. . A strong 50s Western from Fred MacMurray . . As a juvenile Western fan in the 1950s and 60s I had a problem

. More of a tribute than a new film . . It’s the eternal problem of remakes: they only want to remake the really good

. Warners’ answer to Annie Get Your Gun . . As I said in my post on Calamity Jane (click the link for our essay

. The first of the De Toth/Scott Westerns . . Man in the Saddle is an early-50s Randolph Scott Western for Columbia directed by André

. Considering the genre (family TV Westerns) this is quite good . . The good news is that they are still making Westerns. The slightly

. Don’t expect too much but it repays a watch . . Cherokee Strip is a black & white Richard Dix Western of the early

. . One mule for Sister Mary . . I was always a great Richard Boone fan, ever since a boyhood addiction to Have Gun

. . Standard fare but quite fun . . Universal made a lot of Westerns in the 1950s. It was one of their favorite genres.

. Duke, Gabby, Yak, classic . . In Westerns there was a man from everywhere. Everywhere in the West, that is. A glance at the

. . A paleface (and redhead) Cherokee . . Credit to early-1950s Hollywood for making a Western movie about a woman but the wooden Jack

. . The Lone Ranger rides again . . In the heyday of Western comics The Lone Ranger was a popular read from 1948 on,

. A burger western . . While Italians were churning out cheap ‘westerns’ in Spain in the late 1960s, a few Americans were trying the

. No great A-Western but still good . . Despite movies such as Colt .45 and Winchester ’73, the shotgun was the real weapon of the West. Ubiquitous,

. Great title . . Showdown at Abilene is a bog-standard Universal Western of the mid-1950s with all that that implies: quite high production values,

With thanks to and admiration of David Pope

. Not bad . . Mark Stevens  was not perhaps in the very top rank of Western stars. Born in 1916-ish (no one is quite

. Pretty cheesy musical Western . . How Hollywood loved titles with the word guns in them. Of course the firearm, and especially the handgun,

. The thrilling days of yesteryear . . Western comics are almost extinct. There was a time when every screen cowboy had his accompanying comic

. A lot of fun . . Although the director, writer and star of the Back to the Future series had, poor things, no background

. The most popular posts of the year . . I am often surprised by the most popular posts on this blog. In 2014 reviews

. Yet another junk spaghetti . . I don’t like spaghetti westerns (they don’t even deserve a capital W), for reasons I have often listed.

. Middle of the trail . . They Rode West is a rather dreary oater from the mid-1950s, with an unstellar cast and a slightly

. A 1930s Lone Star programmer comes back to life . . It’s great that they are still making Westerns. The genre has been described

. Duke rides again . . John Wayne was certainly tall in the saddle, or anywhere else for that matter. He had emerged from the

. A genre movie . . The word genre is often used in films. IMDb lists Action, Adventure, Biography, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Family, Fantasy,

. The weakest of the three Stagecoach versions but still just about watchable . . John Ford’s Stagecoach, though it was, in my view, far

. He used his fists . . One of the lesser-known but still interesting characters of the old West was a man who bore no

. Texas outlaw . . Sam Bass was born in Indiana, it was his native home And at the age of seventeen, young Sam began

. An extraordinary woman . . Martha Jane Canary or Cannary, known to us all as Calamity Jane, has suffered almost as much in history

. Mexican-American gunman of the Old West . . Much has been written of gunmen of the old West like Jesse James, Billy the Kid

. The legend and the reality . . As heroes of legend, few bands of lawmen have made the mark that the Texas Rangers have.

. Bobby Darin tries on a Stetson . . In the 1950s and 60s Universal produced many Westerns and a lot of them were of

. Clint impressions in the Yukon . . Canadian Westerns aren’t always the very best examples of the genre (for example, the Canadian version of The

. Forty years in the saddle . . Don ‘Red’ Barry, or Donald Barry de Acosta, or possibly Milton Poimboeuf (1912 – 1980) reached his

. The Malevolent Seven . What a magnificent Western actor Robert Ryan was! In his stern, tough way, he was so very good that it

. Horse opera . . David Belasco (1853 – 1931) was an impresario, director and playwright from San Francisco. Throughout his long career, stretching from

. Costume drama gives us Mexican history, Hollywood style . . Movies like Warner Brothers’ 1939 Juarez, however good (or bad) they may be, are

. The Cisco Kid wins an Oscar . . There have been many Cisco Kids. When you hear the name you might immediately think of

. Marshal Preston faces Scratchy Wilson . . In 1898 Stephen Crane of The Red Badge of Courage fame published a short story in McClure’s

. Van the preacher man . . In this, Van Heflin’s eighth Western (of thirteen), he plays a soldier, Luke Fargo, home from the Civil

. Old-timers ride again . . As Gary Brumburgh writes on IMDb,   Dan Duryea was definitely the man you went to the movies for

. Hi yo, Silver. Again. . . Brian Garfield, éminence probably quite grise of the guide to Western movies, was, along with many other critics, dismissive of

. Serial killer . . On this blog we have looked at the (real and celluloid) lives of many famous gunmen of the old West,

. Lacks a top-class badman . . We start with a musical recap of the backstory in the form of a cheesy song by Lenny

. The Wild Bunch rides again . . There have been four (that I know of) motion picture interpretations of the outlaw Bill Doolin. Robert

. The masked man on the big screen . . The Lone Ranger rode across the West and into our hearts not only on radio,

. Hi yo, Silver! . . As everyone in the universe knows, the Lone Ranger first appeared in 1933, broadcast on WEBR in Buffalo, then

. More a courtroom drama than a Western . . Valerie is a black & white late-50s courtroom drama which happens to be a Western

. Clunky Civil War drama . . The Last Outpost, also known as The Apache Outpost, re-released later as Cavalry Charge, is an implausible Civil

. Very good . . Two Flags West is an outstandingly good film, certainly Joseph Cotten’s best Western performance and with Linda Darnell also very

. Rather good . . In 1956 fame as Jim Hardie had yet to come to Dale Robertson (Tales of Wells Fargo started on NBC

. A bit of a yawn . . Not, I fear, Dale Robertson’s finest hour, this is an overlong cartoon Western which would have appealed

. The fact behind the myth . . Recently I found on my shelves a forgotten treasure. I usually write on the flyleaf of books

. Run out of town, then besieged in the snow . . In 1869 Bret Harte’s tale The Outcasts of Poker Flat first appeared. It

. Johnny Guitar it ain’t . . Arrow in the Dust was a color Western Sterling Hayden made in the same year as Johnny Guitar but

. Get the anti-nausea medication ready . . Of all the many services that Jeff Arnold’s West provides, for only $99.99 a month (or free

. Cracking corn . . Independent producer Nat Holt did some good Western work between 1949 and 1955 for various studios, and cooperated especially well

. Not bad but… . . As a general rule, and with certain exceptions, the Westerns Randolph Scott made for Warners were not as good

. Quirky and visually fine Western . . Dalton Trumbo (1905 – 1976), possessor of the best name in world history (Dalton Trumbo) was a

. A Western that bears little resemblance to Bret Harte (or the Western) . . This film is in some ways not a “spaghetti western”.