Sam Fuller made his first movie about a sullen loser, Robert Ford, instead of a two-fisted hero, a singing cowboy or an outlaw. Lucky for Fuller, I...
The First Films of Samuel Fuller
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Western Movies
A Hex Upon You
DC comic hero Jonah Hex is going to hit the big screen in his current Horror-Western incarnation, which means he’ll be fighting demons or zombies or...
Searchers 2.0
Mel (Del Zamora) and Fred (Ed Pansullo) have it in for Fritz Frobisher (Sy Richardson) who they’ve never forgiven for his unkind efforts to make the...
Ford at Fox at Last
I promised you an update on Ford at Fox, and here it is. Fox has packaged 24 of the silents and talkies John Ford directed for Fox, where he worked...
The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid
We can thank The Assassination of Jesse James for the long-overdue DVD release of Philip Kaufman’s brilliant James Gang movie, released in 1972....
My Dear Tom Mix
It’s not surprising that this curious Mexican film draws inspiration and some guidance from Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who...
Gunsmoke: The First Season
Gunsmoke was the black-and-white version of a radio show that starred Bill Conrad as Dodge City Marshal Matt Dillon, circa 1873. Conrad was a fine...
Appa-palooza
Appaloosa wasn’t Robert B. Parker’s first Western; that honor goes to Gunman’s Rhapsody, his 2001 novel about Wyatt Earp and Tombstone. Yet Parker...
The Comic Named Man With No Name
Yes, the character Clint Eastwood played in the most famous and successful of all Spaghetti Westerns, Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars...
Married to the Camera
On an artist’s studio tour, a decade or two ago, an elderly woman, upon seeing a sketch with very straight pencil guidelines, asked the artist, Ed...
3:10 to Yuma, on Track?
Everybody wants to make a Western. It’s a fact. Few directors of note, if you were to ask them, would say, “I’m not interested in Westerns; I have...
Cowboys & Aliens
What makes the graphic novel and comic series Cowboys & Aliens particularly good is the way it unites Apaches and cowboys to fight a supertech...