Other Western Actors

Charlton Heston

Major Dundee

Because of a strategic error he made at the battle of Gettysburg, Major Amos Dundee is punished by being sent to command a Texas prison camp. When raiding Apache destroy a nearby ranch and flee to Mexico with two children as captives, Dundee follows in pursuit with a small force from his prison garrison, including condemned Confederate prisoner and boyhood friend of Dundee's, Capt. Benjamin Tyreen. The two clash with each other as often as their skirmishes with the Apaches, and their hostility comes to a head over a beautiful woman captured during a raid on a French garrison in Mexico. Eventually, the Apaches are hunted down and the children are rescued but Dundee's expedition encounters a new threat - French troops - who pursue them aggressively; it is only a suicidal sacrifice from an unexpected source that enables Dundee's unit to return safely across the border. Full of sweeping action scenes and periodic bursts of the kinetic violence for which director Sam Peckinpah would later become famous, Major Dundee (1965) is really the story of the title character's personal journey to hell and back which is juxtaposed with the Captain Bligh-Mr. Christian-like relationship that rages between Dundee and Tyreen.

According to star Charlton Heston, the script for Major Dundee was only partially finished and "badly needing work" when he signed on. Producers brought in former TV Western director Peckinpah to complete the script and direct, largely on the strength of Ride the High Country (1962), a modestly-budgeted Western he made with Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea in the twilight of their long careers (it turned out to be Scott's last movie). Although an excellent writer, Peckinpah had to contend with the pressure of prepping his first big-budget production while sharing an office with Heston, who continually offered unsolicited advice on casting and the script. Even this early in his career, Peckinpah was known as a maverick who didn't trust producers or studio executives and was a heavy drinker with a volatile temper to boot. At the same time, he didn't do much to endear himself to his colleagues on the set, either. According to Heston, Peckinpah tended to "quarrel with the actors and fire the technicians." And Heston himself had numerous run-ins with the director during the grueling location shoot in Mexico, nearly running Peckinpah down on a horse at one point. In his autobiography, In the Arena, Heston wrote "A lot of things went wrong with Dundee; Sam was responsible for most of them. A lot of things went right with it; Sam was responsible for most of those, too. He was...a difficult but very talented man."

The actor also addressed the film's troubled production and numerous on-set conflicts: "One of the most crucial, though none of us realized it at the time, was that Columbia, Sam and I all really had different pictures in mind. Columbia, reasonably enough, wanted a cavalry/Indians film as much like Jack Ford's best as possible. I wanted to be the first to make a film that really explored the Civil War. Sam, though he never said anything like this, really wanted to make The Wild Bunch. That's the movie that was steaming in his psyche." In fact, many people consider the later movie a reworking of Major Dundee, and a chance for Peckinpah to explore themes and find his own directorial style without studio meddling. In the end, the director asked to have his name taken off Major Dundee after the studio took the final cut away from him and, citing budget overruns, refused to allow him to shoot the additional scenes he requested.

Nevertheless, the major strengths of Major Dundee lie in its excellent ensemble cast. Several character actors from this film - Warren Oates, L.Q. Jones, Ben Johnson, and Dub Taylor - would go on to work on The Wild Bunch. Along with fellow Dundee cast members Slim Pickens and R.G. Armstrong, these actors formed an unofficial Peckinpah stock company, each appearing in four to five of the director's films.

For the role of the local girl with whom the company bugler falls in love, Peckinpah wanted a young actress involved at the time with director Budd Boetticher, who was shooting Arruza (1972) in Mexico. In A Portrait in Montage: Peckinpah by Garner Simmons, the director recalled, "So Budd came by and said, 'She's not going to work for you!' And I had to find another actress to play the part. So I was shown a picture of a young Mexican actress and flamenco dancer named Begonia Palacios. She was beautiful, and I ran a picture she made in Mexico, and....I cast her in the picture and later married her - not once, but three times;twice in civil court, once in a church;. So I always tell Budd when I see him, 'Man, you really know how to f*ck a guy up!"

Richard Harris was relatively new to American movies when he made Major Dundee, his first Western. Before signing to appear in Peckinpah's film, he played the lead in Lindsay Anderson's critically acclaimed drama, This Sporting Life (1963) and he had memorable roles in the ensemble casts of The Guns of Navarone (1961) and Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). Harris was actually on location for Major Dundee when he learned he had received a Best Actor Oscar nomination for This Sporting Life, yelling, "I've struck a blow for the Irish rebellion!"

Director: Sam Peckinpah
Producer: Jerry Bresler
Screenplay: Harry Julian Fink, Oscar Saul, Sam Peckinpah
Cinematography: Sam Leavitt
Editing: William Lyon, Don Starling, Howard Kunin
Production Design: Alfred Ybarra
Original Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof
Cast: Charlton Heston (Major Dundee), Richard Harris (Capt. Tyreen), Jim Hutton (Lt. Graham), James Coburn (Samuel Potts), Senta Berger (Teresa Santiago), Warren Oates (O.W. Hadley), Michael Anderson, Jr. (Tim Ryan), Mario Adorf (Sergeant Gomez), Brock Peters (Aesop), Slim Pickens (Wiley), Ben Johnson (Sergeant Chillum), R.G. Armstrong (Reverend Dahlstrom), L.Q. Jones (Arthur Hadley), Dub Taylor (Benjamin Priam).
C-123m.

by Rob Nixon

Monique

Gene Hackman

Bite the Bullet

Bite the Bullet (1975) is a strong moralistic tale of an endurance race viewed through the eyes of a reluctant participant ­ Sam Clayton (Gene Hackman). Set at the turn of the century when automobiles were being introduced into the culture and the old West was vanishing, the plot follows Clayton as he enters a grueling, cross-country horserace across 600 miles involving several riders competing for a prize of $2,000. Adversaries at first, the contestants develop a grudging respect for each other as the race progresses and their interaction creates the dramatic tension in the film. For Sam Clayton, the race has a greater significance; it's a chance to renew his fading sense of dignity and pride in this time of change.

After appearing in such introspective and offbeat melodramas as The Conversation (1974) and Night Moves (1975), Gene Hackman was ready for a change of pace and Bite the Bullet with its physically demanding narrative and rugged outdoor setting provided a new challenge for the actor. Hackman later said it was 'the toughest film I ever worked on.' The sixty-eight day location shoot, which moved from Nevada to New Mexico to Colorado, was plagued by every kind of weather from snowstorms to pouring rain and scorching heat. The high attitudes, some above 11,000 feet, also affected some of the cast and crew. Still, Hackman enjoyed himself in his role as Sam Clayton and even had some time off to enjoy his private plane on weekends.

While Bite the Bullet can't really be considered one of the major high points in Gene Hackman's career, despite his solid performance, the film did mark a major turning point in the career of Candice Bergen, who had never taken herself seriously as an actress up to this point - and the critics didn't either. In her autobiography, Knock Wood, the actress recalled her preparation for her role, "I was confident about my riding skills. Not so about my acting skills. Here was a triumph of miscasting by any but athletic standards: I was to play a voluptuous, tough-talking, two-timing prostitute. But it was beginning to dawn on me that I might take some responsibility here - might at least try to remedy my insecurity about the role...On Bite the Bullet there was a moment of truth. I found...some of the responsibility I'd been grouping toward. One morning, heading for location in one of the fleet of station wagons...I fired a small salvo on the dialogue to the other actors in the car...'I can't say this stuff. It's like an anthology of cowboy cliches; Gene Autry had better lines, for God's sake, Roy Rogers...' Suddenly, Gene Hackman, who had been sitting silently beside the driver in the front seat, swiveled sharply and turned his fury on me full force. 'Shut up about the dialogue!...I don't need to hear any more of your wisecracks about how it can't be done. My job is to do it.'

'Gene was right, of course, in all he said...He didn't give a damn about what anyone thought of him, never wasted his time buddying up to the crew or getting chummy on the set. He funneled his energy fiercely into his work, and he did make bad material good, mediocre writing great. Made magic...he was the first person to give me a sense of respect for acting...that was the first time I began to see the complexity, the infinite challenge of my profession."

Directed and produced by Richard Brooks, Bite the Bullet certainly stands as one of the more interesting and entertaining westerns from the 1970's. Among its many assets, besides the presence of Hackman and Bergen, are some fine supporting performances, most notably Ben Johnson as the old cowboy who "just wants to amount to something" and former Andy Warhol groupie Sally Kirkland as a vivacious frontier woman. The evocative cinematography is by Harry Stradling, Jr., and the impressive music score, which received an Oscar nomination, is by Alex North (The film also was nominated in the Best Sound category). Filmed on location in the American Southwest, Bite the Bullet features scenes shot at the White Sands National Monument and footage of the Durango-Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad which was immortalized in an Ansel Adams photograph and later used as a location in such films as Viva Zapata (1952) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).

Producer/Director/Screenplay: Richard Brooks
Production Design: Robert F. Boyle
Cinematography: Harry Stradling, Jr.
Costume Design: Rita Riggs
Film Editing: George Grenville
Original Music: Alex North
Principal Cast: Gene Hackman (Sam Clayton), Candice Bergen (Miss Jones), James Coburn (Luke Matthews), Ben Johnson ("Mister"), Ian Bannen (Norfolk), Jan-Michael Vincent (Carbo), Dabney Coleman (Jack Parker), Sally Kirkland (Honey).
C-132m. Letterboxed.

by Michael T. Toole & Jeff Stafford

Monique

Lee Marvin and Burt Lancaster :lol:

The Professionals

One of the most critically acclaimed and financially successful Westerns of the sixties, The Professionals (1966) is a perfect example of a big budget Hollywood action adventure that delivers the goods while at the same time introducing a much more complex and unpredictable narrative than most films in this genre. Immediately we are plunged into the story. It's 1917 and a millionaire's wife (Claudia Cardinale) has been kidnapped for ransom in Mexico. Quickly, the millionaire recruits a group of specialists to rescue his wife Maria. There's the group leader (Lee Marvin), an explosives expert (Burt Lancaster), the horseman (Robert Ryan) and the tracker (Woody Strode). Their mission? To sneak into foreign territory and rescue Maria from the Mexican rebel Raza (Jack Palance). Simple? Of course not.

Shot on location in Death Valley, Lake Mead and the Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada, The Professionals was not a smooth film shoot by any stretch of the imagination; rain, snow, sleet, the blazing sun, intense desert heat and even a flash flood created complications for the film crew during the eighty day production schedule. Another wild card in the mix was actor Lee Marvin who was so drunk for a scene atop a giant rock that assistant producer Tom Shaw had to intervene for fear that Burt Lancaster would "take Lee Marvin by the ass and throw him off that mountain." On the positive side, The Professionals was a personal success for Lancaster who had just come off a huge box office failure, John Sturges' comedy Western, The Hallelujah Trail (1965). Lancaster's performance as the explosives expert in Brooks' epic is similar in some ways to his cynical mercenary in Vera Cruz (1954), another Western set amid the Mexican Revolution and one which keeps Lancaster's true intentions a secret until the final fadeout.

The Professionals was based on the novel A Mule for the Marquesa by Frank O'Rourke (which oddly enough is listed in the landmark Oxford English Dictionary as one source for the phrase "from soup to nuts"). The film snagged three Oscar nominations: Best Director (for Richard Brooks), Best Color Cinematography (for Conrad L. Hall) and Best Adapted Screenplay. Brooks, who also wrote the screenplay, could have played it safe and just delivered a damsel-in-distress scenario but instead he invested his characters with plenty of surprising quirks and secrets. For instance, the kidnapped wife has her own agenda, just as much as any of her rescuers or the bandit leader, creating an unusual tension. Brooks later said he was "surprised by the success of The Professionals" but perhaps he shouldn't have been. Plans were announced in 2000 for a remake (at one point involving James Bond scripter Bruce Feirstein and possibly director John Woo) but no further information has been provided to date.

Critic and historian Glenn Erickson (he discovered the lost original ending to Kiss Me Deadly, 1955) identifies The Professionals as one of what he's labeled "Mexican Adventure" films. He points out others like The Wild Bunch (1969), Vera Cruz and The Magnificent Seven (1960), noting that "The subgenre of Westerns about gun-toting Americans adventuring in Mexico can be seen as an ever-changing record of U.S. attitudes toward U.S. military intervention overseas, our real 'foreign policy', as it were." If Westerns have always been to some degree about the idea of a frontier then these Mexican Adventure films--and indeed most Westerns made during the 60s and 70s--are also about dealing with a frontier that was slowly closing and one reason these films are often set early in the 20th century instead of late in the 19th century.

Producer/Director: Richard Brooks
Screenplay: Richard Brooks
Art Direction: Edward S. Haworth
Cinematography: Conrad L. Hall
Editing: Peter Zinner
Music: Maurice Jarre
Cast: Burt Lancaster (Bill Dolworth), Lee Marvin (Henry 'Rico' Fardan), Robert Ryan (Hans Ehrengard), Jack Palance (Capt. Jesus Raza), Claudia Cardinale (Maria Grant), Woody Strode (Jake Sharp), Ralph Bellamy (Joe Grant), Joe De Santis (Ortega).
C-123m.

By Lang Thompson

Monique

Steve MsQueen

Nevada Smith

Saturday 08/16/2003 05:30 PM

A follow-up to The Carpetbaggers (1964), Nevada Smith (1966) finds McQueen in the Alan Ladd role, but traces his background in a manner that we'd today call a "prequel." Young Nevada finds his parents brutally slain by a gang of thugs (led by Martin Landau), then teams up with an aging gunfighter (Brian Keith) to learn the skills of gunplay and find the men who murdered his family. A fairly routine story is given life by McQueen's flinty screen presence, with Suzanne Pleshette cast improbably as a Cajun farm worker and character actors like Pat Hingle, Howard Da Silva, Gene Evans and Lyle Bettger rounding things out.

Hathaway was faced with staggering logistical problems, with the movie set amidst 42 locations (in the California mountain ranges of the Long Pine, Bishop and Mammoth mountains) and with 68 speaking parts to contend with. Cinematographer Lucien Ballard used the spectacular scenery to full advantage; Hathaway had used the mountains so many times before that Ballard's camera never catches the same place twice. Interestingly, McQueen's role is quite similar to his character on the then-popular TV series Wanted: Dead Or Alive, with the exception being that bounty hunter Josh Randall stalked men for money while Nevada Smith hunted them for vengeance. Still, it's intriguing to think of McQueen's volatile nature running up against Henry Hathaway's authoritarian direction in this film.

Producer/Director: Henry Hathaway
Screenplay: John Michael Hayes
Cinematography: Lucien Ballard
Editor: Frank Bracht
Art direction: Hal Pereira, Tambi Larsen, Al Roelofs
Music: Alfred Newman
Principal Cast: Steve McQueen (Nevada Smith/Max Sand), Karl Malden (Tom Fitch), Brian Keith (Jonas Cord), Arthur Kennedy (Bill Bowdre), Suzanne Pleshette (Pilar), Pat Hingle (Big Foot Work Camp Trustee), Raf Vallone (Father Zaccardi), Martin Landau (Jesse Coe), Howard De Silva (Warden of Work Camp), Paul Fix (Sheriff Bonnell), Gene Evans (Sam Sand).
C-131m. Closed captioning.

by Jerry Renshaw

Monique

A Real Classic

The Magnificent Seven

Saturday 08/16/2003 09:30 PM

Director John Sturges once theorized that it was possible to adapt any story into a Western and proved that hunch by transposing Akira Kurosawa's 1954 art-house hit, The Seven Samurai to a Western setting, replacing the swordsmen with gunfighters, and titling it The Magnificent Seven (1960). Although the basic plot survived the transfer intact - a poor village hires seven armed men to protect them from a marauding band of bandits - Sturges filmed his version in Panavision and color with on-location shooting in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The other main difference was purely cultural. Whereas Kurosawa's film explored samurai honor and social responsibility, Sturges turned The Magnificent Seven into an elegy for a vanishing West once ruled by gunfighters. In a way, The Magnificent Seven could be seen as a forerunner of such influential Westerns by Sam Peckinpah as Ride the High Country (1962) and The Wild Bunch (1969).

The road to production on The Magnificent Seven was a rocky one with conflicting reports of who initiated the project. By most accounts, it was Yul Brynner who first envisioned the Kurosawa film as a Western remake and encouraged movie mogul Walter Mirisch to purchase the rights from Japan's Toho Studios. Mirisch struck up a distribution deal with United Artists but then ran into trouble with Anthony Quinn, who filed a breach of contract suit against Brynner. Quinn claimed he had acquired rights to The Seven Samurai with Brynner and had collaborated with him on several ideas for the remake before they had a parting of the ways. But there was no signed contract and Quinn lost the claim.

There were other obstacles to overcome. The Mexican government censors, who had some major concerns about the depiction of their country as inhospitable, demanded some script changes before granting the film crew permission to shoot in their country. The casting was touch and go for awhile too as Steve McQueen was denied permission to participate by Four Star, the production company for his TV series, Wanted Dead or Alive. He outfoxed them by crashing a rental car and claiming whiplash, which released him from his TV commitments. Although Yul Brynner had final casting decision and had approved McQueen for the film, his relationship with the soon-to-be-famous star would become fiercely competitive on the set of The Magnificent Seven. Brynner, who studied the quick draw with world champion, Rodd Redwing, was no match for McQueen when it came to gunplay. The latter would practice firing for hours each day and learned to shoot two rounds into a one-square-foot target in just eleven hundredths of a second. McQueen also taught Brynner the scene-stealing trick of flicking the gun backward into the holster. However, McQueen remained unimpressed by Brynner's star status at the time and said to one interviewer, "When you work in a scene with Yul, you're supposed to stand perfectly still. I don't work that way."

Perhaps the tension on the set between the two actors improved the film because both Brynner and McQueen are excellent in their roles as Chris and Vin. In fact, Brynner is so closely identified with his character in The Magnificent Seven that he wore the exact same black gunfighter outfit years later as the cyborg killer in the sci-fi thriller, Westworld (1973). The rest of the cast members are equally impressive, particularly James Coburn, who barely has twenty words of dialogue and almost steals the film as the mysterious knife-thrower, Britt. Charles Bronson, who was just a few years away from superstardom in Europe, plays O'Reilly, the stoic woodcutter; Robert Vaughn, soon to be known as TV's The Man from U.N.C.L.E., is Lee, an outlaw wrestling with his fear of death; Brad Dexter co-stars as Harry Luck, the hardened cynic in the group; Horst Buchholz, in the role of the reckless Chino, maintains the same high level of manic energy that Toshiro Mifune brought to the same role in the original version. Last but not least, a mention must be made of Elmer Bernstein's rousing score which was nominated for an Oscar but lost to Ernest Gold's soundtrack for Exodus. If Bernstein's central theme sounds overly familiar, it's because United Artists sold the music to Marlboro cigarettes for use in their television commercials.

Director: John Sturges
Producer: John Sturges, Walter Mirisch, Lou Morheim
Screenplay: William Roberts
Cinematography: Charles Lang Jr.
Editor: Ferris Webster
Art Direction: Edward Fitzgerald
Music: Elmer Bernstein
Cast: Yul Brynner (Chris Adams), Eli Wallach (Calvera), Steve McQueen (Vin), Charles Bronson (Bernardo O'Reilly), Robert Vaughn (Lee).
C-128m. Letterboxed. Closed captioning.

By Jeff Stafford

Monique

Richard Boone

A THUNDER OF DRUMS

The story of a newly commissioned cavalry officer who clashes with his commanding officer at an isolated outpost, A Thunder of Drums (1961) was made during a time when the Western was no longer attracting younger audiences. That's one reason MGM decided to cast George Hamilton in the lead along with Richard Chamberlain (in his screen debut), Luana Patten and guitarist Duane Eddy in supporting roles. However, the real cast member to watch is Charles Bronson, playing a rowdy soldier with an overt fondness for booze and women. For years, Bronson had been typecast as villains or roughnecks but all that began to change after his performance as one of The Magnificent Seven, which was released the previous year. With his athletic build and tight-lipped intensity, Bronson carved out his own niche as an action hero in the coming years and A Thunder of Drums was an excellent early showcase for his burgeoning talents.

Aside from Bronson, A Thunder of Drums is also notable for the involvement of James Warner Bellah, a controversial author who made a name for himself by writing a series of pulp magazine stories about the U.S. Cavalry. Famed director John Ford took early notice of Bellah, adapting many of his cavalry stories printed in The Saturday Evening Post for his informal "Cavalry Trilogy," Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Rio Grande (1950) and later Sergeant Rutledge (1960). Bellah, an unrepentant misanthrope once described by his own son as "a fascist, a racist, and a world-class bigot," saw Native Americans as the "red beast in the night." In most of his films adapted from Bellah stories, Ford countered this contemptuous viewpoint by granting Indians a sense of dignity and humanity. In Fort Apache, for example, the Indians are not the villainous, mysterious "Other," but the victims of government-sanctioned scoundrels. Despite their racial disagreements, Ford and Bellah agreed on one thing: the valor and pride of the military. The cavalry was basically honorable and uncomplicated by psychological neuroses or social bugaboos.

In A Thunder of Drums, Bellah's cavalry unit is still beset by a savage, invisible "Other," but this time the enemy is a war-making Apache tribe. Unlike Ford's pictures, with the exception of Sergeant Rutledge, where racial inequalities were indeed an obvious problem for the military, the cavalry in A Thunder of Drums is not as harmonious as the units in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon or Rio Grande; there is discord among the upper echelons of command as well as the lower ranks. Even more obvious is the low morale among the troops. While Ford's troops often depart or return to their outposts amidst a stirring anthem, the cavalry in A Thunder of Drums are more likely to return from their missions in a defeated manner. The film's unsentimental tone is underscored by the cavalry's hard-nosed leader (Richard Boone) when he claims the best soldiers are bachelors, since they have to mourn only their own deaths. Questions of the military's authority are also raised when George Hamilton's junior officer is seemingly unable to provide true leadership in crisis situations, prompting the central conflict between Hamilton and Boone. And in the very first scene, that of a house being invaded, both literally and sexually, by marauding Indians, we're given the sense that John Ford's cavalry is no longer able to protect everyone from harm on the vast frontier. The sanctity and security of the next generation is left in question as a little girl who witnesses the savage attack is left a traumatized mute.

In some ways, the questioning of military might contextualizes A Thunder of Drums as a pre-Vietnam Western, simmering with the social unrest of the 1960s. But that may be assigning too much importance to it. The real enjoyment here is seeing rising stars like Bronson interact with Western veterans like Richard Boone (star of TV's Have Gun, Will Travel) and Slim Pickens. And let's not forget the novelty of seeing rock 'n' roller Duane Eddy, who invented the 'twangy' guitar sound in instrumentals like "Rebel Rouser," as a horse soldier, crooning songs like "Water from a Bad Well" and "The Ballad of Camden Yates."

Producer: Robert Enders
Director: Joseph Newman
Screenplay: James Warner Bellah
Art Direction: George W. Davis, Gabriel Scognamillo
Cinematography: William W. Spencer
Editing: Ferris Webster
Music: Harry Sukman
Cast: Richard Boone (Capt. Stephen Maddocks), George Hamilton (Lt. Curtis McQuade), Luana Patten (Tracey Hamilton), Arthur O'Connell (Sgt. Rodermill), Charles Bronson (Trooper Hanna), Richard Chamberlain (Lt. Porter), James Douglas (Lt. Gresham), Duane Eddy (Trooper Eddy), Slim Pickens (Trooper Erschick). C-97m. Letterboxed. Closed captioning.

by Scott McGee

Monique

Charles Bronson

Breakheart Pass

With its runaway train ride, Breakheart Pass (1975) provided a perfect vehicle for Yakima Canutt's final assignment as a stunt coordinator. The screen legend, who had started out starring in silent westerns and capped his career staging the chariot race in Ben-Hur (1959), took a final bow after more than 50 years in the business with this 1975 western adventure.

Like the classic Stagecoach (1939), Breakheart Pass features a band of desperate characters -- a state governor, an Army major, a minister, a doctor and a young innocent -- whose trip through the wild West is complicated by the presence of a fugitive from justice (Charles Bronson)...or is he? They come together on a train speeding to a disease-stricken frontier outpost with a precious cargo of medicine...or is it? As passengers start turning up dead, it quickly becomes clear that nothing on this twisted train ride is what it seems.

Charles Bronson was still riding high on the success of Death Wish (1974) when he returned to the Western, the genre that had made him an international star in Once Upon a Time in the West (1969). His director, Tom Gries, had already made one of the modern classics of the genre in Will Penny (1968), starring Charlton Heston and, like this film, beautifully shot by Lucien Ballard. As an added attraction, Alistair MacLean, whose best sellers had served as the basis for such action hits as The Guns of Navarone (1961) and Where Eagles Dare (1968), adapted his own novel for the screen; it was only the second time he had done so.

Along with the daredevil stunts, the film is greatly aided by a strong supporting cast, including Oscar®-winner Ben Johnson as the U.S. Marshal who thinks he's taking Bronson to justice, Richard Crenna as the governor, Charles Durning as a businessman, Ed Lauter as the Army Major on his way to take command at the fort and Bronson's wife and frequent co-star, Jill Ireland, as an innocent passenger aboard the train. Former light heavyweight champ Archie Moore dukes it out with Bronson in a classic fight scene aboard the train. Cast as a friendly lady of the evening is Sally Kirkland, once noted as the first actress to appear naked in a legitimate New York stage production (Sweet Eros by Terrence McNally in 1968) and now better known as the Oscar®-nominated star of the independent hit Anna (1987); she's also an ordained minister.

An entertaining hybrid that was part suspense thriller and part Western, Breakheart Pass proved to be one of Bronson's biggest hits. Along with such other favorites that year as Breakout, also directed by Gries and co-starring Ireland, and Hard Times, which co-starred Ireland and James Coburn, it helped Bronson rise to the number four spot on the year's list of top box-office stars.

Producer: Elliott Kastner, Jerry Gershwin
Director: Tom Gries
Screenplay: Alistair MacLean, based on his novel
Cinematography: Lucien Ballard
Score: Jerry Goldsmith
Art Direction: Johannes Larsen
Cast: Charles Bronson (John Deakin/John Murray), Ben Johnson (Deputy U.S. Marshal Nathan Pearce), Richard Crenna (Governor Richard Fairchild), Jill Ireland (Marcia Scoville), Charles Durning (Frank O'Brien), Ed Lauter (Major Claremont), David Huddleston (Dr. Molyneux), Archie Moore (Carlos the Chef), Sally Kirkland (Jane-Marie). C-95m.

by Frank Miller

Monique

BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID

The tagline for the ad campaign for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) was "Not that it matters, but most of it is true." What does matter is that the film is a wonderfully entertaining western which at once debunks the myth of the Old West, and mourns its passing. What also matters is that it gave huge boosts to the careers of stars Paul Newman and Robert Redford, director George Roy Hill, and screenwriter William Goldman.

Butch and Sundance are a pair of amiable, not-too-bright robbers, members of the legendary Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. But they're finding it harder to practice their profession, since they're relentlessly pursued by a super-posse intent on wiping them out. They escape to Bolivia, and become legends all over again as the "Yanqui banditos," but once again the law closes in.

Writer William Goldman was fascinated with the saga of Robert Leroy Parker (AKA Butch Cassidy) and Harry Longbaugh (AKA the Sundance Kid), which, surprisingly, had never been made into a film before. Goldman researched their story on and off for eight years before writing the screenplay. During that period, he was writing novels (Harry Longbaugh was one of the many pseudonyms he used) and eventually, screenplays. Most of the story was, indeed, true. It's true that Butch never killed anyone until he got to Bolivia and he really did use too much dynamite to blow up a safe, destroying the money as well. A super-posse really was formed to hunt them down, and the boys really did run off to Bolivia because of it (although they left before the posse actually began pursuit). There really was an Etta Place, and she did go with them. The circumstances of the final shootout, if not the details, are also true.

Goldman wrote the screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with Jack Lemmon and Paul Newman in mind for the leads. 20th-Century-Fox, which bought the script, had other ideas. They thought Newman was fine, but wanted Steve McQueen as his co-star. McQueen was interested...until he found out that Newman would get top billing. Fox head of production Richard Zanuck tried and failed to get Marlon Brando, then offered the part to Warren Beatty. Newman was not happy about that, and was having other doubts, too. His past efforts at comedy had flopped, and he decided he couldn't play comedy. Director George Roy Hill had to convince him otherwise, eventually persuading the actor to support his own choice for Sundance - a rising young actor named Robert Redford.

Newman and Redford became fast friends, and all of the participants remember a production filled with raucous but friendly arguments, and many practical jokes. Even a problem in filming one sequence was turned into an asset. The New York montage had been written as a dialogue scene and Hill hoped to shoot these sequences on a huge New York set which had been built for Hello Dolly! (1969), then in production. But Hello Dolly! would not open until after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Fox executives didn't want to dilute the set's impact, so they refused Hill permission to use it. Possibly inspired by photographs of the real Butch, Sundance, and Etta in New York, Hill settled for shooting stills on the Dolly sets, and making the sequence a montage of the photos. It proved to be an excellent pacing device, and an effective marker between the two halves of the film.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid received mixed reviews from the critics, but the public cast the final vote. The film took in well over $30 million, and became the highest grossing western in history. Paul Newman became king of the box office that year, and Robert Redford became a bankable star. George Roy Hill and William Goldman also became major Hollywood players. The film won four Academy Awards; for the song, "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head," and for cinematography, screenplay, and original score. It was nominated for three more: Best Picture (Midnight Cowboy won), Best Direction, and Best Sound. Hill, Newman and Redford reunited for The Sting (1973), which was even bigger at the box office than Butch Cassidy, and won a Best Picture Oscar.

The affection both Newman and Redford felt for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and their characters is evidenced in the names they've given to their favorite personal projects: Redford's Sundance Institute, a center for training and supporting new filmmakers, and Newman's Hole-in-the-Wall camp for children with debilitating illnesses.

Director: George Roy Hill
Producer: Paul Monash, John Foreman
Screenplay: William Goldman
Editor: John C. Howard, Richard C. Meyer
Cinematography: Conrad Hall
Costume Design: Edith Head
Art Direction: Jack Martin Smith, Philip Jefferies
Music: Burt Bacharach
Cast: Paul Newman (Butch Cassidy), Robert Redford (Sundance Kid), Katharine Ross (Etta Place), Strother Martin (Percy Garris), Henry Jones (bike salesman), Jeff Corey (Sheriff Bledsoe), Cloris Leachman (Agnes), Ted Cassidy (Harvey Logan), Kenneth Mars (Marshal).
C-112m. Letterboxed.

By Margarita Landazu

Monique

Lee Van Cleef

SABATA

"The man with gunsight eyes." That's the phrase the film posters used to describe Lee Van Cleef in Sabata (1970), an enormously entertaining spaghetti Western that spawned two sequels. It also helped Van Cleef achieve the kind of success in Europe that he was forever denied in Hollywood where he was mostly typecast as villains in B-movies like The Big Combo (1955) and China Gate (1957). After traveling to Italy to make For a Few Dollars More for Sergio Leone in 1966, Van Cleef remained there and became an international star, thanks to his indomitable presence in such influential "Spaghetti Westerns" as Death Rides a Horse (1968), The Big Gundown (1966), and of course, Sabata.

Directed by Gianfranco Parolini (his name was anglicized for American audiences as Frank Kramer), Sabata is the story of an uneasy partnership between two men, a steely-eyed bounty hunter (Van Cleef) and a street musician (William Berger) whose banjo doubles as a gun. Their plan? To blackmail a bank robber who is hiding behind a mask of respectability in his small town. By the end of the film, the duo have effectively decimated everyone who stands in their way of a $60,000 ransom and you know only one man will walk away with that.

Even though Sabata is set in Texas during the 19th century, this is not the American West you're used to seeing in the films of John Ford and Delmer Daves. Not only does it have a title character who travels with as many gadgets as James Bond or James West but it features a frontier town populated with Las Vegas-like showgirls, knife-welding drunks and cowboy acrobats (Director Parolini, who worked in circuses in his youth, would often pay homage to his former profession by featuring acrobats in his films). The carnival-like atmosphere is further enhanced by exaggerated sound effects, bizarre camera angles, and Marcello Giombini's playful score which would make a great CD release.

Producer: Alberto Grimaldi
Director: Gianfranco Parolini
Screenplay: Gianfranco Parolini
Production Design: Carlo Simi
Cinematography: Sandro Mancori
Costume Design: Carlo Simi
Film Editing: Edmond Lozzi
Original Music: Marcello Giombini
Principal Cast: Lee Van Cleef (Sabata), William Berger (Banjo), Ignazio Spalla (Carrincha), Nick Jordan (Indio), Linda Veras (Jane), Franco Ressel (Stengel).
C-106m. Letterboxed.

By Jeff Stafford

Monique

Support Your Local Sheriff

Saturday 08/23/2003 05:30 PM

Additional Showings:
Friday 10/17/2003 08:00 PM

Although he said he was sick of Westerns after his long run in the TV series Maverick (1957-1960) and several big screen horse operas, or perhaps because of that sentiment, James Garner was happy to produce this parody of the genre under the aegis of his Cherokee production company. The hilarious Western spoof proved to be such a hit, the star went on to do a sequel, Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971), and another period comedy about a couple of guys, one white and one black, who exploit slavery and American racial prejudice for financial gain, Skin Game (1971).

In Support Your Local Sheriff, Garner plays a man trying to make his way to Australia (a running gag throughout the story) who finds himself financially strapped in a small frontier town. He reluctantly accepts the job as sheriff and hires the town drunk as his deputy. Garner arrests a notorious outlaw and forces him to build a new jail, bringing down the wrath of the outlaw's grizzly old father. In a climactic shoot-out, a fractured version of the legendary Wyatt Earp's gunfight at the OK Corral, the sheriff defeats the gang with the help of an apparently empty cannon. There's a fun homage/spoof here of other serious depictions of Earp's famous fight, especially in Walter Brennan's self-parody of a very similar role he played as patriarch of the Clanton gang in John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946).

The film knocks the stuffing out of some hoary old Western cliches but also displays affection for the genre, thanks to an amiable script and the direction of Burt Kennedy, who began his career writing screenplays for the small-scale, offbeat Westerns of director Budd Boetticher in the 1950s. Throughout the following decade, Kennedy distinguished himself directing more serious and bloody examples of the genre, including Welcome to Hard Times (1967) and The War Wagon (1967), as well as episodes of the TV series Lawman (1962) and The Virginian (1962).

For a film as lighthearted as Support Your Local Sheriff, the project began with its share of headaches and bad feelings. Paramount Pictures obtained a copy of the script before shooting began and quickly fired off a threatening letter to United Artists, the movie's distributor, noting that the opening sequence of the film in which the female lead, Joan Hackett, finds gold in an open grave closely paralleled the opening scenes of Paramount's musical Western Paint Your Wagon (1969). The studio warned the plot as written constituted a copyright infringement, leading United Artists to shoot a message to Garner and his Cherokee company holding them legally responsible for any problems. Garner's attorney immediately responded that there was no infringement because the disputed passages were taken from a previous printed work, Recollections of the California Mines. Production went forward and although some correspondence between the studios continued, the conflict eventually died quietly without any court battles.

Director: Burt Kennedy
Producer: William Bowers
Screenplay: William Bowers
Cinematography: Harry Stradling, Jr.
Editing: George W. Brooks
Art Design: Leroy Coleman
Music: Jeff Alexander
Cast: James Garner (Jason McCullough), Joan Hackett (Prudy Perkins), Walter Brennan (Pa Danby), Jack Elam (Jake), Bruce Dern (Joe Danby), Harry Morgan (Mayor Olly Perkins), Henry Jones (Henry Jackson), Gene Evans (Tom Danby), Kathleen Freeman (Mrs. Danvers), Willis Bouchey (Thomas Devery).
C-93m. Letterboxed. Closed captioning.

by Rob Nixon

Monique

Duel at Diablo

Friday 10/10/2003 11:30 PM

By the mid-60s, James Garner was ready to move on from his TV series, Maverick, which first brought him to the attention of the public. Swearing he was through saddling up on screen, he nevertheless signed on as both star and co-producer of Duel at Diablo (1966). Garner was enticed into the role largely because of working with the respected director Ralph Nelson and a sterling cast made up of Oscar-winner Sidney Poitier, Swedish actress (and Ingmar Bergman mainstay) Bibi Andersson in her first American picture, and character actor Dennis Weaver, in a departure from his role as the stiff-legged, good-natured Deputy Chester Goode on the TV series Gunsmoke (1955-64). Garner's decision was well-justified by the resulting healthy box office (he was then a star with a reliable record for hits) and good reviews for the film, many of which focused on his fine portrayal as an ex-Scout bent on revenge after his Indian wife has been murdered and scalped by a white man.

Garner and Poitier, as an ex-soldier turned horse-breaker, join a cavalry group escorting a shipment of ammo to a remote fort, a simple-enough plot built around a fairly standard Indians-versus-cavalry formula, but Nelson keeps the action moving (the caravan is repeatedly attacked by Indians) and the drama intense with strong underlying racial themes. All this is helped by solid performances from all the actors, many of them cast against type.

The film's director had enough of a pedigree to have it identified in some releases as Ralph Nelson's Duel at Diablo. Not exactly a household name today, Nelson began his career with a major role in bringing innovative and quality productions to live dramatic programming in the early days of television. He won an Emmy for the hard-hitting drama Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956), and brought the story to the big screen in 1962. His work often focuses on issues of race, ethnicity, and prejudice: Lilies of the Field (1963), which earned Sidney Poitier an Academy Award, the first for an African-American actor in a lead role; the controversial pro-Indian Western and Vietnam allegory Soldier Blue (1970); and A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich (1978), with Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield. In Duel at Diablo, however, Poitier's race is never an issue. The film is concerned instead with the plight of the American Indian.

Poitier had more on his mind than racial issues at the time of shooting. He had been carrying on a passionate but mostly secretive affair with actress-singer Diahann Carroll (they were both married at the time), who was pregnant at the start of production. Impatient with the uncertainty of their relationship, Carroll decided to have an abortion, spurring the usually cool-headed Poitier to a furious outburst and precipitating the end of their attachment.

Duel at Diablo features former stuntman and frequent Western supporting player Richard Farnsworth in a small un-credited role. Farnsworth was Oscar-nominated as Best Supporting Actor for Comes a Horseman (1978) and as Best Actor in David Lynch's The Straight Story (1999). He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in October 2000 after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Director: Ralph Nelson
Producer: Fred Engel, Ralph Nelson
Screenplay: Marvin H. Albert, Michael M. Grilikhes
Cinematography: Charles F. Wheeler
Editing: Fredric Steinkamp
Art Direction: Alfred Ybarra
Music: Neil Hefti
Cast: James Garner (Jess Remsberg), Sidney Poitier (Toller), Bibi Andersson (Ellen Grange), Dennis Weaver (Willard Grange), Bill Travers (Lt. McAllister), William Redfield (Sgt. Ferguson), John Hoyt (Chata), Eddie Little Sky (Alchise), John Crawford (Clay Dean), Kevin Coughlin (Norton), Richard Farnsworth (uncredited).
C-105m.

By Rob Nixon

Monique

William Holden

WILD ROVERS

Sunday 08/31/2003 03:30 AM

The only thing they can stick to is each other.

Tag line for Wild Rovers

Blake Edwards returned to his roots for Wild Rovers (1971), a tale about two would-be bank robbers; one, an aging cowboy, the other, a naive tenderfoot. Edwards had started his acting career with a role in the 1942 Western Ten Gentlemen From West Point, then broke into writing and producing at Allied Artists in 1948 and 1949 with a pair of low-budget oaters, Panhandle and Stampede. In addition, Wild Rovers gave him the chance to work with William Holden, something he had wanted to do for years. The two had met in the '40s, when both were working at Columbia Pictures, but had not become friends until 1964, when they were briefly attached to The Americanization of Emily (both would drop out before filming).

Edwards was coming off the biggest failure of his career, the expensive musical flop Darling Lili (1970), when he went to MGM for this picture about dealing with age and changing times. He was so personally involved in the film that it marked the first time in his career that he wrote an original screenplay without a collaborator. Following the success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, buddy pictures and westerns were considered surefire box office. With Holden's recent success in The Wild Bunch (1969), the film seemed like a solid investment. But Edwards wasn't interested in directing a conventional western. His film focused more on the friendship between Holden's aging cowhand, Ross Bodine, and a young innocent, Frank Post, played by rising star Ryan O'Neal, who had just finished Love Story (1970). Feeling they've accomplished little with their lives, the two decide to rob a bank, then have to escape a posse relentlessly led by the sons (Tom Skerritt and Joe Don Baker) of their former boss (Karl Malden). Their voyage takes them through scenes of changing times in the West as they fall prey to a series of accidents that had critics calling the picture the first existentialist Western.

During production, the two stars forged a close relationship, particularly after they decided to drive together from Arizona to Utah during location shooting. O'Neal was fascinated with the older actor and begged for stories about his career, his working methods and his life. For his part, Holden took a liking to the young actor and, according to Edwards' wife, Julie Andrews, "held out his hand and gave the picture to Ryan." When O'Neal won an Oscar® nomination for Love Story during shooting, Holden even convinced him to attend the Academy Awards® as a show of respect for the actors who had voted for him.

Unfortunately, Edwards' thoughtful, slow-moving film wasn't quite what studio executives had expected. Although he considered it his best work ever, the studio cut 24 minutes out of the film before its release, a move that left him understandably bitter. And though Holden got strong notices, most of the reviewers complained that the film departed too much from genre formulas. As a result, Wild Rovers was one of the year's biggest box-office disappointments, contributing further to Edwards' career slump. He wouldn't bounce back until the mid-'70s, when he re-united with Peter Sellers for a series of sequels to their original The Pink Panther. Yet the very characteristics that alienated critics and audiences initially, led to the birth of a Wild Rovers cult. In more recent years, fans have come to treasure the film for its thoughtful pace and focus on the growing relationship between Holden and O'Neal, elements that were strengthened when Edwards produced a 136-minute directors cut years later (TCM will be showing this version). Surprisingly, the film also developed a core of gay fans who read a romantic subtext into the relationship and even used one of the film's strongest images -- O'Neal with his arms around Holden's waist as they share a horse -- on posters for gay rights rallies.

Producer: Blake Edwards, Ken Wales
Director: Blake Edwards
Screenplay: Blake Edwards
Cinematography: Philip Lathrop
Art Direction: George W. Davis, Addison Hehr
Music: Jerry Goldsmith
Principal Cast: William Holden (Ross Bodine), Ryan O'Neal (Frank Post), Karl Malden (Walter Buckman), Tom Skerritt (John Buckman), Joe Don Baker (Paul Buckman), James Olson (Joe Billings), Leora Dana (Nell Buckman), Moses Gunn (Ben), Victor French (Sheriff), Rachel Roberts (Maybell).
C-136m. Letterboxed.

by Frank Miller

Monique

Gary Cooper

THE WESTERNER

Gary Cooper cemented his reputation as an icon of the Western screen in William Wyler's 1940 film The Westerner. He stars as Cole Hardin, a wandering horseman who is brought before the kangaroo court of the colorful but deadly Judge Roy Bean (Walter Brennan). Playing upon Bean's obsession with musical actress Lily Langtry, Hardin talks his way out of the hangman's noose, and strikes up a friendship with the hard-drinking, short-tempered, self-proclaimed "judge." Hardin soon learns that the territory is involved in violent range wars (a dispute between cattlemen and farmers over land rights) and lends his support to the homesteaders -- becoming attracted to Jane-Ellen Mathews (Doris Davenport), the daughter of an aging corn farmer (Fred Stone). But when Bean violates his word and allows the farmers' crops to be burned, Hardin has himself deputized and prepares for a final confrontation with the west Texas dictator.

Cooper was not at first interested in the role of Cole Hardin because, in the early drafts of the script, the film revolved around the character of Bean. "I couldn't figure for the life of me why they needed me for this picture," Cooper said, "I had a very minor part. It didn't require any special effort." Screenwriters Niven Busch (Duel in the Sun, 1946) and Jo Swerling (It's a Wonderful Life, 1946) expanded the role (additional material was written by playwright Lillian Hellman) but it was still not to Cooper's satisfaction. Finally, when Goldwyn threatened to sue the actor for violation of his contract, Cooper agreed to play the lead, "with the express understanding that I am doing so under protest." Cooper underestimated the script, for it stands among the most highly regarded films of his career, though he was entirely accurate in predicting who would get the glory. For his performance as the ornery Judge Roy Bean, Walter Brennan won the Academy Award for supporting actor (his third Oscar in five years). Cooper was not nominated, though he would win the Oscar the following year for Sergeant York (1941).

Goldwyn handsomely budgeted the film at $1 million (a substantial amount for a "mere" Western), allowing four weeks of location shooting eight miles outside of Tucson, Arizona. He also funded the herding of 7,000 head of cattle, which was at that time the most that had ever been gathered for a motion picture sequence. While on location, the cast and crew would rise each day at six a.m., recalled Freda Rosenblatt, who traveled with the company, "There would be snow and ice on the ground. By ten the sun would come out and we'd bake. We'd shoot till sundown. Then we'd go back to the Santa Rita Hotel in Tucson and have dinner. At night we'd watch rushes from the day before. Lots of times Willy would want a rewrite for the next day. The crew, including Willy, didn't get much sleep. In the morning we'd start all over again."

Wyler planned to cast his wife, Margaret "Talli" Wyler in the role of Jane-Ellen, but Goldwyn was insistent that the part go to Davenport, who had only appeared in bit parts, and whom the producer believed had breakthrough potential. The Westerner failed to make a star of the actress, and she retired after making one other film, Behind the News (1940).

In the 1940s, the Western entered a new era, leaving behind some of the clear-cut divisions between good and evil that was a defining trait of the genre, but one that limited its thematic complexity. The Westerner was the first in a series of cowboy pictures that grayed the white hat/black hat distinctions of the formula Western. The friendship between Hardin and Judge Bean is the true focus of the film -- much more so than the Texas range wars or even Hardin's relationship with Jane-Ellen. Hardin and Bean enact a dark romance of trickery, back-slapping camaraderie and cold-blooded murder that one sees echoed again and again in the timeless Westerns of its decade -- between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday in My Darling Clementine (1946), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid in The Outlaw (19 43), and Thomas Dunson and Matt Garth in Red River (1948).

Perhaps the shadow of World War II helped cultivate this more cynical approach to the once rigid codes of the Western, as if filmmakers were acknowledging that a chapter of American film -- like the West itself, the very source of so many cinematic myths and legends -- had come to a close. This sense of loss gives films such as The Westerner their elegiac tone, and allowed the genre to take on new emotional resonance.

Much of the film's haunting tone is due to the brilliant camerawork of Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane, 1941). The typically sunny West is, through Toland's lens, a place of looming clouds, dingy barrooms and heavy shadow. One scene in particular showcases Toland's work, that in which Hardin stands silhouetted at nightfall amid the farmer's burned-out crops, as Jane-Ellen reads over the grave of her father from a Bible, its pages charred by the fire that has destroyed her home. This scene -- with its skeletal stalks of scorched corn -- no doubt helped James Basevi score an Academy Award nomination for art direction. Basevi also designed an elaborate recreation of the Fort Davis Grand Opera House, where the film's climax is played out in an especially memorable sequence.

Wyler and Toland made seven films together, including Dead End (1937), Wuthering Heights (1939), and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). At first their working relationship was strained. "I was in the habit of saying, 'Put the camera here with a forty-millimeter lens, move it to this way, pan over here, do this.'" remembered Wyler, "Well, he was not used to that. Making Westerns at Universal, I directed the camera work. I considered it part of my job. You don't do that with a man like Gregg Toland... He was an artist."

For Wyler, The Westerner was a homecoming of sorts. He had gotten his start as director by proving the speed (and quality) at which he could churn out two-reel Westerns -- a total of 21 between 1925 and 1927. In 1930 he abandoned the genre after The Storm, but would return to the American West a final time in 1958 with The Big Country.

Director: William Wyler
Producer: Samuel Goldwyn
Screenplay: Jo Swerling and Niven Busch
Based on a story by Stuart N. Lake
Cinematography: Gregg Toland
Production Design: James Basevi
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin and Alfred Newman
Cast: Gary Cooper (Cole Hardin), Walter Brennan (Judge Roy Bean), Doris Davenport (Jane Ellen Mathews), Fred Stone (Caliphet Mathews), Chill Wills (Southeast), Lilian Bond (Lily Langtry).
BW-100m. Closed captioning.

By Bret Wood

Monique

More Gary Cooper

High Noon

Marshall Will Kane (Gary Cooper) is looking forward to his honeymoon with his new bride Amy (Grace Kelly). But as he and his wife prepare to leave town, Kane is informed that Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), his former nemesis, is out of jail and on the way to Hadleyville for a showdown with him. Not one to back down from a confrontation, Kane decides to postpone his honeymoon and face the murderous outlaw and his gang. However, as the lone sheriff attempts to enlist some of the townspeople to help him, he quickly discovers that no one is willing to risk their life beside him. As the minutes tick away toward the final showdown, Kane prepares to meet his fate alone.

In his biography, A Life in the Movies, director Fred Zinnemann noted that High Noon "seems to mean different things to different people. (Some speculate that it is an allegory on the Korean War!) [Stanley] Kramer, who had worked closely with [Carl] Foreman on the script, said it was about 'a town that died because no one there had the guts to defend it.' Somehow this seemed to be an incomplete explanation. Foreman saw it as an allegory on his own experience of political pesecution in the McCarthy era. With due respect I felt this to be a narrow point of view. First of all I saw it simply as a great movie yarn, full of enormously interesting people. I vaguely sensed deeper meanings in it; but only later did it dawn on me that this was not a regular Western myth....To me it was the story of a man who must make a decision according to his conscience. His town - symbol of a democracy gone soft - faces a horrendous threat to its people's way of life....It is a story that still happens everywhere, every day....The entire action was designed by Foreman and Kramer to take place in the exact screening time of the film - less than ninety minutes."

High Noon proved to be a huge critical and popular success when released and garnered seven Oscar nominations including Best Picture prior to the 1953 Academy Awards ceremony that year (It won statues for Gary Cooper (Best Actor), Best Film Editing, Best Music Score and Best Song ("Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'"), which was performed in the film by Tex Ritter (It also became a hit for Western balladeer Frankie Laine). Kramer noted in his biography, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: A Life in Hollywood, "that High Noon's defeat in the Oscar race by Cecil B. DeMille's circus picture, The Greatest Show on Earth, had to be largely political, and I'm not referring to the unspoken old-boy politics of Hollywood's inner circle. I still believe High Noon was the best picture of 1952, but the political climate of the nation and the right-wing campaigns after High Noon had enough effect to relegate it to an also-ran status. Popular as it was, it could not overcome the climate in which it was released. Carl Foreman, who wrote it, had by then taken off for England under a cloud of accusations as a result of his political beliefs. Between the time he turned in the script and the time the Academy voted, we all learned that he had been a member of the Communist Party, but anyone who has seen the picture knows that he put no Communist propaganda into the story. If he had tried to do so, I would have taken it out."

Producer: Stanley Kramer, Carl Foreman
Director: Fred Zinnemann
Screenplay: Carl Foreman, based on the story "The Tin Star" by John W. Cunningham
Cinematography: Floyd Crosby
Editing: Elmo Williams
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin
Art Direction: Ben Hayne
Cast: Gary Cooper (Marshal Will Kane), Grace Kelly (Amy Kane), Thomas Mitchell (Jonas Henderson), Lloyd Bridges (Harvey Pell), Katy Jurado (Helen Ramirez), Otto Kruger (Judge Percy Mettrick), Lon Chaney, Jr. (Martin Howe), Harry Morgan (Sam Fuller), Ian MacDonald (Frank Miller), Lee Van Cleef (Jack Colby), Sheb Wooley (Ben Miller).
BW-85m. Closed captioning.

by Scott McGee & Jeff Stafford

Monique

James Stewart
FIRECREEK

Friday 09/26/2003 08:00 PM

Late in James Stewart's career, at a time when Hollywood was cutting back on its annual output, releasing either big-budget musicals (for which he was unsuited) or small, offbeat independent films like Pretty Poison (1968, which were equally out of his realm), James Stewart stuck with what worked best for him throughout the preceding decade - the Western. That genre, too, had changed somewhat over the years, and Firecreek (1968) reflected the changing times. For example, the movie╒s brutality - an attempted rape scene, Stewart's killing of an outlaw with a pitchfork through the chest, ugly dirty villains, and a moody score (by multiple Oscar-winner Alfred Newman) - was obviously influenced by the European-produced "Spaghetti Westerns" that made a star of Clint Eastwood.

The plot, however, is a throwback to one of the classics of the genre, High Noon (1952). In Firecreek, it's Stewart as the pacifist sheriff rather than Gary Cooper, and just like that earlier film, he finds he has to single handedly protect a town of cowards against a brutal outlaw band. And similar to the climax of High Noon, Stewart is saved from certain death by a gun-welding woman - but not his wife. Instead, it's the saloonkeeper's daughter, who has tried to coax the chief villain into renouncing his evil ways.

In an interesting twist, the villain of the piece is played by Stewart's old pal, Henry Fonda, in their first movie together since On Our Merry Way in 1948. (They were both in How the West Was Won, 1962, but did not have any scenes together.) Firecreek, though, wasn't entirely a positive experience for Fonda, who wasn't used to playing heavies. The man who had played presidents (most notably in Young Mr. Lincoln, 1939), Wyatt Earp (My Darling Clementine, 1946), and Steinbeck's Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), was now delivering lines like: "I always say if a man's worth shootin', he's worth killin'." Years later in his autobiography, Fonda wrote, "I played a bad guy who tried to kill Jim Stewart. Now, any man who tries to kill Jim Stewart has to be marked as a man who's plain rotten. You can't get much worse than that." Actually, Fonda did get a whole lot worse. A year later he played one of the screen's most cold-blooded killers in Once Upon a Time in the West (1969), an epic Spaghetti Western directed by Sergio Leone, the man who practically invented that sub-genre.

The director of Firecreek, Vincent McEveety, and his two producers, Philip Leacock and John Mantley, came primarily from TV backgrounds, having spent some time laboring on the classic western series Gunsmoke. (McEveety also did a number of Star Trek episodes.) Fonda had praise for the director's skills with actors and even credited McEveety for not letting Stewart "get away with" his usual mannerisms, "things Jimmy Stewart has used to make a caricature of himself almost." Apparently, such sentiments did not affect their working relationship because a short time later, Fonda and Stewart teamed up again, this time for a bawdy, lighthearted Western comedy, The Cheyenne Social Club (1970). As for McEveety, he followed Firecreek with a handful of successful Disney Pictures, including The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again (1979), but has mostly focused on his television career.

Director: Vincent McEveety
Producer: Philip Leacock, John Mantley
Screenplay: Calvin Clements
Cinematography: William H. Clothier
Editing: William Ziegler
Art Direction: Howard Hollander
Original Music: Alfred Newman
Cast: James Stewart (Johnny Cobb), Henry Fonda (Larkin), Inger Stevens (Evelyn), Gary Lockwood (Earl), Dean Jagger (Whittier), Ed Begley (Preacher Boyles), Jay C. Flippen (Mr. Pittman), Jack Elam (Earl Norman), James Best (Drew), Barbara Luna (Meli), Brooke Bundy (Leah).
C-105m. Letterboxed.

Monique

Burt Lancaster

Apache

Along with Broken Arrow (1950), the story of Cochise, Apache (1954) was the beginning of a new approach to the representation of Native Americans on screen. The sympathetic view of the plight of the oppressed Apache nation and the portrayal of the main character, the warrior Massai, as a complex individual rather than a bloodthirsty savage, was the main factor in attracting Burt Lancaster, a lifelong liberal and social activist, to the project. A major box office star for nearly a decade thanks to his good looks and athletic abilities, Lancaster had already begun his strategy to escape typecasting and find projects that were meaningful and different. Early in his career he formed his own company to find and produce worthwhile projects, and in 1952, he and business partner Harold Hecht purchased Paul Wellman's 1936 novel Bronco Apache with an eye to producing it as a Lancaster vehicle.

Wellman's story told of Massai, derived from a historical figure who waged a last stand against the encroaching U.S. Army and white civilization in the late 1880s. Upon the surrender of Geronimo, Massai is captured after attempting to disrupt the peace negotiations between the Apaches and the U.S. government. Placed on a train transferring him to a Florida reservation, he escapes and makes the arduous trek back to his homeland to be reunited with his squaw, Nalinle, but her father betrays him and he's again captured and sent to Florida. This time his escape is marked by a thirst for vengeance not only against the white people but also against all Indians like Nalinle's father who collaborate with them. Fleeing with his pregnant woman into the hills, Massai prepares for a final showdown with the Army. But at the last moment, he hears the cries of his newborn child and decides to live in peaceful coexistence with his enemies.

To bring the story to the screen, Lancaster and Hecht chose writer James R. Webb and director Robert Aldrich, a Hollywood maverick and outspoken liberal himself, considered by Hecht to be unusually gifted at creating intense psychological drama and one who could make a project look more expensive than it actually cost. Thanks to Lancaster's consistent box office clout, United Artists gave the star the sweetest deal it had made with anyone since Charles Chaplin, taking a smaller distributor cut of the picture and giving Hecht-Lancaster $12 million to produce seven films, five of which would star the actor. The studio balked, however, when it became apparent the production team was going way over budget and was planning to take Massai's story to the most tragic possible end. The original finale was going to have the warrior, walking away from the soldiers to a life of peace with his family, shot in the back. Although that ending might have been truer to the fate of most of the Apache, especially those who were openly rebellious against white authority, UA feared audiences would not appreciate seeing one of their favorite stars die. They put considerable pressure on the production, and the ending was changed, much to Lancaster and Aldrich's everlasting regret.

Whether it can be credited to the "happy" ending or not, Apache proved to be a major hit, the top-grossing Western of the year and a confirmation not only of Lancaster's commercial appeal but his ability as a producer who could match himself to the right vehicle at the right time. The film opened a month after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, and its success vindicated Lancaster's assertion that it had been produced "to make a broader statement on the injustice of racism." And nobody seemed to mind that the warrior Apache had blue eyes. Lancaster, Hecht, Aldrich, and Webb immediately re-teamed for another Western, Vera Cruz (1954). This time no one interfered when Lancaster decided to play - with considerable relish - a bad guy who is gunned down in the end by top-billed co-star Gary Cooper.

Director: Robert Aldrich
Producer: Harold Hecht
Screenplay: James R. Webb, based on the novel by Paul Wellman
Cinematography: Ernest Laszlo
Editing: Alan Crosland Jr.
Production Design: Nicolai Remisoff
Original Music: David Raksin
Cast: Burt Lancaster (Massai), Jean Peters (Nalinle), John McIntire (Al Sieber), Charles Bronson (Hondo, as Charles Buchinsky), John Dehner (Weddle), Monte Blue (Geronimo)
C-88m. Closed captioning.

by Rob Nixon

Monique

Paul Newman

BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS

Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976) is a subversive look at the mythology of the Wild West and a unique deconstruction of an American folk hero as envisioned by Robert Altman, a director well known for turning the typical genre film inside out (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, (1971), The Long Goodbye, 1973). With M*A*S*H (1970), his first popular success, Altman used the Korean War as a backdrop for a razor sharp black comedy about the insanity of war. In a similar fashion, he used a traveling Wild West show in Buffalo Bill and the Indians to comment on American history, the politics of show business and the exploitation of Native Americans by greedy entrepreneurs.

Buffalo Bill and the Indians was inspired by Arthur Kopit's play, Indians, which receives a screen credit even though scenarist Alan Rudolph only used a few lines from the original stage production. Where Kopit's play was a cynical political comedy about the numerous injustices visited on Native Americans, Rudolph's screenplay broadens the canvas considerably to address the whole issue of American mythmaking.

Fresh from the success of Nashville (1975), probably the best example of his multi-layered storytelling technique, Buffalo Bill and the Indians was filmed on location at Stoney Indian Reserve in Alberta, Canada and features a stunning array of talent: Paul Newman as the legendary Buffalo Bill, Joel Grey as his press agent, Burt Lancaster as Ned Buntline, the man responsible for inventing the legend of Buffalo Bill, Harvey Keitel as Ed, Buffalo Bill's nephew, Geraldine Chaplin as Annie Oakley, and Shelley Duvall as the wife of President Grover Cleveland. As portrayed by Newman, Buffalo Bill sees himself as a total entertainer and more than willing to exploit his famous name for fame and fortune. But during rehearsals for his show, he is dismayed to discover that his main attraction, Chief Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts), doesn't share his views. Not only does Sitting Bull refuse to participate in staged reenactments of famous historic events (because they are misrepresentations of the truth), but he continually challenges Bill's hero status in the show.

There is another similarity to Nashville in Buffalo Bill and the Indians and it's exemplified by the "story within a story" framework, which is obvious from the first scene in the film where audiences are informed by a narrator that this is "not a show, it is a review of the down-to-earth events that made the American frontier." As we watch an attack on a log cabin, the violence halts abruptly when Buffalo Bill's press agent yells, "Cease the action." The scene is revealed as a rehearsal, thus setting the stage for a movie that plays constantly with the notion of truth and entertainment.

Released amidst the bicentennial celebrations of 1976, Buffalo Bill and the Indians did not enjoy the critical success of Altman's more popular films. The revisionist history did not sit well with audiences and the fact that United Artists did not widely promote the release on television or in print certainly did not help it at the box office. Probably the most damaging blow to Altman came when his producer, Dino de Laurentiis, revealed his disappointment with the final product. De Laurentiis had been expecting a more traditional Western with broad commercial appeal, and Altman's dialogue-heavy, politically subversive product was not the film the producer wished to release. Altman and De Laurentiis' working relationship disintegrated when the producer submitted the film to the Berlin Film Festival, where it was awarded the coveted Grand Prix. Altman angrily turned down the award, stating that the version of Buffalo Bill and the Indians screened was one "that has been edited drastically, [and] does not represent my work." The frustrated director subsequently asked that "neither I nor my film be considered for any prize or honor on the basis that it perpetrated a fraud."

The very public rift between the two men would lead to additional problems for Altman, who already found himself on unsteady footing in Hollywood due to his outspoken nature. De Laurentiis had previously picked Altman to direct an adaptation of the E.L. Doctorow book, Ragtime, prior to filming Buffalo Bill and the Indians. Interestingly, Doctorow had initially turned down the job of writing the screenplay of his book, but reconsidered upon visiting the set of Buffalo Bill and the Indians, where he was encouraged by the "sense of creative participation with cast and crew." But it was Altman, and not De Laurentiis, who wanted to bring Doctorow on as a screenwriter; when the producer discovered that Altman was planning a six-hour adaptation of Ragtime, he fired him from the project. Nevertheless, the 1970s ultimately proved to be a period of great creativity and output for this truly original, American director and Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians remains a fascinating, thematically rich entry in the Western genre.

Producer/Director: Robert Altman
Screenplay: Robert Altman, Alan Rudolph
Art Direction: Jack Maxsted
Cinematography: Paul Lohmann
Editing: Peter Appleton, Dennis M. Hill
Music: Richard Baskin
Cast: Paul Newman (William F. Cody), Burt Lancaster (Ned Buntline), Joel Grey (Nate Salibury), Kevin McCarthy (Maj. John Burke), Harvey Keitel (Ed Goodman), Geraldine Chaplin (Annie Oakley), Allan Nicholls (Prentiss Ingraham), Bert Remsen (Crutch), Frank Kaquitts (Sitting Bull), Will Sampson (William Halsey), John Considine (Frank Butler), Shelley Duvall (Mrs. Cleveland), Pat McCormick (Grover Cleveland), Denver Pyle (McLaughlin).
C-124m. Letterboxed.

By Genevieve McGillicuddy

Monique

Burt Reynolds

Navajo Joe

Navajo Joe, the lone survivor of a massacre, promises payback for the outlaw gang that slaughtered his Indian tribe. He soon gets to avenge his people when the citizens of a small Western community appeal to him for protection from the same marauding gang. Joe quickly accepts their offer of one dollar for each outlaw scalp delivered and goes to work eliminating his enemies one by one, saving the outlaw leader until last.

After the surprise success of A Fistful of Dollars (1964), producer Dino De Laurentiis decided to produce his own spaghetti Western with an American actor who could rival Clint Eastwood in popularity. For the lead in Navajo Joe (1966), De Laurentiis needed someone who could pass as a Native American and Burt Reynolds was the ideal choice. Not only was the actor part Cherokee but he had also convincingly played other minorities on two popular TV series; in Gunsmoke, Reynolds played Quint Asper, a half-breed who worked as the town blacksmith, from 1962-1966 and in Hawk (1966-1976), he was cast as a full blooded Iroquois Indian working as a cop in New York City. Although Reynolds had his doubts about a Western in which he killed about a hundred men single handedly, De Laurentiis convinced him to sign on to his first and only spaghetti Western.

Although Navajo Joe is considered one of the better spaghetti Westerns by fans of the genre, it fared poorly in the U.S. where it was block-booked without fanfare as a second feature at drive-ins and less discriminating movie houses. Reynolds was particularly unkind about the film and often said it was the worse movie he ever made. In fact, the actor remarked that it was "so awful, it was shown only in prisons and airplanes because nobody could leave. I killed 10,000 guys, wore a Japanese slingshot and a fright wig." Obviously, Reynolds had no appreciation for this unique genre and ignored the obvious virtues of Navajo Joe: the rousing music score by Ennio Morricone (credited under the pseudonym Leo Nichols), Silvano Ippoliti's unconventional cinematography and Sergio Corbucci's tightly paced direction. Corbucci, who had helmed some of the most successful Italian sword and sandal epics like Duel of the Titans (1963) with Steve Reeves and Gordon Scott, would go on to direct two of the most influential and acclaimed entries in the spaghetti Western genre - Django (1966) and The Great Silence (1968).

Producer: Luigi Carpentieri, Ermanno Donati
Director: Sergio Corbucci
Screenplay: Fernando Di Leo, Ugo Pirro (story), Piero Regnoli
Cinematography: Silvano Ippoliti
Film Editing: Alberto Gallitti
Original Music: Ennio Morricone
Principal Cast: Burt Reynolds (Joe), Aldo Sambrell (Duncan), Nicoletta Machiavelli (Estella), Simon Arriaga (Monkey), Fernando Rey (Rattigan), Tanya Lopert (Maria), Cris Huerta (El Gordo), Franca Polesello (Barbara).
C-89m. Letterboxed.

by Jeff Stafford

Monique