After the audacity of the middle instalment, some were disappointed that the Back to the Future trilogy wound up with a relatively lightweight action romp set in the Old West while others welcomed the return to simpler, more straightforward storytelling after the more ambitious Part II. It’s a worthy successor to the other films, more linear but no less pleasing, switching attention more to Christopher Lloyd’s Doc this time and adding a charming love story to the mix.
Picking up exactly where Part II ended, with Doc being blasted into the past aboard the DeLorean from 1955, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) has to persuade the 50s version of Doc to help him get back to the future. A note from Doc written in 1885 assures Marty that he is safe and happy in the past and asks him not to try to rescue him – though when Marty learns that Doc is killed just days after arriving in the Old West, he and 50s doc recover the DeLorean from the cave where Doc hid it in 1885 and Marty sets off for 1885. There he meets his Irish immigrant great-great-grandparents Seamus and Maggie (Fox and Lea Thompson), again has a run-in with one of the Tannen family, this time the psychotic and filthy bandit Buford (Thomas F. Wilson), less-than-affectionately known as “Mad Dog” for his violent behaviour and is reunited with Doc. While they try to keep Doc alive and find a way to get the DeLorean up to 88 mph so Marty can return home (they eventually hit on the idea of trying to push it with a steam train), complications arise when Doc falls in love with the town’s new school teacher Clara Clayton (Mary Steenburgen).
Where Part II played games with the tropes of science fiction, Part III has a riot lampooning and playing with the clichés of the western. Zemeckis slyly references some of e threats of the genre – the crane shot that signals Marty’s arrival in 1885 Hill Valley is straight out of Sergio Leone’s masterly C’era una volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Doc shooting the rope that threatens to hang Marty is from Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo/The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and Marty’s means of defending himself in his duel with Mad Dog was already signalled in Part II when Marty watched Clint Eastwood do the exact same thing in Per un pugno di dollari/A Fistful of Dollars (1964).
Eastwood himself gets plenty of love here – not only does Marty pass himself off as “Clint Eastwood” (the townspeople presumably assume that he perished in the ravine as when he arrives back in 1985, the timeline has shifted subtly again and he arrives at Eastwood Ravine) but there’s lovely in-joke for die-hard Clint fans when Marty first mentions his name at the 1955 drive-in where a double bill of Revenge of the Creature (1955) and Tarantula (1955) both of which featured Eastwood in early uncredited roles, is being advertised. Zemeckis asked Eastwood for permission to use his name and he was, by all accounts, delighted to be honoured this way. Die hard western fanatics will delight in seeing old genre hands Dub Taylor, Pat Buttram and Harry Carey Jr.
Other genres get a look in too with quotes referencing Taxi Driver (1976) (“you talking to me”) and Dirty Harry (1971) (“go ahead punk”) and plenty of references to Jules Verne – one might have expected Doc to be more enamoured of the more scientifically rigorous H.G. Wells who of course wrote the genre defining time travel story but presumably naming his sons Herbert and George wouldn’t have been as readily recognisable to the general public as naming them Jules and Verne. Elsewhere, the casting of Mary Steenburgen as a slightly ditzy woman falling in love with a man out of his time and returning with him to his own era is a deliberate tip of the hat to her turn in Nicholas Meyer’s Time After Time (1979).
As you’d expect from a Back to the Future film, Part III is well stocked with visual gags, sly puns and period detail. Series staples like Tannen ending up covered in manure, Marty inadvertently affecting the development of popular culture (in this case he invents the Frisbee) and the scene of Doc sending Marty from 1955 to 1985 are all present and correct though this time Zemeckis and Gale catch us out by having our heroes switch catch phrases, Marty exclaiming “Great Scott!” while Doc agrees that the situation is “heavy.” The regular supporting cast is slimmed down this time – there’s no room for George in Part III though Lea Thompson affects a not entirely convincing Irish accent as Marty’s ancestor Maggie (Fox plays his own great-great-grandfather) and Wilson gives his best performance in the trilogy as the cartoonish Mad Dog.
Production designer Rick Carter excels himself this time. The first two films had made extensive use of standing sets on Universal’s backlot but the 1885 frontier town version of Hill Valley was built from scratch and yet somehow still feel familiar. Location shooting in the glorious Monument Valley, home to many a western over the years, emphasising the point that the version of the Old West seen in Back to the Future Part III is unashamedly the romanticised Hollywood version and not the harsher reality.
While production was under way, Zemeckis was regularly flying from Sonora in California where Hill Valley was built and Railtown 1897 State Historic Park in Jamestown, California where the train sequences were filmed, to Los Angeles to supervise post-production on Part II, a gruelling schedule that might have defeated a lesser man. That he managed to make the climactic train sequence so exhilarating under these conditions is nothing sort of miraculous. It’s a nerve-shredding action scene, the most exciting moment in any of the three films and Zemeckis pulls it off quite brilliantly. He even finds a moment’s pause for one of the funniest exchanges in the series – when Marty and Doc hold up the train, the startled engine driver asks “Is this a hold up?” “No,” deadpans Doc, “it’s a science experiment.”
A love letter to westerns of old (the setting was chosen after a chance remark by Fox during the making of the first film when he suggested that it would be fun to appear in an old school oater), Back to the Future Part III is a very different film to its predecessors, balancing an endearing love story with a more action-oriented plot. Beyond the time travel elements – which play second fiddle in this one – there a few science fiction elements, certainly none of the conceptual game playing of Part II. Add in a cameo from rock band ZZ Top (complete with trademark twirling guitars), references to Buster Keaton’s The General (1926), a sort-of (if somewhat laboured) explanation for why the DeLorean managed to stay undiscovered in the cave from 1855 to 1955 (the cave was inhabited by a bear and, presumably, its offspring stayed on there) and some genuinely appealing chemistry between Doc and Clara and you’ve got a perfect ending to one of science fiction’s most inventive trilogies.
The story was (unnecessarily) continued unnecessarily in the animated television series and Doc returned for a specially shot short film, Doc Brown Saves the World (2015), made by Zemeckis and Lloyd for the trilogy’s 30th anniversary blu-ray release, the series was neatly wrapped in up Part III and really needed no extending. It did get a sort of footnote though from a very unexpected source. In Seth MacFarlane’s spoof western A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014), MacFarlane’s lead character, Albert, is drawn to strange noises coming from a barn late one night. When he investigates, he finds a wild haired Christopher Lloyd standing next to a very familiar DeLorean…
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