindset to forge a better future away from the American studio system. But the truth may be more prosaic. Canada was cheap, available, and a good place for a renegade auteur to set up shop. In many respects the director himself could identify with his characters: a man fighting and escaping the suits in “the wilds of Canada , man country.” I kid you not, this quote is taken from the making-of doc contained in the DVD package.

McCabe remains a haunting film deservedly beloved by those who took part in it, even though the critics of the era found the sound muddy and lighting uneven. They weren’t really ready for its grim poetic vision of dashed hopes. It is now considered a genre classic and one of Altman’s best, and it helped consolidate the director’s stable of character actors used in his often-brilliant, rambling ensemble works throughout the 1970s. For example, John Shuck and Rene Auberjonois (Painless and Father Mulcahy in M*A*S*H) both show up in McCabe; Keith Carradine later starred in Thieves Like Us and Nashville; and Shelley Duvall, Presbyterian Church’s mail-order bride-cum-hooker, figured in his best run of ’70s classics.

Those were pioneering days for mainstream American cinema and Altman was at the forefront. He was fiercely loyal to the oddball actors who gave his movies character and depth—adopted Canadians like Wes and Wayne Robson worked on his Alberta-shot Buffalo Bill and the Indians five years after McCabe. One can’t help but think that Deadwood’s creators took a good look at Altman’s frontier masterpiece and said to themselves: Let’s expand that territory, give the character actors the entire foreground, and reproduce that improvised style of dialogue and action with more polish but no less authenticity.

It’s a debt that was paid with honour. Both productions—from a European settlers’ point of view—are gifts to ourselves, in the sense that they are much-needed, raw retellings of our recent history with uncomfortable echoes into the present day.

Copyright © Mark Mushet, 2006