Comes a Horseman (Alan Pakula, 1978)

A viewer who nowadays seeks out Alan Pakula’s Comes a Horseman will probably already be familiar with the director’s core achievement, his 70’s “paranoia trilogy.” For much of the way, Comes a Horseman may seem like an archetypally conscious “change of pace” – a slowly-paced Western, defined by big skies and vanishing plains, with a conniving cattle baron facing off against a hard-headed up-against-it woman who refuses to give up her land, eventually joined by a like-minded cowboy. The film’s enjoyable enough in that mode, but its primary interest lies in the home stretch, as its thematic links with Pakula’s other works come into focus. It takes place toward the end of WW2, and local interests are already looking ahead to a new economic era, where the imperative of fueling and feeding the troops will yield to domestic development, and the energy that powers it will reign supreme. For all his displays of power (his man-cave of a ranch is the film’s sole imposing interior), the baron (Jason Robards) is in the pocket of the bank, and ultimately impotent to stop the exploratory drilling on his property; rather than capitulate and compromise his sense of himself, he chooses nihilistic, ultimately crazed, resistance. Although the two protagonists (Jane Fonda and James Caan, both at their most quiet and recessive) have a climactic moment of heroism, and a symbolic rebirth in flames, it’s clear they’re only participating in one atypical strand of a revolution that will transform America. Gordon Willis’ cinematography eloquently embodies the duality, painting vistas of a scale and handsomeness that demand respectful submission, while darkly insinuating the looming threat from beyond the frame. A few years later, Pakula would cast Fonda at the centre of a worldwide financial meltdown in Rollover, a film more predictively and analytically ambitious than Comes a Horseman, and yet, for all its underappreciated near-greatness, more dated as a result.