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The health of the American western in 1956 was robust if you go by just two pictures released that year: John Ford's The Searchers, probably one of the greatest westerns ever made, and George Stevens' Giant, which showed how western themes and values could be nudged forward into the modern world. It was also the year when Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels transplanted the Lone Ranger and Tonto from television to the movie screen with The Lone Ranger – a hit for Warner Bros. and the first of two pictures featuring Moore as the masked gunman, proof that there was...

Western icon John Wayne starred in over 160 movies during his long career, but two of his earliest acting roles have been lost to time. Two of John Wayne's movies have been lost to time. Long before his breakout role in John Ford's Stagecoach, Wayne was a struggling young actor who fronted dozens of "Poverty Row" films. These were low-budget b-movies that were filmed quickly, with some notable examples from his career including Wayne's sole "horror" Haunted Gold. He always appeared to be on the cusp of stardom, but after concerns about being typecast, Wayne attempted to leave Westerns behind...

Dating all the way back to the very birth of American cinema in the 1910s, the western genre was pioneered by national filmmakers like John Ford, Howard Hawks and Sam Peckinpah, releasing such respective classics as The Searchers, Rio Bravo and The Wild Bunch. Though, after decades of dominance, by the 1960s, the genre had become stiff, with the arrival of Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone shaking up generations of stuffy cowboy tales. Inspired by Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, Leone brought an iconic style to his Western trilogy that included A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and his...

It’s a nauseatingly evocative moment, both because of the way director Potsy Ponciroli’s camera isolates the actor, and because Tim Blake Nelson conveys, through his defeated posture and anxious movements, the stone that is slowly forming in his stomach. Earlier, when he first came upon the money and the man, Henry had quietly ridden away from them, unwilling to get involved, only to change his mind. Now, again without a word of dialogue, he tells us that he knows that the valley below and the hills beyond will soon fill up with the shadows of other men looking for the...

Larry McMurtry, the prolific novelist and screenwriter who won a Pulitzer Prize and an Academy Award for his work, died Thursday at 84. Amanda Lundberg, a spokesperson for the family, confirmed McMurtry’s death in an obituary published Friday by the New York Times. Lundberg did not respond to The Post’s request for confirmation. SNIP McMurtry was best known for his anti-Western work, or stories that focused on demythologizing the romanticism of the American West.

Beautifully shot yet muted as a drama, ‘News of the World’ brings the post-Civil War Southwest to life in the unlikely journey of a lost girl and a jaded veteran who helps her find home. Ten years ago, auteur filmmaker brothers Joel and Ethan Coen brought a surprisingly sincere revisionist Western to the big screen over Christmas weekend. Out last weekend in theaters, “News of the World” offers a similar throwback film without quite the edge or mass appeal. The Coens’ 2010 take on “True Grit,” a remake of the John Wayne classic, followed a grizzled U.S. Marshal (Jeff Bridges)...

James Drury, star of one of the longest-running Westerns in the history of television, The Virginian, has died. Dury’s assistant confirmed his death in a Facebook post, writing that he died of natural causes. He was 85. “THE COWBOY took his last ride,” Lindsey Karen wrote. “It is with immense sadness that I let you all know that James Drury, our beloved Virginian and dear friend passed away this morning of natural causes, Monday, April 6, 2020. He will be missed so much. It is beyond words. Memorial service to be determined later.” Drury was best known for his role...

I don't like Westerns. Not just those creaky serials spoofed by SCTV's "Six Gun Justice." I mean the genre's purported masterpieces: High Noon is coma-inducing — despite its "exciting" real-time gimmick, those 85 minutes feel like 200. Howard Hawk's "answer film," Rio Bravo, is a door-slamming farce without the jokes — five men running in and out, a simulacrum of "action." Shane? I don't get it. Stagecoach hasn't aged well, leading me to wonder, heretically, whether it was ever any good. Besides today's movie, the only old Westerns that impressed me were The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance...

In 1931, an aspiring cowboy singer named Leonard Franklin Slye left his native Ohio to take his shot at fame and fortune in the Golden State. That young man went on to become Roy Rogers, one of the most popular Western actors and singers of his era. He was known as the "King of the Cowboys" and appeared in over 100 films, as well as in his own television program, "The Roy Rogers Show." Prior to his acting career, Rogers co-founded a singing group in Los Angeles called the Sons of the Pioneers with Bob Nolan and Tim Spencer. By...

With their clear-eyed moral messaging, Westerns are a great antidote to much of the modern filmmaking landscape, where audiences are often asked to identify with the bad guy. No film genre is more quintessential to the American soul than the Western. The virtues Westerns champion—courage, moral clarity, self-reliance, individualism—are American virtues; their vices—excessive or hokey moral simplicity, caricatures of the enemy—are American too. Westerns are so synonymous with the legend that is America that it’s little wonder that from their heyday in the 1950s until today, they’ve played a key role in shaping our perception of ourselves, as well as...

“I thought my last film was hard,” Zhao laughs, “but for a Chinese woman to try to wrangle a bunch of young cowboys?” Chinese filmmaker Chloé Zhao is making her second trip to the Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight this year, with sophomore feature The Rider. Born in Beijing, Zhao went to school in the UK and college in the U.S. before settling in Denver, basing her first two feature films on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. Zhao’s 2015 drama, Songs My Brothers Taught Me, was developed at the Sundance Institute and premiered in Park City that year. It centers...

The new Western Hostiles begins with an unshakably violent event. A small family is attacked and brutalized by a group of Native Americans. There’s no justification for the violence. Only bloodshed. There’s no moral ambiguity in that sequence but as the film tells a larger story, moral ambivalence takes center stage as the story explores the omnipresence of violence in the Old West. Set in 1896, the feature stars Oscar winner Christian Bale as Captain Joseph J. Blocker. Blocker is a weary warrior who has seen his share of violence and engaged in his share of battles. He’s seen friends...

I grew up with guns. Along with my boyhood pals, I grew up coveting, collecting and running wild with guns. "Let's play guns!" was our sham battle cry during those innocent years, the 1940s and '50s. While girls were jumping rope and playing jacks, we boys were shooting up the neighborhood. Depending on the season, we were just as likely to have been playing baseball, basketball or football. But "guns" was our sport for all seasons, fair weather and foul, indoors and out. From prekindergarten years until adolescence, guns had a powerful grip on our imaginations and our sporting lives,...

“The western constantly changes depending on where we are as a society,” Fuqua explained. “What I wanted to do was bring it up to date and show people it’s an exciting genre. It represents who we are, what the promise of the United States is supposed to be.” The 1960 “Magnificent Seven” — itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 epic “Seven Samurai” — had featured white actors in even some of the non-Caucasian roles, with Eli Wallach playing the bandit leader Calvera and Horst Buchholz as a young Mexican gunslinger named Chico. In Fuqua’s remake, by contrast, four of...

Western TV Shows to watch Free Online WATCH FREE TV SHOWS ONLINE, Watch Western TV Shows Online Free by Western Movies Online Watch Western TV Shows Online Free every evening from the late 1940s to the mid 1960s the Western Television series shows dominated prime time TV! Almost 200 western TV series shows premiered from 1948 to 1980.

Robert Horton, a ruggedly handsome actor who found television stardom in 1957 as the scout Flint McCullough on “Wagon Train” but who resisted being typecast in westerns as he pursued a parallel career as a singer, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 91.Robert Horton, left, with Ward Bond in “Wagon Train” in 1958.

So I was watching a movie with my kids (10 and 13) the other day and was thinking about how different the media is that they consume than from the stuff I was raised on. I would like to get them interested in older movies with positive messages. Which John Wayne and which WWII movies are your favorites and which would think would grab kids' attention? I'm thinking "The Cowboys" would be good, but what else would everyone suggest?

I normally watch Turner Classic Movies on a regular basis, but the last month or so has been brutal and I've been able to watch very little. Sadly, I just found out that John Wayne is their Star of the Month for April. Instead of showing his films on several nights a week, TCM is currently doing a marathon of his films. I'm trying to figure out what shows to dump from my DVR in order to record some ones that I haven't seen in quite some time. Today is the official last day of the marathon and there are...

Rawhide is back on tv again on the amc channel. There is a marathon of Rawhide episodes back to back these week followed by western themed movies on Saturdays. Rawhide is on at 11 am on Saturdays and has been on for a couple of weeks. Head em' up, move 'em out! :^)

The Searchers has its critics — but who seriously believes John Wayne had a drop of racist blood?Film critics, a tense and peculiar family (with apologies to the late Max Beerbohm), have spent a half century praising John Ford and John Wayne’s tense and peculiar movie, The Searchers, beyond all-reason. They do this because they believe it gives them a clean shot at calling the Duke a racist, something they enjoy doing, and which appears to be required by a Film Critics Union work rule. For those who haven’t seen the movie or don’t remember it, The Searchers tells the...