. . Kansas with kangaroos . . Purists will quibble as to whether this is a Western. But it certainly is, and a damned fine

 . . The Sharps . . Quigley at 1000 yards . The Sharps is the long-range rifle of the Western. Think of Bob Valdez, high

. . Oh yes, that one . . Gangster-noir movie director Joseph H Lewis did a couple of Randolph Scott Westerns for Columbia in the

. . The best of Lippert . . Robert L Lippert (1909 – 1976) was an owner of movie houses who eventually possessed a chain

. . A superior Western . . Joseph H Lewis (1907 – 2000) is probably most famous for his gangster-noir pictures. Movies like Gun Crazy

. Predictable but don’t underestimate it . .  . . Gunfighters is a good, solid 1940s oater with several merits even if in the last

. A fun Hollywood melodrama . . Only a semi-Western, really, being more a gangster film set in gold-rush California than a proper oater, Barbary

. A Randolph Scott/Harry Joe Brown Western . H Bruce Humberstone directed quite a lot of low-budget movies such as Charlie Chan tales in the

. . Superb Western noir . . “Life is a betrayal. Let’s have the guts to admit it.”  André De Toth . . André De

. . A cracking good Western . . Randolph Scott followed up his appearance in Fox’s major big-budget color Jesse James in 1939 with the same

. No worse than some other Westerns of 1966, I guess . It was always going to be risky remaking Stagecoach. Remaking any very famous Western,

. . Not the best Randolph Scott Western but good fun anyway . . Great little novel . Dead Freight for Piute is a good

. Skip it . From the slushy title onwards, this film is not worth the valuable time of a Western lover. I’d skip it if

. Let’s hope that’s the Last of the Mohicans . I don’t care all that much for Last of the Mohicans films. They’re not Westerns,

. . Wyatt’s Colt . . Wyatt’s Buntline . One thing that every Western fan ‘knows’ about Wyatt Earp is that he used a long-barreled

. A Western that doesn’t really work . . These Thousand Hills has rather a slushy title and sentimental title song (to the tune of

. A routine early programmer . . The series of Paramount Westerns starring Randolph Scott, co-starring Noah Beery and Harry Carey, with Buster Crabbe, Barton

. A little bit of (Hollywood) history . . In 1925 a Zane Grey story had been made into a silent movie, The Thundering Herd,

. A little gripper . . Westerns starring Randolph Scott and produced by his partnership with Harry Joe Brown were often excellent, tight little grippers

. Those Reno boys . . The Renos of Jackson County, Indiana were the original outlaw gang in the James, Younger and Dalton tradition. They

. The Westerns of Kirk Douglas ? . Early life   И́сер Даниело́вич, or Issur Danielovitch, aka Kirk Douglas, born in 1916 and so now

. . Ha ha. Yawn. . . We have said on this blog that Kirk Douglas (click the link for our essay on him) made

. . But whose side are we on? . . If nothing else, Posse is an interesting Western and Kirk Douglas (click the link for

. Curious . . Directed by what we would have to call a lesser light of the Western, Lamont Johnson, who had done only TV

. . Huge, epic, but a bit of a clunker . . Among the Western things I’m not overly keen on are covered-wagon stories, Andrew

. . A little masterpiece . .  Lonely Are The Brave is a little masterpiece. It was Kirk Douglas’s favorite film. It was certainly his

. . A good Western but it missed the train to greatness . . While Columbia brought out its Delmer Daves-directed 3:10 to Yuma in 1957,

. Kirk drifts . . King Vidor direction, Kirk Douglas lead, Borden Chase/DD Beauchamp script, Technicolor photography by Russell Metty: it should have been good.

. Unexceptionable but unexceptional . . Kirk Douglas hadn’t got on at all well with director Raoul Walsh in Douglas’s debut Western, the noirish Along the

. . The Centenary Western . .  Open Range was released in 2003 and can thus claim to be the centenary Western.   The Great Train Robbery,

. A stylized dance of death . Admirers of this movie say that with it Sergio Leone rejuvenated the dying Western. Bernardo Bertolucci said, “It

. The Westerns of William Holden . . William Holden (1918 – 1981) was a very big star. He won an Oscar and was nominated

. . The Dirty Half-Dozen . . Ernest Borgnine (replacing Van Heflin on his death) and William Holden were reunited in a Western three years

. . A Civil War movie combines with a cattle drive one . . This double-billing William Holden/Richard Widmark Civil War Western was directed by

. . A fast, fun Western that turns serious . . This time the artist managed good likenesses of them all – except Holden  

. . A classic 1940s film if only just a Western . . Rachel and the Stranger is not a Western in the sense of

. Excellent . . Arizona is a delightful Western. It was scheduled as a big picture about ‘Manifest Destiny’ empire-building to rival the Oscar-winning giant

. The Return of Will Kane . . You often wonder, don’t you, what happened to the town after the Western ends? I do. I

. . The other Clint . . Why is Fort Dobbs, a black & white lowish budget Western of 1958 starring a TV lead, such

. Bucolic . . Despite the fact that Michael Curtiz directed it, The Proud Rebel is actually a rather subtle and successful Western. You may

. Ladd post-Paramount . . Saskatchewan is a fun movie with a bit of zip. The screenplay (Gil Doud) is a bit dull but thanks

. Branded (Paramount, 1950) . . Branded was the Western directorial debut of cinematographer Rudolph Maté, who went on to direct a good number of

. Whispering Smith (Paramount, 1948) . . Whispering Smith, a 1906 novel  by Frank H Spearman, was a much filmed story. Spearman, a bank president,

. . The Western career of Alan Ladd . . Alan Ladd (1913 – 1964) was very well known as a Western star, notably of

. The Western career of Jack Elam . . . . Everyone loves Jack Elam. One–Reel Jack, so called because he was so often shot

. . Louis L’Amour on the small screen . . At the end of the 1970s, the great Glenn Ford was back in the saddle

. . The ride downhill . . In 1969, the great Western actor Glenn Ford starred in his twenty-second, Smith!  . .   . This

. . A bit of a plodder on the whole . . The Last Challenge, Glenn Ford’s twentieth Western (he was probably getting the hang

. . The Civil War again . . Another Glenn Ford Civil War picture, A Time for Killing, aka The Long Ride Home, could not

. . Glenn Ford in the 1960s . . Glenn Ford got back together with George Marshall in 1964 for the fourth time (they had

. . Lemmon becomes Ford . . Based (loosely) on Frank Harris’s My Reminiscences as a Cowboy, Glenn Ford’s fourteenth Western, and Delmer Daves’s eighth

. . A proper Western . . On the surface a melodramatic tale of range war, passion and lust, Glenn Ford’s tenth Western, The Violent

. . Cowboys brasileiros . . This movie, which we must probably count as Glenn Ford’s ninth Western, commits two cardinal sins against the genre

. . Redhead Rhonda and Cowboy Glenn . . After the high-quality The Man from Colorado and Lust for Gold at the end of the 1940s, that

. . Superb, gripping Western . . Lust for Gold, Glenn Ford’s fifth oater, is a Western sandwich. It starts and ends with modern times,

. . The young Glenn Ford . . Glenn Ford’s Western career started auspiciously with an excellent little picture for Columbia – he and young

. . Need a judge? . Judge character . . One of my all-time favorite character actors in Westerns was Edgar Buchanan.   He was

  . Alan Sharp died on February 8th after a long illness, aged 79.   A Scot, Sharp nevertheless had a notable feel for the

. . “Good or bad, like it or not, that was my film.” . . In 1973 came what many people regard (and they could

. . A lovely, sad, elegiac film . . . This lovely, sad, elegiac film reminds us of The Ballad of Cable Hogue, or even Ride the High