Genre-bird – Newspaper Kommersant No. 168 (7369) dated 09/13/2022

Michael Polish’s western Terror on the Prairie was released. Without trying to say a new word in a well-deserved genre, the authors present its rather traditional sample, almost cleared of the influence of later deconstructions, believes Yulia Shagelman.

The movie western was born almost simultaneously with the cinema as such. Its starting point is Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), although cowboy films have been made even earlier. Until the early 1960s, the genre reigned supreme on the American screen, attracting the best directors and the greatest stars. This is not surprising: breaking away from the mythology of the Old World, the young country needed its own, helping to comprehend and embody the short but turbulent history of the United States in artistic images. So the place of gods and heroes was taken by sheriffs, cowboys and bounty hunters, and the evil forces were personified by bandits and bloodthirsty Indians. Women in this scheme were assigned the role of either pure and innocent lovers and daughters, or evil personifications of vice, but both remained attached to men.

In the 1960s, when the boundaries of good and evil began to blur in the public consciousness, and the historical past ceased to seem black and white, a revisionist western was born, revising old topoi and clichés. Here, the sheriff could turn into a villain, a lone cynical outlaw – take the bright side, and it turned out that the Indians also have their own truth. But the genre gradually lost relevance, and after a brief renaissance in the early 1990s, crowned with Oscars for Dances with Wolves (1990) and The Unforgiven (1992), went into a state of “rather dead than alive.” No, they never stopped shooting westerns, but viewers even in America, not to mention the rest of the world, found themselves new gods and heroes – mostly with the prefix “super”.

However, in the last 15 years, the western, without dying to the end, has been revived again. And not only in the form of plot schemes and tropes adapted to modern realities, but also in the form of exercises in the classical scenery of the frontier. Westerns are being made by directors like Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers, they are back in film festivals and receiving Oscar nominations like Jane Campion’s Dog Power (2021). Well-established and well-understood by the audience, formal boundaries make it possible to have fun inside them as you like, turning a western into a thriller, comedy, drama, political statement, and even philosophical reflection on, say, traditional masculinity or the American collective subconscious.

The new flourishing of the genre also means that, along with selected gems, a lot of passing films appear on the screens, which do not set ambitious goals for themselves, except to keep the audience occupied for one and a half to two hours. Indeed, even from the golden age of the western, the masterpieces of John Ford and Howard Hawks have survived to this day, but there were also countless “besheks” that only film critics will now remember. “Death on the Prairie” by the unremarkable director Michael Polish, who managed to try himself in both a rom-com (“Only Calm”, 2009) and a disaster film (“The Force of the Elements”, 2020), belongs to this category. It’s an unashamed example of the genre with all the trappings, starring former MMA fighters Gina Carano and Donald Cerrone (their, let’s say, rather poor emotional scale is quite in place in the spartan frontier conditions) and a colorful villain played by honored supporting artist Nick Searcy , but the tape will definitely not be included in the gold western fund.

Paying tribute to modern trends, Polish assigns a prominent role to a woman. Hattie McAllister (Carano) lives with her husband Jeb (Cerrone) somewhere in the middle of a barren prairie. They came here from Missouri for a better life, but so far it is more like survival in spite of the harsh nature and poverty. In the end, Jeb goes to the nearest town to look for work, and Hattie is left on the farm alone with her nine-year-old son (Reese Becker) and her daughter in a cradle. It was at this moment that a detachment of four thugs led by a certain Captain (Searsi) passes by – as it turns out later, not by chance.

In a classic western, Jeb would quickly return home to protect his wife and children. In the revisionist one, upon returning, I would find their corpses and a burned farm and go to take revenge. In the neo-western, the woman herself picks up a gun and turns out to be quite capable of standing up for herself and her offspring. Remembering Carano’s previous filmography and how in Knockout (2012) she twisted men’s necks with her iron thighs, you expect her to deal with the villains in less than 70 minutes, but Polish even allows her to be a “lady in need” for a little while. However, the outcome of the confrontation is still clear in advance, and this gives that reassuring confidence in the victory of good over evil, for the sake of which westerns are largely watched.