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White Gold (Producers Distributing Corporation, 1927)
Ho-hum When I was reviewing the rather good 1979 picture Heartland recently (click the link for that) I said that it was in quite a long line of films about a woman facing hardships on the frontier...
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The Wind (MGM, 1928)
Blow the wind northerly Following on with our current theme of the hardships of the life of women on the frontier – see, for example, our review of Heartland (1979) or our last post, our look at...
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The celluloid Alamo: 2
(With) Davy Crockett at the Fall of the Alamo (Sunset Productions/Aywon Film, 1926) Today, I offer you the second in our series on films dealing with the defense and fall of the Alamo. In The...
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Outlaw Women (Howco Productions, 1952)
A lot of fun In 1951, Joy Newton Houck Sr, the owner of 29 ‘Joy Theatres’ in Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, teamed up with producer/director Ron Ormond, who had been making low-budget...
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Lost Westerns
Lost souls Many people would regard John Ford as the greatest director of Westerns of them all. They could be right. He was certainly a towering figure of the genre. Film scholars have examined his...
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A Lust to Kill (BIP, 1958)
Another Jim Davis B-Western In the late 1950s, Jim Davis, who had been pretty popular on the small screen as railroad detective Matt Clark in Stories of the Century 1954 – 55, did a whole series of...
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Seven Cities of Gold (Fox, 1955)
Routine costume drama There have been many Westerns, or pre-Westerns perhaps we should call them, frontier stories anyway, set in eighteenth-century colonial and revolutionary times. Many featured...
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The celluloid Alamo: 3
Heroes of the Alamo (Sunset Productions, 1937 and Columbia, 1938) In the last episode of The Celluloid Alamo (click the link for that) we looked at the 1926 version, a silent made by Anthony J...
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The Darkening Trail (Mutual Film, 1915)
Melodrama in the Yukon We were lamenting the other day, in our article on Lost Westerns, how many silent movies have decomposed, been thrown away, burned, or otherwise lost to us. This was...
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The Disciple (Triangle/Kay-Bee, 1915)
Revd. Bill Hart The other 1915 William S Hart Western that we have (see out earlier post on The Darkening Trail) was again produced by Thomas H Ince, and this time Ince also wrote it, with S Barret...
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The Celluloid Alamo: 4
The Man from the Alamo (Universal, 1953) Last time, in our Celluloid Alamo 3, we looked at the first talkie featuring the defense and fall of the Alamo. They were soon to come thick and fast....
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Land Raiders (Columbia, 1969)
Pretty bad Land Raiders was a late-60s Western that has all the look of a spaghetti. It was shot in Spain (with a bit in Hungary), has Italian-looking 1960s costumes, those stupid gunshots that...
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Last of the Wild Horses (Screen Guild, 1948)
Bob Lippert has a stab at directing Back in 2022 we looked at the career of Robert L Lippert (click the link for that), a movie theater owner who got into distribution and then production. His...
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The Celluloid Alamo: 5
Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier (Buena Vista, 1955) An earlier Alamo film, in 1926, which we looked at in The Celluloid Alamo: 2, put Davy Crockett front and center of the Alamo story,...
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Houston: The Legend of Texas aka Gone to Texas (CBS, 1986)
Another heroic Houston Slightly peripheral to our Alamo season, as I was saying the other day in The Celluloid Alamo: 4, is the story of Sam Houston. Peripheral because while historically he...
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The Celluloid Alamo: 6
The Last Command (Republic, 1955) While Davy Crockett was all the rage, and Disney’s version of the Alamo was hitting the headlines (see The Celluloid Alamo: 5), over at Republic another picture...
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The Celluloid Alamo: 7
The Alamo (United Artists, 1960) The big one Poor John Wayne. He tried so hard and invested so much in The Alamo – not just pretty well all his worldly wealth but his health, heart and soul. All...
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The Westerns of Harry Lauter
Familiar face One of the most reliable Western character actors, on the big screen and small, was Harry Lauter – especially when you needed a heavy. He appeared in 52 feature films in the genre and...
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The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin (Buena Vista, 1967)
Quite fun A Disney live-action comedy Western from the late 60s, The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin, based on the book By the Great Horn Spoon! by Albert Sidney Fleischman, is mildly entertaining....
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The Celluloid Alamo: 8
The Alamo: Thirteen Days to Glory (NBC TV, 1987) The next Alamo film after John Wayne’s was really Viva Max in 1969, but I’m not reviewing it because (a) it isn’t a Western and (b) I haven’t seen...
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