Showing posts with label westerns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label westerns. Show all posts

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Western Russell Watch: The Tall Men (1955)





Watched:  03/13/2024
Format:  Criterion
Viewing:  First
Director:  Raoul Walsh
Selection:  me

I had a brief, brief moment at the start of this film where I wondered if Larry McMurtry hadn't seen this film and decided to borrow from it.  And... maybe, but unlikely.

This is kitchen sink western, with the wilds of the northern west, the frontierish town of San Antonio, cattle drives, hostile Sioux, weather, and one woman.

The basic gist is that the Allison brothers, played by Clark Gable and Cameron Mitchell, have gone northwest since the end of the Civil War, where they fought for the South in Quantrill's Raiders (look it up, and it is a choice).  After the war, they've decided to turn outlaw (really trying to not to editorialize historically here) and gone to Montana.  

Seeing what appears to be an easy mark in Robert Ryan and his moneybelt, they stick him up, only to find he has nothing but $100's, which would draw too much attention.  They strike a deal that Clark Gable will drive Ryan's cattle from San Antonio to Montana and they'll split the proceeds.  

On the way to San Antonio, they meet Jane Russell, who is travelling west to seek her fortune in California.  Eventually Gable and Russell wind up sort of falling for each other until it becomes clear their ideas of what life should be like don't jive.  In San Antonio, she falls in with Ryan and his money.

Together, they head to Montana with the cattle.  

Like a lot of these epic westerns, it's hard to say if this is an action-comedy-musical or what it is, exactly.  It's a fascinating period where a setting and period could open the door for a movie to wear a lot of genre hats under the banner of "Western".  

There's the genuine issue of Cameron Mitchell's characters' blood lust when he's drunk, and he's an alcoholic.  The challenge of moving cattle from Texas to Montana, through Kansas and then through Sioux territory.  And the utterly open question of why on earth Jane Russell went on the cattle drive with them back to Montana.  

There's parts of this movie I liked quite a bit.  I also find the movie a fascinating time capsule of a film that is a-ok with having it's heroes being not just former Confederates and their lost cause, but Quantrill's Raiders, who were notoriously awful people.  I won't comment much on the way the Sioux are depicted, because it's about what you'd expect, only marginally worse, maybe?  We have no actual Native American characters that are even seen in close-up.  And of course Hispanics are depicted as friendly and gregarious and existing to serve alpha male white dudes.  

The gender politics are wildly all over the place, with Russell an independent woman, and that's what the men like, but then still applying mid-50's POV to her - even after it falls flat.  But Russell is almost a cartoon throughout the movie, and we know she can play it serious, so it's a little odd.  She's also 20 years younger than Gable here, who is starting to show his age a bit and clearly playing a guy a decade or more younger.

In general, I like the cattle drive idea, and that it's staffed with vaqueros out of San Antonio, which has a nice historical realism to it.  And the drive footage is kind of beautiful.  And the overall plot of the film still basically works.  I just think there's a better film in here somewhere, and maybe I should just watch or re-read Lonesome Dove.  There is a whole sequence at the end I'd be curious how it got filmed, because it's people in the middle of a stampede, which seems... terrifying?  



Monday, March 4, 2024

Leone Watch: Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)




Watched:  03/03/2024
Format:  Paramount+
Viewing:  Unknown
Director:  Sergio Leone
Selection:  Oh, definitely me

It had been a few years since I'd last watched this movie all the way through, and it's funny to go back see my concern in that write-up that I'd watch the movie too much and it would lose some magic.  Well, I took about 8 years off between viewings, so there you go (I also wrote the film up briefly in 2015).  

This time I was very, very interested in the movie's not exactly subtle analogy for "the end of the West" as rail threatens to bring civilization and that will end the days of the gunslingers and a way of life that's maybe not lasted all that long, but long enough, and can't be a part of the world.  And what happens to the archetypes as the future rolls in.  None of these men are going to change - but the woman can bring civilization.  

As some pals would say, the movie is "vibes".  The plot is pretty easily summed up, and it has long, drawn-out scenes with characters watching and looking, and only speaking as needed - something I associate with Leone films in general.  

But, yeah, I was pretty tired, and pretty raw I guess when I put the movie on, because I got a bit choked up watching some scenes.  Not sad scenes.  Like, literally just watching the shot from the train, to the station to the crane up to the whole town, and Jill moving forward purposefully - and paired with the incredible Ennio Morricone score.  We just don't get that swing-for-the-fences stuff in movies anymore, if we ever did.  

But this movie goes wide as needed, and close-in as needed.  It's a movie where eyes tell the story as much as words. And, man, does Claudia Cardinale's slightest expression carry an ocean of meaning.

Anyway, if you've never seen it, it remains one of my desert-island movies.  There's so much that's great in the movie, and I think people who know about it, know.  But it still seems to fly a bit under the radar. 





Saturday, August 26, 2023

Western Watch: Rio Bravo (1959)




Watched:  08/26/2023
Format:  Max
Viewing:  First
Director:  Howard Hawks

Sometimes a movie just works, and there's a reason that folks keep watching it, decade over decade.  Rio Bravo (1959) has a bit of a reputation as Dean Martin's best role, or at least that's what I recall hearing, and I always assumed I'd get to the movie, but just had not.  

Had I known it also stars Angie Dickinson, I would have gotten to it more quickly.  But it surprised me to learn this was Howard Hawks, not John Ford, and that Leigh Brackett had been involved with the screenplay.  So, you've got a lot of things going for the movie right out of the gate.

I'm also aware that John Wayne is now considered a terrible human by folks younger than myself, but if you want to be mad about (a) things that are likely a myth, and (b) every opinion and attitude of generations prior that do not match your own - we're going to be here all day.  

For going on a decade, I've compared the superhero film to the Western.  It's a broad category encompassing a lot of movies that share common elements, but it's also a dubious and overly broad categorization, and no indicator of quality one way or another.  Plenty of terrible superhero films are released, just as plenty of terrible westerns were made, but there are also great, thoughtful superhero film just as there are phenomenal movies made featuring characters who wear hats and six-shooters.  

Tuesday, May 3, 2022

Western Noir Watch: Lust for Gold (1949)




Watched:  05/02/2022
Format:  Criterion Channel
Viewing:  First
Decade:  1940's
Director:  S. Sylvan Simon and George Marshall


Well, Criterion Channel is currently highlighting a collection of films starring Ida Lupino, and that's good news for me, anyway.  Always on the hunt for more Lupino, I wanted to check out something I hadn't seen, and we mostly randomly landed on Lust for Gold (1949), what appeared to be a Western, but which really turned out to be Western Noir, which is absolutely a thing.

This is a supremely weird movie, and they needed to make one movie or the other movie in their movie, but instead they give you two partial movies, and I cannot begin to conceive of the "why".  A full 2/3rds of the film is flashback to events from the 1880's, and the rest takes place, which a much-less-talented team of actors, in the present day of 1949.  And I'm not sure the whole section in 1949 needs to exist at all, and I'm not sure that the events of 1880 shouldn't have been mentioned in about three sentences in a very different version of how the 1949 stuff spins out.

The end result is that you don't get any Ida Lupino until something like 35 minutes into a 90 minute movie, and... come on.  What are we even doing here?

Friday, March 11, 2022

Western Watch: My Darling Clementine (1946)




Watched:  03/09/2022
Format:  Amazon
Viewing:  First
Director:  John Ford

Yet another deeply factually inaccurate take on the events including Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and the Clantons at the OK Corral, but a solid one that throws out all attempts to stay true to the story and instead does its own myth-making.  That's alright.  We have how many years of TV and movies that have used Earp and Holliday as fictional characters with fictional motivations to the point where my usual rules about biopics can't possibly apply.  

I was spurred to check this one out based on a single photo of Victor Mature in a cowboy hat, a still from this movie, and I'm a bit of a Victor Mature fan, and I had never seen him in a western.  When I checked to see what the story was with My Darling Clementine (1946), it was directed by Ford and co-starred Henry Fonda as Earp and Linda Darnell as "Chihuahua", a Mexican songstress.  And, look, I'm only human.  I'll watch a Linda Darnell movie for all the wrong reasons.  The titular Clementine is played by Cathy Downs, who would go on to sci-fi fame in some B pictures like The Amazing Colossal Man, but who also performed in some noir pictures around the 1940's and 50's.  

he's so cool


The movie fictionalizes a full background as a surgeon for "Doc" Holliday (he was a dentist), and makes up a love triangle between himself and Chihuahua, his local saloon lady, and Clementine - a nurse he once loved when he was still practicing.  While the Clantons are trying to remain outlaw lords of Tombstone, they make the mistake of killing Wyatt Earp's (Fonda's) brother, which leads to Earp becoming Marshall of Tombstone - already famed for his work in Dodge City and Deadwood.  Earp falls hard for the virtuous Clementine, and she has some conflicted feelings (and Doc seems kinda screwed up anyway, plus, you know, he's dating Linda Darnell).  

I can genuinely recommend the movie.  I think it's got a lot going for it, and Ford gets great stuff out of his four leads.  The real life story will continue to exist, but I like the arc for Mature's Holliday, and I think he nails it.   But you've also got Ford's Monument valley backdrops, beautifully shot, thoughtful execution of scene after scene, and a kind of humanity to the characters that grounds everything.


I mean...  Linda Darnell




Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Interaction Watch: For a Few Dollars More (1965)




Watched: 11/10/2020
Format:  Amazon Watch Party
Viewing:  Unknown.  Probably fourth or fifth
Decade:  1960's
Director:  Sergio Leone

It had been maybe 15 years since I last watched For a Few Dollars More (1965), the second in the Man With No Name trilogy, which catapulted Clint Eastwood to stardom, made Leone an unlikely star director, and gave me some movies to be blown away by in my last teens/ early 20's.  

It's an interesting bridge between the solo adventure of a Fistful of Dollars, which is also maybe a bit rougher from a technical standpoint, and the groundbreaking filmmaking that would come with The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and explode into masterpiece filmmaking with Once Upon a Time in the West.  

I may like Leone's work.  Sue me.

The film isn't *that* different to characters and bears from A Fistful of Dollars, but it does insert Lee Van Cleef as the variable in the experiment, and to great effect.  It's not hard to track how Leone went from this film to the three character structure of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly in the next film, giving chances for shifting alliances based on the character's self interests and motivations.  Flashbacks in this film presage similar from the finale from OUATITW.  

It's a gorgeous film, and the pacing and characters are happily breaking the conventions of Westerns of the prior 60 years of film, pointing the way for what we would come to expect from an American action film.  To the point that, with no knowledge of film history, what people coming to this movie for the first time would even think.  But this is 1965 - we're barely two steps from Hopalong Cassidy, chronologically.  

If you think you don't like westerns (a statement I think just basically means: I don't like movies about people without cars, as "western" is a nonsense category of a movie), give the Man With No Name Trilogy a shot.  It's amazing stuff.  

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Crawford Watch: Johnny Guitar (1954)


 

Watched:  09/11/2020
Format: Watch Party
Viewing:  Third
Decade:  1950's
Director:  Nicholas Ray

I don't know how successful Johnny Guitar (1954) was upon its release.  As a Western, it plays with a lot of the tropes of expansion, cattlemen versus progress and settlement, gunslingers, robbing stage coaches and more.  But at the end of the day it's about two iron-willed women who really, really do not like each other, and how one self-righteous person can lead everyone down a path that ends in murder.

1954 was part of the second act of Joan Crawford's bumpy ride of a career that solidified nine years prior with Mildred Pierce.  The glamour days of Grand Hotel were 20 years in the past.  She still had the weirdo horror movie career ahead of her, and was just about to set out as America's foremost proponent of Pepsi Cola.

Friday, April 3, 2020

Proto-Super Reboot Watch: Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981)



Watched:  03/30/2020
Format:  Amazon streaming
Viewing:  First
Decade:  1980's

I remember being confused that, in 1981, I was not allowed to see either Legend of the Lone Ranger or Zorro the Gay Blade.   I'd catch Zorro in the summer of 1993 on TV  - summer I graduated high school, and it confirmed what I'd heard from friends at the elementary school lunch table about why I'd not been taken to see a movie about the original superhero.  Legend of the Lone Ranger held a lot more mystery - partially because it was just harder to find and partially because of what little I'd heard.  "It's really violent" I was told.

Monday, March 2, 2020

Western Watch: Shane (1953)


Watched:  03/02/2020
Format:  Alamo Mueller
Viewing:  Unknown - more than 5
Decade:  1950's

It was a delight to see Shane (1953) on the big screen at Alamo Mueller this evening with SimonUK.  Si had never seen it, so that was kind of cool. 

Back in 7th grade my Reading teacher, Ms. McDowell, had us read the original novel, and then we watched the movie.  I've been a fan ever since and am not objective in any way about Shane.  I will say, seeing it on the big screen was stunning - the Grand Tetons loom large in the background and Wyoming's magnificent landscapes provide epic sweep to the story. 

And while it's no mystery that Shane is largely about violence, the impact of the sound in the theater versus confined to my TV speakers provided an intensity to the film I wasn't expecting. 

If it's been a while or you've never seen it, give Shane a shot.  It's been endlessly ripped off and borrowed from, but the original holds up amazingly well.

Monday, August 12, 2019

Western Watch: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)



Watched:  08/11/2019
Format:  TCM on DVR from a looooong time ago
Viewing:  first
Decade:  1940's

Well.  Between this and The Lost Weekend, I picked quite the double-bill for the weekend.

I mean, I knew.  I'd rented this movie twice in college but when I'd think about what it was about, I'd never hit "play" on the ol' VCR.  And I'd recorded it a half-dozen times on the DVR and never watched it.  But this time I did.

The Ox-Bow Incident (1942) is about a small town in the old west who finds out that a local rancher has been killed, and so they pull together a posse to go track down the killers.  It's a mish-mash of local color and yahoos, rationalizing why they don't need to follow the rules, exactly, and supported by the ineptitude and slack nature of some local authority.

Sunday, January 28, 2018

Saturday, December 10, 2016

Okay. Time to talk a bit about "Westworld" - A non-definitive discussion.



Note:  I'm going to talk about HBO's 2016 series, Westworld, as a whole.  If you're avoiding spoilers, this is not the place for you.  

There's a great deal to like about the 10 episodes of HBO's sci-fi series, Westworld.  It's been interesting to find out how many people haven't seen the original Westworld film by Michael Crichton - a name which is pobably just an echo to Millennials but which was a hosuehold name through the 1990's.  I'll cop to having not seen (or don't remember seeing) Futureworld (1976) or the TV series Beyond Westworld (1980).

I am sure the original 1973 film felt like futureshock at the time, or maybe sci-fi silliness to many.  The first time I watched it back before high school, which would have been the late 1980's, 70's hair-stylings aside, it seemed to work very well as a thriller, even if it didn't seem to run deep with the complexities of Blade Runner or other AI films.  Well into the 1980's, our relationship with technology and computers wasn't as everyday as it's become, and fiction treated computers a bit like the genie's lamp right up through the late 1990's.

What the movie does that still holds up is create an adult theme park that is both impossible, yet seems like something that people would be up for whether we want to admit it or not if the wild success of Las Vegas is any indication.  It's a world of sex and violence with only the most minor of repercussions as one fulfills fantasies and indulges whims in a familiar place, but one separated enough from our own day-to-day that you'd lose your bearings.  And steeped in the inherent violence of the filmic west, it's a world in which you'd be more likely to shoot first and question later.

Sunday, June 26, 2016

Robo-Watch: Westworld (1973)



It had been some time since I'd watched the 1973 sci-fi classic, Westworld.  I'd rented it with Jason some time back in the late 80's, and I think we both really liked it (but, if memory serves, he'd seen it before).    I've only seen it again once in college somewhere along the line, enjoyed it, but not watched it again anytime in the last 16 years at least.  I've tried to watch the sequel, Futureworld, but just couldn't watch the 1976 film.  Something about the pacing lost me the one time I tried to give it a whirl.

It seems HBO is launching a TV series also titled Westworld which will greatly expand on the ideas presented in the movie.  It's got an all-star cast and looks to be the sort of thing I find interesting in science fiction.*  I'll be checking it out, certainly, and have high hopes.  Anyway, it got me fired up to review the original film once again.

Friday, June 10, 2016

TL;DR - Spaghetti Watch-tern (Again): Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)




Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) isn't just one of my favorite Spaghetti Westerns or Westerns, it's one of my favorite movies.  I try not to watch it too often as I'm afraid I'll reduce something about the film by making the viewing of the film rote (I've come dangerously close to this with Superman I and II).  Instead, each time I watch the movie, I feel like I get something more out of it, see some detail, appreciate some nuance a bit more.  If you ever want to see my ideal for combination of camera work, design of scene, score, acting and blocking to drive story and ideas - look no further.

The film features a tremendous central cast.  Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson of course.  Jason Robards.

Woody Strode and Jack Elam have guest spots as gunmen.

And, of course, we have Claudia Cardinale as Jill.

I wrote up this movie in August of last year.  You can read my write up there with many loving screengrabs I stole from the internets.

SimonUK and I took in a screening at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz on Wednesday evening.  It was the second time I'd seen the movie on the big screen, the first being one of my first trips to The Alamo Drafthouse at its original location on Colorado Street.  This time we didn't get the large theater, but the projection was phenomenal.  I assume it was s digital projection, as we weren't told otherwise.

While I don't have anything particularly new to say about the movie itself, I have been thinking about one aspect of the film in relation to current trends in how we interact with media in 2016.

Saturday, April 2, 2016

Western Watch: Shane (1953)



I hadn't watched Shane (1953) in more than a decade.  Even the DVD I have is clearly a relic from the beginning of the DVD era.  If I hadn't watched the movie in a while, it seems that Jamie does not care for Shane, and that's one of those things that you're going to have to endure if you want to stay married.

For my dollar, Shane is one of the great westerns, one of those stories of the expansion into the west and foretelling other great Western stories that explore the nature and fate of the gun-fighter like The Unforgiven,  Beyond the loose definition of the Western genre, it's also, simply, a great film.  Beautifully shot, well-acted, nuanced and better than you likely remember.

Contextually, the book the movie was based on and faithfully adapted from (and which JAL and I read in class in 7th grade if memory serves) was released in 1949, four years after the closing of WWII.  That the book was told in a first-person perspective from the eyes of a child and the movie mostly retains that POV, makes sense.  At it's heart, the story speaks to the naivete of what we see when we look at violence as an heroic act, of putting the gunman on a pedestal - as both writers of Western novels and Hollywood have always done.  In 1949 and 1953, one can imagine all the GI's returning from WWII who had to endure the questions of both the folks who had seen the war from newsreels and kids who saw it as a comic-book adventure against cartoonish Japs and Krauts.

Monday, January 18, 2016

Bear Attack Watch: The Revenant (2015)

About five minutes after the bear attack in The Revenant (2015), I started to get a sinking feeling, and as the movie unspooled, the sinking feeling grew deeper and deeper.  I like to think I have middle-of-the-road taste in movies.  I like to think I can appreciate a dumb slapstick comedy - but I'll almost never pay to see a new one.  I like to think I can enjoy a standard actioner - but I don't know that I've gone to see one in the theater in years.  I've not seen The Expendables franchise and, sorry team, the Fast and the Furious franchise holds as much interest for me as hearing you describe your dreams at length.   I like to think I can muddle my way through art-house, but rarely bother.  And Oscar Bait movies generally bore me to tears.



What hit me as the movie progressed is:  I've become an arbitrarily picky movie watcher.  There's no science to my taste, no real sense to it.  But, oh my god, am I hard on anything that actually tries.

I'm the guy who didn't particularly like The Revenant.

Friday, November 6, 2015

Duke Watch: The Cowboys (1972)



It's interesting to see The Duke in a lead role in a 70's-era Western.  If the 1960's ushered in the modern era of filmmaking and the Spaghetti Western turned the genre on its ear, by the 1972 release of The Cowboys, the western had been fertile territory for telling stories stripped down to their essence.   By the late 1960's and into the 1970's, "realism" in violence on the screen had begun to creep in, or, at least, the horror of being shot had become part of the package.

The Cowboys is a bit of a fascinating movie, maybe not flawlessly executed, but it does double duty as both a coming-of-age film and a reminder of both the lives of our forebears in a fictional context (kids were working stiffs up until the 1940's), and of what we thought of as reasonable content for an all-ages audience in 1972.

In short, the movie would never, ever get made today, and it's likely that showing the movie to kids the same age as the ones in the film, despite the PG rating, would likely get you fired.

Sunday, August 23, 2015

Spaghetti Watch-tern: Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

I vaguely remember my dad explaining Spaghetti Westerns to me at some point in high school while we watched High Plains Drifter on cable on a Saturday, but I didn't watch The Man With No Name Trilogy until college when JAL took me to the Paramount to watch The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and I fell in love with a movie the way you do when you're 20.  I followed up quickly with the two others and then, in that era where you paid extra for letter-boxed movies on VHS, I got my hands on Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).



Expect no objectivity from me when discussing Sergio Leone's sweeping epic.  From Woody Strode entering the frame in the first scene to Claudia Cardinale carrying water jugs out to the railroad workers, there's not a frame of the movie I don't think hits all the right notes.  Now, it's not an obvious and easy movie to watch.  It unspools slowly and steadily, but isn't the sort of movie that's quick to lay out the plot for the audience lest they get lost, and it's rife with operatic symbolism and themes, and it does not care if you're keeping up.  The movie is too busy being exactly the movie Sergio Leone wanted to make, complete with Charles Bronson as the anonymous harmonica playing gunslinger and one of the best of the Leone/ Morricone collaborations.



Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Happy Birthday, Audrey Totter!


December 20th is the 95th Birthday of actress Audrey Totter!  I suppose that makes the timing of this post Audrey Totter-Day Eve.

Ms. Totter starred in a terrific run of films, and had one of her breakout appearances as a source of temptation for the always terrific John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice.  Ms. Totter's character caused a bit of jealousy in Lana Turner.  People, if you can give Lana Turner a moment of pause, clearly you're a force to be reckoned with.

The first movie I saw in which Ms. Totter got top billing was The Set-Up, and it's an absolutely terrific bit of acting under the direction of Robert Wise, but I'd also point you toward Tension, which is a terrific example of noir (and also has Cyd Charisse and Richard Basehart!).  In this one, Totter blows everyone else on screen right out of the frame.   I'd also recommend The Unsuspected to see her alongside Claude Rains and playing a wide range in a single film.

That's sort of what I think of now when I consider Ms. Totter's films.  She wasn't a character actor, and in all of her movies, she manages to do what better actors pull off - and that's too completely fill the character in a unique way and disappear into the role, but still retain the ability to make you notice them.  Her roles in Man or Gun and Tension couldn't be more different, but she's terrific in both movies.

In the 50's, Ms. Totter began working in both film and television, she starred in series like Cimarron City and Medical Center, and retired from the screen with her final televised appearance in 1984 on Murder, She Wrote.

Today, Ms. Totter is still living in Southern California, and through a terrific series of internet blips by way of Jenifer, on Sunday morning I received a video in my email that made my year.   The video is of Audrey Totter sending Jenifer and me best wishes.  The video absolutely blew my mind.  It's like someone you watch at the movies turning to the screen and saying, "Oh, hello, Ryan."

Special thanks to Ms. Totter's granddaughter, voice artist, Eden Totter.  (Eden is super-great, by the way.)


Happy Birthday, Ms. Totter!  We wish you the best on your birthday and will be spending the holiday break catching up on some of your movies we haven't yet seen.



PS.  If you ever want to know what it would be like to be a detective in the presence of Audrey Totter, I highly recommend the experimental first-person movie, Lady in the Lake, based on the Raymond Chandler novel.