Johnny Guitar (Republic, 1954)
A camp classic The more I watch Johnny Guitar (and I’ve just watched it again) the more I think it’s an absolutely stunning film. Of course it’s distinctly weird. When it came out, this picture puzzled Western lovers in the US. It looked like a Western but it was so stylized and […]
The Westerns of Rory Calhoun
Best of the rest? Many of the Western heroes of my childhood (Bronze Age) have remained with me all through my time shuffling on this mortal coil. I grew up with the great Western actors of the 1950s and thrilled to their movies and TV shows. But on a few, just […]
Blind Justice (HBO, 1994)
A 1990s American spaghetti . . There has been quite a little mini-genre of ‘blind’ Westerns. Cameron Mitchell was a gunfighter who goes blind in Minnesota Clay, Peter Graves was blind in Fort Defiance and Pat Wayne managed to shoot accurately, though sightless, in An Eye for an Eye. On TV too gunman Jan Merlin was blinded […]
Whispering Smith (NBC TV, 1961)
Whispering Smith (NBC TV, 1961) We’ve already had a retrospective look at the Western movies of Audie Murphy, and very fine some of them were, too. But let’s not forget television. In common with many a Western actor, Audie in the late 1950s toyed with the idea of a TV show. In the […]
The Westerns of Sterling Hayden
“I started at the top and worked my way down.” (Sterling Hayden) Sterling Hayden was something of a rarity in the world of the Western, a fair-haired hero. Blonds were usually the bad guys. But he was six foot five (1.96m), a bit of a beefcake (he had been a male model […]
Winterhawk (Howco International Pictures, 1975)
A bit long . Winterhawk was a mid-70s pro-Indian picture which got a small-scale independent theatrical release but did most of its sales on VHS. It’s overlong and over-earnest but it does have some saving graces, notably the National Geographic-style photography of Montana winter locations and the cast of grizzled Western old-timers. It […]
Timberjack (Republic, 1955)
“Timber!” (again) . . There’s a whole sub-genre of ‘logging’ Westerns, stories in which the brave hero dominates the ancient forests while beating out bad guys on the side. We think of The Big Trees, Guns of the Timberland, King of the Lumberjacks, Law of the Timber, The Timber Trail and so on, pretty well […]
Bloody West: Infamous Legends (Seal Games)
Nice idea but disappointing I don’t know if you do video games. I do a bit on my iPad (Real Racing 3 being a favorite) and I thought I’d try Bloody West, from Seal Games (a German outfit, I believe). . . The idea is that you have a Western town under […]
The Half-Breed (Triangle Distributing, 1916)
A classic silent Western In 1916 top silent-movie personnel got together to make The Good Bad Man, which we reviewed recently, and later that year the same ensemble produced one of the most famous of the early Westerns, The Half-Breed. Starring huge celebrity Douglas Fairbanks, with Sam De Grasse as the bad guy, produced […]
The Good Bad Man (Triangle Distributing, 1916)
Douglas Fairbanks is Passin’ Through The whole notion of the good badman is fundamental to the Western. Central characters with a murky past who come good and act heroically are a staple of our noble genre, and that has been so since the earliest days. William S Hart made a specialty of it. […]