Charles Bronson! Toshiro Mifune! Alain Delon! Red Sun!

The greatest tragedy of this film is that it never manages to rise to the promise of pairing these three actors together, especially under the direction of Terence Young, an interesting and versatile director whose career most notably peaked with creating, in Dr. No and From Russia With Love, the two most interesting films in the James Bond franchise.  Not a disaster by any means, the film never seems to stick, and though it remains an interesting viewing experience it is nonetheless most interesting to discuss in terms of the film that exists in the imagination, rather than the one we have on screen.

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The plot, which starts with a train robbery and ends in a confrontation with Indians, is fairly perfunctory, a machine built of the standard gears that seeks to elicit interest entirely through use of its unorthodox characters. For nearly 40 minutes of the first hour we watch Mifune and Bronson bicker in the desert, a kind of low-energy take on John Boorman’s far superior Hell in the Pacific (in which Mifune is teemed with Lee Marvin on an island during the second world war) which could have approached Beckett or at least 1960s Monte Hellman but instead plays like a romantic comedy, with the bickering couple learning to love each other in the end, just in time to fight Delon, here playing Bronson’s hated ex. The emptiness of the desert setting – classic Italian – pushes the performances to the forefront, and the whole thing occasionally feels like watching an adolescent playing with his dolls – Cowboy! Samurai! – in a sandbox.

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The performers are in this case cast along strict national lines and, disappointingly, adhere to them. Mifune gets cast as the unfailingly stoic, honorable Samurai; Bronson as the affable but tough American Cowboy; Deloin gets to be the sadistic, black clad dandy (named Gauche, of course). Which is a shame, considering that all three performers made their names in complex roles  that blend iconography aesthetics in often perverse ways.  To imagine the Delon of Le Samurai interacting with the Bronson of Once Upon a Time in the West and the Mifune of Yojimbo (the film that proved the basis for Leone’s Man with no Name trilogy, for which he initially wanted to cast Bronson in the role made famous by Eastwood) is to imagine a much stranger, much more interesting film.

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Increasingly it feels like we live in a world of film that is starved for icons.  Think of Belmondo imitating Bogart in About de Souffle – that gesture, flattening out his lips to resemble his hero’s legendary face, goes beyond something as simple as hero worship or celebrity obsession and into another realm altogether. A great author, a Proust or Beckett, can in a single sentence evoke not only a world but a mode of framing and interacting with the world, and a truly great performer, like any of these three men, can do the same. Just like a young man can fall to his death by basing his ideal universe around the set of Bogart’s lips, so could you construct an entire aesthetics of masculinity in the way Charles Bronson squints at the sun, or the way Delon wears a pin-striped suit and hat. This may not be a healthy way to live – Belmondo dies tragically, we can’t forget that – but it is, perhaps, an inevitable one in the world we live in today.

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All these aesthetics we attribute to these actors are of course tied, very specifically, to a few directors. Jean-Pierre Melville, Akira Kurosawa, Sergio Leone (and arguably Don Siegel). But their hands touch these performers, and their vision carries on within them.  Watch Losey’s disastrous Assasination of Trotsky, and you can see Melville hovering just a bit, like  a ghost or an aerosol emission, behind Delon in the distance. Serge Daney, not long before his death, had a dream of John Wayne standing at the North Pole, and Joao Cesar Monteiro would make a film with that image at its heart; Monteiro, so thin he could joke about having a tape worm and you would just about believe him,  starred in his final film as he was dying of cancer, just like John Wayne did.  The curtains of the twentieth century closed about a decade ago, and the men and women who walked through it as icons seem almost as distant as the apostles.

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As a personal confession: I will watch any film that combines Western iconography and happens to include a scene in a brothel. There is a great such sequence in this film , right in the center; the two men, having spent days in the desert, track down Delon’s mistress (Ursula Andress!) in a brothel where she works.  Bronson seems familiar there, and in fact seems to have something of a relationship with the Madame. Even Mifune gets a girl, a young Mexican (read: Italian) girl who notes that their skin color is almost the same; he has a long bath. They leave the brothel soon, of course, on route to the honorable violence of the conclusion, which leaves both Delon and Mifune dead, the MacGuffin (a ceremonial sword on route to the President in Washington) recovered. But you can imagine a different ending, easily enough. The two men, Bronson and Mifune, feel so comfortable there, in the brothel, that they never leave, forgetting their vendettas, forgetting their mission. Delon sends men to kill them, but it never works, and they use the bounty on the hired killers to pay for their stay (the brothel keeps them as security). Eventually the turn to drink, drugs, and days go by in a haze. One night Mifune will wake up, in a cold sweat, and remember the Japan of his youth, the dying honor of the family he left behind.  A town will be built around them; when they leave, to visit what remains of their family and friends, they will find the twentieth century is already underway, the landscape they remember all but gone. Mifune, an old man, will return to Japan and find men and women wearing Western suits and hats; talk of war will be in the air. His Japanese by now will be accented with a cowboy drawl, and in his ten gallon hat he will be the talk of the town. The meaning of that golden sword will be forgotten by all; there wasn’t even a photograph taken to etch it in memory, all the pity.

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