Free Republic

Like so many westerns after Tex Ritter had a hit with the theme for High Noon, The Lonely Man (1957) starts with a cowboy tune sung by no less than Tennessee Ernie Ford. "The world looks empty to a lonely man," Ford sings, "as he rides an endless trail." It's a "hopeless" world "as he drifts from place to place." The credits roll over the silhouette of this lonely man on horseback, a tiny figure in a vast wasteland captured in Paramount's VistaVision. American westerns in the '50s were probably the pinnacle of the genre, at least if you go...

Jack Palance, (born Volodymyr Palanyuk [Ukr: Âîëîäèìèð Ïàëàíþê] on February 18, 1919, in Hazle Township, Pennsylvania, USA), an Academy Award-winning American actor, died November 10, 2006. With his rugged facial features and gravelly voice, Palance is best known to modern movie audiences as both the characters of Curly and Duke in the City Slickers movies, but his career has spanned half a century of film and television appearances. Palance had recently placed his Butler Township, Pennsylvania, Holly-Brooke Farm up for sale and its contents, his personal lifetime collection, up for auction. As of Friday afternoon, November 10, 2006, the Associated...