Tag Archives: Steve McQueen

Nevada Smith

Nicholas Chennault ~ March 29, 2014

Nevada Smith—Steve McQueen, Brian Keith, Karl Malden, Suzanne Pleshette, Arthur Kennedy, Martin Landau, Janet Margolin, Paul Fix (1966; Dir:  Henry Hathaway)

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This episodic vengeance western is one of Steve McQueen’s few works in the genre.  Uneducated young Max Sand (McQueen) is the product of a mixed marriage—a white father and a Kiowa mother.  He finds his parents brutally killed by three outlaws and sets out to kill them all.  On the way he runs into gunsmith Jonas Cord (Brian Keith), who teaches him to shoot, along with various other survival skills. 

The first of the killers he finds is a gambler in Abilene, Jack Langley (real name Jesse Coe, played by Martin Landau).  Sand kills him in a knife fight, although he is badly wounded himself, saved only by the McGuffey reader stuffed in his shirt.  He is nursed back to health by Kiowa dance hall girl Neesa (Janet Margolin). 

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Young Max Sand (Steve McQueen) being instructed by Jonas Cord (Brian Keith).

He learns that Billy Bowdre (Arthur Kennedy) is in a prison camp in the Louisiana swamps, after an unsuccessful bank robbery.  Sand gets himself thrown in prison to find Bowdre.  Sand and Bowdre escape through the swamps with the help of young Cajun Pilar (Suzanne Pleshette), who is bitten by a snake and doesn’t make it. 

The third is Tom Fitch (Karl Malden in a bad-guy role) in the California gold country, where he has an outlaw gang.  Sands has tracked him down calling himself Fitch’s brother, but Fitch is now paranoid about Max Sand.  Fitch’s men bust him out of jail and all but kill him when they find he isn’t the outlaw.  They leave him for dead and he is nursed back to health by a Catholic priest.  He joins Fitch’s outlaw gang for a big job, and in the middle of the job takes after Fitch, whom he shoots to pieces but can’t bring himself to finish off.  Presumably then he joins up with Jonas Cord again. 

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This is based on two characters (Jonas Cord and Nevada Smith) from a sleazy Harold Robbins novel, The Carpetbaggers, which had been a successful movie two years earlier.  (Nevada Smith was played by Alan Ladd in that one, in his last movie role; he doesn’t look half-Kiowa, either.)  Well-produced and directed by old veteran Henry Hathaway, it looks good but the plot doesn’t hang together real well.  Characters feel manipulated (or tossed away) rather than developed except perhaps for Sand.  Cinematography by Lucien Ballard; music by Alfred Newman.  Watchable but not terribly memorable. 

Blond, blue-eyed McQueen at 36 seems old for the young Sand, and he certainly doesn’t look half Kiowa.  Brian Keith may be the best actor in the film; Howard da Silva is good as the Louisiana prison camp warden and Pat Hingle as a prison trusty.  Iron Eyes Cody, Strother Martin and L.Q. Jones have uncredited bit parts.  A dark-haired Loni Anderson has an uncredited bit part as a dance hall girl in the first half of the film.  Filmed in the Owens Valley desert and in Inyo National Forest.

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Great Performances in Westerns, Part 4

Nicholas Chennault ~ December 6, 2013

Glenn Ford as Ben Wade and Van Heflin as Dan Evans in 3:10 to Yuma

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The two are inseparable, because it’s the tension between them and the opposite ideas they represent that make this movie work.  In large part, that’s because neither of them is quite what he seems.  Ford’s Wade claims to be an unrepentant outlaw, but he’s drawn to the decency he sees in Heflin’s Evans.  Evans is decent, but by the end of the movie he has shown the development of a quiet heroism that no one else in the movie will step up to.  And that makes a difference even to Wade.  For other really good performances by these two, look for Ford in Cowboy, Jubal (both with excellent director Delmer Daves) and The Sheepman and Heflin in Shane.

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Christian Bale as Dan Evans in 3:10 to Yuma

It’s somewhat the same story, but there are differences, especially in how things end.   Russell Crowe is excellent as the captured outlaw leader Ben Wade, but the Dan Evans role as a desperate honest rancher is harder.  How do you make quasi-ineffective decency attractive, both to the movie audience and convincingly to the other characters?  Evans gradually becomes less ineffective and more heroic, to us, to Wade and to his own son.  He doesn’t ask for their admiration, but by the end of the movie he has it.                        

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Alan Ladd as Shane in Shane

Movie roles don’t come any more iconic than Shane, the mysterious gunfighter in the film with his name as its title.  The entire movie revolves around him, as its title implies.  As an actor, Ladd has some drawbacks to overcome:  his small size works against him in a couple of fight scenes; his urban-seeming reserve nevertheless works to lend him some mystery as a western gunman; and he was not a natural either with guns or horses.  Maybe some of his success in this role is due to brilliant direction by George Stevens, who was into an amazing string of movies at the time Shane was made.  But when the film ends, it’s Ladd as Shane that we remember.  He makes almost as big an impression on us as he does on young Brandon de Wilde in the movie.  Ladd made a number of westerns during his career, although none of them are as strong as Shane.  The next best is probably Branded; after that try The Badlanders, Red Mountain and Saskatchewan. 

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Bruce Dern as Asa Watts (Long Hair) in The Cowboys

The role of demented ex-con Asa Watts gave Bruce Dern the chance to both kill John Wayne and to chew the scenery in one of the best bad-guy performances ever in a western.  He’s exactly what’s needed in this role—never quite convincing in his belated attempts at sincerity, and clearly psychotic as he takes on Wayne and his boys.  In Dern’s long career as a supporting actor, this is one of the roles that defines him.  For a similar role, see him as a villain fighting Charlton Heston in Will PennyFor a comedic variant on this role, see him as ne’er-do-well miscreant Joe Danby in Support Your Local Sheriff.  He plays an outlaw who may be more sympathetic than any of the lawmen in the revisionist PosseIn a more sympathetic role late in his career, catch him as an aging lawman on a manhunt south of the border in the made-for-television Hard Ground.

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Gary Cooper as Will Kane in High Noon

Cooper was too old for the part, and presumably for the young Grace Kelly as his romantic interest, when he played Will Kane.  But his particular style of underplaying worked magnificently in this role, and it revitalized his career.  Besieged on every side by a resentful deputy, by old relationships, by evasive townspeople, and most of all by the advancing hour with its approaching confrontation with evildoers, Kane takes the strain and steps up to do what a man’s got to do.  This, Alan Ladd’s Shane and John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards are the iconic roles of the western in the 1950s.  A westerner from Montana himself, Cooper always had both a good feel for playing western roles and a Gregory Peck-like way of projecting a basic decency.  See him also in Man of the West, a later role for which he was also too old, The Hanging Tree, Vera Cruz and Garden of Evil.  For a younger Gary Cooper, see him as Wild Bill Hickok in The Plainsman and as a friend of Judge Roy Bean in The Westerner.  He’s even good as a quasi-comic singing cowboy in Along Came Jones, although he clearly can’t sing.

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Yul Brynner as Chris Adams in The Magnificent Seven

One of the most memorable roles in Brynner’s long and varied career is as the enigmatic Chris Adams, the leader of the Seven.  His accent is hard to place, and Brad Dexter refers to him, not entirely convincingly, as “You old Cajun.”  In the end, we go with him, though, through the tryouts, the planning, the initial confrontations with the bandits, and the outright battles.  We don’t really know him any better as he and Steve McQueen ride out of the village they have saved, though.  But there’s a reason he reprised this role at least twice—once in the first of the sequels and again as a robotic version of his character in Westworld.  And it’s a version of this role he plays in the spaghetti western Adios, Sabata and in Invitation to a Gunfighter.  The role had become iconic, although Brynner didn’t make many westerns.

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Steve McQueen as Vin in The Magnificent Seven

This was McQueen’s breakthough role in movies, although he had become a television star of sorts as the moral bounty hunter Josh Randall in Wanted:  Dead or Alive.  Seemingly a natural for westerns, he nevertheless didn’t make very many of them; his career flowered as the genre was going through one of its numerous fades.  Vin is a rootless cowboy who steps up to help Chris Adams drive a hearse with an unwanted Indian corpse to Boot Hill, in one of the movie’s most memorable scenes.  It’s even more interesting if one considers that McQueen didn’t get along well with Brynner and was looking for ways to make Vin more noticeable with bits of business (shaking shotgun shells, taking off his hat to scan the horizon, etc.).  It works for him; he pretty much steals the scene, and it’s interesting to watch from that perspective.  Notwithstanding the lack of personal chemistry between the actors, the relationship between the characters works, too.  The only other westerns in his body of work were Nevada Smith (1966) and Tom Horn (1980, when the actor was already dying).  McQueen and director Sturges would have another significant success with the non-western The Great Escape,1963.

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Kevin Kline as Paden in Silverado

Silverado is really an ensemble movie, but the character most at the heart of it is Kevin Kline’s Paden.  He never actually loses his temper or composure, even in the most threatening or dire circumstances.  He has a native elegance and competence, but we never learn as much about his backstory as we do about the other major chatacters.  We discover that Paden rode with Cobb’s outlaws for a time and has a quixotically humane streak along with a fondness for saloons, but that’s all we know.  The result is that he’s a bit enigmatic.  For all we know, after the action shown in the movie, Paden lives out his days as a saloon proprietor with Linda Hunt in the town of Silverado, although he’s been instrumental in wiping out the largest rancher in the area.  The character works, although in a way it cries out for a real romantic relationship, aside from his friendship with Hunt’s character.  There’s an allusion to an attraction to Rosanna Arquette’s settler character, but it’s not very developed or persuasive, with the feeling that much of it was left on the cutting room floor.  Kline’s film career largely took place during a period when not many westerns were made, and this may be his only such movie.  For other roles showcasing his sly humor, see Soapdish, Princess Cariboo (in a minor role with wife Phoebe Cates as the lead) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not to mention The Big Chill, another ensemble movie by Lawrence Kasdan from the early 1980s.

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Tom Horn

Nicholas Chennault ~ November 23, 2013

Tom Horn—Steve McQueen, Linda Evans, Richard Farnsworth, Slim Pickens, Geoffrey Lewis (1980; Dir:  William Wiard)

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This was the penultimate movie for 50-year-old Steve McQueen, who was dying of cancer in 1980.   It’s the story of a famous stock detective who hunted down rustlers in Wyoming around the turn of the century after a career as an Indian scout in Arizona.  He is now, and was then to some degree, an anachronism and a symbol of a freer and more open time on the frontier.  Even in Wyoming, the frontier was closing down and law had to be served.  Based in some significant measure on the memoirs of the actual Horn, some parts are remarkably accurate historically and others less so.

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Death and devastation seem to accompany Horn, regardless of how much of it he actually intends.

Horn’s principal tool is his rifle, with which he is remarkably accurate at long distances.  “The rifle Horn uses to such deadly effect in the film is an original Winchester Model 1876 in .45-60 caliber, fitted with a custom tang sight.  Manufactured from 1877-1894, the Model ’76 was an obsolete arm by the turn of the century, when the events of the story take place.  All the available historical sources state that Horn actually used a .30-30 Winchester Model 1894 for his controversial activities as a ‘stock detective’ in Wyoming.”  That is to say that Horn’s rifle in this movie is slightly anachronistic, but that’s quite common in westerns.

Beginning in 1901, in what looks to be too small a town for Cheyenne at that time, Tom Horn is hired by a group of Wyoming ranchers as a stock detective to stop rustling.  By most accounts, Horn’s method of stopping them was to pick off supposed rustlers at long range; this shows him mostly facing his opponents with the above-described rifle.  A couple of Horn’s victims were shot in Brown’s Hole on the opposite (southwestern) side of Wyoming.  The movie shows Horn as probably not being guilty of the murder (of a fifteen-year-old boy) for which he was hanged, but inarticulate and unable to cope with the process that condemns him.  Horn is finally done in by a conspiracy among the ranchers who hired him and then needed to distance themselves from the effects of his work.  And by an inaccurate transcript of a drunken conversation, which he does not bother to correct.  Horn’s last words, to the sheriff:  “Keep your nerve, Sam, ’cause I’m gonna keep mine.”  

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Horn (Steve McQueen) with Glendoline Kimmel (Linda Evans).

The dying McQueen makes Horn’s world-weariness and unwillingness to defend himself believable, if not entirely understandable.  Linda Evans is Glendolene Kimmel, a school teacher and romantic interest of Horn’s.  Richard Farnsworth is excellent as John Coble, the prime mover among the ranchers who remains loyal to Horn.  Slim Pickens is effective as Sam Creedmore, the sheriff in Cheyenne.  Rather an elaborate execution by hanging at the end, with an automated gallows.  Not enough background is given on why Horn is a legend of the west (i.e., his activities as a scout against the Apaches in Arizona), or his relationship with Glendolene.  The movie is shot with lots of stark browns and grays, and the second half is slow-moving. 

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This is an end-of-an-era western, shot in early 1979 and released in 1980 at a time when very few westerns were being made and McQueen’s career was no longer very active (no major commercial films since 1974’s Towering Inferno).  “If you really knew how dirty and raggedy-assed the Old West was, you wouldn’t want any part of it,” Horn tells Glendolene, who ultimately does not stick with him.  The actual deputy U.S. Marshal Joe LeFors, who set up Horn and testified against him, is here renamed Joe Belle (played by Billy Green Bush) for some reason.  There is a brief performance by an aging Elisha Cook, Jr. as a stable hand.

The making of this movie almost defines the term “troubled production.”  That by itself doesn’t mean a movie will be terrible, but when that many things go wrong, it becomes much harder for such a collaborative effort to turn out well.  Five directors worked on this film, but most were either fired or left because of disagreements with McQueen, who is credited as the producer.  It is widely believed that McQueen directed much of the movie himself.  One of those said to be associated in the early stages was Sam Peckinpah, but he and McQueen had a falling out (as Peckinpah often did with producers).  “Neither Don Siegel nor Elliot Silverstein made it past pre-production.  Electra Glide in Blue director James Guercio only lasted for the first three days of the shoot, and cinematographer John Alonzo and McQueen himself also had a hand in the finished film at one point or another, with credited director William Wiard apparently hired only to placate the Directors Guild when they wouldn’t allow the star to direct himself.  The screenplay went through many changes along the route as well, with Thomas McGuane’s 450-page epic being constantly chipped away, Abraham Polonsky’s rewrite being rejected and Bud Shrake’s final script eventually alternating with McGuane’s depending on which version the star felt like filming that day.  And just to add to the good news, the picture suffered from major budget cuts due to studio politics and the threat of a William Goldman-scripted Robert Redford rival project (eventually made for TV with David Carradine as Mr Horn).  It shrank from a three-hour $10m epic about the Indian tracker and interpreter’s life to a $3m small-scale Western about its ignominious end.”  Score by Ernest Gold.  Shot in subdued color, in Arizona.

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The citified gent on the left is the actual Joe LeFors, the competent Wyoming lawman who pursued Butch Cassidy, captured Horn and extracted a (perhaps inaccurate) sort-of-confession by getting Horn drunk.  On the right is the real Tom Horn in 1903 while incarcerated awaiting his execution.  He’s making the rope that will be used to hang him.

McQueen didn’t actually make many westerns, although he seems very much like a western star.  Tom Horn was also played by John Ireland in the 1967 Fort Utah, which hardly anyone has seen, and by David Carridine in the 1979 made-for-television version of the story, Mr. Horn.  This is better than both of those, but that’s not saying much.  The definitive version of Tom Horn’s story has yet to be made.

McQueen did make western screen history with one element of the production design here.  This movie marks the re-introduction of the traditional big cowboy hat to westerns, after several decades of 1950s-styled hats.  Now a western with any pretension to authenticity is likely to include more historically-correct hats, which have been worn with great success by Tom Selleck (see Quigley Down Under, for example), among many others.

For the definitive Tom Horn biography, see Larry D. Ball’s Tom Horn in Life and Legend (2014).

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The Magnificent Seven (1960)

Nicholas Chennault ~ September 9, 2013

The Magnificent Seven—Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Brad Dexter, James Coburn, Robert Vaughan, Charles Bronson, Horst Buchholtz, Eli Wallach (1960; Dir:  John Sturges)

The exotic Yul Brynner seems an odd choice as the star of a western, but he’s become one of the iconic figures in the history of westerns because of his role as Chris Adams, leader of the seven in this relocated remake of Akira Kurosawa’s marvelous The Seven Samurai.  John Sturges’ talent for directing large-scale action was never in better form, and a number of elements combined to make this one of the most memorable westerns of the 1960s—a period that represents the apex of a certain kind of Hollywood western.

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The movie opens in a southwestern town with a dead Indian, whom prejudiced locals won’t allow to be buried in the local Boot Hill.  A newcomer, Chris Adams (Brynner) volunteers for the dangerous job of driving the hearse to the cemetery, and unemployed cowboy Vin (Steve McQueen) rides shotgun.  They make it up the hill, only to be faced at the cemetery by a small mob of armed and angry objectors, whom they handle with ease.

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Chris (Yul Brynner) and Vin (Steve McQueen) ride to Boot Hill.

Among those impressed are three town fathers of a Mexican village plagued by bandits.  They’re looking for help in ridding themselves of Calvera (Eli Wallach in his Mexican bandit chieftain mode) and his band of 30 or so banditos, who prey on the village regularly and kill any one there who shows signs of resisting.  Better employment is hard to come by, and Chris assembles a team of six, starting with himself and Vin.  They include Harry Luck (Brad Dexter), an old acquaintance of Chris’s who refers to him (not entirely convincingly) as “You old Cajun”; Bernardo O’Reilly (Charles Bronson); Lee (Robert Vaughan), a smooth but high-strung gunslinger now on the run himself; and Britt (James Coburn), a taciturn, knife-throwing cowboy.  The final member of the group is Chico (Horst Buchholz), a young Mexican would-be gunfighter initially rejected by Chris.  But as the band goes south into Mexico, Chico follows and is eventually accepted as one of them.

The villagers have considerable misgivings about their new defenders.  But as they prepare for the return of Calvera, Chris and his band teach the villagers some rudiments of self-defense and begin to form relationships.  Bernardo, for example, becomes a favorite of the village children, and there are a few romantic attachments that develop with female villagers, notably for Chico.  Cold gunfighter Lee has nightmares, and, after a drinking bout, confesses his fears to a couple of the villagers.

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Calvera and his bandits return, and initially they are easily driven away by the unexpected resistance.  But they return yet again and Calvera tries to understand what drives these Americans who are now leading the resistance to him.  His native humor and ruthlessness both show through.  And there is the final battle, which four of the seven do not survive.  The action sequences are extremely well directed and edited.

As Chris and Vin leave the village at the end, Chris mutters the bottom line on all the killing:  “The old man was right.  Only the farmers won.  We lost.  We always lose.”  But at least he isn’t dead.  The movie’s most memorable line might be Calvera’s:  “If God had not wanted them sheared, He would not have made them sheep.”  A few lines seem a little anachronistic, like Vin’s reference to a man falling off a ten-story building. 

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There are small touches that work very well, and some that raise questions.  When Vin is loading a shotgun and shakes each shell before popping it in the shotgun, and then tells Brynner, “Let ‘er buck,” that seems authentic.  In fact, McQueen and Brynner did not get along particularly well, and Vin’s sequence of mannerisms are McQueen’s way of stealing the scene against Brynner’s gravity.  The Mexican villagers seem unusually well-laundered, though—lots of bright whites in a very dusty setting.*  And one wonders why McQueen’s character Vin wears chaps so much in town, where they’re not necessary.  You’d think they’d be too hot and cumbersome in what seems to be a very warm climate.  Brynner and Buchholz as actors don’t exactly fit the backstories of their characters.  But it all works surprisingly well notwithstanding those quibbles.

No, The Magnificent Seven is not as good as Seven Samurai, and it’s not nearly as long, either—just over two hours in playing time, to more than three for Kurosawa’s masterpiece.  It has an epic feel without so much of the epic length, as well as less philosophical darkness.  However, it may be the most successful example in film history of transplanting a story from one cinematic genre to another.  Kurosawa was said to have given John Sturges a sword in appreciation after the release of the Sturges film.  (For another successful western based on a Kurosawa samurai film, see Sergio Leone‘s A Fistful of Dollars, based–without prior permission–on Yojimbo.)

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The seven defending the town from Calvera’s men.

Much of the brilliance of this film lies in the casting and character development of the seven, and of Calvera.  The enigmatic, bald Brynner, with his vaguely Asian background, would seem to be an unlikely fit for a western.  Even though he’s the leader of the seven and has more camera time than any of them, he remains enigmatic to the end of the movie.  His bearing and his all-black dress seem a little unusual, too, but it all makes for one of the iconic characters of the genre (reprised by Brynner in one sequel and in the science fiction thriller Westworld).  This was the breakthrough movie role for McQueen, who’d starred on television in Wanted:  Dead or Alive.  He would go on to have one of the greatest movie careers of the 1960s and 1970s, although that career did not include many more westerns.  Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughan, James Coburn—every single one of the seven would be a significant star by the end of the decade, with one exception:  Brad Dexter.  And as these characters are introduced and later developed, enough time is spent to insure that we are interested, but they remain not entirely explained.  Wallach is superb as Calvera, the greedy, human and philosophical bandit chieftain, and an interesting villain contributes significantly to the success of any western.  (See him again in a similar role in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.)

One of its elements may be the best of its kind in any western:  Elmer Bernstein’s score, especially the theme.  Bernstein was the quintessential movie composer of his time; he worked quickly, and in a broad variety of genres.  He scored hundreds of movies, and this may be his most memorable music.  The cinematography of Charles Lang, Jr. is excellent, too.  McQueen, Coburn and Bronson would work with Sturges again in The Great Escape, and this film would spawn three sequels—none remotely approaching this first in the series for quality and watchability.  Decades later (1998-2000) it would even be a short-lived television series.  And a new cinematic remake is currently in production and scheduled for release in late 2016, with Antoine Fuqua directing and Denzel Washington in the Yul Brynner role.

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*The well-laundered whites of the peasants were apparently one result of Mexican authorities not liking the depiction of Mexican nationals in 1954’s Vera Cruz, also filmed in Mexico.  For a period of several years thereafter, they were much more vigilant in policing the way Mexicans were shown in American films shot in Mexico.  So the villagers in The Magnificent Seven were never dirty in their white peasant clothing.

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