All I wanted to do was watch a western. That's it. Big whoop. Little did I know that I was actually asking Earth and the Heavens to move.
Western movies are one of the great vanishing American artforms. And GOOD old westerns are all the more rare.
Give them half a chance, and I believe an old western – a good one – will captivate your afternoon. Hollywood doesn't know how to make them anymore – not good ones, anyway.
Think John Wayne can't act? You haven't seen very many of his films – you've definitely never experienced "The Searchers," or "Red River." You've never burst out in involuntary tears of heartbreak at the 'messed up' final scene of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance."
I can't channel-surf past the Wayne version of "The Alamo" without dropping the remote and staring fixedly until the closing credits roll. Don't leave out Howard Hawks' manifesto of manliness, the 'talking' western, "Rio Bravo."
And there's the great 'non-Duke' oaters, like "The Wild Bunch," "Welcome To Hard Times," "Winchester '73," and the incomparable "Shane."
Wow, I sound like a junky to this passé genre – but I'm hardly that. Let me tell you of one little situation that should prove it to you...
Short version of story: I go to a video store, and I buy an old western. I want to watch it. "The Professionals" (1966). Yes, there are westerns far older, but few better.
Burt Lancaster. Lee Marvin. Robert Ryan. A western with any of these names in the credits is the promise of quality. This western has all three, plus Jack Palance. The female lead is Claudia Cardinale, a causer of wet dreams during my young, young adulthood, in most any film she appeared in. Also present is one of the great, great unsung character actors of the 50s and 60s – and a few 70s – cowboy epics: Woody Strode. Bald before bald was cool; a solumn, unflinching, Biblically intense gaze; intimidatingly manly – call him a black 'Duke.' He occupied space on the screen, the same way that Orson Welles once said of James Cagney – an ultimate compliment. Nuff said?
So anyway, I get a used, er... pre-owned VHS. That's why it's cheap, and such an easy decision. I get home, make myself comfy with a sandwich and a soda, and pop the tape into my VCR (which sits atop my DVD player, lest you assume I live entirely in a career-bachelor backwater).
Problem. The picture appears to have a swarm of bright, digitized cockroaches attacking it. I wait patiently for my VCR, a Quasar Omnivision – not a new model, but not too old for auto-tracking – to self-correct. It doesn't. Instead the screen goes blue-neon, and up zings a screen message that the tapeheads require cleaning.
OK. I put my sandwich and soda in their 'on-hold' positions on the wide wooden arm of my futon. I search about ten minutes for my tapehead cleaning cassette. You remember those, right? Looks just like a VHS tape, but you drip a little cleaning fluid on the 'tape,' put it in the VCR, and it scrubs all the dust and neo-magnetic gunk from the tapeheads. Cool beans. Only, I discover I no longer possess one.
Right. I have to go find some place that still sells them, and buy a new one.
Longs Drugs. Thank the Big Guy for Longs. Maxell still makes VHS tapehead cleaning cassettes. Longs still carries them. O-yeah.
A half hour later I am back home, ripping the plastic wrap off a brand new tapehead cleaning cassette (from this point referred to as the TCC). I'll be enjoying "The Professionals" any minute now. My sandwich and soda casually wait in the fridge.
Opening the TCC's package, I see that it comes with a handy stick-on label, with spaces to document each time the TCC is used. I've never pondered the importance of keeping track of tapehead cleanings – it's so rare a task that the very cassette is usually lost, like mine was, after the first use – but this strikes me as a pretty practical and nifty idea. I peel off the label and sloppily press it in place along the cassette spine. Then I notice that the small bottle of cleaner fluid crucial to the TCC's success, is contained within the frame of the cassette itself, behind a clear plastic, removable window – which I have just made unremovable, because of the distracted fashion with which I applied the handy stick-on label.
Alright. A minor speed bump on the path to classic western cinema enjoyment. I can handle it. My sandwich and soda will keep, nicely chilled.
I attempt to peel the label back off – child's play: create a tiny lip along the edge, slowly pull, and the label should lift off without being destroyed, and still be easily re-applicable. Only... damn, they put strong glue on this. I didn't press it on that hard, did I? Holy crap, this is stuck on good. What kind of atomic time-capsule cement do they put on these stupid monkey-ass things??
Back in the day, video labels were basically worthless – they wouldn't stay stuck – in fact the frikkin' VCR would usually heat them off, and you'd spend hours diddling inside with a ballpoint pen to retrieve the semi-sticky wad from the machine's innards without pulling out some tiny important metal component along with it. But in the years since, Maxell has apparently solved the label glue problem. Bigtime.
The label rips. I manage to peel off a flake, leaving the majority of an ugly, ragged label still super-grafted to the TCC, and still firmly sealing shut the compartment containing the cleaning fluid bottle.
Twenty more minutes of peeling off slivery flakes of label – and still not enough to free the trapped bottle. We approach piss-off territory.
Do I have anything in the closet – a solvent, that will eat the label off? Rubbing alcohol? No – I'll have to get some, one of these days. The very substance that would do the job, is the stuff in the tiny trapped bottle behind the damn label.
Hah! I have something: Half a tube of skin oil astringent! So it isn't exactly sulphuric acid, but it's for dismantling greasy debris on some level, right? I squirt some on the cassette. It works a little – eats away the outer perimeter of the label, aided by some intense action with a dish scrubber, but it doesn't quite put the same whammy on the label's central mass – still with a pitbull grip on the removable plastic window. I need a more powerful corrosive.
The answer would be simple if I was a smoker: lighter fluid! But no. Fantastik? 409? Scrubbing Bubbles? No, no, and no. Clean tapeheads on a ruined VCR? Yeah, right. I commence to rub the shit out of the label with the damp dish scrubber. Slowly, slowly... the skin of my fingertips wears thin and bloody.
A kitchen knife becomes an impromptu scraper. Now I'm making headway. Bit by insufferable bit, finally the label is gone – no longer usable in any way – but no longer holding the cleaning fluid bottle captive. Yes! Oh ecstasy. Consummate joy.
It's only been a mere hour since I tried to start my western. All is not lost. I slide out the clear plastic window, take out the bottle, unscrew the cap to apply it to the TCC, and... nothing. And the damn bottle isn't even squeezable. I examine it more closely... 'please puncture tip of applicator to extract fluid.'
It's like a men's haircolor applicator – yes, I'm savvy with those, so sue me – I have to cut a D.I.Y. hole in the lid of the bottle. Only the bottleneck is so narrow, I need something sharp that's thin enough to fit. I need a pin. A needle. Do I have a pin? Or a needle? I look.
I look for twenty minutes.
BALLS!!!! Okay-dokey. Allllrighty. I try to snip the tip off with scissors, hoping to cut it low enough to get past the solid part of the bottle. No dice. I have to go buy pins!
You hear this?? I gotta go all fucking way back to Longs, to buy a pack of pins, so I can poke a hole in the tip of an applicator bottle, which I've just spent an hour on – crapping my pants, with a Brillo pad, a knife and skin astringent – trying to get it out of a damn plastic cassette, that I impulsively glued shut with a gawddamm cement-soaked, one-inch strip of handy-label, like a brainless twat. So I can clean the tapeheads on my old Quasar VCR. So I can sit on my futon with a soggy sandwich and a flat diet-soda and watch a used, 5-dollar VHS tape. Of a movie that's nearly the same age as I am.
I am not getting in the car one more time tonight. I must have something, anything, pin-like. Finally I come upon it: an aluminum dental pick. Yeah, I bought it a year or two ago, on a whim. It's just like the little metal prong that your dentist probes your cavities with before he drills. I remember I got it at Longs. Irony? Only the best, the most humiliating.
I use the dental pick to puncture the bottle of cleaning fluid, which I then shake over the application hole in the TCC, hard enough to make some of the fluid actually drip out, but gingerly enough not to whack the bottle into the cassette and wreck it. That takes fifteen minutes. Merely. Holy-mother-o'-hump-a-diddling-Pope-John-on-rubber-crutches.
Yeah. Finally. TCC ready to go. Shit yeah. I pop it in the VCR. I press PLAY. The next 30 seconds sound like a cow's tongue licking the scab off a skin graft.
But suddenly the TCC ejects. I pop my movie back in. It's beautiful. A picture as pristine as when the tape was new, probably back in the 80s. It's playing, and it's beautiful, I tells ya! And I'm missing the beginning – I run to grab my sandwich and soda and establish my supreme comfy place on the futon. All that shit just may have been worth it.
Get your own copy of "The Professionals." It is, after all, one of the truly great westerns. I recommend it on DVD.
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