Westworld (1973)

Film: Westworld (1973)

Stars: Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, James Brolin

Director: Michael Crichton

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Yul Brynner: click here to learn more about Mr. Brynner (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By the 1970's, Yul Brynner's career had steply declined from the heyday that had once brought him classics like The King & I, The Ten Commandments, and The Magnificent Seven in short order.  He was consistently broke, and throughout the 1960's had starred in increasingly bad movies, particularly the 1969 flop musical The Madwoman of Chaillot with Katharine Hepburn & Charles Boyer, desperate for money.  For much of the latter years of his life, he split his time between bit work in movies & television, and doing versions of his King Mongkut role, playing it in London, Broadway, and even a brief run on a TV series (yes, dear friends, The King & I was a 12-episode TV sitcom on CBS in 1972 before it was cancelled, and yes I'm desperate to see it if anyone has the means).  Brynner, though, did have one last classic role in him, an unlikely SciFi hit in 1973 that would also spawn a (much, much more successful series) decades later after his death: Westworld.

(Spoilers Ahead) Taking place in 1983, the film is about a high-tech amusement park, run by the Delos corporation that allows guests to live as figures in either a western, medieval, or ancient Roman world.  Debauchery & violence are encouraged, and because there are precautions, the guests are unable to be harmed.  Our two main protagonists are Peter Martin (Benjamin), who is visiting the park for the first time after a divorce, and his pal John Blane (Brolin), who has been in the park multiple times before.  They enjoy the western motif, hooking up with old-timey prostitutes (that are actually robots) and fighting the Gunslinger (Brynner), a robot that is part of the plot and killed multiple times by Peter.  But as the film goes on, it's clear a type of computer virus has inserted itself into the park, putting the guests in danger, including John & Peter, who are now going to have to fight the Gunslinger for real.

There's a lot to say about Westworld, but let's start with the truly groundbreaking aspects of it.  Written & directed by Michael Crichton (most well-known today for authoring the Jurassic Park novels), despite being made on the cheap, the film is the first movie in Hollywood history to use digital image processing (essentially the forefather of CGI).  The moments are brief (they are essentially seen as the way that Brynner's Gunslinger can see the world), but it's an incredible feat and obviously important to the future of cinema.  It's insane that the film didn't get any Oscar attention, because in addition to this, the art direction, costuming, editing, scoring, and especially the makeup & effects (there's a great scene where Brynner's face looks like it's fizzing that's kind of incredible) all were worthy of recognition (I said to future John, reminding myself to include these in the 1973 My Ballot).

The movie overall, honestly, is really well-done.  Crichton keeps it very lean, focused largely on these three men, and clocking in at less than 90 minutes.  The movie doesn't have the conversations about the morality of the place that would become central to the HBO series (which I loved-full disclosure that I was a huge fan of the series right up until the end, and am still angry that HBO cancelled it, and even angrier that they yanked it from their streaming platform, even though I had the foresight to invest in physical media for it...so I come in with a propensity to love this), but it does have a great, unfolding take on the western.  We're not quite to the point where we're going to talk about how New Hollywood changed the westerns (our July star is very much a Classical Hollywood figure), but Westworld is a good introduction to how New Hollywood would skewer and sometimes upend the legend of the Old West, here introducing science fiction elements.

And it would introduce a great new part of Yul Brynner's lexicon.  This is some of his best work, as a robot that starts to realize not only his own place in the world, but that he is, in fact, as good as his myth.  Brynner's part isn't as big as you'd suspect, but he steals every scene he's in, and I get why this was a sizable hit.  Brynner would return a few years later in the sequel Futureworld, but as I said-this wasn't a new phase for his career, just a brief highlight.  He'd do theater for the remainder of his career, and die in 1985 from lung cancer, though he stayed badass to the end, filming an anti-smoking campaign that he mandated to be released after his death, basically becoming one of the first major celebrities to talk publicly about the link between smoking and cancer.

I hate that this is the transition here, but next month, we're also going to talk about a man who died of cancer before his time (and a lifelong smoker).  But while this actor, like Brynner, would become synonymous with the western, his career didn't have nearly the ups-and-downs.  Indeed, for over 40 years he would be the textbook definition of a movie star, and one of the most successful leading men of all-time.  Stay tuned as we reach the halfway point of our fifth season next Saturday.