Monte Walsh (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Jan 28, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
William A. FrakerRelease Date(s)
1970 (December 31, 2024)Studio(s)
Cinema Center Films/Landers-Roberts Productions (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)- Film/Program Grade: A-
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B-
Review
William A. Fraker (1923-2010) was a cinematographer whose impressive list of credits include Rosemary’s Baby, Bullitt, The Day of the Dolphin, Exorcist II: The Heretic, 1941, Sharkey’s Machine, Murphy’s Romance, Tombstone and many others. In 1969 he shot Paint Your Wagon, the calamitous musical-Western starring Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood, and with Marvin the following year Fraker made his directorial debut with another (but, thankfully, non-singing) Western, Monte Walsh. He followed that with the little-seen horror film A Reflection of Fear (1972) and then directed no other films until The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981), perhaps the worst movie with the best coming attractions trailer. Badly stung, Fraker returned to cinematography and never directed another film, though he did helm some episodic television later in the decade.
Monte Walsh is an elegiac Western, in the manner of Ride the High Country and especially Will Penny. It’s not the best of this subgenre, but a welcome addition, certainly, with unexpectedly tender leading performances and a surprisingly political subtext more relevant than ever. The film loosely adapts the novel by Jack Schaefer, the writer of Shane. Jack Palance, who memorably played the heavy in the 1953 film of Shane, co-stars along with the great French actress Jeanne Moreau.
Monte Walsh (Marvin) and Chet Rollins (Palance) are aging cowboys in the last years of the Old West. When their Cross Bar ranch is bankrupted by a bad winter, they go to work for their old boss Cal Brennan (Jim Davis) at the Slash Y ranch. There they reunite with another cowboy, the much younger “Shorty” Austin (Mitchell Ryan). The first half of the picture focuses on the camaraderie among the men, mostly in light, comic scenes that play just a bit too forced, such as when the cowboys, unable to enjoy their meals because of their sweaty cook’s (Ted Gehring) terrible body odor, force-bathe him.
Monte occasionally rides into town to rendezvous with Martine Bernard (Moreau), a France-born prostitute who loves Monte, while Chet sets his sights on “hardware widow” Mary Eagle (the wonderful, underutilized Allyn Ann McLerie), who operates a general store since the death of her husband.
Meanwhile, at the Slash Y, Brennan is forced to lay off three cowboys, including Shorty. The absent speculator owners back east would just as soon shut down the entire ranch, lay everyone off, and after fencing the property off, let it sit unused until the land value increases.
When the movie was new, moviegoers looking at the poster touting Marvin and Palance probably expected a violent Western along the lines of The Wild Bunch, and were perhaps left nonplussed by the film’s unusual tone. The first half of the picture is meandering with much humor, but at about the halfway point it turns a dark corner in ways I can’t reveal here, like a line of falling dominoes and inexorably heading toward great tragedy. Somehow, I’d missed Monte Walsh all these years and for the first 40 minutes wondered where it was all heading; its second-half rather suddenly becomes most compelling and the material carefully, sometimes obviously set-up in the first part of the story begins to pay off.
Fraker’s direction gets fine performances from the actors but it’s a little shaky in other ways. He and/or Lee Marvin sought to show the passage of time by having Walsh clean-shaven with short hair while, in alternating scenes, long-haired and mustachioed in others, but the frequent back-and-forth of Marvin’s appearance is a little jarring, drawing attention to itself. In another scene, late at night, Walsh, drunk yet determined to show he’s still got it, decides to break a stubbornly unbroken horse on display in the middle of western town. The violent bronc riding through the town is not unlike Jonathan Winters destroying the gas station in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: man and beast topple a water tower, set loose cattle, rip off the awnings of buildings, all while the horse is neighing loudly, yet no one ventures out of any of the buildings to see what’s going on. Again, this is so unbelievable that it draws attention to itself, taking the viewer out of what otherwise is an impressive sequence with great stunt work, though one wonders about the well-being of the horse.
At its core, though, are those three leading performances. While the early scenes teeter toward Marvin’s more comic film roles (Donovan’s Reef, Cat Ballou), he seizes upon the tragic aspects of Walsh, wisely underplaying his responses to various tragedies. A Marine in the South Pacific during World War II, Marvin saw the impact of war during his 21 amphibious assaults and was severely wounded himself. This informed and lent verisimilitude to later parts in movies like The Big Red One. In Monte Walsh, his reactions to death, violent and natural, is subtle and believable. Former coal miner, boxer, and B-24 pilot Palance likewise has the right stuff to make a believable career cowboy.
Previously released to Blu-ray by Kino in 2015, their reissue is labeled a “special edition,” though there’s no mention of a new remaster and extras are limited to an audio commentary track by Marvin biographer Dwayne Epstein and a trailer. Filmed in 2.35:1 Panavision, Monte Walsh looks generally good, though this does seem an older transfer. There’re speckling and other minor imperfections but the image throughout is fairly good. The DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 mono) is adequate and supported by optional English subtitles, while the disc itself is Region “A” encoded.
A bit less authentic than Will Penny but also less sentimental and a little better in other subtle ways, Monte Walsh is recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV