The Spikes Gang (UA, 1974)
. Old scoundrel mentors young boys – badly . By the early 70s Lee Marvin, that great Western actor, was doing grizzled old-timer roles. The Spikes Gang was his penultimate Western – two years later he would do the rather unfortunate The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday. In The Duel at Silver Creek (1952), Don Siegel’s […]
Railroads
Lay them rails Ever since The Great Train Robbery of 1903, considered by many to be the first Western movie, railroads have played a key part in the genre. Even before that, in fact, because all through the nineteenth century ballads, dime novels and plays had featured them. In The Fast Mail, […]
Brigham Young: Frontiersman (Fox, 1940)
A premake of The Ten Commandments . At the end of the 1930s big A-picture Westerns came back into fashion and Fox’s contribution was to put its major star Tyrone Power, who wasn’t accustomed to wearing a Stetson, in its Technicolor blockbuster Jesse James (1939), directed by big name Henry King, with Henry Fonda […]
Cemeteries, funerals and undertakers
A grave matter Given that death was ever-present in the Western – you’ll hardly ever see one in which one person or another does not die – it is perhaps not surprising that cemeteries, funerals and undertakers are so often featured. . Hays and Dodge in Kansas both lay claim to have had […]
The Last Drop of Water (Biograph, 1911)
Atonement . On one level just a one-reel short, and a melodramatic morality tale, The Last Drop of Water is also a little landmark in the history of the Western. . . Worth a look . It was directed and produced by the great DW Griffith, who made 47 Westerns (or Westernish pictures […]
Preachers
Howdy, Reverend We might say that the Western generally is a secular form. Cowboy heroes may (or may not) be believers in a divine creator but if so, they are essentially pantheistic, and they eschew organized religion on the whole. Regular churchgoers tend to be women, or stolid townsmen in suits, and not […]
Great Day in the Morning (RKO, 1956)
Jacques’s last Western. Stack’s too. . . . . Great Day in the Morning was Jacques Tourneur’s last Western. Tourneur (above, between gargoyles, not cat people) was a class act as director, and was especially good at creating ‘mood’, that indefinable atmosphere that marked his pictures out. He […]
The shooting lesson
Squeeze, don’t pull A common scene in Westerns was a shooting lesson. Often it is the hero who teaches a young neophyte how to handle a gun. I suppose that the shootin’ iron was so intrinsic to the Western and such a vital part of the Westerner’s equipment that learning how to […]
A Western dictionary: essays on different aspects of the Western movie
What did you do in the lockdown, Daddy? Lockdown is ending, here in France where I live – or at least being relaxed. I have been using my confinement time profitably, I am sure you will agree, by reading and writing about Westerns, watching them and generally pondering the noble genre. What more fruitful use […]
Titles
Title: the distinguishing name of a written, printed, or filmed production (Webster’s) Funny how you can tell right away from a title that a movie is a Western. . . Let’s take an actor like Joel McCrea, who appeared in Westerns but many other genres too. You can’t instantly tell from […]