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.
O Shenandoah, I love your daughter
Away, you rolling river
O Shenandoah, I love your daughter
Away I’m bound to go ‘cross the wide Missouri
The Indians have camped along you
Away! Away! Away ‘cross the wide Missouri.”
Best 15 STILLS entries in Steve’s 1965 video [rated 99% overall by me and 2 views already] are for my money the following ones though the exceptionally-high quality is so virtually-even throughout that I wouldn’t quarrel if somebody picked different ones. In fact a really-satisfying ‘round-up’ by Steve of westerns material and visuals.
1/Town Tamer
2/3 for Guns of Diablo
3/Apache Uprising
4/Young Fury
5/2 for Carry on Cowboy – one of them quite daring!
6/2 for The Rounders – this movie was demoted to lower half of double bills over here. The top-star career of Charlie Bill Stuart [aka Glenn Ford] never quite survived the enormous financial flops of 1960’s Cimarron and 1962’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and when The Rounders was released the slope was irreversibly downward – in this life anyway!
7/Winnetou 3
8/2 for Halleluiah Trail – awful movie for my money. Burt wasted-but wasn’t he always highly photogenic?
9/2 for The Glory Guys
10/2 for Major Dundee – wow!
11/ALL for Cat Balloo – another mini-montage that must be commended. Jane in her sexy prime.
12/2 for sons of Katie Elder
13/ALL 3 for Shenandoah
14/ALL for Few Dollars More – really splendid.
15/2 for Pistol for Gringo
“You run a sad train Mister. It lifts people from where they belong and takes them to places they don’t want to be.” -Jimmy Stewart’s Charlie Anderson to the driver of a train taking Confederate prisoners to POW camps up North in Shenandoah.
Charlie and his sons disarm the guards, free the prisoners and have the train set-ablaze. Virginia must have been a wild place in 1864 though possibly little has changed. “I hear there’s a real bad element over there, Dalton.” Ben Gazzara to Patrick Swayze in 1989’s Roadhouse.
Film historians have praised Shenandoah itself though for its anit-war and humanitarian themes and it has a large Cogerson adjusted domestic box-office gross of approx $175 million; indeed Jimmy’s final major stand-alone box office success outgrossing even every one of the very-popular 5 James Stewart/Anthony Mann classic westerns of the earlier 1950-1955 period
Best 15 POSTERS entries in Steve’s 1965 video are in my opinion:
1/Town Tamer
2/Black Spurs
3/Apache Uprising
4/Young Fury
[All those 4 were the Lyles westerns]
5/1st one for Carry on Cowboy. No! No! No! We have to draw the line somewhere short of madness as to what constitutes a western.
6/1st and foreign language one for The Rounders – saucy!
7/2 for Winnetou 3
8/A Pistol for Ring
9/ALL for Major Dundee – super spread of wonderful posters
10/ALL for Cat Balloo – another great mini-montage
11/ALL for Sons of Katie Elder
12/ALL for Shenandoah
13/ALL for Few Dollars More
14/1st one for Great Sioux Massacre.
15/Apache Rifles – Audie’s box office career continues its serious slide. Bruce credits this movie with an adjusted domestic gross of a paltry $2.1 million. In the 1950s most of Audie’s standalone B westerns raked in profitable grosses as they didn’t cost much to produce. For example his two highest B movie grossers in the Cogerson’s charts both released in 1954 [Destry and Ride Clear of Manchester] earned an adjusted domestic gross of $86 million each – big money for a 1950s B movie
BOY: [Youngest son of 1864 Virginia farmer Charlie Anderson in Shenandoah] “Pop why have WE not joined the Civil War?”
CHARLIE [Jimmy Stewart] “Boy, do YOU want to own a slave?”
BOY: “No, Pop”
CHARLIE: “Me neither. That’s why the war doesn’t concern us.”
There are 4 AC Lyles productions in Steve’s 1965 westerns video and 3 of them starring Rory Calhoun. Rory’s Black Spurs and Apache Uprising disappointed me; and I doubt if Major Dundee would have interested me if Chuck Heston hadn’t been in it. [I saw Apache Uprising on a double bill with The Ipcress File].
However Shenandoah is arguably the final GREAT western of Jimmy Stewart’s career co-starring chip-of-the-old-block Patrick Wayne while if one likes John Wayne himself Sons of Katie Elder is pleasing traditional entertainment.
In fact in a 1960s movie world where generally the western was in my view badly deteriorating and becoming less-and-less a major standard annual genre and other great western stars of the past were dropping away like snow from a ditch it could be said that then-and indeed arguably as now – The Duke is Forever!
Hi Bob, thanks for the review, generous rating (ooo), info, trivia, quotes and lyrics, always appreciated. Glad you liked the posters, stills and lobby cards.
I like the song and music for Shenandoah, though the film isn’t much fun to watch it is well directed and acted. Basically a family drama, and so is that other big 1965 western The Sons of Katie Elder. Someone somewhere remarked that Katie Elder must have been a remarkable woman if her sons range from 58 year old John Wayne to the supposedly 18 year old Michael Anderson Jr. 🙂
The last time I saw Carry On Cowboy was probably back in the 1980s, I can’t remember if it was funny or not. Cat Ballou made me laugh a couple of times but I prefer the two James Garner ‘Support Your Local’ comedies.
One film scored 10 out of 10 from my sources and it was For a Few Dollars More. And one scored 9 – Cat Ballou.
My Video Top 5 –
For a Few Dollars More 8.4
Shenandoah 7.6
The Sons of Katie Elder 7.5
Cat Ballou 7.4
Major Dundee 7.2
The UMR Critics Top 5 –
For a Few Dollars More 8.5
The Sons of Katie Elder 7.8
Cat Ballou 7.7
Shenandoah 7.5
Major Dundee 7.1
IMDB trivia – “Even though everyone knew that they were making at least a good film, no one had any idea that they were making a classic. Jane Fonda recalled – “I have to admit, it wasn’t until I saw the final cut of Cat Ballou that I realized we had a hit on our hands. I hadn’t been around when they filmed Lee Mavin’s horse, leaning cross-legged up against the barn in what’s become a classic image, or when Lee tries to shoot the side of the barn.”
Lee Marvin earned just $30,000 for Cat Ballou. Following his Oscar win, he was earning up to $1,000,000 for Paint Your Wagon (1969) and Monte Walsh (1970).
At his acceptance of the Oscar, Lee Marvin opened by saying, “Half of this probably belongs to a horse out in the Valley somewhere”.
More videos next week.
HI STEVE: Thanks for the reply and some excellent quotes. You never disappoint with your feedbacks.
As you know “comedy westerns” are not my scene. Films like Support Your Local Sheriff/Blazing Saddles are comedies and have a western setting and if you like them I suppose it doesn’t matter what they are called: “a rose by any other name” etc.
For me though the ideal template for the traditional western form that I like is provided by films such as the five 1950-55 Stewart/Mann westerns; Ladd’s Shane; and the best of The Duke.
If you extend your own westerns video series into the 1970s you may get around to 1970’s The Cheyenne Social Club starring Stewart and Hank Fonda who play a pair of ageing cowboys who inherit a “red light” establishment and try to turn it into a respectable enterprise but are resisted by the townsfolk and the resident hookers who depend on it for a livelihood.
It is categorised as a “comedy western” and whilst it turned a small profit to its studio critics didn’t like it. Here’s what one review says about it: “Set in a brothel with suggestive dialogue, this was one of the few off-color films that James Stewart ever did.” The Work Horse allocates it a 65% rating and a respectable $94 million adjusred domestic gross.
As Stewart later turned down the Peter Finch part in 1977’s Network because of the bad language in the movie I became retrospectively surprised that he ever appeared in such a movie as Cheyenne Social Club.
Certainly Fonda and Stewart constantly engaging in risqué innuendoes with the hookers like a couple of Sidney Jameses were a far-cry form the Hank and Jimmy of My Darling Clementine/The Tin Star and Bend of the River/The Man from Laramie and it was the Fonda and Stewart of that type of western movie that I wanted to see.
However we’ll leave the last word to the guy who concocted “One man’s meat is another man’s poison”! Have a good weekend and I look forward to your next week’s offerings. Keep safe.
CHRISTMAS PEN-PALS (2018) 90 MINS – IMDB official Rating 70%/rating of IMDB viewers 10/10 – Wow!
“Following an unexpected romantic breakup weeks before Christmas, tech wiz Hannah creator of the dating app Perfect One heads home for the holidays, challenged to save her failing business by creating a new romantic dating model.
Upon her return she runs into her high-school boyfriend Sam whom she had carefully avoided for years, and reluctantly makes a deal with her dad Ted to sign up for the town’s Christmas Cupid, an anonymous holiday pen-pal service.
As the season progresses, Hannah is smitten by each beautifully-written letter she receives and starts to believe that her secret and unknown Christmas pen pal could be her soul mate.
It’s not until Christmas Eve that everyone must reveal their true identities to their pen pals, even if it means coming face-to-face with the last person they ever expected. A good romantic treat that combines the two Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan movies Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve got Mail”
STEVE. We are now into September which signals the start of the rundown- to-Christmas season with this year’s Strictly Come Dancing due to begin shortly and designed to finish around Christmas Eve with the final and the announcement of the winner.
That means too that the TV wall-to-wall Christmas movie season [usually taking up about 5 channels] has just started and will provide so much lovely “mush” between now and Xmas that a husky would be quite happy pulling a sleigh through it!
In part 3 is a write-up on what I have lined-up for tonight and it will give you a flavor of entire glut of similar treats in store for us over the next 4 months until the end of the first week in January 2022. There will be “not a dry eye in the house”!