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PostPosted: Mon Dec 10, 2012 5:12 am 
I agree Blazing Saddles isn't worth the time to watch. I got about 30 minutes into it before changing the channel. Mel Brooks is hit or miss with me. That one missed for me. Young Frankenstein though was good.

The western genre never gets old because it can act as an analogy for any number of themes.

Films like High Noon were made as a way to protest communist witch hunting in Hollywood. The Marshall is forced to fight alone when everyone turns their back on him when the outlaws come. At the end when he throws the badge on the ground John Wayne reportedly walked out of the theater and said it was the most un-American movie he had seen. John Wayne then made Rio Bravo in which everyone in the town helped the sheriff apprehend the criminals as a more accurate vision of his America. Personally I think Wayne's vision is more accurate.

There were lots of cookie-cutter western films but some were amazingly good. Some we haven't yet named - The Big Country (Gregory Peck), Duel in the Sun (Peck again), and The Naked Spur (Jimmy Stewart).

Let us not forget that for every great western though there were usually two bad ones. Anyone ever sit through Frank Sinatra's The Kissing Bandit? How about Cagney in Tribute to a Bad Man? I kept expecting Cagney to pull out his gat and knock those screws right off their horses, see? Dirty rats!

Or for you Yankees... the Olson Twins go west in "How the West was Fun"!


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PostPosted: Mon Dec 10, 2012 8:53 am 
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Neal Hebert wrote:
General Ringbloom <salute>

Suh, my compliments!

I haven't seen Lancaster's "Unforgiven", however will keep it in mind to view.

Highest regards,

Gen. Hebert: Sir, Lancaster and Audrey Hepburn were cast in this great 1960 western. You can get it over the internet of course. It has a great cast with Audie Murphy, Charles Bickford, many others and even Doug McClure in one of his early roles. Surprisingly, Audie Murphy has a supporting role when at this time he was a big western star in his own right.- Gen. Ringbloom

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PostPosted: Mon Dec 10, 2012 11:04 am 
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We tend to judge the movies by their actors but the best Westerns were written by the best Western writers and I consider James Warner Bellah one of the best. He wrote primarially for the Saturday Evening Post which makes getting copies of his books and short stories very difficult now. He wrote the 2nd Cavalry series which was the bases of the Ford movies "Fort Apache", "Rio Grande", and "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" as well as "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance". Also think the Richard Boone version "A Thunder of Drums" is better than the Wayne/Ford version "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon".

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PostPosted: Mon Dec 10, 2012 1:52 pm 
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I have to disagree. Writing a great western does not translate into a great movie. Look at the remake of 3;10 to Yuma. It has to be the director and screenwriter. the actors make it real.

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PostPosted: Mon Dec 10, 2012 6:03 pm 
You are both probably right as its a combination of the factors. I do think we had much better western actors back then. Most actors may be in one western these days (if that!) during their career. Back then you had guys like Cooper, Wayne, Cotton, Scott, Stewart, Carey, ect. who were in dozens and dozens of westerns. Not to mention the great character actors like Gabby Hayes, Walter Brennan, Hank Worden, Chill Wills, ect. who really made the movies much better by their efforts. You could take a few stars with a mediocre script and make it much better by just them being in it (watch The War Wagon or The Train Robbers sometime for proof).


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PostPosted: Tue Dec 11, 2012 8:30 am 
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Drex wrote:
I have to disagree. Writing a great western does not translate into a great movie. Look at the remake of 3;10 to Yuma. It has to be the director and screenwriter. the actors make it real.


It isn't necessarially the writer's fault. Usually its the directors and screenwriters that turn a great story into a dog. "3:10 to Yuma" remake had good actors. Russell Crowe and Christian Bale as the main characters. The 1957 version had Glen Ford and Van Heflin. The 1957 version had great reviews but so did the 2007 version. But my point is that a great Western story can be turned into a great Western movie. A poorly written story probably will make a poor movie. Usually the worse Westerns were the ones that didn't come from written stories but were screenwriter creations to take advantage of whatever was currently popular.

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PostPosted: Mon Dec 31, 2012 10:58 am 
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Lots of posts, so surely someone has nominated "The Searchers" In the nearly annual Hollywood effort to screw John Wayne out of an Oscar, this was the biggest injustice.


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PostPosted: Mon Dec 31, 2012 11:56 am 
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Blake wrote:
You are both probably right as its a combination of the factors. I do think we had much better western actors back then. Most actors may be in one western these days (if that!) during their career. Back then you had guys like Cooper, Wayne, Cotton, Scott, Stewart, Carey, ect. who were in dozens and dozens of westerns. Not to mention the great character actors like Gabby Hayes, Walter Brennan, Hank Worden, Chill Wills, ect. who really made the movies much better by their efforts. You could take a few stars with a mediocre script and make it much better by just them being in it (watch The War Wagon or The Train Robbers sometime for proof).


you must be kidding..........you obviously have not seen "Jangmuga" or what ever the hell it was named.

deCrapreo and jamie whats his name...........now those are western actors.

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PostPosted: Mon Dec 31, 2012 12:07 pm 
Oh yeah, like Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson in Shanghai Noon, lol.

Actually that was a rather amusing movie. It was like Rush Hour except with horses.


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