The beginnings of the 1960s saw the sun set on the Western audiences were used to seeing. John Wayne going off to bring back Natalie Wood had only happened two years prior, but even by then the questions raised about the treatment of Native Americans and the growing revolution defining the new generation of the sixties…
An unwitting franchise of sorts, the Support Your Local… series acts as simultaneous send-up and loving tribute to the dying Western. Released just three months before Sam Peckinpah shot the Western in the face with The Wild Bunch, Support Your Local Sheriff lampoons the genre’s tropes and fallacies, creates a genuinely entertaining story that never…
The Western isn’t my go-to genre, but I have been surprised by a few in my film reviewing career as I was with Dodge City, recently released on Blu-ray through Warner Home Entertainment. A take on the Wyatt Earp story, director Michael Curtiz takes the basic tenets of the Western and uses it to craft…
Our last Friday With Yvonne De Carlo sees her starring in her most passionate project yet, entitled…..Passion! As with Frontier Gal (1945), De Carlo’s films placed generic plots in convenient genres demanding specific plot paths with the finished product feeling surprisingly fresh by emphasizing narrative over setting. Unfortunately, the plots are never executed nearly as…
Gazing at Frontier Gal’s opening credits might leave you thinking we’ve already reviewed this week’s film: a Charles Lamont-directed picture starring Yvonne De Carlo and Rod Cameron? Isn’t that Salome, Where She Danced? And put out the same year, no less? Released only eight months after De Carlo’s star-making performance, Lamont and crew gave her a bigger…
After the success of Baby Face, Barbara Stanwyck found herself increasingly dissatisfied with the films Warner Brothers cast her in. She broke out as a freelancer and did today’s film, Annie Oakley, for RKO. How bad could her WB films have been that she’d find this a better film? Despite the soon-to-be A-list talent of…
John Wayne’s mythos has transformed from just a man playing a part, into a representation of America and the American West itself. So it makes sense to end John Wayne week with a film about the self-creation of myths and the blossoming changes of the American West: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
