Although the world of entertainment has been mining the Old West for dramatic material since Buffalo Bill established his first vaudeville show in 1883, it seems that fascination with the most tumultuous and thrilling period in America’s relatively short history will never fade.
While AMC’s Hell on Wheels isn’t as immediately striking as Once Upon a Time in the West, Deadwood or even Red Dead Redemption, its spit-and-sawdust cocktail of spirited trailblazing, corporate corruption, and throat-gouging frontier violence is impressive enough to ensure it will never be bracketed with Copperhead or Carry On Cowboy.
The year is 1865. In the aftermath of the US Civil War, pioneering politicians and bent businessmen are trying to heal the bitter wound dividing the North and South of the country by bringing together the east and west via the First Transcontinental Railroad.
Thomas ‘Doc’ Durrant (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Colm Meaney) is one such enterprising industrialist for whom the railway is a licence to cream money from the federal government; and about a million miles below him in the food chain is Hell on Wheels, a mobile settlement heading westward across the country, surveying the countryside, digging out the cuttings, and laying the tracks of what will ultimately be the Union Pacific’s link between the existing rail network in the east and the Californian coast.
Among the company men, labourers, freed slaves and mercenaries of Hell on Wheels is Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount), a former Confederate soldier who is seeking vengeance for the murder of his wife by men from the North.
From the scene of a guilt-plagued veteran being gunned down in the confession box by the pitiless Bohannon that precedes the opening titles, and the beautiful idyllic vista of a silhouetted steam train crossing the horizon between sweeping cornfields and a vast expanse of blue sky that follows, Hell on Wheels immediately sets out its stall as a study in opposites.
‘This land … it’s breathtaking,’ Lily Bell (Dominique McElligott) says to her husband as they stare across the peaceful, picturesque Nebraskan plains they’re surveying. But within hours, their camp is attacked by Native Americans, scalping, stabbings and shootings portrayed with unflinchingly brutal casualness. Lily even has to make an unusually harrowing use of an arrow herself when she and her better half are cornered in the woods.
It’s no surprise to see the violence of the period being recreated in such stomach-churning detail – even if modern American dramas weren’t bursting at the britches with brutality, it’s pretty much de rigueur for the West to be depicted in the bloodiest way possible – but the visual styling is more unexpected.
From the overall design to the costumes to the dressings, Hell on Wheels owes more to Scorsese’s contemporaneous Gangs of New York than True Grit. Similarly, Doc Durrant has more than a shade of Jim Broadbent’s Boss Tweed, albeit with all the cowardly crookedness replaced by money-grabbing malfeasance.
‘Is it a villain you want?’ the entrepreneur asks in a stately soliloquy delivered to the emptiness of his plush, hi-tech (his clerk hacks into the telegraph wires to send a cable direct from the train) Pullman car. ‘I’ll play the part. After all, what is a drama without a villain?’
All very well, but villainy isn’t really something the show is lacking. One-handed racist foreman Daniel Johnson (Ted Levine in his most despicable role since that other famous Buffalo Bill, Jame Gumb in Silence of the Lambs) is a boss from hell and there are other, even less affable characters to come in subsequent episodes.
Even Cullen Bohannon – nominally the hero – is easy to sympathise with but difficult to like (although this may just be in an attempt to set him up alongside such anti-heroic Western luminaries as Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name). The real trouble is: he seems too unmemorable a principal protagonist for the series to hang its hat on.
Hell on Wheels has epic ambitions, and while its main character is fairly ordinary and its stories similar to ones we’ve heard countless times before during the last century or so of Wild West folklore, its detailed visual splendour and sweeping, cinematic scale make these old campfire tales worth hearing again.
Airs at 9pm on Sunday 20th May 2012 on TCM.
> Order Season 1 on DVD on Amazon.
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