Yeah, many people think Ford glorified the west. He did not.
Does anybody glorify the west?
most overated:high noon dances with wolves silverado pale rider my faves :unforgiven tombstone blood on the moon deadman winchester 73 red river searchers hondo high plains drifter judge roy bean butch cassidy and sundance kid monte walsh(lee marvin) lonesome dove. but there are lots of classics i havent seen. looking forward to seeing all of jimmy stewarts,randolph scott,.
forgot open range, good movie,and thats saying a lot cause i hate costner.oh and if you think john wayne was too clean i would add rooster cocburn.although its not one of my favorites.wayne won a oscar for this and not red river or the searchers? shows how stupid the oscars are .
I would say wayne and eastwood both represented the’ american male’ wayne was the role model for 40-6os eastwood the new breed 60s-70s.the question is who the heck represents the modern american male? scary aint it.
No-One Glorifys the west. Ever.
But most think Eastwood and Leone made it dirty and how it was. Lemme tell you. It was a lot more bloody, and Blondie wound’t have lasted a second with his morals. In the job he was in.
Barquero 1970.
Finally saw this the other day, its been called the “most Italianate of American Westerns” by some critics (more so than Eastwoods contemporary Hang em High) and I’ll have to admit I was pleasantly surprised, it really starts off like gangbusters, after the unusual opening credits sequence (its shot to resemble an oil painting looking as if the film is being projected upon a canvas). Director was Gordon Douglas who did “Rio Conchos”, “Chuka”, “Them”, “Robin & The Seven Hoods”, and “In Like Flint” to name a few. Its initial first half has a way more SW feel to it than “Hang Em’ High”.
Unfortunately what I watched was a DVDr recording off of a TV screening with the colors seeming abit too strong.
It was shot on location in Colorado. It starts off with two groups, a small army of mercenary outlaws and a trio breaking off and riding in opposite direction with ariver valley in the b.g. One side of the river leads to the Mexican border.
Lee Van Cleef is Travis the Barquero the ferryman, and we see him plying his trade as he pulls a wagon of settlers across, his only weapons are a bowie knife and some sort of longrange rifle of a Sharps or Spencer type. He has one prop from his SW days and that’s his “Angel Eyes” tobacco pipe.
Now a something to point out here that a lot of folks today may not realise but rivers & water was a real barrier to movement throughout history. Not very many people could swim at all there were barely any good swimers. I lot of folks were deathly afraid of water and they weren’t going to even attempt to cross a river on a horse unless it was at a shallow ford, anything deep or fast flowing would be suicide even on a horse. There is a little segment where one of the outlaws alludes to this.
We first see (Jack Remy) Oates in bed with a plump sweaty Hispanic whore Layeta, wearing his black hat with a fancy gold hatband in a whore house the "Double Eagle"in the town of Buckskin (very frontier looking with a lot of log cabin buildings), he’s looking his sleaziest best.
Some sample dialog:
Layeta the whore (fawning) “am I not beautiful senior”?
Jack (looking disgusted) “I need a drink”.
Whore "Say it senior."
Jack “you’re beautiful…oh are you beautiful”.
Whore “why do you wear your sombero”?
Jack " why do you wear your stockings"
Whore "because they are pretty"
Jack “my hat’s pretty”
a bit later the whore is splashing perfume on herself while singing…
Whore "do I smell senior’?
Jack “yea you sure do”.
The massacre of the town starts and Jack is shooting from the window.A Mexican male breaks into Jacks room and asks “whats going on”
Jack “we’re shooting people”. and Jack blows him away.
Jack to whore “you live in a lousy neighborhood, you ought to move”.
Jack is in his “command post” (tough duty, lol) for the raid on the town by his small army of misfits. Their goal is the bank and a shipment of Winchester Rifles that an army patrol is escorting. Oates’ second in command is a Frenchman Marquette (Kerwin Matthews)and its he who shoots the town sherrif to start off the fireworks.
As Jack dresses, Layeta asks "Senior wouldn’t it be nice to take Layeta with you"
Jack "no"
Layeta “will I see you again”?
Jack “I don’t think so” and he shoots her.
The action sequences are pretty good throughout the whole massacre when people get shot they go flying.
There are some very good character actors Forrest Tucker (Mountain Phil ) puts in an over the top memorable performance as a grizzeled mountian man.
All I remember of Tucker is his TV (F Troop) performance but he’s a hoot in this flick too.
Marie Gomez plays Nola (Chiquita from The Professionals) she is Travis’s woman. Mariette Hartley plays the unfaithful wife of a “squatter” who offers herself to Travis (a type of person she loaths but is attracted too) if he’ll save her husband, he does, and she does, and Nola doesn’t mind.
The film looses steam unfortunately once the confrontation becomes a Mexican standoff at the river, it even quotes FAFDM with a bit where Jack smokes reefer and has a flashback but it just doesn’t work. The flash back recalls how he got his hat, not exactly a major plot point, and it feels as if it was stuck in there just to be going with the flow of the late 60’s early 70’s idea of cool. Now a better flash back would be to some kind of traumatic experience with water which would have echoed their dilema and really punctuate his later actions.
The film had potential but ends up loosing its way abit and feels more like a TV program at the end.
The barge battle was a bit hurried and I think cut or trimmed in the version I saw, its a bit too hurried and some of the action has no explanations (like how did Travis & the squatters figuer out what Remy had planned and plan their own defence) but you have to admit different.
The final duel between Travis & Jack is a bit flat has almost no dramatic build up at all, almost as if they ran out of time. Though on second watching there are some cool dialog lines between Oates & Van Cleef. Score is nothing special and Domenic Frontieri actually quotes “Hang Em High”.
Van Cleef should have had a wee bit more screen time he’s just not featured enough in my opinion, but he is acting in a very different role, not a cool efficient killer, not and ex outlaw, not a drunk, more of a pioneering business man. And this, come to think of it in hindsight may have been his biggest career screwup, he was typecast for years by Hollywood as an outlaw, then he got that role of a lifetime as Mortimer, he could of, or at least his agent could have really tried to do (as Eastwood did and parlayed the MWNN charater into an American film career) if they had held out. If he had played another strong Mortimer type in a successful American film here who knows how far he may have gone.
I highly recommend this for LVC fans.
Wild Bunch
High Plains Drifter
Unforgiven
Pale Rider
The Outlaw Josey Wales
Dead Man
here are mine:
Of course Rio Bravo and High Noon
Johnny guitare maybe my favorite 50’s western
The wild bunch,Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid and all Peckinpah’s westerns
Unforgiven,High plain drifter,The Outlaw Josey Wales,Pale rider.
A Man Called Horse
Soldier Blue
Little Big Man
Dead Man
Open Range
Missouri Breaks
El topo
Tombstone
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
The long riders the best 80’s western
Nevada Smith
I also like Alamo (with Wayne) but its more a war movie than a western.
And many others i forgot…
i forgot peter Fonda’s Hired hand
It seems that no one has mentioned Two mules for Sister Sara, starring Eastwood and Shirley MacLaine, from 1970. This film is good and really spaghetti-like, it even has a score by Morricone 
Yea Two Mules is good, and check out Hombre with Paul Newman, Richard Boone, Cameron Mitchel, it even has a three way shoot out at the end, if you can too
Have any of you seen Gunfight with Kirk Douglas and Johnny Cash? That’s one of my favorites too.
Everybody is forgetting the transcendant westerns made in the late fifties by Budd Boetticher starring Randolph; SEVEN MEN FROM NOW, newly available on a great looking dvd with Lee Marvin as Scott’s advesary, THE TALL T from the story by Elmore Leonard with Richard Boone and Henry Silva as “Chink”, RIDE LONESOME with Pernell Roberts, a very young James Coburn and Lee Van Cleef, and COMANCHE STATION with Claude Akins, four of the greatest westerns of all time. Oh yeah, blah blah blah, SEARCHERS, STAGECOACH, RIO BRAVO, PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID, RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, WILD BUNCH, THE WESTERNER, WINCHESTER 73, THE MAN FROM LARAMIE, NAKED SPUR, BEND OF THE RIVER, and the all but forgotten and nearly impossible to find LITTLE BIG HORN with Lloyd Bridges and John Ireland, about a cavalry patrol trying to make it back to Custer’s command on that fateful day. Talk about grim!
BOETTICHER is mentioned in the “greatest director(american)” poll in the saloon.cast your vote. by the way i love his films.He also wrote two mules for sister sara i noticed the last time i watched it.
Man its hard to add that impressive list…about Invitation to a Gunfighter with Yul Brynner and Last of the Fast Guns.
Van James
Yup both Boone and Newman were great in that one ,esp Boone as the cold hearted killer…been awhile since I saw that one, but I remember it was good and I am a huge fan of Richard Boone espp in Have Gun Will Travel.
Van James
“Stagecoach”.
Hang em’ high starring the great Clint Eastwood
[quote=“Damien, post:3, topic:103”]I’m not such a big fan of John Wayne-westerns, but Rio Bravo is one of the best there is. Maybe not because of John Wayne, but rather Dean Martin, Angie Dickinson and Walter Brennan. Also, basically all of Eastwoods american westerns are great - Pale Rider, High Plains Drifter, Unforgiven…
Among the “newer” ones (if 20-25 years old films are new…) I really like The Long Riders (great music), Silverado (the music isn’t bad there either, and Brian Dennehy is one of my favourite actors) and Tombstone (better than Costners film the same year).[/quote]
The long riders is great.
Walter Hill is one of my favourite American directors.