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The poor settlers in the wagon train, didn't even manage to get slaughtered on-screen and are thusly relegated to obscurity



The poor settlers in the wagon train, didn't even manage to get slaughtered on-screen and are thusly relegated to obscurity
ha, that's true and we never seen what happened to the other brother either.




Copper Sky (1957)

An obscure b-western that's big on effort and worth seeking out. As I was watching this I started thinking just how much it reminded me of The African Queen (1951). A prim and proper schoolmarm (Coleen Gray) arrives from the east to a frontier town only to find out everyone has been massacred by the Apache as revenge. The only man to survive is a drunk falsely accused of murder (Jeff Morrow) who goes unseen in the town's jail. He's jaded and burnt out on humanity but agrees to take the young schoolmarm to a nearby settlement for safety.

Along the way their personalities clash, much as Hepburn and Bogart clashed in The African Queen. The majority of the film is the two oddly mixed people trying to survie the desert and Apache attacks...and each other!

I thought this was unique enough to write a longer review.
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Duel in the Sun (1946)

Producer David O. Selznick pulled out all stops to make Duel in the Sun. Problem is Selznick was deeply hooked on amphetamines and on the leading lady Jennifer Jones. Later they married, but during the film shoot they had the hots for each other and Selznick longed to make Jennifer Jones a star. He also longed to top his Gone With the Wind, a near impossible task.

Reportedly Selznick would take the script and rewrite scenes on a regular basis and reshoot scenes that were already 'in the can'. That's a strange thing for a producer to do as usual a producer is concerned with budgets and profits. But Selznick had a great need to turn this into another GWTW. He even went so far as to hire renown director Josef von Sternberg just to do the lighting so that Jennifer Jones would look more glamours. Indeed the lighting is one of the highlights of the film, especially the back shot of Jennifer as she walks away from the camera down a covered arboretum while holding a lamp, the effect is magic.

Even though this is directed by King Vidor this is a Selznick film start to finish. What we get is a grand melodrama where the characters are larger than life and the stakes are high. Think of Duel in the Sun as a big budget western soap opera, heavy on the melodrama...then you'll get the idea.

I liked it for it's unique placement in film history and for it's one of a kind take on a western.
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Dodge City (Michael Curtiz 1939)

Big budget, big stars and 3 strip technicolor in 1939, that should be enough to pique somebodies interest. But like many westerns in the 1930s the story is simple and was aimed at Saturday matinee goers, who were mainly kids. A lot of Errol Flynn's movies were like that as he was the first superstar actor and his lively personality was the main selling point. Errol starred in a number of swashbuckler films and westerns. But make no mistake he's a fine actor and has tons of chemistry with his real life friend, the lovely Olivia de Havilland. Olivia was just 22 when she made this film. Previously she had made a name for herself when she costarred with Errol Flynn in 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood.

In Dodge City, the good guys are good, very good and the bad guys can be spotted from a mile away. The story is simple yet it allows our heroes to do their thing. Watch this one just for the early technicolor experience and for Olivia and Errol.




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Mackenna's Gold (1969)

"Mackenna's Gold was a terrible western. Just wretched." Gregory Peck

Maybe the lead star didn't like his own film, but I thought Mackenna's Gold was a blast. It's like a western on peyote! I mean there's some strange metaphysical stuff happening in this movie. Reportedly a real canyon in the southwest U.S. was purchased by the movie company and destroyed to make the film. I'm not sure if that's true but you do see a desert canyon fall to pieces in the film. It's that weird.

Oh did I mention there's like a ton of movie stars doing small bit roles. The film's roster is rather impressive. Though many a star is killed before they can earn an Oscar. Then there's statue-ist Julie Newmar who's decked out as an Apache with a big scar on her face. In the swimming scene she takes a dip in her birthday suit. It's a huge pond with a waterfall and it's man made, which is something to see! Then again there's lots of special practical effects in this one of a kind western.


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Apache (Robert Aldrich 1954)

Let's cut to the chase, if you're younger you're most likely going to see Apache as racist because white actors are playing native Americans. And that's too bad because this is one of the first westerns to tell the story of an Apache native American, from their viewpoint. The whole film is about Massai (Burt Lancaster) who's the last of the fighting Apache. He's captured, chained and shipped from his homeland in New Mexico to Florida by a train. He escapes and goes on the run, across country, waging a one man guerilla war against the U.S. Army. I mean that's pretty unique for 1950s and progressive too. Massai was a real Apache and if you can get over seeing white actors playing native Americans, then you might just enjoy this film. I did.


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I didn't think of it as racist but it was distracting. It was just ok for me.
Yup, it was distracting, especially at first. As entertainment it was just OK for me too, but I rated it higher for it's ground breaking story. I watched a couple other westerns that I liked pretty well. I just need to have time to write em up.



I watched Apache within the last year and enjoyed it too, a good Western. Robert Aldrich seems like a great director to me and I want to check out more of his films.
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I watched Apache within the last year and enjoyed it too, a good Western. Robert Aldrich seems like a great director to me and I want to check out more of his films.
Aldrich has some solid westerns, I watched another of his and will post about it.




Along Came Jones (1945)

What was interesting, was that the title credits listed the writer, Nunnally Johnson, over the movie title and before the director or producer's names. I would've thought that movie goers in 1945 would not have recognized his name. But I guess they did, and so did I as he's wrote many a fine film script.

Along Came Jones is a 1940s comedy western with Gary Cooper as the likable, but non-too-bright Melody Jones. He's been mistaken for an ornery killer Monte Jarrad (Dan Duryea). Jarrad's girlfriend is the lovely (Loretta Young) and she also just happens to fall for Melody...Which doesn't set will with Jarrad.

This is a likable film, the pacing is a bit slow and it's not a long movie at only 90 minutes. It's lucky Gary Cooper didn't play this happy-dappy character earlier in his film career or he might have very well been type cast and never got to make some of cinema's greatest films. He's good at playing his role, almost too good!

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The next two westerns have one thing in common: incestuous relationships.

The Last Sunset (1961)

Director: Robert Aldrich
Writers: Howard Rigsby (novel), Dalton Trumbo (screenplay)
Cast: Rock Hudson, Kirk Douglas, Dorothy Malone, Carol Lynley, Joseph Cotten

Beautiful cinematography shot in breath taking locations, with a star studded cast. But what stands out is the oddly controversial script written by Dalton Trumbo. On the surface this is a standard western about an aging gunman Bren (Kirk Douglas) hiring on as a cattle boss, with a family of expatriates living in Mexico. Bren has held a candle for his one and only love for many years. She's Belle (Dorthy Malone) the wife of the man (Joseph Cotton) who has just hired the gunman to drive the cattle. As part of the deal the gunman says he want's 1/5 of the cattle and the wife too! Hot on his trail is a lawman (Rock Hudson) who also hires on the cattle drive so he can arrest the gunman the second he crosses back into the U.S. with intentions of seeing him hung.

The rub is that the young daughter reminds Kirk Douglas of the girl he had loved all those years ago. This might sound sappy, but it's not. In the last part of the film it takes a strange turn with the introduction of an

incestuous relationship. I read that the script was a work in progress and Dalton Trumbo didn't finish the final drafts, so we're left wondering just what was he trying to say here?
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The Unforgiven (1960)

Director: John Huston
Writers: Ben Maddow (screenplay), Alan Le May (novel)
Cast: Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn, Audie Murphy, Lillian Gish

"The neighbors of a frontier family turn on them when it is suspected that their adopted daughter was stolen from the local Kiowa tribe."

Not to be confused with Eastwood's Unforgiven, John Huston's The Unforgiven was his answer to John Ford's The Searchers. With such stunning cinematography that even John Ford would take notice, this film is way underseen today. And that's too bad as it's one of the most powerful statements on racial hatred towards native Americans, that came out of the western genre.

Part of the reason people haven't discovered this hidden gem is the misplaced idea that Audrey Hepburn couldn't play a native American woman. Name me 10, top rated native American actresses working in the early 1960s, you can't because there weren't any. So if one can get over their own prejudices about a white European woman playing a Kiowa girl who was raised by whites and looked white enough to pass as a white woman, then you might actually enjoy this powerful tale of lust and hatred.

The native American Kiowa's are portrayed as human and not just fodder for the gun barrel, as in so many other westerns. We see the hatred the settlers have for them and we see that the Kiowa aren't the devils that the whites make them out to be. In fact we see that most of the ugliness is coming from the white settlers with their blind rage hatred of the 'red hides'. That's where Audrey Hepburn comes in, when it's discovered she was rescued from a massacred Kiowa camp and raised to believe she was white, everyone turns on her, even some of her family!

This is a very powerful film, well made and beautiful shot. If that ain't enough, we also get an odd incestuous underlying theme. This is one of Burt Lancaster's best performances too.
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Haven't seen Along Came Jones and I don't think that's going to change.

The other 2 are good uns.
You've seen a lot of these westerns...I bet you've seen the next one I post about too.




Ride the High Country (Sam Peckinpah 1962)

Ride the High Country...they did a lot of that alright, though that journey in the high country wasn't all that interesting. The movie picked up it's pace once they arrived at the miner's camp where the young runaway woman (Mariette Hartley) gets a surprise wedding to Clevis and his brothers: lil' Clevis, Clevis jr. and big un' Clevis, all to her dismay.

Not much is made of the dangerous gold transportation mission taken on by an aging ex-lawman (Joel McCrea) and his unreliable friend (Randolph Scott) until the last scenes. The last scene is decent, but mostly this film never seemed to bring the characters or the plot to life.



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