2014-03-12
Showdown! Please click this link and listen to the music while reading today’s page.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating on a page like this one: a lot of Silk & Honey is my personal love letter to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, which is the Greatest Western Movie Of All Time. Hands down.
I dig Once Upon A Time in the West, and even High Noon (which Once Upon A Time in the West was a love letter to!), but nothing beats GBU, man. Nothin’. Let me explain:
GBU came out towards the tail end of the Western Movie Craze that had gripped the US from the 1950s (if not before!) to the 1970s (or thereabouts), and to fully understand this movie, you had to have watched all (or at least a lot) of the films that came before it. You had to be well-versed in the shared universe these films all dipped into. By the time GBU hit the screens, there were a lot of shared western tropes that audiences more or less took for granted.
One of these tropes was the character who was The Fastest Gun In The West, or at least The Fastest Gun In The Movie. For most of these films, there was one and only one Fastest Gun, and he was usually the good guy.
Then GBU came out, and gave its audience THREE Fastest Guns. Blondie, Tuco and Angel Eyes were all dead even when it came to gunslingin’. Unlike the films that came before, it wasn’t the speed of the draw that was important, it was the man doing the drawing.
Blondie had brains–he was the smartest one by far…which I think is why he came off as so lucky in the film. Tuco was sneaky and cunning–more animal instinct than human reason. Angel Eyes was barely human at all. He was a flat-out cold-blooded, ruthless killer devoid of any compassion whatsoever. And when all three of these men are in pursuit of the same goal, who wins?
That is what made GBU the greatest Western movie in my eyes. So much so that it’s been a Thanksgiving tradition in my house to watch this film while the turkey’s cooking.
And just as there were closeups of everyone’s eyes during the 3-way showdown in GBU, so there is a similar scene here.
(GBU opened with an extreme closeup, too…just like Silk & Honey did. And I put the cemetery from the 3-way showdown in Locus, back at the end of Issue 13, but I’m not sure anyone noticed…I probably could’ve drawn it better!)
At any rate: there you go! What’s gonna happen? Tune in next week!