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The Westerns of Arthur Kennedy
Best as charming rogue Comments by readers Jean-Marie and RR have made me rethink and reassess the Western career of Arthur Kennedy. So today a little Arthurology. Kennedy did 16 feature Westerns...
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The Captivity Narrative
Taken by Indians The so-called captivity narrative, a story about a person of one tribe or race or religion taken and held by another, is pretty well as old as story-telling itself. It played on...
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The Parson and the Outlaw (Columbia, 1957)
Billy lives to fight another day One of the (very) many movies about the (entirely mythical) Billy the Kid was a B-Western of 1957, distributed by Columbia but made by Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers...
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Bounty hunters
Wanted: Dead or Alive The whole notion of allowing or even encouraging people who are not sworn officers of the law to apprehend fugitives, and rewarding them for it with money, may seem to us...
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Black Hat Jack by Joe R Lansdale
A good yarn I knew Texan author Joe R Lansdale from his enjoyable Hap and Leonard stories but was reminded by reading Kim Newman’s Western Movies (review of that soon), to which Mr Lansdale wrote...
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The Longhorn (Monogram, 1951)
The B-Western at its best The longhorn is a descendant of the cattle brought to the Americas by Spanish conquistadores in the days of Christopher Columbus. Over the next two centuries, the...
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Cattle
Git ‘em up! Move ‘em out! Movie titles with livelinks can be clicked on to go to our reviews of those pictures. In one way or another, cattle are integral to the Western. The very word cowboy...
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King of the Pecos (Republic, 1936)
Second-feature cattle baron King of the Pecos dates from the period when John Wayne, who had flirted with stardom in Fox’s wagon-train epic The Big Trail when he was chosen by director Raoul Walsh...
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The Westerns of Dorothy Malone
Dorothy I always thought that Dorothy Malone was what my aged pop would have called a corker (he was fond of old-time slang and might also have called her the cat’s pajamas). My mom liked her too,...
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The non-American Western
Made for a Fistful of Yen (or pounds, or lire or whatever) Film titles with livelinks can be clicked on for our reviews of those pictures. Some purists think that a film can only be a Western if...
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The Kangaroo Kid (Eagle-Lion, 1950)
Jocko down under The Kangaroo Kid is an example of the films I was waffling on about the other day, a non-American Western (click the link for that). It is a Western, no doubt about that. It...
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The Cactus Kid and Pioneer Days (Columbia, 1930)
Go West, young mouse A sometimes overlooked part of the comedy Western oeuvre (posh word, oeuvre) is the animated cartoon. But it was inevitable, given the popularity of the Western, and...
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The Phantom Empire (Mascot, 1935)
Six-guns v. ray-guns I felt it incumbent on me (rather a good word, incumbent) as a Western blogger to watch and review for you, dear e-reader, Mascot’s 1935 serial The Phantom Empire. Because...
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Cars in Westerns
Horseless Movie titles with livelinks will take you to our reviews of those pictures. The Western movie is usually set in a time before automobiles, most typically in the twenty-odd years after...
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The Pledge/A Gunfighter’s Pledge (Larry Levinson/Hallmark TV, 2008)
An OK TV movie First screened as A Gunfighter’s Pledge by the Hallmark TV channel, then released on DVD under its working title The Pledge (maybe they wanted some reflected glory from the 2001 Sean...
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Sturgeon’s Law and the Western
A refutation Refutation: denial of the truth or accuracy of In 1957 the science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon coined what he called Sturgeon’s Law, or even Sturgeon’s Revelation (which has an...
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The Second Time Around (MGM, 1961)
Yawn Debbie Reynolds, who had made a hit in MGM’s Singin’ in the Rain in 1952, had never done a Western, and indeed in her whole career would only do three, none of them any good. But in 1961 the...
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Wild West Movies by Kim Newman
A highly entertaining guide Kim Newman may be better known to film buffs as a horror expert. Author of fiction like The Vampire Genevieve and Anno Dracula, he has been accorded such honors as The...
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Desperate Riders (Lionsgate, 2022)
Modest Desperate Trails is one of those straight-to-video Westerns which is modest in scope and equally so in achievement, but has a couple of points of interest. It was directed and produced by...
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The celluloid Alamo: 1
Martyrs The story of the defense and fall of the Alamo in 1836 is a key one in the American psyche and of almost religious significance in Texas. It is no wonder that it has been so often the...
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