Tomahawk Trail (UA, 1957)
Not great art but quite enjoyable Tomahawk Trail was another of the Bel Air productions put together by Aubrey Schenck and Howard Koch. It was directed by a go-to of theirs, Lesley Selander. The movie had quite a life because Koch, as director/producer, re-used parts of it (waste not, want not) in […]
Convict Stage (Fox, 1965)
Showdown in a ghost town: classic stuff The first of the three Westerns that highly experienced Lesley Selander directed for producer Hal Klein at Fox in 1965 was Convict Stage. It’s actually quite good. Selander always handled action well and this is no exception. He also managed to get a somber mood […]
Fort Courageous (Fox, 1965)
Another mid-60s Retrowestern . . Recently we were looking at Fort Utah, one of the dozen or so low-budget mid- to late-60s retro-westerns put together by AC Lyles and released by Paramount, featuring actors of the decade before. Well, Lyles wasn’t the only producer to try that on. Over at Fox, Hal Klein had the […]
Lesley Selander
A real pro One of the names we come across again and again on this blog is Lesley Selander. It’s easy to concentrate on the famous Western directorial names such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, Anthony Mann, Sam Peckinpah and the other greats, and indeed we have looked at their careers, […]
Fort Utah (Paramount, 1967)
Ireland is Tom Horn Fort Utah was one of the later low-budget Westerns producer AC Lyles made to be released by Paramount, the tenth of 13, and like the others, it featured some well-known Western actors of the 1940s and 50s. By the late 1960s the Western was in a state of decline […]
San Fernando Valley (Republic, 1944)
Dale’s first but not one of Roy’s best San Fernando Valley was in many ways just another Roy Rogers oater like the pre-war ones we reviewed recently, those first four Republic Westerns in 1938. San Fernando runs for just over an hour, is in black & white and to be brutally frank is […]
Bill Longley
Gun man Post-Civil War Texas produced many homicidal criminals, gun-men as they were sometimes called (the terms gunfighter and gunslinger were later nomenclature). Defeat in the war and subsequent occupation, as many Texans saw it, severe economic dislocation, the political restructuring of so-called Reconstruction which was detested especially by the poorer and less […]
The Last Musketeer (Republic, 1952)
Rex and Slim ride again . . The Last Musketeer was the second of Republic’s series of oaters with Rex Allen and Slim Pickens, released the month after Colorado Sundown. Of course the title had nothing whatever to do with either plot or characters of any musketeers but that was par for the course. Westerns […]
Colorado Sundown (Republic, 1952)
Rex and Slim ride together for the first time . Following our conversation the other day about sidekicks, I thought we might have a look at the very first of the series of oaters that Rex Allen made with Slim Pickens as the comic relief (for if truth be told, Rex was, like most […]
Shine On, Harvest Moon (Republic, 1938)
. The origin of Jackson Hole . . The last of the quartet of debutant Westerns that Roy Rogers starred in for Republic in 1938 took for its title the old vaudeville standard Shine On, Harvest Moon. The movie was no relation to Warners’ 1944 picture of the same title with Ann Sheridan. It turned […]