|
Stagecoach is essential, because you are basically witnessing the birth of a genre and one of most iconic movie stars of all-time all in one shot. On that note, lets talk about the guy that most people consider the father of the Western, at least in terms of feature films. John Ford is remembered mostly as a Western director, but really he was just one of the most prolific filmmakers of his era. Most people would separate his career into two halves, pre-war and post-war. In 1939, Ford made his first Western featuring sound, and right out of the gate he redefined the Western in the minds of audiences. Stagecoach was not just frivolous entertainment for children, it was a real movie with complex characters and a much larger scope than other Westerns at the time. About two decades later, Akira Kurosawa would take many of the lessons learned from Stagecoach and apply them to his own work, and like Ford expanding the scope of what people were used to seeing when they went to the theater. In particular, Kurosawa adopted Ford's dynamic way of shooting action, which can be seen in the horse chases in Stagecoach and The Hidden Fortress.   What doesn't really translate to still photos is the kinetic energy that Ford was able to get into these scenes. Cuts that emphasize the power and speed. Close ups that give you a sense of the intensity of the action, but not so close that you lose your sense of geography. These elements that Kurosawa adopted made his work stand out among his peers, and also probably contributed to his being labelled as "too western" by his own country at the time. These scenes are also a primary influence for another iconic chase, in Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark. Post-war, Ford continued to make Westerns but you can start to see his characters changing a bit. His first film after returning from the war was My Darling Clementine, a Western that features a pretty unambiguous good guy in Wyatt Earp, but at the same time Ford has begun to examine the idea of The Old West in a more nuanced way than before. While he never went as far as some of his successors in that regard, the decade after WWII saw Ford gradually ramping up that element of his storytelling, which of course culminated in what I feel is the greatest Western of all-time, The Searchers.   Featuring maybe the best opening and closing shots in film history, The Searchers is Ford's best looking film and also probably his most complex. People who go back and watch it today may not immediately have a sense of how ground-breaking John Wayne's character was, and certainly the politics of the film is outdated and/or problematic at points, but it's influence is undeniable. Scorsese once said in an interview that Wayne's Ethan(paraphrasing) "holds all of the hate of the West inside him", which I thought was an apt description. And it's the first time a director so directly confronted that hate instead of glossing over it. On a technical level, The Searchers(also Stagecoach, of course) is a prime example of how John Ford used great ensemble casts to the fullest extent. In dialogue scenes, Ford often stuck to wider shots than many other directors, allowing multiple characters to appear in the scene and inject those little character bits that make Ford's characters so memorable. It also results in better, more painterly images overall in my opinion. More in the frame isn't always better, but when it's all so meticulously designed like in a John Ford film, it often is. And it's just a flat-out better way of telling a story, because multiple characters can be developed all in the same shot.   Monument Valley often gets top-billing when Ford is discussed, and I understand why of course, but there is so much for to Ford as a filmmaker. He was a innovator, a ground-breaking technician that will always be on the Mount Rushmore of American directors. So yea, go watch Stagecoach. Basebf555 fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Nov 20, 2018 |
#
¿
Nov 20, 2018 17:05
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 10:51 |
|
|
I bounce around on which Leone I think is the best, which probably just means he made four masterpieces and they're all equally great in their own way. Fistfull of Dollars is so perfectly streamlined, it goes from point to point so smoothly and you're never bored for a second. For a Few Dollars More is bigger and more epic, and sometimes I feel like the story is better than The Good the Bad and the Ugly, which has it beat in some other areas. Once Upon a Time in the West is Leone throwing all of that together and using the best parts of all three Dollars films, and I do think that if Eastwood had starred in it more people would say it's Leone's best. It has a great villain, multiple storylines going at once, an amazingly satisfying climax, and what I would argue is the best single sequence Leone ever shot(fans of the duel in The Good the Bad and the Ugly may disagree) with Claudia Cardinale entering Flagstone for the first time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WPMoVtHSOs
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2018 19:34
|
|
|
Samuel Clemens posted:I don't know what it was in your case, but a lot of people bounce off The Searchers on their first viewing. I think it mainly comes down to two reasons: I agree with all of your points but for me The Searchers was my first Ford film, and even though I didn't "get it" in full context until a few years and a few viewings later, the grandeur and scope of the whole thing won me over instantly. So I think if there's one thing about it that makes it a good entry point, it's that Vistavision format where the vivid colors of Monument Valley just fill the screen and if you have a decent home set-up it really is an eye opener on blu ray in a way that the earlier stuff filmed in the Academy ratio aren't. Hitchcock filmed a few of his most famous movies(Vertigo, North by Northwest) in Vistavision and they're just as visually impressive.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2018 20:04
|
|
|
The Quick and the Dead is basically a love letter to the genre by Raimi, but he made sure to maintain his own identify as a director as well. All of the characters are cartoon versions of the ones you've seen in classic Westerns, most prominently Hackman playing a villain who's basically like "what if Little Bill from Unforgiven was just pure evil".
Basebf555 fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Nov 20, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2018 21:27
|
|
|
I'm not sure Sharon Stone really was the problem there, more that the movie itself is designed to give you a parade of interesting characters played by amazing actors and then you have the main protagonist who is mostly just a blank slate mystery woman. I think in the scenes where Stone is actually required to display intense emotion she does pretty well.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2018 23:22
|
|
|
X-Ray Pecs posted:I've never bought this line, they're very VERY different from Rio Bravo, unless you count less than 5 minutes from the finale, shot and presented in a very different way from Carpenter's movies. Remake is probably not an appropriate term for what they are, it's not like Carpenter was following Rio Bravo beat for beat. The whole "remake" thing probably just came along after years of Carpenter emphasizing how much of an influence Westerns and Rio Bravo in particular had on his films in various interviews.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2018 01:52
|
|
|
FreudianSlippers posted:Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a good modern western from Peckinpah. I've had that movie on my radar for a good while now and it's never popped up on any streaming service that I'm aware of. Might have to give in and blind buy it on blu ray. Edit: or maybe DVD since it looks like OOP blu rays are going for like $75. Yikes
|
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2018 21:31
|
|
|
Another Peckinpah that I haven't seen DID just show up on Prime though, The Ballad of Cable Hogue. Looking forward to watching that tonight. Although I can never see Jason Robards without imagining him in the title role of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, it's so bizarre to think about that role being played by anyone other than Kinski. Life half the movie was filmed with him before he got dysentery. We also lost out on Mick Jagger being in the movie due to Robard's illness. Anyway, I think Westerns are probably Robard's natural home, he fits very well into that setting.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2018 21:51
|
|
|
Alfred P. Pseudonym posted:Just watched The Homesman, with Hillary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones. I have a high tolerance for grim movies, but this was really goddamn grim. Mostly just one particular moment, which I absolutely did not see coming and it was a complete gut punch. Don't watch The Homesman if you don't want to be bummed out.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 26, 2018 16:06
|
|
|
I was primed to love The Ballad of Buster Skruggs but for me it just fell flat. I was pretty shocked, usually the Coens are money in the bank for me but not this one. Just not enough time to get to know any of the characters, and too many of the stories were depressing as hell.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 27, 2018 20:22
|
|
|
If we're gonna get a little bit loose with the definition then I guess you could throw Wake in Fright in there. If you want to consider it a Western then what you have here is a Western with Donald Pleasence as the villain, how can you go wrong? Haven't seen it mentioned yet, but another low/mid budget Western that really impressed me recently was Slow West, which I think is on Netflix. Basebf555 fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Nov 29, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2018 14:54
|
|
|
General Dog posted:Slow West is an E/N thread turned into a western, it’s great Yea it's easy to miss that for like 99% of the movie(obviously the ending makes it quite clear) but then on rewatch it's even better.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2018 21:39
|
|
|
It was mentioned in the OP, but I saw Johnny Guitar for the first time over the weekend and it's really excellent. Fantastic use of color for a 50's film, and the performances put it over the top, Joan Crawford has a ridiculous amount of screen presence. It's also a good chance to see a younger Sterling Hayden, a full decade before Dr. Strangelove(he's also great in The Killing of course).
|
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2018 17:04
|
|
|
Jack B Nimble posted:What are three John ford silent Westerns I could show to set up Stage Coach? I can't speak from experience, I've never seen a John Ford silent film, but from reading a bit about it a bunch of them unfortunately are considered lost. Two that jump out at me when I look at his filmography though are Straight Shooter(1917), which is the earliest Ford film that survived and then Iron Horse(1924), which you could probably consider his first big hit. Iron Horse seems to get credit for Ford's preference for Westerns as his career went on.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 13, 2019 19:45
|
|
|
I'd throw out two suggestions: 1. Peckinpah. Personally I prefer Ford and Leone but Peckinpah was too important to ignore completely. The Wild Bunch is the most obvious choice. 2. McCabe & Mrs. Miller(1971) is for me, one of the most unique and immersive Westerns ever made. It's very much a revisionist Western and I think your list could use one more of those. But for real, you will not find better set design and costume design in a Western and I consider it one of the best of the genre regardless of how "important" it is(or isn't).
|
|
#
¿
Nov 13, 2019 20:23
|
|
|
It was already mentioned but yea The Assassination of Jesse James is THE modern western to watch and I think it's very clearly the best Western since Unforgiven.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 13, 2019 23:04
|
|
|
feedmyleg posted:It also happens to be the best film of the 21st century. Hard to argue with that but I prefer There Will Be Blood. It's close though.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 13, 2019 23:08
|
|
|
Finally watched The Great Silence and goddamn, that is a brutal ending. Not sure I've ever seen an ending quite like that in a Western. It totally lives up to the hype, now having seen it I realize how essential and iconic it really is. It's one of those movies that not many people have actually seen but it's obvious that a lot of filmmakers certainly have.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2020 16:49
|
|
|
Anonymous Robot posted:I once showed this to a class and, upon learning that the studio forced the filmmakers to shoot an alternate ending where the sheriff shows up at the end and saves everyone, the majority of the class agreed they would have preferred that ending. I can't necessary blame them because it's so shocking and just an absolute gut punch. I wonder if they'd been given a few days to let the movie marinate, maybe they'd feel differently. I'm spoiler tagging a movie from the late 60s because I think it would definitely be better experienced first hand and I assume a lot of people in CineD have never seen it.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2020 17:18
|
|
|
I think Fort Apache is really good, but is it possible your friend doesn't like black and white films or maybe has a problem with the different aspect ratios? I think a lot of people who go back and watch movies from the 30s and 40s don't realize that it's gonna mostly be the Academy ratio(the square one). I guess if he liked Stagecoach that's out the window though. I dunno, one thing might be that Fort Apache is pretty focused on characters who are military men, and the story is about a famous military scenario. I imagine that isn't as interesting to some people as outlaws and saloons. Basebf555 fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Jan 21, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2020 21:26
|
|
|
General Dog posted:Is Fort Apache the one with an adult Shirley Temple? Yep
|
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2020 22:24
|
|
|
Kull the Conqueror posted:In honor of my man K-Doug’s memory, please watch Lonely Are the Brave if you get the chance. I've hadn't heard of this but the poster appears to depict a Cowboy vs. Helicopter scenario so it definitely has peaked my interest.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2020 15:03
|
|
|
I saw Johnny Guitar pretty late in my Western viewing, I'd already seen a ton of Wayne and John Ford and Eastwood and the rest, but still it blew me away. Maybe it blew me away even moreso because of all the Westerns I'd seen, I dunno. It's just so unique, even today, I'm not sure I've seen another character along the same lines as Vienna in any other Western. Fantastic sets and costumes as well.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2020 15:52
|
|
|
Hard to separate the Spaghetti Western influence in Star Wars from the Kurosawa influence, because obviously Lucas had all that stuff swirling around in his head when he made ANH. And of course Lone Wolf and Cub probably doesn't exist without the various Kurosawa/Mifune films of the 60s. And then you can trace Kurosawa back to John Ford, so when you combine Ford/Kurosawa/Lucas, you can account for a surprising large chunk of American pop culture of the last 100 years. Even moreso if you lump Spielberg in there with Lucas.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 24, 2020 16:23
|
|
|
TheOmegaWalrus posted:The Great Silence is an amazing film with the sole caveat you see the original ending. You're absolutely correct but I almost feel like even mentioning the ending is a potential spoiler. Because I saw the movie blind knowing nothing about it and hoooo boy did it hit hard. So if you're considering watching The Great Silence just go watch it! Don't read anything more!
|
|
#
¿
Jul 6, 2020 22:10
|
|
|
Jack B Nimble posted:Where can I rent a copy with the original ending? Just tell me a service/platform and I'll watch it blind. The one that's on Prime is what you want.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 6, 2020 22:38
|
|
|
Jack B Nimble posted:Still working slowly through Westerns, saw Cheyenne Autumn last weekend, really not the treatment I was expecting from John Ford. I think it illustrates a real change from his earliest films like Iron Horse and Stagecoach, you can see how his ever present interest in the narrative of the American West is changing as the decades go by. Beautiful landscapes and cinematography, as always. I checked this one off my list recently too, it's on HBO Max. From what I've read, it really is known as the film where Ford tried to reckon with his previous portrayals of Native Americans. And you can tell, it's a much more honest presentation of how they were treated than anything else he's done, at least of what I've seen. Franchescanado posted:McCabe and Mrs. Miller not only lives up to the hype, I now understand Altman in a way I didn’t before, and it’s now probably my favorite Western. Dang I wish I'd seen this post last month. Westerns were really my gateway to Altman because I blind-bought McCabe & Ms. Miller because of it's importance in the genre, not because of Altman. I'd never seen an Altman film before at the time, and the immersive world that he created in McCabe & Ms. Miller just blew me away. Of course I found out that it's a calling card for Altman, each film's setting is realized to the fullest extent, no matter what genre he's working in. And that allows for extremely interesting character work too, because when the stage is set so expertly you can then subvert expectations much more convincingly and effectively. The Criterion essay really opened my eyes to the mindset Altman had. It says, "The best way to demolish the old cliches, Altman decided, was to use as source material a novel that embraced them without irony", and includes a quote from Altman where he said, "I picked the story because it's the conventional thing. It's the most ordinary, common Western that's ever been told. It's every event, every character, every Western you've ever seen".
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2021 17:51
|
|
|
Jack B Nimble posted:Edit: Oh, also! Wtf is up with the Jimmy Stewart Wyat Earp interlude? Was he just on the set and insisting on playing the gunfighter in a western? Did Ford try to slip in a comedic beat like in the searchers and just have it go on too long? It doesn't match the feel of the rest of the movie and went on way longer than I thought it should; it was a fine couple of scenes on it's own but not in the context of the larger film. Yea my guess is that Stewart and Ford kinda knew they weren't gonna be making too many more Westerns so it was just a fun idea to throw in there that would allow them to work together one more time.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2021 14:37
|
|
|
A Fistful of Dollars was an international hit so by the time Leone went to make The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, he had like 6X the budget to work with. I feel like the mythic quality that the Eastwood trilogy has is due to the multiple layers of culture that the material was filtered through. Kurosawa idolized John Ford, and films like Yojimbo and Seven Samurai were heavily influenced by Ford. So by the time Leone takes the story and shoots it in Spain filling in for the American West, it's already filtered down through these two titans and it comes out as something instantly iconic yet also somehow different than anything seen before. You can say the same thing about the success of Star Wars, obviously.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2021 00:15
|
|
|
I watched Silverado last night as well, it's been kicking around on my watchlist for years. It's a really fun movie, especially if you grew up in the late 80's and into the 90's, the cast is pretty stacked. And you can tell Kasdan wanted to do a tribute to classic John Ford style Westerns, there's a lot of shots in the movie that I don't think you get if the director doesn't love the genre. As I watched I was wondering if Goldblum was trying to do like an homage to Warren Beatty's McCabe because he first shows up wearing that ridiculous jacket somewhat similar to McCabe, and you find out that he's like a seedy gambler who owns a brothel. Plus Goldblum has a connection to Robert Altman from one of his early roles in Nashville.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 18, 2021 14:28
|
|
|
The story surrounding the making of Tombstone seems to indicate that Cosmatos was almost like a set/production designer and Kurt Russell actually directed the movie. Like, Cosmatos was super interested in the period detail and the sets and costumes and all that stuff and Russell was the one who got the script into a condition where it could actually be shot and then kept everything on schedule during the actual shoot etc., i.e. all the stuff the director usually does. You bring up Altman and I do wonder if the original director's script(Cosmatos as brought in after the first director was fired) had more of a McCabe & Ms. Miller bent to it, because Russell cut it by a lot and focused it more on Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. So I wonder if the original script was more meandering and spent more time following some of the side characters.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2021 15:45
|
|
|
I think probably the legitimate thing that Russell gets credit for is holding the project together during that first week or two when they were in the process of firing the director and bringing in Cosmatos. Not everyone was on board with the decision and from the way Val Kilmer describes it, Russell was the one who had the passion for making the movie and was the main factor keeping it from going off the rails when some people were considering quitting in protest over the firing.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2021 16:34
|
|
|
One of my unpopular movie opinions is that I've never been a huge fan of Peckinpah, but I realize I probably shouldn't consider that a fully educated opinion because I still need to see Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. I've yet to really click with a Peckinpah film and I've watched The Wild Bunch like three times to try to get into it but each time there's a huge lull in the middle(the two main shootouts are of course, awesome) where I can't stay with it.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 21, 2021 22:00
|
|
|
One thing about Fistful of Dollars that makes it stand out from the other two in the trilogy is how lean and efficient it is. Of course I enjoy immersing myself in a 2 hours+ Leone Western as much as the next guy but Fistful of Dollars kinda fills a different niche. It moves from beat to beat extremely quickly and there's a constant escalation happening for the entire movie, it's just a different feel than the other two.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2022 19:45
|
|
|
It was great watching Back to the Future 3 for the first time in years and realizing that they were referencing Once Upon a Time in the West with this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12bCLVGpmZ4
|
|
#
¿
Apr 25, 2023 16:03
|
|
|
Once Upon a Time in America is let down by the parts with the younger actors imo. I've always been a bit of an outlier with that film, it's my least favorite Leone.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 25, 2023 16:41
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 10:51 |
|
|
Michael Biehns character in Tombstone is Johnny Ringo.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2024 18:22
|
|