. A bit of a yawn . . Barely a Western at all, Hidalgo is a kind of Bite the Bullet 2. Unfortunately, Bite the Bullet

. Classic Hart . . I suppose a silent movie is a good place to have as hero a silent man. William S Hart had

. Tarzan rides the range . . Universal made so many Westerns in the 1950s, they couldn’t all be good. By mid-decade quantity was definitely

. Boomers . . The Some-Day Country is another fast-paced paperback Western novel by the master of that genre. It was quite a late one,

. Tom and Vicky ride again . . Since we are on early Tom Mix one-reelers at the moment, another couple, both from 1916.  

. Wm S Hart on the Santa Fe Trail . . Lambert Hillyer, the director who worked so often and so closely with William S

. A credit to the genre . . Regular readers will know how keen I am on the Western novels of Luke Short (Frederick D

. Tom wins a shop girl . . Two one-reel Tom Mix Westerns from 1915, when Tom was ensconced in Las Vegas, NM, were the entertaining

. Fritz is really the star . . The Narrow Trail is a classic William S Hart Western about a badman redeemed by the love

. Tom impresses the Eastern lady . . Both these Tom Mix 14-minute one-reelers were released in July 1916 and date from the time when

. A seminal work of mythography . . Fort Apache is essentially a war film, almost an apologia for the US Army, and in the

. American creation myth . . To complete our reviews of the trio of Westerns that came out in 2015 (the other two are Bone Tomahawk 

. Cowboys & Cavemen . . The very word tomahawk, defined by Webster’s as a small ax used as a weapon by Native Americans, conjures

. Another bloodfest . . Quentin Tarantino enjoys the Western genre. He has spoken highly of Rio Bravo, for example, and also goes in for 1960s

. California dreamin’ . . In the early 1970s Westerns got a bit ‘different’, out of the mainstream, not to say weird. Let’s call them

. . I thought you might like this photograph, which I took when I was in Monument Valley. OK, everyone has a snap they took

. Amusing one-reelers . . The other day we were examining a two-reel Tom Mix silent movie, The Man from Texas. More typical of his

. A classic Tom Mix two-reeler . . Westerns loved The Man from… titles. They gave us stories about the man from Laramie, Arizona, Dakota,

. Lusty . . In May 1960 John Wayne began shooting North to Alaska, a commitment he had with Fox, as soon as he had

. Six-gun vs. tommy-gun . . This blog concerns itself with the West and the Western. We do not discuss other, weaker genres such as

. A classy little noir Western . . When I first saw Fox’s 1951 Western The Secret of Convict Lake I was – I now

. Marshal Sam Elliott, thug . . Many made-for-TV Western movies are no better (but no worse either) than the run-of-the-mill B-Westerns churned out for

. Vin ordinaire . . I’ve come to the conclusion that I quite like Rory Calhoun Westerns. I know that may seem to be damning

. Slim in a Roosterish eyepatch . . The TV film, television movie, TV movie, telefilm, telemovie, made-for-television film, direct-to-TV film, movie of the week

. Rooster rides again – but he rides a raft, this time . . John Wayne’s penultimate Western (only The Shootist was to come, a year

. They ride yet again . . I must first declare an interest: ever since I saw The Magnificent Seven movie, in 1960 when I was

. Audie’s last starring role . . 40 Guns to Apache Pass was the last Western Audie Murphy, now 43, made for Columbia, and in

. He sings of the prairie . . In the 1980s and 90s I lived in Italy and there I became an admirer or the

. Sheriff Hayden solves the crime . . I must admit to quite liking Sterling Hayden Westerns. He was good at gritty films noirs and

. Excellent stuff . . Issued within weeks of The Lucky Texan (see review) with much the same crew and cast, and, to be frank, pretty

. Those Lone Star Westerns . . I do admit to having a soft spot for the sixteen Lone Star Westerns John Wayne did over

. Rango, have you always been alone? . . Directed by Lone Ranger maestro Gore Verbinski (Johnny Depp’s accomplice on the Pirates movies) and written

. Old-timer rides again . . You can get Westerns all kinds of ways now. In the olden days you had to go to the

. A Western! . . They’ve added an exclamation point to the title, in an attempt to give it a bit of zip.It needed it,

. The real thing . . A splendid portrait of Cody on old age   I apologize in advance for the length of this post

. The story begins . . Back in February I reviewed an entertaining Western novel, The Valles Caldera, by Gary L Stuart. It was the sequel

. Back to the 1980s in the Longmire story . . Coming after The Serpent’s Tooth, the thirteenth episode in the story of Walt Longmire, Wyoming

. Rooster rides again . . Made-for-TV Westerns in the 1970s were not often very good. It was pre-Lonesome Dove and major big-budget miniseries were

. The poor man’s Coop . . He was born at the turn of the twentieth century and brought up on a ranch near Helena,

. The Original of The Quick Gun . . A few weeks ago on this blog I wrote a review of an Audie Murphy Western, The

. OK if you like trash movies . . Gallowwalkers starts with a rape and a decapitation, so is not for children or the squeamish.

. For a Fistful of Yen . . Sukiyaki Western Django is a way cool, 21st century spaghetti Western in the Quentin Tarantino mold. In

. Weak . . Tim Holt’s Westerns for RKO were quite fun. Most were juvenile programmers and as such hardly great art but they had

. Not a Rockie in sight . . I still like Tex Ritter Westerns. Sad, I know. He was an indifferent actor and not even

. Western icon: the buffalo . . Few animals are more symbolic of the Old West than the American bison (bison bison), commonly known as

. Audie bows out . . A Time for Dying is a flawed film. It has its moments and on paper it should have been

. Cowboys Indians and Indians . . Indian Paint is an independently produced mid-60s Western, unusual in that there are no white men in it

. Preston still had it . . The main reason why September Gun is enjoyable (and it is, quite) is Robert Preston. The old fellow

. The Western becomes epic   Paramount’s The Covered Wagon was an important milestone along the road (or trail) of the Western movie. It was

. Acceptable . . 6 Guns is a not very special but acceptable straight-to-video Western, a project of the Van Dyke clan. It’s currently available

. Not the best André De Toth/Randolph Scott Western but still pretty good . . Hollywood was always interested in the bounty hunter. In Westerns

. Pistol-packing railroad engineer . . Only two years after constructing the Canadian Pacific in Cariboo Trail for Fox, pistol-packing railroad engineer Randolph Scott was down

. Standard stuff . . Law of the Land (no relation to the 1917 silent movie or the Australian or American 1990s TV series) is

. Big Republic drama . . Though she was good in a couple of Westerns with Joel McCrea, Barbara Stanwyck is not really my idea

. Audie rides for Columbia now . . Towards the end of his career, in the mid-1960s, Audie Murphy’s contract with Universal ran out. New

. Texas Rangers, Hollywood style . . Hollywood loved the Texas Rangers. Of course silver screen Rangers were all noble and there were no incompetent,

. Heart-warming . . All Western fans know Clint Walker as Cheyenne Bodie on TV from 1955 on, and they will also probably be well

. Billy the Kid as goody . . Of all the silver-screen representations of Billy the Kid, the Buster Crabbe ones were probably the silliest.

. The jerk method . . The Valles Caldera (The Cadence Group, 2015) is a recent Western novel by lawyer/writer Gary Stuart, and it is

. Family melodrama . . I must admit that, being a child in the 50s and 60s, I tend to think of Fred MacMurray as