. . An unhappy time for Duke – and three weak Westerns . . It is commonly believed that one industry immune from the great

. Like a runty old dog . Allied Artists was a transmogrification of the old B-movie producers Monogram and they had big dreams. This oater

. Pretty routine . This film is curious in that the director, ‘Allen Smithee’, didn’t exist. The first director was Robert Totten, with whom lead

. A bandit reformed by the love of a maid . Knight of the Trail is a rather charming 23-minute two-reeler produced and written by

. . An underrated gem . . A fine little movie, only 79 minutes, black & white, The Ride Back was the sleeper of 1957.

. Three Sad Men . . Three Bad Men (as also the title of a 1926 John Ford motion picture) is a very good name

. Now if there were a Western Hall of Shame… . On this blog we’ve talked from time to time about the British Western. Everyone

. 100 Years Ago . In the year of the big blockbuster Western with Johnny Depp, let’s look back a century.   The Battle of

. . Less djangly music . . After the three Dollars movies directed by Sergio Leone, Django and its 31 sequels, directed by Leone’s friend

. . The best spaghetti western . . On the front of the DVD box there is a quote from Alex Cox, an expert on

. Gray . . Man with the Gun (aka Deadly Peacemaker, The Trouble Shooter) has the classic town-tamer plot. A town treed by an arrogant

. Robert Mitchum plays a hard-drinking, womanizing, cynical outsider. How hard did he have to act? . . In his excellent biography of Robert Mitchum,

. . A twenty-gallon hat . . I don’t always go for comedy Westerns. I find the genre faintly sacrilegious.   But I do sometimes

. . Magical . . Fatty Arbuckle, the Marx Brothers, Bob Hope, WC Fields, all comedians had to Go West or be a Paleface sooner

. . James Arness on the big screen in a cloud of gunsmoke . . Gun the Man Down is in many ways little more

. . Cheesy . . Yvonne De Carlo specialized in cheesy 40s Westerns. She was Calamity Jane in one. In this one she is accompanied

. . A very good Western . You might think that a Western with Elvis Presley in it would be a popular, ultra-commercial vehicle, just

. . A menacing game of chess . . Bad Day at Black Rock is a very good film. You can argue whether it’s a

. . Rootin’, tootin’ . . This is a cracking little movie, well worth a watch. Republic churned out standard horse operas all through the

. . Taming of the Western Shrew . . Beware movies with exclamation points in their titles! They seem to want to make the story

. . Peck’s last Western . . Gregory Peck’s last excursion in our noble genre was a ‘matzo-ball western’. Or it was filmed in Israel

. . Kennedy at his best . . Edgar G Ulmer (1904 – 1972) is considered now a cult director. Peter Bogdanovich thinks that his

. . Ford on TV . . Towards the end of his career, John Ford used to slam Ward Bond for the low quality of

. . Jim Bridger saves the day . . George Sherman directed more Westerns than any other kind of movie, 85 in all. We’ve looked

. . If all else fails, make Rio Bravo again . . Howard Hawks directs John Wayne – but this about as far from as

. . Van Heflin’s last Western . . So many American Western stars went off to Europe in the late 1960s to make Italian Westerns.

. . Routine Warners Wstern . . Los Angeleno Stuart Heisler had directed the nice little Gary Cooper vehicle Along Came Jones in 1945 (I

. . Formulaic 60s Wayne Western . . Big Fox budget; Michael Curtiz to direct; beefy, muscular theme by Elmer Bernstein; large panoramic Utah locations,

. . Old Gabe . 1          The fact   James Felix Bridger was one of the greatest of the explorers, mountain men and trappers of

. . Kit . Christopher Houston Carson . . Of all the Hollywood treatments of famous figures of the West – Wyatt Earp, Billy the

. . A good mid-50s Western with a lot to recommend it . . Dana Andrews started his career in Westerns (Lucky Cisco Kid and

. . Old-fashioned but Preston Foster excellent . . John Ford, no less, directed the first film version of the 1869 Bret Harte story The

. . Lumbering . . The Sea of Grass should have been the rancher vs. homesteader film par excellence. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn (their

. . You could do worse . . Cattle Drive is a children’s Western, really, or perhaps, rather, a boy’s one. The title says it

. . Mooo! .   Although cattle were vital to the West, and the Western, there were few really good cattle drive movies in the

. . A nice old-fashioned Western Well Worth a Watch . . To the Last Man is an early Randolph Scott Western (his sixth; he

. . 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