Nice idea but disappointing   I don’t know if you do video games. I do a bit on my iPad (Real Racing 3 being

  A classic silent Western   In 1916 top silent-movie personnel got together to make The Good Bad Man, which we reviewed recently, and later that

  Douglas Fairbanks is Passin’ Through   The whole notion of the good badman is fundamental to the Western. Central characters with a murky past

  Folksy Americana   Take Me to Town was directed by Douglas Sirk, and though on one level an overly bucolic rural story (hardly a

  Don ‘Red’ Barry is Frank   When minor movie studio Lippert had a (for them) big hit in 1949 with I Shot Jesse James, starring

  The Kid from Texas     The Kid from Texas, the title of Audie Murphy’s first Western movie, will do very well also to

  Early Rory   A very early Rory Calhoun Western is Return of the Frontiersman, a Warners effort of 1950. Well, it wasn’t really a

  Corny  . . Judy Canova (1913 to 1983), pictured left, was an exponent of so-called cornpone humor. Her shtick was to make herself as

  Dick   Richard Widmark was one of the principal Western actors. He appeared in 19 examples of our noble genre from 1948 to 1988.

  Sentimental California romance   Ramona is one of the most durable and long-lasting examples of the Western genre. It started life as a novel

  It’s trashy enough to be Samuel Fuller but isn’t really by him   The Deadly Trackers was Samuel Fuller’s last Western. Well, it was

  Twaddle, but harmless twaddle . . The other day we were talking about Al Jennings (left), looking at the silent Western he made in

  Brod’s best     1953 was a remarkably good year for the Western movie, and The Last Posse was by no means the worst

  The old flame flickers again   In the early 1960s the mainstream theater Western seemed doomed. The wonderful The Magnificent Seven (1960) seemed now

  Classic Sturges . . I’ve been meaning to write about The Law and Jake Wade for some time, partly because I like Robert Taylor

  The odious Colonel Chivington   The Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 was one of the most shameful episodes of nineteenth-century American history. It hasn’t

  The women are taken to the state pen   Jeff Morrow was Major Bart McClelland in Union Pacific on TV and he was Cochise

  Rooster Cogburn without the zip . . Critic Brian Garfield called Copper Sky a “black and white Z-movie”. It’s not quite as bad as

  A tense town Western   Tension at Table Rock was a classy Western from RKO in the mid-1950s, that high-water mark of our noble

  Writer, director and producer of over a thousand Westerns   Charles Marquis Warren (pictured left in 1955), born 1912, died 1990, was an important

  A low-budget black & white that is still a lot of fun   Producer Wallace MacDonald, director Fred F Sears and writer David Lang

  Better than it should have been   I’ve never been the greatest fan of John Derek in Westerns. He wasn’t the finest actor ever

  Huge fun   I’ve been reviewing a number of mediocre-to-bad Westerns lately but here at last is an oater you can really enjoy, an

  Schmaltz . . Mission to Glory is not my kind of film, being too close to Catholic propaganda for my taste, though of course

  Not good, I fear . . The other day I was waffling on about a recent Western, Jonah Hex. That starred Josh Brolin. Well, Josh’s

  Pretty stupid   It’s curious, isn’t it, the popularity of superheroes and characters with magic powers. I suppose folk have always had a propensity

  Bland   While the early 1970s were the time of revisionist and often gory Westerns, when former heroes were being debunked and shown as

  Peppard saves the day but without the A-Team   The Bravos was an early-70s made-for-TV cavalry Western which starred George Peppard and Pernell Roberts.

  Derivative   By the early 1970s the Western movie was in full decline. An overstatement, perhaps, but largely true. Yes, Fox’s box-office hit Butch Cassidy

Howdy Some of you might be interested in this press release that I have received. Jeff   HDNET MOVIES is proud to announce groundbreaking Cherokee actor

  Full of zip    The Desperadoes, not to be confused with The Desperados (a trashy Henry Levin-directed movie starring Vince Edwards, from the same studio

  The early days of Smith and Jones   When I was reviewing the excellent Randolph Scott Western Hangman’s Knot the other day I said that

  Top notch   I watched one of my favorite Randolph Scott Westerns again last night. It was on TV. To say “one of my

  It’s big alright   The Big Sky was not the greatest ever Western, and it was not Howard Hawks’s best Western either (that was

  Ho-hum   Guns of the Revolution, also known as Rain for a Dusty Summer, the title of a soppy and inappropriate ballad crooned during

  High quality   The Westerner was one of the most short-lived of the TV Western shows, yet one of the best.   It only

  A John Wayne/Ron Howard project finally gets made   Blood River was a TV movie which starred Rick(y) Schroder. It was written by John

  Budd gives us a classy TV show   Many directors of low-budget Westerns at minor studios embraced TV with gusto. As the market for

  Posh Brit rides the range   Well, we’ve had Gun Battle, Gun Belt, Gun Duel, Gun Fight, Gun Fury and Gun Street, to name but

  Death on the range . . In his excellent book on a great Western author, Ernest Haycox and the Western, Richard W Etulain tells us

  The Yeehar factor      Jeff on The Mag 7 . .   I have decided to say a little more on The Magnificent

  It’s not very good!!!   Regular readers of this blog, both of them, will know of the ALEPH, the Arnold Ludicrous Exclamation Point Hypothesis,

  Yawn   Jeff Arnold’s West is having a bit of a Brian Keith-orama at the moment, a Western career retrospective looking at Westerns Keith

  Land-grabbers   Fox’s eleven Western offerings for 1958 (quite a normal quantity for those days!) were a mixed bag. There was a great one, The

  An early-40s MGM minor Western   One thinks of MGM putting out big A-pictures all the time but they had their own line in

  The Hollywood Mountie always gets his man   Just as Hollywood liked Mexico as a setting for Westerns, as I was waffling on about

  Hollywood crosses the Rio Grande   Since the earliest days of the Western movie, Hollywood has been fascinated by that land south of the

  It’s well done   I suppose the gunman’s walk of the title is the famous walk-down as the approaching gunslingers draw near, ready for

  The Indian Fighter (UA, 1955)   I have mixed feelings about Kirk Douglas as a Western lead. He could be very good, for example

  Ernest Haycox: “The significant and talented western author whose presence continues to exert power on the page and the screen” (Susan Kollin)   On

  No thanks     I reviewed Vera Cruz back in October 2015 and have mentioned it several times since, often in a critical, even

  Fast-paced, almost lurid   Unless you count the 1945 short Star in the Night, The Duel at Silver Creek was Don Siegel’s first Western

  Rory becomes a producer . . Spoiler alert: there are lots of spoilers in this review. Don’t say you haven’t been spoiler alerted. .

  Not so funny these days   Not one of Audie’s best, this Western (the first Murphy made put out by Columbia – in fact

  Boring   Regular readers of this blog, both of them, will know that I am not a fan of the spaghetti western. It’s odd

  The eternal trio of foes: bad guys, Injuns and harsh terrain . . Back in July last year a new Western was released, a

  Claudette, pretty little babe, Claudette – er, no, actually, not that one . . The famous Hollywood actress Claudette Colbert (left), one of the

  I was rooting for the horse   At some point in their careers most screen cowboys did the capture-the-wild-stallion plot. We think of Dale

  Western fans will be saddened to hear of the death of Brian Garfield, who passed away December 29 at his home in Pasadena.  

  What a great title   Our first Western of 2019 has almost the perfect title: The Toughest Gun in Tombstone. A late-50s black &