FaFDM is, up to this point in my exploration of the Western genre, my favorite film. The first object of any picture is to get the viewer's attention and hold it for the duration. To do this, it must entertain. FaFDM is simply marvelous entertainment. Sure, its deployment of Western tropes is over-the-top. But that (sympathetic) outrageousness is the key to the movie's appeal. There's an abundance of arch humor, a wealth of derring-do, a score just as outsized as the film itself, and a fascinating and monstrous villain (El Indio) who, though quite intelligent, is also too evil to go on living. There is a shot where El Indio, asleep but with his eyes open under a slouched hat, looks strikingly live a viper coiled under a rock. Is sums up the character well.

And this gets to a very common animadversion at the time of the film's release about its supposedly gratuitous violence. Sure, sure--the killing is part of the entertainment. Or more accurately, the supreme technique used to kill is the entertainment. But Manco and Mortimer are not killing innocent grandmothers or even kicking puppies. They are eliminating monsters who make their little corner of the world miserable. In that sense, when Manco and Mortimer eliminate El Indio and his gang, they are providing a small service to humanity, even if material gain seems to be Manco's primary purpose. The bounty hunters are the instruments of justice brought to bear by the public on fiends they cannot cope with themselves. Unlike many critics, I suppose, I don't go all misty and wobbly with guilt when Manco and Mortimer go about their grim business.

This is the book Cormac McCarthy found dusty in an old library sometime in the early ‘60s that inspired Blood Meridian. Few know how many of the depictions in that book weren’t invented by McCarthy.

The book is a war diary by Samuel Chamberlain, a young man from Boston who rode in the real John Joel Glanton’s gang of scalpers in 1849, as is depicted in Mccarthy’s Blood Meridian.

If you thought Judge Holden wasn’t scary enough wait till you hear that he was a real person mentioned in this book, this excerpt is from Sam’s description of him (not Mccarthy’s) and is claimed by him to be true:

The second in command, now left in charge of the camp, was a man of gigantic size who rejoiced in the name of Holden, called "Judge" Holden of Texas. Who or what he was no one knew but a cooler blooded villain never went unhung; he stood six feet six in his moccasins, had a large fleshy frame, a dull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression. But when a quarrel took place and blood shed, his hog-like eyes would gleam with a sullen ferocity worthy of the countenance of a fiend. His desires was blood and women, and terrible stories were circulated in camp of horrid crimes committed by him when bearing another name, in the Cherokee nation and Texas; and before we left Fronteras a little girl of ten years was found in the chapperal, foully violated and murdered. The mark of a huge hand on her little throat pointed him out as the ravisher as no other man had such a hand, but though all suspected, no one charged him with the crime.

Holden was by far the best educated man in northern Mexico; he conversed with all in their own language, spoke in several Indian lingos, at a fandango would take the Harp or the Guitar from the hands of the musicians and charm all with his wonderful performance and out-waltz any poblana of the ball. He was "plum center" with a rifle or revolver, a daring horseman, acquainted with the nature of all the strange plants and their botanical names, great in geology and mineralogy, in short another Admirable Crichton [sc., the 16th-century Scottish prodigy and polymath], and
with all an arrant coward.

Not but that he possessed enough courage
to fight Indians and Mexicans or anyone else where he had the advantage in strength, skill, and weapons. But where the combat would be equal, he would avoid it if possible. I hated him at first sight and he knew it, yet nothing could be more gentle and kind than his deportment towards me; he would often seek conversation with me and speak of Massachusetts and to my astonishment I found he knew more about Boston than I did.

I’ve read the book, it’s an extremely interesting insight into the time.

It follows the style of adventure memoirs of the era with quite an exaggerated flamboyance to it.

However this description of a potential real life Holden sent a shiver down my spine, finding out the most evil character in fiction is in fact based on a real person, down to the finer details, was a harrowing moment.

Haunted by their past, with a lust for violence and lost deep in the wilderness of the American West, two British immigrants on the Oregon trail have their loyalty put to the test when finding stolen gold.

I have memories of a specific Lone Ranger episode, but I cannot for the life of me find any trace of it online. I'm fairly confident that it starred Clayton Moore, and I'm pretty confident it was in black and white.

The notable happenings of the episode (as I recall it):

The lone ranger is captured at one point in the episode, his hands are tied, either in front of him, or behind him, and he is placed on a horse.

He, along with others, are tied to a post in a barn, and the barn is set on fire. I remember this a fairly long sequence, with shots of the flames, and an emphasis on the struggle to escape. I believe the Lone Ranger was tied with his back to the post, along with Tonto, and that Tonto was able to either untie the rope, or the flames burned through it, I'm not positive.

I have checked out the episodes listed on the disc, and I believe the episodes on the other disc to be episodes 1,2,3, & 4, of season 1, none of them match the description. I do not have access to the discs at the moment, I will be able to retrieve them tomorrow. Its possible that there was a 3rd disc, but it is lost to time.

I remember that the opening of the disc was a family sitting on a couch with their backs to us, as they watched the intro sequence play on a projector. below them was an episode select with 4 options. Additionally, there were miscellaneous commercials interspersed throughout the discs, with the Jenos Pizza roll commercial being a notable example.

Unfortunately, with over 150 episodes, its a bit time consuming to check each one individually. Any insight is greatly appreciated.

Back at uni, I had an assignment to pick a painting and write a piece for it. I was going through a massive Western phase at the time, so I went straight for Frederic Remington's Fight for the Waterhole.

What got me about it is that nothing actually happens. Four men pinned down in a crater, rifles up, and the attackers are barely there, just marks on the horizon. No charge, no smoke, no bodies. It's all the wait before. I wanted the music to sit in that.

It opens with a slow acoustic section to set the heat and the dread, then breaks into a heavier middle sequence when the shootout starts, and resolves back into the opening material.

That middle section is an arrangement of American Venom by Woody Jackson. That was the point. It's the sound most people my age carry around for the West at gunpoint, and I wanted to hear it against an image painted in 1903.

Thought this community might appreciate seeing Remington paired with a score.

I love Nicholas Ray’s noirs, such as In a Lonely Place and They Live by Night. I also love Westerns. However, the story doesn’t seem to intrigue me. I love the more traditional John Ford westerns, and the more revisionist Westerns of Mann and Boetticher. It’s pretty expensive, since it’s OOP. For those who have seen it, what are your thoughts? In regards to female-led Westerns, I really like Forty Guns by Sam Fuller. I wasn’t a fan of Rancho Notorious, which is a Western Noir in Technicolor that seems to look similar to Johnny Guitar.

McQueen and Brynner,as Vin and Chris,,deliver Old Sam to Boot Hill..

Comanche Moon is a book I greatly enjoyed, but the parts with Captain Schull getting captured and losing his eyelids and the black Vaquero stuff were all really corny to me, I really enjoyed the bits about Buffalo Hump, Kicking Wolf and Famous Shoes - the Comanche POV stuff was actually really awesome.

Dead Man’s Walk is quite fun but again, there’s just a lot of ridiculous elements that make it feel more like a pulpy romp,

Streets of Laredo… is just a terrible book in so many ways even though I couldn’t not slightly enjoy it as I knew all the characters so well by now.

But Lonesome Dove is a true masterpiece, even won a Pulitzer Prize, and probably the best Western novel ever written (after Blood Meridian for me).

It’s just crazy to me that Larry seemed to cast all his subtlety and deftness aside when writing the other novels, it makes me question him as a writer - but then I reread Lonesome Dove and I’m blown away again.

Anyone else feel like this?

I recently found myself in an argument over American fantasy writing, and I wanted to present it here because the fantasy genre fans I met got kind of heated about it:

If someone wanted to write an American-style Lord of the Rings, it should be set in the Old West. The truth is that a lot of what Tolkien had to say about his era was done by deliberately examining the deep past of British and, by extension, European myth and history. He wanted to emphasize what he considered good while highlighting what he considered bad, using tropes from fairy tales and myths that formed the basis of his social structure (Medieval Britain and Arthurian Legend). If you were to do the same thing for America, it would be set in America's Age of Western Expansion; you would have completely different fantasy tropes, and it would feel very different but it would still be fantasy, not a western.

I need help finding the name of a western I saw on tcm years ago.
A woman becomes a gunfighter or maybe bounty hunter after her family is killed. She tries to ask
a man for help who brushes her off at first but later helps her out. I specifically remember she buys some pants or jeans but since they’re not made for women she has to soak in a tub while wearing them so they shrink. In the end she gets revenge on whoever killed her family I think.

Hi there! I adore Red Dead Redemption, but it's so predominant in the genre that I'd rather sift for overlooked gold!

Any genre is fine - and that includes point-and-clicks, etc. And any era as well.

Thanks for your best recommendations.

Younger Lee Van Cleef lookin sharp - already got that presence.

Imagine all the conventions and imagery of a sci-fi movie violently blasted onto the canvas of a quaint horizon depicting a sun setting over the Rockies. That’s Oblivion.

“Ambitious” is a kind way to put it. There is just too, too much going on in this movie which lists at least people five under the “Story By” or “Written By” credits, including famed scribe Peter David. I can’t even succinctly relay it here: it’s so jumbled in focus and feel and leans so heavily on the language of its parent genres the movie feels insincere.

Of course, I expected a bad product when I fired this up because it’s a project by RiffTrax, a Mystery Science Theater 3000 offshoot that roasts poorly assembled movies as they unfold. The boys do not disappoint in their savagery. George Takei never stood a chance!

From the poor acting (you’ll cringe toward infinity from Julie Newmar’s belabored cat noises), to the absurd set design (ceiling fans count as futuristic, right??) there’s fertile ground here to mock. Even more transgressions: random ass side characters with paper-thin personalities, grueling meandering in and around low-budget locales, off-brand Muppets, boring stereotypes, random ass quotes from other movies and the gall to flash a “To Be Continued” message before the end credits.

That said, there’s a nugget or two of a good idea here, but as comic writer Dan Slott has put it: this suffers from “too many mojos”. It’s like a slapdash campfire story where each kid around the circle adds a little bit of their own favorite lore and passes it to the next. Lizard-man banditos? Empath lawmen? Robotic justice-bringers? Focus on one of these ideas and maybe it works. Throw them all in a pot and forget the seasoning? That’s how you fuck up a meal.

I’m doing a school project that is comparing three of Quentin Tarantino‘s films, namely Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained, and the hateful 8, to 4 spaghetti western films from the 60s and 70s which are Inglourious bastards (the original), Django, the Good the Bad and the Ugly, and a Fistful of Dollars. I am comparing anything in between these films such as similar camera shots, similar music potentially by Ennio Morricone, and any thing that might be similar or influential or the same. Please let me know if you know of anything no matter how niche, and if you want to help me with my project. Thanks!

I just watched Unforgiven for about the 7th time. I love the movie and think it is great on many levels. I am curious about the iconic "Deserve's got nothing to do with it line". (Apologies if this has been covered before, I took a look and didn't see something recently exactly on point.)

In that moment, doesn't "deserve" have EVERYTHING to do with what Little Bill has coming? Munny wouldn't be there if Little Bill didn't "deserve" punishment for what he did to Ned (and many other bad actions too). I believe one main message of MOST of the movie is that things just happen, not because of karma; justice often doesn't prevail, good things happen to bad people, bad things happen to good people etc And this line reinforces that idea, esp out on the harsh random frontier.

But THIS particular violence (or "the general harshness of the world") is not random or indifferent, and seems to undermine its own point. Bill does "deserve" it (although it's vigilante justice, that might be about all one can hope for on the frontier). Little Bill beat the crap out of Munny for little reason (and even then Munny was gonna leave it be), and tortured Munny's good friend to death (and we the audience saw some other bad actions by Little Bill).

Actions speak louder than words, and Munny's actions are to be a sort of agent of justice because Bill did somewhat/a lot "deserve" it (again, putting aside vigilanteism issues).

To me, the line would have made more sense in many other moments of the movie. In this moment, obviously less memorable and less poetic, but it seems more accurate if he said something along the lines of: "Deserve's usually got nothing to do with anything in life, especially out here on the harsh frontier, but you Little Bill -- who tortured to death an innocent man -- you do deserve this."

More generally, although revisionist/deconstructionist etc, throughout much of the film, I think the audience got exactly what it wanted at the end and it was similar to many older Westerns. Which seems to confuse what "appears" to be the intent of the movie makers. Yes, there are some hiccups in the confrontation, but Munny kicks ass on those who seemed to sorta deserve it (Skinny and the other deputies who Munny kills were complicit in bad actions earlier too).

In THIS moment, I don't see Munny as reverting to being "evil" or a "monster", as I've seen some comments suggest. He lets many of the those in Greelys get away, he is an agent of "justice" (or perhaps a little more negatively: "revenge"). Then he tells them bury my friend properly and no more violence against women. And Beauchamp, when he writes about this for the east coast, he only needs to embellish/smooth out a little bit of the facts. The reality and facts of what Munny did will be gargantuan as legend and myth back East, but we saw it was all real.

The movie spent much time deconstructing western myths and tropes. But then leaves the audience with what appears to be a big one (I know real close examination of the scene brings up counterarguments, but most audience won't do that). Maybe it's also saying, there was a little bit of truth to some of those stories too?

I know there are many other big themes to the movie, but as to what I've raised, I'm truly curious as to others' thoughts and views on this. Am I way off? Misunderstanding something or a lot? Seem like a reasonable analysis (but of course not the only one)?

EDIT: I just read Roger Ebert wrote somewhere that with this line, actually “Deserves got everything to do with it.” And I just listened to the voice over commentary of the scene with Richard Schickel, Time’s movie critic, who mentioned this is first time Munny has killed for a partly legit reason, and that purges him of his past and gives him moral authority so he can finally live out his days quietly.

He also disagrees with calling Unforgiven revisionist. He thinks its “a classic western that brings in some themes of modernism”, and also traditional but also very realistic.

Im likely overthinking the “deserves” line, it is a cool line at a cool moment, but there is this fact- Little Bill does not die or “have it coming” that night, or possibly for 30 more years, except that he did something to alter events. Munny woulda gone home if Bill left Ned alone. Munny is not there to utter the line but for Bill’s direct causal actions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Man%27s_Walk_(miniseries))

I've read the book (all the Lonesome Dove series, to be honest) and liked it. Decided to try the TV series (on PlutoTV) because wife and son wanted to see the Odyssey and I did not.

The show isn't bad at all. And the casting seemed solid (a very young Jennifer Garner plays Clara). Worth a watch.

I just dropped this video about my favorite Western movie actors ever. My first Western I ever watched was They Call Me Trinity, my 2nd was Trinity is Still my Name. I love these guys…

If you like your Westerns just a little bit strange, you'll probably enjoy High Plains Drifter. Personally, I cotton to the bizarre in Westerns just so long as it's not grotesque or overly disturbing.

This element--let's call it the Benign Bizarre--is a hallmark of the spaghettis, and it's there in HPD, too. Clint riding out of the heat shimmer to the odd sound of that synthesizer is a great and strange way to start the film, and a great way to end it, too. There is the social inversion of Clint annointing the lowly midget as the sheriff and the mayor. There is, of course, the red-painted town, which is surely one of the most striking visuals in all of the Western genre. And finally we have an avenging ghost of sorts, albeit one of surpassingly corporeal characteristics. No diaphonous specter is Clint, as the good folk of Lago will soon find out.

Another common feature of the Spaghettis and HPD that I admire is humor. William O'Connell as the nervous barber is good for a couple of guffaws as is the midget donning Eastwoodian attire--complete with a cheroot--and mimicking Eastood's mannerisms.

The bizarre, Gothic elements and the fine humor--it all adds up to a fascinating and satisfying film for me. All the more so that the repellent people of Lago get their comeuppance. And maybe that's what it's all about--in the end we cannot escape our sins.