Peter Viney's Blog

Series original music by Federico Jusid

CAST

STARRING

Emily Blunt – Lady Cornelia Locke
Chaske Spencer – Sergeant Eli Whipp

with
Rafe Spall – David Melmont
Tom Hughes – Thomas Trafford
Steve Wall- Thin Kelly
Stephen Rea- Sheriff Robert Marshall
Nicholas Aaron – Billy Myers
Valerie Pachner- Martha Myers
Julian Bleach – Jerome McLintock
Corey Bird – White Moon (young)
Ciaron Hinds – Richard M. Watts
Toby Jones – Sebold Cusk, stagecoach driver

There are six episodes:

• 1 What You Want & What You Need
• 2 Path of The Dead
• 3 Vultures on the Line
• 4 The Wounded Wolf
• 5 The Buffalo Gun
• 6 Cherished

Each is 45 minutes which definitely does not fit BBC programme slots, so they had their eye on other markets with advertising. It is quite confusing in places with time and place shifts, marked by onscreen titles, and I don’t think adverts would help that!

You know you have friends in the right places when you can put Ciaron Hinds and Toby Jones in Part One of a six part series, and kill them both off before the end of that first 45 minutes.

So it’s a Western, and Lady Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt) is in the USA seeking revenge on the father of her child who he “killed” (it’s not quite as simple as it sounds). She meets up with a Pawnee Army Sergeant scout (Chaske Spencer), who is just retiring from the service. He wants to find a plot of land to homestead on in Nebraska, but is haunted by a massacre he observed fifteen years earlier, and the men who did it with a Gatling gun. They find common cause as well as romance. Reviews are ecstatic. This was 5 stars in The Daily Mail.

Lady Cornelia is a crack shot with rifle and bow and arrow, you wouldn’t want to mess with Sergeant Whipp. Both know how to handle a knife. There are clear stylistic connections to Jane Campion’s The Power of The Dog (LINK TO MY REVIEW) and The Coen Brothers 2018 Netflix The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, (LINK TO MY REVIEW) two recent and very classy Westerns.

I’m not going to venture anywhere near plot spoilers. Emily Blunt has rare screen charisma and is clearly enjoying the part. Chaske Spencer does enigmatic tight-lipped wise tough guy as well as anyone you’ll see. Tom Hughes is Thomas Trafford, once affianced to Lady Cornelia, now a major cattle rancher. As reviews say, just wait until Rafe Spall appears (the last two episodes) as the evil David Melmont. The last episode is a major twist. I’m not going there. The big event in the past is the massacre, but we only see it at a distance. There’s enough close up blood and guts for anyone without it.

It’s right there in the central American literary template… the white hero with the Native / Ethnic best friend and companion … Hawkeye and Chingachook for James Fenimore Cooper, Ishmael and Queeqeg for Herman Melville, Huck Finn and Jim for Mark Twain, and, er, The Lone Ranger and Tonto. The twist is a woman white heroine.

Emily Blunt revels in the shifts of character and costume. IMDB calls it Series One (though I’d say they close the story at the end of this series). She could go on as Lady Cornelia a Western star for years based on this. She soon shifts to trousers but keeps her red skirt round them at the back.

The story starts in Oklahoma and roams to Nebraska and Wyoming both of which seem most similar, what with being filmed in Spain. They look perfect Wild west to me, but then that’s where Spaghetti Westerns were filmed, so it would look right. Only the Oklahoma sections were filmed in the USA. That’s a link to The Power of The Dog filmed in New Zealand, though because of the Sergio Leone effect, I find Spain looks more like the Wild West than New Zealand does.

The sky is a co-star. There are so many beautiful shots of the wide, wide sky. The director is especially fond of figures silhouetted on a skyline of deep sunset / sunrise blues and yellow. I wondered how they got so many spectacular skies. OK, you could do the silhouette shots from several episodes together, but ‘spectacular sunset’ is a short window each night, too short to be moving cast around and doing retakes. Maybe La Mancha has skies like that all the time. Or just possibly they are post-production enhanced.

Much is made of it being a picture of the real West. It takes place late, 1890, with flashbacks to 1873 in England, and back to 1875 with a massacre of Native Americans. By 1890, I’d guess these places were getting ‘civilised’ in Huckleberry Finn’s terms. The reality is the violence, the hard pioneer life, the cruelty and corruption, the disregard for human life, and the living conditions.

The hotel in episode one, and the towns later, are in the middle of nowhere (very much like The Power of The Dog) apparently surrounded by empty prairie. There are wooden frontages with tents behind them in the main town. Authentic or cheap to construct? Odd, or impressively minimalist? Normally towns grow up for SOME reason … mainly natural resources, rivers and wells, trail junctions, or points on a railway line or even staging points for stagecoaches to switch horses.

Accents are accurate – and so unlike most Westerns. Years ago, Norwegian folk singer Jonas Fjeld was criticized for singing in cowboy character on One More Shot from The Legend of Jesse James. His faint Norwegian accent was mentioned … but that was the Wild West. New immigrants moved west. A book on the Battle of Big Horn pointed out that The two largest nationalities in The 7th Cavalry were German and Irish recent immigrants, so that the battlefield might have resounded to Achtung! and Begorrah. In 1890, recent immigrants would be Scandinavian, or Russian accented.

So of course, Lady Cornelia is RP English, as is her ex-fiance Thomas Trafford. Rafe Spall’s David Melmont is nasty Cockney. Stephen Rea’s Sheriff is an Ulsterman. Then Sergeant Whipp, who has been in the army for years, speaks standard modern American. There is no Hollywood Indian ‘Heap big iron horse’ about his accent whatsoever.

The original score is definitive modern Western, but the use of found songs is also notable. They play Rodriguez and a hillbilly version of Paul Simon’s American Tune as well as other apposite modern songs I don’t recognize.

Among all those five star reviews, I’m inclined to four. It looks marvellous, it’s full of short but intriguing cameos. There is an issue with too many on-screen titles locating us, and deliberately enigmatic (aka confusing) switches between the scenes. Even starting an episode off with new characters in a new scene. We’re never quite sure where we are or why. It’s also too sadistically violent in places for mainstream TV, so at the level of film. It is also consciously striving at art film, perhaps a tad too hard for a Western. Westerns can be art films, but shouldn’t look as if they’re trying.

LINKS ON THIS BLOG:

EMILY BLUNT

We first saw her as Juliet at Chichester Festival Theatre! Wild Target is a favourite film to re-watch.

Wild Mountain Thyme
The Girl On The Train
The Five Year Engagement
Salmon Fishing in Yemen
Wild Target

CIARON HINDS
Belfast
The Man In The Hat

TOBY JONES
Uncle Vanya
The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter, 2018
Dad’s Army, 2016 (FILM)
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (FILM) (2011)

RAFE SPALL
The Salisbury Poisonings
Jurassic World: The Fallen Kingdom
One Day

TOM HUGHES
Cemetery Junction