As is always the case with Tarantino films, the “The Hateful Eight” is an original film that bears heavy influence from other movies. Below you’ll find eleven wintery and/or weird westerns, that will put you in the mood for Tarantino’s film. Some are direct influences on Tarantino’s new movie, while others are simply great or unique examples of westerns done with an unusual flair, or with a frigid air thanks to winter settings.
“The Wild North” (1952)
Stewart Granger, looking like the original owner of the chin and hair coif that now belong to Bruce Campbell, adopts an exaggerated French-Canadian accent to star as trapper Jules Vincent. In town to get drunk, Jules gets into a fight with a local side of beef while talking to a native woman at a bar. Sober the next day, the meathead apologizes and cajoles a canoe ride north with Jules and the woman, played by Cyd Charisse. The request, however, may conceal a nefarious intent. The big local ends up dead, and Jules is soon in the custody of a Mountie (Wendell Corey) as the pair journey back to civilization through the frozen north. That setup creates a tug of war between Granger and Corey; they’re forced to be survival partners even as Jules taunts the constable and seeks to escape the law’s hold. Jules is a determined survivalist, but we know he is a fundamentally good man. (The film opens with him rescuing a kitten!) Will his desire for freedom overcome his true character? The tone is a bit careful, even anemic, but things get interesting when wolves and madness begin to prey upon the men. “Before I turn into an animal I’ll let this country take me,” says Corey, and there’s a good chance it might. If Jules didn’t say “bay-bee” every time he spoke, “The Wild North” might have a shot as a genre standard. (Side note: Check out the film’s title theme, which really seems to prefigure the original “Star Trek” theme.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNm7Qg8xY5o
Availability: DVD (Warner Archive)
“Track of the Cat” (1954)
Director William A. Wellman designed this intense melodramatic western like a black and white film, only shot in color. The result is a nearly monochromatic vision splashed with specifically-chosen dollops of color, such as the red jacket worn by Robert Mitchum. The actor plays the middle son in a very dysfunctional family — a unit which has sacrificed most of their chances for individual personal happiness in order to carve out a living on a ranch in northern California. Mitchum here is almost like a rough draft of his “Night of the Hunter” character, domineering and abusive, as he tracks a possibly-mythical big cat that is prowling around the family’s cattle. “Track of the Cat” is adapted from a novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark (whose prior novel “The Ox-Bow Incident” was also filmed by Wellman) with a script from A.I. Bezzerides, who works the family drama up into something that is almost mythic. Mitchum’s character has elder and younger brothers, one a gentle mediator, the other ambitious but browbeaten, and a drunk, bent-willow father and judgmental mother. Tensions rise in the family cabin — anticipating the closed-room concept behind “The Hateful Eight” — as Mitchum tracks the big cat. We never see the animal, but the sequences out in the snowy landscape are bone-chillingly gorgeous, and the film is significant as a tightly-wound drama in which every character’s worst fears could come true.
Availability: DVD (Paramount), Digital (Amazon)
“Day of the Outlaw” (1959)
Robert Ryan stars Starrett, as a rancher incensed at the idea that a neighbor, Mr. Crane, has strung barbed wire fence across the local range. He’s grinding his ax to an edge fine enough to separate Crane’s head from his shoulders, and the movie is clenched like a fist from the opening frame. Or perhaps Sterritt’s interest really lies with Mrs. Crane, played by Tina Louise, who first strides across the screen dressed in black like a widow at a funeral. (Louise would, a few years later, be stranded on “Gilligan’s Island” as Ginger.) The potential for violence escalates into a near-showdown between the two men, featuring a terrific gimmick to begin their duel. Then the outlaws show up, a particularly bad bunch led by Bruhn, a former Army captain with an iron backbone. (Burl Ives excels in the role.) Bruhn is wounded, possibly dying, and Starrett is forced to take an uncomfortable role as he tries to keep the new rogues in order as he guards the few women in town. When out of doors, the action takes place against the backdrop of a mountain range during a particularly cold and hard winter. The unforgiving black and white cinematography from Russell Harlan never gives the screen a moment to defrost, even when characters hunker down around a fire. This is a tense and stony production, with just enough life to offer some hope of redemption, like seeing the first new shoots push up through old snow.
Availability: DVD (Shout Factory); Digital (iTunes)