Showdown at the OK, eh, corral

Paul Gross film turns western conventions on their head

Posted: 1:00 AM CDT Thursday, Apr. 29, 2010

VANCOUVER -- "Most of what follows is true." So said the cheeky disclaimer at the beginning of the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a classic western about two real-life outlaws.

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VANCOUVER -- "Most of what follows is true." So said the cheeky disclaimer at the beginning of the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a classic western about two real-life outlaws.

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VANCOUVER — "Most of what follows is true." So said the cheeky disclaimer at the beginning of the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a classic western about two real-life outlaws.

Be advised that as far as the Canadian western Gunless is concerned, most of what will follow is decidedly untrue.

The film, directed by Canadian writer-director William Phillips (Foolproof), posits a showdown between a stereotypical pistol-packing American (Paul Gross’s trigger-happy outlaw the Montana Kid) and the Canadian community of Barclay’s Brush, a mountain town of some 29 inhabitants with not a single working pistol among them.

ALLIANCE FILMS
Paul Gross plays an U.S. gunslinger in a town without firearms. — ALLIANCE FILMS Paul Gross plays an U.S. gunslinger in a town without firearms.

A fugitive from a ruthless posse, the Montana Kid promptly calls out a peaceable blacksmith upon his arrival in town and then waits impatiently the rest of the film to come up with a pistol his opponent can use.

For Gross, the film was a 180-degree turnaround from Passchendaele, his self-directed First World War epic that sought to establish that Canadian fighting men were among the most fearsome soldiers to ever wear a uniform. In Gunless, we’re back to being polite and affable. But Gross emphasizes that Gunless has no aspirations to revealing any truth whatsoever.

"This is a comedy," he says.

He suggests that it is, in fact, very much a comedy in the vein of his series Due South (1994-1999), wherein Gross’s straitlaced mountie Const. Benton Fraser was transplanted to corrupt big-city Chicago.

"The engine underneath the comedy is very similar to Due South, where you take these mythologies about ourselves and about them being Americans.

"The mythology of the American is this wild, crazy frontier man of action who solves his problems alone with a gun," he says.

"And our comfort mythology is that we were pragmatic and sensible and much more accommodating and relentlessly polite … nice.

"Well, none of these are true," Gross says.

"The way we think of the wild frontier of the U.S. west is really just an invention of eastern European immigrants," he says. "If you look at America textbooks from the turn of the 19th century, they don’t talk about the Wild West, they talk about settlement. It’s kind of a made-up history.

"But they’re really terrific when you slam them together because in that collision, out comes this funny stuff."

When it comes to making movies, Gross says he may have been in the mood for funny stuff, especially after the formidable work of writing, directing and acting in Passchendaele, and subsequently helping to market the film across the country. A western comedy in particular is one Gross says he never anticipated doing, given that the genre is so very American.

"It’s not our forum. It’s not natural for us as a genre," Gross says. "I think most actors would love to do it. But you don’t imagine you’re ever going to get the opportunity to do it, particularly in Canada, so I didn’t think I’d ever get the chance.

"I thought (writer-director) Bill Phillips did a fantastic job of taking all of the iconic touchstones of the western and skewing it slightly, sticking it on its head," Gross says. "It’s exactly like a western but everybody had crossed eyes… like a rigatoni western as opposed to a spaghetti western."

Gunless opens on Friday.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca