Tag Archives: westerns

Westerns In March: The Great Train Robbery (1903)

Posted on by

the great train robbery

If you’ve never watched a Western before you’ve still probably seen scene from this one. An iconic moment shows a dusty old man with a hat and massive mustache stare at the screen, then point his gun at the audience and shoot. Any discussion of film history will bring up this scene.

It is a scene that has no real place in the film. It was shown either at the beginning or the end of the movie, depending on the projectionist’s whims. It is just a cool little moment. Sometimes it is said that audiences watching that moment, unfamiliar with cinema as they might have been in 1903, actually ducked for fear of actually being shot. This seems to be apocryphal, made up to show what rubes people used to be.

It is also sometimes called the very first Western movie, or the first film that told an actual story. This, also is pure nonsense as there were many Westerns that came before this one, many of which told a real story. The Wikipedia article on the film is pretty funny as the editors over there seem to be actually angry over these errors.

What The Great Train Robbery actually was, what in fact most likely caused it to be called all of those superlatives, was really popular. It was a huge box-office success. It is also rip-roaring fun to watch.

The plot does exactly what it says on the tin, and with a run time of just 12 minutes, it does nothing more. Some outlaws board a train, rob it at gunpoint, and then are captured by a posse of lawmen.

While it might not have significantly influenced or advanced the Western as a genre (as Wikipedia notes with a certain amount of glee) it still uses the tools of the time most effectively.

It uses wide shots, camera pans, and matte paintings to great effect. While on the train in the foreground, we see the outlaws doing their thing but in the background, through an open door, we see the mountains whiz by, making incredible use of rear projection.

There is also a great use of smoke and some hand colorization of certain items which I always find amazing.

The film is in the public domain and as such is widely available all over the Internet, including YouTube. It is well worth watching if you are a fan of cinema history. I’m surprised it took me so long to get to it.

Westerns in March: Vera Cruz (1954)

Posted on by

vera cruz

In my review of Blood on the Moon I talked a little about how the Western slowly changed from a genre about moral absolutes to one that sometimes lived in the grey. That film does have some grey tones to it. Robert Mitchum’s character is someone with a dark past, who contemplates destroying a family for money. But ultimately he chose the path of righteousness, and if we’re being honest, we always knew he would.

Anthony Mann and James Stewart would team up for five westerns (the first and probably best – Winchester ’75 came out in 1950) that explored the darker sides of men living in wild, lawless times. As the 1950s rolled along the genre changed in other ways too. They became more violent and dirty. Oh, Westerns had always lived by violence – gunfights and brawls are staples of the genre – but for decades the violence had been rather bloodless. But as times changed, as the culture changed, this violence became more explicit, more real.

Vera Cruz is often cited as a lynchpin for this change. All of its characters are amoral, cynical, and aggressively violent. At one point Burt Lancaster’s character threatens to murder several children if he doesn’t get what he wants.

Set just after the Civil War, Vera Crus follows Ben Trane (Gary Cooper) and Joe Erin (Burt Lancaster) as they look for work. Both fought during the war and now they aren’t cut out for much more than that. They head to Mexico because they’ve got their own war going on (the Franco-Mexican War). Ben has at least some sense of a moral code, those he’s still willing to kill for money, whereas Joe (and his band of cutthroats) is willing to do just about anything if the price is right.

They are recruited by both sides of the war – the Juarists and Emperor or Miximillian – but they get with Maximillian since he has deeper pockets. They are charged with escorting Countess Duvarre (Denise Darcel) to the city of Vera Cruz. Naturally, there are complications including the discovery of gold hidden in her stagecoach.

It is a dirty, cynical, violent film and both Cooper and Lancaster are good in it, but something about it just didn’t hit with me. I suspect part of the problem is the way it sits somewhere in between the Classic Western and the Revisionist Westerns that would follow in its wake. It has a classic structure to it, and while it is certainly more violent than those films, and its characters are more morally reprehensible, it never goes quite fully into those darker motifs. As such it feels a little out of sorts.

Or something. I really don’t know exactly why I didn’t love it, and to be honest I watched it a couple of weeks ago and its already faded in my memory banks. I’d say it is worth watching if you are a fan of the genre or those two actors. But it isn’t necessarily a must-see for everyone.

Westerns in March: The Searchers (1956)

Posted on by

the searchers

When we went to visit Monument Valley I knew I’d be watching a John Ford western soon after, I just wasn’t sure which one it was going to be. Ford made some half a dozen films there and it was really those movies that made the location famous. There is even a spot in the Valley called John Ford Point.

He shot at least a couple of scenes on that point, but I couldn’t remember which ones so I decided to watch my favorite Ford Western, The Searchers.

In some ways, The Searchers was John Ford and John Wayne’s response to many of the previous Westerns they made together. Like a lot of Westerns at the time their previous films depicted American Indians as deplorable enemies – faceless, nameless, and utterly brutal. In The Searchers the Native Americans aren’t exactly kind and generous, but the white folks are just as brutal.

Wayne plays Ethan Edwards an independent loner. The film begins with one of cinema’s most striking images. Matha Edwards (Dorothy Jordan) stands in her doorway. The camera sits inside her house which is dark and small, it looks outside into the wild, expanse of the West. In the distance rides Ethan, small and alone. This image will be bookended at the end of the film with Ethan standing just outside the door, always on his own.

He fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederates. He still wears the uniform and takes pride in having never surrendered. It’s been three years since the war ended, but he’s just now returning home. He’s got gold in his pocket and it is hinted that he got it by ill-gotten means. The way he looks at Martha, his brother’s wife, indicates he’s in love with her.

When a neighbor’s cattle are stolen by someone – probably Indians – Ethan rides off to help. When he realizes that the cattle were a diversion, that the Indians were really a “murder party” he heads home but too late. His brother, wife and one of their children are dead. The older daughter Lucy and the youngest Debbie (played by Natalie Wood later in the film) have been abducted.

Ethan and Lucy’s fiancee Martin (Jeffrey Hunter) spend the next many years pursuing the tribe. Soon they find Lucy murdered (and by implication, raped) but Debbie remains with the tribe, taken in as one of their own.

We soon realize that Ethan isn’t tracking her as a rescue mission, but aims to kill the girl, as living as an Indian is worse than being dead in his warped mind. Martin stays with him, acting as something of a moral compass, but mostly there to keep Ethan from doing what he’s set out to do.

It’s fascinating to see Wayne in this mode. He’s so often played the hero. Here his actions are often very similar to what he’s done in previous movies – killing Native Americans with a vengeance – but The Searchers allows the audience to view those actions in a different light. We see the black heart of racism deep inside his character and it’s chilling. It’s also one of Wayne’s finest performances.

Ford shoots it beautifully. The western landscapes, especially those of Monument Valley are uncanny and utterly beautiful. This is the West of the movies, and it has never looked better.

I’ve seen The Searchers three times now and I’ve liked it more with each viewing. On the surface level it is a terrifically told Western adventure, but a closer look finds Ford really digging deep into the mythos of the Old West and what it meant for Native Americans and the Europeans who conquered it.

A terrific movie all around.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Bone Tomahawk (2015)

Posted on by

bone tomahawk

There aren’t a lot of Western/Horror hybrids for some reason. I don’t know why as it would seem like the barren landscapes of the West and the isolated communities filled with all sorts of outlaws would lend itself to horror, but I guess not. Maybe the audiences for those two genres are considered too far apart to make bringing them together worth it.

Controversial director S. Craig Zahler gave it a pretty good shot with his debut film Bone Tomahawk. Storywise it is primarily a Western but its graphic use of violence and impending sense of doom give it a good dose of horror.

In discussing the Western Genre I’ve not spoken much about its depictions of Native Americans (though we did have a good discussion in the comments section a while back). Generally speaking, the Western’s depiction of Native Americans has not been good. They were usually depicted as nameless, faceless savages attacking, raping, and murdering the pure and righteous white people who had come to the new land to save them from their savage ways.

Zahler (who also wrote the script) tries to work his way around this problem within the genre by having an Indian character (Zahn McClarnon) state that the film’s villains aren’t real Indians, but Troglodytes, cannibalistic savages that belong to no tribe. And thus hand waiving the whole problem away. But this is a Western set in the American West and the villains sure do look a lot like Indians, and they sure are savage. If you can get past that (and the really, truly, gruesome violence) then you are in for a bit of a treat.

A stranger (David Arquette) stumbles into the small town of Bright Hope. He buries his ill-gotten treasure before wandering into a bar. The town’s Back-Up Deputy Chickory (Richard Jenkins) spies the bag burial and tells Sheriff Hunt (Kurt Russell) about the suspicious nature of it all. They question the man who pushes Chickory down and tries to escape, getting shot in the leg by Hunt for his trouble.

They call in the doctor’s daughter Samantha (Lili Simmons) to take the bullet out of the stranger’s leg. Somewhere in the night our villains sneak into town and kidnap the stranger, a deputy, and Samantha.

In the light of day Sheriff Hunt, Chickory, Samantha’s husband Arthur (Patrick Wilson) who has a broken leg, and a dandyish gunslinger named John Brooder (Matthew Fox) all head for the valley where the enemy camps.

All of this is fairly standard Western stuff. Zahler gives it a lazy energy in the first half which is punctuated by some wonderful dialog and terrific performances by all involved. As they finally come to the enemy camp things turn horrific as the bad guys are truly abhorrent. I won’t go into details but let’s just say cannibalism isn’t their worst trait.

I’ve seen a lot of horror films in my day so I’m fairly immune to graphic violence, but this gets pretty intense. I do appreciate a film that doesn’t shy away from the realities of violence. Westerns have a tendency to have bloodless gunfights where the worst that happens to a man when he gets shot is that he falls off a building. Real violence is full of blood and gore and is horrible in every way. There is something to be said for a film to show that.

If you can stomach the violence and the hand-waiving away of the genre’s casual racism, Bone Tomahawk is a rather terrific bit of genre filmmaking.

Westerns in March: Blood on the Moon (1948)

Posted on by

blood on the moon

On a surface level Westerns and Film Noirs have very little in common. Noirs tend to take place inside the big city. Westerns are all about the wide open spaces of the American West. Noirs usually occur in the present, whereas westerns (almost by definition) occur in a specific past. Noirs are filmed in black and white. They revel in shadows and light. They take place in smoky little bars and grubby flats. Westerns make great use of the widescreen format and technicolor. Classic Westerns are about good versus evil; the differences are plain. Noirs live in the grey, the morally ambiguous, the dark nights of the soul.

It is that last bit that sometimes allows the two genres that seem so far apart to grow a little closer. While Classic Westerns often do present moral absolutes with clear good guys and bad guys, as the genre grew older it began to change. Their heroes were sometimes morally grey. They wrestled with complex questions. Dealt with complex characters. Etc. They started to feel a little more like noirs. Not always, of course, the vast majority of westerns stuck to their lane, but some of them, some of the best of them, allowed themselves into murkier territory.

Blood on the Moon is a Western Noir. It is set in the Old West, its characters are old cowboys, and its plot involves cattle and Indians, but its hero is flawed and its cinematography is pure noir.

Robert Mitchum plays Jim Garrey, a man down on his luck. When his old pal Tate Riling (Robert Preston) offers him a job he takes it, no questions asked. He soon learns he should have asked questions because Riling is up to some shenanigans.

The plot (or I should say Riling’s plot) is convoluted and too complicated to get into here. Basically, he’s setting some homesteaders against a rancher in hopes of making himself rich. He needs Garrey as a mediator to arrange a deal over some cattle.

That part of the plot doesn’t really matter. It boils down to Riley using Garrey for some pretty shading dealings. Garrey is basically a good man, but he’s done some bad things which makes him feel like a scoundrel. He’s left with a decision on whether to do the right thing and go against an old friend, or stay the course and get rich in the process.

Honestly, I got a bit lost in the machinations of the plot but Mitchum is great as usual and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca gets some great noir visuals out of his scraggly western landscape (and no wonder he shot a lot of great film noirs including Out of the Past and The Spiral Staircase). Preston seems a bit miscast to me. He’s great when he’s playing rascally con men, but he doesn’t quite exude the menace his character needs in this film.

Overall a decent example of both the Western and the film noir but there are better films in both genres.

Frozen In January: Jeremiah Johnson (1972)

Posted on by

jeremiah johnson poster

Jeremiah Johnson was a real mountain man who, as legend has it, killed, scalped, and ate the livers of some 300 Crow Indians. From what I’ve read he seems like a pretty rough-and-tumble guy. Director Sydney Pollack teamed up with Robert Redford and turned him into some kind of folk hero in their film based upon the legend.

Redford plays Johnson as a man who initially heads to the mountains to get away from society and truly become something, some kind of man. He isn’t naive or untrained like Chris McCandless from Into the Wild. He has some skills hunting and surviving in the wild. Just getting to the Rockies in the late 1800s was an adventure in itself. 

But life in the mountains is different than life in the plains. Johnson find himself in trouble. He struggles making fire in the cold, wind, and snow. He can’t catch a fish in the mountain streams. He has better luck with wild game, but not much.

Cold and nearly starved, he stumbles across an old grisly bear hunter named Bear Claw (Will Greer). The old man teaches him how to survive in the mountains. He becomes good at it. He thrives. He learns the ways of the various Indian tribes in the area, but doesn’t befriend them. He’s a man who likes to be alone.

In time he comes across a cabin that has been attacked by Indians. A child was killed, and the husband is missing. A young boy has survived and his mother who has gone crazy from the ordeal. Johnson begins caring for the boy. Later Johnson makes a mistake in a trade with a Flathead tribe and finds himself with a wife.

This man of solitude now finds himself with a family. It is hard on him at first, especially since he does not speak his Crow wife’s language and the boy is mute, but he learns to love them and they make a life together.

Then tragedy hits and Johnson becomes the liver-eating man of legend.

Pollack and cinematographer Duke Callaghan film it like poetry. Pollack calls it his silent picture and there are long scenes in which not a word is spoken. Shot in and around the Rocky Mountains in Utah it is often stunningly beautiful. Redford does some of his best work. All of this is periodically puncturated by songs from Tim McIntire and John Rubinstein. They are sung in the Appalachian folk tradition and are a little too on the nose declaring the themes of the film. Also they are just bad.

It is interesting that they turned this story of a rugged mountain man, known for his ruthless slaying of countless natives into the story of a good man who just wants to be left alone, at peace in nature. He rarely takes action himself, the mountains or outsiders force him into it. Even in the end when he becomes the Crow Slayer, it is always them who attack him. It does feel like they are turning into a folk hero. I doubt that is where the truth really lies. But we’ll never really know the truth anyway, as the true story was turned into legend long ago and the facts have long since been lost.

Not that it matters. True or not the film is quite good, longing and beautiful. A tale of a time long past, but of mountains that still amaze with their grandeur.

Wichita (1955)

Posted on by

wichita movie

Wyatt Earp stands tall amongst figures of the Old West. He’s one of America’s great old legends. There have been a lot of movies made about his life. Wichita is kind of an origin story for the legend as it begins before he became a lawman and tells the story of how he wound up being a Marshall.

It isn’t particularly good, but if you like westerns I’d recommend it. You can read my full review here.

Blood Money: Four Classic Westerns is the Pick of the Week

Posted on by

blood money bluray

Over the last few years, my movie-watching has increased by a large margin. I’ve gone from watching around 120 movies a year to over 300. One of the things I’ve tried to do with this increase in viewings is to increase my overall cinematic knowledge. I try to watch films from different eras and genres, films that I might otherwise not see. I don’t want to just watch the latest blockbusters but to allow my movie watching to increase my understanding of film history. I think that is obvious just from the movies I’ve reviewed on this site.

The Western is a genre that I mostly ignored for large swaths of my life. I didn’t dislike Westerns as much as I just wasn’t interested in them. It didn’t help that my formative years were a time when the genre had mostly gone out of style. But I’ve come to love the genre over the last few years.

I love the wide open spaces of the genre and the gunfights. I love how the films are about expanding and living in a new world, about starting a new country, about etching out a living in a harsh, brave world.

The Italians got into the Western business about the time they were dying out in America. These so-called Spaghetti westerns played with the standard tropes of the genres and made it their own.

Arrow Video is doing what they do best this week – releasing a boxed set of relatively obscure genre films and loading them with extras. Blood Money: Four Classic Westerns includes four Italian Westerns (Mátalo!, Find a Place to Die, Vengeance is Mine, $10,000 Blood Money) that were made from 1967-1970. I don’t know anything about them, and I don’t have to. I want to buy this box and learn about them as I watch.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

Soundies: The Ultimate Collection: Around the time of WWII little jukebox type machines started showing up in bars, honkytonks, and night clubs. For the drop of a coin you could watch what amounted to an early music video (or burlesque shows, or any number of other things). Kino Classics has put together a big collection of the music videos which star folks like Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Hoagy Carmichael, Doris Day and a ton of others. Sounds cool.

Paint: I would have bet you a lot of money that this comedy starring Owen Wilson was a weird biopic of Bob Ross, and I would have lost. Apparently Wilson’s character just looks like that painter of happy little clouds (and paints for a public television station), but that’s were the similarities end. Or something. The reviews have been terrible so I’ve not bothered to dig into it more.

The Broadway Melody: The first sound film to win an Oscar is also generally regarded as the first proper movie musical.

The War of the Worlds: This sci-fi classic from 1953 is getting a big 4K release for its 70th anniversary.

One False Move: Criterion is releasing this neo-noir classic about a police chief awaiting the arrival of some killers in a 4K set.

Chucky 4-7: Shout Factory presents this collection of Chucky films (Bride of Chucky, Seed of Chucky, Curse of Chucky, and Cult of Chucky) in a new 4K boxed set. I’ve never seen any of the Chucky films so this probably isn’t the place to start, but for fans it looks pretty cool.

Westerns in March: Django (1966)

Posted on by

django poster

As the popularity of westerns began to wane in America, the Italians picked up the mantle and ran with it. A number of westerns had been produced in Europe before Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars in 1964 but it was that film that is generally credited as the first Spaghetti Western. With its distinctive visual style, unusual score by Ennio Morricone, and iconic anti-hero played by Clint Eastwood, A Fistful of Dollars set the template for all the Spaghetti Westerns to follow.

It was a huge success and naturally, numerous films came out soon after, that aped its style and tried to cash in on its success. Perhaps the most successful, both financially and artistically, was Sergio Corbucci’s Django. It was also a big success. It launched the career of Franco Nero and spawned some 30 different sequels (most of them unofficial).

It begins with our hero, Django (Nero), a former Union soldier walking alone in the wilderness somewhere along the US/Mexican border, dragging a coffin behind him. It is a magnificent image to open a film on, one of the all-time great opening images in fact. The movie ends with another indelible image, one that I won’t spoil, but it, too, is an all-timer. The film that happens in between those fantastic moments is also quite good.

Django stumbles upon a prostitute (Loredana Nusciak) about to be literally crucified upon a burning cross by some racist Red Shirts. Django shoots the men and offers the woman protection.

The two walk to a nearby town, half-deserted save for a bartender named Nathaniel (Ángel Álvarez) and a handful of prostitutes. Nathaniel tells them that the townspeople have mostly been killed off due to the feud between the Redshirts and some Mexican revolutionaries.

The plot, with Django working both sides of the fight, is very similar to A Fistful of Dollars (which itself was inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which in turn was inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s novels The Glass Key and Red Harvest.)

But first, there is a lot of discussion as to just exactly what is in that coffin he’s been dragging around. Most seem to think it holds an actual body which produces a lot of signs of the cross. His enemies often joke that he’s just being helpful, bringing his own coffin along as they are about to kill him.

But friends, and this does count as a spoiler, that thing holds one big ass machine gun. When the Red Shirts come down he hauls it out and mows them down in glorious fashion.

He works with the Mexicans for a time, but he has no interest in their politics. Like Eastwood in those Leone films, Django is a man on his own. It is frequently violent, periodically hilarious, and always cool.

It isn’t quite as stylish as Leone’s Dollars Trilogy but it is still pretty darn great. Franco Nero is terrific as Django and the score from Luis Bacalov is fantastic. It makes a terrific way for me to end my Westerns in March series.