Western Watch: Barricade (1950)

she's so cheery about whatever the hell is happening back there

Watched:  11/26/2024

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Peter Godfrey

TCM was running a day of Ruth Roman movies.  I am but a simple man, so I recorded a couple of the Ruth Roman films I hadn't yet seen - leading to this viewing of Barricade (1950).  

Based on the Jack London story The Sea Wolf, but transported to a gold mine in the west, there sure seems like this has the makings of something that could have been good - even thought provoking.  But, it is not.  I don't even know why it's called Barricade.  There's kinda some barricades in, like, one scene.  But it's not a plot point, and I don't think there's a metaphor here...  It's just called "Barricade".  And Ruth Roman is not big enough by far to barricade anything.

What's odd is that this movie seems like it has high aspirations, but just feels weird and flat throughout.  Maybe I'm just not a Dane Clark fan, or I don't think Raymond Massey was as compelling as the script was begging him to be.  And I was tricked!  Because the movie starts with a scene in which Roman shows up dressed as a lady, getting off of a wagon, and when you find out she's a wanted prison escapee, she kicks a dude over and steals the 6-horse wagon.  It is the best part of the movie.  I briefly had high hopes.

Anyway, there's an accident and she and the other passenger on the wagon end up stranded in a remote gold mine where the crooked boss runs the place with an odd, intellectual cruelty, crushing everyone around him - as he mostly hires people looking to hide from the law.

While Roman and Dane Clark fall for each other, the travelling companion, Robert Douglas, spars verbally with Raymond Massey, the boss.  

I dunno.  It's... fine.  I think the 6.0/ 10 rating on IMDB sounds right.  It's not horrible, but I won't think about this movie again until I'm looking at old posts or IMDB in the future.  Roman is the only real highlight of the film.  I just don't think Dane Clark is all that exciting as a leading man here or in the other things where I've seen him, and Robert Douglas is... fine.  But feels perfunctory in the part.  

It happens.  Even the wikpedia entry on this movie is basically "yes, this movie exists".  

Western Watch: The Far Country (1954)

Watched:  07/23/2024

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Anthony Mann

I have a few beliefs I will drop on people that seem to get a puzzled look, but one of those is that Jimmy Stewart was one of the 20th Century's best actors.  After playing "nice guys" (and a casual murdered in After The Thin Man) as a young actor, post WWII, he sought out more challenging roles, and showed he could also play a real SOB.  Never a villain that I've seen, but reluctant heroes.   The Far Country (1954) is one of those films in which he is an ambivalent dick until, oh, the last few minutes of the movie.  

Directed by Anthony Mann, the movie takes place during the Yukon Goldrush, which I know about almost exclusively via how it shows up in comic books (hello, Uncle Scrooge) and movies.  And, frankly, this movie left me wondering if Don Rosa's take on Glittering Goldie was influenced by Ruth Roman from this movie.*  And, yes, I'd put this in queue in part because it co-stars Roman.    

The movie is full of familiar faces from Westerns - Walter Brennan, Jay C. Flippen, Jack Elam, Royal Dano, etc...  and some others like Harry Morgan and Kathleen Freeman who I relate more to the modern era (Ie: They were still in new things while I was coming up).  It also has someone I'd never seen before, French actor Corinne Calvet, who plays an unrequited love interest to Stewart, more or less trying to follow him around The Yukon.  

I'd seen John McIntire in other things, but he's kind of great as the devious lawman, Gannon, playing Sheriff, judge and executioner in Skagway - the waypoint for people entering the Yukon territory before they cross into Canada and reach Dawson.  He's more or less taking advantage of the relative lawlessness of the area to seize whatever he can, throwing anyone who complains into jail - or into a noose.

Meanwhile, Roman plays Ronda Castle, who runs a saloon in Skagway, where she also pays out for gold, while finding ways to skim from and screw over the miners in order to make a healthy profit.  

After a brief legal skirmish that puts Stewart in a bad spot, Roman hires him out to lead her ride up to Dawson.  Along the way we learn that Stewart is dedicated to covering his own ass above all else, and - this matches pretty well with Roman's worldview.  But along the way and in Dawson, they begin to see people trying to build a town out of the seasonal camp.

Gannon, the shady lawman shows up, and we get a pretty rote Western where some bad dudes push around a bunch of seemingly helpless people.  He may be a bad guy, but you kind of like him, anyway.  He's such a heel, but honest about being a heel.

A few things make this an A picture over a bit of Saturday afternoon B programming.  

In 1954, Stewart was a box office draw, and Ruth Roman was doing well enough that she gets second billing, despite limited screentime.  It may be folks you know from Westerns, but this is a collection of some of the greatest-hits-type supporting actors.  No one is dialing it in, even if they're playing to type.  And Stewart and Roman's mutual arcs toward realizing you really can't live out your libertarian fantasy on the back of a saddle if you want a civilization - or any human connection - is well written if not particularly moving/ telegraphed.

I quite liked Corinna Calvert, and am surprised I don't know her from other things.  

The movie is shot in part in Canada, on location.  And, holy cats, is it beautiful.  That's a part of the world that's on my bucket list, and now maybe even more so.  It's actually shot in Alberta at Athabasca Glacier,  Jasper National Park and other locales.  So while you do get some scenes clearly shot on sets, others are out there in the wild, and it adds considerably to the movie.  

The look is enhanced by careful lenswork of William H. Daniels, who knows how to get that sweeping vista you're looking for.  

But, yeah, if you only really know Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, this is a good one to see his range (not that you don't see a bit of everything in It's a Wonderful Life).  And a chance to see a Western that's pretty darn far west and muddier than it is dusty.  

*I'll have Stuart ask next time he haunts Mr. Rosa's signing table.  

Western Watch: Colt. 45 (1950)

Watched:  07/13/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Edwin L. Marin

I'm not a proud man, and so I will cop to watching this movie to catch Ruth Roman in another flick - especially something like a fairly short western action film.  Plus, I get a kick out of both Randolph Scott and Austin's own Zachary Scott (no relation to Randolph), who plays the villain in this movie.  

The basic set-up is that Randolph Scott is a war veteran and salesman for the new Colt .45, which he used in the Mexican-American War to great effect.  He's now selling them to law enforcement on the frontier, which has not previously seen a repeating, multi-shot handgun - ie: a revolver.  The tactical advantage of 6 shots over 1 is pretty obvious, I hope.    

While showing off his wares, the idiot sheriff (who doesn't get the value) picks a handfight with his prisoner, Zach Scott, who handily wins the fight, grabs the .45s and kills the Sheriff before running off, leaving Randolph - who the townsfolk decide is an accomplice.  Zach Scott goes on a rampage, founding the .45's gang, and raiding wagons carrying gold from a mining town.

Ruth Roman plays the wife to an early-career Lloyd Bridges, and the two are essentially hostages to Zach Scott's gang - except, Lloyd has realized farming doesn't pay as well as stealing gold, so he teams up with Zach Scott while tell his wife that they're biding their time and playing it safe.

Texas Watch: Dallas (1950)

Watched:  07/09/2024

Format:  Amazon 

Viewing:  First

Director:  Stuart Heisler

Full disclosure, I was just looking to see what else Ruth Roman was in, and this came up.  And, as a long-time Texan, I was curious how a movie about Dallas, the most Dallasy city in Texas, was going to work.  Plus, Gary Cooper.  And Steve Cochran in facial hair!

Dallas (1950) takes place shortly after the Civil War, so Dallas is a small, growing western town (it was founded in the early 1840's).  Gary Cooper plays a former Confederate colonel who is sought by the law.  A young Bostonian of means has become a US Marshall to impress his fiance, and come west to prove he's no shrinking violet.  He stumbles across Cooper - a fugitive, and after finding out the situation is not so clear as his orders suggested, he and Cooper ride to Dallas together.  Cooper hears three brothers are there, and he'd like to help take them down.  

There's some frankly unnecessary identity switching as the two enter town, and we learn that the Bostonian is engaged to the daughter of a local Don, which, yes, means Ruth Roman is playing a Mexican-American.   Which...  there's a lot of Hollywood history why this was probably true.  Is Roman, of Jewish-Lithuanian heritage, a good candidate for a Latina?  Uhhhhhhhh...  man, that's a loaded question I asked myself.  

On the flip side, I don't remember too many movies from this era that include Hispanic characters quite like this, shown to be very successful ranchers (or even more so, if these criminals weren't so busy being criminals at them and taking their cattle).

In a lot of ways, this is a pretty typical Western, where some shady dudes are going to take advantage of the lawless nature of the new town/ land and exploit that weakness to steal property and land from others, and the promise of civilization coming is welcomed.  It's also likely an early of an example of the mastermind bad-guy with the loose-canon sibling he's trying to wrangle (Cochran!).  

In the course of events, Roman's character falls for Cooper, who looks old enough to be her father (she's 27-28 and he's probably 49 here).  And, man, Hollywood.  They couldn't stop pairing Cooper with women who look way too young.

There's not much to actually report about this one - other than that the terrain and town look nothing like Dallas or North Texas, which IRL is hilariously flat and so visually uninteresting that Dallas architecture has been weird since the 1970s in an effort to combat this problem.  But this movie is shot in typical ranchland outside of LA, so... behold!  The rolling hill country of Ft. Worth!  The deep valleys outside of Dallas!

If you're looking for more Ruth Roman:  good news.  She's in this.  But I'm not sure this movie is terribly ground-breaking.  It is, however, fairly entertaining and a reminder how cool vaqueros looked in their jackets and on Mexican-style saddles.

Western Russell Watch: The Tall Men (1955)

Watched:  03/13/2024

Format:  Criterion

Viewing:  First

Director:  Raoul Walsh

Selection:  me

I had a brief, brief moment at the start of this film where I wondered if Larry McMurtry hadn't seen this film and decided to borrow from it.  And... maybe, but unlikely.

This is kitchen sink western, with the wilds of the northern west, the frontierish town of San Antonio, cattle drives, hostile Sioux, weather, and one woman.

The basic gist is that the Allison brothers, played by Clark Gable and Cameron Mitchell, have gone northwest since the end of the Civil War, where they fought for the South in Quantrill's Raiders (look it up, and it is a choice).  After the war, they've decided to turn outlaw (really trying to not to editorialize historically here) and gone to Montana.  

Seeing what appears to be an easy mark in Robert Ryan and his moneybelt, they stick him up, only to find he has nothing but $100's, which would draw too much attention.  They strike a deal that Clark Gable will drive Ryan's cattle from San Antonio to Montana and they'll split the proceeds.  

On the way to San Antonio, they meet Jane Russell, who is travelling west to seek her fortune in California.  Eventually Gable and Russell wind up sort of falling for each other until it becomes clear their ideas of what life should be like don't jive.  In San Antonio, she falls in with Ryan and his money.

Together, they head to Montana with the cattle.  

Like a lot of these epic westerns, it's hard to say if this is an action-comedy-musical or what it is, exactly.  It's a fascinating period where a setting and period could open the door for a movie to wear a lot of genre hats under the banner of "Western".  

There's the genuine issue of Cameron Mitchell's characters' blood lust when he's drunk, and he's an alcoholic.  The challenge of moving cattle from Texas to Montana, through Kansas and then through Sioux territory.  And the utterly open question of why on earth Jane Russell went on the cattle drive with them back to Montana.  

There's parts of this movie I liked quite a bit.  I also find the movie a fascinating time capsule of a film that is a-ok with having it's heroes being not just former Confederates and their lost cause, but Quantrill's Raiders, who were notoriously awful people.  I won't comment much on the way the Sioux are depicted, because it's about what you'd expect, only marginally worse, maybe?  We have no actual Native American characters that are even seen in close-up.  And of course Hispanics are depicted as friendly and gregarious and existing to serve alpha male white dudes.  

The gender politics are wildly all over the place, with Russell an independent woman, and that's what the men like, but then still applying mid-50's POV to her - even after it falls flat.  But Russell is almost a cartoon throughout the movie, and we know she can play it serious, so it's a little odd.  She's also 20 years younger than Gable here, who is starting to show his age a bit and clearly playing a guy a decade or more younger.

In general, I like the cattle drive idea, and that it's staffed with vaqueros out of San Antonio, which has a nice historical realism to it.  And the drive footage is kind of beautiful.  And the overall plot of the film still basically works.  I just think there's a better film in here somewhere, and maybe I should just watch or re-read Lonesome Dove.  There is a whole sequence at the end I'd be curious how it got filmed, because it's people in the middle of a stampede, which seems... terrifying?  

Leone Watch: Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Watched:  03/03/2024

Format:  Paramount+

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  Sergio Leone

Selection:  Oh, definitely me

It had been a few years since I'd last watched this movie all the way through, and it's funny to go back see my concern in that write-up that I'd watch the movie too much and it would lose some magic.  Well, I took about 8 years off between viewings, so there you go (I also wrote the film up briefly in 2015).  

This time I was very, very interested in the movie's not exactly subtle analogy for "the end of the West" as rail threatens to bring civilization and that will end the days of the gunslingers and a way of life that's maybe not lasted all that long, but long enough, and can't be a part of the world.  And what happens to the archetypes as the future rolls in.  None of these men are going to change - but the woman can bring civilization.  

As some pals would say, the movie is "vibes".  The plot is pretty easily summed up, and it has long, drawn-out scenes with characters watching and looking, and only speaking as needed - something I associate with Leone films in general.  

But, yeah, I was pretty tired, and pretty raw I guess when I put the movie on, because I got a bit choked up watching some scenes.  Not sad scenes.  Like, literally just watching the shot from the train, to the station to the crane up to the whole town, and Jill moving forward purposefully - and paired with the incredible Ennio Morricone score.  We just don't get that swing-for-the-fences stuff in movies anymore, if we ever did.  

But this movie goes wide as needed, and close-in as needed.  It's a movie where eyes tell the story as much as words. And, man, does Claudia Cardinale's slightest expression carry an ocean of meaning.

Anyway, if you've never seen it, it remains one of my desert-island movies.  There's so much that's great in the movie, and I think people who know about it, know.  But it still seems to fly a bit under the radar. 

Western Watch: Rio Bravo (1959)

Watched:  08/26/2023

Format:  Max

Viewing:  First

Director:  Howard Hawks

Sometimes a movie just works, and there's a reason that folks keep watching it, decade over decade.  Rio Bravo (1959) has a bit of a reputation as Dean Martin's best role, or at least that's what I recall hearing, and I always assumed I'd get to the movie, but just had not.  

Had I known it also stars Angie Dickinson, I would have gotten to it more quickly.  But it surprised me to learn this was Howard Hawks, not John Ford, and that Leigh Brackett had been involved with the screenplay.  So, you've got a lot of things going for the movie right out of the gate.

I'm also aware that John Wayne is now considered a terrible human by folks younger than myself, but if you want to be mad about (a) things that are likely a myth, and (b) every opinion and attitude of generations prior that do not match your own - we're going to be here all day.  

For going on a decade, I've compared the superhero film to the Western.  It's a broad category encompassing a lot of movies that share common elements, but it's also a dubious and overly broad categorization, and no indicator of quality one way or another.  Plenty of terrible superhero films are released, just as plenty of terrible westerns were made, but there are also great, thoughtful superhero film just as there are phenomenal movies made featuring characters who wear hats and six-shooters.  

Western Noir Watch: Lust for Gold (1949)

Watched:  05/02/2022

Format:  Criterion Channel

Viewing:  First

Decade:  1940's

Director:  S. Sylvan Simon and George Marshall

Well, Criterion Channel is currently highlighting a collection of films starring Ida Lupino, and that's good news for me, anyway.  Always on the hunt for more Lupino, I wanted to check out something I hadn't seen, and we mostly randomly landed on Lust for Gold (1949), what appeared to be a Western, but which really turned out to be Western Noir, which is absolutely a thing.

This is a supremely weird movie, and they needed to make one movie or the other movie in their movie, but instead they give you two partial movies, and I cannot begin to conceive of the "why".  A full 2/3rds of the film is flashback to events from the 1880's, and the rest takes place, which a much-less-talented team of actors, in the present day of 1949.  And I'm not sure the whole section in 1949 needs to exist at all, and I'm not sure that the events of 1880 shouldn't have been mentioned in about three sentences in a very different version of how the 1949 stuff spins out.

The end result is that you don't get any Ida Lupino until something like 35 minutes into a 90 minute movie, and... come on.  What are we even doing here?

Western Watch: My Darling Clementine (1946)

Watched:  03/09/2022

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  John Ford

Yet another deeply factually inaccurate take on the events including Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and the Clantons at the OK Corral, but a solid one that throws out all attempts to stay true to the story and instead does its own myth-making.  That's alright.  We have how many years of TV and movies that have used Earp and Holliday as fictional characters with fictional motivations to the point where my usual rules about biopics can't possibly apply.  

I was spurred to check this one out based on a single photo of Victor Mature in a cowboy hat, a still from this movie, and I'm a bit of a Victor Mature fan, and I had never seen him in a western.  When I checked to see what the story was with My Darling Clementine (1946), it was directed by Ford and co-starred Henry Fonda as Earp and Linda Darnell as "Chihuahua", a Mexican songstress.  And, look, I'm only human.  I'll watch a Linda Darnell movie for all the wrong reasons.  The titular Clementine is played by Cathy Downs, who would go on to sci-fi fame in some B pictures like The Amazing Colossal Man, but who also performed in some noir pictures around the 1940's and 50's.  

he's so cool

The movie fictionalizes a full background as a surgeon for "Doc" Holliday (he was a dentist), and makes up a love triangle between himself and Chihuahua, his local saloon lady, and Clementine - a nurse he once loved when he was still practicing.  While the Clantons are trying to remain outlaw lords of Tombstone, they make the mistake of killing Wyatt Earp's (Fonda's) brother, which leads to Earp becoming Marshall of Tombstone - already famed for his work in Dodge City and Deadwood.  Earp falls hard for the virtuous Clementine, and she has some conflicted feelings (and Doc seems kinda screwed up anyway, plus, you know, he's dating Linda Darnell).  

I can genuinely recommend the movie.  I think it's got a lot going for it, and Ford gets great stuff out of his four leads.  The real life story will continue to exist, but I like the arc for Mature's Holliday, and I think he nails it.   But you've also got Ford's Monument valley backdrops, beautifully shot, thoughtful execution of scene after scene, and a kind of humanity to the characters that grounds everything.

I mean...  Linda Darnell

Interaction Watch: For a Few Dollars More (1965)

Watched: 11/10/2020

Format:  Amazon Watch Party

Viewing:  Unknown.  Probably fourth or fifth

Decade:  1960's

Director:  Sergio Leone

It had been maybe 15 years since I last watched For a Few Dollars More (1965), the second in the Man With No Name trilogy, which catapulted Clint Eastwood to stardom, made Leone an unlikely star director, and gave me some movies to be blown away by in my last teens/ early 20's.  

It's an interesting bridge between the solo adventure of a Fistful of Dollars, which is also maybe a bit rougher from a technical standpoint, and the groundbreaking filmmaking that would come with The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and explode into masterpiece filmmaking with Once Upon a Time in the West.  

I may like Leone's work.  Sue me.

The film isn't *that* different to characters and bears from A Fistful of Dollars, but it does insert Lee Van Cleef as the variable in the experiment, and to great effect.  It's not hard to track how Leone went from this film to the three character structure of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly in the next film, giving chances for shifting alliances based on the character's self interests and motivations.  Flashbacks in this film presage similar from the finale from OUATITW.  

It's a gorgeous film, and the pacing and characters are happily breaking the conventions of Westerns of the prior 60 years of film, pointing the way for what we would come to expect from an American action film.  To the point that, with no knowledge of film history, what people coming to this movie for the first time would even think.  But this is 1965 - we're barely two steps from Hopalong Cassidy, chronologically.  

If you think you don't like westerns (a statement I think just basically means: I don't like movies about people without cars, as "western" is a nonsense category of a movie), give the Man With No Name Trilogy a shot.  It's amazing stuff.  

Crawford Watch: Johnny Guitar (1954)

 

Watched:  09/11/2020
Format: Watch Party

Viewing:  Third

Decade:  1950's

Director:  Nicholas Ray

I don't know how successful Johnny Guitar (1954) was upon its release.  As a Western, it plays with a lot of the tropes of expansion, cattlemen versus progress and settlement, gunslingers, robbing stage coaches and more.  But at the end of the day it's about two iron-willed women who really, really do not like each other, and how one self-righteous person can lead everyone down a path that ends in murder.

1954 was part of the second act of Joan Crawford's bumpy ride of a career that solidified nine years prior with Mildred Pierce.  The glamour days of Grand Hotel were 20 years in the past.  She still had the weirdo horror movie career ahead of her, and was just about to set out as America's foremost proponent of Pepsi Cola.

Proto-Super Reboot Watch: Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981)

Watched:  03/30/2020
Format:  Amazon streaming
Viewing:  First
Decade:  1980's

I remember being confused that, in 1981, I was not allowed to see either Legend of the Lone Ranger or Zorro the Gay Blade.   I'd catch Zorro in the summer of 1993 on TV  - summer I graduated high school, and it confirmed what I'd heard from friends at the elementary school lunch table about why I'd not been taken to see a movie about the original superhero.  Legend of the Lone Ranger held a lot more mystery - partially because it was just harder to find and partially because of what little I'd heard.  "It's really violent" I was told.

Western Watch: Shane (1953)

Watched:  03/02/2020
Format:  Alamo Mueller
Viewing:  Unknown - more than 5
Decade:  1950's

It was a delight to see Shane (1953) on the big screen at Alamo Mueller this evening with SimonUK.  Si had never seen it, so that was kind of cool. 

Back in 7th grade my Reading teacher, Ms. McDowell, had us read the original novel, and then we watched the movie.  I've been a fan ever since and am not objective in any way about Shane.  I will say, seeing it on the big screen was stunning - the Grand Tetons loom large in the background and Wyoming's magnificent landscapes provide epic sweep to the story. 

And while it's no mystery that Shane is largely about violence, the impact of the sound in the theater versus confined to my TV speakers provided an intensity to the film I wasn't expecting. 

If it's been a while or you've never seen it, give Shane a shot.  It's been endlessly ripped off and borrowed from, but the original holds up amazingly well.

Western Watch: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)

Watched:  08/11/2019
Format:  TCM on DVR from a looooong time ago
Viewing:  first
Decade:  1940's

Well.  Between this and The Lost Weekend, I picked quite the double-bill for the weekend.

I mean, I knew.  I'd rented this movie twice in college but when I'd think about what it was about, I'd never hit "play" on the ol' VCR.  And I'd recorded it a half-dozen times on the DVR and never watched it.  But this time I did.

The Ox-Bow Incident (1942) is about a small town in the old west who finds out that a local rancher has been killed, and so they pull together a posse to go track down the killers.  It's a mish-mash of local color and yahoos, rationalizing why they don't need to follow the rules, exactly, and supported by the ineptitude and slack nature of some local authority.

Spaghetti Western Watch: The Great Silence (1968)

Watched:  06/26/2018
Format:  Alamo Ritz
Viewing:  First
Decade:  1960's

SPOILERS AHEAD

Western Watch: Silverado (1985)

Watched: 01/26/2018
Format: Home/ Amazon
Viewing: oh, who knows?
Decade: 1980's

Okay. Time to talk a bit about "Westworld" - A non-definitive discussion.

Note:  I'm going to talk about HBO's 2016 series, Westworld, as a whole.  If you're avoiding spoilers, this is not the place for you.  

There's a great deal to like about the 10 episodes of HBO's sci-fi series, Westworld.  It's been interesting to find out how many people haven't seen the original Westworld film by Michael Crichton - a name which is pobably just an echo to Millennials but which was a hosuehold name through the 1990's.  I'll cop to having not seen (or don't remember seeing) Futureworld (1976) or the TV series Beyond Westworld (1980).

I am sure the original 1973 film felt like futureshock at the time, or maybe sci-fi silliness to many.  The first time I watched it back before high school, which would have been the late 1980's, 70's hair-stylings aside, it seemed to work very well as a thriller, even if it didn't seem to run deep with the complexities of Blade Runner or other AI films.  Well into the 1980's, our relationship with technology and computers wasn't as everyday as it's become, and fiction treated computers a bit like the genie's lamp right up through the late 1990's.

What the movie does that still holds up is create an adult theme park that is both impossible, yet seems like something that people would be up for whether we want to admit it or not if the wild success of Las Vegas is any indication.  It's a world of sex and violence with only the most minor of repercussions as one fulfills fantasies and indulges whims in a familiar place, but one separated enough from our own day-to-day that you'd lose your bearings.  And steeped in the inherent violence of the filmic west, it's a world in which you'd be more likely to shoot first and question later.

Robo-Watch: Westworld (1973)

It had been some time since I'd watched the 1973 sci-fi classic, Westworld.  I'd rented it with Jason some time back in the late 80's, and I think we both really liked it (but, if memory serves, he'd seen it before).    I've only seen it again once in college somewhere along the line, enjoyed it, but not watched it again anytime in the last 16 years at least.  I've tried to watch the sequel, Futureworld, but just couldn't watch the 1976 film.  Something about the pacing lost me the one time I tried to give it a whirl.

It seems HBO is launching a TV series also titled Westworld which will greatly expand on the ideas presented in the movie.  It's got an all-star cast and looks to be the sort of thing I find interesting in science fiction.*  I'll be checking it out, certainly, and have high hopes.  Anyway, it got me fired up to review the original film once again.

TL;DR - Spaghetti Watch-tern (Again): Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) isn't just one of my favorite Spaghetti Westerns or Westerns, it's one of my favorite movies.  I try not to watch it too often as I'm afraid I'll reduce something about the film by making the viewing of the film rote (I've come dangerously close to this with Superman I and II).  Instead, each time I watch the movie, I feel like I get something more out of it, see some detail, appreciate some nuance a bit more.  If you ever want to see my ideal for combination of camera work, design of scene, score, acting and blocking to drive story and ideas - look no further.

The film features a tremendous central cast.  Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson of course.  Jason Robards.

Woody Strode and Jack Elam have guest spots as gunmen.

And, of course, we have Claudia Cardinale as Jill.

I wrote up this movie in August of last year.  You can read my write up there with many loving screengrabs I stole from the internets.

SimonUK and I took in a screening at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz on Wednesday evening.  It was the second time I'd seen the movie on the big screen, the first being one of my first trips to The Alamo Drafthouse at its original location on Colorado Street.  This time we didn't get the large theater, but the projection was phenomenal.  I assume it was s digital projection, as we weren't told otherwise.

While I don't have anything particularly new to say about the movie itself, I have been thinking about one aspect of the film in relation to current trends in how we interact with media in 2016.

Western Watch: Shane (1953)

I hadn't watched Shane (1953) in more than a decade.  Even the DVD I have is clearly a relic from the beginning of the DVD era.  If I hadn't watched the movie in a while, it seems that Jamie does not care for Shane, and that's one of those things that you're going to have to endure if you want to stay married.

For my dollar, Shane is one of the great westerns, one of those stories of the expansion into the west and foretelling other great Western stories that explore the nature and fate of the gun-fighter like The Unforgiven,  Beyond the loose definition of the Western genre, it's also, simply, a great film.  Beautifully shot, well-acted, nuanced and better than you likely remember.

Contextually, the book the movie was based on and faithfully adapted from (and which JAL and I read in class in 7th grade if memory serves) was released in 1949, four years after the closing of WWII.  That the book was told in a first-person perspective from the eyes of a child and the movie mostly retains that POV, makes sense.  At it's heart, the story speaks to the naivete of what we see when we look at violence as an heroic act, of putting the gunman on a pedestal - as both writers of Western novels and Hollywood have always done.  In 1949 and 1953, one can imagine all the GI's returning from WWII who had to endure the questions of both the folks who had seen the war from newsreels and kids who saw it as a comic-book adventure against cartoonish Japs and Krauts.