![]() ![]() While stopped at a cantina, however, he is confronted by Tate, who now wants him to make the purchase offer to Lufton. After a grateful Amy apologizes to him, Jim leaves town. There Jim saves Lufton when he is almost gunned down in the street by Frank Reardan and Joe Shotten, Tate's other hired guns. A saddened Jim informs Fred's father Kris, a former avid supporter of Tate's efforts, about his son's death and then rides into town. During the ensuing chaos, one of Lufton's cowboys is trampled to death and homesteader Fred Barden is shot. ![]() Soon after, as Amy informs Lufton about Jim, Tate and his men storm into their cattle camp and start a stampede. Unknown to Amy, Carol, who is in love with Tate, relayed the information to him and later agrees to tell him where her father actually crossed. Amy reveals that her father deliberately wrote the wrong location on the note and angrily accuses Jim of betraying its contents. When they arrive, however, they are greeted by Tate, Jim and the gang. The next day, Carol and Amy ride to meet their father at the basin crossing point indicated in his note. Because he is broke, Jim agrees to become one of Tate's henchmen, but expresses no enthusiasm for the scheme. Tate reveals to Jim that his true plan is to force Lufton, who must soon vacate the reservation, to sell his cattle to him at a cutrate price and then sell the herd to Pindalest, with whom he is in league, at an inflated rate. After Jim hands the note to Lufton's eldest daughter Carol, he meets with Tate, an old friend who had summoned him in a letter. As Jim approaches the spread, he is shot at by a woman, who turns out to be Lufton's daughter Amy. Although suspicious that Jim may be one of Tate's hired guns, Lufton asks him to deliver a note to his family, who have a house in the basin. ![]() Lufton is also fighting rancher Tate Riling, who has organized the area homesteaders to prevent him from moving his cattle back to the basin grazing land that was once his. The wary Lufton reveals to Jim that, after years of supplying the local reservation with beef, he is being forced out by Jake Pindalest, the new Indian agent. War movies used to have dash and color and a certain corny sentimentality "Midway" hardly even makes us care.After he is nearly trampled by a herd of runaway steers while camping on Indian reservation range land, Jim Garry is questioned by the herd's owner, John Lufton. Heston is a professional actor, and rarely at a loss, but Albert seems so uncomfortable and stiff. Albert pleads with his father to pull some strings, and the father does, but not before some terribly awkward moments. The son is engaged to marry a Japanese-American girl, but she has been detained for security reasons. These are supposed to provide what little human interest the movie allows us. He's good at that - he looks right at home in the cockpit, as indeed he should after " Airport 1975" - but he barely makes it through some scenes with his son ( Edward Albert). He brings a suitably heroic stature to his role, and, toward the movie's end, we're not surprised when he climbs into a plane and personally attacks the remaining Japanese carrier. The hero of the movie is that veteran of countless previous epics, Charlton Heston. While Fonda and Holbrook and Robert Mitchum and Glenn Ford are working away at being droll and sly and wise, the Japanese speak in monosyllables punctuated by deep, meaningful pauses. They speak in English (instead of in subtitles as in "Tora! Tora! Tora!"), but they're never allowed to have the human quirks of their American counterparts. The characterization of the Japanese officers in "Midway" is, in fact, the most distracting thing about the movie. There's one curious thing, though: Throughout the movie, the Japanese seem pessimistic, bitter, taciturn, as if they know they're going to lose. But there's no real directorial intelligence at hand to weave the special effects into the story, to clarify the outlines of the battle and to convincingly account for the unexpected American victory. Bombs explode and planes crash and the theater shakes with the magic of Sensurround. The movie can be experienced as pure spectacle, I suppose, if we give up all hopes of making sense of it. Footage of the actors is intercut unconvincingly with newsreel and documentary footage. But then, when the actual battle starts, we quickly lose our orientation. Everything's very businesslike, calm, and determined. American and Japanese strategists push model ships around their war maps until we feel we know the Pacific as intimately as they do. Instead of bugle calls, blood and guts and jingoism, we get the battle as a tactical game. But this "Midway" was filmed for 1976, and so cannot be as straightforward. ![]()
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