Plot

The scalp hunter discovers that the Captain has a treasure map of lost Aztec gold and he and his companions latch onto him. Rainbow is forced to join them when he is defeated by the inhospitable wilderness and Indian attack. The Captain eventually finds his gold and Rainbow finally responds to the persistent advances of the woman who desperately wants to be rescued from her situation. Rainbow offers to travel with the Captain to help protect him and his gold from the scalp hunter in exchange for the legal contract which binds the woman to the Captain. The scalp hunter however has other ideas and surprising Rainbow in the night he stakes him out on a rock and leaves him to die. The scalp hunter also forces the local Navajo people at gunpoint to help transport the gold back to Santa Fe.

Rainbow is rescued by a tribal elder who has remained behind to die. In the meantime the party with the gold has run into some soldiers and there is a standoff. Rainbow catches up with them and under cover of darkness, poisons the water supply of the soldiers and spikes the canon of the other party with sand. Unfortunately when the cannon is fired, the woman who is standing nearby is mortally wounded when it explodes. Rainbow frees Sunbearer and his people and together they deal with the scalp hunter and his one remaining companion, a Delaware Indian. Rainbow allows the Captain to leave and buries the woman, the wheel of gold lying symbolically in the background behind the grave. After saying goodbye to Sunbearer, he rides on his solitary way to join the Texans at the Alamo.

Commentary

David Leeds who produced, directed and co-wrote the film came from a background in art history at Harvard and had made a couple of short films and a full length docu-drama before producing this work. He subsequently left film and now devotes his time to poetry, painting and sculpture. The film was made entirely on location in New Mexico and Texas with the working title Santa Fe 1836, which provides far more useful clues as to its historical and geographical setting than the somewhat enigmatic Shoot the Sun Down. Indeed, it is this time and location that make for some of the more original features of the film within its genre setting.

Overall, the atmosphere is bleak and rather remote with a preponderance of rather static medium to long shots. The actors perform well, with Lewis an irritatingly unpleasant and imposing villain, Brundin a stolid and worthy sea captain, Kidder a woman desperate in her quest for freedom and a minimum of dignity and Martinez a suitably stoic and dignified member of a conquered people. Walken, for his part, convincingly plays a solitary loner who for all his social alienation injects a romantic warmth into his encounters with those who have no power. Walken has mentioned in a couple of recent interviews, that he would have liked to have had more of an opportunity in his career to play the hero: 'I actually wanted to be more romantic... I could sort of see myself on a horse with a hat, sort of a cowboy, romantic.' (1) And here we actually get to see him play precisely this kind of role.

One of the things which make the film interesting, is the contrast Walken offers to the kind of performance one has come to expect in this genre. For a start, there is his appearance: namely his graceful ballet dancer, slightly odd, blond good looks. A painfully graphic sunburn scene where Rainbow is left staked out on a rock to die by the scalp hunter emphasizes the impracticalities of such pale refinement in the deserts of New Mexico. After viewing this scene, one can understand Walken's well-known position of strenuous sun avoidance. As he remarks in a 2002 interview 'I hardly ever go in the sun. I don't like it because it hurts.' (2) But Walken has never been one to shirk his acting responsibilities and he insisted on being tied to the rock properly, not even taking a break for lunch. He did, nonetheless, make some concessions and allowed himself to be given some water and to be sheltered by the parasol which serves Margot Kidder's character so well in the film. The scene also features some rather wild vultures who made their own contribution towards creating authenticity by enthusiastically attacking him for real, lending a certain genuineness to his efforts to scream at them and shoo them off (Leeds 2003).

Secondly, one cannot help but picture those two accomplished stalwarts of macho cool, Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson in the role and be struck by what a different spin Walken puts on proceedings. Leeds had in fact envisaged a young Clint Eastwood type - but with a difference - in the role (Leeds 2003). Walken also deliberately distances himself from the association, noting in a 1981 interview: 'I had press agents that a studio hired doing ridiculous things that I didn't find out about until later. I got rid of them immediately. They were trying to sell me as the new Clint Eastwood. He's very good - I like him - but he's got it all tied up. I don't want to be that. I want to be something else.' (3)

Instead, Walken's character comes across as an introspective poetic dreamer, an impression curiously at odds with the force and directness with which he delivers his lines. He has a number of interesting things to say in a 1988 interview about these introspective qualities which are on display particularly in his earlier films:

'I've been called taciturn. I think that if you're quiet, there's an automatic mystery enacted that is not necessarily indicative of anything. It's really just "solitariness"... There's an expression with actors that less is more. Sometimes that works. On the other hand there are great actors who don't go by that principle at all. Where would Laurence Olivier be with less is more? Or Groucho Marx, for that matter? ... Actually, I've been criticized for not being inhibited enough onstage. There I tend to be an extrovert, but not in the movies. I wish I were more of an extrovert in the movies - I might get different kinds of parts.' (4)

Returning to Mr. Rainbow, however, a further subversion of our genre expectations emerges in the way he treats the woman. He recognizes and accepts her as an equal, a fellow human being. Again, this is as much, if not more, an artifact of Walken's performance as the way the character is written. (5) Indeed, what is most striking about Walken's performance in the film is the contrast between the superiority that one expects him to display as a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant male and the uncompromising respect and equality with which he actually treats those who have no power. We are so used to the automatic assumption of privilege and entitlement by white European males, that when it is absent, we become disconcertingly aware of just how far it operates as a matter of course. This respect is apparent not only in his dealings with the woman, but also in his interactions with Sunbearer and the tribal elder Dancing Fox.

In short, Walken presents a very different model of white European masculinity to the one we are accustomed to seeing in this genre. Walken is quite conscious of the way WASPs position themselves, remarking in 1981 in relation to his less heroic roles: 'Everyone knows WASPs are malevolent as hell. But why don't these types show up in the movies? We WASPs are supposed to play Boy Scouts, when, in fact, we do terrible things. The type is a hard one to figure out, because the two things don't seem to go together.' (6)

Walken's acting aside however, it must be remembered that the film is in general very much a product of its times, the socially conscious 1970s. David Leeds in discussing his interest in the Western comments:

'I loved the idea of the frontier, of remaking yourself, of the vast open landscape and of the code of personal responsibility that was implied in a culture basically without law, or rather where everyone was the law. Westerns fed my mythic aspirations and wish that the world could be what you made it, not what a stuffy, entrenched society said it was. To me the dream of the West was about who you were in the present, not how you were born, or the pre-existing rules.' (Leeds 2003)

Further to this, the action takes place at the harsh and unforgiving frontiers of organized society. Radical thought of the 1960s and 1970s was obsessed with the idea of the limit and the frontier. The French historian Michelle Perrot observes the growth during this period of a form of cultural analysis 'increasingly haunted by the great nocturnal side of society: illness, madness, delinquency, an exogamic part of ourselves, a broken mirror that reflects our image, an experience of the limit (Michel Foucault) where we can read a culture differently, but just a well as in the thick clusters of majority facts.' (8) She refers here to the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, who for his part, emphasizes his interest in trying 'to understand our society and civilization in terms of its systems of exclusion, of rejection, of refusal, in terms of what it does not want, its limits...' (9)

The landscape of the frontier exerts an overwhelming presence in the film. It is a landscape which barely, if at all, tolerates its human inhabitants. One can see here the echoes of a broad movement in radical thought which draws attention to, and deplores the unjust plight of those forced to live on the inhospitable margins of organized society. The frontiers are only inhabited by the recklessly adventurous or the socially excluded.

Mr. Rainbow can be counted amongst the recklessly adventurous and is very much a hero of seventies counter-culture on every front. His adopted name itself is an immediate clue to the character's hippy and radical sensibilities. Indeed, it was originally envisaged that Walken should wear a pair of historically authentic coloured spectacles, very much the quintessential hippy accessory such as those worn by John Lennon. These glasses were in fact the inspiration for the name of the character - but Walken simply looked too odd wearing them and they were dispensed with (Leeds 2003).

Not only has Mr. Rainbow rejected the name and army rank which gives him status as a member of the white European establishment, but he is the champion of oppressed minorities. He disapproves of the institutionalized slaughter of indigenous people and is quite willing to reject and desert the establishment, namely the army, that perpetrates such injustice. Unfortunately a number of sequences which further emphasize Rainbow's sympathies on this front were cut (Leeds 2003). In these, he stays for long periods in a Navajo village, becomes a close friend to Sunbearer and has a minor love interest with the character played by Sacheen Littlefeather. (10)

Rainbow likewise abhors the servitude of women and champions the rights of one woman at least, by attempting to rescue her from her institutionalized oppressors as they come both in the form of the Captain (who is nonetheless not a bad sort for his times) and the patriarchal force of the law. He also despises money and capitalism and has no use for the greedy intrigues of his fellow travelers - except as a lever for freeing the woman from slavery and oppression. Passing critiques of the British class system can also be observed in the film. And if further symbolic reinforcement of Mr. Rainbow's libertarian anti-establishment leanings is needed, we see him unhooding a falcon tethered for the night in a barn.

Apart from sporting an early six-shooter - 1836 was the year the first six shot repeater appeared on the scene - Mr. Rainbow is also an unexpected adept of the Eastern martial art of shuriken throwing. (11) Eastern martial arts of course, reached unprecedented zeniths of popularity in the Western world in the 1970s, with the films of Bruce Lee and television series such as Kung Fu (1972-5) and cross-fertilization between the Spaghetti Western and Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's work. Mr. Rainbow's shurikens interestingly take the less common form of small knives, rather than the star shapes of popular cliché. If Rainbow does not look entirely comfortable with his six shooter (a reflection of the actor's dislike of guns (12)), he looks more than comfortable with the shurikens, which are strapped to his wrists for ready action. Indeed Walken was actually throwing the shurikens in the scenes which feature them. The (non fatal) results of Rainbow's handiwork are shown in the film with typical unglossy seventies realism. This preference of weapon, the unconventional and exotic over the Western standard issue, merely adds yet further credence to Rainbow's credentials as an anti-establishment hero.

But in characteristic 1970s dystopian fashion, Mr. Rainbow's efforts are ultimately doomed to failure. The all-pervasive force of the law continues to assert itself even at the remotest frontier, punishing all who dare to transgress its dictates. Rainbow is unwittingly responsible for the death of the woman he has worked so hard to rescue and the Native Americans he frees from slavery and exploitation are a culture and a people threatened with imminent destruction by the European invader. He then rides across the frozen dead wastes to join the heroic, but soon to be annihilated, forces of the Texans in their fight against political oppression at the Alamo.

In the last words of the film, Sunbearer, the leader of the Navajo tribe sums it all up in bleak and broken platitudes: 'The old ones say, nothing lives long but the mountains and the earth'. The film is about the futility and vanity of all human effort, but unfortunately a limited budget, some uneven editing, the absence of scenes which would have added to the narrative coherence of the film and the rather static cinematography mute the tragic force of this message. Nonetheless, these shortcomings are offset by a number of factors. These factors include Walken's complex and thought-provoking performance, the film's portrayal of an intractable landscape, and its engagement with certain preoccupations in the air during the 1970s, giving it documentary force as a record of its times.

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Soundtrack

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