westerns
DVD: My Darling ClementineFriday, 07 August 2015
In John Ford’s rueful 1946 allegory about the human cost of America’s new role as global peacekeeper, Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) agrees to clean up Tombstone, Arizona, as a pretext for revenging his teenage brother's murder by Old Man Clanton (Walter... Read more... |
DVD: Cemetery Without CrossesFriday, 17 July 2015
This must be one of the year’s most remarkable archive exhumations: it may well become the re-release of 2015. A French take on the western released in 1969, Cemetery Without Crosses was explicitly made in the style of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti... Read more... |
DVD: Forty GunsWednesday, 17 June 2015
Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford camped it up superbly as 1950s Western matriarchs in Rancho Notorious and Johnny Guitar respectively. Yet they were outflanked by the steelier Barbara Stanwyck, an actress passionate about the genre. She carved a... Read more... |
DVD: Man of the WestMonday, 23 March 2015
The 19 films directed by Anthony Mann between 1950 and 1960 included all 11 of his Westerns – five of them psychologically nuanced vehicles for James Stewart as an irascible loner scourged or mutilated for his obsessive pursuit of some goal. The... Read more... |
Heaven's GateThursday, 01 August 2013
Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate is the most Melvillean of modern Westerns. It is the American conquest tragedy allegorised in a sprawling semi-fictional account of the 1892 Johnson County range war, in which the big ranchers of the Wyoming Stock... Read more... |
Cowboys & AliensMonday, 15 August 2011
The title is the film. In a new low point for high concepts, producers Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg only needed to see the cover of the titular, unfinished comic book to give Cowboys & Aliens the green light. Iron Man’s director Jon Favreau,... Read more... |
DVD: Meek's CutoffTuesday, 09 August 2011
Spare, slow and beautiful, Kelly Reichardt’s revisionist Western is an effective allegory about bad leadership in America, but it’s as a minimalist tribute to women pioneers that it excels.Inspired by the worst disaster to take place on the Oregon... Read more... |
DVD: True GritMonday, 06 June 2011
As shoes to fill go, John Wayne’s dusty cowboy boots are about as big as it gets. So when the Coen brothers decided to take their shot at True Grit – the Charles Portis novel that finally won Wayne his Oscar – the world sat back with folded arms to... Read more... |
Meek's CutoffThursday, 14 April 2011
Kelly Reichardt’s quietly radical vision of the Wild West is a slender, provocatively ambiguous work and the antithesis to the genre’s muscular action-packed epics. It’s a western which aligns us with those who don bonnets rather than Stetsons, and... Read more... |
True GritTuesday, 08 February 2011
Henry Hathaway's 1969 version of True Grit famously won John Wayne his solitary Oscar for Best Actor. Jeff Bridges, remaking the role of battered, boozing, one-eyed lawman Rooster Cogburn in the Coen brothers' new incarnation, is nominated for the... Read more... |
DVD Release: StagecoachTuesday, 15 June 2010
For the second time in four years, John Ford’s Stagecoach - the epochal black-and-white 1939 B-western that made a star of John Wayne and an icon of Monument Valley, and anticipated Ford’s unequalled run of westerns over the next quarter-century and... Read more... |
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