Posse (1975) – DVD

*½/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Kirk Douglas, Bruce Dern, Bo Hopkins, James Stacy
screenplay by William Roberts and Christopher Knopf
directed by Kirk Douglas

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Posse performs the not-inconsiderable feat of taking the iconoclastic spirit of '70s cinema and rendering it completely banal, going through the motions without believing in any of them and repeating gestures it fails to completely understand. Whether this is due to it being the directorial debut of star Kirk Douglas–who doesn't exactly belong to the Film Generation his film mechanically apes–is unclear, but Posse's simple inversion of authority and criminality is so inadequate as a genre critique that it spits more in the eye of the audience than in that of its limply-invoked Man. What remains is a series of blunt narrative events lacking in formal resonance to the extent that they seem to have been communicated through tin cans linked by string.

Douglas plays Howard Nightingale, a U.S. Marshal and Senatorial candidate–which in a '70s western naturally means that he's corrupt and self-glorifying. As the film begins, his men are ruthlessly gunning down and incinerating the members of the notorious Strawhorn gang–which would be a major publicity coup were it not for the fact that leader Jack Strawhorn (Bruce Dern) manages to elude his grasp. Not to worry: Nightingale's got a posse of agents to put on his trail, and sure enough, the undermanned and unpopular fugitive is caught again, occasioning a victory-slash-campaign speech straight from the immodest marshal's mouth. But slow and steady wins the race: Strawhorn has a couple of tricks up his sleeve, and he uses them on the slow train ride to what is supposed to be his brush with justice.

Though not, unfortunately, a brush with greatness. Writers Christopher Knopf and William Roberts seem to think that a simple reversal of good and bad guys is all you need to call your script subversive. While much hue and cry is made about Nightingale's abuses of power and selfish disregard for his men, not nearly enough is made of whatever Strawhorn is guilty of himself: since the fugitive doesn't exactly come with clean hands (as demonstrated in a scene in which he chooses to kill a local lawman rather than be taken in), his position as a sympathetic rebel is a little hard to take. A better screenplay might have seized on the symmetry between the two marauders and indicted both of them, but Knopf and Roberts trot out laboured symbolism (a skeptical amputee newspaperman is representative of something-or-other) and outrageously improbable plot contrivances once it comes time to give Nightingale his much-deserved comeuppance.

Of course, a resourceful director might have been able to bend that ungainly script into something that was at least archetypally resonant, if not entirely coherent. What cries out for an amoral moralist like Sam Peckinpah is instead answered by the unskilled Kirk Douglas, whose literal-mindedness can't help but highlight the weaknesses of his source material. To be sure, everything is in focus and framed for maximum clarity (you won't be confused as to who's doing what), but there's no visual comment on the action. Save for the always-welcome Bruce Dern, there are no felicities in this movie–there's no colour, no clever montage, no play of shadows to leaven the banality. The set-ups are no-nonsense and the palette favours the tan-drab of the dusty outdoor locations, thus the skeletal screenplay has no flesh to hide behind. It practically dissolves to ash before your very eyes.

THE DVD
Paramount's Posse disc reflects the film's B-list status. The 2.35:1, 16×9-enhanced image is extremely murky; blacks flicker and retain a greenish tinge, and detail is fuzzy even in daylight scenes. Two listening options grace the disc: Dolby Digital 5.1 and "restored mono." The former is acceptable but strangely redundant, as the only thing in the surround channels is music, and while it sounds clear and sharp, it's not exactly a creative remix. With the mono track being equally lucid, one wonders why they bothered. There are no extras.

92 minutes; PG; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; Paramount