. The master .   . Elmore Leonard died on August 20th.   Much as I love Leonard’s crime fiction, it is his Westerns that

. . Wayne at Warners . . After his starring role in Fox’s big-budget The Big Trail for Raoul Walsh in 1930, it all went

. . Great Western . . The book and subsequent TV mini-series Lonesome Dove spawned a considerable number of prequels and sequels.   The first

. . Duke slowly improving his acting skills . . Ride Him, Cowboy, aka The Hawk, was the first of the six Warners Westerns starring

. . British Western filmed in Spain . . Eurowesterns are named for foodstuffs. If Italian or Spanish cowboy movies are called spaghetti or paella

. . Classic . . The Star Packer was the eighth of the series of Lone Star westerns made between 1933 and 1935 and came

. . Indy and Bond take on strangers from outa town . . We haven’t (tragically) had a huge number of movie Westerns this century.

. . Embarrassingly bad . . There are some films so bad that you sort of cringe before the screen. Your toes curl up in

. . Chilly . . The lives of some of the mountain men of pre-Civil War America were so colorful and dramatic that it is

. . Splendid . . The TV mini-series Lonesome Dove was of course based on the great Western novel of the same name by Larry

  The Dickens of the West . . Since its publication in 1985, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1985) has become

. . Very good . . Much of the American interest in the Mexican revolution and therefore by extension (regrettably or not) world interest, has

. . Gripping . . An excellent way to get into the characters and events of Pancho Villa’s part in the Mexican revolution is to

. . A classic Villa . . Until the recent HBO film And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself, the 1930s Viva Villa! was the best movie

. . The worst film about Pancho Villa . . The worst of all the films made about Pancho Villa was a ‘comedy’ Western made

. . The best American film about Pancho Villa . . Just as the best book in English on the Mexican Revolution is Villa and

. . Pretty poor all round . . This is a European film about revolution rather than a Western but as it is usually listed

. . The past is not another country. It’s this one. . . Lone Star (the title has several meanings) is a very good movie

. . Ideal for those who find the average Western TV movie too deep . . There was a 1932 Hollywood Jack Hoxie talkie called

. . Cruel men in a pitiless terrain . . There is a short but high-quality list of Australian Westerns or, if you prefer, Australian

. . Lowbrow, maybe, but that suits me . . Although many ‘comedy Westerns’ were dire, some were splendid. The Sheepman was the best of

. . A fine Western novel . . Situated in Western novel terms somewhere between the literary weight of Cormac McCarthy and the sweeping scope

. . A great leader . . If you take Highway 10 south east from Phoenix, you pass near the town of Chandler, AZ and,

. . Cochise 2 . . Once Fox’s had shown us in 1950 a statesmanlike Cochise making peace despite stupid racist white bigots, pro-Indian movies

. . Not very good . . The Quick and the Dead with its double meaning and slightly biblical sound is naturally a great title

. . Very fine . . It seems paradoxical that the really big, long Westerns these days are made for the small screen while movie

. A great Western novel . . The best novel about Wild Bill Hickok by far, and indeed one of the finest of all Westerns,

. . You can rely on Walter Hill to give you a good Western . . Probably the best movie (so far) about Wild Bill

. . Clint is second to nun . . Directed by Don Siegel and based on a story by Budd Boetticher, this Clint Eastwood movie

. . Better than some later Eastwood stuff . . This movie came in a boxed set of spaghetti westerns with the Dollars trilogy which is

. The Prince of Pistoleers . Pancake hat, Prince Albert frock coat . Even while Wild Bill Hickok was alive, and ever since his dramatic

. . Book and film leave you with a hard knot of coldness in your stomach . . Set in West Texas (as was the

. . So bad you laugh . . Jaws meets Moby Dick on the Plains. Great white shark, a white whale, a white buffalo? White

. . Cormac McCarthy, Camus, Peckinpah: Tommy Lee Jones . . You can argue whether this very fine film is a Western. Purists would reject

. . One of the greatest . . Of all the great characters of the Old West, the so-called gunslingers (it’s actually a twentieth century

. . Great fun . . Apart from a celebrity appearance in 1940 along with Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and several others in Rodeo Dough,

. . A 60s actioner with good plot twists . . One of the better offerings of the mid-1960s, The Professionals was well directed by

. . A Farewell to the West – and the Western . . Tumbleweeds was William S Hart’s last Western. Hart left Paramount in 1924,

. . What’s not to like? . . I reckon that Ed Harris in a bar one day grumbled, “They don’t make Westerns like they

. Burt as athletic Apache . This film treats the fascinating story of Massai (also known as Massa, Massi, Masai, Wasse or Massey), the last

. . Lippert B-Western but quite fun . . Rimfire is a straight-down-the-line, black & white, low-budget Lippert oater that’s worth a watch. But not

. . Audie’s last Universal Western . . By the mid-1960s we have to admit that the pictures in the long series of Audie Murphy

. . A classic gambler-gunfighter of the Old West . . We have made several references in this blog to Luke Short the writer of

. . Custerology . . It is with some trepidation that I venture in this blog even to paddle in the shallows of those vast,

. Another quality Audie Western . . Another in the long series of Audie Murphy oaters for Universal was Ride a Crooked Trail. It was

. Fun . . Audie Murphy was very modest about his 33 Westerns (34 if you count his Whispering Smith on TV) but actually he

. A nice little Audie oater . . Gunsmoke (no relation to the TV show of that name) is one of the many Westerns that

. . Subtle and introspective . . From one point of view, The Wonderful Country is a slow-paced Western with too little action. And certainly

. . Bob Mitchum gets to lead in Westerns . . After serving his time as heavy in Hopalong Cassidy movies in the early 1940s,

. . Russell Simpson does a Judge Roy Bean act . . Starting in 1904, Clarence E Mulford wrote a series of magazine short stories

. . 60s California liberal rides the trail . . Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was Robert Redford’s first Western film and he made

. . Audie as killer . . Jack Arnold (no relation to Jeff, sadly) was a director known for work of the caliber of It

. . Another Robin Hoodish Western outlaw . . Did Sam Bass (1851 – 1878) ever know Calamity Jane (1852 – 1903)? Probably not, although

. . Not Sturges’s or Widmark’s best . . By the mid-1950s John Sturges had already directed some interesting Westerns or near-Westerns such as The Walking

. A good Western . In 1946, new Universal boss William Goetz decided to abandon low-budget second features to concentrate on bigger pictures and he

. . Plane stunts over the Grand Canyon . . Tom Mix was 42 by the time he made Sky High and though at the

. . Close to a masterpiece . . There are several good rodeo movies. One thinks in particular of Bronco Buster directed by Budd Boetticher

. . Creatures of a bygone era . . There was naturally a poignancy about John Wayne, who had had lung cancer and was soon

. . Mitchum was so good yet many of the movies he was in – weren’t . . Hard on the hooves of Young Billy Young, Robert

. . You’ve seen worse . . This agreeable but not top-rank Western was written and directed by Burt Kennedy, the screenwriter of the best