Anthony Mann’s second western, The Furies (1950), is an operatically volatile, incest-laden vehicle for daddy Walter Huston and daughter Barbara Stanwyck. Next came Devil’s Doorway, an elegy for the American Indian. Hollywood was at last treating Native Americans with respect and compassion. Released in the summer of 1950, Delmer Daves’s Broken Arrow, a film that [...]

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It seemed logical when [John] Sturges signed on to direct Hour of the Gun, his second picture about Wyatt and Doc, and another opportunity to provide the action, gunplay, and heroics he’d delivered so successfully before. Well, two very unexpected things happened. Instead of a straightforwardly rousing, profit-minded epic, Sturges made a demanding, elegiac meditation [...]

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This septet of color films is often regarded as a great B-movie series. They may be B in their unpretentiousness and brief running times (not one reaches 80 minutes), but certainly not thematically or visually. The deceptive simplicity of [director Budd] Boetticher’s artistry was ideally matched to [Randolph] Scott’s plain acting. Scott never could have [...]

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The Big Country is best remembered for Jerome Moross’s instantly identifiable musical score, one of the greatest (and most hummable) ever written for a western. It’s also a score of surprising variety and texture, enhancing the visuals and the emotions so much so that it becomes an integral element of the film’s overall impact, in [...]

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With The Lusty Men, from RKO, director Nicholas Ray gave us a West in which the only way a cowhand can improve his lot is to bring his skills to the rodeo circuit, risking life and limb but possibly hitting the jackpot. The story could apply to race-car drivers or test pilots or any profession [...]

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