Screen Savers Movies » Westerns

Devil’s Doorway (1950)

Jennifer Kurdyla, Editor — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 04:01:05 +0000

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 treated the Apaches sympathetically, became a very popular and acclaimed western. Later that year, Devil’s Doorway opened, but it was soon relegated to obscurity. Whereas Broken Arrow starred James Stewart as a scout and put Jeff Chandler’s Cochise in a supporting role, Devil’s Doorway’s Indian, played by Robert Taylor, is the starring role. Perhaps having a white main character made it easier for Broken Arrow to find an audience (even though the prominent Indians are played by white actors in both movies). Both films hold up exceedingly well, yet few people seem to know Devil’s Doorway. Not only is it a disturbing and powerful work about the inevitability of the Indians’ demise, but it’s also one of the more haunting westerns ever made.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
© 2008 Hansen Publishing Group. All Rights Reserved.

Learn more about Devil’s Doorway

Hour of the Gun (1967)

John DiLeo — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 04:01:49 +0000

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 on violence and its lingering residue. The film was also a surprise in that it begins where most Wyatt Earp movies finish: at the O.K. Corral. The shootout opens the picture rather than serve as its cathartic peak. An unofficial sequel to Sturges’s 1957 crowd pleaser, the movie takes its renowned characters past the central event of their lives and probes the dark aftermath. Its tone of low-key introspection didn’t appeal to audiences or critics of 1967, but the result now looks mightily impressive and far superior to Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. It’s hard to accept that the same man directed both movies.

Learn more about Hour of the Gun

Comanche Station (1960)

John DiLeo — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 04:01:15 +0000

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 played the psychologically bristling roles that James Stewart mastered in his Anthony Mann westerns, but he’s just right for Boetticher’s private stoics.

Learn more about Comanche Station

The Big Country (1958)

Jennifer Kurdyla, Editor — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 04:01:24 +0000

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
© 2008 Hansen Publishing Group. All Rights Reserved.

Learn more about The Big Country

The Lusty Men (1952)

John DiLeo — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 04:01:37 +0000

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 in which there’s a quest for highs outside the realm of usual experience. The West in The Lusty Men is a drab and dusty black-and-white expanse, not a place of colorful vistas or storybook ranches. The rodeo world has a tawdry showbiz aura, with the heightening drama of its potential for bodily harm. Like the booze, guns, and dance-hall gals of saloon westerns, the rodeo in The Lusty Men is an addiction. The main character, Robert Mitchum’s Jeff, says, “Some things you do just for the buzz you get out of it.” Here it’s awfully hard to turn one’s back on that buzz. But what makes this movie unusually adult is its three central characters, whose cross-purpose yearnings create a psychologically rich triptych of intense, festering desires and fears, both conscious and unconscious.

Learn more about The Lusty Men

Mann of the West

John DiLeo — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 03:05:53 +0000

Well, we can cross one movie off our list of hoped-for DVDs! The Criterion Collection has had the good sense and taste to release director Anthony Mann’s magnificent western THE FURIES (1950). Whether you are a collector or a Netflix user, it’s one you should not miss. In my book SCREEN SAVERS, I focus on 40 under-appreciated movies. If I had added just one more movie, it’s quite likely that THE FURIES would have been next in line. The Mann western that I did include in the book is the outstanding and equally overlooked DEVIL’S DOORWAY (1950), which will be screened on TCM’s night devoted to SCREEN SAVERS on September 22nd. THE FURIES, made earlier that year, is a western noted for its volatility, the suddenness of its violence, and its unmistakable strain of incest. Operatically extravagant, it’s a film in which love and hate are so closely allied that they are barley distinguishable. It’s certainly the best of Barbara Stanwyck’s eleven western features and also the final top-notch movie of her extraordinary career. She plays the daughter of widower Walter Huston, one of the most powerful men in the New Mexico territory of the 1870s. His cattle ranch, The Furies, is a vast empire. The closeness shared by father and daughter turns ugly and violent, mainly due to the effects of their outside romantic entanglements, with Stanwyck eventually vowing to destroy daddy and claim the ranch for herself.

This is the movie with the electrifying scene in which Stanwyck flings a pair of scissors at Judith Anderson’s face. Anderson plays a marriage-minded widow set on nabbing Huston, but she’s a threat to Stanwyck who instantly detests her. Stanwyck was past forty when she starred in this movie, yet she’s remarkably convincing playing much younger. She’s a blonde here, looking far more attractive than she did when she blonded herself for DOUBLE INDEMNITY six years earlier.

Stanwyck has a brief yet memorable run-in with a tart who says, “I’m new in town, honey.” To which Stanwyck replies, “Honey, you wouldn’t be new anyplace.”

This was Walter Huston’s final film, and it was released four months after his death. He and Stanwyck are sensational together, bringing out the sizzling best in each other. Two great stars, a phenomenal western director, glorious Oscar-nominated black-and-white cinematography, a ferocious and intelligent script, a superb supporting cast…what more could you want? Maybe, at last, THE FURIES is on its way to becoming the classic it has always been to those of us who love and admire it.

Hour of the Gun (1967): Deconstructing Wyatt Earp

John DiLeo — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:39:25 +0000

In 1957, director John Sturges made a slick, Technicolor version of the story baldly titled Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, starring Burt Lancaster as Wyatt and Kirk Douglas as Doc. Lacking the artistry and textures of Ford’s film, it’s nonetheless a satisfying commercial entertainment, vitalized by its star power. With this muscular hit behind him, Sturges went on to make two of the most devoutly revered “guy flicks” of all time: The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Great Escape (1963). (If he, instead of Robert Aldrich, had directed The Dirty Dozen [1967], then he would have made all three of the 1960s’ triumvirate of mega-macho movies.) It seemed logical when 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 on violence and its lingering residue. The film was also a surprise in that it begins where most Wyatt Earp movies finish: at the O.K. Corral. The shootout opens the picture rather than serve as its cathartic peak. An unofficial sequel to Sturges’s 1957 crowd pleaser, the movie takes its renowned characters past the central event of their lives and probes the dark aftermath. Its tone of low-key introspection didn’t appeal to audiences or critics of 1967, but the result now looks mightily impressive and far superior to Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. It’s hard to accept that the same man directed both movies. Hour of the Gun is one of the relatively few fine westerns of the 60s. It’s a transitory work that connects the 50s-style thinking man’s westerns, like The Gunfighter (1950) and High Noon (1952), with the new Hollywood’s genre-busters, such as The Wild Bunch (1969) and McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971).

Comanche Station (1960): “B” As in Budd Boetticher

John DiLeo — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:27:27 +0000

Like John Ford and John Wayne on Stagecoach (1939), and Anthony Mann and James Stewart on Winchester ’73 (1950), something rare clicked when Budd Boetticher directed Scott for the first time in Seven Men from Now (1956). With a superior script and a director with gifts for visual expressiveness, dramatic fire, and unvarnished truthtelling, Scott, by now in his late fifties, excelled as never before. The movie established the Scott persona that dominated the series of seven Boetticher-Scott westerns (1956-60): a loner mourning the loss of a wife and seeking revenge and/or closure. 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 Boetticher’s artistry was ideally matched to Scott’s plain acting. Scott never could have played the psychologically bristling roles that James Stewart mastered in his Anthony Mann westerns, but he’s just right for Boetticher’s private stoics. My favorite picture, and arguably the best, in the series is Comanche Station, the final one and the purest distillation of the Boetticher-Scott style. If it’s a B, then few westerns rate an A.

The Big Country (1958): The Issue of Manliness

John DiLeo — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:16:10 +0000

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 much the same way that Hitchcock’s later classics, such as Vertigo (1958), are unimaginable without Bernard Herrmann’s music. And, as with Herrmann’s work, you’re never unaware of Moross’s Oscar-nominated score, but it’s so right that I never tire of it. Moross’s rousing music connects stirringly with the rapturously beautiful images of Franz Planer’s color cinematography, embellishing the film’s sensory pleasures to ecstatic proportions. Obviously, this movie has to be big, and it has to be big often. It’s no surprise that the camerawork is gorgeous, or that the natural scenery astonishes, but the film’s look is uniquely memorable for its array of compositions that serve as constant reminders of just how big the big country is. These vistas aren’t employed merely to showcase wide-screen visions of American beauty for their own sake, but rather to highlight, through the camera’s distant perspective, how small humanity is within these unfathomable spaces. The film features breathtaking, panoramic shots in which the human figures (or the houses or towns that inhabit them) are tiny, isolated specks in a world they mean to conquer and control. Whether on horseback or in carriages or on foot, the characters are matted against an endless nothingness that, to our eyes, overwhelms them, but it actually invigorates them with possibility. Since “big” is the unifying force behind every aspect of Wyler’s vision, it’s extraordinary that the production never swallows up its cast. In his pursuit of grandeur, Wyler never sacrifices the small, telling details of character.

The Lusty Men (1952): Contemporary Cowboys

John DiLeo — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:07:23 +0000

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 in which there’s a quest for highs outside the realm of usual experience. The West in The Lusty Men is a drab and dusty black-and-white expanse, not a place of colorful vistas or storybook ranches. The rodeo world has a tawdry showbiz aura, with the heightening drama of its potential for bodily harm. Like the booze, guns, and dance-hall gals of saloon westerns, the rodeo in The Lusty Men is an addiction. The main character, Robert Mitchum’s Jeff, says, “Some things you do just for the buzz you get out of it.” Here it’s awfully hard to turn one’s back on that buzz. But what makes this movie unusually adult is its three central characters, whose cross-purpose yearnings create a psychologically rich triptych of intense, festering desires and fears, both conscious and unconscious. Ray had already made They Live By Night (1949) and In a Lonely Place (1950), two overrated films held in higher esteem today than The Lusty Men; the former is marred by the malt-shop casting of its bruised leads and the latter is undermined by its weak second half. Flavorful Lusty Men easily bests them both.