. A little beauty   Comanche Station, what Robert Nott in his book The Films of Randolph Scott calls “another short and sweet wonder”, opens

. An absolute gem   For the last two Westerns of the seven-picture cycle that Budd Boetticher made with Randolph Scott in the late 1950s,

. Pretty darn good   It is often said that Westbound was the weakest of the seven Westerns that Budd Boetticher made with Randolph Scott

. Randy rides alone   The fourth in the fine series of Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott Westerns (click the links for essays on them) after Seven

  Randy rides lonesome   We’ll come back soon to the great series of Westerns Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher made in the second half

. Another gripper   Decision at Sundown, the third of the late-1950s Randolph Scott/Budd Boetticher Westerns, a series of seven, was a little different from

. Ultra-tense   The Tall T was the second, after Seven Men from Now, which we reviewed recently (click the link for that) of the

. 1950s Westerns at their very best   This picture started life in 1954 when Burt Kennedy, click the link to read our essay on

  Western maestro   Prompted by reader Barry’s comment on The Tall T, I thought it might be time to re-examine that series of seven

  Dreary   Burt Kennedy (1922 – 2001) about who we were talking yesterday (click the link for that), was certainly a major figure in

  “Burt Kennedy writes Broadway in Arizona.” (John Wayne)   Burt Kennedy (1922 – 2001), pictured below, was certainly a major figure in our beloved

. A landmark Western movie   We’ve been looking recently at the career of William S Hart, prototype Western star (click the link to read

. Two-Gun Bill rides again   As we have been saying, many of the films of the great silent Western star William S Hart (click

. William S Hart’s first feature Western   The other day we were discussing the career of one of the big early stars of the

    Two-Gun Bill   William Surrey Hart (1864 – 1946) was the foremost Western star of the 1910s and early 20s. He was to

  Chris   Though he liked strutting around in a Stetson, Yuly Borisovich Briner, or Юлий Борисович Бринер, better known to us as Yul Brynner,

  The geezers return                   You probably know the story of AC Lyles (1918 – 2013), pictured

  Novel, play and various versions on film   The author   In 1906 Rex Beach (1877 – 1949) published his novel The Spoilers, set

  Chuck   Although Charles Bronson was in little danger of winning an Oscar for the Westerns he was in, or indeed those Westerns of

. The most recent screen The Virginian, and the worst   It is inevitable that any great Western story will be remade in different versions

. The second-best Virginian   We’ve been looking lately at Owen Wister’s seminal 1902 novel The Virginian, and its various ‘picturizations’, as they used to

. OK, I guess   Much as I like Joel McCrea in Westerns, I have to say that his turn at being the Virginian was

    The best version   Following our recent posts on this blog on the novel The Virginian by Owen Wister, and the first two

. Silent remake   We’ve been looking at The Virginian, the novel by Owen Wister, and the first movie The Virginian, the Jesse Lasky/Cecil B

. A seminal Western movie   Owen Wister’s great Western novel The Virginian, which we reviewed the other day (click the link for that) was

    When you call me that, smile!   It is said that Owen Wister (1860 – 1938) heard a deputy sheriff in Wyoming address

  The real McCoys do it for the camera   I view the ancestors of the modern Western, that is the old silent movies from

  The very early days of the Western movie   The Great Train Robbery is often regarded as the first Western movie. It wasn’t, actually.

  Decent enough   Earlier this year I was writing about the Confederate guerrilla leader Quantrill and how he has been portrayed on screen (click

  The early days of the Western   Even the title these days leaves a slightly sour taste in the mouth, the word squaw having

  Historical hooey but great spectacle – a DeMille Western, in fact   Paramount bucked the trend a bit in the mid-1930s. After the Depression

  Hollywood bigwig   Cecil B DeMille was in many ways the Hollywood director. It was he who introduced the notion of the all-powerful jodhpur-wearing

  A 60s actioner with good plot twists   As we have recently been looking at the Westerns of Lee Marvin and Burt Lancaster, I

  A real talent for the genre   As well as being a very ‘physical’ actor, and a versatile one who was not afraid to

  Huge but weak   Since we are on a bit of a Spencer Tracy kick at the moment I thought we might have a

  Stetson and six-gun weren’t really for him   Spencer Tracy, left, star of the likes of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Judgment at Nuremberg

  Protowestern a bit of a plodder   MGM rather missed the boat (or the stagecoach anyway) in 1939 when the big-budget adult Western suddenly

  A pretty picture but pretty boring   We were saying the other day (click here for that post) that surprisingly, perhaps, for a macho

  Not the brightest Western star in the Hollywood firmament   You might think that an all-American gun-loving macho guy like Charlton Heston (left), whose

  A worthy contributor to our genre                   Gordon Douglas (left) was one of those directors who

  Gimme that gold   Gold of the Seven Saints falls into that category of gold-lust Westerns, with characters going crazy to get their hands

  The mighty Quinn   The Mexican-American actor Anthony Quinn was a great, larger-than-life Rabelaisian figure who tended to dominate the screen, even when in

  Longtime director/producer of some good Westerns                         George Sherman is credited with having

  How the West was Fun   Partly perhaps because Hollywood motion pictures tended to be made by showbiz people who had a natural affinity

  Space Western   What is and is not a Western is the subject of endless debate but if you accept a broader definition of

  Jacques the lad   The French movie director Jacques Tourneur (1904 – 1977), son of director and screenwriter Maurice, who came to Hollywood as

  Calvera   One of the most surprising casting choices by John Sturges and Yul Brynner for The Magnificent Seven in 1960 was that of

  Western tough-guy par excellence   The other day we were talking about how good Lee Marvin was in a Randolph Scott oater. It’s time

  Randy is at Lawrence   The Stranger Wore a Gun is a Scott-Brown production for Columbia and a priori a cut above some of

  Better than pulp   Many Western and detective novels and short stories earned the derogative term pulp fiction. Pulp has rather a bad name.

  Jesse James rides with Quantrill   Westerns in the 1940s and 50s loved the characters of Frank and Jesse James, Jesse in particular. Ever

  Quantrill in fact and fiction     A great deal has been written about William Clarke Quantrill (1837 – 1865). Though Quantrill himself left

  The End of the West   In the 1960s and 70s Western movies often highlighted the notion, in an elegiac and almost nostalgic way,

  “You got a sickness, Tracy.”   The Naked Hills tells of two partners (David Wayne and Denver Pyle) who become forty-niners. One, Bert (Pyle,

  Hollywood stuntman and actor   I am grateful to Gene Freese for his book Jock Mahoney: The Life and Films of a Hollywood Stuntman

  European expatriate who loved the hard-boiled   If I told you I was going to talk about a director of Westerns who was born

  Not great Westerns but not bad either     I thought we could maybe add Rudolph Maté to our roll-call of Western directors.  

  Indians attack the fort (again)   Allied Artists had been born from low-budget outfit Monogram, which produced pictures, including many Westerns, on a typical

  This world is an abomination, says one character, perceptively   Back at the tail-end of 2018, here in rural France where I live, the