Pretty trashy   When we were looking the other day at the 1950s Westerns that Paramount put out (click the link for that) I

  He made some pretty good oaters   Film titles with live links will take you to our reviews of those pictures.   Nat Holt

  Ho-hum   A Bullet is Waiting is a movie that hovers on the edges of the Western genre. It stars Stephen McNally as a

  He made a Small fortune   Edward Small had a long history in the movie business, ‘presenting’ his first film, a First National silent,

  Mouse Pass   I think I’ve been guilty of neglecting Dennis Morgan on this blog. I only talked of him when he was Cole

  Monogram gets delusions of grandeur   The last of the studios were are examining in this current series (you can catch our other articles,

  From Cimarron to The Big Sky   RKO had been one of the major Hollywood studios but after eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes took control

  Slow starters, UA came good   The history of United Artists is long and complex, with many different ownership structures over the years, many

  They liked the Western   Republic may be thought of as one of the ‘lesser’ studios but it certainly favored the Western, like Columbia

  Harry Cohn liked an oater   Columbia, like Universal, rather specialized in the Western.     In 1953, one of our sample years, the

  Uncle Carl   Universal was another outfit that favored the Western – and had done from the start.     The heyday   1953,

  Warner Westerns We’re looking at different studios’ contributions to our noble genre. In 1953, as an example, Warner Bros released 28 pictures, six of

  Tom Mix and John Ford   In 1953 Fox released 37 films, three of which, c 8%, were Westerns, The Silver Whip, Powder River

  The oater wasn’t always paramount     Continuing our look at the different studios’ Westerns, concentrating on the early 1950s, Paramount put out 25

  The studios and the Western   We’ve looked, in our The Westerns of… series, at the series of oaters made by many directors, producers,

  Pretty good   We’ve been looking at the Western career of Forrest Tucker (click the link for our Forrestscape). California Passage dates from his

  A great Western bad guy   Many people will think first of Forrest Tucker as Sergeant Morgan O’Rourke in ABC’s md-60s Western sitcom F

  Anti-Shane   For most of the history of the Western movie, the range war has been a central theme. Big ranchers using thousands of

  The Rangers are the good guys (again)   Today we’ll continue our current mini-season of Wild Bill Elliott oaters with a picture similar in

  Bill Elliott rides again   I like a Wild Bill Elliott oater now and then.     This one dates from his Republic period,

  US Marshal Morris unmasks the bad guys   Big, beefy and blond Wayne Morris started in the 1930s as a “sunny juvenile”, as the

  Amateur   There’s a little sub-genre of Western that might be described as a family film. Not a family film in the usual sense

  The Aussie Jesse James   The Australian Western, or ‘Western’, has a long history, and we on this blog have already looked at Westerns

  Point ‘em north   Fox’s 1955 movie The Tall Men (click the link for our review) was a great letdown, especially for a fine

  Allison has a showdown with Wyatt Earp   Accounts of the life of the noted gunman Clay Allison (click the link for our article

  Clay Allison on TV   Republic’s first television production, Stories of the Century, which ran for two seasons, 1954/55, was a popular show and

  Clay Allison shot to death, again   The third feature Western (that I know of) to feature the disreputable Western character Clay Allison (click

  Clay Allison’s the villain again   We’ve been looking at the nefarious career of Clay Allison (click the link for our article on him)

  Hoppy rides again   Back in July 2021 I wrote an article on this blog about the somewhat less than salubrious denizen of the

  Early conspiracy theory   Old men who claimed to be notable figures of history, in spite of the fact that history records the earlier

  Innocuous   More of a family/adventure film really, this picture nevertheless taps into the mountain man sub-genre of Western, and a sprinkling of gunplay

  The rather unmagnificent seven   Journey to Shiloh was a theatrical release but by 1968 the Western film had become pretty debased, frankly, and

  “I’ve made a living doing what I wanted to do”   James Griffith was a prolific Western actor who, between 1949 and 1960, appeared

  Great art it ain’t but…   Westerns were fond of numerical firearm titles. Ballad for One Gun (1963), Two Guns and a Badge (1954),

  Poor boy, you’re bound to die   In 1958 the Kingston Trio’s Grammy-winning version of the song Tom Dooley reached No. 1 in the

  Ted Post’s first theatrical Western   Ted Post was a highly prolific director who worked from 1950 thru 2002, helming very many episodes of

  Light-hearted musical comedy   Diligently pursuing our current thread of Westerns that Noah Beery Jr appeared in (click the link for our appreciation of

  A rattlin’ good oater   We’re on a bit of a Noah Beery Jr jag at the mo and that gives us a good

  Not great art but watchable   Bad Lands was a remake as a Western of John Ford’s WWI drama The Lost Patrol of 1934

  A lot of fun   We were talking about Noah Beery Jr the other day (click the link for our look at his Western

  Regular fella   Noah Beery Jr was born into Western royalty, really. Both his father, Noah Beery Sr, and his uncle, Wallace Beery, were

  Not John Ford’s finest hour   After the commercial and critical failure of The Fugitive in 1947, John Ford, pictured left in 1948, decided

  Classy version of a rather mawkish tale   At the start of the year on this blog we looked at Peter B Kyne’s novella

  Best of the badmen   I wrote a post on the Western badman some time ago but it seems to have got lost when

  Not as good as the original but not bad   Although Jack Slade in 1953 was in many ways a ‘minor’ Western, a 90-minute

  Western tough guy   Neville Brand has pride of place in the center of the cover photo of the enjoyable book Television Western Players

  Need an Indian maiden?   You may remember in the 1960s (I do anyway) Milly Scott, the storekeeper who exercised her charms on Lucas

  Victorio, Sitting Bull, Watanka, Crazy Horse? Need an Indian chief? Call Pate.   Michael Pate was an Australian, born in a suburb of Sydney

  I wrote this review when the movie came out in December 2021 but it was not in the index, as I recall because I

  Universal oaters   Movie moguls are also producers, and some were particularly hands-on, not just signing the checks and greenlighting pictures but being actively

  Six-gun Willy   William Wyler’s grandmother was the first cousin of Carl Laemmle, known as Uncle, the boss of Universal, and Willi’s grandfather had

  They don’t come any bigger   William Wyler started in Westerns, as Universal’s youngest director in the mid-1920s making 2-reel programmers. His first sound

  Schmaltz   A year or two back I was staying with some friends in Denmark. The conversation turned, as of course it will turn,

  A tense and sophisticated masterpiece   The big adult A-picture Western came back into style at the end of the 1930s, with the Walter

  Follow the formula – to the letter   The other day, when we were discussing the Westerns of producer/distributor Robert Lippert (click the link

  Classy film version of a rather tawdry tale   Last time on this blog we were discussing the famous Peter B Kyne Western story

  Mawkish   Peter B Kyne (1880 – 1957) was an American novelist who published between 1904 and 1940. Many of his works were adapted

  Very charming   By the early 1930s, the great Tom Mix was in his fifties, stocky and endearingly plug-ugly, and though he did several

  Enjoyable   I enjoy the writing of Johnny D Boggs. He’s especially good on comparing and contrasting fact with fiction in the West, a

  Not Raoul’s or Kirk’s greatest Western but still worth a look   In the 1940s Raoul Walsh moved from the big dashing oaters such