Duel In The Sun
SirDoug208
were amazing, and Gregory Peck actually showed emotion!!
fm
Wull
Peck, the bad guy, not very often.
Jones looked gorgeous.
Cotton, great as always.
Best lines for Barrymore.
Gish, too much but good
Prissy, was still Prissy.
A very good film from a very good book.
Wull-wondering why you waited so long to view that film?
Helen & Bob
Wull wrote:
> I'll agree, quite a film.
>
> Peck, the bad guy, not very often.
> Jones looked gorgeous.
> Cotton, great as always.
> Best lines for Barrymore.
> Gish, too much but good
> Prissy, was still Prissy.
>
> A very good film from a very good book.
>
> Wull-wondering why you waited so long to view that film?
>
And why don't we have good westerns any more?
Or just westerns?
Bob
AdamFriday
>Or just westerns?
>Bob
See "All the Pretty Horses." It was a Western and it was quite good.
Adam
CLaGuire
<chil...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> And why don't we have good westerns any more?
> Or just westerns?
Well, they were done so much for a while. Radio, movies, television.
Times changed and they got cynical, which was refreshing for a while, but
there's only so far you can go with pure cynical.
I think it's time for a comeback. There are more and more westerns on TV
these days. When someone does a western, it may be seen as a bit of an
odd-ball, but recently the critics stopped saying "oh, look, a western!
Haven't seen one of those in years," when something like Shainghai Noon
comes out.
Camille
--
Spamblock in use: Remove .NULL from my address to reply by email.
Movie Buff Reviews: http://www.sff.net/people/camille/videos.htp
Roger D. White
camp, over-the-top hilarity!
"You got me *that* time!" :-)
~ Roger
Tom Sutpen
my case as to why we're not going to be seeing too many more Westerns; why the
genre is more or less exhausted.
The last truly great Western, I think most of us would agree, was
"Unforgiven", which took the form into a direct, decidedly unsentimental and
unblinking portrayal of violence. Even Sam Peckinpah engaged in romanticizing
his protagonists; it was a twisted romanticism, true, but it was still a kind
of idealization.
Westerns, for most of the history of film, were always involved in the
circumstances of good vs. evil. They were our American mythology (even
Peckinpah referred to his films as 'morality plays'). "Unforgiven" (1992) drops
these trappings. Almost ten years after the fact, I don't think a lot of
cineastes have come to terms with just how revolutionary this movie was.
Everyone is right AND wrong; good AND evil. Eastwood doesn't just take the
moral divisions inherent to this genre and blur them (as Anthony Mann did), or
obscure them (as Peckinpah did), he just....removes them. We don't have, in
this film, a moral landscape anymore, or even a conventionally amoral
landscape. We simply have these people with their own motives and impulses.
They have their reasons, to ham-handedly paraphrase Renoir; they can justify
whatever they do in the name of something larger than themselves (the Law;
human Justice; commercial imperitives, you name it), even if it means taking
another person's life from them. Eastwood's real achievement is that at no time
can anyone in the audience think that what any character does in this movie is
completely wrong. Nothing is indefensible, no matter how horrible it is.
For a Hollywood Western this is genuinely unsettling. And so
groundbreaking and singular an accomplishment that it's hard to see how anybody
can take it any further. Not without imitating it. To do anything else would be
retrenchment. This is not to suggest that there won't be anymore Westerns
(there've been several since "Unforgiven") or even any good ones. But I do
believe that "Unforgiven" will be the final masterpiece in the genre.
I could be wrong, though.
T. Sutpen.
"Cinema is Truth, 24 times a second." -- Jean-Luc Godard
"Movies lie 24 times a second." -- Brian DePalma
"Kill Ugly Cinema!" -- Tom Sutpen
Helen & Bob
Tom Sutpen wrote:
> This is not to suggest that there won't be anymore Westerns
> (there've been several since "Unforgiven") or even any good ones. But I do
> believe that "Unforgiven" will be the final masterpiece in the genre.
> I could be wrong, though.
>
> T. Sutpen.
Tom, I sincerely hope you are wrong. Not that it's personal, for it is not, but I
would love to see a new western masterpiece.
Bob
Hownow
<chil...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
It would surely require someone like Eastwood, with the personal
interest, the money and the ability to find backing, to do it.
Other money might consider any kind of western too much of a gamble to
place before today's demographics.
- hm
Helen & Bob
Hownow wrote:
Unfortunately, I think you are right.
Bob
Wishy13764
think of the ending and laugh. The best scene for me, was when they were
'raceing' the horse, while they were in the car. That horse was flying.
Howard Brazee
The point is, people think the genre is what they like or dislike, especially young people who see most of the movies. But it ain't necessarily so!
CLaGuire
akir...@aol.comnojunk (Tom Sutpen) wrote:
> Forgive me for taking a bit of a detour here, but I just wanted to state
> my case as to why we're not going to be seeing too many more Westerns; why the
> genre is more or less exhausted.
>
> The last truly great Western, I think most of us would agree, was
> "Unforgiven", which took the form into a direct, decidedly unsentimental and
> unblinking portrayal of violence. Even Sam Peckinpah engaged in romanticizing
> his protagonists; it was a twisted romanticism, true, but it was still a kind
> of idealization. ...
I agree and disagree. I think when The Unforgiven was made, the western
was truly dead. And I think it will take a complete cycle of cultural
change to make it possible to do anything really _thoughtful_ in a western.
However, the western is basically defined just by a region and period. It
isn't necessarily any particular kind of picture. It's a subject matter.
For a while it was the ultimate good vs. evil format, and then people got
tired of it, and it became cynical, nihilist, then slowly a satire of
itself, and then settled into specialized historical drama.
But each of these aspects are not dead. That is, the concept of "good vs.
evil" is not gone--it just moved to different kinds of action dramas. All
those "good vs. evil" westerns were really just action pictures. The thing
that killed the western was over-exposure to the point where you couldn't
DO a western without lampooning the genre.
The fact that The Unforgiven managed to be what it was intended to be, not
the stylized homage that The Quick and The Dead was (much as I love that
movie), and not the trivia that things like Silverado, or Maverick or any
of a dozen pictures were. That tells me that the statute of limitations is
beginning to pass on the western.
I don't expect any great works of Art in Western Form to happen any time
soon, nor do I expect there to be a big rush of western pictures, but I do
expect that they are moving into a period where they can be taken as what
they are. Much like a thriller, or a romance.
Jim Beaver
Chris Camfield <ccam...@email.com> wrote in message
news:3a800a5b...@news1.on.sympatico.ca...
> The trouble is, as time goes on, there is (I think) less incentive for
> anyone to use the western backdrop in a film. If, for instance, you
> make a western thriller/action movie, you cut out a lot of
> opportunities for whiz-bang special effects that would be there if the
> movie was, for instance, a science fiction film.
>
> I'm not saying I dislike westerns - I rented a ton of old westerns
> this year and enjoyed 'em - but I could cynically imagine a movie
> company bureaucrat thinking the potential profits for a western movie
> being lower, and turning down the idea on that basis.
>
I ran into Mark Harmon last night. When we were doing our tv series
together in the early Nineties, we talked a lot about wanting to do a
Western together, and last night I was kidding him about having the gall to
do one recently without me (the TNT movie CROSSFIRE TRAIL). He said he
wouldn't have gotten to do it if Tom Selleck hadn't been the star. He said
that Selleck and Sam Elliott are the only two guys who can get a Western
done consistently, and even then it's got to be for television. He said the
producers just don't see any profit in it. (Of course, CROSSFIRE TRAIL was
the highest rated movie in the history of basic cable, but I'm sure they
somehow see that as a fluke.)
At any rate, it's all about money. If one could make 200 million doing a
movie about Peruvian llama trainers, everybody would make movies about
Peruvian llama trainers. Same with Westerns. In the Fifties and Sixties, a
Western could make that kind of money (adjusted) and often did. Not
anymore.
Of course, as John Wayne said when asked twenty-five years ago if the
Western was dead, "If somebody makes a good one, people will go see it."
Jim Beaver