Kirk’s last Western   Draw! was Kirk Douglas’s last Western. It was a TV movie made by Douglas’s own Bryna Productions (named for his

  Another old post I have revised!   Hats off to the Stetson   There are three main ways to distinguish a cowboy: his horse,

  The finest Western Peck ever made   I reviewed The Gunfighter back in 2016 but having just seen it again and also listened to

  Worthy, if a tad dull   Continuing our current thread of ‘important’ 1920s Westerns, today we’ll look at a big Paramount picture from a

  Coop’s first big role   It is often said that Samuel Goldwyn’s The Winning of Barbara Worth is not a Western, and indeed it

  Coop’s first sound Western – though not really   Wolf Song, released in March 1929, dates from the period of transition between silent and

  Indian Charlie   Charles Stevens was colorful character actor of the Western. For most of his professional life he claimed to be Geronimo’s grandson,

  L’Alliance brisée: Le Western des anneés 1920 by Jean-Louis Leutrat   The Western movie certainly took enormous strides forward in the 1920s, even before

  The only surviving footage of Tom Mix directed by John Ford   In 1920 John Ford moved from Universal to Fox, where he was

  A guksu western   Lovers of spaghetti westerns will probably like this nine-part Netflix show. It is set in Jiandao, known in Korean as

  A woman’s lot   Heartland is a drama which in a way harks right back to the early days of silent movies. There is

    Readers in the US might be interested in this e-mail I received from INSP:     Hi Jeff,   I hope you’ve been

  DVD, please   I’m writing about a film today but not reviewing it, as such. That’s because I haven’t seen it, and indeed my

  Divided opinions   There’s a whole sub-genre of capture-the-wild-horse Westerns. Many cowboy stars felt they had to do one. Joel McCrea did two. These

  That’s enough Mohicans   Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans has sold millions of copies, has been filmed very many times and

  The B-Western in its death throes   By the early 1960s, the second-feature just-over-an-hour black & white Western movie was a rider on a

  Yet another go-round of the Mohicans yarn   Made as Last of the Redskins but finally released as the marginally more PC Last of

  Notes from the prairie   How important music can be to a Western!   It must have been even more so in the early

  Siegel and Fonda, not bad!   In the mid-1960s Don Siegel was ‘reduced’ to working in TV. He produced the series The Legend of

  Walsh at the typewriter   In 1969 or ’70, when Raoul Walsh was in his early eighties, he hadn’t made a Western or indeed

  Western parable   A curious picture in some ways, Stranger at My Door is, I suppose, a Western. It starts with a James gang-style

  Weighty tomes   As part of my summer reading I have been re-perusing some hefty guides to the Western, in particular three, Brian Garfield’s

  Durango rides (yet) again   A Durango Kid Western every now and then doesn’t hurt.     The Rough, Tough West is part of

  Another Geezer Western   Red Tomahawk was one of three Westerns that AC Lyles produced which were released in 1967 (the others were Fort

  A Western? Nah.   Tulsa is often called a Western, in TV listings, guides and so on, and indeed, the first reel is Western

  The Preston Westerns   Robert Preston Meservey (1918 – 1987), actor and musician, is probably best remembered today for his role as The Music

  Film noir on the page   Reel West is a series of (admirably short) books about Western films from the University of New Mexico

  Tough guy supreme   Part of my holiday reading was Lee Marvin: Point Blank by Dwayne Epstein (Schaffner Press, 2013) and in light of

  On vacation now, dear e-readers, so I won’t be posting for a bit but I hope you’ll tune back in towards the end of

  A wonderfully good Western   We have of course reviewed the 1959 Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott Western Ride Lonesome on this blog, along with the

  Bang, bang (silently)   I’ve always liked Lloyd Bridges in Westerns. He was a talented actor, I think. Just look at the way he

  OK if you like that kind of thing   Alone Yet Not Alone: Their Faith Became Their Freedom, retitled for some television showings more

  Hard case Clint   The Western has long pursued a love affair with the character of the bounty hunter. One might have thought that

  “Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”   Film titles with livelinks have been reviewed already on this blog

  Mediocre-to-fair   Big Kill is a Western written and directed by and also co-starring Scott Martin. It’s a good-looking picture, shot in handsome New

  Frenemies   During Jeff Arnold’s West’s appropriately short season of Western short films, we have looked at a couple of shorts made by Michael

  That’s a lot of gunfight in 8 minutes   Jeff Arnold’s West is currently having a mini-season reviewing Western short films, and we looked

  Short and not too sweet   The Dentist is another Western short film (I’m rather into shorts at the mo), a nice little picture

  Nine minutes well spent   The ‘short’, so long a staple of the Western genre (very many of the early silent oaters were one-

  The ending was a bit different anyway   Last time on this blog we reviewed a 1954 Lippert Western starring Dane Clark, Thunder Pass.

  A modest oater   Back in December 2022 on this blog we looked at the career of B-movie mogul Robert L Lippert (click the

  Moderately wild times   Last time we reviewed the entertaining Western novel Wild Times by Brian Garfield (click the link for that). Well, soon

  Dickens on the prairie   Regular readers of this blog will know how highly I rate the late Brian Garfield as a Western writer,

  A Dern nasty chief villain   A made-for-TV Western of the early 1990s directed by Alan J Levi (probably best known for helming Battlestar

  Then said Gregorio Cortez With his pistol in his hand, “Ah, so many mounted Rangers Just to take one Mexican!”   (Part of the

  Burnin’ daylight   A very early post on this blog, back in 2010, was a review of a John Wayne Western of the 1970s

  A big-budget romance   Like 1883, the Western series we reviewed recently (click the link for that), 1923 is another spin-off of the popular

  A bit creaky   Harold Ueberroth was a photographic model in Chicago whose good looks got him work in Hollywood in the late 1930s,

  An OK Columbia B-Western   I don’t know whose bright idea it was to take Robert Louis Stevenson’s memoir or travelogue The Silverado Squatters

  A writer in the Old West   When the present writer [viz Jeff] was what Robert Louis Stevenson would Scottishly have called a halfling,

  Nazi-hunting in the Old West   The concept of the war crime seems to us quite recent, I suppose, and before the Nuremberg trials

  A fun 50s B-Western   The Phantom Stagecoach was another of those Wallace MacDonald-produced second feature oaters made for Columbia in the late 1950s,

  I was saddened to hear of the death of Cormac McCarthy, in my view one of America’s greatest ever writers. According to his publishers,

  Sam Elliott’s favorite role   I think you have to give credit to Turner for some of the made-for-television pictures produced in the 1990s.

  The book of the film   1990s editions of Louis L’Amour’s 1969 novel Conagher naturally featured Sam Elliott on the cover but in fact

  Slightly Boetticheresque   You can always rely on Walter Hill. He once said that all the films he made were Westerns, really. When you

  Pretty well done   As Jeff Shaara, author of the enjoyable The Old Lion: A Novel of Theodore Roosevelt, says in a conversation with

  A tidy little oater with a slightly unusual plot   Like our last review, Montana Territory, this picture was a mid-budget 1950s Columbia second

  Plummer and the vigilantes   Montana Territory was a one-hour Columbia Western shot up at the Iverson Ranch with a modest budget but was

  More spaghetti?   Not for me, thanks. I’ve had enough.   There’s a generation of people who were teenagers or young adults in the