Monte Walsh (1970)

 

MONTE WALSH  (1970)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: William A. Fraker

    Lee Marvin, Jack Palance, Jeanne Moreau,

    Jim Davis, Mitchell Ryan, G.D. Spradlin,

    Matt Clark, Bo Hopkins, Allyn Ann McLerie

Marvin and Palance play aging cowpokes in a changing West, where accountants are taking over the cattle industry, jobs are becoming scarce, and the open range is being fenced in. A western that manages to be both playful and meloncholy, a celebration and an elegy for a vanishing way of life. Marvin's at his tight-lipped best, and Palance, in a rare sympathetic role, gives one of his most affecting and least mannered performances. 

The Virginian (1929)

 

THE VIRGINIAN  (1929)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Victor Fleming

    Gary Cooper, Walter Huston, Mary Brian,

    Richard Arlen, Chester Conklin, Eugene Pallette

In his first all-talking movie, a lean, young Gary Cooper plays Owen Wister's nameless cowboy, who stands up to a rustler played by Walter Huston, romances a schoolmarm played by Mary Brian, and rolls and lights a cigarette using just one hand. Movies were still figuring out what to do with sound at that point, and Cooper was still figuring out how to act in them. They'd both improve a lot in the next few years. According to IMDb, Randolph Scott was Cooper's dialect coach, resulting in what may or may not pass for a Virginia accent. 

The Thicket (2024)

 

THE THICKET  (2024)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Elliott Lester

    Peter Dinklage, Juliette Lewis, Esme Creed Miles,

    Levon Hawke, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Leslie Grace,

    Ned Dennehy, Derek Gilfoy, Arliss Howard

A brutal, snowbound western shot in Alberta, about a makeshift posse on the trail of a kidnapped girl and a notorious outlaw named Cutthroat Bill. If Peter Dinklage isn't the first actor you'd think to cast a a deadshot frontier bounty hunter, wait till you see Juliette Lewis as Cutthroat Bill. 

Stranger On the Run (1967)

 

STRANGER ON THE RUN  (1967)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Don Siegel

    Henry Fonda, Anne Baxter, Michael Parks,

    Dan Duryea, Sal Mineo, Lloyd Bochner,

    Michael Burns, Tom Reese, Bernie Hamilton,

    Walter Burke, Madlyn Rhue, Zalman King

A bum played by Henry Fonda gets thrown out of a boxcar in a dusty western town, does a little work in exchange for a shot of whiskey, and starts looking for a woman nobody seems to want to talk about. When the woman turns up murdered, the bum becomes a suspect, on the run from some railroad vigilantes who want to hang him. Dan Duryea has a good late-career role as an old gunman who functions as the posse's conscience, but there's some uncertainty in the script, especially with the Michael Parks character, a lawman whose values and motives are never entirely clear. He mumbles a lot, too. The ending could've gone in two very different directions. See if you think the filmmakers chose the right one. Made for TV. 

News of the World (2020)

 

NEWS OF THE WORLD  (2020)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Paul Greengrass

    Tom Hanks, Helena Zengel, Elizabeth Marvel,

    Mare Winingham, Ray McKinnon, Fred Hechinger,

    Michael Angelo Covino, Thomas Francis Murphy

As much as anything, "News of the World" is a movie about stories. Tom Hanks plays Captain Thomas Jefferson Kidd (yes, Captain Kidd), a Civil War veteran traveling from town to town in 1870 Texas, reading stories out of newspapers to folks who presumably don't have access to CNN or NPR. Out on the trail one day, he comes across a young girl (Helena  Zengel), who's just spent six years living with the Kiowa, after a raid that killed her family. Now an Army raid has killed her Kiowa family, and the kid is lost. And wild. Unable to find anybody who will take her in, the newsman reluctantly embarks on a 400-mile journey to her only remaining relatives, an aunt and uncle who live down toward San Antonio. It's a perilous adventure, and there's an old-fashioned, storybook feel to the way it plays out. The captain turns out to be just as damaged and haunted as the girl is, and a brief exchange along the way is revealing: He tells her (in English) that the only way to face the future is to forget the past. She replies (in Kiowa) that the only way to move on is to remember it. Hanks is good - you expect that - and Zengel doesn't miss a step keeping up with him. Their evolving relationship and the way they play off each other are the heart and soul of the movie. It's an odyssey, really, and a reminder that western stories aren't just our national myth. They're our national fairy tale. 

All Hat (2007)

 

ALL HAT  (2007)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Leonard Farlinger

    Luke Kirby, Keith Carradine, Carmine Cangialosi,

    Lisa Ray, Rachael Leigh Cook, David Alpay,

    Ernie Hudson, Gary Farmer, Graham Greene

Struggling farmers try to hold off greedy developers, and there's a horse race. Bill Frisell's music weaves in and out on the soundtrack, and Keith Carradine strums a guitar, downs a shot, takes a gun off the bad guy and once again makes movie acting look easy. 

Murder At Yellowstone City (2022)

MURDER AT YELLOWSTONE CITY  (2022)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Richard Gray 

    Gabriel Byrne, Isaiah Mustafa, Thomas Jane, 

    Anna Camp, Aimee Garcia, Scottie Thompson,

    Isabella Ruby, Richard Dreyfuss, John Ales

When a gold prospector strikes it rich and turns up murdered, the local sheriff wastes no time finding a convenient suspect, a black man who just rode into town. He promises a trial followed by a quick hanging, but the woman who runs the livery stable turns up evidence that shows he's put the wrong guy in jail. There are more murders, with people getting their throats cut, followed by a climactic gunfight in which many more people are shot and killed. There are some interesting wrinkles in this: John Ales and Richard Dreyfuss as a couple of old guys who would be flying a pride flag over the saloon if they weren't in 1881 Montana, and a loose community of women who in most ways are smarter than the men. Most of the characters have secrets, and most are dealing with crippling loss. Tense performances by Scottie Thompson as the murder victim's grieving widow and Gabriel Byrne as a no-nonsense lawman who's more committed to the appearance of justice than the real thing. 

Lucky Luke (2009)

 

LUCKY LUKE  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: James Huth

    Jean Dujardin, Sylvie Testud, Melvil Poupaud,

    Michaël Youn, Alexandra Lamy, Daniel Prévost

The president of the United States, facing a tough reelection campaign, dispatches a gunman named Lucky Luke to clean up a place called Daisy Town, where he plans to sink the last spike in the Transcontinental Railroad. An absurdist French spoof on westerns, both spaghetti and traditional, based on a comic book. It plays like a cartoon, sometimes funny, sometimes silly, and usually both at once. (There's even a talking horse.) Calamity Jane, Jesse James and Billy the Kid all show up. They bring their guns. 

Billy Two Hats (1974)

 

BILLY TWO HATS  (1974)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Ted Kotcheff

    Gregory Peck, Desi Arnaz Jr., Jack Warden,

    Sian Barbara Allen, David Huddleston, John Pearce

A spare western tale shot in Israel, about a couple of outlaws on the run from a sheriff who pursues them across an apparently endless desert. As the chase goes on and characters pair off in various combinations, the movie becomes a reflection on loyalty, and the subversive notion (in a western, at least) that two people together can be a lot stronger than a man alone. Peck's feisty performance as an old Scottish bandit is a departure from the more stoic western characters he usually portrayed. 

Ted Kotcheff

(1931-2025)

In a Valley of Violence (2016)

 

IN A VALLEY OF VIOLENCE  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Ti West

    Ethan Hawke, John Travolta, Taissa Farmiga,

    James Ransone, Karen Gillan, Tommy Nohilly,

    Toby Huss, Burn Gorman, Larry Fessenden

A stranger rides into a town called Denton, accompanied by his best (and only) friend, a dog. In the saloon, a punk confronts him and challenges him to a fight out in the street, an encounter that does not end well for the punk. It turns out the punk is both the deputy and the son of the town marshall, who tells the stranger to get out of town, which he does. So the stranger's camping out on the range somewhere when the punk and his gang ambush him and throw him off a cliff and kill his dog. They don't check to make sure he's dead, though, which is a mistake, on top of the mistake they made by killing the dog. You can guess the rest. Ethan Hawke plays the stranger. John Travolta plays the marshall. It's a spaghetti western, or a riff on spaghetti westerns, enhanced by West's affection for the genre and a musical score by Jeff Grace that owes a lot to Ennio Morricone. There's a rule in movies like this that the punk should've paid more attention to: No matter how tough you think you are, if you want to be breathing when the end credits roll, you'd better not kill no dog.

Warlock (1959)

 

WARLOCK  (1959)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Edward Dmytryk

    Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn,

    Dorothy Malone, Dolores Michaels, Tom Drake,

    Wallace Ford, Richard Arlen, DeForest Kelley,

    Regis Toomey, Vaughn Taylor, Whit Bissell

Shifty morals and shifting alliances in a western starring Richard Widmark as an outlaw cowboy-turned-lawman, Henry Fonda as a gunman hired to keep the peace, and Anthony Quinn as a gambler whose main job seems to be watching Fonda's back. Director Edward Dmytryk had been blacklisted, and it's one of those '50s westerns in which the metaphorical implications are up for grabs. If you watch it, see if you don't think there's a little Dean Martin in Quinn's performance. 

The Furies (1950)

 

THE FURIES  (1950)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Anthony Mann

    Barbara Stanwyck, Walter Huston, Wendell Corey, 

    Judith Anderson, Gilbert Roland, Thomas Gomez, 

    Beulah Bondi, Albert Dekker, Frank Ferguson

Walter Huston plays a cattlemen whose ranch covers the open range as far as he can see. Barbara Stanwyck plays his ambitious daughter, who thinks she could run the place as well as he can, and maybe better. Wendell Corey plays a gambler-turned-banker who Stanwyck unaccountably takes a shine to and who ends up holding the deed to the ranch. It's one of those movies that you always want to be better than it is. Huston (in his last screen role) chews the scenery. Corey, who had less natural charm than just about any actor ever, seems miscast. Stanwyck provides the star power, but there's just not enough there for her to grab on to. You keep wanting her to hook up with good-guy Mexican cowboy Gilbert Roland, but instead, the old man has him hanged. Sometimes things just don't work out. 

Dead For a Dollar (2022)

DEAD FOR A DOLLAR  (2022)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Walter Hill

    Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, Rachel Brosnahan,

    Warren Burke, Brandon Scott, Benjamin Bratt,

    Luis Chavez, Hamish Linklater, Guy Burnet,

    Diane Villegas, Fidel Gomez, Alfredo Aragon

Right away in "Dead For a Dollar", you notice some of the things you'd associate with a spaghetti western: the title, the musical score, the desiccated landscapes. It's like Walter Hill's way of saying, "Look, I can make a spaghetti western if I want to," but that's not quite what it's about. It's more like, what if John Ford made a spaghetti western, or more to the point, Budd Boetticher, to whom the film is dedicated. Remember David Lynch as Ford in "The Fabelmans", telling young Steven Spielberg to look at the horizon? There are a lot of horizons to look at here. Christoph Waltz plays a bounty hunter. Willem Dafoe plays a gambling ex-con who's good with a gun. Rachel Brosnahan plays a kidnapped woman Waltz has been hired to rescue, only she hasn't been abducted and doesn't want to be saved. There's a classic look to the way the shots are set up, with lots of washed-out colors and sepia tones, and Hill's an economical storyteller, even when he's doing exposition. Also, he knows where to put the horizon. 

Alien Thunder (1974)

 

ALIEN THUNDER  (1974)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Claude Fournier

    Donald Sutherland, Gordon Tootoosis, Chief Dan George,

    Kevin McCarthy, Sarain Stump, Francine Racette

Racism on the Canadian prairie, with Donald Sutherland as a Mountie on an obsessive mission to track down the Cree Indian who killed his best friend. Parallels to "The Searchers" are obvious, and Sutherland's Dan Candy, like John Wayne's Ethan Edwards, is doomed by his own fanatical quest: If he captures his quarry, the quest ends and he loses the thing that defines him. If he doesn't, he's a failure on a quest that goes on forever. "You've become a hunter with nothing to hunt," Chief Dan George tells Sutherland at one point. He's chasing a ghost. The cinematography and the Saskatchewan locations look good, but the storytelling's a little murky. Kevin  McCarthy has a cameo as Candy's dead comrade, which allows the two "Body Snatchers" stars to share the screen for a minute or two. 

Donald Sutherland

(1935-2024)

Charms (1973)

 

CHARMS  (1973)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Leo Garen

    Keith Carradine, Cristina Raines, Scott Glenn

    Hilarie Thompson, Robert Walker Jr., Mike Combs,

    Gary Busey, Doria Cook, Dan Haggerty, Tom Jones

Just after the end of the First World War, a ragtag gang of bikers roll into Bingo, a town somewhere out on the plains of Nebraska. They stick around just long enough to raise a little hell and then high-tail it out of town, chased by an equally ragtag, motorized posse. They elude the posse by hiding out on a farm run by two half-Indian sisters, not knowing that one of the women has an ancestral connection and magical powers. A hippie hillbilly motorcycle comedy western with a touch of horror, broadly acted by everybody except Cristina Raines as the severe older sister (billed in the credits as Tina Herazo) and Robert Walker Jr. as a mute member of the gang. A lot of it's really hokey, but there's something interesting going on here, too. Maybe the loco weed had something to do with that. It's an odd one, for sure. Shot in 1971 and released two years later. Alternate title: "Hex".

The Ballad of Lefty Brown (2017)

 

THE BALLAD OF LEFTY BROWN  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Jared Moshe

    Bill Pullman, Peter Fonda, Kathy Baker,

    Jim Caviezel, Tommy Flanagan, Diego Josef

Bill Pullman plays an old, illiterate cowboy out to avenge the murder of his partner, played by Peter Fonda. Which is kind of like if you made a Gary Cooper movie and killed off Gary Cooper about ten minutes in and turned the rest of the film over to Walter Brennan or Edgar Buchanan. It's a good role for Pullman, and Fonda gets just enough screen time to suggest what he might've done with something like "Unforgiven". The story's all about loyalty and betrayal, and people don't always get shot in the order you expect. 

Blindman (1971)

 

BLINDMAN  (1971)  ¢ ¢

    D: Ferdinando Baldi

    Tony Anthony, Ringo Starr, Lloyd Batista,

    Raf Baldasarre, Magda Konopka, Agneta Eckmyr, 

    Marisa Solinas, Franz von Treuberg, Shirley Corrigan

Tony Anthony tries to pretend he's Charles Bronson in a pointless (and pointlessly brutal) spaghetti western about a blind gunman who takes on a horde of murderous Mexicans while trying to get 50 mail-order brides to their prospective husbands in Texas. In fact, he spends most of the movie trying to spring the women from captivity at the hands of bandits or the Mexican army, and he's no closer to getting the job done at the end than he was when the story began. Shots and even whole scenes in this are lifted from other, better spaghetti westerns, and Stelvio Cipriani's musical score owes everything to Ennio Morricone. Some bits stand out for their sheer bizarreness. One is the scene where the women, running barefoot through the desert, are chased down by men on horseback, who hunt them like animals. Another is the funeral of a bandit named Candy (played by Ringo Starr), in which all the sets and costumes are black-and-white. Ringo doesn't do much and gets killed off too soon. Anthony had a hand in the screenplay, so he can't blame anybody else for his lame one-liners. One thing he does make clear: He's not Charles Bronson. 

The Way West (1967)

 

THE WAY WEST  (1967)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Andrew V. McLaglen

    Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Richard Widmark,

    Lola Albright, Jack Elam, Sally Field, Stubby Kaye,

    Michael McGreevey, Roy Glenn, Harry Carey Jr.

Widmark, Mitchum and Douglas point the wagons west and lead a bunch of settlers across the plains to Oregon. This plays like an offshoot of "How the West Was Won", with impressive production values, spectacular landscapes, a rousing musical score and a clunky script. Mitchum, as a scout who's going blind, comes off the best. Sally Field, in her first big-screen role, plays an impetuous teenager named Mercy - Gidget out on the prairie.

The Last Wagon (1956)

 

THE LAST WAGON  (1956)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Delmer Daves

    Richard Widmark, Felicia Farr, Susan Kohner,

    Tommy Rettig, Stephanie Griffin, Ian McShane,

    Nick Adams, James Drury, Carl Benton Reid

Richard Widmark played his share of heroes over the years, and his share of murderers. In this movie, he plays a hero who's also a murderer, or maybe it's the other way around. He's Comanche Todd, a renegade white man who spent 20 years living with the Indians and saw his Indian family killed by four white guys, all of them brothers. As the story opens, three of the brothers are dead (he killed them), and the fourth, a sheriff, is chasing Widmark down and taking him in to be hanged. Then a wagon train comes along and some Apaches attack the wagon train and there are only six survivors, and who do you suppose has the skill set required to help them all escape through the perilous Canyon of Death? That'd be the guy in the filthy buckskins chained to the wagon wheel down there at the bottom of the cliff. You know. Richard Widmark. Hero. Murderer. Both.

Forsaken (2015)

FORSAKEN  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Jon Cassar

    Kiefer Sutherland, Donald Sutherland, Brian Cox, 

    Michael Wincott, Demi Moore, Greg Ellis

A remake of "Unforgiven" by way of "Pale Rider", with Kiefer Sutherland in what would be the Clint Eastwood role as a man trying to move on from a violent past he can never escape. It's nice to see the Sutherland boys working together playing father and son. Donald has the more flamboyant role as an inflexibly righteous preacher, but it's Kiefer's haunted stoicism that moves the story along and carries the film. You know it's only a matter of time before he gets out his gun again, and it's going to be hell for somebody when he does. Brian Cox plays the corrupt local kingpin, Michael Wincott's an elegant rival gunman, and Demi Moore plays an old flame, now marred with a young kid. They're all good and so is the movie, but it's Kiefer, lost, forsaken, and never more than a stone's throw from madness, who makes the movie hard to forget.