Reasons to be cheerful   If you like a George Montgomery Western now and then (and, dear Westernista, which of us does not?) then

  “I’d like to get my hands around the throat of the son of a bitch that told me to go west.” . . I

  1990s blaxploitation . . I went to see this Posse (no relation to the Kirk Douglas one; there’s no copyright on titles) when it

  Lightweight   In 1968 Ossie Davis appeared in a comedy Western written by William Norton and produced by Arnold Laven, and the following year

  Thanks, Kirk   And don’t forget he was a derringer user in The Last Sunset . . I was sad to hear this morning

  Classic Americana turned sour     You can argue if you want whether Hud is a Western. It is perhaps more a modern drama.

  Pretty dreary . . Just because they make far fewer Westerns now than they did in the olden days doesn’t mean that the ones

  Mildly amusing   The great film reviewer Roger Ebert wrote in 1968, “A lot of people expect a masterpiece every time they go to

Rancid     Do you remember back last month when I was talking about Wayne Morris in The Marksman? I was aiming also to review his

  Ann leads the outlaws   In the 1940s Ann Savage made it quite big in the world of low-budget movies as a hard-bitten blonde

  Pretty painful . . I don’t like The Missouri Breaks.   Part of the reason is its director Arthur Penn. He won Broadway’s 1960

  Last and least     The third of the sequels to The Magnificent Seven (1960) that the Mirisch company put out was The Magnificent

  Chris is back. Sort of.     By the end of the decade that had started so gloriously with The Magnificent Seven in 1960,

  The not quite so magnificent seven return . . 1966 was rather the year, as far as Westerns go, of remakes and sequels. Originality

  Mildly amusing . . A post-spaghetti or faux-spaghetti or neo-spaghetti (take your pick), In a Valley of Violence opens with cheesy 60s cartoony titles

  Farewell, the 2010s         Well, as the year trickles to a close, and the decade with it, let’s have a brief

  As opposed to Fast West . I was going to review for you today The Fighting Lawman, the second Wayne Morris oater of 1953,

  Wayne is a crack shot . . I found Wayne Morris to be quite good in The Desperado (1954), I would almost say surprisingly

  Bloody Bill     James Carlos Blake writes very well. There is a ‘literary’ tone to his prose, and while he is not Cormac

  Comedy Westerns are very hard to get right   A not-very-funny comedy Western from the mid-70s, this picture is saved only by Lee Marvin.

  Mowing down Apaches . . Richard Gatling (left), a North Carolina inventor and doctor (though he never practiced medicine), was living in Indianapolis at

. Red strikes oil . . The outing of Wild Bill Elliott as Red Ryder Conquest of Cheyenne followed hard on the hooves of Sun Valley

  Red Ryder aids the US war effort   About a month ago on this blog we were looking at a couple of Red Ryder

  Wayne Morris good as hard-bitten gunfighter   A short time ago I reviewed a big color widescreen picture Allied Artists put out in 1958,

  Believe it or not   ‘The Younger brothers in fact and fiction’. In the case of the Youngers, as with Jesse James, Wyatt Earp,

  Cole as goody     In 1903, at the age of 58, Cole Younger published an autobiography. He said in his preface:    Many

  “All bleeding stops eventually.” (Doc Cochran)   The series Deadwood (three seasons, starting 2004) was the best TV of its decade. The combination of

  Cole is the boss   We were on the trail of director RG Springsteen, and following him quite closely too, until we got to

  Preposterous twaddle     Hollywood Westerns liked the Younger brothers, especially Cole. Harry Hoffman played Cole as bold Confederate fighter in an early silent

  Those evil carpetbaggers . In the late 1950s director RG Springsteen, known as Bud, who had spent the late 40s and early 50s churning

  Cowboy philosopher   Today, another of the RG Springsteen-directed Red Ryder Westerns starring Allan ‘Rocky’ Lane as Red, after Stagecoach to Denver, which we looked

  Red and Beaver save the day   We’ve kind of overlooked Allan ‘Rocky’ Lane on this blog till now. I’ve mentioned him from time

  He’s a tall man riding . . We’ve been talking recently about 1960s feature Westerns, pictures that were made for die-hard fans of the

  Not great art but quite enjoyable     Tomahawk Trail was another of the Bel Air productions put together by Aubrey Schenck and Howard

  Showdown in a ghost town: classic stuff     The first of the three Westerns that highly experienced Lesley Selander directed for producer Hal

  Another mid-60s Retrowestern . . Recently we were looking at Fort Utah, one of the dozen or so low-budget mid- to late-60s retro-westerns put together

  A real pro   One of the names we come across again and again on this blog is Lesley Selander. It’s easy to concentrate

  Ireland is Tom Horn   Fort Utah was one of the later low-budget Westerns producer AC Lyles made to be released by Paramount, the

  Dale’s first but not one of Roy’s best   San Fernando Valley was in many ways just another Roy Rogers oater like the pre-war

  Gun man   Post-Civil War Texas produced many homicidal criminals, gun-men as they were sometimes called (the terms gunfighter and gunslinger were later nomenclature).

  Rex and Slim ride again . . The Last Musketeer was the second of Republic’s series of oaters with Rex Allen and Slim Pickens,

  Rex and Slim ride together for the first time . Following our conversation the other day about sidekicks, I thought we might have a

. The origin of Jackson Hole . . The  last of the quartet of debutant Westerns that Roy Rogers starred in for Republic in 1938

  Not quite so light-hearted   The third Western that Republic had Roy Rogers star in, after Under Western Stars and Billy the Kid Returns, was, despite the

  Roy’s first big break   Leonard Franklin Slye (1911 to 1998), much better known to us all as Roy Rogers, though a denizen of

. . Dobe tells his story   Company of Heroes: My Life as an Actor in the John Ford Stock Company, published by Scarecrow Press

  Hoppy goes South of the border   You can’t go wrong with a Hopalong Cassidy Western every now and then.   William Boyd had

  An overwrought tear-jerker   This another of those movies that is only arguably a Western. Perhaps it’s more a drama with many elements of

  Single-minded lawman pursues charismatic outlaw   I have been an admirer of the work of the late Brian Garfield (1939 to 2018), pictured left,

  No drums in the not very deep South . . Rather like A Thunder of Drums or War Drums, there are remarkably few drums in this

  Outlaws and lawmen in the last days of the Old West   Augustine Chacon   In the final days of the ‘Wild West’, in

  Rory is Bill Longley (only not)   As the feature-film Western declined in the late 1950s and the popularity of TV shows grew, many

  Singin’ showdown . . Vaughn Monroe, you probably know, was a trumpeter and vocalist who made his way up through the big bands, eventually

  A camp classic   The more I watch Johnny Guitar (and I’ve just watched it again) the more I think it’s an absolutely stunning

    Best of the rest?     Many of the Western heroes of my childhood (Bronze Age) have remained with me all through my

  A 1990s American spaghetti . . There has been quite a little mini-genre of ‘blind’ Westerns. Cameron Mitchell was a gunfighter who goes blind

  Whispering Smith (NBC TV, 1961)   We’ve already had a retrospective look at the Western movies of Audie Murphy, and very fine some of

  “I started at the top and worked my way down.” (Sterling Hayden)     Sterling Hayden was something of a rarity in the world

  A bit long . Winterhawk was a mid-70s pro-Indian picture which got a small-scale independent theatrical release but did most of its sales on

  “Timber!” (again) . . There’s a whole sub-genre of ‘logging’ Westerns, stories in which the brave hero dominates the ancient forests while beating out