More on 3:10 to Yuma.

"James Mangold's movies include Cop Land (1997), Girl, Interrupted (1999) and Walk the Line (2005), and this is by far his most sustained and evocative work," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "[M]uch of this Western is tense and intricately wrought, and I found myself settling into its stern logic and its physical splendor with a grateful sigh. The old rituals are so far removed from our glib media world that they seem as solid as the hills and boulders of Arizona itself."

But for Newsweek's David Ansen, 3:10 to Yuma is "hardly going to breathe new life to a genre whose demise has been reported for at least 30 years. What this version offers is the chance to watch Russell Crowe and Christian Bale - two of the more charismatic, macho leading men around - duke it out psychologically, while another fine but less well-known intensity artist, Ben Foster, steals whatever scenes are left."

Updated through 9/6.

"[D]espite the movies' best efforts to make his people a tad more susceptible to conventional psychological explication, something of [Elmore] Leonard's flinty detachment always seems, like his favorite characters, to survive." In the New York Times, Terrence Rafferty goes back to the original short story.

The Oregonian's Shawn Levy talks with Mangold; so does Paul Fischer for Film Monthly.

Cristy Lytal profiles Bale for the Los Angeles Times.

Joe Leydon points to Scott Bowles's piece in USA Today on the return of the Western. And Chris Mashawaty lists "15 Must-See Westerns" for Entertainment Weekly.

Earlier: "3:10 to Yuma."

Update, 9/3: "3:10 to Yuma is, at least in theory, the type of do-over Hollywood needs more of, as it's based on a sturdy genre pic (a 1957 Glenn Ford Western) whose flaws offer significant room for improvement," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "Too bad James Mangold's version, for all its merits, doesn't rectify its source material's most glaring deficiency: a vicious villain whose transformative third-act decisions are unbelievable and even slightly ludicrous."

Updates, 9/4: An annotated list at the AV Club: "Dark Side of the West: 17 Truly Grim Westerns."

"Mangold's remake of 3:10 to Yuma isn't as startling a resurrection job as his Johnny Cash biopic, but it does send a saddlebag full of western tropes skittering into the 21st century," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "The movie's best performance... belongs to Peter Fonda. Tough, terrific, and totally unrecognizable as a bounty hunter, this cantankerous old hippie is so leathery he deserves his own line of rawhide apparel. Maybe, if the western ever does come back, he'll get a movie of his own."

Mangold "avoids knowingness," writes David Bordwell. "He doesn't fill his movies with in-jokes, citations, or homages. Instead, he shows the continuity between one vein of classical cinema and one strength of indie film by concentrating on character development and nuances of performance. In an industry that demands one-liners and catch-phrases sprinkled through a script, Mangold offers the mature appeal of writing grounded in psychological revelation. In a cinema that valorizes the one-sheet and special effects and directorial flourishes, he begins by collaborating with his actors. He is, we might say, following in the steps of Elia Kazan and George Cukor."

Update, 9/5: "[Delmer] Daves functioned by implication; scaling up the core moral dilemma, Mangold excavates subtext with dynamite," writes Mark Asch in the L Magazine.

Updates, 9/6: "Besides shoot 'em-ups, suspense and dastardly doings of various stripes, 3:10 to Yuma serves up an interestingly evolving contest of wills - or perhaps I mean psyches - between the violent but world-weary bandit and the put-upon but determined homesteader," writes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly. "Though the two-hour film's narrative sometimes slackens, its climactic scene - which I won't describe - struck me as one of the sharpest, most satisfying endings I've seen in a movie in a long while."

"The original 1957 version... is enormously entertaining," Josef Braun reminds us in the Vue Weekly. "Mangold's dusting off and beefing up of the material, however, takes extrapolation several steps further, with characters returning again and again to the deterministic and philosophical rationale behind their moral choices, as though undergoing a crude series of therapy sessions. It's a western that desperately wants to impart its seriousness."

"It's some kind of bad joke that a lame genre movie like the new western 3:10 to Yuma gets prestige treatment while War, an ideal example of genre filmmaking, gets ignored," argues Armond White in the New York Press.

"Bringing the western 3:10 to Yuma to the big screen was more than a labor of love for director James Mangold (Walk the Line) and his producer wife, Cathy Konrad - it was a magnificent obsession. And it was their passion that kept them determined to make the film even after a studio put it in turnaround -- and logistics presented nightmares." Susan King reports in the Los Angeles Times.

"Maybe it's the recent success of Brokeback Mountain and the way that film made us reevaluate the gay subtext of many screen Westerns, but it's hard to watch the otherwise-undaring remake of 3:10 to Yuma without looking for same-sex signifiers," notes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC.

Posted by dwhudson at September 2, 2007 6:39 AM