Favourite Western's

[MaxJoker]

Originally Posted by Mal Hombre

(sadly Stone vetoed a nude bathing sequence early in the film)

Not surprising i guess , as she`s never been one to play on her sexuality in film roles

[nevermind]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

Definitely one of the best westerns ever made...

If you have nothing more to loose, than it's time to take
the law in your own hands.. And that's exactly what he did....
I really like the spitting scenes..

[womenarethebest]

The Magnificent Seven

[cidron]

"Bad Company" (1972), filmed in the hills of Kansas. "Will Penny" (1968), filmed at the Eastern foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. Both of these movies are superior westerns and superior films. If you have not seen them, check them out. You will not be disappointed.

[bigfoot1951]

I hate spaghetti westerns , with the possible exception of Red Sun ! My favourites are High Noon , Shane , the original 3:10 To Yuma , Destry , Gunfight at OK Corral , Magnificent Seven , No Name on the bullet , The Sheepman , Support Your Local Sheriff , Hondo ,. The Professionals , etc.

[cidron]

When the Legends Die (1972) is a very good slice-of-life rodeo movie filmed in Durango, CO and Farmington, NM. It is based on Hal Borland's 1963 novel When the Legends Die. Richard Widmark is excellent as Red Dillon.

[zabdart]

1. The Searchers
2. High Noon
3. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
4. Red River
5. Lonesome Dove
6. Dances with Wolves
7. Unforgiven
8. One-Eyed Jacks
9. Once Upon a Time in the West
10. Cat Ballou

[renno61]

the sacketts

a made for tv two part western

[danton]

I wonder if anyone has like myself noticed the immense contribution to the western genre of Hollywood's ex-pat Europeans? Not so much the actors, as the back room and behind the camera people, not excluding studio bosses. I wonder if scoundrel who is virtually a walking compendium when it comes to these movies has any thoughts? Many were from non-British Isles backgrounds, whereas most of the characters portrayed in the 'golden age' movies, are (supposedly).

It would fit however, historically. Most of those setting out on the trails would have been recent immigrants from far and wide. Ford occasionally nods to this with some extremely stereotypical characters in his films who speak English like cartoon Swedes or Germans. Cowboys on the big drives would be different to the homesteaders and prospectors I imagine; but they were only briefly a part of a varied picture; once the railroads were in place their days were over.

Somehow, Demitri Tiomkin and the hugely influential Aaron Copland (never I think a western film music composer) were both from immigrant backgrounds who could be held to have given the West its beating musical heart.

Can I finish by putting in plea for 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre' to be considered a western? A wonderful film in any case.

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by danton

I wonder if anyone has like myself noticed the immense contribution to the western genre of Hollywood's ex-pat Europeans? Not so much the actors, as the back room and behind the camera people, not excluding studio bosses. I wonder if scoundrel who is virtually a walking compendium when it comes to these movies has any thoughts? Many were from non-British Isles backgrounds, whereas most of the characters portrayed in the 'golden age' movies, are (supposedly).

It would fit however, historically. Most of those setting out on the trails would have been recent immigrants from far and wide. Ford occasionally nods to this with some extremely stereotypical characters in his films who speak English like cartoon Swedes or Germans. Cowboys on the big drives would be different to the homesteaders and prospectors I imagine; but they were only briefly a part of a varied picture; once the railroads were in place their days were over.

Somehow, Demitri Tiomkin and the hugely influential Aaron Copland (never I think a western film music composer) were both from immigrant backgrounds who could be held to have given the West its beating musical heart.

Can I finish by putting in plea for 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre' to be considered a western? A wonderful film in any case.

The western is a quintessentially American myth. A perfect example of this myth is Stagecoach: an almost complete rolecall of the mythic western composition. It uses the following characteristic ingredients:

• An outlaw on the run
• A prostitute who wants to escape her life before it ruins her
• A drunken philosopher (the doctor)
• A quiet and sinister gambler
• An emolient but tough minded and determined sheriff
• Some posh totty (in this case she is the heavily pregnant wife of a Cavalry officer we never get to meet
• A pompous bourguoise windbag (the banker)
• A bleak desert landscape full of desolate beauty (it was the first time John Ford exploited the Monument Valley location he loved so well), but made alien and out of whack by the unseen threat of the Apache Indians, who mostly appear as smoke signals and fear in the eyes of the Mexican way-station proprietor whose silent, beautiful but malignant wife is Apache and tips off her tribe that the coach is around.
• The Apache themselves, not as players in the drama but as an impersonal plot device, a brooding threat which is the more frightening for being hidden and impossible to measure.

There are no Europeans that I know of either front or behind the camera in Stagecoach. The European influence crept in little by little as the years went by. Behind the camera, Austrian orchestral musicians became a potent force in Hollywood film scores in the late 1930s through to the 1950s. European scriptwriters and camera technicians became more influential also. But these things are not very evident in the film which the audience sees.

It was undoubtedly the Italians, especially Sergio Leone, who re-invented the western by imposing a subversive alternative European take on the well established mythic components. Once Upon a Time in the West is an obvious example, especially in the bleak and pitiless outlaw character played so well by Henry Fonda. The mere choice of Fonda for this role was a darkly ironic comment on the noble-outlaw myth: Fonda is so often the everyman of straightforward American decency, but here we see him as a smiling killer, an utterly merciless and cruel fiend in human form. Evil doesnt need to wear a black hat in a Sergio Leone film, it manifests itself in the characters entire life on screen. The Outlaw Josie Wales made an even more subtle refinement on this European critique by resurrecting the noble outlaw and explaining why a noble human being would choose to be an outlaw by portraying the world of the western itself as a foul cesspool of human depravity, against which any decent human being would inevitably rebel. There is no comforting backdrop of American civilisation such as we see in a typical Ford western, only a Darwinian chaos where the hero must impose his own law because no other law exists.

Other, distinctively European westerns are usually inferior but there are some noteable exceptions. A Man Called Horse is a fine film which helped to bring in the American Indians as part of the narrative by opposing them to an English, not an American protagonist, who is not a prisoner of American pre-conceptions but able to take these strange new people exactly as he finds them. The European is often a fish-out-of-water comedy figure in westerns, for example Kenneth More in The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw. The common denominator is the subversive effect of a European perspective superimposed on western mythic stereotypes.

In the real west of the 1870s and later, Europeans would have been massively present, streaming west by the boatload via Ellis Island, desperate to create their own American Dream out of a background of stark hunger and destitution in Ireland, Poland, Sweden and failed societies all over Europe. European voices probably outnumbered American voices in the US Cavalry, on cattle drives and in the saloons and bordellos of the Old West. But the western myth was created in Hollywood and became one of the key myths and legends which forged the identity of a young republic in an old world.