Tag Archives: Westerns in March

Westerns In March: The Great Train Robbery (1903)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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.

Westerns In March: 2024

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I’ve been doing monthly movie themes for long enough now that they are starting to come around again. This is interesting to me because on most months I will pick a theme and try to watch as many movies as I can from that theme, but some work better than others. I’ve been doing Noirvember now for 6 or 7 years and I always look forward to it. But some themes like musicals or the 1960s fizzle out almost before they get started.

Last year I did Westerns in March and quite enjoyed myself. I’ve only really gotten into westerns over the last few years but I got into them in a big way.

Not to get nerdy with numbers but I can actually pinpoint when I really started to get into the genre. Prior to 2019, I would watch a handful of Westerns or less every year. Then in 2019, I watched 11 westerns. I started the year off with a couple of the Man With No Name films, then watched Stagecoach with John Wayne. That set me off watching several more John Wayne films and the year ended with Johnny Guitar, a new favorite. Ever since I’ve watched at least 30 westerns every year. That’s more than a couple Westerns per month.

That doesn’t mean anything to anyone, but I love that kind of stuff. That is why I subscribe to Letterboxd.

Anyway, it is March again and I’ve already seen several Westerns. I look forward to watching many more and hopefully writing about a few.

Here’s the list of film I watched for this series:

Blood on the Moon (1948)
Vera Cruz (1954)
The Great Train Robbery (1903)
The Professionals (1966)
Comanche Station (1960)
Ride Lonesome (1959)
Ten Wanted Men (1955)
The Searchers (1956)
Ride the High Country (1962)
Bone Tomahawk (2015)

Westerns in March: Django (1966)

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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.

Westerns In March: The Wild Bunch & Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

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butch cassidy movie posterthe wild bunch poster

While the western was a hugely popular genre (some figures have the genre comprising up to 1/5th of the total output from Hollywood through the 1950s – call it the MCU of the classic era) it declined sharply in the 1960s. About that time the Europeans, especially the Italians, picked up the western handle and made many more films in the genre – some were great like Sergio Leonne’s Man with No Name Trilogy, but many were pretty terrible.

But in America, the western pretty much died out. Oh here and there a new western would pop up, but they were no longer the preeminent genre and have never regained that title.

Somewhere between the peak of western popularity and the death of it, there began a new kind of western, call it revisionist western. Where classic westerns tended to side with the Europeans in things like Manifest Destiny and treated the natives with contempt – making them faceless, nameless hordes of blood-thirsty monsters – revisionist westerns saw things differently. They dealt in shades of gray instead black and white.

Last week I watched two revisionist westerns from 1969. While they both subvert the classic western tropes, they are vastly different in the stories they tell and the tone in which they take. Call them two sides of the same coin. I thought it would be fun to talk about them both in this post.

The Wild Bunch is a pessimistic, dark, and violent film. It begins with a group of children watching with glee some scorpions get devoured by a million ants. A little later they will set them all on fire. In between those moments, we watch The Wild Bunch (led by William Holden and Ernest Borgnine) rob a bank. A posse (led by Robert Ryan) hired by the railroad to stop the Bunch opens fire as soon as they come out. They kill some of the gang, but a bunch of innocent citizens as well.

The movie, as directed by Sam Peckinpah, seems to announce, This is Not Your Daddy’s Western. Classic westerns were violent – there was plenty of gunplay and death – but they tended to not be particularly bloody. When a man was shot rarely do you see a bullet hole in his clothes, much less blood spurting out. I reckon half The Wild Bunch’s budget was spent on squibs and fake blood.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid begins with a card game. Sundance (Robert Redford) is winning but is accused of cheating. Butch (Paul Newman) tries to tell him to just let it go, but Sundance can’t. The confrontation ends with Sundance literally shooting the pants (or the belt, rather) right off his accuser. It is a completely unrealistic maneuver (the bullet would easily go through the belt and into the man, but doesn’t) but it sets the playful, humorous tone of the entire film.

Butch and Sundance spend most of the film wisecracking and generally having fun being outlaws. The Wild Bunch often laughs, but it is a desperate laugh, the laugh of men headed toward their demise.

Not to spoil both films, albeit ones that are more than 50 years old and such a part of the cultural zeitgeist you likely know how they both end, but all of these characters are headed toward their demise. None of our heroes live out their lives in peace and prosperity. Part of what revisionist westerns often did, and these two films in particular definitely do, is recognize that life in the Old West was often short and very violent. They also act as codas of sorts to the western genre itself.

It is fascinating how these two films are saying similar things but in such different ways. The Wild Bunch is realistic, dark, and gritty. Butch and Sundance is a light, buoyant, and joyful. I love them both, but on any particular day I’m gonna reach for Butch Cassidy far more often than The Wild Bunch.

Westerns In March: Cheyenne Autumn (1964)

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cheyenne autumn poster

John Ford made some of the greatest westerns ever made. From Stagecoach (1939) to My Darling Clementine (1946), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962) to The Searchers (1956) Ford proved over and over again to be a master of his craft, and of telling stories about the wild west and the men (and women) who tamed it.

Unfortunately, like so many western filmmakers at the time his films were not always kind to the Indians. All too often the Native Americans in western movies were faceless savages bent on raping and killing the white man. They were rarely made into full characters and very little attention was paid to the fact that the white man was invading the Indian’s territory and homeland.

In later years Ford seemed to have recognized his flaws in this area and at least in some ways he tried to make amends. In The Searchers John Wayne plays a pretty repugnant racist and his quest to rescue his niece, who has been captured by some Comanche Indians, allows the film to raise questions about the inherent racism of Manifest Destiny and America’s unrelenting quest to capture the entire country.

With Cheyenne Autumn, Ford’s last western and his penultimate film as a director, he depicts the historical event of the Northern Cheyenne Exodus in 1877 where a group of Indians decided to move from Oklahoma Territory back to their homeland in Wyoming. His depiction of the Indians is sympathetic and demonstrates just how awful the American government treated them.

Unfortunately, the film is overlong, rather dull, and still a bit racist. The two main Indian characters, Red Shirt and Little Wolf are played by Sal Mineo and Ricardo Montalban respectively – two very much not Indian actors (Mineo was of Italian descent and Montalban was Mexican born). The film’s focus likewise is on the white characters with the Indian characters playing second fiddle in their own story.

I could be more forgiving of most of this if the film was actually any good. Instead, it is slow, plodding, and contains one of the most unnecessary side stories I’ve ever witnessed.

The film begins with the Cheyenne on a reservation in Oklahoma. The land is arid and infertile. The people are sick and starving. Some delegates from Washington are supposed to meet them and discuss what can be done. But they don’t show and the Cheyenne decide to go home.

The trip is long and arduous. They must travel in desolate areas so as to not be seen by one of the many Army Forts along the way. Starving, some of them decide to turn themselves in at one of those forts. Though the Captain is sympathetic to their needs he has orders to turn them right around and send them home. Sickness, starvation and the brutal winter weather be damned.

There is some business about the press drumming up hysteria by printing falsehoods about the number of Cheyenne on the march and their ill intentions. Many of the soldiers on the ground (led by Richard Widmark) tend to be sympathetic to the plight of the Cheyenne but have their hands tied by forces in Washington.

Etc. and so on. Ford shot some of it in and around Monument Valley and Arches National Park and he gives the scenery his usual widescreen glory. But the story just never congeals into something interesting.

At one point, out of nowhere comes a scene with James Stewart playing Wyatt Earp and Arthur Kenney as Doc Holiday. It has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the film and is completely comic in tone (the rest of the film is utterly dramatic) and then it just ends and we never see them again.

Somewhere buried in there is a film that could have been great. The story of the Cheyenne’s exodus is a fascinating one and could make an excellent film. This is not that film and what we’re left with is the thought that Ford’s legacy left a whole lot of other films that are far greater than this one.

Westerns in March: The Magnificent Seven (2016)

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magnificent seven poster

Seven Samurai (1954) is one of my all-time favorite films. It would easily make my Top 5 list. It is full of adventure and action, romance and comedy. It has some of the best camerawork of any film and its themes of loyalty and justice, honor and duty speak directly to me. Its plot – that of a poor farming village hiring a group of masterless samurai to protect them from thieving bandits – has been the template for countless other films.

Its Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa, was greatly influenced by American cinema, especially the westerns of John Ford and Howard Hawks so it makes sense that an American, John Sturges, would turn the Seven Samurai into a western.

The Magnificent Seven (1960) turns the samurai into cowboys who are hired by poor Mexican farmers to protect them from some thieving bandits. It loses some of the thematic weight of Kurosawa’s film but it has a great cast (Including Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, and Charles Bronson), a fantastic soundtrack from Elmer Bernstein and its a lot of fun to watch.

Hollywood seems to do nothing much anymore but make comic books movies and remake their own films and so naturally they remade The Magnificent Seven in 2016. If the original The Magnificent Seven is a pale imitation of Seven Samurai, then the remake is a paler imitation of the original.

It is kind of boring. No, that’s not the right word as there is a lot of action. It is forgettable. I watched it a week or so ago and I’d be hard-pressed to give you any detail about the film.

It follows the plot of the original, more or less. In this one, the bandits are robber barons, or rather robber baron (singular, played by Peter Sarsgaard) and his hired hands. The village is a frontier town and our villain isn’t raiding it for food, but has built a mine nearby and has more or less enslaved them as workers.

Denzel Washington leads the Seven. He’s good, as he is good in everything, but his character has none of the moral center that Yul Brynner’s version had. Brynner played it like a man who simply had to defend the village, but Washington’s character is in it for revenge.

Chris Pratt plays the Steve McQueen part. I’ve liked Pratt in other things but here he only proves that there will only ever be one Steve McQueen. The rest of the cast (including Ethan Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio) are fine, but mostly not that interesting (it took me a minute to realize D’Onofrio was even in the film he looks so different than he usually does, but his character is probably my favorite.)

It isn’t that this film is bad, it is that it is so completely unnecessary. If you want to watch a great film with a similar plot go watch Seven Samurai. If you want to watch a really enjoyable version of this film then watch the original. There is no reason to waste your time on this one.