Dargo
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Posts posted by Dargo
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Most people hate Westerns, the best reason I can come up with is it reminds them too much of camping. You know the pitching the tent, eating out of cans, lackluster restrooms to say the least, dirty campgrounds, bugs galore, etc. They may not admit it but in the back or their mind I am guessing that is what it is, and the latest movies to come out of Hollywood are unfortunately revisionist so that is how they classify them.
I doubt we will ever see Westerns making a comeback with the high costs of making these films, Disney blew a couple of hundred million on The Lone Ranger, and they make the movies too damn long now.
Now i do like Westerns myself, at least the good ones. There are a lot of bad Westerns though and that may also be a factor in why so many don't like them. Look at all the early John Wayne westerns, TCM couldn't even show most of those.
While I agree with some of your thoughts here MM, I highlighted that word "revisionist" up there in your text primarily because I'm of the mind that it's somewhat misplaced in its use, and because I believe many if not MOST of the westerns made during the studio era WERE actually "revisionist" in their presentations of the Old West to begin with and didn't and don't in many cases present that era in as true a depiction as many of the newer westerns have.
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So, by these definitions, The Searchers is not a real western.
Really?
Yep Iz, good point also.
And thus Andy's contention(and which I earlier stated I believe Andy actually offered up tongue-in-cheek) would also imply that ANY John Ford movie in which he was given enough money to film it in Technicolor, would fall into this "Neo-Western" genre too, and NOT just "The Searchers".
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And btw Joe, while I think I understand your reasoning here, at least I think your basic and underlying rationale for this "Neo-Western" category being that many of the newer westerns seem to have matured into stories that are presented without clearly defined "good guy/bad guy" characters(or this whole "antihero" thing which has been mentioned), I would suppose Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" would then fall into this "Neo" category, correct?
(...well, at least in MY opinion anyway, THAT movie is STILL one of the greatest westerns ever made and regardless if one wishes to tack-on a "Neo" prefix to its genre or NOT!)
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A "real" Western has to have these characteristics:
1. Cowboys and Indians
1a. In case of a final showdown shootout, the cowboys have to win.
1b. Alternately, the good guy Indians help the good guy cowboys foil the bad guy cowboys.
2. Transportation solely by horse
3. Black and white film only
4. Any character known as a "dude" is by definition a villain
5. Girls can be either frightened pacifists or six-shooting tomboys, but if they're under 30 they also have to be eye candy. But if they're over 40 they're allowed to smoke cigars or spit tobacco. This is for the purpose of arousing cigarjoe.
In addition, a "real" Western must have one of three endings:
---Cowboy rides off into sunset
---Cowboy kisses or marries girl
---Cowboy kisses horse
And all traces of moral ambiguity are to be wiped out before the final shootout. No exceptions.
And Andy, while I got the feelin' your post here was offered up in sort of a tongue-in-cheek fashion, that whole "dude" thing especially doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
(...unless you're going to place both Greg Peck in "The Big Country" and Jimmy Stewart in "Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" in this new "Neo-Western" category?!)
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Our current stable of actors that could make a convincing lead in a Western are virtually non existent In the Classic Westerns the lead actor had a wearyForget the hewing close to historical accuracy BS, or trying to hard to get the archaic speech patterns correct, the more modern directors attempt to make a Western too true to the actual historical West the farther they get away from the classic Western mythos and its look.
So Joe, what you're sayin' here is...
"When legend becomes fact, FILM the legend!"...RIGHT?!
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Wow! REALLY, Kid???
Yeah, well, I suppose I could see Danton as the nerdish engineer father of Dennis the Menace.
(...that is if he moonlighted as a GANGSTER!!!)
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No, my photo was just a simple snapshot of a lady sitting on a bench inside a shop. At that time she looked just like any other random 52 year old lady who had gone out to the shop without bothering to fix her hair or put on any makeup. She didn't look bad, but she didn't look like the Gloria De Haven we all know from her early movies. She looked like an average human being, a completely average middle-class person who never expected to encounter a photographer that day.
And this is exactly what I noticed quite a lot while working the boarding gates at LAX all those years. and not ONLY the older stars, but also many of the younger ones too...without their makeup on, you really wouldn't look twice at 'em because they're not nearly as good looking in person as they are in the movies or on television in many cases.
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Duck, You Sucker
I occasionally wonder when I hear or read this alternate English language title for Leone's "A Fistful of Dynamite", if it might have contributed to the poor showing at the box office and being far less remembered than most other Leone westerns, as I always thought in many regards it was as good as any he ever made?
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All this talk of "fallout shelters" is remindin' me of one of my favorite MTV videos back in the early '80s(and when everyone thought "video had killed the radio star")...Donald Fagen's(he of Steely Dan) jazzy and tongue-in-cheek "New Frontier" song/video.
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Have you ever tasted grits? Yum.
Are you KIDDIN', lady?! Why, I'll have you know that even THIS ol' Angeleno HERE never passes up the opportunity to tell the waitress at the Cracker Barrel that I'll take the grits whenever I order that delicious Country Breakfast special there! So yeah SURE, I've tastes grits, and I LOVE 'em!!!
(...but that really wasn't my point)
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Schools in the South that I was in, in the 1950s, also combined the practice duck and cover warnings, along with the sirens, to simulate tornado warnings.
These were always taken seriously, since we did have a lot of tornadoes in the South. But, luckily, no Russian bombers.
SEE?! Like I was sayin' here...we ANGELENOS were probably goin' to be THE FIRST to get hit in a worst case scenario!!!
(...and mean, why would those Ruskies even BOTHER with those little podunk places in the South, right?!...WHAT?!...would they REALLY need to worry about destroyin' all the GRITS in the world???!!!)
LOL
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Thanks Dothery. Good catch there.
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I always viewed Allyson as harridan-like, no matter what the role.
I had to google the word "harridan".
(...'cause all I could think of was what the hell does that old George M. Cohan song that Cagney sings in "Yankee Doodle Dandy" have to do with June Allyson???!!!)
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Yep, I concur with the Kid here. It was especially taken seriously during the height of the Cold War in the environs of Los Angeles, and where at the time probably half the fathers of the kids in my classes worked for one of great many of the aircraft "defense plants"(North American/Rockwell Aviation and where my father worked, Douglas Aircraft, Northrup Aircraft, Lockheed Aviation) located there at the time.
(...and thus the theory was that WE were gonna get hit FIRST when those "nasty ol' Ruskies started WWIII")
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"Lust in the Dust" was not a real film, was it? It was a nickname for DUEL IN THE SUN.
Yep, there actually is a 1985 western comedy with that title, finance. It starred Tab Hunter, Lainie Kazan and Devine.
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"I'm Dreaming Of A Wide Isthmus" -- episode of the short-lived sitcom The Wackiest Ship In The Army
LOL
This one reminds me of somethin' Jay Ward might have written for William Conrad to say as a teaser for the next episode on the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
(...and now I think you folks can see who one of the "great" influences in life was, can't ya!)
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ONE OF OUR AIRCRAFT IS MISSING (the 1942 Powell/Pressburger WWII film...and almost ANYTHING by those two is masterful)
And another very well made WWII movie...
THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY(the 1957 film starring Hardy Kruger as a German POW who the Allied Forces can't seem to hold on to for very long)
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And that kinda looks like Leo Carrillo sitting to Barbara's left there, Joe.
(...though the guy IS now startin' to remind me of some other actor from that era, but who I can't quite place...any idea???)
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When I meet a star, I just stick out my hand and say "spare change?" At least that's what I did when I was living on the streets of LA, in '68.
Well, ya know VX, word was THE best place for THAT was always at the end of the 405/Sunset Blvd off-ramp!
(..in fact, there was once a report that the guy most often seen there would end his day walking over to his Mercedes S-class sedan parked nearby and driving off to his apartment situated along Ocean Ave in Santa Monica!!!)
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Thanks Dargo for mentioning Agee. I had been refraining from bringing him up, since we were focusing on Maltin and to a lesser degree Kael. Agee's reviews are a bit more layered-- he is much more intelligent than Maltin. He will offer up a positive comment that seems embedded in claims against the same text-- and he will also offer up a negative criticism surrounded by a lot of commentary in favor of the same text. So you have to sift through his reviews very carefully. You almost have to read him backwards. LOL
Maltin is not as complex-- his Trix are for kids.
You're welcome, TB.
Just to add here that with my formative years occurring in Los Angeles during the '60s, and indeed having lived most of my life in the L.A. area, the movie critics which influenced me the most in regard to desiring to see a particular newly released film were the L.A. Times' Charles Champlin, and then later on Kenneth Turan.
(...both of whom I always felt were reasonably evenhanded in their reviews)
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Regarding influential critics who offered up "great reads" and insightful comments about film...
TopBilled's ongoing thread of a while back that featured excerpts of James Agee's reviews would often leave me sad knowing that he died in 1955 at the age of only 45, and when I was but 4 years old. And sad of course because he was gone long before I came of age and began my interest in film, as I think I would have relied heavily upon his learned critiques to make my choices in which films to go see as a younger man.
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California Chrome, the horse which may win the Triple Crown, looks a lot like Edna May Oliver.
Yeah, but word was Edna May was never a good mudder...
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I'm surprised no one has mentioned that in 1955 MARTY and THE ROSE TATTOO were both nominated for the BEST OSCAR FILM. Of course MARTY won, but isn't it interesting that in that year 2 films nominated for the OSCAR featured Italian families in their plots.
Well lavender, NOT so much after you find out that there were a whole lot of horse heads being found in many a Hollywood bedroom in '55!!!
(...sorry, couldn't resist)
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Those are some I hadn't thought about, Dargo. Can you say what there is in the movies, either in the visuals or the ideas, that you can seen in other movies?
Yep. How about this famous scene in "The Crowd"?
(...I'll bet at first glance you might have been tryin' to pick out Jack Lemmon's C.C. Baxter in this still, now didn't ya?!)
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*CANDIDS* 2
in Films and Filmmakers
Posted
And yet ANOTHER interesting old story about William Boyd...
Unlike most other areas of the country, Ironically in Brooklyn NY, the locals actually pronounced his name: "William Bird"!
(...betcha NOBODY knew THAT around here, now DID ya???!!!...and yep, if you're wonderin', those SAME folks would ALSO call the guy who played Messala in the '59 remake of BEN HUR, yep, you guessed it: "Stephen Bird")