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

  Wagons roll!   I have been prompted by reading Kim Newman’s book Wild West Movies (review of that when I have finished it) to

  Then what?   Today’s little essay concerns an aspect of the Western which I have noticed and maybe you have too. It kind of

  Two Ince/Hart shorts   Although William S Hart was anxious to do ‘serious’ multi-reel feature Westerns when he started making films with Thomas H

  Are cowboys right-wing or left?   After recent discussion on this blog by readers about a book, Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State

  Drive ‘em north   Well, I have some very good news for Western lovers. Readers of this blog may remember an article I posted

    Forgive me for blowing my own (rather beat-up) trumpet again, but I hope you might want to scan this review of my new

  Disney, but still just about watchable   Of course it depends on your definition of a Western but Disney’s 1958 film version of Conrad

  Tough cattleman finds love   We’ve been looking at the Westerns Thomas H Ince made, especially those with William S Hart, and one that

  Father of the Western   Film titles with livelinks can be clicked for our reviews of the pictures.   Tragically in a way, the

  New Western   Surrounded is a beautiful-looking film, shot in New Mexico (that wonderful pink light) by Max Goldman, better known for rock videos

  Reading the West     On Jeff Arnold’s West we have reviewed or discussed various Western books – mostly biographies, novels, history and film

  Pretty darn good   By 1960, the B-Western, in the sense of a one-hour second feature, was all but dead, but producer/director Maury Dexter,

  Hoss off the Ponderosa   In the fall of 1968, NBC’s TV show Bonanza was already beginning its tenth season, and although Adam Cartwright

  Winter Wyoming   We’ve reviewed some of Taylor Sheridan’s Western or semi-Western films on this blog, the likes of 1883 and 1923. Wind River

  A brief guide   Howard Hughes’s book on Western movies Stagecoach to Tombstone: The Filmgoers Guide to the Great Westerns (IB Tauris) came out

  American Indians in early Westerns   Today, something a bit different: two Westerns for the price of one.   The two greatest pioneer artists

  New Western novel   This is a red-letter day for your Jeff, because today Stay and Die is published, his new Western novel, and

  Independent 70s Western   Shoot the Sun Down was a small independent film which seems to have got a limited theatrical release in the

  A cracking good oater   Wyoming Renegades is just the kind of Western I go for, a fast-paced 73-minute actioner with a strong cast,

  “Times are bad and gettin’ worse. That’s when the show business flourishes, when times are bad.” (Burt Lancaster as Ned Buntline)   I don’t

  A dark tale of the Arkansas woods   Bastard’s Crossing (the title is explained in the final scene) is another of the ‘twelve Westerns

  What in the old days we would have called a B-Western   Counting Bullets is a recent cavalry Western with a pretty traditional ‘siege’

  Spooky, man   And we’ll finish our current mini-season of three horror-westerns, pictures which deliberately crossed between the genres, with a classic of the

  Weirdly watchable   Since we are on a roll of horror-westerns, today one of the cheapest.   Jacques Marquette (not the Jesuit missionary) was

  Fangs for the memory   I’m like a dog with a bone as far as Jesse James and Billy the Kid are concerned. Any