Westerns(not necessarily restricted to spaghetti)

MRS · Post by **MRS** » Tue Jul 21, 2009 5:48 pm

Watched Warlock for the first time last night, let's say B/B+. Lots of quick, sardonic cuts which come off anachronistic and more importantly just out of character for the mood of the film. DeForest Kelley (!) is on the wrong side of the law and gets a lot of dialogue, an almost dandy outlaw of sorts. Additionally, lots of shifts in pathos and perception, you see multiple antithetical deviations in characters pretty quickly. Fonda and Quinn show up fashionably late. Fonda, to an audience of townsfolk he's contracted to defend: "The four hundred dollars a month I get from you would hardly pay for the ammunition I use in practice." It's shot in Ford country, in fact I recognized a recurrent local sheriff as the actor who played Ethan Edwards' brother.

I think every one of Pacino's roles after Bobby Deerfield is derived from Quinn's here, that bizarre locution sounding like you'd been raised week to week between New York and Houma. They even open doors the same way. The indoor sets are cleaner, more chiseled than any big budget Western I've seen, the costumes unconvincingly ornate.

Fonda's reputation (not a spoiler) inevitably precedes him, diplomacy vs. bloodthirst. Dick Widmark for top billing certainly doesn't say much but maybe that's saying something since every important voice is painfully sententious. Buddy Holly could cull an album from some of the doomsday lines. It's often read that the High Noon duel scene took a lot of the genre's early rules and turned them every which way, I can see the same said here for better or worse.

And the pool table death scene in Tombstone is egregiously lifted from this film. Thanks for mentioning it.

jon abbey · Post by **jon abbey** » Sat Jul 25, 2009 9:15 am

saw Ride the High Country for the first time last night, am planning on making my way through most major Peckinpah in the next month or so, the bulk of which I haven't seen before. thought RtHC was pretty good, but am looking forward to the seventies ones more.

Jesse · Post by **Jesse** » Sat Jul 25, 2009 12:01 pm

Weigh in with your take on Dylan's mumbley performance in Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid.

Dohol · Post by **Dohol** » Sun Jul 26, 2009 3:32 pm

jon abbey wrote:saw Ride the High Country for the first time last night, am planning on making my way through most major Peckinpah in the next month or so, the bulk of which I haven't seen before. thought RtHC was pretty good, but am looking forward to the seventies ones more.

What did you think of Ride the High Country? I always thought it wasn't typical Peckinpah, but still one of his best.

jon abbey · Post by **jon abbey** » Sun Jul 26, 2009 4:17 pm

yeah, like I said, it was pretty solid, not supermemorable, but enjoyable. it's probably better if you have a stronger attachment to Randolph Scott and/or Joel McCrea than I do, since they're kind of playing off their previous roles a bit.

MRS · Post by **MRS** » Sun Jul 26, 2009 4:29 pm

Bad Day at Black Rock for the first time last night, stunning, straight into my top ten or so Westerns. Tracy is unimaginably good, even for his own bar (somewhat out of context here, evidently he really didn't want to do this). Lord knows how many Walter Brennan roles I've seen, this is by far his most affected, biggest shock of the film for me. Ryan is uneasy, Borgnine is in batshit mode and there's only one Lee Marvin. Cinemascope doubtless adds a huge element. I can't believe Sturges pulled this out of a hat, going to watch it again before I mail it back.

Dan Warburton · Post by **Dan Warburton** » Wed Aug 12, 2009 1:14 am

Great movie, but a little marred by André Previn's intrusive over the top soundtrack, wouldn't you say?

Dan Warburton · Post by **Dan Warburton** » Mon Oct 26, 2009 6:15 am

Howard Hawks, El Dorado, 1966

Wayne and Mitchum were good pals and drinking buddies, and it shows. OK, so it's basically a remake of Rio Bravo (drunken sheriff, heroes besieged in jailhouse, with comical aged deputy and wild card young gunslinger - knife slinger here etc etc) but it's so well done, who cares?

Dan Warburton · Post by **Dan Warburton** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 1:19 am

Anthony Mann, Cimarron, 1960

Not enthralled. Glenn Ford does as well as he can with a dodgy and unconvincing script, but the rest of the casting seems way off - Maria Schell should have been replaced by Anne Baxter, who's hardly credible as the local hooker; nor is Arthur O'Connell as the hick sharecropper who becomes oil millionaire and corrupt US Senator is totally over the top. Seems to be influenced by another flawed "epic", Giant, and suffers from the same problems: too long, too mawkish and lousy makeup. Still some great Mann touches though: the lynching, school house shootout and land rush scenes are terrific. But the rest of the movie drags.

Dan Warburton · Post by **Dan Warburton** » Sun Nov 08, 2009 11:46 am

jon abbey wrote:anyone seen Warlock (Edward Dmytryk, 1959)?

Just have - for the first time. What a great film - is the book as dense?

jon abbey · Post by **jon abbey** » Sun Nov 08, 2009 5:36 pm

haven't seen the film yet, although it is sitting here. but the book is almost 500 pages, so I'm guessing it's quite a bit denser.

Post by **mudd** » Sun Nov 08, 2009 5:48 pm

i read the book and remember liking it quite a bit, but nothing else about it comes to mind. at all.

hrm.

m

leroysghost · Post by **leroysghost** » Fri Nov 27, 2009 1:34 pm

so warner is selling dvd-r's on demand from their archives now. this is both a blessing (you can finally get a dvd of Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious now) and a curse (you have to pay $15-20 for a dvd-r

). some of the more interesting titles are Carson City (De Toth 1952), Westbound (Boetticher 1959) and Wichita (Tourneur 1955) but seeing as i haven't viewed any of them before i was wondering if anyone here thought they were any good before i dropped fifty bucks for them.

Robert G · Post by **Robert G** » Sun Nov 29, 2009 10:08 pm

Surprised I went through this entire thread, searching the pages for The Proposition, and found nothing. What the deuce? Granted it does take place in Australia and it was written by Nick Cave, but that shouldn't limit it from this thread I think. It could have taken place in any small Western territory in the States, perhaps even be Southern Gothic (if you just changed certain cultural and geographical elements that are exclusive to Australia and nowhere else).

leroysghost · Post by **leroysghost** » Mon Nov 30, 2009 9:43 pm

yeah The Proposition is a good one.

moesgaard · Post by **moesgaard** » Tue Dec 08, 2009 7:53 am

Some faves of mine:

The Big Silence - Silvio Corbucci, 1968 (w/ Jean-Louis Trintignant and Klaus Kinky)
Really strange and pessimistic western replacing the traditionnal desert/dry wilderness with snowy mountains , Wonderful music by Ennio Morricone.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063032/

Westward the Women - William A Wellman, 1950
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044205/

The Tall T, Budd Boetticher, 1957
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044205/
Comanche Station, Budd Boetticher, 1960
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053729/

The Shooting" - Monte Hellman, 1967
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062262/
Ride in the whirlwind - Monte Hellman, 1965
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059653/

Dan Warburton · Post by **Dan Warburton** » Tue Dec 08, 2009 12:38 pm

I thought those two Monte Hellmans were mentioned earlier in the thread, but I can't see them (maybe I haven't looked properly). If not, they came up in the ever-ballooning Recently Watched Films thread about 76 pages ago. Both favourites of mine, as I said there, along with China 9 Liberty 37 (shame my copy is so shitty).

Jack's arrival in The Shooting is one of my favourite moments in cinema.

rlrds · Post by **rlrds** » Tue Dec 08, 2009 9:05 pm

Johnny Guitar.....
I'm still confused why this movie hasn't had a proper dvd release in the US...
watched it for the first time on a kind of bad but watchable bootleg...all the colors were pretty faded...

MRS · Post by **MRS** » Sun Dec 20, 2009 3:13 pm

Dan Warburton wrote:

Jack's arrival in The Shooting is one of my favourite moments in cinema.

Rented last night, I missed what this was trying to say, bored me to tears. Yes the Jack entrance is strong.

Dan Warburton · Post by **Dan Warburton** » Mon Dec 21, 2009 1:27 am

MRS wrote:
Dan Warburton wrote:

Jack's arrival in The Shooting is one of my favourite moments in cinema.
Rented last night, I missed what this was trying to say, bored me to tears. Yes the Jack entrance is strong.

I have no idea what it's trying to say either, but I love it. Feel the same way about Beckett. Is that a problem?

ihatemusic

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