Zachariah: The First Electric Western

The poster called it “the first electric western”. This was 1971, when the American film industry had spent two years in a blind panic trying to work out why Easy Rider had made so much money, and the answer it kept arriving at was: hire some longhairs and let them do whatever they want. Zachariah is what that policy looked like when it went all the way through.

The pitch is genuinely difficult to say out loud without laughing. It is a western, set in a recognisable mythic frontier, in which the gunfighters travel with amplifiers. Rock bands appear as outlaw gangs and play full numbers on electric instruments in a period the electric guitar had not been invented in. The plot is loosely lifted from Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. The script is credited in part to the Firesign Theatre, the great American comedy troupe, who then publicly disowned the finished film. And the fastest gun in the West is played by Elvin Jones, the drummer from John Coltrane’s quartet.

It is a mess. It is also, in about four separate places, better than it has any business being, and those four places are why people still hunt for it.

What actually happens

Zachariah, played by John Rubinstein, is a young man in a nowhere town who sends away for a mail-order pistol. His friend Matthew — played by Don Johnson, roughly a decade and a half before television made him a household object — does the same. The two of them ride out to become outlaws, in the way that two bored teenagers might decide to start a band.

They fall in with the Crackers, a gang of catastrophic incompetents played by Country Joe and the Fish, who cannot rob anything and would rather perform. They encounter the James Gang, played by the James Gang, which is the single best joke in the film and is over in ninety seconds. Zachariah drifts on, acquires a reputation, meets a woman called Belle Starr who runs an establishment, and eventually does what Hesse’s protagonist does: renounces the lot and goes to sit in the desert with an old man who has stopped wanting things.

Matthew, meanwhile, does the opposite, and the film’s ending is the collision of those two answers to the same question.

Why it works: Elvin Jones as death

Everything I have just described is executed with variable competence by George Englund, a director whose visual instincts were formed in a much squarer industry and who cannot quite decide how ironic the film is being. Then, roughly halfway through, Zachariah produces a sequence that justifies the whole enterprise.

Job Cain is the fastest gun alive. He works a saloon. Before the inevitable confrontation, he sits down at a drum kit and plays, and the film simply stops and lets Elvin Jones play the drums for several minutes.

The idea underneath this is genuinely brilliant, and I do not think Englund fully understood what he had. The western gunfighter is a figure defined by timing — the whole mythology of the draw is about a man whose relationship to a fraction of a second is superhuman. Casting a great jazz drummer in the role, and letting his solo be the demonstration of that gift, collapses the metaphor into the thing itself. You do not need a scene establishing that Job Cain is faster than everyone. You watch Elvin Jones’ hands and the argument is closed. Then he stands up and shoots a man, and the shooting is an anticlimax, because you have already seen what he can do with time.

The other flash of intelligence is the anachronism policy. The film never winks at the amplifiers. Nobody remarks on them. The instruments are simply present in the frontier, the way that anything is present in a myth, and that deadpan is the correct choice — an acknowledgement would have turned the film into a sketch. It is holding a straight face while a hopeless gang of desperados set up a stage in the desert, and that straight face is the only formal discipline the film has.

The bands are the budget

It is worth being clear about what the musical guests are doing here commercially, because it explains the film’s shape better than any account of its themes.

In 1971 a rock act on a cinema poster was a financing instrument. Soundtrack albums could out-earn the pictures attached to them, and a studio that signed several bands acquired both a marketing hook and a second revenue line before a frame was shot. So the bands are in Zachariah the way product placement is in a modern blockbuster — they had to be accommodated, and the screenplay had to grow pockets for them to stand in.

That is why the film keeps stopping. The Crackers are a gang who mostly perform because Country Joe and the Fish were hired to perform; the fiddle interlude exists because a fiddler was booked. Once you see the contracts, the structure becomes legible: this is a revue with a plot stapled around it, and the plot’s job is to get everyone to the next number without anyone noticing the stapling.

The remarkable thing is that one of those obligations produced the best scene in the film. Elvin Jones was presumably hired on exactly the same logic as everyone else — a name, a solo, a booking. What the film got instead was a piece of casting that accidentally said something true about the western.

The Firesign problem

The screenplay carries the names of the Firesign Theatre’s four members alongside Joe Massot’s, and the troupe spent years afterwards making clear they wanted nothing to do with the result, on the grounds that what they wrote and what was shot were different films. You can see the seam. There are stretches of dialogue with the cadence of very good absurdist radio comedy — the Firesign’s home form — sitting inside scenes staged with the flatness of a television western. The jokes are structured to land on the ear and are being shot as if they should land on the eye.

That mismatch is the film’s central wound, and it is the reason Zachariah reads as an artefact rather than a work. Somewhere in the drawer there was a genuinely subversive script. What reached the screen is a studio’s approximation of it, made by people who had been told that the counterculture was a demographic.

The real ancestor

The stated source is Siddhartha, and Hesse was, in 1971, the most reliably shifted paperback on any American campus. That is the joke history plays on the film: the counterculture’s chosen philosophical text was a German novel from 1922, and grafting it onto the most rigidly American of genres was less a fusion than a category error performed at high volume.

The actual ancestor is El Topo, which had appeared the previous year and had proven that you could take the western’s iconography — the desert, the gunman, the road — and use it as a delivery system for mysticism. Jodorowsky did it with conviction and a genuinely deranged personal cosmology. Zachariah does it with a development executive’s summary of one. The distance between the two films is the distance between a belief and a marketing category.

What follows is more interesting. Greaser’s Palace arrived the following year and pushed the same materials into real blasphemy. And the acid western as a genuinely coherent form had to wait until Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man in 1995 — the film that finally worked out that the trick is to play the mysticism absolutely straight and let the West be the hallucination. The critical term itself came into wide use in the writing around Jarmusch, applied retroactively to this whole strange 1970s cul-de-sac.

The other lineage worth tracing is commercial. Zachariah sits in a very specific 1971 cohort of studio films handed to unlikely people on the theory that incomprehensibility was a selling point — the same year as Two-Lane Blacktop and Vanishing Point. Within about two years the experiment was over. The industry’s brief conviction that it should fund things it did not understand is the most valuable thing about the era, and Zachariah is a monument to it precisely because it is bad.

The case against, honestly

It does not work. The tone wobbles between parody, sincerity and a third thing that is mostly just under-rehearsed. Rubinstein is amiable and weightless; Don Johnson is doing something more interesting and gets less room. The Siddhartha structure sits on top of the material rather than inside it, so the renunciation arrives as an announcement. Long stretches are simply flat, and there are musical numbers that exist because a band was under contract.

The honest verdict is that Zachariah is worth ninety minutes for its failures rather than despite them. It is the clearest surviving evidence of a moment when a major studio genuinely did not know what a young audience wanted and was frightened enough to write cheques to find out. Films like this cannot be made now, because the industry knows exactly what it thinks you want, and it is never a jazz drummer in a saloon.

Where to find it

It surfaces periodically on cult labels and in midnight-movie programming, usually double-billed with something angrier. Go in for Elvin Jones and stay for the spectacle of a studio losing its nerve in public.

Spoilers below

The ending is where the film’s borrowed philosophy has to pay, and it half does.

Zachariah’s renunciation takes him to an old man living alone in the desert, who has no interest in reputation and functions as the film’s ferryman — Hesse’s structure surfacing almost undisguised. Zachariah stays, works, and stops being anybody. It is the only sustained quiet in the picture and Englund shoots it with a plainness that finally suits him.

Matthew arrives, of course. He has become what Zachariah declined to become: fast, known, hollow. The confrontation the entire western genre exists to deliver is set up in full, with two friends and two guns and a landscape.

And the film refuses it. There is no duel. Zachariah declines to draw, and the refusal is not staged as cowardice or as a trick — it is presented as the only available victory. Matthew is left holding a weapon that has stopped meaning anything, in front of a man who will not participate in the ritual that gives it force.

It is the correct ending and it is not earned. A film that had built its case would land it hard; Zachariah has spent ninety minutes on gags and guitar solos, so the renunciation reads as the last item on a list rather than as a conclusion. The idea is sound. The picture underneath it never showed up. And still — a western that ends by declining the gunfight, in 1971, financed by a major studio, with Coltrane’s drummer as the angel of death somewhere back in the second act. Cinema has produced very few objects this strange with this much money behind them.