Tag: Westerns in March

Westerns In March: The Quick and the Dead (1987)

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Not to be confused with the Sam Raimi film of the same name, this The Quick and the Dead stars Sam Elliott, Kate Capshaw, and Tom Conti and was based on a book by Louis Lamour. I haven’t seen the Raimi film, but I’d bet my ten-gallon hat it is a lot better than this nonsense.

In the Wild West, Duncan McKaskel (Tom Conti), his wife Susanna (Kate Capshaw), and their 12-year-old son Tom (Kenny Morrison) are traveling to Bighorn, Montana, where Susanna’s brother is camped with Custard. The rest of the wagon train were stricken with consumption.

They come across an old, worn-down town and ask a man named Doc Shabbitt (Matt Clark) for help. He says they can stay in an abandoned house for the night, but Duncan decides Shabbitt’s gang looks a little too shabby, and they decide to move along.

That night Shabbitt’s men steal two horses from our heroes.  And then comes Con Vallian (Sam Shepherd). He’s half Native American and a full-blooded badass.  He’s also the kind of guy who likes looking at Susanna and saying things like “Your wife sure is a handsome woman.”  And then says it again. And again. Seriously, half his dialogue is saying inappropriate things to her. It is all kinds of creepy, and he’s the hero of this film.

Anyway, Vallian tells Duncan about the stolen horses and how Shabbit took them. He also says if he doesn’t do something about it, then Shabbitt’s men will think them weak and will keep coming back for more stuff and his woman. Vallian says he’ll take care of it, but Duncan says, “No” it is his battle to fight. Vallian says “ok” and you get the feeling he wouldn’t mind if Duncan got killed so he could have some good times with that “handsome woman.”

Duncan goes to the men and demands his horses back and nearly gets killed for it. Luckily, Vallian came in behind him and saves the day. When they return to camp, the boy hails Vallian as a hero and she starts looking at Vallian like maybe he’s a handsome man.

The rest of the film is like this. Shabbitt or his men will attack, and Vallian will defeat them. Tom wishes his dad was more like Vallian, and Susanna finds herself taking waterfall showers within Vallian’s view. 

What pissed me off about all of this is that Duncan is a good man. He’s smart and fair, and he doesn’t lack for courage. He goes after Shabbitt just as much as Vallian, and he’s not afraid to look Vallian in the face and tell him to stop saying such things about his wife. He isn’t as tough or masculine as Vallian or as good with a gun.  But he still deserves respect.  And he isn’t getting it from his wife, his son, or even the film.

Now I will say that Tom does sometimes say to Vallian that his dad is tough. That he fought bravely in the war. And other than one good kiss, Susanna doesn’t give in to her temptation. But it is still a weird and rather lousy way the film frames Vallian as a hero. This is a TV movie so thing do work out in the end, and if they hadn’t I would have thrown my boots at the TV.

The action is rather dull. Shabbit and his men aren’t particularly interesting or threatening, and the rest of the film never really goes anywhere. There is a romanticism to the Old West that I suspect comes from Louis Lamour’s book, but I sure hope he treats his characters better. 

Now you’ll have to excuse me, I’m going to go watch the Sam Raimi film in hopes it will help me forget this mess.

Westerns in March: Hour of the Gun (1964)

hour of the gun

Welcome back to Westerns in March. This is my fourth year doing this theme, and I’ve come to really enjoy it. There is something wonderful about this genre with its wide-open spaces, its barroom brawls, and its shootouts. So let’s get started.

Director John Sturges made Gunfight at the OK Corral in 1957 with Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday. It is a darn good film. It ends with the titular gunfight.

Ten years later Sturges revisited the story with this film, a sort of sequel with James Garner in the Earp role and Jason Robards as Holiday. It begins with the gunfight at the OK Corral and then deals with its aftermath.

An opening title notes that “This picture is based on Fact. This is the way it happened” and Sturges did strive for more historical accuracy than is usually told with these stories, though, of course, he still changed quite a bit to suit his needs.

Ike Clanton (Robert Ryan) survived the gunfight (something he did in real life but did not in the previous film) and is now taking our heroes to court. He claims his men were unarmed and had raised their hands in the air when Earp and his men shot them dead.

Clanton loses the court case but sets up his own personal war with Earp, his brothers, and Holiday. Some of them get shot, some of them get killed. Wyatt is determined to stop them, but his moral code demands he do it legally. But his stubbornness makes him bend the law to suit his needs.

Robards is terrific as Doc Holiday. This is a very different performance from Val Kilmer’s portrayal in Tombstone, but it’s still real good. I never really buy James Garner as Wyatt Earp. I’m so used to him playing rascally wiseacres that it is difficult to buy him as the deadly serious man he’s playing here.

Robert Ryan barely has any screen time, and when he does, he isn’t nearly menacing enough. He’s the main villain, and he’s far too tame to be threatening. Which is a weird thing to say about Robert Ryan, who is usually so good at playing scary dudes.

Sturges’s direction is steady but not memorable. Ultimately, the film is worth watching for Robards’s performance and if you are interested in what happened after the famous gunfight.

Westerns in March – Buchanan Rides Alone (1958)

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Actor Randolph Scott and director Budd Boetticher made seven movies together, all westerns. I’m a big fan of all of them and this weekend while looking for another western to watch I landed on this one. Mostly because I knew it to be lighter fare than the others and my wife tends to not like dark and serious films.

Buchanan Rides Alone is the silliest of the films they made together, and probably my least favorite. Scott plays Tom Buchanon a drifter returning from Mexico with a lot of money in his pocket. He’s headed home where he’ll buy a plot of land and finally settle down.

He stops at a strange little border town called Agry where he quickly learns everything – a glass of whisky, a room for the night, a well-cooked steak – costs ten dollars exactly. He sits down with a bottle only to have it taken away from him by a drunk named Tom Agry. Moments later a young man named Juan (Manuel Rojas) charges into the bar and kills Tom.

The Sheriff and several other men round Juan up and beat the living tar out of him. Buchanan steps in to lend a hand. Naturally, this lands him in jail.

Nearly everybody of importance in the town is named Agry. The leader of the family Simon runs the town with a tight fist and is also a judge.

There is a trial, and a breakout, and lots of gunfights. It is all light-hearted and fun. There are a few attempts to be actually funny, but mostly it is just breezy and slight. Most of the other films Scott and Boetticher made together are much more serious in nature and have something to say. This is pure entertainment.

It isn’t bad at that, but I can’t help but compare it to films like The Tall T and Ride Lonesome (both of which I reviewed here), and this film just doesn’t compare.

Westerns in March – Day of the Outlaw (1959)

day of the outlaw poster

One of the things I love about Westerns is how they deal with taming the wild frontier, and how they depict small societies forming miniature communities. As Europeans settled across the Western United States they formed embryonic societies outside the confines of the Eastern cities. Certainly, they brought with them Western ideas of society (while destroying many of the native cultures around them) but they could literally create their communities in the ways that they saw fit.

The television series Deadwood does an amazing job of bringing forth what I’m talking about.

Obviously, Western movies take a great many liberties with history and the societies that they depict are often in the shape of (what was then) modern ideas, but it is still a fascinating concept.

Day of the Outlaw begins with a man, Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) who helped found and make safe the tiny, isolated community of Bitters, Wyoming. He killed and ran off various outlaws and badmen from the area to make it safe for women and children. He figures that gives him a say in how things are run now.

But while society sometimes needs men like Starrett, it likes to forget them once their jobs are done. Homesteaders have come to town, farmers, and they want to put up barbed wire fences (someday I want to do a study on the use of fences in Westerns) to keep their livestock from running away. Starrett runs cattle across the open land and fences get in his way.

It is this conflict that the film begins. Starrett has come into town to either force the homesteaders to not put up their fences or kill them. It doesn’t help matters that the head homesteader is married to Helen Crane (Tina Louise) whom Starrett loves. Just as the fight is about to happen Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives) and his band of outlaws bust in.

They are on the run from the cavalry but need a place to button down for the night. The men are raring for a good time and figure copious amounts of whiskey and a few turns with the women would be just about right. Bruhn is a tough man, and not opposed to murder when it suits him, but he forbids the men from indulging their basest instincts. Not so much because he has a soft heart for the women but because he knows the men will wind up fighting over the small number of women in this burg, and that’s not good for anybody.

Director Andre de Toth ratchets up the tension as the outlaws grow increasingly impatient and Starrett learns to become the good man. Matters take a turn for the worse as storms blow in making it nearly impossible for anyone to leave.

Cinematographer Russell Harlan fills the screen with wide vistas of the on-location snowy mountains. The stark black-and-white photographer emphasizes the isolation and frozen hardness of everything.

Robert Ryan and Burl Ives are terrific as two hard men sizing each other up in an impossible situation. It all comes to a boil with Starrett leading the men through the mountains in a suicidal trek that he hopes will at least keep the townsfolk safe.

I liked it a lot and I recommend it to one and all.

Westerns in March: A Reason To Live, A Reason To Die (1972)

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This movie is basically a Western version of The Dirty Dozen with James Coburn playing disgraced Col. Pembroke who surrendered Fort Holman to the Confederate Army without a single shot being fired. We’ll eventually find out why, but as the film begins he’s disgraced and considered a coward.

After he breaks out of Fort Holman, where he is being held as a prisoner of war, he makes his way to another Union Fort and makes a deal with its commander. He’ll take a handful of men and retake the fort, reclaiming his good name. The commander figures if Pembroke actually accomplishes this then he’ll get a promotion and if he doesn’t then good riddance. For his team, Pembroke rescues a group of deserters and cutthroats about to be hanged. This includes Eli (Bud Spencer) who he already knows.

As soon as the men are on their way they begin to grumble and plot to ditch Pembroke and regain their freedom. Pembroke has his own reasons for going back (and it isn’t just to clear his name) but he tells the men there is hidden gold and if they succeed then they will all be rich in Mexico.

The Fort is considered impenatrable (which is all the more reason Pembroke is considered a coward for having surrendered so easily) but naturally our heroes find a way in. Telly Savalas plays the new commander. There is a big battle with lots of explosions. Some of our heroes die, but only the ones you don’t really care for.

It is pretty paint-by-numbers and it really does borrow a lot from The Dirty Dozen. The action is well done and it moves along rather quickly. Coburn is good as is Bud Spencer (whom I only know from that Robert Altman take on Popeye). Savalas sometimes attempts a Southern accent, but mostly feels like he’s playing in some other movie. I read somewhere that he wanted to portray the character as gay (which was still a big no-no in 1972) which may account for his odd mannerisms.

All in all it is a decent film, worth watching if you like westerns or Coburn, but still a bit of an oddity.

Westerns in March – Hombre (1967)

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As it is March the 15th and I haven’t written about a single western I’ve clearly been remiss at tackling my Westerns in March theme. My apologies for that. It has been quite a month, but I’m gonna try and make the back half of March full of cowboys.

Westerns have always struggled with their depictions of Native Americans. For decades they were generally depicted as nameless savages out to rape the womenfolk and massacre the men. Even when Hollywood started to be more sympathetic they often chose white actors to portray the Native American characters with more than a few lines.

I had all that in mind when Paul Newman shows up in Hombre with tanned skin, long hair, and dressed like an Apache. My immediate thought was, “Oh no. Not this again.” But Hombre has something different in mind. Newman plays John Russell a white man who was stolen and raised by Apaches. But he was treated well enough that when his real father found him as a teenager and took him home he ran away to join back with his tribe.

As the film begins he is living on a reservation. A Mexican man comes to tell him that his father has died and left him his boarding house. The man suggests that Russell should clean himself up and live a nice life as a white man. He does clean himself up, gets a haircut, and puts on white man clothes (makes himself look like Paul Newman) but he has no intention of living at the boarding house. The lady who runs it, tries to make him a deal, says she’ll still run the house that he won’t have to do anything and he’ll make a nice living. But he decides to sell it. He takes the money and joins a stagecoach out of town.

There are a couple of fancy-pants riders on the coach, one of who used to be the US Indian Agent for the reservation (Fredric March). Since Russell now looks like Paul Newman the Agent (and especially his wife, played by Barbara Rush) takes a shine to him, but once they learn he used to live on the reservation as a native they immediately force him into riding up top with the driver.

There is a lot of that in this film. Paul Newman was one of the most handsome men on the planet, and with his blondish hair and blue eyes, one of the whitest. But the moment anyone finds out his character lived with the Apache they hate him, and they treat him like garbage.

For his part, Russell doesn’t play the Indian with a heart of gold. He’s full of righteous anger. The story inevitably leads them to a situation in which Russell has to save the racist white people but it plays out in unexpected ways. It isn’t a perfect film and I can’t say that all of its racial moralizing works, but it sure is interesting. It is also a fine bit of genre filmmaking as well. I’ve made it sound like more of a morality play than it really is.

That situation I alluded to finds one of the coach riders with a box full of (stolen) cash and some outlaws trying to steal it. The film takes all of that stuff and makes it quite thrilling to watch beyond the fascinating takes on Native Americans and how the white man treated them.

Highly recommended.

Westerns In March: All the Movies

the searchers poster

For the last couple of years, I’ve tried to watch and write about Western movies in March. I couldn’t think of a clever title for this theme, but I’ve enjoyed partaking in it. Even if I don’t seem to write as many movies as I’d like to each time.

Here’s the full list of films I’ve covered.

The Big Trail (1930)
Blood on the Moon (1948)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
The Cariboo Trail (1950)
Cheyenne Autumn (1964)
Day of the Outlaw (1959)
Django (1966)
The Great Train Robbery (1903)
Hombre (1967)
Hour of the Gun (1964)
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Major Dundee (1965)
The Naked Spur (1953)
The Quick and the Dead (1987)
A Reason To Live, A Reason To Die (1972)
The Searchers (1956)
Stars: in My Crown (1950)
Vera Cruz (1954)
The Wild Bunch (1969)
Young Guns (1988)

Westerns In March: The Great Train Robbery (1903)

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)

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)

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.