Rustlers' Rhapsody

Before Spring Break, one of my USC professors was lecturing on aspect ratios, and he showed us a clip from Rustlers’ Rhapsody to show the change between the Academy ratio and modern-day wide screen. In the clip he showed us, the ratio changed, the film when from black and white to color, and the mechanics of the scene changed a bit. With the narrator’s line, “I wondered what a B Western would be like today,” the bad guys became more confident and our hero became more clumsy. So, I borrowed the movie from my professor and watched the rest of it. It was basically a very self-aware postmodern Western in which the protagonist, Rex, knew everything that was coming. He said he knew the future because all Western towns were alike, a thin veil for the parody of the classic Western film structure. Rex knew when he would be attacked and how to deal with them. He knew his sidekick would get shot, so he didn’t want one, even though he knew he would have to accept one in the end. In knowing these things, he knew how to protect himself. Rex gave his sidekick a bulletproof vest that protected him from the inevitable shots to the chest. He danced around his opponents to confuse them.

But, one of the colonels in charge of the bad guys realizes how to throw him off. He introduces a new opponent: another good guy. Bob points out Rex’s iniquities, including the fact that Rex is not a confident heterosexual. Rex leaves without a fight. Rex almost cedes to the villains, but when they try to kill his sidekick, he goes back to action. Realizing that Bob is a lawyer and cannot possibly be good, Rex shoots Bob in the head. At the end Rex rides off into the sunset, calling it a “perfect” ending. Then, his sidekick decides to go along and follows him, as the waving villains say they knew that was coming. The movie is actually pretty entertaining, especially since we know the conventions of Westerns so well, not to mention postmodernism.