Friendly persuasion 1956 - Pacifism put to the test during the Civil War

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IMDB Rating: 7,5

Director: William Wyler
Main Cast: Gary Cooper, Dorothy McGuire, Anthony Perkins, Richard Eyer, Robert Middleton, Phyllis Love

"Friendly Persuasion is a charming, sensitive tale of a family of Quakers that attempts to maintain their pacifist ideals amid the turmoil of the U.S. Civil War. Best-known for playing quiet, understated characters who use violence when pushed too far, Gary Cooper gets the opportunity to explore a more peaceful resolution - though the film occasionally suggests that no person can be completely pacifistic. The tech credits are solid, as should be expected for a film directed by William Wyler; of particular note are Dimitri Tiomkin's score and Dorothy Jeakins's costume design. Though the film tends to exaggerate Quaker speech, the performances are convincing, and the screenplay (by blacklisted Michael Wilson) does a good job of transferring Jessamyn West's story to the screen. The film received six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, though it did not win in any category." - www.allmovie.com

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The searchers 1956 - Ford's masterpiece, Wayne's definitive role

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IMDB Rating: 8,0

Director: John Ford
Main Cast: John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond, Natalie Wood, John Qualen

"If John Ford is the greatest Western director, The Searchers is arguably his greatest film, at once a grand outdoor spectacle like such Ford classics as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950) and a film about one man's troubling moral codes, a big-screen adventure of the 1950s that anticipated the complex themes and characters that would dominate the 1970s.
Described by the director as a 'psychological epic', The Searchers (1956) is John Ford's most revered Western, for its visual richness and profoundly ambiguous critique of the genre's (and America's) racism. Ford pushed John Wayne's archetypal Westerner into the realm of antiheroism, as Ethan's five-year quest to rescue his niece from Comanche chief Scar mutates into killing her when he discovers her living placidly as Scar's bride. While Ethan's lethal racism signals his insanity, Wayne's charismatic presence and Ethan's desire to salvage the family unit of 'civilized' settlers carries its own sheen of Western heroism. Still, the famous final image of Ethan's departure into the desert reveals that 'civilization' has no place for such an uncompromising figure.
Shot on location in Colorado and Monument Valley, Ford's vividly arid Technicolor vistas render Ethan a man of the magnificent and punishing landscape, unable to reconcile his inner savagery with domestic constraints. Greeted in America as just another quality Ford oater, the film was first reclaimed by French critics for the unresolved tensions and evocative style of Ford's narrative, elevating it to the status of cinematic art.
John Wayne gives perhaps his finest performance in a role that predated screen antiheroes of the 1970s; by the film's conclusion, his single-minded obsession seems less like heroism and more like madness. Wayne bravely refuses to soft-pedal Ethan's ugly side, and the result is a remarkable portrait of a man incapable of answering to anyone but himself, who ultimately has more in common with his despised Indians than with his more 'civilized' brethren. Natalie Wood is striking in her brief role as the 16-year-old Debbie, lost between two worlds, and Winton C. Hoch's Technicolor photography captures Monument Valley's savage beauty with subtle grace.
The Searchers paved the way for such revisionist Westerns as The Wild Bunch (1969) and McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), and its influence on movies from Taxi Driver (1976) to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Star Wars (1977) testifies to its lasting importance." - www.allmovie.com

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Johnny Guitar 1954 - An unusual Western with much sexual symbolism

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IMDB Rating: 7,7

Director: Nicholas Ray
Main Cast: Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge, Scott Brady, Ward Bond, Ben Cooper, Ernest Borgnine, John Carradine

"Few Westerns more obviously begged the question 'What was the studio thinking?' than Nicholas Ray's brilliantly perverse Johnny Guitar. Ray had a knack for finding subversive subtexts in standard material, and on the surface Johnny Guitar's outlaws on the run, factions battling over a town's future, and love and betrayal among the tumbleweeds seem like the stuff of a typical Western. But in Johnny Guitar, nearly all the men are unwilling or afraid to fight, the action is dominated by two aggressive women who hate each other (but are also oddly drawn to each other), the title character is at once the lover and the employee of the female lead, and her arch-rival is driven to near-psychotic hatred and violence by unrequited affection for a handsome outlaw. Lust rules nearly everyone in this film, and in ways that generally fall outside the boundaries of mainstream Hollywood's sexual economy; one look at Joan Crawford's butch Western outfit, complete with string tie, should be enough to signal that this isn't an ordinary sagebrush shoot-'em-up. Ray plays this saga of unusual appetites in a hyper-emotional style against a broad and colorful backdrop, and the result feels more like an opera than a Western, as Martin Scorsese has pointed out. Throw in an allegory of 1950s anti-Communist blacklisting, the bold visual style, Victor Young's moody score, and the con brio performances of Crawford, Mercedes McCambridge, and Sterling Hayden and you have a unique movie that's fascinating and entertaining throughout.
According to most sources, the animosity between Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge was quite real, added several extra dimensions to their scenes together. Director Nicholas Ray and screenwriter Philip Yordan stuff the film with so much sexual symbolism that one wonders why they left out a train going into a tunnel. Ms. Crawford's vivid red-and-blue wardrobe scheme was later appropriated by Ray for James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause - with equally stunning results. In addition to the stars, Johnny Guitar is well stocked with reliable supporting players, including Ernest Borgnine, Ben Cooper, Royal Dano (superb as a consumptive, book-reading hired gun) and Paul Fix." - www.allmovie.com

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Shane 1953 - A simple Western elevated to mythical status

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IMDB Rating: 7,7

Director: George Stevens
Main Cast: Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Van Heflin, Brandon De Wilde, Jack Palance, Ben Johnson, Edgar Buchanan

"Despite being burdened with grand pretensions, George Steven's Shane stands securely as one of the most intelligent westerns of its era. The story, underscored by potent historical conflicts between cattle ranchers and homesteaders, and broad philosophical issues contrasting the rugged individualist of American lore with the value of belonging to a community, is mythic in scope. The massive, imposing and ragged landscape of Wyoming's Grand Tetons, captured capably by Oscar winner Loyal Griggs, provides an appropriately awe-inspiring backdrop to the action. Stevens rarely passes up a chance to offer up attention-seeking directorial flourishes (long takes capped by extended fades), but in the end his faithfulness to the characters and their stories preserves the movie's greatness. Jack Palance, whose sneering charisma is palpable, is the embodiment of evil as the ranchers' hired assassin. Alan Ladd, who is enigmatic and mysterious as the neo-pacifist ex-gunslinger titular character, is quietly imposing (despite his lack of physical stature) in the role. As a man with a dark past, Shane willingly martyrs himself in order to atone for past sins and to save his newly adopted family. Therefore, it is appropriate that his son-by-proxy Joey provides the predominant point-of-view, since it is his coming-of-age that reflects the maturation of the American west.
Cinematographer Loyal Griggs imbues this no-frills tale with the outer trappings of an epic, forever framing the action in relation to the unspoiled land surrounding it. A. B. Guthrie Jr.'s screenplay, adapted from the Jack Schaefer novel, avoids the standard good guy/bad guy clichés: both homesteaders and cattlemen are shown as three-dimensional human beings, flaws and all
Nominated for 5 Oscars, winner of one for its stunning color cinematography." - www.allmovie.com

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High noon 1952 - The Western classic shot in real time

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IMDB rating: 8,1

Director: Fred Zinnemann
Main Cast: Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Thomas Mitchell, Lloyd Bridges, Katy Jurado, Otto Kruger, Lon Chaney Jr.

"This Western classic stars Gary Cooper as Hadleyville marshal Will Kane, about to retire from office and go on his honeymoon with his new Quaker bride, Amy (Grace Kelly). But his happiness is short-lived when he is informed that the Miller gang, whose leader (Ian McDonald) Will had arrested, is due on the 12:00 train. Pacifist Amy urges Will to leave town and forget about the Millers, but this isn't his style; protecting Hadleyburg has always been his duty, and it remains so now. But when he asks for deputies to fend off the Millers, virtually nobody will stand by him. Chief Deputy Harvey Pell (Lloyd Bridges) covets Will's job and ex-mistress (Katy Jurado); his mentor, former lawman Martin Howe (Lon Chaney Jr.) is now arthritic and unable to wield a gun. Even Amy, who doesn't want to be around for her husband's apparently certain demise, deserts him. Meanwhile, the clocks tick off the minutes to High Noon - the film is shot in 'real time', so that its 85-minute length corresponds to the story's actual timeframe. Utterly alone, Kane walks into the center of town, steeling himself for his showdown with the murderous Millers. Considered a landmark of the 'adult western', High Noon won four Academy Awards (including Best Actor for Cooper) and Best Song for the hit, 'Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darling' sung by Tex Ritter. The screenplay was written by Carl Foreman, whose blacklisting was temporarily prevented by star Cooper, one of Hollywood's most virulent anti-Communists." - www.allmovie.com

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Red river 1948 - Epic, emotional Western; a clash between the old and the new

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IMDB rating: 7,8

Director: Howard Hawks
Main Cast: John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru, Walter Brennan, Coleen Gray, Harry Carey Sr., John Ireland, Noah Beery Jr., Harry Carey Jr.

"In his first collaboration with John Wayne, Howard Hawks examines capitalism and dueling masculinities in the rousing context of a Western cattle drive. A Mutiny on the Bounty for Big Sky country, Red River features a challenge between Montgomery Clift's Matthew Garth and Wayne's Tom Dunson that becomes a contest between new and old models of Western manhood - a clash enhanced by the different performance styles of ambiguous, Method-acting, proto-rebel Clift and stolidly imposing star Wayne. Young and adaptable, Garth sees the necessity of finding new markets and cooperating with a community, including such potential adversaries as John Ireland's gun-loving Cherry, while Dunson's Old West individualism becomes an inflexible, economically ruinous monomania. The unsympathetic Dunson challenged the traditional Wayne persona, presaging the disturbed Western heroes that proliferated in the 1950s and 1960s, including Wayne's later role as psychotic Ethan Edwards in John Ford's The Searchers (1956) and in the films that Red River writer Borden Chase wrote for director Anthony Mann. Powered by Russell Harlan's dynamic yet moody black-and-white cinematography and Dimitri Tiomkin's score, Red River became a substantial hit, confirming Clift's star quality in his film debut and earning Oscar nominations for Chase and action editor Christian Nyby; it still stands as one of Hawks's top Westerns." - www.allmovie.com

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My darling Clementine 1946 - One of the greatest classic Westerns, but an idealized version of the shootout at OK Corral

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IMDB rating: 7,8

Director: John Ford
Main Cast: Henry Fonda, Linda Darnell, Victor Mature, Cathy Downs, Walter Brennan, Tim Holt

"One of the greatest movie Westerns, John Ford's My Darling Clementine is hardly the most accurate film version of the Wyatt Earp legend, but it is still one of the most entertaining. Shot on location in Monument Valley in crisp, deep-focus black-and-white, the film opens as Henry Fonda's upstanding yet slightly (and humorously) awkward Wyatt Earp arrives in Tombstone to settle a family score with the murderous Clantons, staying long enough to make the untamed town safe for the new church and schoolmarm-to-be Clementine and enable corrupt, tubercular Easterner Doc Holliday to find a bit of redemption. Yet even as Ford celebrates the possibilities of the new West, he also engages the post-war tendency for Westerns to examine their own myths: for instance, in the expressionistic photography and in Earp's contradictory place between civilization and the wilderness. He knows the way Tombstone ought to be, but he can't settle there himself; the final shootout begins as an orderly ritual but becomes a chaotic montage of death. The 'director's cut' discovered in 1994 contains several minutes of excised footage; the ending was reportedly changed due to the reaction of a 1946 preview audience." - www.allmovie.com

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Stagecoach 1939 - Lifting the Western genre and John Wayne up to A-movie status

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IMDB rating: 7,9

Director: John Ford
Main Cast: John Wayne, Claire Trevor, Andy Devine, John Carradine, Thomas Mitchell

"Although there were Westerns before it, Stagecoach quickly became a template for all movie Westerns to come. Director John Ford combined action, drama, humor, and a set of well-drawn characters in the story of a stagecoach set to leave Tonto, New Mexico for a distant settlement in Lordsburg, with a diverse set of passengers on board.
Relegated to B-movie status by the mid-1930s, the western was regenerated most prominently by John Ford's Stagecoach in 1939. Ford and screenwriter Dudley Nichols artfully balanced the genre's standard action with the character studies and quality production values of prestigious 1930s films. In the microcosm of the stagecoach, the confrontation between 'civilization' and 'savagery', Western future and Eastern past, is played out among characters journeying through hostile Apache territory, with honor-bound outlaw Ringo fighting valiantly for a society that shuns him. Though not the top-billed player, and then a B-movie actor, John Wayne as Ringo became the star hero from the moment that Ford introduces him with a rare kinetic flourish. Ford here introduced his signature Western setting of Monument Valley, lending Stagecoach a realism that set it apart from studio-bound films; and his deep focus interiors preceded Citizen Kane by two years. When he made Citizen Kane, Orson Welles claimed that he learned everything about directing movies from watching Stagecoach more than 40 times.
A critical and commercial success, Stagecoach offers plenty of cowboys, Indians, shootouts, and chases, aided by Yakima Canutt's remarkable stunt work and Bert Glennon's majestic photography of Ford's beloved Monument Valley. It also offers a strong screenplay by Dudley Nichols with plenty of room for the cast to show its stuff. John Wayne's performance made him a star after years as a B-Western leading man, and Thomas Mitchell won an Oscar for what could have been just another comic relief role. Thousands of films have followed Stagecoach's path, but no has ever improved on its formula." - www.allmovie.com

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Destry rides again 1939 - Pure gold from the golden age

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IMDB rating: 7,7

Director: George Marshall
Main Cast: James Stewart, Marlene Dietrich, Mischa Auer, Charles Winninger, Brian Donlevy

"Destry Rides Again was a huge critical and box-office success in 1939, a year that had many critical and box-office successes and that is often considered to have produced more great films than any other year of the 20th century. Max Brand, the author of the source novel, is little remembered today, but in his era he was a prolific and popular writer who created such memorable screen successes as the Doctor Kildare series. Sadly, Brand was killed at the height of his career, while serving as a war correspondent in Italy during World War II. Brand's story was considerably changed for the screen, and as a result there are occasional inconsistencies of characterization for Destry, who sometimes seems a bit too inclined to fight for a pacifist. Yet, in Tom Destry, James Stewart creates one of the screen's most likable characters, and the film's success revived the career of Marlene Dietrich, who had been dumped from her studio contract by Paramount because of her temperamental behavior and perceived weak box-office appeal. The problem, though, proved to be not that audiences had tired of Dietrich but that they had tired of her in the melodramatic films that Paramount put her in. Free of Paramount, Dietrich found a broader range of work and once again became a bankable star." - www.allmovie.com

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Secrets 1933 - The last film of America's Sweetheart

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IMDB rating: 7,7

Director: Frank Borzage
Main Cast: Mary Pickford, Leslie Howard, C. Aubrey Smith, Blanche Friderici, Doris Lloyd, Ned Sparks

"Silent screen legend Mary Pickford makes her final movie appearance in Secrets, adapted from the play by Rudolph Besier and Mary Edgerton. Secrets is a curious misfire, meaning that it doesn't really work as a film but has more than enough interesting things about it to make it worth watching. For one thing, it's Mary Pickford's last film and one of the few talkies that the vibrant silent star made. Pickford never really made the transition from silent to sound, although a number of her talking pictures were popular. She was capable of being a fine talkie actress; the talent was clearly there, but she needed to put a great deal of effort into re-learning how to act in front of a camera with a microphone, and she apparently didn't want to do so. As a result, some of her scenes come across as stilted or disjointed; others, however, are magical and demonstrate what could have been. Indeed, her scene following the death of her child is pure gold. Leslie Howard was more at ease with dialogue, and his performance is a big help to Secrets, but there's also a problem here: Howard is very convincing as the lover, not quite as convincing as a rough Western hero type. Frank Borzage works some magic of his own in his direction; despite some credibility problems in the script, Borzage directs as if he believes in every wild moment, every truth-stretching bit turn of events." - www.allmovie.com

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The range feud 1931 - Jones and Wayne: two generations of cowboys

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IMDB rating: 5,8

Director: D. Ross Lederman
Main Cast: Buck Jones, John Wayne, Susan Fleming

"Buck Jones is supported by a very young John Wayne in this fine Western from his early years at Columbia Pictures.
They play stepbrothers involved in a feud between the Turners and the Waltons. Clint Turner (Wayne) is forbidden to visit Judy Walton (Susan Fleming) by her father, John (Edward J. LeSaint). He does so anyway and is conveniently blamed for old man Walton's murder. Forced to arrest his stepbrother, Sheriff Buck Gordon (Jones) decides to investigate the real reason for the feud. After being shot and wounded by a mysterious figure, Buck discovers that a cattle rustler, Vandall (Harry Woods), is stirring up the bad blood between the families for his own nefarious purposes. When Vandall is proven guilty of Walton's murder, the feud comes to a peaceful end and Clint and Judy are reunited.
While Wayne disliked working with Tim McCoy, another Columbia Western star, he came to admire the amiable Jones, a friendship that lasted until Jones' death. Wayne, as befitted his low status in Hollywood in 1931, is playing little more than a supporting character, but he still managed to have a quarrel with the powers at be, and, despite his friendship with Jones, vowed never to work for Columbia again, a promise he kept. Range Feud was unofficially remade by Jones as The Red Rider (1934), a 15-chapter Universal serial featuring Grant Withers as the stepbrother falsely accused of murder." - www.allmovie.com

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Cimarron 1931 - Lavishly produced but a little bit dated Western

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021746/?ref_=nv_sr_3
IMDB rating: 6,1

Director: Wesley Ruggles
Main Cast: Richard Dix, Irene Dunne, Estelle Taylor, Nance O'Neil, William Collier Jr., Roscoe Ates, Edna May Oliver

"Cimarron was the first Western to win the Oscar for Best Picture - and, until Dances with Wolves in 1990 - the only one. The film begins on April 22, 1889, the opening day of the great Oklahoma Land Rush on the Cherokee Strip. Boisterous Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix) is cheated out of his land claim by the devious Dixie Lee (Estelle Taylor). Instead of becoming a homesteader, Cravat establishes a muckraking newspaper, and with pistols in hand he becomes a widely respected (and widely feared) peacekeeper. He also displays a compassionate streak by coming to the defense of Dixie Lee, who is about to be arrested for prostitution. Cravat's insistence on sticking his nose into everyone's affairs drives a wedge between him and his young wife Sabra (Irene Dunne), but she stands by him - until he deserts her and her children, ever in pursuit of new adventures. Sabra takes over the newspaper herself, and with the moral support of her best friend, Mrs. Wyatt (Edna May Oliver), she creates a powerful publishing empire.
Cimarron makes the mistake of placing most of the action early in the film, so that everything that follows the spectacular opening land-rush sequence may feel anti-climactic. The famous Oklahoma Land Rush sequence was filmed near Bakersfield, CA, and included 47 camera operators and 5,000 dress extras. The scene, which to a modern viewer suggests some heavy borrowing from William S. Hart's similar sequence in the silent Tumbleweeds (1925), remains Cimarron's centerpiece and tends to dwarf the empire building sweep of Edna Ferber's original novel. And, to be frank, the remaining hour or so of political intrigue is rather ponderous and dull in comparison. While it's always enjoyable to watch Irene Dunne persevering through the years, it's rather wearing to sit through the overblown performance of Richard Dix, who seems to think that he can't make a point unless it's at the top of his lungs. Cimarron creaks badly when seen today, but it still outclasses the plodding 1960 remake." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/cimarron-v9640/

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Jesse James 1939 - A highly romanticized account of the infamous criminal

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031507/?ref_=fn_al_tt_5
IMDB rating: 7,1

Director: Henry King
Main Cast: Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, Nancy Kelly, Randolph Scott, Henry Hull, Brian Donlevy, John Carradine, Jane Darwell

"Historians will shudder at Jesse James, a biopic which is much more interested in the legend of the famous outlaw than in the facts, but viewers looking only for entertainment will be quite happy with this rip-roaring adventure tale. While the story has been whitewashed, credit should be given to the creators of Jesse for at least not making the title character as pure as the driven snow. Though the motivation they have devised for his first forays into crime make him out to be something of an avenging angel, as time goes on they show that greed does enter into his continued career. Still, with matinee idol Tyrone Power playing the part, there's only a certain amount of 'sullying' that can come into play. Power does very well with the part, turning in a powerful performance that anchors the film and handling his dramatic scenes with aplomb. As brother Frank, Henry Fonda's role is much smaller, but he makes a terrific impact; granted, the part is written as a bit of a scene stealer, but Fonda really runs with it and his scenes are especially memorable. Nancy Kelly is only so-so, but the rest of the supporting cast is right on target. Henry King's direction is nimble and deft, staging the action sequences in glorious outsized fashion, notably the famous bank-robbery scene in which Jesse rides his horse through a plate glass window. Jesse James was filmed largely on location in Missouri, resulting in crowd-control nightmares for the picture's beleaguered assistant directors." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/jesse-james-v26071/

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Dodge City 1939 - A landmark early Flynn Western

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031235/?ref_=nv_sr_1
IMDB rating: 7,2

Director: Michael Curtiz
Main Cast: Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Ann Sheridan, Bruce Cabot, Frank McHugh

"Director Michael Curtiz paints with a wide and colorful brush and Dodge City is the kind of virile entertainment where a mammoth barroom free-for-all rudely interrupts the temperance meeting taking place next door, a situation that allows recently chaste cattle driver Alan Hale to partake in both. There is also a stampede of cattle, a fiery climax on a hi-jacked train and the cowardly killing of little Bobs Watson to keep the action fan happy for a good 104 minutes of so. Which, needless to say, doesn't leave much space for feminine interest, supplied here by Olivia de Havilland (exceedingly good and ultimately brave) and Ann Sheridan (sort of 'bad' by the mere fact that she is in the employ of evil Bruce Cabot). The latter, unfortunately, is completely wasted in the thankless role of the saloon belle but does get to warble a song or two. Overseeing it all with his usual authority, Curtiz has a couple of neat tricks up his sleeve, including a memorable sequence where Miss de Havilland spots an intruder by his shadow. A solid box office hit, Dodge City was the first of a series of westerns for swashbuckling star Flynn; his next oater, Virginia City, followed in 1940." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/dodge-city-v14179/

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