The Westerns of Harry Lauter
Familiar face One of the most reliable Western character actors, on the big screen and small, was Harry Lauter – especially when you needed a heavy. He appeared in 52 feature films in the genre and 251 episodes of 61 different TV shows, between 1949 and 1979. Not bad! Harry only […]
The Celluloid Alamo: 7
The Alamo (United Artists, 1960) The big one Poor John Wayne. He tried so hard and invested so much in The Alamo – not just pretty well all his worldly wealth but his health, heart and soul. All his professional life he wanted to make this movie. The Alamo project was so […]
The Celluloid Alamo: 6
The Last Command (Republic, 1955) While Davy Crockett was all the rage, and Disney’s version of the Alamo was hitting the headlines (see The Celluloid Alamo: 5), over at Republic another picture about the heroic defense and fall of the mission was being prepared. It would turn out to be a better film […]
Houston: The Legend of Texas aka Gone to Texas (CBS, 1986)
Another heroic Houston Slightly peripheral to our Alamo season, as I was saying the other day in The Celluloid Alamo: 4, is the story of Sam Houston. Peripheral because while historically he clearly played a key part in Texas political and military affairs of the 1830s, Houston is always a minor figure in […]
The Celluloid Alamo: 5
Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier (Buena Vista, 1955) An earlier Alamo film, in 1926, which we looked at in The Celluloid Alamo: 2, put Davy Crockett front and center of the Alamo story, with the title Davy Crockett at the Fall of the Alamo. Usually hitherto Crockett had played a relatively […]
Last of the Wild Horses (Screen Guild, 1948)
Bob Lippert has a stab at directing Back in 2022 we looked at the career of Robert L Lippert (click the link for that), a movie theater owner who got into distribution and then production. His pictures were low-cost affairs but would sell, especially to modest rural theaters and drive-ins. Lippert […]
Land Raiders (Columbia, 1969)
Pretty bad Land Raiders was a late-60s Western that has all the look of a spaghetti. It was shot in Spain (with a bit in Hungary), has Italian-looking 1960s costumes, those stupid gunshots that have a ricochet whine all the time even when they don’t hit anything, sub-Morricone jangly music (by Bruno Nicolai) […]
The Celluloid Alamo: 4
The Man from the Alamo (Universal, 1953) Last time, in our Celluloid Alamo 3, we looked at the first talkie featuring the defense and fall of the Alamo. They were soon to come thick and fast. There were movies that centered on Sam Houston, in which the siege figured, naturally, but these […]
The Disciple (Triangle/Kay-Bee, 1915)
Revd. Bill Hart The other 1915 William S Hart Western that we have (see out earlier post on The Darkening Trail) was again produced by Thomas H Ince, and this time Ince also wrote it, with S Barret McCormick. It’s a 50-minute 5-reeler (the two films are available on the same DVD) whose […]
The Darkening Trail (Mutual Film, 1915)
Melodrama in the Yukon We were lamenting the other day, in our article on Lost Westerns, how many silent movies have decomposed, been thrown away, burned, or otherwise lost to us. This was certainly true of William S Hart Westerns. Two we do have, early ones he made with Thomas H Ince, are […]