MacKenna's Gold (1969)

Sometimes, as a kid, you see a film on TV which has been built up all week as some kind of big screen epic, a sprawling, action packed adventure, featuring all manner of star names.  Then, when you actually see it, you realise that it actually isn't very good.  Sure, it has all those stars, although some of them barely feature, and it is long, but it just doesn't hold together as a movie.  The years pass and, if you think about the film at all, you wonder if, maybe, you were too harsh in your judgements.  Then, you finally get an opportunity to see it again and decide to give it another chance.  But, you know what?  It still isn't any good.  Not an absolute stinker, but just not very good.

I've just had this experience with MacKenna's Gold, the 1969 would be epic western, which I caught again in Talking Pictures TV over the weekend.  I always remember it as being a big disappointment when I saw it as a kid - not just because of Gregory Peck's phoned in performance, or Omar Sharif's bizarre casting as a Mexican bandit, nor J Lee Thompson's trademark pedestrian direction, which leaves the film moving at walking pace.  No, it's the fact that it features a poorly thought out scenario, a fractured narrative and a disjointed structure, all of which leave the film limping along.  Adding to these problems are some poor, for such a big budgeted movie, special effects which undermine several key sequences.  The miniatures work, in particular, is unconvincing and undermines several key sequences.  While, on the whole, the cinematography is very good, there are sequences which look grainy, as if shot on poorer quality stock.

It really doesn't help that the film keeps introducing characters, usually played by well known actors, then killing them off a couple of scenes later, without them having added anything to the plot.  Part way through, for instance, it brings in a group of venal towns folk, led by Eli Wallach and including such acting luminaries as Raymond Massey, Lee J Cobb, Burgess Meredith, Anthony Quayle and Edward G Robinson, yet most of them have only a handful of lines and most are quickly killed off in an ambush.  It seems an utterly pointless waste of acting talent.  Telly Savalas as a corrupt cavalry sergeant gets a slightly better deal, becoming, briefly, a main character late in the film, but, in truth, his presence still seems pointless, adding nothing to the narrative.

But, this time around, I least knew why the movie seems so compromised.  It was the victim of a change of mind by the studio as to how the film should be presented.  It was apparently originally intended to be one of those three hour Cinerama wide screen epics, shown as a 'road show' presentation, complete with an intermission. The format had been popular during the sixties, with movies like The Longest Day and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World, not to mention numerous musicals, had been successfully released in this form.  But, for some reason, Columbia got cold feet about MacKenna's Gold, deciding to cut down the release version to just 128 minutes.  At what point the decision was made is unclear - I don't know whether there were scenes filed which weren't used, or whether some sequences simply weren't filmed at all,  Either way, it explains the film's disjointed, episodic, feel.  I can only assume that the group of famous faces who turn up as the greedy citizens originally had more scenes and, some of them at least, played a more significant role in the story.  The sudden change in format probably also explains the grainy sequences, which were shot on 35mm stock rather than the 65mm stock required for its originally intended Cinerama release.

As it stands, MacKenna's Gold is a fitfully entertaining film, with a few effective set pieces overwhelmed by its slow pace and disjointed narrative.  It's tempting to speculate that, in its original format, it might have been a classic epic western.  But the presence of J Lee Thompson (in my opinion a vastly overrated director, whose lack of any concept of pace hobbled many a would be action movie) at the helm indicates otherwise.  It would just have been a slower, longer movie, albeit with a more coherent narrative, it's length magnifying its central problems of poor casting and weak plotting.