I too enjoy the films mentioned above.

Another western I really enjoy is, Open Range.

I think Robert Duval is brilliant in this film!

I am one of the few of my circle that enjoys westerns,

when I was a kid I loved Silverado, not knowing hoe derivative it was.

Good Bad Ugly is on my top 3 of all time films.

I liked the True Grit remake a lot too.

As a kid (11-13 years old) I used to read a ton of Louis L'Amour books, which were cheap paperbacks at the time. I really enjoyed them as they were pure story.

YESSS!!!!!! Spot On!


I LOVE Louis L'Amour novels, and still read them. I'll probably end up one of those sad old men who spends his retirement visiting those 'Old West' theme-park towns like Enchanted Springs and Tombstone, watching mock shoot outs and collecting Wyatt Earp memorabilia.

Give it a few years, this'll be me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBWWCgtlNKU

I don't know about 'best'. They're both up there, though. (Although for Ford I'd still take My Darling Clementine and Stagecoach over The Searchers.) Have you seen Shane, or Winchester '73? They'd also be strong contenders for me. And that's even before you get to the 60s and 70s 'revisionist' stuff like McCabe and Mrs Miller and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

Interestingly, they're not really that bad at all!

Louis L'Amour is obviously at the pulpier end of Western lit but, despite its lowly reputation, many of America's best and most respected writers like Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, Daniel Woodrell, Charles Portis, Elmore Leonard, Ron Hansen, have built at least part of their reputation writing 'cowboy books'.

I keep wanting to read something by him but there's so much of it I never know where to start.

My guess, its not worth it. I think Clancy is like Stephen King, his books make for great films but suffer from terrible dialogue and narration so as to make them essentially unreadable.


Pulp is exactly what I was going to call it, but really, even some of the great "classics" started out as serials which are the origin of pulp fiction.

Yeah. I never meant it as an insult. If the likes of Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett and Jim Thompson are 'pulp' then what on earth is 'literature'?

I spend at 90% of the year going away exploring exotic places,
having sex with my beautiful girlfriend, just doing sit ups, and then counting money..
because they just to see me doing what I do..
I know I say the same thing, but they were like we just need a good looking guy with
a great ass and tight abs to provide some down home enthusiasm..
I said it didn't make any sense..

Tonight I watched a double feature of these two, seeing both only for the second time since seeing them in the theatre.

Shane is very minimal, as though the main themes of the western have been boiled down to a hard core. It's not a 'great' film, in any general sense, but it's a 'great western'


Ford treated the West as national myth. Shane does too but in a far less epic way. I'm not sure about Hawks. I love him but tend to think he was never really suited to Westerns. Rio Bravo is fantastic but it's perhaps telling that John Carpenter relocated it to an urban setting for his remake, Assault on Precinct 13. Hawks' was at his best for me when making more big city-based gangster films or screwball comedies.


I think that nails why Ford was so well suited (in terms of style) to the western. Plus his politics were fairly in tune with the deep underlying conservatism of the genre at that time (he dismissed more 'liberal' Westerns like High Noon as 'anti-westerns'). Ford was a romantic sentimentalist in a way that I don't think Hawks ever was and the classical western anyway was about as romantic and sentimental as American cinema probably ever got.

Anyway, just watched ...



The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Loved it. I'm becoming a really big fan of Casey Affleck.

johnny guitar

2nd time i watch this (first time was on vhs) and now crazier than ever. was recently released on bluray so it looks awesome (it's a 1.37 aspect ratio but the picture quality/color are great on hi def)

this is of course a western/non-western. meaning, it looks like a western but it kinda really isn't. scorsese gets a 3 minute special feature where he calls the movie "operatic" --and it is not just theconstant emotional high pitch of the
story but also the decor, makeup and wardrobe-- a saloon with a cave wall and a large piano on a stage? bananas. joan crawford's weird/beautiful face with the massive bright red lipstick on it is like it was picked out of a hallucination or a kenneth anger movie. sterling hayden with his colorless face and deadened features in a complete contrast (see photo above).

there is so much artificiality and artifice that goes against the grain of the classic western. like when the film switches between a clear blue sky and an ominous dark sunset as it cuts between scenes that are supposedly occurring at the same time. plus the night shots are spectacular. it's almost like a film noir, but with a bright and garish color palette.

anyway, if you haven't watched this, it's a cult classic, dreamlike and bizarre, don't miss it.

I once heard JG described as a 'baroque western', which works for me, although 'operatic' obviously makes just as much sense. As you say, it does look beautiful, which you'd expect from Nicholas Ray. His forte was his interiors (he trained as an architect under Frank Lloyd Wright). Either way, it has some of the strangest scenes in any Western, like the bit when Joan Crawford plays the piano to the posse, or when she walks through the waterfall with Sterling Hayden at the end.

The masses of vaguely subversive sex-related symbolism inevitably made it a far bigger hit with Freudian film critics than with general audiences, which makes the rumours that Hollywood want to remake it seem even more perverse.

PS: I've never thought of it in terms of Kenneth Anger but now you mention it I definitely know what you mean. Like Anger meeting Mario Bava in a wild west saloon.

Anyway, just watched ...



Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

I generally like Robert Rodriguez but this just feels like a bit of a mess. Johnny Depp's great (along with Mickey Rourke's chihuahua and Eva (Salma Who?) Mendes' sheer Eva Mendesness) but other than that it just drags on from one predictably absurdist action sequence to the next. And killing off Danny Trejo half way through has to be seen as an almost criminal waste of top class action-movie talent. In the end I think Rodriguez did it all far better the first time round, with El Mariachi.

But Eva Mendes. With a gun. Jesus flippin' Christ!

Its a mess especially when compared to Desperado and El Mariachi but on its own its still better than half the movies out there. Worth seeing all the same.

8/10

I just watched the Maniac remake. It wasn't good. The POV camera shots were maddening. Hot chicks though.

Right now I'm watching Searching for Sugar Man on Xanax (just got tattooed)

In a rare twist, this film was hands down better than the small short story which quasi-inspired it.