Will Penny (1968)
Paramount DVD (region 4)
d. Tom Gries; pr. Fred Engel, Walter Seltzer; scr. Tom Gries; ph. Lucien Ballard; m. David Raksin; ed. Warren Low; cast. Charlton Heston, Joan Hackett, Donald Pleasance, Anthony Zerbe, Lee Majors, Ben Johnson, Slim Pickens, Clifton James (108 mins)
Following the lavish widescreen western spectacles of the early 1960s there emerged towards the end of that decade a counter-trend featuring a greater emphasis on the real, unglamorous day to day existence of the ordinary cowboy. Tom Gries’ film of Will Penny is perhaps the first and foremost of these films and its emphasis on weathered grit anticipates the so-called “mud-and-rags” school of revisionist westerns of the 1970s. But where these later revisionist films used a realistic squalor to subvert the glory of the western hero, Will Penny and its ilk sought to find a quiet inevitability and resigned dignity in the hard life of the cowboy. Gries had been involved in television before he wrote the script and submitted it to producers on the condition that he would be the only one to direct it: he was understandably fond of it and intended it as his feature debut. His tactic worked and Gries made a stunning though quietly realized film (which would ironically prove to be one that his subsequent career was considered to never match), one of the first westerns to tackle the predicament of the ageing cowboy. Indeed, these problems of ageing western heroes, also explored to different ends in Sam Peckinpah’s seminal The Wild Bunch and Richard Brooks’ adventurous The Professionals, subsequently became something of a mini-vogue as films sought to address a beloved type at the end of its lifespan.
Will Penny tells the story of the title character, an ageing cowboy (marvellously played by Charlton Heston) who drifts from job to job on the range. It is winter and he is out of work. He goes with two acquaintances (Lee Majors and a most amusing Anthony Zerbe), one of whom is soon wounded in a shootout with a demented preacher (Donald Pleasence) and his wandering clan of thieves. Pleasence soon swears vengeance for the death of one of his clan. Heston and his friend get the wounded man to a doctor, but Heston rejects any possible teaming and goes his own way. He gets a job as a line rider for a large ranch (headed by Ben Johnson) and soon sets off on the lonely trail to the rider’s distant, isolated shack. There he finds a woman (Joan Hackett) and her son squatting, hoping to avoid the ravages of the winter. Although he has been told to move all travellers along, he agrees to let them stay for a day or two, provided they are gone when he returns from his ride. On his ride, Pleasence and his clan ambush him and leave him to perish in the harsh winter conditions. He makes his way to the shack where the woman slowly nurses him to health. He lets them stay and soon develops a bond with them, experiencing a family for the first time in his life. However, Pleasence and his clan return and Heston’s idyll is interrupted as Pleasence now intends the woman for one of his two sons. read more