Those that are obscure, are so obscure that they probably barely raise an eyebrow (Le souffle is probably the best example) but, like I say, there aren't too many of those.
What I'm trying to get at here is that this entry, Rob Roy, is one of the few that bucks these trends. It is not too obscure (at least I would certainly not label it obscure) but it is by no means a big ticket film.
As much as I dislike the term, I'd probably venture to call it under-appreciated.
It is difficult for me to express how pervading this lack of appreciation is, or how I've subconsciously felt a pressure to perpetuate it. I've been sitting on this write-up for a while now. I rewatched Rob Roy way back in October 2014, on the eve of Scotland's referendum on independence. Since then I've been going backwards and forwards on whether I'd even post about the film (I've been freely swapping films in and out of the list behind the scenes). I know my love runs deep but there is something about Michael Caton-Jones' film that seems to defy hyperbolic praise, as if it deliberately wants to stay unnoticed.
It is, if I may say so, defiantly un-showy. Case in point: It opens with Eric Stoltz nibbling on a cow pat...
"A day, maybe two."
If you can think back to Rob Roy's release, you'll remember how utterly overshadowed it was by Mel Gibson and his glossier, more gushy, more wode-covered William Wallace. I will (begrudgingly) admit to falling for Braveheart also. As hard, or even harder. Not for the film making, mind you, but for the mythic character work, the epic excess and the romantic nationalism.
As the years went on, though, I progressively cooled on Gibson's film and, as I did, the workmanlike sturdiness of Rob Roy came into its own. Now, with Braveheart near-evaporated, the moral grandeur of Liam Neeson's Rob Roy MacGregor has no kilted equal.
I am kind of loathe to admit it but this gradual appreciation was also a creeping tether to my unrestrained romanticism. I'm not going to say that Rob Roy killed off my romantic streak, or that Rob Roy doesn't have its own soaring romantic subplot, but I will say that this film awakened in me an understanding that true love is rarely found at first sight and that grandiose romantic gestures don't occur in isolation. Flippancy and stupidity may make for "happily ever after" but only for the flippant and the stupid.
This is the antithesis of Caton-Jones' film. Rob, his wife Mary (played by an epic Jessica Lange) and his clan make hard decisions for the right reasons. Often these decisions, though made for love, have destructive ramifications.
That said, it was the romance of Rob and Mary that roped me into Rob Roy more than anything else. The way Caton-Jones, Lange and Neeson handle the reunion that opens the film is just plain soul-nourishing. It is a scene of disarming freshness, bathed in the Scottish sunlight and Carter Burwell's skin-warming score (a score that will get more than a few mentions here). Within twenty minutes they have invoked a bucolic idyll that encompasses the pastoral, the domestic and the sensual.
I'd challenge any audience member not to melt when Rob growls under-breath, "How fine you are to me, Mary MacGregor." Many swoons.
Their love is a firm and abiding core for the whole of the film. This watershed scene provides the "happy place" amongst the shit that is to come. Their complete and unshakeable devotion is the film's threatened treasure. It is everything that is at risk in the film because it is the purest expression of what Rob and everyone around him is fighting for.
Yes, there's this honour thing, which Rob explains to his boys:
"Honour is what no man can give you and none can take away. Honour is a man's gift to himself... Never worry on the getting of it. It grows in you and speaks to you. All you need do is listen."But when all is said and done it is that solitary moment in the warmth of the glade that makes every fight on every front more meaningful, more desperate. This scene gives form to the MacGregor's honour-booty. It makes the stakes all that much higher.
Or maybe that's just the last gasp of the romantic in me.
The MacGregor's paradise doesn't exist in isolation though. It is under threat. And this is where the less than romantic side of Rob Roy comes into play.
There is a strong realist bent to Caton-Jones' film, an ashen, tell-it-like-it-was nastiness. On the other side of the heather, Rob's clansmen are suffering. Their way of life is being starved out of existence. Acton-Jones throws this fact front and centre in the film's opening scenes, with Rob and his men tracking a some cows stolen from the Marquis of Montrose. They've been enlisted by the Marquis to retrieve them, and they do, but at a cost. The thieves are ex-clansmen like themselves, pushed to desperation. Indeed, as they bring the cattle back onto their lands, Rob instructs his men to kill one to feed the families.
Scotland, at least in the highlands, is a land of starvation and desperation. Rob Roy's honour doesn't put food on the table. Opportunity for the clansmen is slight and many already have their eyes on the Americas.
The highlands are held in a chokehold and the grip, as always is locked tight by the rich. In the Scottish court, stocked with bastardy, violent betting and duplicitous politicking, it's every man for himself. And women get the raw end of every deal.
"It is years, Your Grace, since I buggered a boy. And in my own defence, I thought him a girl at the moment of entry."
It is a stark contrast to the MacGregor's glade, not least in its sturdy stone and mahogany toning. Where Rob and his people live by a code, court life is unevenly stacked with rules that aren't so simply explained and moral compasses that don't necessarily point true north. The words are cleverer but less wise; the social ladder is stringently enforced, and the sun barely gets a look in. Caton-Jones maps out a world where title and guile win out over ethics.
It is no surprise that Rob doesn't fit in here. Nor that he's so easily taken advantage of.
Rob Roy's drama is intimate. Its scale grows from a single transaction - a transaction that suggests the birth of entrepreneurship in the Highlands. The transaction - a loan of £1000 so that the MacGregors can buy their own cattle in speculation of a future profit - is hijacked by the lending lord's oily hangers-on and the escalation of their cover-up grows to swallow lives, names and eventually Scotland's nobles.
In this, Rob Roy is beautifully constructed. Screenwriter Alan Sharp, drawing on generations of cultural mythologising (books, plays, films, operas) which started in Rob Roy's own lifetime, builds Rob's heroic stature in relief. He is set up as a good man who refuses, even in the face of certain loss, to be anything but good. His honour, his reputation, his very being depends on this moral stubbornness. People die because of his fortitude.
That's the idealistic side of Sharp's screenplay; live by your word, no matter what and the world will be righted.
But Sharp's work also has a significant underbelly: the rank beauty of its evildoers. John Hurt's Montrose, Tim Roth's Archibald Cunningham, and Brian Cox's oily factor, Killearn. If you don't feel like you need a wash after spending a few minutes with Archibald Cunningham, then I think you probably need to look at your hygiene regime.
Rob Roy wouldn't be the film it is without these three or their astute pronouncements on the corruption of life in the 1700s, pronouncements so astute they'd not seem out of place today but for their beautifully archaic turn of phrase.
Business is business, and has always been. Killearn and Cunningham's stacking of the payment of MacGregor's loan and their murder of its courier is one thing (and an horrifically calculated thing at that) but it is Montrose's acceptance of the deal in the first place, knowing that MacGregor's land was committed as surety, and clearly understanding the the deal has been scuttled by his own men, that hammers home the selfishness of the aristocracy.
If further proof is needed of Montrose's moral grubbiness, is offer to rescind the debt in exchange for MacGregor's word against his enemy, the Duke of Argyll, putting him about as a Jacobite. In keeping with his character, MacGregor refuses. And, again, Caton-Jones eschews epic grandeur (we'll see no armies marching here) for stalwart moral fortitude. MacGregor lives by his own decisions. He doesn't enter into another person's fight without cause. His word is his bond.
That opposition: the easy and manipulative versus core personal truth, is something I think everyone struggles with and I don't think I have seen it expressed more forcibly than here in this film. Sure, it is folkloric in a way that could imbue it with fanciful distance (a simple morality tale) but Caton-Jones doesn't take that easy route. Nowhere is this better evidenced than when Montrose calls in his stakes; when he orders Cunningham to bring MacGregor down. "Broken but not dead" are his words, which Cunningham interprets in the most callous way imaginable.
I mentioned earlier of the life that MacGregor was fighting to maintain. Of his love of Mary, his boys, his wide open domestic idyll. This is what Cunningham and Montrose attack. Directly.
I find the treatment of rape in film difficult. For the most part it is lazy. A narrative tool used to motivate characters in the most simplistic and often insensitive way imaginable. In mainstream cinema, it is more often than not (and I'm almost tempted to say invariably) an act of violence enacted upon a threadbare female character.
That is not the case here. That is not to say that Caton-Jones' treatment of Mary MacGregor's rape in Rob Roy isn't difficult, just that it is more motivated, more in keeping with the moral complexities of the film and portrayed in such a way that Mary never loses agency. If anything, the act, which is carried out by Cunningham as an express provocation, fits so well with the film's obsession with honour and is performed with such intense power by Lange that it allows the film to make devastating comment on the status of women amongst the structural and romantic frameworks that surround them.
This starts with the lead up to Rob's attempts at defining honour:
"Women are the heart of honour and we cherish and protect it in them. You must never mistreat a woman or malign a man, nor stand by and see another do so."And continues with Cunningham's explicit acknowledgement that his rape is an act of warfare. But it is seen throughout the film in the treatment of women. The women that do gain screen time (and it should be noted that in the court scenes they are few and far between), they are treated more like penis receptacles than actual human beings. Cunningham's liaison with Betty the kitchen maid, and Killearn's assault of her hard upon, is the most in your face example.
The absence of women at court and their idolatry in the highlands come into sharp focus with Mary's rape. The manner in which Lange picks up Mary's fire is absolutely blistering. The steel in her eyes when it dawns on Alasdair (Brian McCardie's ungainly puppy dog of a watchmen) speaks directly to her understanding of what has happened and how successful Cunningham's play will be if Rob suspects. She knows her husband. She knows what honour will have him do. And she'll have none of it. She has her own honour to appease. In bringing this to the fore, Lange, Sharp and Caton-Jones both reinforce the dominant rape tropes and allow for them to be knowingly subverted.
The end result is the same though. Structures will be structures. Montrose's pressure, metered out by Cunningham still pushes Rob to his limits and finds him face to face with his enemy.
If there is a section of Rob Roy that succumbs to traditional action conventions, it is in this back end. Though, when all is said and done, the passage is mercifully short. While the back and forth between the highlanders and Montrose's cronies is going on, Caton-Jones delivers some marvellous set pieces, all scored sublimely by Carter Burwell.
I still consider Burwell's work on Rob Roy to be some of his finest. He delivers an elegant mix of expressive thematic leitmotivs and traditional celtic orchestrations, along with moments that exemplify his love of percussion. Burwell's accompaniment for the scene that culminates in Alasdair's death and Rob's capture is one that I've regularly played end to end for the sheer thrill of it. It is a fine example of music carrying the emotion (or in this case the adrenaline) of a scene so entirely that it can evoke the same response with the images removed. Even now I have it on high rotation.
I won't lie, I still find Rob Roy's short lived action interlude exciting. Mainly for Caton-Jones' impressive use of framing and his ability to kick the pace up in an instant. But these scenes are atypical and Sharp's screenplay is quick to move on from them. MacGregor's escape from Montrose and his return to Mary, and her petitioning of Argyll adroitly re-centre the film's priorities.
What Caton-Jones delivers by way of climax is a deserving distillation of the film's themes into a single showdown, an expressive mirror of Cunningham's introduction in the film's first act. Again we are in Montrose's duelling room, again we see brute force face off against deadly effeteness. Again we get commerce and social standing coming into play; Argyll, who sets up the bout, is only goaded into wagering on Rob's success after Montrose enflames their rivalry. So, enmity is played out on multiple levels: political, commercial and physical. And all without a whiff of pageantry.
Themes aside, the duel itself is brutal. Certainly one of the most brutal showdowns I can remember seeing onscreen. While it is true that the old bait-and-switch play is rather predictably employed, it carries weight given the amount of effort Neeson and the team have expelled in laying bare what is at risk. The duel carries all of that. He's baited like an animal. He's outclassed and yet (bait-and-switch) he can rally at the crucial moment. Rob, pushed to his physical limit can only fall back on his on Mary. On the boys. On revenge for both Cunningham's sexual violence and the loss of the child.
And, of course, on his honour.
That's enough to cleave a man in two. I think there's something in that for all of us.
And release...
(Maybe the romantic in me is not dead just yet.)
Rob Roy is #65 in my Personal 100, a journey back through my hundred most beloved films.
You can track my progress here.
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