Damfino

Groucho's Movie Challenge Week 16: Classic Western Week

What is Groucho’s Movie Challenge? Its mission is simple: let us all, as a forum, work to seek out films that might otherwise slip our radar. Each week, anybody who wants to participate will see a film within the guidelines, and return back to the forum to report on the film they saw. It’s easy, it’s fun, and everybody can participate. It’s not a trivia contest…it’s not a game…it’s merely a way we can all be exposed to new avenues of film appreciation…or at the very least see a good flick or two.

The level of interest in these challenges seems to be in decline. Could it be because recent challenges have been too easy? With that in mind, I decided to narrow the focus this week...

Week 16: Watch a Classic Western movie produced prior to 1980. It should be a movie you've never seen before (or that you haven't seen in a long time).

Here is a list of Western Classics to get you started:
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
El Dorado (1966)
Fistful of Dollars, A (1964)
For a Few Dollars More (1965)
Fort Apache (1948)
Good, The Bad and the Ugly, The (1966)
Gunfighter, The (1950)
High Noon (1952)
High Plains Drifter (1973)
Hud (1963)
Johnny Guitar (1954)
Little Big Man (1970)
Magnificent Seven, The (1960)
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The (1962)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
My Darling Clementine (1946)
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Outlaw Josey Wales, The (1976)
Ox-Bow Incident, The (1943)
Red River (1948)
Ride the High Country (1962)
Rio Bravo (1959)
Rio Grande (1950)
Searchers, The (1956)
Shane (1953)
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)
Shootist, The (1976)
Stagecoach (1939)
Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969)
Wild Bunch, The (1969)

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Missed a previous week of the Movie Challenge? It’s never to late to play:

Week 1: Old Movie Week
Week 2: Foreign Film Week
Week 3: Silence is Golden
Week 4: The Truth is Stranger
Week 5: IMDB Top 250
Week 6: Unfamiliar Genres
Week 7: Martial Arts Films (Guest Host: $tarr)
Week 8: Watch a movie you didn't originally like (Guest Host: Rypro 525)
Week 9: If it ain't broke...FIX IT ANYWAY!
Week 10: The Greatest Year (The Year you were born) (Guest Host: karnblack)
Week 11: The Cannes Film Festival (Guest Host: Damfino)
Week 12: Anime (Guest Host: littlefuzzy)
Week 13: Top 100 DVD Census 2004 (Guest Host: karnblack)
Week 14: Bad Movie Week (Guest Host: Quake1028)
Week 15: One Degree of Kevin Bacon (Guest Host: karnblack)

sundog

Apropos thread. For those in the Chicagoland area the Film Center downtown is running Westerns this July with two programs:

For a Few Westerns More

THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE
1970, Sam Peckinpah, USA, 121 min.
With Jason Robards, Stella Stevens

Archival print!
DAY OF THE OUTLAW
1959, Andre de Toth, USA, 91 min.
With Robert Ryan, Burl Ives

Archival print!
DIRTY LITTLE BILLY
1973, Stan Dragoti, USA, 100 min.
With Michael J. Pollard, Lee Purcell

New archival print!
THE FAR COUNTRY
1955, Anthony Mann, USA, 97 min.
With James Stewesternst, John McIntire

New archival print!
THE LONG RIDERS
1980, Walter Hill, USA, 96 min.
With James Keach, David Carradine

MAJOR DUNDEE
1965, Sam Peckinpah, USA, 124 min.
With Charlton Heston, Richard Harris

Archival print!
ULZANA’S RAID
1972, Robert Aldrich, USA, 103 min.
With Burt Lancaster, Bruce Davison

Archival print!
WILD BILL
1995, Walter Hill, USA, 97 min.
With Jeff Bridges, Ellen Barkin

Archival print!
WINCHESTER ’73
1950, Anthony Mann, USA, 92 min.
With James Stewesternst, Shelley Winters

Films of Sergio Leone

Restored archival print!
DUCK, YOU SUCKER!
(GIÙ LA TESTA)
1972, Sergio Leone, Italy, 158 min.
With Rod Steiger, James Coburn

Archival print!
FISTFUL OF DOLLARS
(PER UN PUGNO DI DOLLARI)
1964, Sergio Leone, Italy, 96 min.
With Clint Eastwood, Gian Maria Volonté

Archival print!
FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE
(PER QUALCHE DOLLARO IN PIÙ)
1965, Sergio Leone, Italy, 130 min.
With Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef

Restored archival print!
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
(IL BUONO, IL BRUTTO, IL CATTIVO)
1966, Sergio Leone, Italy, 180 min.
With Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach

New print!
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
(C’ERA UNA VOLTA IL WEST)
1968, Sergio Leone, Italy, 165 min.
With Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards

Corvin

Much grass, sundog. I'm going to try to catch a couple of those.

Quake1028

It's either gonna be THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY or ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST for me .

Damfino

The Ox-Bow Incident

Director: William Wellman (Wings, Public Enemy)

Cast:
Henry Fonda
Dana Andrews
Anthony Quinn
William Eythe
Harry Morgan

Although I've seen most classic Westerns, this one escaped my radar until its recent DVD release as part of the Fox Classics series.

This is a tightly constructed story of vigilante justice gone horribly wrong in a small Nevada town plagued by cattle rustlers. When a rancher is murdered, most of the community is outraged and despite some protests a posse is organized to catch the killers.

It's not a spoiler to know that the 3 men captured and hanged without trial are innocent as that will be obvious from the start.

The real story here is one of how a mob mentality can corrupt rational thought and the tragic aftermath of the mob's actions.

chente

I saw Once Upon A Time In the West. Brilliant film. I really love how Leone isn't afraid to slow the pace down to let us relish his world. As usual, the music really was melded to the film. Apparently, he was playing the score during filming so that the actors felt the pace. This was his general idea, so he had the score made before filming began. Pretty unusual but it worked great.

karnblack

Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969)

It was funny, but not as funny as I thought it would be. There are some great bits in this movie and I laughed out loud a few times, but in many places I think it fell flat. I might be jaded by today's humor, but what may have seemed funny back then is no longer funny now. Overall I enjoyed this film, and it's worth a rental.

bsktballDude1

I saw Once Upon a Time in the West too. I agree it's a brillant film. The visuals, Morricone's score, and Leone's slow but elegant pacing make the film quite a delight film to watch. Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, and Jason Robards give such exciting performances even when they are just staring at each other when an important character enters the screen.

On to watch A Fistfull of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More.

John-In-VA

I'm trying to add some westerns to my collection, so I recently bought the Man with No Name Trilogy for $21 during the DDD sale. I know it doesn't contain the super duper edition of GBU, but that's ok with me. At least it's anamorphic.

So anyway, I watched THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY and really enjoyed it. The final showdown was so well done. Clint's character was great. He's such a badass but his humanity always shines through.

VOOM

The Professionals, Yellowstone Kelly, Last of the Dogmen 2 out of 3 are on DVD YK not yet.

sundog

Finally made it to one of the westerns I posted above. Monday I saw Sam Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) starring Jason Robards in the title role.

The movie seems to be the other side of Peckinpah's masterpiece The Wild Bunch, in so much that it is a comedy, features a prominent female character (though she is a hooker), and plays off revenge more as bittersweet and unfulfilling than the grandiose, visceral punishment William Holden and crew dish out.

Again, the setting is that nebulous time when industry and advancement is erasing the frontier mindset. Even with the forboding appearance of an automobile in the final act. Cable Hogue is robbed of his water and mule in the middle of the desert. After four days of wandering (and bitching at God) he finally stumbles across a mudhole and his salvation, setting up a way station for watering horses on the stagecoach route and waiting to get his revenge.

The movie is essentially Jason Robards conflicting with the mores of the time, particularly religion, which takes form in Hogue's friend, the Reverend Joshua (a stellar David Warner). And then there's the hooker he falls for, Hildy (Stella Stevens), whose introduction is spliced with many, many money shots of her ample cleavage.

And in Hildy, Peckinpah makes the film unique. In so many westerns, its the men struggling with their own honor, strength, and conflicts, with nary a mind paid to their personal relationships and motivations. Hildy brings a femininity that soothes Robards' savage beast and downplays the eventual revenge.

And the final scenes, with the presence of an automobile and David Warner on a motorcycle are elegantly conceived and quite touching.

littlefuzzy

I will try to watch The Magnificent Seven, as I have had this for a while, and haven't gotten around to watching it yet.

I think I am doing this in reverse order... I've watched Battle Beyond the Stars, which was a sci-fi remake of The Magnificent Seven or The Seven Samurai (not sure which,) then I'll watch TM7, and one of these days I need to watch T7S... Wasn't that also loosely based on a Dashiel Hammet novel, or was that another Kurosawa film?

The funny thing is, I watched several episodes of a new anime last week, Samurai 7, which is based on T7S, and even has Kurosawa's name in the credits.

Damfino

Nice bump!

I thought the Movie Challenge rode off into the sunset after this thread.

littlefuzzy

I was out of town for a month and a half.

I'd like to try one more challenge, if I can think of something, before we let these die off... They have been fun.

dhmac

Recently watched a number of Westerns...


A Fistful of Dollars (B+)
For a Few Dollars More (A-)
The Good, the Bad & the Ugly - Restored Version (A+)

The Dollars Trilogy is great, just great. The first two do have some flaws due to their low budgets, but The Good, the Bad & the Ugly is virtually flawless. The directing, the music, the acting all are superb. Which is a bit surprising in the case of the acting given that the movie had its dialogue all recorded after the fact. As for the restored scenes, they do help the plot a lot, but I wish that the sound of the actor's voices didn't stand out so much from the original soundtrack. (Eastwood and Wallach don't sound the way they used to, and the guy who does Van Cleef's voice in the restored scenes is only so-so.)

Ride the High Country (B+)

From 1962. Although directed by Sam Peckinpah, this is so unlike the later Westerns he is now known for. Still a good Western in the old style before the genre would be re-invented in the following years.

Destry Rides Again (B+)

One from 1939 that holds up well today. I really liked that James Stewart's character didn't carry a gun and just wish the ending had stuck to that idea.

The Naked Spur (B+)

Another good one with James Stewart. Nice, simple story with only a handful of characters, although I think the ending was too symbolic and drained some of the believability from the movie.

My Name Is Nobody (C-)

I really didn't like this one. It's too much of a Spaghetti Western self-parody that doesn't hold together very well. And it ended up being Henry Fonda's final Western, which is a bit of a shame given how much better his earlier work in the genre is.

dhmac

I think you're thinking of Yojimbo, which was based on Hammett's novel Red Harvest. (And A Fistful of Dollars was then later based on Yojimbo.)

billy9215

My Darling Clementine, A1.

dhmac

Saw a few more...

Winchester '73 (B+)

I liked this one, although the link between Lin McAdam (James Stewart) and Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally) was artificially kept secret for too long in the movie. Still a pretty good Western.


She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (B)

Although I love John Ford's visuals and John Wayne is great in this, I found the story to be too simplistic and the movie has a lot of scenes that drag. However, the action scenes are all superbly shot - I just wish there were more of them.


Rio Grande (B)

This one, the last of John Ford's Calvary Trilogy, is a lot like She Wore a Yellow Ribbon in many ways, and I liked a lot of things about it better, such as the addition of Maureen O'Hara. Just wish there was more action scenes to liven it up more.