Don't go knocking Stagecoach...
I remember first watching this flick as a kid. The Japanese cook had to find Jim Quackenbush's grave.... It was where the whiskey was buried.
Robert Taylor, usually wooden (Ivanhoe), was good in it.
Posted on 06/30/2019 8:03:37 AM PDT by Rummyfan
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 and the operatic Douglas Sirk-meets-David-Lynch camp classic acid trip, Johnny Guitar.
But those don't really count as "old," because they're considered precursors to the revisionist anti-Western of the Little Big Man sub-species, which ham-fistedly allegorized the Vietnam War or some such. (Don't laugh: The Shooting is about the Kennedy assassination, which is perversely funny: the Zapruder film itself — history's most argued-about strip of celluloid — is somehow less ambiguous, plus a LOT shorter...)
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Don't go knocking Stagecoach...
I remember first watching this flick as a kid. The Japanese cook had to find Jim Quackenbush's grave.... It was where the whiskey was buried.
Robert Taylor, usually wooden (Ivanhoe), was good in it.
Yeah!
Lash LaEue and Hoppy were kinda crude!
Yeah!
Lash LaEue and Hoppy were kinda crude!
Somebody got up on the wrong side of the bed...
Either Steyn is writing under a lady’s pseudonym or he’s outsourcing to idiots.
Mark should stick to musicology or even B’way. He has a good book on the subject called “Broadway Babies Say Goodnight.”
“The Searchers”...mentioned in the article.
Great John Wayne movie. Some hard parts to watch in it.
The country/culture was better off during the years when Westerns were routinely being turned out and viewed.
They are the King Arthur tales updated — taught lessons in chivalry. Westerns are basically dead and so is chivalry, which is looked upon as sexist, which is the flip side of the only sin left to condemn - racism.
True righteousness is easily attainable in today’s world; all that is necessary is to condemn racism and you are a righteousness dude.
So, men are supposed to be completely supportive of women and never ever criticize their horrible tearjerking chick flick genre. But otoh the action genre that men are drawn to is open to derision by nasty b****es.
Okay. Got it.
I’m sure at the time they were considered great and they DID teach great values.
However, I cannot stay at my 86 year old mother’s place for too long when old westerns are on for fear I will run into the street after 2 hours and throw myself in front of a fast moving truck.
>p
Dang I have forgotten how to post a pic.
“The Searchers” sould be named one of America’s top ten moviews.
The Searchers is on all the lists of the greatest American movies as is Shane and, usually, High Noon. Their reputations are secure from obscure folks writing on blogs. If only Humblegunner ruled the world!
“I don’t like Westerns.”
Mark musn’t have seen the Magnificent Seven, Big Jake, Sons of Katie Elder, Tombstone, the Outlaw Josie Wales, Good, Bad and Ugly,etc.
I’m not sure Mark wrote the article. He commissioned it, though. It’s one of my favorite genres. I get to look at good-looking men with Angie Dickinson occasionally horning in.
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Just remove the parentheses, and place the image address in between the quotation marks.
Steyn is an excellent writer and observer of lots in politics and the human condition.
But he ain’t American.
As others have commented, Westerns are our folk lore, our Grimms Tales, our teaching stories, our identity myths.
It shows what it is to be American.
Popular culture has “Progressed” to the Left. That’s why these stories seem to some a bit hokey these days.
Westerns what is not to like. Just like the by gone era’s melodramas except with horses inlieu of automobiles.
On the TV, my fav is still The Rifleman.
Mark DID NOT WRITE THIS COLUMN.
Some "rhymes with witch" named Kathy Shaidle wrote it, a millennial probably. I can't imagine Mark Steyn holding these ridiculous opinions. Not like "Stagecoach"? She must be a commie.
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