[Originally published in Movietone News 49, April 1976]
Ripeness has gone to rot with a vengeance in Richard Lester’s latest film. In some wasteland out at the edge of the world (patently not a holy land) a one-eyed old man and some women and children hide out in a cracked, ungarrisoned castle and do not guard a golden statue coveted by King Richard the Lion-Hearted (Richard Harris), because it’s really only a stone, and besides, it was too heavy to carry away from the turnip field where it was dug up. Not even Robin Hood’s still-illusioned alchemy can shapechange the “pig” who peevishly orders the castle razed and its inhabitants butchered back into a lion-hearted monarch. Richard’s death is flung like accidentally accurate doom from above; but Justice in this diminished world is old and one-eyed, its bolt flung in fallibly human long shot rather than sent as sign of any god’s terminal exasperation with a hero long fallen from divine or mystic or even human grace. The heroic vision that Richard once embodied, and gave Robin a taste for, is apparently laid to rest where it went bad—in a stony land of too much sun and too many senseless massacres. But although Robin, Little John, and we watch the king’s funeral cortege in longshot, it soon becomes clear that Robin has managed to internalize some vestige of the former dream, and now means to take it home—home to the cool green fastnesses of Sherwood Forest where it first thrived.
Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn as Robin and Marian
If Nicol Williamson’s practical Little John finds sustenance in plain bread, the sights he’s seen in the wide world, and his love for Robin, Sean Connery’s Robin Hood is hooked on more exotic fare. Grizzled, just this side of being old, he lacks the cleverness to buy cynicism as life insurance, but is just simple enough to be a hero. He’s hardly ever able to contain the gay, brave boy who, untouched by time and circumstance, struggles free to shout “I’ll save you!” to an uncooperatively grownup Maid Marian (Audrey Hepburn). Bergman’s knight in TheSeventh Seal comes home from the Crusades to seek God among the ruins, but finds only ruins and, inevitably, death. Lester’s peasant-knight returns to quest for a present, if not a future, in the past, and ends by putting a period to a life that cannot, will not dwindle into obscurity and old age, but must burn out in a flash of meaning. There must be a beginning, a middle, and a proper end. Some richer, more resonant image must replace that of a spent king bleeding in the foreground of an empty stonescape, a uselessly burning castle thrust up in the dusk behind him, a monument to death without dignity or purpose.
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976]
A lot of things work against Richard Lester’s new film Robin and Marian. In the first place, as two of England’s most treasured heroes, those ur-Communists Robin Hood and Little John, Lester has cast (horrors!) two rowdy Scots, Sean Connery and Nicol Williamson. In the second, he has allowed the film itself to take a back seat to the heavily flacked return to the screen of Audrey Hepburn. Further, he has settled for an always inappropriate and often downright bad film score from John Barry which threatens to sabotage some of the film’s best moments (one keeps wishing period music had been used). And, worst of all, he has accepted from James Goldman a selfconscious and often labored screenplay that, in attempting to capture the conflict between a man’s mortality and the timelessness of myth, is at best adequate, and at worst overwritten with an embarrassing sappiness (Marian’s final profession of love to Robin falls somewhere between Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s counting of the ways and Maria von Trapp’s enumeration of a few of her favorite things). In fact, Goldman’s screenplay bears some uncomfortable similarities to that other Goldman’s script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: the image of the fair-fighting hero debunked with a kick to the balls; two heroes in a hesitant jump from a high place (cf. “I can’t swim!” with “We might hurt ourselves!”); and the woman eternally fond of them both, but desperate to dissuade them from following the suicidal course of reckless adventurism.
Why isn’t Richard Lester more celebrated? An American who made his home in England, Lester earned an Oscar nomination for The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (1959), a lark he made with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan and others, made his reputation as a fresh, innovative filmmaker with Beatles rock and roll romp A Hard Day’s Night (1964), and proved his versatility with the acidic drama Petulia (1968), the comic swashbucklers The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974), and the melancholy Robin and Marian (1976).
Kino Lorber has just released three of Lester’s British film on Blu-ray for the first time on their Studio Classics label, including one of his best.
Fresh from the playfully exuberant A Hard Day’s Night, which set the bar for rock and roll cinema and inspired the modern music video, Richard Lester continued the same acrobatic, tongue-in-cheek style in The Knack… and How to Get It (Kino Lorber Studio Classics, Blu-ray), his adaptation of Ann Jelico’s lightweight play “The Knack,” creating a delightfully frivolous take on swinging London and the sexual revolution.
The rock movie was never the same after A Hard Day’s Night opened 50 years ago, on July 6, 1964. The Beatles black-and-white comedy, which is being re-released in theaters for the anniversary, immediately became the cheekiest, wittiest, most inventive film in the then-fledgling rock and roll movie genre.
Before A Hard Day’s Night, there were two basic approaches to the rock movie. Neither demanded much in the way of creativity. There was the Elvis model, where you cast a pop star in a dramatic or comic role and shoehorned a few songs between the scripted scenes, and the “Beach Party” model, where singers and bands simply dropped into a movie to perform a number and then quickly disappeared.
A Hard Day’s Night was something different. The Beatles played themselves, in a tongue-in-cheek fantasy of a day-in-the-life of the band. They were real and unreal at the same time, goofing their way through the world as a way of dealing with the insanity of superstardom, and they were likable and funny and just a little impertinent. If this isn’t how they were in real life, it’s how we wanted them to be.
[Originally published in Movietone News 49, April 1976]
Richard Lester is sitting in the study of his house in Surrey “looking out over a garden filled with rain and daffodils.” He was raised in Philadelphia but he has spent nearly half of his 42 years in England and he has no particular wish to return to the States. England has given him his career, his wife, his children and most of his friends, for all of which he is most grateful. In addition, he has a rather perverse fondness for English weather.
In the middle Sixties, Lester seemed unstoppable. He had made, consecutively and within the space of a few years, four highly profitable films for United Artists, films whose box-office clout was exceeded only by their glowing critical reception. He turned his attention then to a couple of projects which, although they were much more personal, seemed to him to have only slightly less popular potential. He was wrong. How I Won the War, Petulia, and The Bed-Sitting Room—all brilliant, unique films—failed miserably at the box office. From 1968 to 1973 Lester watched forlornly as a dozen potential projects fell through for one reason or another. He occupied himself in the long interim making television commercials for European producers. When the Salkind family troika approached him with the prospectus for a version of Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, the drought broke.
Richard Lester
Two films were made from that book. The first, The Three Musketeers: The Queen’s Diamonds, was released in the spring of 1974 and did excellent business during the summer and fall; the second, The Four Musketeers, The Revenge of Milady, was scheduled for release the following spring—shortly after the ensuing interview—and promised to do as well. Hardly a month after he had finished post-production work on these, Lester was offered, and took, the job of directing Juggernaut—which was in release barely six months after he began work on it. Andrew Sarris, who was later to contradict many reviewers in preferring The Four Musketeers to The Three, wrote of Juggernautthat it “comes very, very close to being the best film I have seen all year under any auspices. It is a thriller, yes, but it is much, much more, besides.” Just .as Juggernautwas being released, Lester began work on a long-deferred project, Royal Flash.
Both Juggernaut and the Musketeers films were essentially commercial projects conceived by their producers rather than Lester, but he nevertheless managed to inject his own brand of irony and wit into them, making them considerably more interesting than they otherwise might have been. After all, Lester is an old hand at the battle of the genres, having wittily satirized the Donen-Minnelli musical with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, reconstructed the melodrama in Petulia, and destroyed for all time the war film in How I Won the War.
[Originally published in Movietone News 40, April 1975]
The Four Musketeers cannot be recommended to anyone who hasn’t seen The Three Musketeers. On the other hand, you haven’t seen The Three until you’ve seen The Four; and once you’ve seen The Four, The Three becomes a much better movie. They’re all one movie, really, and one of the most enjoyable prospects the near future holds out to us is the chance, eventually, to sit down in some suburban auditorium and put the whole four-hours-minus picture back together. There’ll also, for those of us who inveterately worry about such things, be the problem of sorting out whether this is a great film or just a splendiferous film with greatness in it.
Perhaps I can get at the nature of that unmonumental problem by indulging in a little film-critical housecleaning. Last year, in MTN 31, I delivered myself of an unadulteratedly positive appreciation of Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers: The Queen’s Diamonds, which marked the director’s return to feature filmmaking after almost five years’ silence. The comeback itself was good news, and it was easy to find complimentary things to say about the picture. I didn’t—and don’t—retract any of them; but I also didn’t record my uneasiness about the movie, most especially its failure to achieve an overall structural integrity. Nice things would happen, and then other nice things would happen—some of them beautiful-type nice things, others comic-type nice things—but they didn’t go anywhere. I don’t know how many people paused to tell me how great it was when Athos, last seen grotesquely pinioned on a waterwheel, reappeared in bandages, stewed to the gills, to tip backwards down a country well; it was hohoho to swashbuckling and all that, and bring on the clowns. If it wasn’t that easy for Dick Jameson to go along with that, neither was it all that easy for Dick Lester. If you read around among various reviews of the film, you might find one commentator sneering at Lester for venturing to tell an anachronistic adventure story straight, while another would see him playing the same thing for facile laughs, and a third might detect the Musketeers and d’Artagnan casting the shadows of the Watergate plumbers. There isn’t necessarily any significance in the phenomenon of various commentators finding different points-of-view to take on the same film; but in this particular case I do feel the conspicuously divergent readings were at least partially accountable-for in the unresolved quality of Lester’s half-of-a-film. There was material there to qualify The Queen’s Diamonds as a sumptuously romantic extravaganza to out-Curtiz Curtiz, and there was evidence that this movie was made by hip Richard Lester, director of the Beatles films and The Knack, and a sense of muckraking revisionism laced with absurdism could also be sustained. Leaving such questions of tone and intention aside, one had still to contend with the basic dichotomy of spectacular period piece vs. high, middle, and low comedy. My own experience of Part One was that, after an intricately graded first hour or so, the laughs ran away with the show; and while there continued to be such headily ambivalent punctuation marks as the Musketeers-against-the-setting-sun-ride-to-the-rescue shot, d’Artagnan’s protracted—and much too undangerous—attempt to enter the palace and return the queen’s jewels tended to linger in my mind as more typical of the film’s failure of perspective. Hence, come year-end toting-up, I found myself discreetly omitting The Three Musketeers from what might have seemed, on the basis of my April review, a guaranteed slot on my Ten Best List.
Charlton Heston unexpectedly swell as Cardinal Richelieu
With that convoluted but by no means irrelevant self-account out of the way, I can return to saying that The Revenge of Milady not only makes good on the necessarily failed promise of The Queen’s Diamonds but even makes better. Part Two begins in media of rather bewildering res with Aramis, having summarized Part One in voiceover for the tardy arrival, announcing that the Musketeers have become involved in a war between the Catholics (the king’s forces) and the Protestants, that the latter hold the fortress of LaRochelle, and that the Musketeers’ old enemy Rochefort has been captured by the other side while spying. And so, since Musketeers rescue just about anybody, we find them preparing to foil Rochefort’s execution by firing squad—if they can just keep the fuses on their hand grenades lit, and if the firing squad doesn’t do such a thorough job of botching their own assignment that our heroes become superfluous. Once Rochefort is spirited away to make his apologies to the king and Cardinal Richelieu, we’re back where we left off last year: d’Artagnan stands in a marketplace with his hand up a goose’s ass.
Beside him is Constance Bonacieux, handmaiden to the queen and wife of d’Artagnan’s one-time innkeeper (Spike Milligan’s Bonacieux, alas, does not return). In Richelieu’s ever-shifting chess plan to retain control of the destiny of France, she, as the queen’s confidential emissary to her English lover, the Duke of Buckingham, has come to be a most strategic piece. Browsing in the market now, she pauses near a heap of melons. A hand reaches out from them and seizes her; another hand, gesturing from behind a cart across the street, directs the kidnapping; as a barrel is settled over Constance’s head, d’Artagnan leaps to her assistance. The hand behind the cart belongs to Rochefort, who moves to cross swords with the young Gascon—but slips in a pile of grapes, thereby running himself—his wrist, anyway—onto the blade of someone who has no business wounding the greatest swordsman in France. D’Artagnan’s advantage is momentary at best and he ends up buried by a hill of potatoes. In the twinkling of a splice he’s being uncovered by the devious Milady de Winter. Constance is nowhere to be seen.
The movie is changing on us already, although the seriocomic deftness of this sequence is not apparent until we’ve seen the next. Milady has taken d’Artagnan to her apartments. Under her soothing hand and four inches from her enticing and mostly unlaced bosom, he reminds himself that he really must be going—er, mustn’t he?—to find his sworn lady. Amid a cacophony of falling candelabra he departs, Milady waving a benediction that also directs her maid to see him safely out. Then, completing the untying of her robe, she turns her back to the camera and starts toward a waiting bathtub mere feet away from the couch where she almost seduced the new Musketeer. The lens, with Thirties quaintness, drops with her robe. A discreet closeup follows her foot into the bath. The water is red. In shock closeup, Milady gasps. In closeup equally large, Rochefort, concealed behind a screen the whole while, smiles. They embrace, murmuring of artful treason, as Lester cuts once again to the water reddened by Rochefort’s wounded hand.
That this shot dissolves into the surreally comic image of a l7th-century “submersible” breaking the surface of the English Channel does not alter the drift events—and filmstyle—are taking. Increasingly, and with the beauty of aesthetic and moral necessity, death begins to reclaim its own in this narrative by Lester out of Dumas. Characters formerly separated by the sprawl of history and Dumas’s teeming invention are drawn together in fatal compacts. Planchet, d’Artagnan’s servant, a terrified wheezing fat man ill-made for travel of any sort, heaves on horseback across a richly flowered field; moments later the man he is riding to meet and warn lies dead at his feet, sprinkled with well-wishers’ posies, his stomach showing through a gap in his fine clothes with boyish and unaccustomed gaucherie. Foppish Aramis, ever making flip references to his preparations for the priesthood, gratuitously slides his blade between the ribs of a winded and disarmed enemy, then closes the fellow’s eyes and makes the Sign of the Cross. The Musketeers occupy a shattered bastion in no-man’s-land at LaRochelle because they need to have a private chat and they’re safer in the middle of a battle where the Cardinal’s spies and Milady’s tricks can’t reach them; they play games with bombs and loaves of bread, and let the enemy obligingly shoot the necks off their champagne bottles, and playfully graze a cannoneer’s rear with a pistol shot; but when they finally retaliate in earnest against their attackers by pushing a masonry wall down on them, the victims don’t get up to roar in comic protest.
Where all this is building, finally, is toward one of the most harrowing and beautiful climaxes I’ve witnessed in films. The ending of “a story to cure a man of love”—and perhaps romance in a larger sense—honors romantic aspiration in fiction, in filmmaking, and in life, and exacts fair payment in audience pain. Comic exceptions are not permitted, though, even here, Lester’s film does not forswear humor: grim (an arquebusier is incinerated in a haywagon set afire by his own fuse), triumphant (Porthos saving Aramis’s life with a preposterous move Aramis had once ridiculed), grotesque (d’Artagnan screaming for Constance and a nun blithely admonishing sssssshh while in the next room a murder may be taking place). There are several devastating payoffs in the last moments of the film; one I can safely mention without giving too much away—for those to whom Dumas’s plot remains unfamiliar—is d’Artagnan’s cosmically enraged, lunging duel with Rochefort, and the moment when he loses his balance, stumbles, and gasps “Oh!—”, the syllable charged with hate, frustration, the fear of failure and a sense of the comic absurdity of taking a pratfall in the midst of the most crucial action of his life; almost four hours of film have prepared for the awesome complexity of that instant on the brink—the stylistic brink The Three Musketeers, in toto, exists to define.
THE FOUR MUSKETEERS, or: The Revenge of Milady Direction: Richard Lester. Screenplay: George Macdonald Fraser, after the novel The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Cinematography: David Watkin. Production design: Brian Eatwell. Costumes: Yvonne Blake. Fight direction: William Hobbs. Editing: John Victor Smith. Music: Lalo Schifrin. Executive Producer: llya Salkind.
The Players: Michael York, Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, Richard Chamberlain, Faye Dunaway, Christopher Lee, Charlton Heston, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Geraldine Chaplin, Roy Kinnear, Simon Ward, Michael Gothard, Raquel Welch, Angel del Pozo, Nicole Calfan
[Written in 1996 as part of a cine-bio project that never saw the light of day.]
Richard Lester, just like he was before he was
Richard Lester
aka Dick Lester
Birth: January 19, 1932; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Education: University of Pennsylvania (clinical psychology)
My whole metabolism is that I’m inclined to do the sum at the end and then realize that I’ve left out one of the parts I’m adding up…. I like a feeling of rough excitement in films. I like to shoot rehearsals rather than actual performances…. A director to me is a highly paid dustman. —Richard Lester, quoted by biographer Andrew Yule
Physical descriptions are rarely key to directorial bios, yet one cannot ignore George Melly’s word-portrait of Richard Lester: “an amiable space creature, very thin, with a great domed bald head, tiny childlike features, and large, kind eyes.” How else would you want to picture the force behind some of the most prodigiously pixilated and breathlessly inventive films of the Sixties? For a brief span of two, maybe three years in the middle of that anarchic film decade, Lester reigned as the master spirit, combining the freewheeling legacy of the French New Wave, the daft Goon Show line in British drollery, and intuitions of an absurdist bleakness whose exemplars were Beckett and Buster Keaton. Then he dropped off the map till the mid-Seventies, when he returned to make several of his finest films in as brief a period … then winked away again.
He was born an American, and still claims on his passport to be one. His father was a failed playwright, onetime title-writer for silent movies, and a Philadelphia schoolteacher his life long. A child prodigy, young Richard scored 186 on his first IQ test—“high genius.” He entered school early and consequently grew up as a perennial outsider, three years younger than his peers. He taught himself to play the piano, then the clarinet, then a host of other instruments. Enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania at age 15 to study clinical psychology, he devoted more of his energies to writing music and forming a vocal group (who called themselves Vocal Group—is this a Richard Lester movie waiting to happen, or what?). They performed at a local television station and were almost immediately invited not to return. Lester, however, stayed on, and worked his way up to directing within a year.
[Originally published in Movietone News 31, April 1974]
The Three Musketeers opens with an auspiciousness I haven’t experienced since the first image and chords of 2001: Against a dark, featureless background and in a light that seems to have seeped out of a pearl, a hand seizes the hilt of a heavy sword and slowly draws the blade from its scabbard. Metal rubs against metal with a sense of reawakening; the sound is bigger than it ought normally to be, reverberating in a vault of time. A man poises himself, then leaps to attack another. They play with their swords—not dancing or lunging as if spearing hors d’oeuvres, but swinging, hacking, beads of sweat flashing from them. Suddenly one man’s leap is traced in a dozen luminous outlines of himself. Richard Lester is making movies again.
Oliver Reed and Roy Kinnear
It’s not immediately apparent what sort of film he’s making—which is, of course, one of the things that make Lester Lester. From such a hip contemporary artist one scarcely expects a straight retelling of the Dumas classic. Not that romanticism hasn’t been violated before: the Ritz Brothers, no less (and certainly no more), played the Musketeers in a 1939 Fox version. Lester’s Goon Show pixilation is frequently in evidence: a servant registering mute pique at Aramis’s incurable penchant for cutting off the candles in idle swordplay; a group of court midgets, each trying to one-up his fellows by having the king select one of his canapés, and all commenting sotto voce on the various court intrigues (“It i’n’t her, I tell ya—she got bigger feet!”); a branding iron and a potato nestling side-by-side in a bed of hot coals. We get an indication of what must be in store when D’Artagnan (Michael York), humiliated by Cardinal Richelieu’s chief henchman Rochefort (Christopher Lee), sets off to avenge his disgrace. Rochefort is riding leisurely away on horseback. Lester moves his camera back to take in the whole arena of D’Artagnan’s revenge, a sort of rural plaza with peasants and workmen browsing about, an intricate superstructure topping a well at left, and Rochefort describing an assured diagonal down through the center of the scene and shot. D’Artagnan runs ahead of his enemy, seizes a handy rope that should swing him right into Rochefort’s lap and send the bully sprawling, and swoops toward his man—and past him. D’Artagnan falls in the mud; Rochefort, without a backward or even a sidelong glance, continues on his way. All right then, Lester’s going to guy the whole business of making a swashbuckler. Who believes in heroes anyway, or possesses the grace of a Fairbanks, or even gives a damn? Bring on the yoks, Dick! And they come—very good ones, too—until, not long afterward, we find D’Artagnan rather accidentally in the company of the Musketeers and in the midst of a duel with more of the Cardinal’s men. One of them charges D’Artagnan; lacking a sword at the moment, our hero leaps up, grabs a clothesline, and starts looping loops as his assailant draws nearer. What’s going to happen: D’Artagnan gets tangled in a sheet? The line breaks? Well, as a matter of fact, the whole thing works out just fine, with D’Artagnan’s heels catching the fellow at just the right instant and knocking him for a loop of his own. Say, what is this?! But the movie makes no comment. And that’s the way it tends to go from there on out, some of the swashes buckling under the weight of their ingenuity and some of them coming off as though the ghosts of Fairbanks and Flynn were giving D’Artagnan a leg up.
[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]
When Hitchcock had to set a spy movie in Switzerland, he decided that the most effective way to exploit the milieu would be to honor an armchair tourist’s idea of the place. Hence, he built his plot and key sequences around those geographical and cultural phenomena most readily identifiable as Swiss: mountains, lakes, the manufacture of chocolate, quaint shrines, a demonstration of yodeling. Richard Lester tries to get away with the same approach to Cuba in 1959. Rum, cigars, sugar cane, the Morro, nightclubs, salsa, the U.S. Navy on more or less residential shore leave, a Latin lover and Latin love for sale: if it’s part of the pop iconography, grab it and play it for all its worth—because there’s not going to be much else to play with. That might do for Switzerland; Batista’s Cuba on the eve of Castro is quite another matter. One doesn’t have to be rabidly political to want a more substantive index of governmental corruption than a scungy police detective taking bribes from everyone in sight, or a self-promoted general (Martin Balsam) keeping fat on the income from Havana’s parking meters (said loot stashed in a strongbox chained to his dotty mother’s TV). Likewise, the proverbial fat sweaty American entrepreneur (Jack Weston) swooping down on every target of acquisitional opportunity, and a couple of bland accountants from an unspecified U.S. agency come to balance the books of the Committee for Anti-Communist Activities, are pretty unimaginative representations of the American presence, and deployed just as unimaginatively. Not that the politically correct side comes off much more flatteringly or interestingly: Fidel is (necessarily, I suppose) only a newsreel image on a video monitor, the Fidelistas are low-comedy, if well-meaning, goons beating about the cane fields, and the most dramatically important rebel is a punk (Danny De La Paz) who just wants a hifalutin excuse to shoot somebody—his sister’s aristocratic despoiler (Chris Sarandon), a British mercenary come too late to do anyone any good (Sean Connery), or any poor schmuck who gets in the line of fire.
[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]
There are undeniable similarities between Butch and Sundance: The Early Days and Richard Lester’s reworking of popular mythology, Robin and Marian. The earlier film, written by William (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) Goldman’s brother James, contained several seemingly deliberate takeoffs on Butch and Sundance in the dialogue, misadventures, characterization and relationship of Robin and Little John. In Butch and Sundance: The Early Days we encounter the same kind of buddy-comedy once again, with the two young men (Tom Berenger, William Katt) consistently rejecting heterosexual love in favor of their own interdependence. The departure from Butch Cassidy’s two little sons is much harder for Butch than the farewell to his wife (Jill Eikenberry); and there is a scene in which Butch and Sundance—not Butch and Mary—are treated as the boys’ parents. Butch and Sundance: The Early Days also shares with Robin and Marian an emphasis (generally uncharacteristic of Lester) on landscape to delineate character. Lester and Laszló Kovacs create the film’s best moments out of such memorable phenomena as the sand-palace mesas among which Butch first proposes partnership to the Kid (then walks from one edge of a mesa to the other, and asks, silhouetted in longshot, “How do I get outta here?”); the snowdrifts among which the Butch-Sundance relationship becomes cemented in a tradeoff of heroic sacrifices, and behind which they gradually disappear in a visual denial of the heroic stature they sought to achieve by bringing diphtheria serum into an infected area; or the floodwaters that make a creek out of the main street of Butch’s hometown, where Sundance faces the trauma of killing his first human being.
