Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

What does a tall, rail-thin cowpoke hot footing in long red socks down the Western Pacific right-of-way, in the wilds of Utah, have to do with the history of World Theater?

Well . . . .

One of the enduring themes of drama is the generational gap between parents and their children. From Euripides' Medea (431 B.C.) to Shakepeare's 16th Century Hamlet or King Lear, to Shaw's Major Barbara (1905) to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949), many of the greatest plays have attacked this theme, sometimes from the father's or mother's standpoint, at other times the children's. Sam Shepard, occasionally listed as America's most significant living playwright (pace, David Mamet), has made the conflict among fathers and sons, brothers, families in general, his subject -- what he sees as the dysfunctional, decaying nature of American culture.

A Midwestern playwright (from Ilinois), once a rock band drummer ("The Holy Modal Rounders") and song writer (Bob Dylan's "Brownsville Girl," 1984); often an actor (most memorably in DAYS OF HEAVEN, 1978), a sometime screenwriter (PARIS, TEXAS: Wenders, 1984), Shepard has set his most significant works in the Western States, contrasting the mythic qualities of the old with the ironic failings of the new. True West (1980), a much admired drama, for instance, pits one brother, an LA scriptwriter, against the other, a prodigal son and small time criminal. In a manic version of The Odd Couple, both brothers rail bitterly, violently, Cain and Abel-fashion, against each other, their parents, and what they have become. Mom is on vacation and Dad "is out in the desert somewhere." Prodigal sons, missing or dead mothers, absent fathers, blighted values, are Shepard's forte.

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Interesting, then, that German Director Wim Wender's reunion with Writer/Actor Shepard, the wry DON'T COME KNOCKING, should be more a gentle fable about a prodigal father returning not only to find an angry, abandoned son but a daughter he didn't know he had.

DON'T COME KNOCKING begins with a masterful tracking shot of old Western Movie Star Howard Spence (Shepard) riding majestically against the rim rocks of Utah's Monument Valley, which literally have the Eyes of God. Then, the Director of "The Phantom of the West" (George Kennedy) shouts, "CUT!"

But Howard Spence just keeps riding until he's out of sight, leaving his "L'il Gal" (Marley Shelton) standing, frustrated before the cameras, in the sunset -- not to mention the production company, which no longer has a closing scene for their movie. They are out a few tens of million, if they can't find Spence and bring him back alive.

As completion insurance bondsman Sutter (Tim Roth) assigned to track him down soon discovers, the tabloid rumors about Howard Spence's life style are true. The evidence is all there in his cluttered trailer at the location site: empty Tequila bottles, remnants of cocaine parties, and a set of bewildered twin babes (the Delfino Sisters). The indefatigable Sutter sets out to track down his Hollywood outlaw with little more than a hand-scrawled note in Howard's hand: "Don't come knocking."

Somewhere over the next few hills, Howard is giving up his exhausted horse, and trading his fancy vest, chaps, designer jeans and boots for those of a hung-over old ranch hand (Jim Gammon). He then follows the railway to Moab, Utah (most difficult, I should think, in stocking feet), where he tears up all his credit cards and identification, after buying a bus ticket to Elko, Nevada. Mom, a widow whom he has not seen -- nor communicated with --in thirty years, lives in a small house there, next to the casino.

Weary, slightly paranoid, Howard Spence has not only reached the end of his tether; he has broken it and wants to come home.

But though Mom (Eva Marie Saint) welcomes him to her typical, old Western clapboard cottage, she is not willing to offer him much solace. After a night at the casino, in which he imagines everyone recognizes him, he is enjoying a home-cooked breakfast, when she tells him that, thirty years before, a girl named Doreen in Butte, Montana, phoned her to say that she had given birth to a son by Howard. Would Mom help her find and contact Howard? Mom tried, but could not penetrate the cowboy star's formidable protective public relations agency.

Thinking back to a movie he made in Butte about that time, Howard agrees that it would be as good an activity as any, to spend some of his new freedom looking out his son, Mom's grandson. The next morning, he puts air in the tires of his father's old classic Oldsmobile, and drives northeast toward Montana.

By that time, Agent Sutter has picked up the trail and is gaining on him.

Howard finds Doreen (Jessica Lange) where he left her, at the M & M Bar and Grill on Butte's main drag, but she is no longer just a waitress; she's the manager. She greets Howard with remarkably cheerful indifference, but tells him where he may find their angry son Earl (Gabriel Mann), a balladeer at a country-western bar down the street. Their meeting is a confused and ambivalent one, involving Earl's hippie girlfriend, Amber (Fairuza Balk) .

It is not many hours before Sutter, having paused for milk and cookies with Mom in Elko, arrives at the M & M to question Doreen about the make up of the three kinds of fries on the bar menu, and interrogate her on the where-abouts of Howard Spence.

Around the same time, as out of a Greek play, a plainly beautiful young woman, Sky (Sarah Polley), also appears at the bar and grill, carrying a blue urn containing the ashes of her mother.

How these figures collide, resolve themselves and the story, I best let you discover.

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DON'T COME KNOCKING, while displaying all elements of Shepard's acrid major works, is gentle, often more humorous, at times whimsical fable. The contrasting theme is the same: Myth vs. Reality. But here, Shepard seems to be saying that maybe if the reality cannot be denied, perhaps there is nothing else to do but embrace the myth.

That, in itself, is a slice of Hollywood wisdom, going back at least to another student of the Western: Director John Ford.

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Early critics of DON'T COME KNOCKING have attacked Shepard and the players with low blows. Some have ranted that the film is meandering, illogical in places. True, it does betray traces of having been once been a play, a regretful farce perhaps. If so, it knits together the wisdom of age with the passionate anger of youth. As I say, if it is a fable, the picture is well within Shepard's established canon. And, then, several reviewers have thrown snide, ungentlemanly remarks about the "unmoving forehead" of Jessica Lange (long Shepard's lady and mother of two of his children), but Director Wenders and Cinematographer Franz Lustig have submitted her features and chin line to several brutal camera angles, and if she has had plastic surgery, it is very good.

There's something just very nice to seeing two such accomplished artists as Lange and Shepard occupying the same space in a picture, and so, I'll just say that I found Miss Lange's performance mature, realistic, and understanding.

A likewise observation might be made in the case of the extraordinary young Canadian actress, Sarah Polley, playing Sky as a kind of Western second-sighted goddess. Gabriel Mann and Fairuza Balk, whom a few other critics found annoying, are what they are, the younger generation, the children of broken homes. They are not meant to comfort and soothe a lot of us over forty.

Cinematographer Lustig is aided by the locations Wenders and Shepard selected for the film: Utah's Monument Valley, where Hollywood met the real West; Moab, a small, passed over oil and railway town, site of an Indian massacre, where Uranium was discovered and extracted long before the Atom Bomb; Elko, an old cattletown, with its juxtaposition of weathered shacks and glittering Casinos, the little residential streets which are really dirt alleys; and proud, ravaged Butte, once a center of copper and silver mining operations, all obviously apparent in the great water filled pits which surround the town, but set off its handsome late 19th Century brick buildings.

The architecture of these places and the heroic or mean history they have witnessed become actors in the sensitive framings of the director and photographer.

Scenes on the main street, when Howard and Doreen have public arguments before unconcerned young people using a storefront gym, Earl pushing Amber away from him as he flees down a street masked by a board fence, or an Edward Hopper shot of Howard drinking a beer in the night-lit window of his old brick hotel room, make the point.

Another plus are the evocative guitar chords and song arrangements of T-Bone Burnett, who was such an asset to the Coens' O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? -- a picture which DON'T COME KNOCKING resembles in certain ways.

But, thin and leathery as a latter day Gary Cooper, the figure of 63 year-old Sam Shepard, never too insistent, fittingly contrite, self-deprecatingly funny, acts as the mysterious center of DON'T COME KNOCKING. He still embodies the Legend of the West, which he has habitually undercut.

Actor and Screenwriter Sam Shepard, for once, has printed the legend, and I thought DON'T COME KNOCKING, on balance, an entertaining and moving work.

You may find it, as I did, worth a look.

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UPDATE: April 13, 2006: In answer to questions, DON'T COME KNOCKING was released in six theaters in the U.S., on March 17, 2006. As of today, the film appears not to have "opened wide" here, but in Europe, its grosses are fairly substantial.

If you want to see it in your town, bug your theater managers!

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UPDATE: January 11, 2007: DON'T COME KNOCKING recently was brought out on a handsomely engineered DVD. Features include a truly intimate, main title to crawl, commentary by Wim Wenders; a featurette on the NYC Premiere; another from Sundance; and an interview between Wenders and Eva Marie Saint.

A Keeper.




Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older