Trouble at the Metropole saloon

Press, 12 June 1978, Page 12

Trouble at the Metropole saloon

AT THE CINEMA

Stan Darling

It is 1901 in Carson City, Nevada. Queen Victoria has Just died, and her story is splashed across the local newspaper’s front page. J. B. Books, an ageing gunfighter, is in town and dying fast from natural causes. In “The Shootist”, at 'the Carlton, he wants to keep his pride and go out in style, the way the Queen did. Sadly, the film doesn’t let him do that. Played by John Wayne — who “beat the Big C” in real life — Books is wasting away from cancer. Can he pull through? I Forget it. He can’t get rid I of the disease any more I than he can extricate him‘self from this Western gone wrong. Director Don Siegel (“Dirty Harry”, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”) put just enough good things into this film to make it worth ■seeing; he put enough bad I things in to make you wish jyou hadn’t bothered. I Siegel draws on the jinfluences of John Ford and j Howard Hawks at first, even ' using clips from their past John Wayne films to show] Books growing older as a shootist, but he forgets that j a classic Western has to be ended with grace. His ending is uncalled for and stupid. Books is shown as a man who always lived by a strict code: “I won’t b: wronged, I won t be insulted and 1 won’t be laid a hand on,” he says. “I don’t Jo these things to other people, and I require the same from them.” So far, so good. He is

'even shown giving a robber only a flesh wound and a bit of advice, instead of killing him. From then on. he guns down two men who probably needed it and several more whose crimes against him are questionable. Richard Boone. . a fine actor, and Hugh O’Brian, a passable one. are wasted. They are brought on briefly as cannon fodder, for little apparent reason other than the screenwriter’s twisted logic about the way a real man should die.

Books is called Methusaleh when he rides into town, carrying a tasseled red pillow to "sit on because of the pain of his cancer. One tough says he “looks all tuckered out. ain’t worth a

bullett. He goes to ground’ i a boarding house with a d e c e n t-looking widow woman (Lauren Bacall). When the locals find out: who he is, a man of some shootist fame, a few change [their minds about giving him that bullet. Doctor Hostetler (James Stewart) tells Books he would have to gut him like; a fish to get out the cancer,: ■so the gunman settles in to l ‘die. He mutters a soft I “Damn” when he finds out, 'and if the rest of the film

were like that, it might be all right. The rot sets in quickly. Books pays the landlady some cowboy compliments — “Mrs Rogers, you have a fine colour when you’re in a scrap” and “You’re such a real lady on the outside, full of vim and vinegar on the inside” — which soften her up for when he has to use her lodgings as a slaughterhouse. ' He has been “full of [alone” lately, and knows she' [has enough starch in her corset to put up with him dying in her house. The city marshal keeps asking after his health as [

the death toll mounts

“You draw trouble like an outhouse draws flies." he says. “Keepin’ you alive to die natural is costing us a pretty penny.”

Some locals are out to kill him. others to make monet from his death. Even the doctor urges him on to things ridiculous by saying a man with his courage should not die an agonising death from cancer.

The gunman sticks his pistol in the mouth of a newspaperman who tries to get him to psychoanalyse his violent life. “Between us, we could put Carson City on the map,” the newspaperman savs, and the gun goes into his mouth. It’s that kind of film.

Some of the minor characters are mildly interesting as familiar Western stereotypes — a bug-eyed black stable owner named Moses and a slimy undertaker — named Hezekiah — but a director like Ford made them more than stereotypes. In some ways, the Western town set is more interesting than most, with its telephone lines and streetcar tracks. But it is too tricked up, too strenuously authentic. It is like watching John Wayne mosey through Disneyland. Books dresses up in his Sunday go-to-meetin’ clothes for the final shoot-out down at the Metropole saloon. He has outlived his time, a tired old line if ever there was one.

There is no excuse for what comes next. He should have tossed himself off a cliff, put his head in the 'stove. Anything would have jbeen nobler than what he does. They should have cut off the ending and let old John Wayne shoot it clean through the heart at 80 feet.