Shoot the Sun Down (1978)

Going by a mention of the Alamo late in the movie, I think this is supposed to take place in 1836. Variations on various Western stock characters converge in Santa Fe. At this point in time the town still belongs to Mexico but in the practice of the film takes a kind of liminal place between the US and Mexico. It’s a classical melting pot in the American style, where people of many cultures attempt to kill and rob each other. Our main characters are a guy calling himself Rainbow (Christopher Walken), a conscientious deserter from some massacres or other committed on the Native American population, but still a highly competent killer when that ability is needed; a Scalphunter (Geoffrey Lewis) and his gang of cutthroats; a former sea Captain (Bo Brundin) who supposedly wants to open a trading post in the desert and travels with a woman (Margot Kidder) who says she’s a British upper-class daughter but is actually a former maidservant to the upper-class the Captain has bought (rented?) for five years; and the Navajo warrior Sunbearer (A Martinez), soon to be in a debt of honour to Rainbow when the gunman helps out in a gambling incident.

Eventually, it will become clear that the Captain has a line on a gold treasure. Rainbow’s initially not interested at all but will be drawn into the affair nonetheless, particularly thanks to the Woman; the Scalphunter is very much interested but is not the kind of man anyone will want to trust, yet he is also inescapable; Sunbearer is going to get drawn into the mess too. As you can imagine, the characters will play through versions of the old trust and betrayal game, Rainbow eventually showing the character of a classic western hero, but not exactly the talent for anything but killing the classic western hero does usually have.

Shoot the Sun Down is the only film directed (as well a written and produced) by one David Leeds. It’s a western influenced by the Italians, ideas from the revisionist western and perhaps the more conventional moments of Jodorowsky, but is not as good at fusing these elements as it could be. The film certainly demonstrates a tendency towards abstraction and the abstract, shaving off character names here, scenes that would be exciting and adventurous there. The problem with this approach is that the film doesn’t really seem to know what it wants to do with the elements it has left after it has removed much what people expect of a western. It clearly wants to say something about America, but it is exactly its abstraction that makes it rather difficult to say what its ideas about America are, exactly, beyond the very obvious territory mined better by the Italians and the revisionists.

The problem with abstraction in genre movies is of course that it tends to deny an audience the joys of the genre it has come to see. It’s not the political assumptions underlying these joys - those you can change as much as you want if you know what you are doing – but the plot tropes that constitute a genre.

The film, for example, lacks the classical shoot-out in the finale, but it seems to do so for no good reason but for Leeds wanting to make it difficult for his audience; one imagines the director standing in a corner grumbling “I don’t wanna!”, while not putting much thought into what he actually wants to do to replace the tropes he clearly doesn’t like with. Just leaving them out, it turns out, really doesn’t lead him anywhere.

In visual style and mood, this really does its best to be poetic (there are some very fine shots of the moon, and the frozen desert in the end is very moody but not as metaphorical as the film seems to assume), mildly trippy and very, very slow, but the slowness only seems to have an actual function about half of the time. The rest of the movie, the slowness seems to keep with the film’s motto of denying the audience genre joys without wanting to come up with anything useful to replace them.

The cast, on the other hand, is pretty brilliant, with Christopher Walken, Geoffrey Lewis, A Martinez and Margot Kidder all lending the film what it otherwise lacks completely in its love for abstracting things away: personality.