The Old Man and the Gun(2018)
John Wayne’s last film was The Shootist (1976) about an ageing gunfighter, which ends in a full-on western blood bath. Biographer Ronald Davis said, "John Wayne personified for millions the nation's frontier heritage. Eighty-three of his movies were Westerns, and in them he played cowboys, cavalrymen, and unconquerable loners extracted from the Republic's central creation myth."
Wayne was a staunch Republican who would, one suspects, have voted for Genghis Khan had the veteran trouble-maker ventured onto the West Coast ballot paper. He was at the heart of the Hollywood star system. His “The Searchers” (1956) is one of my favourite films but I lay that as much at the door of director John Ford as Wayne. Robert Redford, now 82, has declared The Old Man and The Gun to be his last film. It is about an elderly man who feels most fulfilled when robbing banks. I wonder why he chose this as his last film? This is the man who gave us Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, All the Presidents Men, Ordinary People, Out Of Africa, All is Lost and many more. The film’s ensemble, which includes Danny Glover, Casey Aflek, Tom Wates is intimate and feels as if they have been working together in rep. for months. His chemistry in this film with Cissy Spaceck is masterly and thoroughly convincing on both sides and his acting ability a very moving delight. We perhaps take it for granted.
The whole thing is charmingly light at one level but at a Redford level a moving finale. He was also the man with whom Producer Richard Drewitt and I made a documentary about the destruction of the American West and the man who launched Sundance, which has been a launch pad for so many directors and writers. If Wayne was a man who blasted his way through life Redford has sought change, he cares about the environment and in his life preferred his Sundance festival for new talent and innovation, to the traditional Hollywood system. The Shootist is a fiction,The Old Man and the Gun is based on the life of real man Forrest Tucker. It may be an over simplification to see Wayne’s film and life as being about a macho America and Redford’s film and life about a more outward looking benign America. In the Trump era Fiction v. Truth is an ongoing struggle As a Redford fan (you guessed) I noted the sound of a distant train whistle as Tucker looked out across the countryside which took me back to Butch Cassidy’s train robbery (I was lucky to visit the actual spot where it “happened”) and the closing shot seems a homage to Butch Cassidy where we see the Redford character heading smiling for another bank to rob, now with no Paul Newman at his side. You would most likely not go to this film for the story, the direction, or the script, though all are perfectly workmanlike. But you might get from is – as I did - the feeling of being in at the end of a fabulous journey. Ironically Wayne had no Boot Hill macho nonsense on his gravestone but altogether more thoughtful words. ”Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday.” Some of us have. God bless you Bobby - I am already missing you.
