PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Western Wednesday 37

Only time for one Western today. Rawhide is a 1951 movie with Tyrone Powers and Susan Hayward in the lead roles. It's got a screenplay by Dudley Nichols and it was directed by Henry Hathaway. Dudley wrote some pretty well known pictures, the 1939 Stagecoach, Bringing Up Baby, Gunga Din, Mr Lucky, The Big Sky and For Whom The Bell Tolls. I've seen all those but not too many of his other 70 pictures. Henry directed 66 other pictures and I have to admit most of them aren't familiar. I have seen How The West Was Won, True Grit and Circus World for sure.

Tyrone is working at a remote Stagecoach Station with Edgar Buchanan. They take care of the horses for stagecoaches, provide a meal for the passengers, that sort of thing. There's word of some bad men in the area and Susan gets taken off the stage with her baby. She's forced to stay the night because the Stagecoach Company policy is not to let children ride in a dangerous situation. The Calvary will be along with the coach tomorrow and they want her to go then. Susan's pissed, she takes Tyrone's room to sleep in, then she takes his gun when she goes off to the hot spring for a bath. That's when the real trouble starts, Hugh Marlow shows up, sayin' he's a deputy. He has a badge but soon as he's in the door he pulls a gun. His pals, Jack Elam, George Tobias and Dean Jagger come hustling in after he fires a couple of rounds in the air.

Jack plays the best psycho, he's a murderin' rapist held in check by Hugh. George and Dean are weaker men. There's a lot of tension as everyone settles down a bit. Jack gets trigger happy and poor Edgar is the first to die. It's a nice tight story, more a thriller than a western at times. Tyrone and Susan gang up and fight back. You can see how it all ends yourself, there's a watchable copy on YouTube. I'd recommend it.

Western Wednesday 36

I thought I'd watch as many of my massive stock of Western DVDs as I could today. First up She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, a 1949 Western directed by John Ford and the screenplay is by Frank Nugent and Laurence Stallings. Ford is well know for his Westerns, they stand out among the rest. Frank wrote several films for Ford and John Wayne, Fort Apache, 3 Godfathers, The Quiet Man, Donovan's Reef and The Searchers. He also wrote the screenplay to Mister Roberts. I always liked that movie, I read the book before I saw the movie. Laurence's output isn't something I'm familiar with, I see he wrote this and 3 Godfathers with Frank but nothing else.

It's 1876 and it's a short time after the battle of Little Big Horn. The battle and the death of Custer have emboldened the young men of the local Apache, Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. They are off the reservation and attacking white men. John Wayne plays Captain Brittles, who's got a week to go before he retires. He gets an order to take a troop out and deliver the wife and daughter of his commander to the stagecoach line. They have Indian trouble along the way and find the station attacked and the stage burned. Brittles devises a plan to stop the braves from fighting and it works. He retires and rides off into the sunset.

Don't worry the Army isn't done with Captain Brittles. John was 41 at the time the movie was made and he plays a man in his 60s. He does a great job and it's one of the many movies that really show how good an actor he can be. It's one of John's favorite roles. There's a good cast; Joanne Dru, John Agar, Ben Johnson, Harry Carey Jr, Victor McLaglen and Mildred Natwick were the ones I knew. There's plenty of gorgeous scenery in Monument Valley. It's a good entertaining story that's worth seeing.

Cast A Long Shadow is a 1959 Western with Audie Murphy as a man who inherits a big ranch when the man who might be his father died. It's directed by Thomas Carr and written by Martin Goldsmith and John McGreevey. Walter Mirisch is the producer for a company he owned with Audie Murphy.

John Denher is the foreman of the ranch and he'd been on Audie's trail for 5 weeks when he finds him gambling in a cantina. He brings Audie back to the big ranch so the men that worked there can buy him out and he can go on drinking. Audie meets up with his old girlfriend, played by Terry Moore, and he changes his mind about selling the ranch. Trouble is, they need to get 3000 head of cattle to Santa Fe in a week to make enough money to keep the bank from foreclosing. There's a lot of tension and hard feelings as Audie acts the big cold hearted boss on the trail. It all works itself out in the end, though the third act is like a summary of what happened, Audie regains his humanity in a stampede, literally and figuratively. It was still an OK movie but you sure wasn't as good as the first movie I watched today.

The Alamo is John Wayne's movie, he directed and starred in this 1960 historical Western. I say historical, only in that it's based on something that happened in the past. I read on the Wikipedia that some say there's really nothing much that really happened depicted in the movie but I kind of expect that from a Hollywood historical drama. It was the first movie he directed, The Green Berets was the second, though he has some uncredited directing on three other movies. James Edward Grant wrote the script. It's a long film that used to be longer. The DVD I have is 162 minutes and the original release was 202 minutes, much of that longer time was musical overture, intermission and end music. I don't feel I'm missing anything by not seeing the longer version, even John Wayne said it was too long. It's a movie that only ends badly for everyone at the place. It's not going to be one of my favorites, that's for sure, but it's OK. I'll keep the DVD but I doubt I'll get around to watching it again.

The Proud Ones is a 1956 Robert Ryan Western. He's a sheriff in a small town and he's dating the lovely Virginia Mayo. It's nice to see him as a good guy. Jeffrey Hunter is the son of a man Robert killed in another town. Jeff's dad was a skunk gunfighter working for Robert Middleton, a gambler that run a dirty saloon. Ryan moved away and some time later Middleton has moved to the same town. Ryan's got problems, a scared deputy who quits and dizzy spells that blur his vision. Things get tense but Jeff sides with Ryan and takes a job in the sheriff's office. It's a good story, with a good shoot out in a barn at the end. The script was by Edmund H North and Joseph Petracca. They adapted the novel by Verne Athanas. Robert D Webb is the director. 

Western Wednesday 35

A couple of Roy Rogers movies today, Robin Hood Of The Pecos is first, it's a 1941 movie with Roy and Gaby Hayes. A local baddie wants to drive out the farmers and take their land. Roy's the sheriff and he has to save Gaby from being framed for murder. I usually enjoy Roy's movies and this was OK, plenty of Western goings on and the baddie gets blasted. Who couldn't like that.

Carson City Kid is a 1940 Roy Rogers film with Gaby Hayes. Roy dresses as a robber, stops stages, and checks the mail in the strong box. He's looking for a man, played by Bob Steele, who killed his brother. Bob's got himself a new name and he's hiding in a town as a saloon owner, and creep. Eventually he finds Bob and punishes him with some hot lead. Another one that I enjoyed.

Western Wednesday 34

A four pack of Roy Rogers movies today. Island View Entertainment is another of those public domain packagers. All the movies on the disc were Platinum releases first. I wouldn't be surprised if IVE is the same people behind the scenes. They both are in Chaska, a local suburb. This is volume 25 of 30 in the Cinema Classics series.

Jesse James At Bay 1941 Roy plays two parts in this retelling of the Jesse James legend. He's Jesse and he's a good guy. Gaby Hayes plays the sheriff. The local banker has a plan to legally steal the land from the locals. There's a couple of plucky lady reporters that mix into the story. Roy and Gaby will put a stop to the banker's plan and Roy will get one of the reporters. The end of the movie was shot at Vasquez Rocks.

Night Time In Nevada 1948 Roy is a rancher who's herd of cattle are missing. He's also working with Andy Devine, who plays the sheriff. It's set modern day and there are many cars as there are horses. There's a baddie who first kills his partner in a gold mine. The partner left the baddie in charge of the trust fund for his daughter. Then he steals Roy's cattle stealing. He'll soon get his. Roy and Andy sing Rock Candy Mountain.

Rough Riders' Roundup 1939 Roy and the Rough Riders are after stage robbers that smuggle the gold into Mexico. They have their own ghost town to hand out in. There's plenty or riding and shooting in this one. There's also a gal who's being cheated out of her fortune. Roy lends her a hand too.

Silver Spurs 1943 Roy works for Jerome Cowan, the son of an old friend, the guy is a big dick. John Carradine is his pal, he's got a eye for the ranch, and he's got a plan to kill Jerome. Roy gets framed for the murder. Between songs Roy tries to keep out of jail and figure out who framed him.

All were pretty entertaining but I'm a bit of Roy Rogers fan. You can check out any of them on YouTube. There's plenty of other Westerns on site.

Western Wednesday 33

I hadn't seen The Searchers for years, maybe since the 70s. I picked up the 50th Anniversary DVD set at Half Price Books today for a cheapish 7 bucks. It's coupon week again and today was 30% off. Sadly it was the only thing I found at the Ford Parkway store.

The Searchers came out in 1956 and it's set 90 years before. The movie is based on a novel by Alan LeMay, it was adapted to screenplay by Frank S Nugent, John Ford is the director. It's said to be the best of the Westerns and others rank it very high in top 100 film lists. I'm not much for Best of Lists, my own rankings are more fluid as time passes, but it is a great movie that deserves it's praise. Ford is taking the Western into new ground and Wayne is at the top of his game. I'm certainly in the camp that says John Wayne can be a great actor. He did some of his best work with John Ford. In The Searchers Wayne gets a great script that gives him a complex character to play and Ford gives him a beautiful place to play him.The rest of the cast is equally up to their parts.

The DVD set has a digest size reproduction of the Dell Comic adaptation of the movie. There are also reprints of press kit material and news paper clippings. There's a second DVD with featurettes and the like. Ford had a lot of behind the scenes film shot and it was presented on the Warner's Presents TV show. That program, hosted by Gig Young, shows up on the second disc. Newer featurettes also use some of the making of footage. Peter Bogdanovich does a commentary on the movie. He'd gotten to know both Ford and Wayne in the last years of their lives and he talks a bit about that.

It's filled with great shots of Monument Valley. Ford was as good at putting amazing panoramas up on the screen as he was working with his actors. I need to go re-watch some of other films, most I haven't seen since in a long number of years.

The Searchers is a bit of a tough story, filled with danger, hardship, rape, racism, hatred, and vengeance, yet neither side in the conflict is shown to be any better than the other. There's even a bit of compassion fighting to stay alive. It was a tough place, the old west, I wouldn't want to live there. I'd rather visit briefly from the safety of my comfy chair. Glad to have picked this up, it's a welcome addition to the pile, I'll try to watch it again some time. I know I've been wanting to watch Rio Bravo again. I'll have to dig that out.

Western Wednesday 32

The four pack of Westerns I watched today came from Platinum Disc Corporation and they put four different Westerns on a single disc. The series is called The Great American Western and it's the 11th volume of 30.

Battle Of Chief Pontiac 1962 It's directed by Felix E Feist with a script by Jack DeWitt. Lon Chaney Jr plays Chief Pontiac and Lex Barker is a soldier who goes against the Hessian Colonel who is in favor of killing the natives outright. It's pretty heavy handed but the bitter sweet ending is good. About average for the story. There's a nice score by Elmer Bernstein.

Sitting Bull 1954 Dale Robertson is a Major in the Army, he disagrees with General Custer and sides with Sitting Bull. J Carrol Naish plays Sitting Bull and Iron Eyes Cody plays Crazy Horse. He gets tried and convicted of treason for helping the Indians. Don't worry he'll be saved when Sitting Bull comes to his rescue in a pretty unbelievable scene. Jack DeWitt wrote the screenplay to this movie, he co-wrote the script with director Sidney Salkow.

Against A Crooked Sky 1975 Richard Boone plays a prospector who helps a young man find the Indian tribe that stole his sister. They find her just as she's doomed to die int he morning. The brother has a certain amount of time to beat the sun so he can die in his sisters place. He fails and the sister is shot with an arrow and falls off a cliff. In a kind of bogus made for TV ending she's alive. The daughter of the chief took her place under the strategically placed blanket and fell off the cliff with an arrow in her. The Indian brave who took the sister returns her to the family. It was mostly below average with hardly anything happening for long stretches. Richard Boone was noisy.

The Great Indian Wars is a 1991 documentary that was pretty poorly produced. They use clips from public domain Westerns and re-use them several times in the 96 minute running time. The narration is kind of dull on top of that. I started speeding up after a while. From what I see the documentary I saw is edited from a longer 5 part series. You can see the 3 hour and 40 minute version on YouTube. It looks like a lot of the interviews, and other interesting stuff, was cut out and the narration changed. After watching bits and pieces from the same era it turns out to be a more interesting documentary. I'll download it and get to it in the future.

Western Wednesday 31

More Lash LaRue films today. It's the other half of the 12 film set of Lash LaRue film with Lash playing Marshal Lash LaRue. He made 11 films as the same character and they tossed in one of his other films with sidekick Fuzzy Q Jones, played by Al St John.

The Daltons' Women 1950 - Lash and Fuzzy are on the trail of the Dalton brothers. Pamela Blake plays an undercover Pinkerton agent. Pamela has a great fight with one of the other women in the saloon. They break stuff and nearly loose their dresses. One of the best fights in a Western I've seen in a while. There's plenty of shooting and riding, and singing too. Entertaining.

King Of The Bullwhip 1950 - Lash and Fuzzy come to town to help a banker catch El Azote, a local bandit who uses a whip like Lash.

The Thundering Trail 1951 - Lots of the usual, some of which I had seen before. Not the film, it was new to me. Some scenes from other Lash movies have been lifted and added to new footage to bring the film to  feature length. It's still a fairly good film. This is the start of the practice of using stock footage from other Lash films to reduce costs.

The Vanishing Outpost 1951 - The Wikipedia says that more than half the film is scenes cut from Son Of Billy The Kid, Son Of A Badman, Outlaw County and Mark Of The Lash. It's still watchable, after all it was watchable before.

The Black Lash 1952 - A guy Lash sent to jail in a previous film gets out and comes gunning for Lash. More dipping into the older films, this time footage from Frontier Revenge. I noticed the clips from past films because I've seen the films in two batches a week apart. When they were released, no one would have a chance to see these films close enough together to notice the reused footage. Not that it didn't happen in other cases. 

The Frontier Phantom 1952 - Lash and Fuzzy appear in the new material and a good bit of footage from Outlaw Country is used for a flashback. This is the last film for Al St John, he would go one for another 11 years and die waiting to go on stage at a Wild West show.

All in all, not a bad set of films. I was glad to have picked up the set.

Western Wednesday 30

It's Lash LaRue today, the first 5 of his 11 Marshal Lash LaRue Westerns, and another Lash Western in which he plays another character, one that's totally similar to Marshal Las LaRue. Currently the DVD is on Amazon for $6.70, for some unknown reason it was an "Add On" with an order I made and the price was only $4.95. The two DVDs in the set had been released separately in the past. They are still available on Amazon and they are each priced nearly as high as the double set.

Alfred "Lash" LaRue plays Marshal Lash LaRue and Al St John plays Lash's sidekick Fuzzy Q. Jones. Lash appeared in 39 Western movies in a 45 year career that ended in 1990. Al had a 39 year career, starting in 1913 and ending in 1952, and he appeared in 338 short and feature films. He was in the Keystone Kops. I looked at my Watched Movies List and found I hadn't seen any of the films on this DVD. In real life Lash was married ten times and he taught Harrison Ford to use the whip for the Indiana Jones movies.

Dead Man's Gold 1948 Lash and Fuzzy arrive to help a pal with some gold. They find their pal dead and the gold gone. They set to investigating. The local baddie is up to something so Lash and Fuzzy kick his ass. A good solid picture with all the expected Western stuff going on with the added bonus of a bit of whip work. I don't find Lash as personable as some of my more favorite Western stars.

Mark Of The Lash 1948 Water rights in this one. Lash and Fuzzy help the ranchers fight a greedy rancher. He's got control of the main water supply and charges a lot for them to water their cattle. I've seen that water right story in 2 or 3 other movies.

Frontier Revenge 1948 Lash and Fuzzy after after a couple of criminal brothers by pretending to be them. Another good one. The Producers were so cheap they used the same art for different titles.

Outlaw Country 1949 Lash plays Lash and his evil twin in this movie. About the same as the rest.

Son Of A Badman 1949 It's Lash and Fuzzy against the evil gang leader El Sombre. Noel Neill, Lois Lane on the Superman TV show, plays a local gal. Another entertaining film.

Son Of Billy The Kid 1949 Lash plays Peter Garrett is this film and he's very much like Marshal Lash LaRue. Al St John plays Sheriff Fuzzy, he's also the Mayor, the stage coach driver, the ticket agent and the porter. The idea is that Billy the Kid didn't die, he's now 20 years older and a respected banker. There's plenty of shooting and the like as the guys put an end to the baddies.

All in all, a nice addition to the Western collection. Next week I'll watch the rest of them.

Western Wednesday 29

Retromedia put out a 4 movie Weird Western DVD set called Creepy Cowboys. It's a collection of what they think are Weird Westerns. They're aren't very weird, even for the 1930s and 1940s. The movies are all in the public domain and available online or in various DVD collections. Lucky for me I only paid a couple of bucks for this DVD. It's $6 to $23 on Amazon. Crazy, huh. All these films are available on YouTube for free. I know I downloaded some from The Internet Archive several years ago, I suspect they're still there. I think the cover to the DVD sucks too. What a lack of effort.

Tombstone Canyon 1932 Ken Maynard is a guy who is looking for clues to his family. He arrives in a town where there's a crazy guy, dressed up in black robes, shooting people in the canyon's near the town. He calls himself The Phantom and he leaves notes with the dead. It was fairly good, a bit of action, some romance and plenty of riding through the interesting rocks of the canyons.

Vanishing Riders 1935 Bill Cody plays the sheriff who adopts the son of a man he killed in the line of duty. His real life son, Bill Cody Jr, plays the son. Together they help a lady rancher fight back against some local baddies. The weird part is Bill and Bill Jr dress up as skeletons to scare the simple cowpokes they're up against. It's an OK picture but it isn't quite up to average. You can check it out on YouTube to see if you like it more than me.

The Rawhide Terror 1934 Some settlers get attacked by some fake Indians. The two boy survive and years later the oldest son has tracked down the gang that did the deed. They now hold positions of authority in a town. The Rawhide Terror doesn't care, he's slowly killing them, one at a time. It's enjoyable seeing a man having a good time at his job, he's doing such good work, you hate to see him stop. Sadly the movie is a bit below average. It's still watchable, though it's not that weird.

Wild Horse Phantom 1944 It's a modern Western, one with cars, and Buster Crabbe and Al "Fuzzy" St John star. The pair are lawmen after some robbers and some gold. They engineer a prison break so the men lead them to the gold. It doesn't work out so well as the guy what knows where the gold is, has forgotten. This is the best of the lot, Crabbe and St John have a good chemistry and their more personable than many of their Western counterparts. The Devil's Bat prop from the 1940 Bela Lugosi movie is used in the mine to attack Fuzzy. He survives. That's the weird aspect of the film. Not too weird.

All in all, not that great a collection. Yay, that it only cost a couple of smackers. It just shows Retromedia is happy to charge a lot more than Mill Creek when delivering PD movies. No wonder I hardly buy any of their DVDs.

Western Wednesday 28

The Yellow Rose Of Texas is a 1944 Roy Rogers Western. It's written by Jack Townley and directed by Joseph Kane. Roy is an insurance investigator. Dale Evans is a singer on the Yellow Rose Of Texas showboat. Her father was convicted of robbing some gold and the showboat is coming into the town where the robbery took place. About a week before the story starts Dale's father has bust jail, that's why Roy is there, there's also some federal marshals looking for pop. Dale doesn't believe her father is guilty and it takes a while to convince Roy of that. There's plenty of musical numbers and the usual western antics. It was as entertaining as most of Roy's movies are. Nothing much out of the ordinary.

On the other hand Adios Amigo is a bit out of the ordinary. It's not often you see Richard Pryor and Fred Williamson in a Western. I see that Richard's first credit was an episode of The Wild Wild West. I had forgotten he was on that show.

Adios Amigo came out in 1976 and I'm pretty sure that I hadn't seen it before. The elements of the Western are there, more a comedy than a drama, and the production is more Italian looking than American, even though it was filmed near Santa Fe New Mexico. The movie was written, produced and directed by Fred Williamson. He wrote a 12 page script, figuring that Richard would ad-lib all his lines and jokes. That part didn't work out so well but they manage to get through the movie anyway. It was shot in 9 days and looks it. It's pretty weak, joke wise, and it gets a 4.2 on the IMDb for a good reason. I only paid a couple of bucks for it and I feel I almost got my money worth.