Sam Whiskey (UA, 1969)
Lightweight In 1968 Ossie Davis appeared in a comedy Western written by William Norton and produced by Arnold Laven, and the following year he did it again. The Scalphunters in ’68 benefited from Burt Lancaster in the lead and had some weight, but in Sam Whiskey another Burt topped the billing, Burt Reynolds, and […]
Kirk Douglas, RIP
Thanks, Kirk And don’t forget he was a derringer user in The Last Sunset . . I was sad to hear this morning of the death of Kirk Douglas, at the grand old age of 103. He was the very last of the Western actor giants from the golden age of our beloved […]
Hud (Paramount, 1963)
Classic Americana turned sour You can argue if you want whether Hud is a Western. It is perhaps more a modern drama. IMDb classifies it as Drama, Western and Brian Garfield reviews it in his Western Films. Characters wear Stetsons and use Winchesters, and a Texas cattle ranch is the setting. More […]
Blood Country (Running Wild Films, 2017)
Pretty dreary . . Just because they make far fewer Westerns now than they did in the olden days doesn’t mean that the ones they do make are all good. Some recent ones have been well made but the bad Western is not the preserve of the past. As proof of that, watch Blood […]
The Scalphunters (Paramount, 1968)
Mildly amusing The great film reviewer Roger Ebert wrote in 1968, “A lot of people expect a masterpiece every time they go to the movies, and the other day someone was complaining that Madigan wasn’t a work of art. So what did he expect? It was a very good cop movie, and Widmark […]
The Hunting Party (UA, 1971)
Rancid Do you remember back last month when I was talking about Wayne Morris in The Marksman? I was aiming also to review his The Fighting Lawman, which was the other Western on the Warner Bros Archive Collection double-feature DVD. But the wretched DVD wouldn’t work, and I contacted the supplier, Rarewaves in the […]
Renegade Girl (Screen Guild, 1946)
Ann leads the outlaws In the 1940s Ann Savage made it quite big in the world of low-budget movies as a hard-bitten blonde with the nickname ‘Perfect Vixen’. She started at Columbia but that didn’t last. . . Not so blonde in this one . . While she specialized in noirs and gangster […]
The Missouri Breaks (UA, 1976)
Pretty painful . . I don’t like The Missouri Breaks. Part of the reason is its director Arthur Penn. He won Broadway’s 1960 Tony Award as Best Director in 1980 and he directed 8 different movie actors in Oscar-nominated performances, and many people would regard him as one of the great directors of […]
The Magnificent Seven Ride! (UA, 1972)
Last and least The third of the sequels to The Magnificent Seven (1960) that the Mirisch company put out was The Magnificent Seven Ride! When a title ends with an exclamation point it’s a sign that the producers are desperate to pep it up and evoke some interest in an otherwise lackluster […]
Guns of the Magnificent Seven (UA, 1969)
Chris is back. Sort of. By the end of the decade that had started so gloriously with The Magnificent Seven in 1960, with its third iteration, i.e. the second sequel, Guns of the Magnificent Seven, the franchise had become decidedly watered down. The first sequel, Return of the Seven only had one […]