. . . under the big Western sky. Click on the image to enlarge. A new Amazon customer review of Fourteen Western Stories: A terrific page turner, I enjoyed hitching a ride with these Characters moving west, with unexpected twists … Continue reading
The great John Keegan has died. His book The Face Of Battle revolutionized serious writing about war, because it concentrated on the dynamics of combat, on why men actually risk their lives in battle, without sentiment or euphemism. The answers … Continue reading
Sometimes I think this is the greatest song ever written. Beauty, romance, gallantry, community, resignation all have a place in it. And this is one of the great renditions of the song, not least because of the stirring singing of … Continue reading
My beloved horse Rienzi, of blessed memory — as good a friend and as wise a mentor as I have ever had.He was a thoroughbred, originally called Zorro, who had no success at the track and ended up with the … Continue reading
This is one of the saddest films ever made, but the depths of its sorrow don't reveal themselves on a first viewing, when we have the tension and suspense of the narrative to distract us. But it's a tale told … Continue reading
Just a few months after he delivered The Wild Bunch, in 1969, Sam Peckinpah started work on its unlikely follow-up, The Ballad Of Cable Hogue. Hogue is so sweet and sentimental that one is tempted to read it as an … Continue reading
Before the anti-Western there was the twilight Western — a series of films which seemed to sense that the genre was almost played out, or at least that America no longer looked to it for wisdom and inspiration. The iconic … Continue reading
In a review of Legends Of the Fall, which he called “the Monty Python version of Bonanza“, Terrence Rafferty said that making a cynical Western was the equivalent of shooting someone in the back. Westerns got very edgy and borderline … Continue reading
Rio Grande, from 1950, the last film in John Ford’s cavalry trilogy, isn’t really about the cavalry, it’s about marriage, and like any serious work about marriage it deals with the subject of boundaries — boundaries respected, boundaries transgressed and … Continue reading
The environmental, or broad cultural racism in the first half of The Birth Of A Nation finds expression in two ways. The first is the general depiction of blacks under slavery as well-treated and happy. It can be argued that … Continue reading
The word gallant once meant beautiful, even as applied to a woman. Now rare in that sense, as the dictionary says, except when referring to horses or ships. The Greeks understood the logic of this association of ideas around the … Continue reading