“No matter how a man alone ain't got no bloody f****** chance.” —Harry Morgan, To Have and Have Not (1937) No Country for Old Men is really two...
The Good News, Bad News No Country
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Western Movies
What They Got Right
It is a rare day indeed when an author admits, “They were very faithful to my book.” Ron Hansen is one of those happy writers. Hansen tells us five...
The Curse of Idolatry
Jesse James stands on a frozen pond. Through the ice, he can see the carp swimming inches below the surface. He asks his friend if he ever...
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...
Braver than John Wayne?
Who was Gene Autry? It’s a fair question. In his time, Gene Autry was many things to many people, but it’s fair to say that Autry was a man who, by...
Not So Lonesome
Successful literary collaborations are rare. A few exceptions can be found, such as Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner (The Gilded Age), Charles...
Not So Lonesome
Successful literary collaborations are rare. A few exceptions can be found, such as Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner (The Gilded Age), Charles...
A Fistful of DVDs
If anybody needs convincing that the boomers still wield considerable cultural and economic clout, consider this: The Beatles still rule, as...
A Fistful of DVDs
If anybody needs convincing that the boomers still wield considerable cultural and economic clout, consider this: The Beatles still rule, as...
Month of Atonement
This must be the month of atonement because culpability for ancient and unaddressed sins is the overriding theme of the summer, on TV and in the...
Crazy Spy Gadgets from CBS’s Wild Wild West
James West was the American Bond on horseback. When he rode on screen in the 1965 delirious madhouse CBS series Wild Wild West, he, in the person of...