We figured it was time to have a place to talk about Steve’s latest video subjects that do not have an UMR page.
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Ranking Movies Since 2011
We figured it was time to have a place to talk about Steve’s latest video subjects that do not have an UMR page.
When Liberty Valance rode to town, the womenfolk would hide, they’d hide
When Liberty Valance walked around, the men would step aside
‘Cause the point of a gun was the only law that Liberty understood
When it came to shootin’ straight and fast, he was mighty good
From out of the east a stranger came, a law book in his hand, a man
The kind of a man the West would need to tame a troubled land
‘Cause the point of a gun was the only law that Liberty understood
When it came to shootin’ straight and fast, he was mighty good
Many a man would face his gun, and many a man would fall
BUt the man who shot Liberty Valance
He shot Liberty Valance
He was the bravest of them all
BEST STILLS IN STEVE’s 1962 VIDEO
1/2 for Young Guns of Manchester
2/Broken Land
3/Great montage for How the West Was Won. The only movie that I have ever walked out on featuring one or more of the following great idols of mine: Jimmy Stewart/ “Dickie”/The Duke/Royal Edward Dano Senior aka Ed Dano, so I have taken to calling it How the West was Bored!
4/ALL for Sgts 3
5/Geronimo
6/Treasure of Silver Lake
7/2 for Lonely are the Brave
8/ALL for Liberty Valance. A truly exceptional historical montage from Steve. John Ford claims he made Liberty Valance in black and white because Wayne and Stewart, within the chronology of the plot based on Dorothy M Johnson’s 1953 short story, were actually too old for the parts they played and colour would have shown up too many wrinkles!
9/ALL for Ride the High Country/Guns in the Afternoon
10/Savage Guns
11/Six Black Horses
ADDITIONAL TRIVIA:
“When my time comes I want a hearse drawn by six black horses to carry me on my final journey.” – Dan Duryea as Frank Jesse speaking to Audie’s Ben Lane.
“Dan Duryea’s colorful performance as a hired gun almost steals Six Black Horses.” – 1962 critic’s review.
“The original script for Six Black Horses was written by Burt Kennedy with Richard Widmark in mind for the Murphy role.” – Wikipedia.
Despite the low number of films covered in Steve’s 1962 westerns video there is a wealth of material -indeed much exceptional material – packed into it with lots of multiple pictorials supporting many of the entries and only someone who didn’t appreciate the beauty of good promotional material would give it less than 98% in my shoes. My pick of the POSTERS is as follows – FL=foreign language version of poster:
1/Rider on a Dead Horse
2/Firebrando
3/FL for Wild Westerners
4/Young Guns of Manchester
5/FL for Savage Guns
6/ALL for Sgts 3
7/ALL for Geronimo
8/ALL for Six Black Horses
9/ALL for Treasure of Silver Lake
10/1st and FL one for Lonely are The Brave
11/How the West Was Won
11/ALL for Liberty Valance: Jimmy was ceded top billing on all promotional material including trailers as Steve’s posters faithfully reflect; Duke got 1st billing on movie and TV screens. Give the 2 Giants their due: they were prepared to compromise. Tracy and Bogie were offered an identical deal to make 1955’s The Desperate Hours according to Betty Bacall but Tracy refused so Bogie made the movie with Freddie March who was happy enough to accept 2nd biling. Tracy had propbably the greatest obsession with billing among all the great movie star with the exception of McQueen.
12/Ride the High Country [aka Guns in the Afternoon – my own preferred title]. In a Brown-Derby restaurant and surrounded by a crowd of onlookers Scott and McCrea tossed a coin for top billing and as Steve’s posters show Randy won.
HI STEVE: I mentioned to you before that 1962’s Six Black Horses might well have been called Ride Clear of Manchester 2 as Six Black Horses reprises the Murphy/Duryea good guy/bad guy buddy-buddy relationship in that 1954 movie.
IMDB gives the movie a 66% rating which is good for a 1950s/60s B western; you give it a satisfactory 60%; and I highlight it because in my perception it was the last satisfactory oater Audie ever made and for me HE along with Rory and John Payne were a big part of the 1950s B westerns scene.
The Work Horse’s stats on the Murphy page do in fact when closely examined reflect Audie’s post fifties decline. Bruce’s 8 highest grossing stand-alone Murphy movies, made between 1950 and 1956, have an adjusted domestic average of a respectable $70 million and are credited with a “good” average approx 60% artistic rating.
That adjusted average gross figure of $70 million is fine for a 1950s B western as most of them wouldn’t have gotten near that figure and in fact didn’t need to do so to be profitable because of their low budgets. A typical budget for a Murphy B movie was around the equivalent of a mere $4.5 million in today’s money.
However Audie 8 westerns after 1962’s Six Black Horses -in the 1964-67 period – have a diabolical average adjusted domestic gross of $5million per movie and a “less-than-good” average Cogerson rating of 56%. Indeed I personally feel that the trajectory of Audie’s career in the 1960s probably reflects the decline of the traditional B western overall.
Hi Bob, thanks for the review, generous rating, info, trivia, quote and lyrics, always appreciated. Happy you liked the posters, stills and lobby cards.
I’ve had to start including ‘modern westerns’ into the line up because of the short supply of ‘A’ westerns, and come to think of it ‘B’ westerns too. The studios would increase production of westerns around the mid 1960s. The success of A Fistful of Dollars in 1964 was the stimulus the genre needed.
Lonely are the Brave deserved inclusion because Kirk was essentially playing ‘The Last Cowboy’ at odds with the modern world.
Sorry to read you didn’t like ‘How The West Was Won’, a film I’ve watched and enjoyed many times. I also have the excellent soundtrack on CD. Boring you say? Noooo and coming from the guy who adores Douglas Sirk tearjerkers.
Two films scored 10 out of 10 from my sources – Ride the High Country and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
My Video Top 5 –
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 8.6
Ride the High Country 8.2
Lonely Are the Brave 7.8
How The West Was Won 7.6
Treasure of Silver Lake 6.6
The UMR critics top 5 –
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 8.4
Lonely Are the Brave 8.3
Ride the High Country 8.0
How The West Was Won 7.6
Sergeants 3 4.5
Next video on Friday.
HI STEVE: Thanks for the usual well-thought-reply and for advancing an interesting debating-point. However when you set one of my weepies alongside an ensemble compartmentalized movie I perceive the equation to be probably one that favours my own preferences.
A traditional weepie usually centres round two people -ie one romantic team-who dominate throughout and thus have time and space to build a momentum that gradually advances to a climax that enables the audience to well-prepare for, and to have, a good cry – Al Leach and Deb Kerr in An Affair to remember/Hanks and Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Virginia/Hudson and Wyman in Magnificent Obsession and All that Heaven Allows/Rock and Lauren Bacall in Written on the Wind. If I were Joel I would give hankies out instead of stars and all of those movies would be four-out-of-four hankie movies!
Conversely ensemble movies like How the West Was Boring are split-up into about half-a-dozen stories so that the plot and characters keep changing with the consequence that no momentum can get going and the audience can fail to get to know and empathise with the characters.
An added disadvantage in my eyes is that too many BIG stars in a single movie – and even ones that I would normally adore like “Dickie” and The Duke – can make a movie seem like a gimmicky variety parade such as we arguably used to see in those musical extravaganzas in the 1940s/1950s like Ziegfeld Follies/Till the Clouds Roll By/Deep in My Heart.
The likes of How the West Was Boring and The Longest Day have always struck me as not really movies in the traditional sense but a visual exercise in name- dropping that someone like Leslie Townes Hope who often dined out on name-dropping would like to get in on. Anyway I hope that we are able to exchange comments again on or after Friday and in the meantime keep safe.
In the lead-in to Part 3 I mentioned how for me the quality of westerns generally dropped-off in the 1960s; something that was in the 1950s westerns seemed to be missing. Today though one constant is the consistent high quality of Steve’s posters and stills so that any movie buff who likes viewing exciting and top-notch promotional material for films should be giving Steve’s 1961 westerns video no less than a 98% rating. My pick of the best STILLS are as follows:
1/The Canucks
2/2 for 2nd Time Around
3/2 for A Thunder of Drums
4/3 for The Singer Not the Song
5/Deadly Companions
6/2 for Gold of the 7 Saints
7/Both for Posse from Manchester
8/2 for 2 Rode Together
9/ALL for The Last Sunset
10/All for The Comancheros
11/ALL for One Eyed Jacks.
RELATED TRIVIA Paramount wanted Spencer Tracy to play Dad Longworth in JACKS but Brando was at the height of his powers [at least 1st time round pre-Godpop] and insisted upon his Streetcar/Waterfront pal Karl Malden getting the role. Karl was brilliant whereas Old Cantankerous and Mr Mumbles probably wouldn’t have worked.
I have never come across any comment by Marlon about Spence but the latter hated Brando because, it is said, Tracy saw Marlon as a threat to the image Spence had of himself as THE Hollywood Actor and its foremost Liberal via his “caring” films such as Bad Day at Black Rock and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner*** “Acting doesn’t take intelligence: look at your husband,” Cantank notoriously said to Brando’s wife at the time, Anna Kashfi.
*** SPOILER: Some modern critics now accuse Tracy of being patronising to the African American community in Guess Who’s Coming—-
I have said before that after the 1950s for me the quality and thus the appeal of westerns fell-away and for the most part only The Duke’s films continued to entertain me in the old way. Although Steve’s 1961 offering covers just 15 movies most of the entries are supported by multiple pictorials so the overall video is still good value for money. Best POSTERS for my taste are:
1/Purple Hills
2/The Long Rope
3/1st one for 2nd Time Around
4/All for A Thunder of Drums
5/Both for Deadly Companions
6/ALL for Gold of the Seven Saints: Another English “Big Girls’ Blouse” the late Sir Roger George Moore KBE showed Hollywood he COULD do westerns every bit as well as those Yanks – Rule Britannia!
7/Both for Posse from Hell: one of Audie’s remaining good westerns.
8/Great spread for 2 Rode Together
9/ALL for The Last Sunset [aka Hot Eye of Heaven]
10/ALL for One Eyed Jacks
11/The Canadians
12/Both for Sir Dirk’s Singer Not the Song
13/All for The Comancheros
The Comancheros’re takin’ this land; the Comancheros’re takin’ this land
Now Paul Regret of New Orleans a fast man with a gun
Didn’t want to go but he had to run when he shot down the judge’s son
Yes he shot Judge Moebeam’s son
With the dark of night he left that town never to return again
With a oneway ticket at the end of the line
He was told by a stranger man: the Comancheros’re takin’ this land
And then the Comancheros came ridin’ through the night
Stealin’ and a killin’ takin’ everything in sight
Nothin’ left behind but the blood in the sand
The Comancheros’re takin’ this land; the Comancheros’re takin’ this land
Hi Bob, thanks for the review, generous rating, info, trivia and song lyrics, much appreciated. Glad you liked the posters, stills and lobby cards.
Less and less worthwhile westerns each year but it should pick up by the mid 1960s when the Italians start mass production on their ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ thanks to the worldwide success of Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name trilogy.
These videos have found an audience so I may go back to the 1930s and 1940s after finishing up on modern westerns. When I’m finished I will have ranked and rated every single noteworthy western in the past 90 years and with accompanying posters and stills! [Bob gasps] 🙂
No westerns scored 10 out of 10 this year from my sources but one did score 9, One Eyed Jacks. Two more scored 8.
My Video Top 5 –
One Eyed Jacks 7.2
The Comancheros 7.1
The Last Sunset 6.8
Two Rode Together 6.5
Posse from Hell 6.4
The UMR Critics top 5 –
The Comancheros 7.1
The Deadly Companions 7.1
Posse from Hell 6.7
One Eyed Jacks 6.6
Two Rode Together 6.4
“One Eyed Jacks had very little resemblance to the source novel, and what remains has much more resonance with history than fiction. At various times, the two credited screenwriters and the uncredited Peckinpah have claimed (or had claimed for them) a majority of the responsibility for the film. When Karl Malden was asked who really wrote the story, he said: “There is one answer to your question – Marlon Brando, a genius in our time.”
“Marlon Brando’s first cut of the film was allegedly five hours long. He was reportedly unhappy with the final cut of 141 minutes, despite its box-office success. “Now, it’s a good picture for them [Paramount],” he said upon its release, “but it’s not the picture I made . . . now the characters in the film are black-and-white, not gray-and-human as I planned them.”
HI STEVE: Thanks for the interesting feedback. Excellent quotes about One Eyed Jacks. I hadn’t seen those ones before. Malden’s comments are par-for-the-course for him: he used to refer to MB as “The Boy Wonder” as of course did Joe Cotten nickname his own mentor and pal Orson Welles. Good idea about extending your westerns run backwards into the 30s/40s.
I now digress from the westerns genre to talk about another of your pet ones: Sci-fi- as this morning I watched an interesting 2019 documentary about the origins of the now-famous Alien franchise. The documentary runs for 90 mins
It credited as early creators of the ideas, technical aspects and images in the series [apart from obviously Ridley Scott himself ]H R Giger and Dan O’Bannon both of whom tellingly had as their sci-fi ‘Bible’ Lovecraft’s Necronomicon!
There are also in the documentary some fascinating ideas expressed about the motivation of the Alien and his its antics with renowned critics participating in the documentary hailing the film as a salute to feminism.
According to observers who speak in the documentary, as the crew of the space ship [Nostromo] in Alien 1979 is predominately-male the reason that the Alien eats them all with only female Sigourney’s Ellen Louise Ripley surviving is to extract revenge on men for the way in which they have been mistreating women.
The Alien getting inside John Hurt as a parasite for example represents counter-rape; and it exploding out of him later symbolises women breaking their bonds. Ellen Ripley herself is described as the screen’s fully-fleshed-out action heroine, a match for Arnie any day. [and maybe even Jace!]
Personally I’ll always support protests about obvious exploitation of and discrimination against women but the kind of ‘hidden’ analogies I’ve mentioned are too deep for me and I’ll leave such clever stuff to Oracles like Hirsch. They just can’t let us enjoy a good sci-fi/horror yarn for its own sake can they?
I think the Alien films are my own favourite franchise in those two genres. Bottom line though: if the female-avenging Alien were about and I was called LensMAN I’d keep that quite!! Anyway keep safe and have a good weekend.
Hi Bob, interesting post as usual. Like you I’d rather watch and enjoy my films without trying to explore hidden meanings or analogies. Most of the time I’ll bet the director or writer were oblivious to controversial and barely noticed subtexts in their work. Like Freud said sometimes a cigar is ‘just’ a cigar.
Ridley Scott’s biggest hit of the 90s ‘Thelma and Louise’ did cause some controversy I remember, one of them was promoting ‘male-bashing’ (for a change). Misandry, now there’s a word you don’t see often – “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against men”. Which connects nicely with your post on Scott’s Alien. 🙂
HI STEVE: Thanks for your usual level-headed observations. Good coverage of the Myrna and Louise controversy and I laughed at your cigar quip which I hadn’t heard before! I totally agree that we can’t be sure that the originators of a movie meant there to be the deep covert meanings that a lot of highbrow critics read into the plot.
I often think that the Joel-types come up with their fancy notions just to show us how clever they are; or else they are so preoccupied with their own pet themes that they imagine them being advanced everywhere in movies.
Similarly because one is critical of a certain theme one shouldn’t necessarily blame the star (s) for the inclusion of that theme or assume that they support it: the financial backers and/or the studio top brass for example could have demanded its inclusion.
As you know I am a great fan of the Duke but I don’t think that he was sufficiently prepared to allow his fellow-actors a degree of ‘poetic licence’. As you know Big John crucified Cooper because small-town America didn’t come out too well in High Noon.
Also Wayne gave Kirk Douglas a tongue-lashing in Kirk’s own home for playing Van Gogh The Duke’s beef being that Van G was gay and Kirk was setting a bad example to the American people; and Wayne forced Sinatra to fire some script-writer who had been black-listed way back in McCarthy’s time.
If my memory is correct in The Green Berets David Jansen plays a reporter critical of the Viet Nam war and Wayne invites him out to the front in Nam to “see what we’re up against!” As soon as Jansen arrives there the Cong out-of-the-blue attack the US base and of course there are casualties; so Jansen says to The Duke something like “I see what you mean. I’ve come round to your way of thinking!”
The morality of war and whether or not a particular war is justified will always be debated but no matter who is morally right in any military conflict once war starts it is accepted that both sides WILL shoot and try to kill each other. Anyway a movie in which only one side is allowed to sneak-attack the other wouldn’t be much of a realistic war movie.
SOLDIER: Mr President. Our helicopters are all ready to attack the Viet Cong and are lined up for your inspection. We are providing you and your support team with fresh ones for your own onward journey to visit our troops Sir.
The soldier accompanies Lyndon Johnson on his inspection of the line of helicopters until they reach a particularly impressive one at the end of the line and the soldier says “And this is YOUR helicopter Mr President.”
LBJ: “Son – they’re ALL mine!”
Anyway I look forward to catching up with you again tomorrow when hopefully 1962 arrives.