Machochists

By R.C.

BARBAROSA

Directed by Fred Schepisi

Written by William D. Wittliff

THE CHALLENGE Directed by John Frankenheimer Screenplay by Richard Maxwell and John Sayles

For a tough-guy movie hero these days, it doesn't matter whether he can dish it out; he has to be able to take it. He must be a Zen stoic who overdoses on pain in order to prove himself to himself. In Barbarosa, Willie Nelson lies placidly in his own new grave; he cauterizes his own stomach wound with flaming gunpowder; an enemy's bullet creases his cheek--not a word, not a whine, not so much as a flinch. In The Challenge, Scott Glenn dines on live eels and beetles; stands buried up to his neck in dirt for five days; gets karated or garroted every five minutes. So reads the code of the Old West (in Barbarosa) and modern Japan (in The Challenge): the rite of passage has become a suicidal gauntlet. Call it machochism.

Both Barbarosa and The Challenge trace the search for a spiritual father who will teach the male lessons of energy and discipline. The films mean to display these virtues as well and get a head start toward that goal by casting, as the mentors, Willie Nelson and, in The Challenge, Toshiro Mifune, two sternly noble faces worthy of being carved on any cinematic Rushmore. Each man carries an aura of stolid grace and flashing moral strength.

Nelson is Barbarosa, an aging outlaw who has grown tired of living up to his 30-year legend. Gary Busey plays (engagingly, as always) a renegade farm boy who wants to be part of that legend and, if he can, extend it into Western myth. For all its genre trappings, Barbarosa is essentially a comedy about friendship; both the humor and the amity are infectious. Australian Director Schepisi (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith) uses his telephoto lens to caress the rugged vistas and visages of West Texas like a melancholy lover. Time-lapse shadows lope across a mountain range, eloquently suggesting the irony of a professional in the twilight of his career. He is too old and lonely to keep playing the boy's game of trying to be a man.

The spring of Barbarosa's plot is an endless battle between the outlaw and a Mexican family he married into decades ago. There is a blood feud in The Challenge, too, as bloody as it is feudal. Two swords have been in an old Japanese family for six centuries. Now, in modern Kyoto, two brothers fight to the death for possession of those swords. Life, it would seem, is cheap in the mystic East, at least when an Occidental director like John Frankenheimer invades Japan to make a martial-arts movie. Glenn and Mifune invade the industrial fortress of Mifune's brother and, banzai! 23 men are dead of arrow, sword, spike and gunshot wounds. Honor is all, death is nothing--except the excuse for some spectacular carnage.

Only at the climax does Frankenheimer build something durable out of the mayhem: a metaphorical bridge between old and new Japan, between the integrity of the samurai and the ingenuity of the technocrat. The warlord's fortress is an executive suite; the watchtowers are electronic eyes; hero and villain cross swords over a photocopier, wrestle on sleek chairs and desks, almost electrocute each other with a computer's exposed wires. The final blow, be warned, is a vertical slice through the bad guy's cranium. One wonders how many members of the audience will stay around to watch the end of this compact Armageddon--and how many of these will leave with a splitting headache. --R.C.

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