Budgets
$$$ We sometimes talk about a low-budget Western or a big-budget one, or even a mid-budget oater. What did it mean? I thought it might be interesting today to look at dollars and cents a bit. Of course it’s very difficult to compare the budgets of Westerns from different years. […]
Westworld (HBO, 2016+)
Yawn Despite its big budget and the ballyhoo that attended it, HBO’s series Westworld is very disappointing. I was looking forward to it. I quite enjoyed the 1973 movie. It was mildly amusing, and Yul was good strutting about in his Magnificent Seven costume. So I signed up for a Netflix-style subscription of some […]
Bankers and bank robberies
Bank gets robbed: serves the crooked banker right Bank robberies are an essential ingredient of the Western movie genre. They might be large set-pieces such as the raid on the First National Bank in Northfield, Minnesota, in many a Jesse James flick – see, for example, the opening of The True Story of Jesse […]
Apache Woman (ARC, 1955)
She’s only half-Apache though Apache Woman was a low-budget oater by Roger Corman. Corman (born 1926 and still going strong, as far as I know), pictured left, is, as you will probably know, an interesting chap who studied engineering, didn’t like it, did a term at Oxford University in England studying […]
Women in Westerns
Jane finally got a gun It is sometimes said that in Westerns women were only either saintly schoolteacher types who redeemed the good-badman hero or whore-with-a-heart-of-gold saloon gals who provided the racier element. The Western was a male genre which projected its binary fantasies onto its movies. I believe this to be […]
The Gun that Won the West (Columbia, 1955)
Jim Bridger rides again What was the gun that won the West? Many people would say the Colt .45, and judging by its appearance in Western movies (including those set in the 1860s before the gun was invented) they’d be right. Every cowboy had one on his hip and gunslingers were lightning-fast at […]
Dead Man (Miramax, 1995)
Quite a trip . . Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man arouses perplexity, scorn and admiration in equal measure from Westernistas, I find. I’m on the admiration side of the fence, just to set out my stall at the get-go. . . Jarmusch at Cannes . . I read on the subject a 1998 essay, The […]
The bath
You can keep your hat on In 1919 there came a major turning point in the development of the motion picture. Yup, you’ve guessed it, in that year Cecil B DeMille decided to show, in Male and Female, the big hit movie of that year, a bath scene. He had Gloria Swanson step […]
The Fighting Redhead (Eagle-Lion, 1949)
Red Ryder rides again . . Red Ryder started as a very popular cartoon character in newspapers in 1938, created by writer/merchandising wizard Stephen Slesinger and talented artist Fred Harman. Don ‘Red’ Barry was cast as the hero by Republic boss Herb Yates when the studio acquired the rights to bring Red to the […]
Brave Warrior (Columbia, 1952)
Watchable twaddle . . Jay Silverheels wasn’t only Tonto. In different movies from 1937 to 1973 he was Geronimo (three times), Satanta and Red Cloud, as far as real chiefs go, as well as countless fictional Indians, including Chingachgook in The Pathfinder. Now he added Tecumseh to his list. In fact The Pathfinder and Brave […]