The Last Post
The end of the trail Well, e-pards, I’m sorry to tell you that this is the end of the trail. The Big C, I’m afraid, and it’s spread and is inoperable. So I won’t be posting any more. I’ve enjoyed these years writing and conversing about our noble genre. I’ll leave […]
A Bit of a Pause
Howdy, regular readers. Just to say I shall be offline for a bit, for health reasons. I’ll be posting again as soon as I can. Meanwhile, don’t hesitate to plunder the index for back-numbers! Best wishes, Jeff
The Westerns of Donald Siegel
Don The next in our The Westerns of… series is Don Siegel. He didn’t direct a great number of feature oaters, with full credit on only four – five if you count The Beguiled, six if you count Coogan’s Bluff – and they weren’t all very good either, but as David Thomson says […]
100 Westerns by Edward Buscombe
An excellent introduction to the genre I like Edward Buscombe’s writing on Westerns. I have already reviewed The BFI Companion to the Western, which he edited, and his book Injuns: Native Americans in the Movies –click the links for those. I heard about his 2005 book (reissued 2013) 100 Westerns on How the […]
The Castaway Cowboy (Buena Vista, 1974)
Pineapple cowboys Personally speaking, Disney live-action Westerns are not really my thing. They have always been quite popular, I’m sure, and many people still like them, especially perhaps young children and some of their parents, but I wouldn’t normally pay to go to a theater to see one. Still, this one starred James […]
Old Henry (Shout! Factory, 2021)
Very good I’ve wanted to see Old Henry for some time. It’s been up on Amazon Prime but unfortunately Amazon is too mean or too lazy to offer it in the original language here in France where I live (Netflix is much better in that regard and also doesn’t have confounded advertizing), so […]
Wild Heritage (Universal, 1958)
Disappointing I was talking the other day about Will Rogers Jr, and how much I enjoyed his light-hearted 1954 movie The Boy from Oklahoma, Michael Curtiz’s last Western at Warners. Rogers only did one other big-screen oater after that, Universal’s Wild Heritage in 1958, but in fact he was hardly in it, despite […]
The Boy from Oklahoma (Warner Bros, 1954)
Delightful The Boy from Oklahoma was Michael Curtiz’s last Western at Warners, and it has often been regarded as a minor, even disappointing picture compared with the Errol Flynn ones, but unjustly so because it’s an absolute charmer. And it was directed with vim and pace such as to mark it out, in […]
A Thunder of Drums (MGM, 1961)
Not much thunder and I didn’t hear any drums I would say that A Thunder of Drums is a John Ford cavalry western without the John Ford part. There wasn’t any thunder and I heard no drums. It’s quite big and glossy, in Metrocolor and CinemaScope, shot by William W Spencer […]
The Wonderful Country by Tom Lea
One of the great Western novels Thomas Calloway Lea III (1907 – 2001) was a son of El Paso – in fact his namesake father was mayor in the 1910s, and made a public declaration that he would arrest Pancho Villa if he dared enter El Paso, after Villa raided Columbus, NM. Villa […]