I got to thinking about what distinguished so many great action films once upon a time and it occurred to me that they all shared the element of tragedy. In westerns, war movies and crime, esp. gangster films, someone had to die and something had to change. The Wild Bunch had to die fighting a force worse even than themselves in order for an embattled people to be free of oppression. In John Ford’s great westerns—MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, FORT APACHE, THE SEARCHERS, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE--someone heroic had to die or fade into obscurity after neutralizing the lawless elements to allow the civilizing forces of the law and the press and the schoolroom safely onto the frontier. In great auteurist war movies like Sam Fuller’s THE STEEL HELMET, Robert Aldrich’s ATTACK! and THE DIRTY DOZEN, and Anthony Mann’s MEN IN WAR, the cast was inevitably going to get whittled down in battle. In gangster films like Howard Hawks’ SCARFACE and Raoul Walsh’s stunning triptych of THE ROARING TWENTIES, HIGH SIERRA and WHITE HEAT, you entered the film knowing the protagonist is doomed. And something always changes when he dies. An era ends.

When was the last time we had an action film like that? Certainly not the LETHAL WEAPON or DIE HARD films. Maybe De Palma’s SCARFACE—25 years ago! The closest I can come after that are a couple of Walter Hill films like JOHNNY HANDSOME or TRESPASS, although the tragic elements there are not quite as prominent or as fatalistic. Nothing really CHANGES in those films. The deaths don’t presage the end of anything. Maybe Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War-themed PLATOON, which is now 22 years old. Yet I can’t help but feel that something was missing from Stone’s treatment of this theme. It doesn’t resonate as strongly for me and I’m not sure why offhand.

I have a theory about why the tragic sensibility is absent from films nowadays. Filmmakers like Ford, Walsh, Fuller, Aldrich, Mann, Peckinpah, et al, all lived through periods of upheaval and rapid change, whether WWI, Prohibition, the Depression, WWII, the rise of TV and Madison Avenue, the anti-communist witchhunt, and finally the civil rights struggles of the post-war era and the anti-war protests of the ‘60s. Things were changing during the times they lived and made films. They knew how things used to be and they saw how things were changing. They knew what was being lost and, hopefully, what was being gained.

Filmmakers of the last 30-odd years have thrived in a period after things had changed. Things weren’t changing anymore. On some level, things have been the same since the end of the Nixon administration. And the filmmakers who grew up in this era, not to mention their audiences, don’t remember how things were before they changed. They have no concept of changing times, of what was lost. All they know is that they have laptops and iPhones or vPhones and MP3s and BitTorrent, etc. and their parents didn’t. To them nothing was lost and everything was gained. They don't need westerns because history means nothing to them. So younger filmmakers like Michael Bay and Brett Ratner and Christopher Nolan or even Tarantino don’t have that tragic sensibility that Ford, Peckinpah, etc. had. Call it the Post-Tragic era of filmmaking.

But that’s why we don’t get action films anymore that rank with classics like WINCHESTER ’73, VERA CRUZ, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, etc. Or THE SEVEN SAMURAI and the great samurai films from Japan, which had that tragic element also. Etc.

Unless I'm missing something and that tragic element has shifted to other genres and other forms. Thoughts?

Fascinating premise, Brian, very eloquently presented. Initial quick thoughts:

Your idea might be overly simplified, like most grand overarching hypotheses, but my first instinct is there's probably something to it.

One thing that comes immediately to mind, though, is that you just talk about the filmmakers as if they're working in a vacuum. Most of these artists were popular filmmakers, working within some version of the studio system. Producers and executives green-lit these movies, and audiences had to keep paying to see them for them to be viable. I suppose that if all these people were soaking in the same or similar experiences of history, that would explain that.

Which leads to the thought that another key element might be that the principal target audience used to be adults, while in the '70s, I guess, it became essentially children.

I'm reminded of a quote from some critic whose name I forget: "Whatever happened to the good old days of Hong Kong movies when the hero always died in the end?" That industry is an interesting test case that might back up your concept. There you could find action movies where tragic endings* were pretty common until sometimes in the '90s - which might track your idea about growing affluence and physical comfort and stability blunting the affinity/tolerance for tragic heroism.

And speaking of Christopher Nolan, he has some movie coming out sometime soon (heard anything about it? I forget the title, it's a little flick that's kinda flying under the radar) that might have some elements of what you're looking for, from what I've read about it. Although something tells me the main protagonist probably doesn't die in the end.

*a lot of them could also be quite nihilistic, though, which isn't the same as tragic (although the line can be fuzzy in practice). Think of RIGHTING WRONGS, for example.

It should be pointed out that all of the films Brian mentioned positively, while containing action, had a lot more going on underneath the surface. The story and character arcs were meant to convey something to us beyond the judicious use of sound and visual fury. Today's action films, in a general sense, are all about sound and movement, with character and story as mere garnishment.

There are still examples of current action movies with that type of premise/conclusion. Like, depending which version you watch, Will Smith had to die so that the world could be saved from the rabid zombie hairless dog people in I Am Legend. And you could extend it to a lot more movies if you allow for something a little less specific like, "in order to escape and exact revenge on the baddies, the lead character had to have all his friends die and undergo excruciating torture" in Hostel.

I think the real tragedy in HOSTEL is that it took the horrible disfigurement of one woman for the main character to wake up and actually see women as people and not mindless sex objects. A lot of viewers had a hard time swallowing some of the stuff Roth threw at them near the end (How can he hear her screams outside? How does he know exactly where she's being tortured? How come no one at the train station notices this hideously deformed woman?), but for me it was all tied in with this simple character arc.

THE DARK KNIGHT is an appreciated nod in this direction, but it tries too hard to be tragic, and is too self-conscious about its gloom and doom. Kids today; Aldrich, Peckipah, etc. hauled blocks of ice up several flights of stairs to make a living, while Nolan and Co. call it in on their iPhones. :)

I view Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino a little differently because both of them seem to have an affection for cinema era's beyond the last twenty years. PULP FICTION, KILL BILL, MEMENTO, THE PRESTIGE and BATMAN BEGINS reflect some understanding that there are consequences for one's action and sacrifices that need to be made along the way to right wrongs, including the ultimate one.

In addition, the people who made films in the timeframes that Brian pulls films from were adults. Many served in the military, had held real jobs, and understood the fragility of life and their own mortality in a way that many contemporary filmmakers do not. Many had seen suffering and death first hand and had lived through times in which there was no social safety net. People were familiar with what it meant to sacrifice in their daily lives to get ahead, if not for themselves, then for others.

Today's pop culture promotes a youth-centric view of the world that suggests to people they can remain youthful looking forever, or worse, they don't have to grow up.

Compare the faces of stars of the past with the botox and plastic surgery victims of today and you get a front row seat to the changes. I think Christopher Lee recently stated that his scenes in a film he was recently working on were cut out because the test audiences didn't respond well to him as an older man. They didn't want to see someone of his age!

Well, that was his take on it, yeah. Who's to say those aren't sour grapes he's pressing, though?

I wrote a review several years ago claiming that the best action films are the ones that could be a cinematic equivalent to the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter", the point being that same sense of something at stake and a kind of bittersweet feeling of doom. For the past 25 years a few have done that, at least for me: A Better Tomorrow, A Bullet in the Head, Face/Off, the first two Terminator films, Aliens, the middle (but certainly not the opening or ending) of Smoking Aces, Infernal Affairs or if you're willing to count them as action films a few like Unforgiven, Boiling Point or Pusher. But I'd also say there are some great action films that don't even attempt this, that work mainly on formal elements: Die Hard II, Crank, Wanted, The Killer, Hard-Boiled, Full Contact, Dobermann, etc.

But I'm not sure how much of those classics was necessarily due to a specific tragic element. The sense of an era passing was long a part of Westerns and became a main theme especially around mid-century. The Wild Bunch in some sense just amped up what you can already find in My Darling Clementine, Red River, Run of the Arrow or others. Same with war films and an increasing body count. Then again I wouldn't really count any of the named classics as action films except possibly for The Dirty Dozen.

Maybe my point is that asking recent action films for something tragic is irrelevant; maybe they're doing something else. Personally I don't much care whether any narrative, film or otherwise, has "well-rounded" characters and certainly not whether they grow over the course. It'd be hard to argue that Hamlet is any different at the end than the beginning, except for the being-dead part, and that's true of a lot of major art from The Odyssey to Citizen Kane. I don't see any problem with films like Die Hard or Crank that do their work in different areas.

Bah - from the sound of it, you probably don't sit there with your arms folded, tapping your foot, daring the movie not to suck or anything. Where's the fun in that?! :ph43r:

Crappy economy (including the looming death of their own film industry), doomed war in Iraq, increasing issues of drug use destroying lives, far greater access to first-hand accounts of tragedies all over the world (i.e. the situation in Africa)... Are today's young filmmakers really more sheltered from the grim side of reality than the Peckinpahs and the Kubricks?

Lang's choices of fairly recent action films that have clicked for him match my own. I semi-agree that the cited examples aren't tragic in the mid-century Fordian way, which expressed the price paid for progress in terms of what's been left behind, the basic premise of all the Sergio Leone 'Once Upon a Time' films too.

These were 'historical' films playing on viewers' hindsight knowledge of what would be lost after the story ended, chiefly national innocence, and of how easily the reforming spirit that folks like the man who shot Liberty Valance embodied could be warped into a legend serving all sorts of dubious nationalist causes.

No, they're not exactly 'action movies', but the form wasn't really defined as such till the eighties. Swashbucklers, Gunga Dins, Italian-import Peplums and Polizieschi and Spaghetti Westerns, Japanese Samurai, Hong Kong martial arts, James Bonds, etc. sketched in the genre we know today, which encompasses and references all of them, but they were taken on their own narrower generic terms at the time. Note the international product (and the vast potential market accompanying it) increasingly dictating the stripped-down action and outrage driving it, derived from American models, but minus the moral/ethical high drama which obligatorily had to motivate any action in the Yank originals. 'Spaghetti Cinema' was scandalous and an insult for discriminating folks when it first arrived on our shores because of its utter lack of congressional-hearings-style compunctions. Just read the reviews of Bosley Crowther in the New York Times of the day for confirmation, and for the mixed message that action for its own sake sure felt good, however shameful.

What is the first usage of the term 'Action Movie'? I'd like to know.

Action Films like the first two Terminators are tragic in a new way, not nostalgically, but with a sense of what losses we will incur if we don't act now immediately, the future visiting us and demanding urgency, 'Once Upon a Time in the Future'. They keep Ford's downbeat progressive message and flickering flame alive while trying to race ahead before it's too late, this time. They're true Action Movies, whereas DIE HARDs are reassuring dreams that John Wayne can ride to the rescue and preserve the eternal, unchanging American identity and way of life, no need to change course or invest less in fossil fuel and product placements, just vanquish the latest terrorist cell or lone psycho threatening the system, a technique of filmmaking being employed that exploits patriotic emotions but limits their agency to kicking butt. These are deeply conservative status-quo Inaction Movies in my opinion.

Yes. Seeing Iraq, and a watered down, sanitized version courtesy of American media, in no way compares to someone experiencing being there. My watching MASH and FULL METAL JACKET does not compare to the experience of my great-uncle and my father being in Korea and Vietnam, respectively.

That's not to say that filmmakers sensitive to the times cannot create works that delve with clarity and conviction into the morass of world dilemmas, but as a generation, they do not have the firsthand knowledge of the real measure of say, war, that previous ones have, regardless of increased access to information.

There's a difference between standing on the sidewalk watching a burning building and being the person who enters the burning building to rescue people and put out the fire. Now if you were standing on the corner looking at the fire and were suddenly drafted and found yourself in the burning building, the perspective would shift from our current day circumstances to that of an entire generation of people for whom that's exactly what happened.

-- I'm not sure these earlier action movies were "tragic", or if one concedes that, "tragic" in the sense we generally think of the term, and certainly not all "tragic" in the same ways. It doesn't seem to me useful to compare the "things are being lost and that's sad" sort of Ford vibe with the popcorn ethos of THE DIRTY DOZEN or the critical looks at masculinity in Peckinpah. (If THE WILD BUNCH and STRAW DOGS are "tragic", they are only in a very self-conscious, we're all victims so let's take a look at ourselves kind of way. That's not a criticism; I love both films.) A more useful term, it strikes me, is something far more general, like "tough minded", but of course the more general the terms the less focused the points, inevitably.

-- Certainly they don't make 'em like they used to. I agree with Mr. Moore and his points about modern directors being more sheltered from life experiences than in the past; I think that's a serious problem with Hollywood generally. Other reasons I think you could at least argue: the rise of foreign markets and the need to make things to appeal to a wide audience set; the rise of technology, which allowed moviemakers to do stories that previously were beyond their capability; the growing discomfort in some segments of American society with uncomplicated presentations of heroism, which obviously ring false to a lot of people, especially tastemakers; the explosion of alternative entertainment options and the subsequent bifurcation of the movies into arthouse and blockbuster; the influence of the VHS tape, which brought a library of movies into everyones house and helped spur on moviemakers who essentially make referential movies (for better and worse, Tarantino). And that's just off the top of my head.

-- That doesn't mean there aren't great action movies being made now, or even that they aren't toughminded as ever. Hard to get tougherminded than say ALIENS. Or BULLET IN THE HEAD. But agreed, it's not the same sort of thing, although examining what it shares and what's different would probably take a book.

-- I do not get the love here for FACE/OFF, which I never liked even at the height of my Woo infatuation and which strikes me as an absolutely tired movie when it's not being ridiculous, but your mileage may vary. Nor do I understand the love for TERMINATOR 2, which I actually think is a pretty bad movie, all in all, but again, YMMV. And finally, whatever one's political opinions, I think DIE HARD is a true classic (I actually like all of them, to some extent, but the first one is a masterpiece IMHO) but is best understood in almost pure cinematic terms, as a recontextualizing of space. That's what I think the movie is really "about" -- "Urban landscape transformed into Wild West" -- and that's why it spurred on a mini subgenre of action movies characterized by their setting and style, not plot.

doug

I would argue for THE WILD BUNCH being a full-fledged tragedy. The heroes are all doomed to die and it’s pretty obvious from the beginning, given the casualties they take during the botched robbery in the film’s opening. They’re outlaws from another era, the Youngers, the Daltons, the Doolins, or the actual Wild Bunch led by Butch Cassidy, but they’re trying to pull off the same jobs in an era of automobiles and telephones and automatic weapons, amidst a confluence of politics, corporations and the military, with an added layer of international affairs as the Mexican Revolution threatens to cross the border (as it eventually did with Pancho Villa’s 1916 raid, a few years after the events in the film). Pike Bishop & co. try to exploit the Revolution for personal gain, but they get caught up in it and ultimately die in its service. You can’t just ride in, take the money and run anymore.

Ironically, BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, which came out the same season as THE WILD BUNCH, eschews the tragic element even though it’s dealing with the outlaws who constituted the actual Wild Bunch. It’s a sanitized, M-rated Hollywood/movie star view of the Old West with lots of jokes and big smiles and a pop song on the soundtrack, even though it offers thematic elements similar to THE WILD BUNCH, but without that sense of impending doom. And yet its tragic ending is a lot closer to the way the outlaws of the BUNCH would actually have met their demise. (Of course, it doesn't show the actual deaths. No one wanted to show Newman and Redford covered in blood.) Peckinpah gives his doomed outlaws a much more romantic ending, where they die fighting and taking down the true bad guys, the Mexican generals and their German advisors. They become true heroes after all, something Butch and Sundance never achieve. And Peckinpah shows them covered in blood.

THE WILD BUNCH resonated with its audience on a much deeper level than other westerns of the era. Male baby boomers, the sons of WWII veterans, saw their fathers in the Bunch, the actors being about the same age as our fathers. There was something at work there that we recognized and picked up on, whether consciously or not, and which drew us back to theaters to see it multiple times. (THE WILD BUNCH was reissued a lot back then and frequently played revival theaters as well throughout the early '70s.) When Pike aimed his gun at the German officer, the crowd, still attached to WWII-era sympathies, cheered. I may not have been able to articulate this at the time, when I was still a teenager, but as I got older and continued to revisit the film, I came to recognize the similarities between Pike and my father (who was only a year older than William Holden). Of course, whenever I went to screenings of the film in later decades, e.g. its 25th anniversary rerelease, the audience was younger and didn’t react the same way at all.

There's plenty of people from the 'Nam generation that weren't there and plenty of people from the Iraq war generation that were there, though, no? I mean, Kubrick was as much "on the sidewalk" as anyone on today. Sure, you can divide filmmakers into "those who fought" and "those who didn't;" but isn't that a different discussion than the today/yesterday one?

Edited: because I got a weird, double quote thing.

The idea that war confers some kind of "realness" onto one's experience seems disturbingly macho to me. For one thing, American cinema isn't ignoring the Iraq War; it's produced far more films about it than were made during the first six years of the Vietnam War. As far as I know, none of these have been made by veterans, apart from THE WAR TAPES (in which director Deborah Scranton gave cameras to three soldiers, asked them to document their experiences and then edited their footage together), but I'm sure that eventually, some will be. This won't necessarily confer some kind of automatic authenticity and artistry. Is PLATOON better - or even more truthful - than APOCALYPSE NOW or FULL METAL JACKET because Oliver Stone served in Vietnam but Coppola and Kubrick didn't?

Nothing in this statement precludes the possibility of a Coppola or Kubrick making a subjective, artistic, insightful statement on war. The generation that made the films Brian mentioned had a different perspective on things due to their life experiences. Coming out of the assassinations and political corruption of the 60's and 70's, the Coppola's, Scorsese's, etc., had a their own viewpoints.

I figure this article would be fun to add to the thread. So here it is.

I would argue that PLATOON benefits from Stone's personal experiences as a war vet. One can argue its merits as a film versus those of APOCALYPSE NOW, FULL METAL JACKET and THE DEER HUNTER, but as a war film, I certainly consider PLATOON a more truthful one. Each of the other three has its considerable strengths, but I don't think Vietnam War-veracity/authenticity is quite one of them.

>Each of the other three has its considerable strengths, but I don't think Vietnam War-veracity/authenticity is quite one of them.

I've only seen Platoon once but I remember it being pretty stylized and with blatant Christ imagery that mitigated against "realism", at least as far as I'm concerned. Certainly it's not as stylized or as intellectually conceived/overburdened (depending on your taste) as the other three. Sam Fuller once said the only way to make a realistic war film would be to have bullets flying in the theatre but that's complete hogwash that confuses the actual experience with an artistic portrayal (though I suspect Fuller had at least part of his tongue in his cheek). Would a comedy require somebody sitting beside you to tickle you, a horror film somebody to cut you and let's pass discreetly over a porn film. For that matter if I didn't fight in a war am I able to judge whether any combat portrayal is authentic? Think of The Red Badge of Courage written by somebody who didn't witness combat until years later and in a completely different war.

(The only version of the Fuller quote I can find right now is “The only way to make a truly realistic war movie is to fill the theatre with smoke and flames, the sound of explosions, and to have someone shoot the person sitting next to you.” However I remember it being much shorter so I don't know if this is accurate or not.)