John Wayne (1907-1979), aka The Duke, remained a top ten box office draw for an impressive quarter of a century during which he was primarily known for Western roles in seminal productions like The Searchers (1956), Hondo (1953), and Rio Bravo (1959) and war films like his influential portrayal of Sergeant Stryker in Sands of…
This is the second entry in a series on the final Westerns of the great cowboy stars. The previous entry looked at Gary Cooper and The Hanging Tree. Don Siegel’s The Shootist is an elegy. Made three years before John Wayne’s death from cancer, it tells the story of a gunfighter (or a “shootist” to…
In our series on Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, we looked at the films the great screen duo made between 1944 and 1948. After 1948, however, the two never made another movie together. (Though they did star in the radio adventure series Bold Venture in 1951 and worked together on a 1955 television production of…
I can’t count the number of times people have said to me that they won't watch a Western because they just can’t sit through one of “those boring movies.” Not another stale plot of cowboys vs. Indians mêlée or range war standoff, they say. And I agree with them … I can’t sit through those…
“The private-eye novel was a western that happened somewhere else.”–William Reuhlmann, Saint with a Gun “The modern detective story and the modern Western have a great deal in common. . . .In essence both kinds of stories are American products, like corn on the cob and blueberry pie.” – Erle Stanley Gardner, “Introduction” to Davis…
