An uncle and his nephew (played, let's say, by John Wayne and Montgomery Clift) cross the border with ill-gotten gains, including saddlebags filled with bullion, and herds of prime cattle. Ahead of them are mountains, deserts and, somewhere, green valleys. Eventually they settle in a suitable place, one man neighbouring the other. But it quickly becomes apparent that the land is not big enough for the both of them; their herdsmen fight, their cattle compete for grazing. They agree to go their separate ways; the older man to a new valley, the younger to dwell near the cities of the plain. There the nephew prospers -despite the proximity of such corrupt places -but not as bountifully as his uncle. Rich beyond imagining, he stands on the hill that shelters his valley, looks to the north, the south, the east, and the west, and resolves that all the land as far as the eye can see will belong to him and his descendants. What he doesn't yet know is that his nephew's spread has been raided by a hostile chieftain, who has made off with both property and person. Hearing that his brother's son has been made a captive, he raises a posse and sets off in hot pursuit. Pursuer and pursued come face to face in some fly-blown desert town, both knowing that with sunup will come the final showdown . . . .

The border is that between Egypt and Canaan, the uncle is Abram (not yet Abraham), the nephew Lot. For this is the ur-Western, the first of the entire wild bunch. In its brief span are all the necessary ingredients; a magnificent but indifferent landscape, territorial strife, manifest destiny, a quest, and a bloody climax. Out of these raw materials come both Genesis 13 and John Ford's The Searchers, the greatest of all Westerns. They also give rise to a new film, The Proposition, set in Queensland, Australia. The period is the 1880s, by which time American expansion had all but run its course, and the Frontier been more or less civilized. In Queensland, however, the process had hardly begun.

The movie opens at the scene of a merciless crime, then cuts quickly to the capture of some of its perpetrators. Righteous bullets are turning their hideout into a colander through which the sun shines on both the bad men and their whores.

There are fingerprints all over the celluloid and they belong to Sam Peckinpah, his Billy the Kid having found himself in a similar situation. Like Peckinpah, The Proposition's director, John Hillcoat, regards violence as poetry in motion. Some of the baddies are picturesquely slaughtered, but two are captured. These are Charlie and Mickey Burns (Guy Pearce and Richard Williams).

It is to the former that Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone in rough diamond mode) makes the titular proposition: find and kill your older brother, Arthur, the gang's ringleader, so that Mickey, the youngest may be spared. Charlie is granted just over a week in which to complete the task. Should he fail, Mickey will hang on Christmas Day.

Charlie sets off on his quest.

In the meantime, Captain Stanley keeps muttering, "I will civilize this place", while trying to convince wide-eyed Mrs Stanley (Emily Watson) that she is actually living in the Home Counties, the effort of which has rendered him impotent.

Perhaps because of this failing, the Captain can refuse her nothing else. But when she discovers via lascivious tittle-tattle that a friend of hers was not only murdered by the Burns Gang, but also raped, she allies herself with the local toff in insisting that Mickey (a simpleton) be whipped, thereby forcing her husband to forfeit his bond. As a result, the town's riff-raff are treated to the sight of the poor boy being viciously striped.

After many bloody misadventures involving bounty hunters and spear-chucking Aborigines, Charlie finally arrives at Arthur's desert redoubt. Burns is a well-chosen family name, implying both conflagration and poetry, from which we are meant to infer that Arthur is no mere psychopath. And Danny Huston in the role almost convinces -if only he were given more than sunsets to watch, and lines of Victorian poesy to spout.

The musician and screenwriter, Nick Cave, has boasted that he knocked off the script for The Proposition in three weeks, which I'm prepared to believe. Not that the film isn't visually impressive and cleverly constructed. The required climax arrives on Christmas Day, which Mr and Mrs Stanley are intent on celebrating in time-honoured fashion. As she leans forward to serve her husband some turkey breast, we can guess that the Burns gang is about to burst in, and that Captain Stanley's deficiencies will be made good by others. The only question is: who will survive the onslaught, and what will be left of them? In any event, the notion that such a ferocious land can be civilized or even feminized is dismissed as so much baloney.

At the end of The Westerner, Gary Cooper is summoned by his new bride to watch the immigrants passing their cabin. "Wagons by the score", he says in Abrahamic mode.

"It's the Promised Land . . . . Some day, Texas is going to be the biggest and the finest . . . ." But he doesn't get to finish the sentence, his mouth stoppered by a conjugal kiss. Whatever Texas Cooper saw, it was definitely not the state featured in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. In this latter-day Texas, immigrants are not welcome; rather, they are chased away or worse by the Border Patrol.

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