. . 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

. Peckinpah looks around for work . . After Major Dundee bombed, Sam Peckinpah was in a difficult place. He participated in The Glory Guys later in

. . A decent enough low-budget Western . . Sam Peckinpah’s first feature film was on a small scale and is reminiscent of The Westerner

. . The Westerns of Sam Peckinpah . . . Most Western fans would agree that David Samuel Peckinpah (1925 – 1984) was one of

. . The nearest movies got to the truth about the Daltons (though it still wasn’t near) . . The Dalton brothers, who had been

. . A whole lotta fun . . Now it’s the turn of the Dalton brothers to be glamorous criminals. A classic, straight-down-the-line early 40s

. Bob, Grat and Emmett . Bob Dalton . Grat Dalton . Emmett Dalton . The Daltons are famous outlaws of the old West, and

. . Rather charming . . James Stewart made two Westerns in the 1970s, The Cheyenne Social Club in 1970, when he was 62, and

. . A real clunker . . The Rare Breed ought certainly to have had a parental guidance warning (to stop parents going).   Oh,

. . A family saga . . Shenandoah was more a Western than Gone with the Wind is but it’s still really only a family

. . One of the great Western actors . . I don’t want to get into top tens and all that. A league table of

. One of the best Westerns of the 1960s . . John Ford’s Stagecoach in 1939 is a very famous Western and was hugely influential,

  . Tarantino makes a Western . . Well, it’s spectacular, I’ll give it that. And long. Actually, at 2 hours 45 minutes, it’s too

. I knew a fella once… . .   . This celebrated film, very loosely based on the Max Brand novella Twelve Peers, was the first

. . It has its admirers . . High Plains Drifter was the fourth Western that Clint Eastwood starred in after the Dollars European ones

. . Frontier woman . .   . This film, directed by Ron Howard and starring Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones, has a lot

. . Homage to Shane . And I looked, and behold a pale horse and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell

. Huge fun . . The comedy Western is hard to get right but when it does hit the right notes, it can be a

. A great Western actor  .   . What a great Western actor Slim Pickens was.   Mr Louis Burton Lindley Jr (slim pickings were

. Did he or didn’t he? . . Thomas Horn Jr (1860 – 1903) is a very interesting figure to anyone who reads about the

. . The Song of Jesse . . Jesse James passed into folk song almost immediately. The Ballad of Jesse James, supposedly written by a

. . The Book of Jesse . . There have been hundreds, if not thousands of books written about Jesse James, from scholarly analysis to

. . Jesse’s mother . . Zerelda Elizabeth Cole James Simms Samuel (let’s call her Ma James; we can’t go on giving her that full

Another in the occasional series on Western cinematographers . A Western master . . Another of the great Western cinematographers was Lucien Ballard ASC (1908

. . I wouldn’t have it any other way . . We can’t do justice to this great movie in a short blogpost. It would