. Nobody can outdraw that Rick Martin . . Sterling Hayden despised most of the Westerns he was in. He called them “wretched”. It’s a

. Dire . . John Sturges was a talented director of Westerns. There is no doubt about that. The Magnificent Seven, his rip-roaringest, is one

. The restless gunman . . John Howard Payne (1912 – 1989) was an interesting fellow. . .   . The star of Miracle on

. Starting up the stage line . . Not perhaps the best of the ten Western films John Payne made before devoting himself to The

. Good noir Western . . Rebel in Town was the last of the Western movies John Payne starred in before devoting his time to

. Classic gold-mining story hits the silver screen . . 1     The story   The short story Tennessee’s Partner by Bret Harte first appeared in

. Down in the west Texas town of El Paso . . El Paso was the first Western to star John Payne. He  had been

. . Big John Wayne rides again . . Big Jake was the fourth of seven big movies John Wayne made down in Durango between

. . Building that railroad (again) . . Many place names have figured in the titles of Westerns. Certain places have a magic ring to

. . Gold and cattle in British Columbia . . Randolph Scott made a pair of ‘Canadian’ Westerns for Fox in 1949 and ’50, the

. . Surveyor with six-guns . . Canadian Pacific is certainly not one of Randolph Scott’s better Westerns. In fact it is one of his

. . A whole film about the Colt .45 . . Guns have always been essential to the Western, an integral part of the whole

. . More soap opera than horse opera . . There have been several films showing the Oklahoma Territory land rush of April 22nd 1889

. . Not Flynn’s or Walsh’s best but still fun . . Errol Flynn first ventured hesitantly into Westerns (he wasn’t at all sure they

. . Frontier farce . . Bob Hope was a huge star in 1948. Aged 45, he had already starred in 52 films, including three

. . A Western worth seeing . . While Fort Massacre is a Joel McCrea Western, and ipso facto worth seeing, it is an intense

. . Ray Enright at his best . . If I didn’t see the opening credits I would believe that this great little Western was

. . A little gem . . At only 65 minutes, this little Western is a pure gem.   Paris-born Jacques Tourneur, who had as

. . Gone With The Breeze . . Tap Roots has been (rather unfairly) described as a poor person’s Gone With The Wind. Doubtless the

. . Joel at Universal . . Black Horse Canyon has what you might expect from a 1950s Universal Western, such as fine color photography

. . The chocolate-box West . . Only a Western in the same way that, say, Friendly Persuasion is a Western, Stars in My Crown

. . Beware the owl . . The last time we met Sheriff Walt Longmire of Absaroka County, Wyoming was when we discovered that crows

. . Western odyssey . . More a Civil War drama than a true Western, Cold Mountain is still a very good picture that has

. . Integrity and moral courage . . Sam Peckinpah loved the theme of the ‘end of the West’ (click here for our essay on

. . The drifter . . A fiddlefoot, that is a drifter, a man with itchy feet who can settle to nothing, often appears in

. . Print the legend . . Director William A Wellman claimed that he spent months researching the real William F Cody but decided that

. . Weird but it works . . In some ways The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw was the bizarrest Western ever. It brought together Raoul

. . Drive that tunnel through, whatever the cost . . Hard Money is quite an early Luke Short, the eleventh of fifty-three Western novels.

. . Swashbuckling the West . . All through the 1930s, with a few notable exceptions Westerns were for youthful audiences. The vast majority produced

. . Outstanding . . I have always loved Denver and Rio Grande. I saw it when I was a small boy (Bronze Age) and

. . Like a classy Western movie . . Regular readers, both of them, will know of my admiration for the Western novels of Luke

. . Blood and horses . . The last volume of the trilogy known as The Crossing, the series that many regard as Cormac McCarthy’s

. . Anjelica does Calamity . . Right away, from the very opening scenes, when you get that swirling, slightly sentimental introductory music and Anjelica

. . Un viajero . . On page 383 of The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy (Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1994) we have the essence

. . A hard beauty . . Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1992) succeeded Blood Meridian, after a gap

. . A real saloon . . Crows don’t always fly in a straight line or the most direct route from A to, well, B.

. . Longmire, to Hell and Back . . Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

. . An important film that argues for evil . . It is hard to watch The Birth of a Nation today. Such overtly racist

. . Volume 6 . . Walt Longmire is, regular readers will know by now, a county sheriff in northern Wyoming. He is surrounded by

. . There will be oil . . There Will Be Blood, based very loosely on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, is really a showcase

. . Walt Longmire rides the range – in a Town Car . . The fifth in Craig Johnson’s Longmire series of novels about a

. . A valuable corrective . . In 1993, two movies were made about Geronimo. Columbia’s Geronimo: An American Legend was directed by the excellent Walter

. . Tonto gets his own back . . Now before discussing the überblockbuster of 2013 I feel I ought to declare an interest. The

. . Completely faithful to his culture . . If you were asked to name the most famous Indian chief of them all you might

. . It can be safely missed . . It isn’t entirely clear why this less than glorious picture is called The Buckskin Lady as

. . Wild Bill is shot down, but not by Jack McCall . . John Carpenter (not the John Carpenter of Halloween but the B-movie

. . Hopalong Cassidy rides (yet) again . . Starting in 1904, Clarence E Mulford wrote a series of magazine short stories and 28 popular

. . Boy howdy . . The fourth of Craig Johnson’s Wyoming police procedural novels with a Western tinge, after The Cold Dish (2004),Death Without Company

. . Mr Hawk falls for Mrs Travolta . . Cheyenne Warrior was a made-for-TV movie of 1994 which aired on Starz! Network and then

. . Quite fun . . In 1996 HBO ventured into the dangerous territory of the comedy Western. The Cherokee Kid starred a person called

. . Quick on the draw .   . We first meet Raylan Givens of the US Marshals Service in the 1993 Elmore Leonard novel

. . “No good deed goes unpunished” (Oscar Wilde) . . Those who think that Craig Johnson’s Longmire series, about Sheriff Walter Longmire of Absaroka

. . Monte rides again . . The 1963 book Monte Walsh by Jack Schaefer (click the link for our review of that) is one of

. . Shucks, it’s a horse, ain’t it? . . The first movie adaptation of Jack Schaefer’s 1963 novel Monte Walsh (click the link for our

. . One of the great Western books . . Jack Schaefer is of course widely known for Shane. Although Schaefer was an Easterner, Ohio born

. . You’ve seen worse . . In 1987 NBC aired a TV movie called Desperado inspired in some way by the Eagles song (at least

. . OK, if musicals are your thing . . Paint Your Wagon is a very famous Western (if Western it actually be) and it

. . Yet another ‘Kid’ title . . The last Rex Bell Western that we’ll review for a while (he wasn’t that good) is a