Great American Westerns (Part 5) – ace directors and star actors hunt in pairs: Clint Eastwood

In the final entry of this series, let’s look at a collaboration that brought a strikingly different stylistic approach to the Western and heralded the arrival of a new leading man, just in time to take over from ageing stars like John Wayne and James Stewart. Sergio Leone’s “Spaghetti Westerns” in the mid-60’s made Clint Eastwood the face of the Western for GenX just as John Wayne had been for Baby Boomers. Eastwood then parlayed the success of these Italian-made films to become a one-man global entertainment behemoth over the next half a century, which included some notable Westerns in which he excelled both in front of and behind the camera.

Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood

A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966).

After honing his skills for nearly two decades as an assistant director and scriptwriter for Italian “sword-and-sandal” epics such as Sign of the Gladiator, The Last Days of Pompeii and The Colossus of Rhodes (which he also directed), Sergio Leone was ready to try his hand at something new. After he and his filmmaker friends saw Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, he used the story template to write the screenplay for A Fistful of Dollars. At this point, the Italian film industry had just started experimenting with their own version of Hollywood westerns having released a few western comedies in the early 60’s. Leone and his producer friends felt that it would be interesting to take the genre into a grittier and edgier direction, and Kurosawa’s story of a morally ambiguous ronin playing two opposing village factions against each other for his own financial benefit, presented the perfect vehicle to bring this vision to life.

Failing to secure established Hollywood stars for an Italian production, the producers eventually approached Clint Eastwood who was coming off a highly successful run on the TV show Rawhide, but hadn’t had much success in films up to that point. Eastwood was eager to take on a screen persona that was the polar opposite of the his goody-two-shoes TV cowboy Rowdy Yates. The movie redefined everything that the public had come to expect from a Western; the title sequence (by Iginio Lardani), the soundtrack (by Ennio Morricone) and the camerawork (by Massimo Dallamano) were all highly stylized. Eastwood’s nameless lead had a distinctive look, with a permanent stubble, a poncho, a cigar in his mouth and a wide-brimmed, flatter hat (as opposed to the high crown, pinch-front diamond crease hats worn by John Wayne). The only weak link in the movies is the atrocious dubbing into English. Two more films in the series followed in quick succession repeating the winning template, launching Eastwood’s career and also creating the much-talked-about but short-lived “Spaghetti Western” sub-genre.

Clint Eastwood as “the man with no name” from Sergio Leone’s trilogy.

The final film in the trilogy was the most commercially successful. It benefited from the inclusion of American actors Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef (he was also in the second film), who along with Eastwood’s “man with no name” created a compelling on-screen dynamic.

The producers had failed to secure the rights from Toho Studios for Yojimbo and so the two parties got bogged down in a lengthy legal dispute before an out-of-court settlement finally paved the way for the release of all three films back-to-back in the US in 1967.

Sergio Leone only directed three more films in his career, which are loosely referred to as the “Once Upon a Time” trilogy. These were the highly acclaimed Western, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), the unfortunately named, but visually arresting “Zapata Western” Duck You Sucker (1971) and the nearly 4-hour-long crime drama Once Upon a Time in America (1984). These films featured some of the most accomplished actors of their time, including Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, Rod Steiger, James Coburn, Robert De Niro, James Woods and Joe Pesci.

Clint Eastwood and Clint Eastwood

High Plains Drifter (1973), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Pale Rider (1985), Unforgiven (1992).

Armed with his earnings from The Man with No Name trilogy, the doors of Hollywood opened for Eastwood and he proceeded to take control of his cinematic future by setting up Malpaso Productions, and going on to produce and direct a number of his feature films. Studios loved his economical directing style; he would invariably bring his films in ahead of schedule and under budget. After an auspicious directing debut with the psycho-thriller Play Misty for Me, Eastwood returned to the Western genre again as a nameless stranger with High Plains Drifter in 1973, quickly followed by the highly acclaimed and financially successful The Outlaw Josey Wales in 1976.

After nearly a decade during which he directed himself in a wide range of action films, he returned to the Western with Pale Rider in 1985, one of my favourites. Again playing a man with no name, Eastwood dialled up the mythic aura of his character The Preacher, in a film dotted with religious symbolism. It was quite a risky venture for Warner Bros., given the decline of the Western as a genre and the costly failure of Heaven’s Gate in 1980. But Eastwood delivered as usual, with a $40 million domestic box office against a $7 million budget. The film received praise from critics and was even entered into Cannes that year.

And then, as he entered his sixth decade, Eastwood kicked off one of the most remarkably successful runs of any director in the modern era with his revisionist Western, Unforgiven. The film would be nominated for 9 Oscars, including 3 for Eastwood personally as producer, director and actor, of which he would win for Best Picture and Best Director. This extraordinary, engrossing tale attempts to subvert every aspect of the Eastwood’s on-screen cowboy persona. It is effectively the sequel to every one of his man-with-no-name films, answering the question – what happens to a gunslinger if he survives all his fights and settles down with a family and gets old. Is he able to walk away from his violent past forever, or will there always be a yearning for one last fight? And so, he plays Bill Munny, going from the man with no name to a man with a very ordinary, in fact almost laughable name. We are introduced to him many years after his violent past, now living as a (not very capable) hog farmer and single parent trying to raise two kids, a man who has forgotten how to shoot or even get on a horse. Somehow, through the most unlikely circumstances, he is drawn back to violence one last time. But instead of glorifying violence, the film deglamorizes it, not just for the audience but even for the characters. As Bill Munny says at the end, “Its a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away everything he’s got and everything he’s ever gonna have.”

Filled with an all-star cast of character actors at the top of their game – Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, Richard Harris, Jaimz Woolvet (in his feature film debut), Frances Fisher, Saul Rubinek, Anthony James and others – this is as powerful a film as any Eastwood has made in his career, matched perhaps only by 2003’s Mystic River for its deep examination of the choices people make and the impact of those choices on the people around them.

Clint Eastwood as Bill Munny in Unforgiven (1992), directed by Clint Eastwood

And so, we come to the end of this series which I’ve really enjoyed reminiscing, researching and writing. What started out as a chance reading of a New York Times article about the films of Bud Boetticher and Randolph Scott led to a 2 month long discovery (and re-discovery) of some fantastic (and some pedestrian) Westerns from these extraordinary director-actor collaborations.

To close off, here are the other collaborations I covered in this series:

Part 1: Randolph Scott’s films with Henry Hathaway, Andre DeToth and Budd Boetticher
Part 2: James Stewart’s films with Anthony Mann, John Ford and Andrew V. McLaglen
Part 3: John Wayne’s films with George Sherman and John Ford
Part 4: John Wayne’s films with Howard Hawks, Henry Hathaway and Andrew V. McLaglen

Great American Westerns (Part 4) – ace directors and star actors hunt in pairs: John Wayne II

In part 3 of this series on successful director-actor pairings, we took a look at the two early collaborations which set John Wayne on his path to stardom. Now, let’s dive into John Wayne’s work with directors Howard Hawks, Henry Hathaway and Andrew V. McLaglen. These partnerships would yield some of the most financially successful and critically acclaimed films of John Wayne’s career.

Howard Hawks and John Wayne

Red River (1948), Rio Bravo (1959), El Dorado (1966), Rio Lobo (1970)

Howard Hawks was one of the greatest directors from the Golden Age of Hollywood. He directed hit movies for every big star over a 40-year period, including Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Kirk Douglas, Marilyn Monroe and of course, John Wayne.

Wayne first worked with Hawks on the film Red River which was released in the busiest year of his career, 1948, in which he also starred in two films by John Ford (including Fort Apache, the first of the “Cavalry Trilogy”) and in the sea adventure The Wake of the Red Witch. Considered one of the greatest Westerns made, Red River tells the story of the conflict between a ranch owner (John Wayne) and his adopted son (Montgomery Clift) during a 1000 mile cattle drive they undertake along the famous Chisholm Trail from their ranch in southern Texas to the town of Abilene, Kansas. This was only Clift’s second film; the strikingly handsome actor with a brooding screen persona was the perfect foil for John Wayne’s overbearing, larger-than-life character Thomas Dunson. Clift’s debut film The Search had been released just a few months earlier, for which he would receive a Best Actor nomination, the first of 4 in a 26-year career that was impacted by a horrific auto accident in 1956 and tragically cut short by an early death ten years later.

Hawks and Wayne came together more than a decade later for Rio Bravo, in which sheriff John T. Chance (Wayne) must hold off a siege of his jailhouse, assisted by his drunken deputy (played by popular entertainer Dean Martin), a young gunfighter (played by teen heartthrob Ricky Nelson), a cripple (played by acclaimed character actor Walter Brennan) and a female gambler (Angie Dickinson, years before she became TV’s Police Woman). Howard Hawks was a critic of the portrayal of the sheriff in the acclaimed 1952 Western High Noon, and Rio Bravo was his and Wayne’s statement of how they felt a sheriff should act in the face of overwhelming odds.

The Hawks-Wayne collaboration yielded two more Westerns, both essentially remakes of Rio Bravo. El Dorado (1966) is a genuinely entertaining attempt, with Robert Mitchum and a young James Caan taking up the roles of John Wayne’s associates. Rio Lobo (1970), on the other hand is an embarrassment and was a commercial bomb. It was Hawks’ final film as director and frankly the only thing worth noting is that it features one of the earliest screen appearances of former math teacher and model Sherry Lansing, who would go on to become CEO of Paramount Pictures and release some of the studio’s greatest hits like Forrest Gump, Braveheart and James Cameron’s Titanic in the 90’s.

Although not a Western, Hawks and Wayne worked on one other film, one of my favorites, Hatari!. It was released in 1962 with an international cast, including Elsa Martinelli as Wayne’s romantic interest and featured Henry Mancini’s famous “Baby Elephant Walk” tune. In adjusted dollars, three of their films together, Red River, Rio Bravo and Hatari! each made about $250 million at the domestic box office and count as among the highest grossing Westerns of Wayne’s career.

John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River (1948), directed by Howard Hawks

Henry Hathaway and John Wayne

North to Alaska (1960), How the West Was Won (1962), The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), True Grit (1969).

By the time John Wayne appeared in a Henry Hathaway film in 1960, the director was an old hand at Westerns having kick-started his career with actor Randolph Scott in the early 30’s.

Their first partnership North to Alaska, as the name indicates, was technically a “Northern” rather than a Western, but it featured all the standard Western tropes and settings, much as the Anthony Mann-James Stewart Canada-set film The Far Country had five years earlier. This was perhaps the first John Wayne Western to embrace so much broad comedy and it proved reasonably popular and profitable. Hathaway and Wayne worked together soon after in How the West Was Won, but as I mentioned in the James Stewart section of this series, this film had three directors and pretty much every big movie star of the day, so cannot be genuinely considered a one-to-one collaboration. It remains however, the biggest grossing movie of Wayne’s career in adjusted dollars. Their third effort The Sons of Katie Elder repeated the pairing of John Wayne and Dean Martin from Rio Bravo and was a profitable release. John Singleton’s 2005 film Four Brothers starring Mark Wahlberg is a loose remake.

And so in 1969, came the crowning glory of Wayne’s career with his Oscar winning performance as the one-eyed U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. Honestly, I didn’t see anything in his acting that I hadn’t seen before or since and it’s generally believed that the Oscar was effectively a “lifetime achievement award” for an amazing body of work and indeed, his longevity as a top box office draw. Even Wayne was self-effacing when receiving the award and commented “Wow! If I’d known I’d have put the patch on 35 years earlier…”. Wayne appeared in a poorly received and forgettable sequel titled Rooster Cogburn in 1975, but the original film’s legacy was restored by the highly acclaimed Coen Bros. remake in 2010, with Jeff Bridges playing Rooster Cogburn.

Kim Darby and John Wayne in True Grit (1969), directed by Henry Hathaway

Andrew V. McLaglen and John Wayne

McLintock! (1963), The Undefeated (1969), Chisum (1970), Cahill United States Marshal (1973).

Andrew V. McLaglen was the son of veteran actor Victor McLaglen, who had such a memorable Oscar-nominated role in John Ford’s The Quiet Man, starring alongside John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. The younger McLaglen was primarily a TV director before graduating to the big screen with the Western action-comedy McLintock! in 1963, which reunited Wayne and O’Hara for the first time since The Quiet Man. The film was quite popular and led to three more McLaglen-Wayne partnerships, but with steadily diminishing box office returns. This was not for lack of resources, as all the films were big budget affairs, featuring ensemble casts, lots of extras, lavish outdoor locales and some impressive action set-pieces. The storylines are interesting too, but somehow they are missing that special something in the execution that could have elevated them into the realm of greatness.

All the films were shot in glorious widescreen Technicolor with the first three lensed by William H. Clothier, an expert in filming Westerns, having worked on several since the late 50’s and subsequently contracted by Wayne’s Batjac Productions. His cinematography on The Undefeated in particular is striking, with spectacular scenery shot in the Sierra de Órganos National Park in Mexico and some stirring scenes involving hundreds of horses. This Civil War era Western is the only film in which John Wayne shared the screen with acting legend Rock Hudson.

In the same way that character actor Ward Bond served as an on-screen foil for Wayne in the early part of his career, actor Ben Johnson did so in some of Wayne’s later films. The former stuntman played Wayne’s #2 in both The Undefeated and Chisum. I loved the recurring gag of Johnson’s character James Pepper muttering and complaining under his breath in Chisum, his own unique expression of affection and concern for his boss! A year later, Johnson would win theBest Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance as “Sam the Lion” in the small-town drama The Last Picture Show, highlighted by his poignant lake-side soliloquy which reflected the nostalgia and faded hopes of an entire generation.

By the time the McLaglen-Wayne partnership arrived at its final film in 1973, Cahill, United States Marshal, there was a distinct change in tone, perhaps influenced by Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 film The Wild Bunch. Gone was the characteristic light-hearted joviality of the typical John Wayne film and instead the film has a darker feel to it.

In addition to the four Westerns, the director and star also worked together on Hellfighters, loosely based on the life of American firefighting legend, Red Adair.

As I had mentioned in part 2, McLaglen also directed three Westerns starring James Stewart in the late 60’s, two of which were middling efforts. The director thus had the rare, but questionable privilege of working with two acting legends at the tail end of their careers, when perhaps the scripts didn’t go through the rigor that they should have been subject to, and quality was often equated to big budgets.

John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in McLintock! (1963), directed by Andrew V. McLaglen

And so, I’ve now touched upon the most prolific and notable collaborations of Golden Age of Westerns involving stars Randolph Scott, James Stewart and John Wayne. Others like Gary Cooper and Glenn Ford were equally prolific in Westerns but didn’t have any long-lasting or memorable partnerships with specific directors. There is one big Hollywood star who emerged as these legends were fading away and is indelibly linked to Westerns through a game-changing collaboration with an Italian director. He will be the focus of my fifth and concluding entry in this series next week.

Great American Westerns (Part 3) – ace directors and star actors hunt in pairs: John Wayne I

Having covered the Western careers of Randolph Scott and James Stewart, specifically their significant partnerships with directors, it’s time to talk about the biggest cowboy of them all, John Wayne.

During an acting career spanning half a century and more than 150 films, John Wayne’s personality and mannerisms (that distinctive walk!) came to define the American Western hero. Given his longevity and stature, it’s no surprise that Wayne worked with virtually every A-list director in Hollywood across Westerns, war films, comedies and dramas. His first role as a leading man came in Raoul Walsh’s epic western The Big Trail, which was shot on both 35mm and 70mm (one of the earliest widescreen films, decades before the format caught on), but it wasn’t until he teamed up with director John Ford in Stagecoach (1939) that he broke through. The films that these two giants made together until the early 60’s represent the high-water marks of both their careers. But of course, Wayne had equally rewarding, though less prolific partnerships with other celebrated directors. And in fact, in numerical terms he made more Westerns with directors R.N. Bradbury (13) and George Sherman (8) for Monogram and Republic Pictures in the 30’s then he did with anyone else.

George Sherman and John Wayne

Pals of the Saddle, Overland Stage Raiders, Santa Fe Stampede, Red River Range (all 1938), The Night Riders, Three Texas Steers, Wyoming Outlaw, New Frontier (all 1939), Big Jake (1971)

The Three Mesquiteers was a “Western Cinematic Universe” owned by Republic Pictures which encompassed 51 films produced between 1936 and 1943. These were B-movie “quickies”, usually 55 minutes long, and were very popular in their day. They were based on a series of Western novels by William Colt MacDonald, with stories set in the early to mid 20th century, in which the world of cowboys comes in contact with the contemporary world represented by modern technology (cars, phones, radios) and a growing bureaucracy. All the films featured a trio of good-natured cowboys as the heroes, played by a revolving door of actors. During the peak years of the series in 1938-39 when the films were directed by George Sherman, John Wayne played Stony Brooke, one of the three cowboys. The George Sherman movies are packed with light humor, drama, occasional romance and elaborately staged action scenes. The fresh-faced Wayne with his easy smile and lanky 6’4″ frame came across as a natural leader of the trio and had top billing. These films honed Wayne’s craft and set him up for greater things to come. A good example is Wyoming Outlaw, available on YouTube, which addresses the clash between the emerging laws of the land (coupled with corruption in the local government) and the traditional ways of frontier living. Raymond Hatton, who plays Rusty Joslin, another member of the trio, is a dead ringer for modern day character actor Tim Blake Nelson!

From left: Ray Corrigan (as Tucson Smith), John Wayne (as Stony Brooke) and Raymond Hatton (as Rusty Joslin) are the “Three Mesquiteers” in The Wyoming Outlaw (1939), directed by George Sherman

Sherman continued to direct films for the next three decades and was also the producer for one of John Wayne’s hit films The Comancheros in 1961. John Wayne reunited with George Sherman as director in 1971 for the final feature film of Sherman’s career, Big Jake. In the latter part his career when his name alone could get a movie into production, it was not uncommon for Wayne to ensure the inclusion of favoured cast and crew into his films on a recurring basis. And so, Big Jake featured beloved actress and Wayne’s close friend, Maureen O’Hara playing the title character’s estranged wife (a repeat of Rio Grande and McLintock!). Also on board was Wayne’s son Patrick and Christopher Mitchum (the son of star Robert Mitchum) playing Big Jake’s sons.

John Ford and John Wayne

Stagecoach (1939), Fort Apache (1948), 3 Godfathers (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Rio Grande (1950), The Searchers (1956), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1961).

There’s not much to be said about this partnership that hasn’t already been written. In the late 1920’s, Wayne appeared as an un-credited extra in half a dozen silent films directed by Ford. Soon after, Ford recommended Wayne to director Raoul Walsh for his first starring role in The Big Trail. Ford eventually got to feature Wayne as a leading man in one of his own films, Stagecoach in 1939. His portrayal of the Ringo Kid captured the imagination of the paying public and Wayne never looked back. His on-screen entrance riding shotgun on a stagecoach as the camera zooms in (and briefly goes out of focus) is one of the all-time famous shots in the history of cinema.

In spite of that success, Ford and Wayne got back together again only about a decade later. They released four films in two years from 1948-50 including the “Cavalry Trilogy” – Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande. These films (along with the ones Wayne did with director Howard Hawks) created the legend of John Wayne and the stereotype of the Western hero. These three are very much my favourites from the Ford-Wayne oeuvre. In Fort Apache, Wayne shares the screen with acting legends Shirley Temple and Henry Fonda, both arguably bigger household names than him at that point. Shirley Temple was 20 years old at the time and this would be among her last big screen appearances. One of my favourite character actors Ward Bond, who appears repeatedly in John Wayne films, has a significant supporting role in this one. Rio Grande paired John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara together for the first time as estranged husband and wife; they would become lifelong friends working together in another four films together, usually repeating the same relationship dynamic on-screen (O’Hara referred to herself as Wayne’s “fighting partner” in an interview). Although not a Western, it’s worth mentioning that this dynamite combination of director Ford and actors Wayne, O’Hara and Bond delivered the charming and delightful Ireland-set film The Quiet Man…it won a Best Director Oscar for John Ford and is a must-see for any John Wayne fan.

The last two films of the Ford-Wayne partnership – The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – then attempted to tear down the legend of the Western hero with a revisionist approach. After nearly 40 years of making largely formulaic Westerns, it’s understandable that Ford wanted to explore some shades of grey, perhaps even the dark underbelly of the Wild West. John Wayne plays tragic characters in both films. The Searchers is considered a seminal Western film, appearing on multiple lists of the greatest films ever made. Rather than the standard Cowboys vs. Indians narrative, the film attempted to address the issues of racial hatred and the systematic genocide of native Americans. Personally, I found this a difficult movie to watch. Teenage actress Natalie Wood, coming off her Oscar-nominated role in Rebel Without a Cause, plays the 15-year-old version of the little girl whose abduction by Comanches sets off a journey into the heart of darkness for her uncle Ethan Edwards (John Wayne). Also in a prominent role is Jeffrey Hunter, who sci-fi geeks will be familiar with as the actor who portrayed Capt. Christopher Pike in the abandoned pilot episode of Star Trek.

John Wayne in the iconic “doorway” shot from The Searchers (1956), directed by John Ford

In next part of this series, I will cover John Wayne’s collaborations with Howard Hawks, Henry Hathaway and Andrew V. McLaglen.

Great American Westerns (Part 2) – ace directors and star actors hunt in pairs: James Stewart

In the f irst part of this series, I looked at three of the five significant collaborations that actor Randolph Scott had with directors during his 30-year career as a Western star.

Now in Part 2, let’s look at three partnerships involving beloved actor James Stewart. After breaking through in 1939 with the political satire Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and the western Destry Rides Again, Stewart’s career took off in the 40’s with dramas and romantic comedies, including The Shop Around the Corner, The Philadelphia Story and of course, It’s a Wonderful Life all of which showcased a mild-mannered amiable persona. Then, at the peak of his career in the late 50’s, he played tougher on-screen characters in some of Alfred Hitchcock’s biggest thrillers – Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo. It’s not so well-known that the transition to those tougher roles took place during 1950-55, when James Stewart starred in 5 highly regarded Westerns that formed part of a larger 8-film collaboration with director, Anthony Mann. He continued acting in Westerns later on in his career as well, teaming up with iconic filmmaker John Ford and with another prolific director, Andrew V. McLaglan.

Anthony Mann and James Stewart

Winchester ’73 (1950), Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), The Far Country (1954), The Man from Laramie (1955).

For Winchester ’73, James Stewart’s agent Lew Wasserman negotiated an innovative deal with Universal Pictures, foregoing Stewart’s acting fee in exchange for “points”, i.e. a percentage of the box office gross. This was the first instance of an arrangement that has since become standard practice for A-list movie stars and top directors. This lucrative contract also gave Stewart a say in some key decisions, including the choice of Anthony Mann as the director. The movie was a critical and commercial success, which set the stage for a busy 5-year partnership between the two men.

The plot for Winchester ’73 bears a conceptual similarity to that of Colt .45, a Western starring Randolph Scott that was released the same year – the central “character” in both films is the firearm, which is stolen from its owner and then used to commit criminal acts, while the rightful owner sets out to reclaim the weapon and serve justice upon the perpetrators. Of course, Winchester ’73 is a far superior film in terms of casting and acting performances. Two notable actors who featured in this film early in their careers are Rock Hudson, improbably cast as a Native American named Young Bull (he would get a larger part in Bend of the River two years later) and Tony Curtis with a bit part as a cavalry trooper. Playing the female lead is Shelly Winters, who would go on to win 2 acting Oscars some years later as part of an illustrious career playing complex characters, including the mother of the title character in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita.

The most acclaimed entry in the series is The Naked Spur, which was nominated for a Best Screenplay Academy Award. There are just five speaking parts in the film and every one of them is a morally compromised character, driven by greed. James Stewart plays bounty hunter Howard Kemp who is on the trail of a bank robber (Robert Ryan) and his accomplice (Janet Leigh). Two strangers fall in with Kemp as his partners in the hunt, seeking a share in the bounty, much to Kemp’s vexation. Robert Ryan superbly portrays a criminal beyond redemption, a man who is completely self-aware of his “badness” and revels in it. He continually goads his pursuers and uses the prospect of his own reward money and the gender of his partner to drive a wedge between them. The director plays with unusual camera angles to heighten the feeling that the fate of these people is constantly on a knife edge. As was de riguer for films of that time operating under the Motion Picture Production Code (aka the Hays Code), Janet Leigh’s character slowly changes allegiance and becomes Kemp’s romantic interest. Likewise, Kemp eventually allows his inner goodness to govern his actions so that his happy ending can be justified. Nevertheless, the repugnance of every character through most of the narrative means this is a film that can be appreciated more than enjoyed.

B&W publicity pic (from left to right): Millard Mitchell, Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh, Ralph Meeker and James Stewart form a rogues gallery in The Naked Spur (1953), directed by Anthony Mann

In fact, most of the characters Stewart plays in these films are of similar nature – hard, angry, complex men (of course, with goodness deep inside) – and very different to his wholesome screen image from the 40’s. I think his success at portraying these characters with Anthony Mann led to roles with Alfred Hitchcock immediately after. Stewart’s strikingly clear blue eyes can be used for dramatic effect; we’ve seen it in the Hitchcock films, but you can also see it in The Naked Spur – close-up shots of his eyes that leave no doubt this is a dangerous man who will shoot to kill.

Winchester ’73 was shot in B&W, but all the rest were filmed in Technicolor. The mental image most of us have of the typical Western setting is of the arid and dusty locales in California, Arizona and Mexico. But these films present a very different terrain, in the heavily forested Midwest (Kansas and Colorado) or the wide plains of the Northwest (Oregon and Wyoming); The Far Country is in fact set in the Canadian territory of Yukon during the famous Klondike Gold Rush in 1896.

Besides, the five Westerns, the star and the director made a movie about oil rig workers (Thunder Bay), a biopic about bandleader Glenn Miller (The Glenn Miller Story) and a film about an Air Force veteran during the Cold War (Strategic Air Command), the latter two receiving Oscar nominations for Best Screenplay. Sadly, a disagreement after the release of The Man from Laramie meant that the two would never work again.

Anthony Mann would leverage the success of these films to land some high-profile assignments – the outstanding Man of the West with Gary Cooper in 1958 (one of the best Westerns ever made), the historical epic El Cid with Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren in 1961 and the multi-starrer The Fall of The Roman Empire in 1964 featuring Loren, James Mason, Alec Guinness and Omar Sharif. After Man of the West, I personally felt that he lost his magic touch once he got into the league of big budget films.

John Ford and James Stewart

Two Rode Together (1961), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), How the West Was Won (1962), Cheyenne Autumn (1964).

James Stewart returned to the Western genre several more times in the 60’s, but did not reach the artistic heights of the Anthony Mann films. The most high profile director Stewart worked with was John Ford, but at a time when the great director was arguably past his peak.

Of the 4 films they did together, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is noteworthy and in fact is frequently included in the list of great Western classics. Shot in B&W, which was unusual for a Western at that time, it is essentially a deconstruction of the cowboy myth and a meta-reference to co-star John Wayne’s role in building that myth through his roles in Westerns over the previous two decades. Lee Marvin plays the character Liberty Valance and Lee Van Cleef appears as one of the henchman, three years before he hit the big time in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns.

James Stewart (left) and John Wayne (right) in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), directed by John Ford

MGM’s How the West Was Won was one of those all-star movies that was so popular in the 60’s and 70’s. It was an expensive production, shot using the curved screen, 3-panel Cinerama process and requiring the efforts of three directors – John Ford, Henry Hathaway and George Marshall. It’s a bit of a cheat to include this film in the list of Ford-Stewart collaborations, as John Ford was only a co-director of the film and Stewart was part of a huge ensemble cast that included the likes of Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda and John Wayne.

Similarly, Cheyenne Autumn was also a sprawling epic with a large cast, in which Stewart has a limited, though key role as the legendary Wyatt Earp. The film was released to mixed reviews and is seen as a flawed though commendable effort by director Ford to present the Wild West story from the perspective of Native Americans.

Andrew V. McLaglen and James Stewart

James Stewart continued to appear in Westerns, including three films during 1965-68 with director Andrew V. McLaglen, who had just entered the Western genre in 1963 with the entertaining John Wayne/Maureen O’Hara starrer, McLintock!. McLaglan was a prolific TV director, but also made some reasonably proficient feature films, including four with John Wayne (more about that in Part 3)

I think the Stewart-McLaglen films appealed to family audiences, especially the parents who grew up watching Westerns in the 40’s and were now indulging in nostalgia and looking for wholesome entertainment. But for young adults in the late 60’s, these movies were less appealing as they were being drawn towards edgier, more violent fare of the sort that Sam Peckinpah and Arthur Penn were making.

Nevertheless Shenandoah (1965), The Rare Breed (1966) and Bandolero! (1968) all are enjoyable and suitable for a relaxed afternoon. Shenandoah is a well regarded Civil War drama which eventually became a successful Broadway musical. The Rare Breed is a comedy-western co-starring the always entertaining Maureen O’Hara in one of her signature feisty roles. And Bandolero! was one of several formulaic action films featuring Raquel Welch that were released in the late 60’s (another one was 100 Rifles in 1969); not particularly memorable.

James Stewart is the patriarch of the Anderson family (John Wayne’s son Patrick is on the extreme left) in *Shenandoah*, directed by Andrew V. McLaglen

Towards the end of his career, Stewart played a small role in one final Western, The Shootist, which was also John Wayne’s final film. Directed by Don Siegel and released in 1976, it was an emotional send-off for the iconic Wayne and one of the best reviewed films of the latter part of his career. It was truly fitting that James Stewart who blazed his own trail in this genre, played a part in signalling the end of the Wayne era and effectively, the end of the heyday of Westerns.

Great American Westerns (Part 1) – ace directors and star actors hunt in pairs: Randolph Scott

The Western is a uniquely American genre in the history of cinema. Through a significant part of the 20^th century from the 1930’s to the 60’s, they dominated the output of Hollywood. Every well-known director including Cecile B. DeMille, John Ford, Howard Hawks and Sam Peckinpah counted Westerns among their most successful films. Likewise, in front of the camera, household names such as John Wayne, Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum and Clint Eastwood had some of the biggest hits of their careers starring in Westerns. As is usually the case in this industry, some directors and actors formed strong partnerships that yielded some of the most iconic films of this genre. Perhaps no creative pairing is as well-known as that of John Ford and John Wayne. Over nearly a quarter century, the two giants of Hollywood worked together 8 times to create arguably the most celebrated films of their respective careers, all except The Quiet Man being Westerns. But there were other notable director-actor collaborations in the category, some of which are not quite as well remembered today.

In the first part of this series, let’s look at actor Randolph Scott and his most significant collaborations. Throughout his career, Mr. Scott had a tendency to build partnerships with directors, working with Henry Hathaway, Ray Enright, Edwin L. Marin, Andre DeToth and Budd Boetticher across multiple films.

Randolph Scott in Comanche Station (1960)

Henry Hathaway and Randolph Scott

Heritage of the Desert (1932), Wild Horse Mesa (1932), The Thundering Herd (1933), Sunset Pass (1933), Man of the Forest (1933), To the Last Man (1933), The Last Round-Up (1934).

Perhaps the earliest actor-director collaboration in the Western genre was between director Henry Hathaway and actor Randolph Scott. Heritage of the Desert in 1932 was Hathaway’s first film as a director and Scott’s first as a leading man. The two paired up and churned out six more films for Paramount over just two years, all based on Zane Grey novels. Many of these films were remakes of earlier silent films from the 20’s, in some cases featuring the same supporting cast, but with the lead role now taken over by Randolph Scott. The fast rate of production was possible because the films were each only about an hour long, but they showcased impressive production quality for that time, including scenes involving mountain lions in Man of the Forest and an avalanche in To The Last Man. The absence of a musical score and some wooden dialogue delivery make the films difficult to appreciate when watched today. But Randolph Scott made for a very appealing leading man with his lantern jaw and chiseled looks. In 1933’s The Thundering Herd and Man of the Forest, he sports a moustache that makes him the spitting image of Errol Flynn, well before Flynn himself started wearing a moustache in his movies (probably in The Charge of the Light Brigade in 1936).

The films were a launchpad for a young Olympic swimmer named Buster Crabbe, who had supporting roles in three of them, just before he became a star in the late 30’s playing Flash Gordon and Tarzan. To the Last Man also included among its cast a 5-year-old Shirley Temple in a small uncredited role, just a year before her breakout performance in Little Miss Marker.

Verna Hillie and Randolph Scott in Man of the Forest (1933), directed by Henry Hathaway

Andre DeToth and Randolph Scott

Man in the Saddle (1951), Carson City (1952), The Stranger Wore a Gun (1953), Thunder Over the Plains (1953), Riding Shotgun (1954), The Bounty Hunter (1954).

After World War II, Randolph Scott was at his busiest, starring in over two dozen westerns during a 10 year period from 1946-56. He made multiple films with three directors – Edwin L. Marin, Ray Enright and Andre DeToth. These films wouldn’t feature in a list of most influential Western movies, instead they represent the Western genre ‘formula’ or ‘assembly line’ at its peak.

DeToth was one of the more colorful Hollywood directors, sporting an eye patch, having lost his eye at an early age. He is perhaps best known for having directed the first major studio 3D production, the horror film House of Wax in 1953. In the latter part of his career, he did uncredited second unit work on acclaimed films like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Superman (1978). But during his heyday in the 50’s, he directed several Westerns, including six with Randolph Scott, and it’s believed he added elements of the thriller to the genre, helping to place these films a cut above the rest of Scott’s work during this period. The first of this series was Man in the Saddle in 1951 and it also started off Scott’s involvement in film production with producer Harry Joe Brown, which started off as Scott-Brown Productions and eventually became Ranown Pictures Corp.

Some of the films have Scott involved in extended and elaborately choreographed fistfight scenes (using stunt doubles, of course), most memorably in Man in the Saddle and Carson City. The last of the films, The Bounty Hunter, was apparently the first Western to showcase a bounty hunter as its hero. In all these films, Scott’s character frequently dressed in black, a bold and distinctive choice for a leading man in Westerns in those days. Although he was past 50 by this time, he was very fit and cut quite a dashing figure.

Filmed in Technicolour, the movies feature some notable actors playing Scott’s adversaries, the likes of Raymond Massey as an evil mine owner in Carson City, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin as henchmen in The Stranger Wore a Gun, and Borgnine again as a trouble-maker in The Bounty Hunter (a year later, Borgnine would win Best Actor for Marty). Watch Riding Shotgun to see a brief but intense Charles Bronson performance in one of his earliest big screen parts.

Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott

7 Men From Now (1956), The Tall T (1957), Decision at Sundown (1957), Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), Ride Lonesome (1959), Westbound (1959), Comanche Station (1960).

At a time when one would have expected Randolph Scott to transition to supporting roles as he approached his 60s, he kicked off a career rebirth (like Liam Neeson did in 2008 with Taken) by teaming up with director Budd Boetticher to star in seven Westerns released over a 4-year period. Because they were produced by Scott and Harry Joe Brown’s Ranown Corp., the films are collectively referred to as the Ranown Cycle. Six of the films were set up at Columbia Pictures whereas Westbound was with Warner Bros. and technically is not part of the cycle, although it features the same team. Shot in Cinemascope on Eastman Color and dominated by the sparse vegetation and burnt sienna palette of California, the films are little known gems that should be seen by any fan of Westerns. Four of the films were scripted by Burt Kennedy, who was originally hired by John Wayne’s production company Batjac to write scripts for Wayne. In fact, the series kicked off because John Wayne was committed to shooting The Searchers for John Ford and therefore recommended Randolph Scott to take the lead role for the production of Kennedy’s 7 Men from Now script. All seven films are masterclasses of economical storytelling, coming in under 80 minutes running time, packed with exposition, character interactions and plenty of action. Scott’s characters are usually cast in the same mould – even-tempered loners, men of principle, riding “tall in the saddle”. Not unexpectedly the films are all very male-centric, although Karen Steele does play significant roles in Decision at Sundown, Ride Lonesome and Westbound.

Some famous actors made early screen appearances in these films. A lanky young James Coburn made his feature film debut in a supporting role in Ride Lonesome which also has Lee Van Cleef in a brief but impactful appearance as an outlaw. Actor L.Q. Jones who was such a staple of Sam Peckinpah’s films in the 60’s had one of his earliest significant speaking roles as the likeable Texan Pecos Hill working for a bunch of cutthroats in Buchanan Rides Alone. And Lee Marvin was Scott’s nemesis in 7 Men From Now.

Karen Steele and Randolph Scott in Westbound (1959), directed by Budd Boetticher

Randolph Scott acted in just one more film after the Ranown cycle and it turned out to be perhaps the most highly regarded film of his career. Ride the High Country, released in 1962 was Sam Peckinpah’s second feature film and set the director on the path to greatness. Co-starring another acting veteran Joel McCrea, it was the best possible swan song for Randolph Scott, the ‘gentle giant’ of Westerns.

Logan: Jackman signs off Wolverine on a high note

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Hugh Jackman debuted the Wolverine character in 2000’s X-Men, which also kicked off the sustained and successful run of Marvel characters on film. Seventeen years later, he is retiring the character in Logan, the third standalone Wolverine film and the 7^th time he has played the clawed mutant (besides 2 cameos).

What’s different this time and why is everyone praising the film? Director and screenwriter James Mangold was given a lot more freedom by the studio, which included allowing it go violent/ R-rated, in keeping with the nature of the character (we can thank 2016’s Deadpool as well, which gave Fox the confidence to approve an R-rated comic book film, realizing it wouldn’t affect box office income).

The result is a very satisfying film, filled with plenty of blood-soaked violence and more importantly, with vulnerable characters who we care about. The first hour and a half is so engaging that one doesn’t realize the time going by. We are introduced to aged and decrepit versions of the invincible characters we have known since 2000. Professor X (played by 76-year-old thesp Patrick Stewart) now in his 90’s and is losing his mental faculties, spends most of the day in a drug-induced stupor. Wolverine’s healing ability is fading (he’s over 140 years old, in case anyone’s still counting) and he has been reduced to earning his living as a limo driver (driving an uber cool Chrysler stretch)! With no new mutants born in the past quarter century, the X-Men have died out and have become a sort of urban myth, good enough only to feature in comic books. We also meet an intense, mute child Laura (newcomer Dafne Keen, daughter of British actor Will Kean and Spanish actress Maria Fernandez Ache), who is on the run from a bunch of heavily armed bad guys, led by the cybernetically enhanced Pierce (played with great flair by a charismatic Boyd Holbrook). What we get when they all come together is a road trip/ chase movie, featuring a good mix of action, poignancy and some dry humor.

Wearing its R-rating on its sleeve, Logan allows Wolverine fans to see him in his famous ‘berserker rage’ mode more than once. But he’s not the only one. The scene in the first act in which Laura explodes into action and reveals her capabilities is shocking in its violence and intensity. Even Wolverine is stunned. There is another great ‘armrest gripping moment’ at a casino when we get a glimpse of why Charles Xavier’s mind is classified as a weapon of mass destruction.

At the other end of the spectrum, I really liked how the second act brings our heroes in touch with regular people, in this case a family who invites them to dinner. This reminded me of a similar scene in Avengers: Age of Ultron in which we find that Hawkeye has an entire family hidden away on a ranch. I feel that this sort of interlude helps to humanize the superheroes and brings the audience closer to them.

The third act was the weakest part of the movie for me, simply because it featured the obligatory action showdown between the good guys and the bad guys, with not much else. Perhaps the only unpredictable part of this formulaic sequence was what would happen to Wolverine at the end.

Before watching the movie, I had read all about how it plays out like a Western. Mangold has previously directed an excellent Western called 3:10 to Yuma, a remake of the 1957 classic. Even his 1997 breakout film Cop Land can be seen as a sort of modern-day Western with Stallone’s quiet, unassuming sheriff unexpectedly coming up trumps in a final showdown against the corrupt cops living in his town. True enough, all the visual cues in Logan are straight from a Western – the characters look weather-beaten and a lot of the action takes place in sunburnt, dusty locations. And of course, there is the overt reference to the famous 1953 Western Shane, the purpose being to establish the parallels in the relationship between the gunfighter and the boy in Shane and Wolverine and Laura in Logan. Frankly, I thought that this part of the script was a bit heavy-handed, especially when the girl spouts the entire dialogue from the closing moments of Shane, having watched it just once in a hotel room previously.

I also had my usual issues with that ‘home video’ look of night time scenes because of the use of digital cameras, which tend to capture a lot of information (very useful in low light conditions), but can create a ‘flat’ look devoid of texture. DP John Mathieson has used the Arri Alexa camera which is very popular and usually produce a very film-like effect, especially when combined with Panavision lenses (like you see in Mad Max: Fury Road or Rogue One), but am not sure what low-light combo was used here and why some of the night scenes look so terrible. Given that the film takes so much inspiration from Westerns and from Shane in particular, how cool would it have been to have shot it in real film to mimic the glorious Technicolor of Shane.

Considering that the movie is set in 2029, there isn’t much that appears futuristic about it. The only indications are the driverless trailer trucks on the highway and the reference to tigers being extinct.

Overall, it’s a very powerful movie and a wonderful way to end a trilogy, especially one that started so unpromisingly with the universally panned X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2009. The X-Men films spin off into new directions now, with new teams coming up in Josh Boone’s X-Men: The New Mutants and Joe Carnahan’s X-Force. There will also be another entry called X-Men: Supernova in Bryan Singer’s continuing series featuring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence as the younger versions of Prof X, Magneto and Mystique. But it looks like this is the end of the road for Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart’s characters…and they should both feel proud of signing off with a bang.

Favourite movie soundtracks – A Western union

The first 3 minutes of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) ranks as one of my favourite opening sequences of all time, alongside the first 5 minutes of Lord of the Rings and the first few minutes of Star Wars. It certainly features the coolest introduction of a movie hero that I can recall. The score by Masaru Sato plays a big part in creating this impactful scene. There’s lots of percussion and then a horn section (which all sound like traditional Japanese instruments) punctuated by what sounds like a trumpet. Later on, I think he uses a cello and perhaps even an electric guitar. I have tried to read up about how the score was composed, or about the instruments used, but have not been able to find any material on this so far. Sato has composed scores for other famous Kurosawa films but none as inventive as his work on Yojimbo. He has also composed scores for some of the Godzilla movies and apparently worked on over 300 films before his death in 1999.

Kurosawa made Yojimbo as a Western, with Toshiro Mifune playing the equivalent of a ‘lone wolf’ gunman. Three years later, Italian director Sergio Leone remade Yojimbo as A Fistfull of Dollars and the ‘spaghetti western’ was born. Leone’s ‘Man with no Name’ trilogy has been lauded as a revisionist take on American Westerns, creating a much more realistic and gritty world peopled by morally ambiguous characters in stark contrast to the clear-cut ‘white hat, black hat’ world of Hollywood.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) is the 3^rd film in this trilogy and Ennio Morricone’s score for the film is my other big favourite. Morricone composed the scores for all the 3 films, eschewing a traditional orchestra (they probably didn’t have the budget for it) and instead using vocals, gunshots, cracking whips and whistles. I think scores became more sophisticated and innovative from the first film to the third and certainly, the title theme for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the best known of perhaps any Western ever. The soundtrack also contains the famous and beautiful piece Ecstasy of Gold, which has been covered by Metallica in their live performances as well as on their S&M album, playing with the San Francisco Symphony. Mr. Morricone has produced a vast body of work, resulting in 5 Oscar nominations (including The Untouchables and Bugsy) and incredibly, is composing scores for films even today, more than 50 years after he first started.