Not much thunder and I didn’t hear any drums   I would say that A Thunder of Drums is a John Ford cavalry western

  One of the great Western novels   Thomas Calloway Lea III (1907 – 2001) was a son of El Paso – in fact his

  The play within the play   Last time on this blog we looked at a 1948 picture made by Robert L Lippert’s company Screen

  Yet another capture-the-wild-stallion Western   Maker of low-budget fare Robert Lippert made the first film for his company Screen Guild in 1945. It was

  A round-up   We’ve looked, over the past few weeks, at big-screen (in the case of the 1988 IMAX film a very big screen)

  The last big picture – for the moment   The next Alamo film in a long line was the 37-minute IMAX docudrama Alamo… The

  Derringers galore   I really like The Outlaw’s Daughter for one principal reason: it’s derringer-rich. The little guns, with which, regular readers will know,

  Harry Carey rides again   In a deliberate allusion to ‘the law west of the Pecos’, in RKO’s 1938 picture The Law West of

  Gripping stuff   In my recent article on American Indians in the Western (click here for that) I suggested that many of the earliest

  American Indians in the movies   We have been looking at the way American Indians were represented in Western movies (click here for Part

  The beginnings   Back in 2020 I wrote an article on this blog, American Indians and the Western, but I’d like to revise it

  The Alamo: Thirteen Days to Glory (NBC TV, 1987)   The next Alamo film after John Wayne’s was really Viva Max in 1969, but

  Quite fun   A Disney live-action comedy Western from the late 60s, The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin, based on the book By the Great

  Familiar face   One of the most reliable Western character actors, on the big screen and small, was Harry Lauter – especially when you

  The Alamo (United Artists, 1960)   The big one   Poor John Wayne. He tried so hard and invested so much in The Alamo

  The Last Command (Republic, 1955)   While Davy Crockett was all the rage, and Disney’s version of the Alamo was hitting the headlines (see

  Another heroic Houston   Slightly peripheral to our Alamo season, as I was saying the other day in The Celluloid Alamo: 4, is the

  Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier (Buena Vista, 1955)   An earlier Alamo film, in 1926, which we looked at in The Celluloid

  Bob Lippert has a stab at directing   Back in 2022 we looked at the career of Robert L Lippert (click the link for

  Pretty bad   Land Raiders was a late-60s Western that has all the look of a spaghetti. It was shot in Spain (with a

  The Man from the Alamo (Universal, 1953)   Last time, in our Celluloid Alamo 3, we looked at the first talkie featuring the defense

  Revd. Bill Hart   The other 1915 William S Hart Western that we have (see out earlier post on The Darkening Trail) was again

  Melodrama in the Yukon   We were lamenting the other day, in our article on Lost Westerns, how many silent movies have decomposed, been

  Heroes of the Alamo (Sunset Productions, 1937 and Columbia, 1938)   In the last episode of The Celluloid Alamo (click the link for that)

  Routine costume drama   There have been many Westerns, or pre-Westerns perhaps we should call them, frontier stories anyway, set in eighteenth-century colonial and

  Another Jim Davis B-Western   In the late 1950s, Jim Davis, who had been pretty popular on the small screen as railroad detective Matt

  Lost souls   Many people would regard John Ford as the greatest director of Westerns of them all. They could be right. He was

  A lot of fun   In 1951, Joy Newton Houck Sr, the owner of 29 ‘Joy Theatres’ in Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, teamed up

  (With) Davy Crockett at the Fall of the Alamo (Sunset Productions/Aywon Film, 1926)   Today, I offer you the second in our series on

  Blow the wind northerly   Following on with our current theme of the hardships of the life of women on the frontier – see,

  Ho-hum   When I was reviewing the rather good 1979 picture Heartland recently (click the link for that) I said that it was in

  Martyrs   The story of the defense and fall of the Alamo in 1836 is a key one in the American psyche and of

  Modest   Desperate Trails is one of those straight-to-video Westerns which is modest in scope and equally so in achievement, but has a couple

  A highly entertaining guide   Kim Newman may be better known to film buffs as a horror expert. Author of fiction like The Vampire

  Yawn   Debbie Reynolds, who had made a hit in MGM’s Singin’ in the Rain in 1952, had never done a Western, and indeed

  A refutation   Refutation: denial of the truth or accuracy of   In 1957 the science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon coined what he called Sturgeon’s

  An OK TV movie   First screened as A Gunfighter’s Pledge by the Hallmark TV channel, then released on DVD under its working title

  Horseless   Movie titles with livelinks will take you to our reviews of those pictures.   The Western movie is usually set in a

  Six-guns v. ray-guns   I felt it incumbent on me (rather a good word, incumbent) as a Western blogger to watch and review for

  Go West, young mouse   A sometimes overlooked part of the comedy Western oeuvre (posh word, oeuvre) is the animated cartoon. But it was

  Jocko down under   The Kangaroo Kid is an example of the films I was waffling on about the other day, a non-American Western

  Made for a Fistful of Yen (or pounds, or lire or whatever)   Film titles with livelinks can be clicked on for our reviews

  Dorothy   I always thought that Dorothy Malone was what my aged pop would have called a corker (he was fond of old-time slang

  Second-feature cattle baron   King of the Pecos dates from the period when John Wayne, who had flirted with stardom in Fox’s wagon-train epic

  Git ‘em up! Move ‘em out!   Movie titles with livelinks can be clicked on to go to our reviews of those pictures.  

  The B-Western at its best   The longhorn is a descendant of the cattle brought to the Americas by Spanish conquistadores in the days

  A good yarn   I knew Texan author Joe R Lansdale from his enjoyable Hap and Leonard stories but was reminded by reading Kim

  Wanted: Dead or Alive   The whole notion of allowing or even encouraging people who are not sworn officers of the law to apprehend

  Billy lives to fight another day   One of the (very) many movies about the (entirely mythical) Billy the Kid was a B-Western of

  Taken by Indians   The so-called captivity narrative, a story about a person of one tribe or race or religion taken and held by

  Best as charming rogue   Comments by readers Jean-Marie and RR have made me rethink and reassess the Western career of Arthur Kennedy. So

  Blowing my own trumpet again   I crave your indulgence dear e-reader, for another mention of my recent novel Stay and Die. But I

  My principal sources for this article were the 2015 biography Wild Bill Wellman, Hollywood Rebel by Wellman’s son, William Wellman Jr, and the 1995

  An early Bill Hart oater   On the Night Stage was an early Western that William S Hart made with producer Thomas H Ince,

  Jeff Chandler does his Gary Cooper act   Some of the Hollywood greats steered clear of the Western, the poor deluded fools. Perhaps they

  Pretty nifty   I followed up Jean-Marie’s comment on Helena’s three-barrel pistol in the 2013 The Lone Ranger. You know me and derringers.  

  Git ’em up! Head ’em out!   The Quest, you may remember, was a Columbia Television Western series created by Tracy Keenan Wynn (Keenan

  Interesting story though not a very good film   Although it is not a Western, I watched Glory on Netflix the other day. It’s

  A Hart feature become a short   A late feature (it was a 50-minute 5-reeler) that William S Hart made for Thomas H Ince

  Faintly distasteful   Jed Buell was a publicist for Mack Sennett and Keystone who founded his own company, Spectrum Pictures, to make ultra-low-budget exploitation