WESTERN BOOKS
Reading the West On Jeff Arnold’s West we have reviewed or discussed various Western books – mostly biographies, novels, history and film studies. I thought it might be helpful for readers to have easy access to the books, so they are listed below alphabetically with links, and I will update as […]
Walk Tall (Fox, 1960)
Pretty darn good By 1960, the B-Western, in the sense of a one-hour second feature, was all but dead, but producer/director Maury Dexter, a former henchman of Robert Lippert’s at Regal Films (click for our essays on Bob and Regal) and later to concentrate on Little House on the Prairie, was out to […]
Something for a Lonely Man (Universal TV/NBC, 1968)
Hoss off the Ponderosa In the fall of 1968, NBC’s TV show Bonanza was already beginning its tenth season, and although Adam Cartwright had disappeared from the Ponderosa, Pa, Little Joe and Hoss were still there alright, as they had been since the start in 1959, and though the show’s ratings weren’t quite […]
Wind River (Lionsgate, 2017)
Winter Wyoming We’ve reviewed some of Taylor Sheridan’s Western or semi-Western films on this blog, the likes of 1883 and 1923. Wind River in 2017, which he wrote and directed, was perhaps at the outer edges of the Western genre, more of a police procedural really, but it is set in winter Wyoming, […]
Stagecoach to Tombstone: The Filmgoers Guide to the Great Westerns by Howard Hughes
A brief guide Howard Hughes’s book on Western movies Stagecoach to Tombstone: The Filmgoers Guide to the Great Westerns (IB Tauris) came out in 2008. It’s a readable romp through some fine Western films. Of course, readers’ definitions of “great” may differ from the author’s, but all the movies chosen […]
The Indian Massacre (Unicorn Film Service, 1912) and The Massacre (Biograph, 1912)
American Indians in early Westerns Today, something a bit different: two Westerns for the price of one. The two greatest pioneer artists of the early motion picture, Thomas H Ince and DW Griffith (Edison was also a great pioneer but he was interested in the technical and commercial possibilities of the form, […]
Stay and Die by Jeff Arnold
New Western novel This is a red-letter day for your Jeff, because today Stay and Die is published, his new Western novel, and I hope you will forgive me, dear e-readers, if I pause in my commentary of other people’s Westerns to blow my own little trumpet for a moment. Stay […]
Shoot the Sun Down (VidAmerica, 1978)
Independent 70s Western Shoot the Sun Down was a small independent film which seems to have got a limited theatrical release in the Southwest (and in Norway, bizarrely) but elsewhere went straight to VHS. It was produced, written and directed by David Leeds, his only film project as far as I know (he […]
Wyoming Renegades (Columbia, 1955)
A cracking good oater Wyoming Renegades is just the kind of Western I go for, a fast-paced 73-minute actioner with a strong cast, produced by Wallace MacDonald and helmed by good old Fred F Sears. It’s in Technicolor and has music by Randolph Scott-Western favorite composer Mischa Bakaleinikoff, and the tight story and […]
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (United Artists, 1976)
“Times are bad and gettin’ worse. That’s when the show business flourishes, when times are bad.” (Burt Lancaster as Ned Buntline) I don’t object to Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill because it ‘debunks’ William F Cody, though the timing of such a debunking, in the bicentennial, wasn’t perhaps ideal. In the early 1970s the […]