Notice the last three westerns have flopped?

My kids bought me one of those DVD western movie packs a few years ago. Some of them feature some big name western actors. Most of the movies are really bad. Even in the golden age of westerns, most that came out were lousy. Even the great westerns have their flaws. There are sequences in The Searchers or in Liberty Valence, or any number of others that are hard for me to sit through because they are so corny.
 
finesse_r said:
In the western genre, it is difficult to top Eastwood's Unforgiven, which in my opinion is the best western ever made. It is loaded with star power having four leading men including, Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Richard Harris, and Morgan Freeman, and a tremendous supporting cast. Everything about Unforgiven is first rate from the writing and directing to the acting and costumes. It was Eastwood's Gone With the Wind, but of course on a much smaller scale.
.
Click to expand...

Unforgiven is an interesting movie. The popular take on it by critics who up to that time dismissed Eastwood as an actor and director was that Eastwood was atoning for all the violence and bloodshed in his previous movies by depicting negative consequences to violence. After that, Eastwood was the critic's darling. I thought the same thing the first time I saw it, no doubt being primed somewhat by the reviews I had read. But on subsequent viewings I realized Eastwood is a sly dog. The shootout toward the end is a classic western dealing out to the bad guys what they have coming to them by an invincible hero. Is Eastwood repudiating violence as a solution to violence? Check out the look on the cut-up whore's face at the end if you think he is.
 
I'm a big fan both of Japanese gangster movies (yakuza eiga) and WELL MADE westerns.

"Tombstone" has all of the elements of a classic yakuza film:
  1. Taciturn but honorable hero. (Wyatt Earp)
  2. Craven, dishonorable villain. (Ike Clanton)
  3. Loyal followers of the hero. (the Earp brothers, Doc Holliday, etc.)
  4. Sinister underlings and allies of the villain. (Johnny Ringo, "Curly Bill" Brocius, etc.)
  5. A shy, tentative romance between the hero and the female lead.
  6. A certain degree of moral ambiguity (The "heroes" in yakuza eiga are gamblers and borderline gangsters. Wyatt Earp tries to make his fortune as a gambler, strongarming his way into a gambling parlor.
  7. A climactic showdown between the forces of "good" and "evil". Lots of the villain's men are slaughtered. The villain is humiliated and or killed.
Two of my favorite films are "The Yakuza" with Robert Mitchum and "Tombstone". They have amazing similarities in concept.
 
I agree its hard for present day Hollywood to make a decent main stream Western as everything has to meet their PC standards. I've heard talk of a remake of "The Searchers." That should be a real Daisy.

I think the best Westerns in recent years can be found on TV (Hell on Wheels) and in Indy productions from Australia and New Zealand ("Good For Nothing", "Red Hill" and "The Proposition").
 
I'll tell you how to do a western...

Sign Uncle Si and Phil as gunslingers...
Have Ennio Morricone write some music...
Get Jim Supica and Lee Jarrett to brainstorm on some period arms...
Add a train, some gold and a gatling gun just for a little spice...
A very attractive red headed woman/damsel in distress...(for heat- needs to be filmed in cold weather)
throw in a good plot...

Mix well and VIOLA!
You got a western!

:D

Can you tell I might be influenced by Sergio Leone?
 
Last edited:
If you REALLY want to be terrified, then think a remake of "Have Gun Will Travel." With Paladin as a modern day bounty hunter in Detroit and played by Eminem.
It almost happened a few years back...thank the stars above it didn't!
The "westerns" as we knew them are a thing of the past That is why I will not go to any "remakes" or "reimaginings" of the old classics.
Like it or not, when Moore and Silverheels left this Earth...so did the Lone Ranger and Tonto.
 
Make them more real

The last good westerns were Back To The Future 3, Two Mules For Sister Sara, And Paint Your Wagon.

Need good actors and good plot.

Dances With Wolves was good old west fiction. As usual I was offended that those black powder guns and cannons did not blast out large clouds of smoke.

My dad was born in 1901 and hated hunting rabbits with a black powder shotgun. He said "you fire, and then bend over and look under the cloud of smoke to see if you hit anything".

Imagine a more authentic movie showing Doc Holliday with his double barrel black powder shotgun at the O.K. Coral shootout. With the several smaller guns giving their own smoke.

For authenticity we then show Holliday and two of the three Earp Brothers limping away as the sirens at the mines sounded. And miners rushed up from the mines flooding into the streets to protect the town against the cowboys.
 
finesse_r said:
Also the Cohen Brothers are still making some high quality movies, but not really westerns. No Country for Old Men, while close in some ways, was not really a western, even if it was set in southwest Texas. In fact on one level it was about the end of the western era, and the end of the era of men like the character played by Tommy lee Jones.
Click to expand...

Cormac McCarthy, who in my opinion has written some really fine stuff, has got the potential for some good westerns in his body of work. His Border Trilogy, which is really about the end of an era, has yielded one mediocre one (All the Pretty Horses), but ought to be good for at least one good one. The one I am really waiting to see, if it ever happens, is a movie treatment of Blood Meridian.
Blood Meridian - IMDb
Blood Meridian - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yeah, it'd be a hard movie to make, and would probably flop at the box office too, but I'd still like to see it happen.
 
Last edited:
Andy Griffith said:
I'll tell you how to do a western...

Sign Uncle Si and Phil as gunslingers...
Have Ennio Morricone write some music...
Get Jim Supica and Lee Jarrett to brainstorm on some period arms...
Add a train, some gold and a gatling gun just for a little spice...
A very attractive red headed woman/damsel in distress...(for heat- needs to be filmed in cold weather)
throw in a good plot...

Mix well and VIOLA!
You got a western!

:D

Can you tell I might be influenced by Sergio Leone?
Click to expand...

The Mask of Zorro is pretty close. 'Sept we need sword experts!
 
I have a theory, movies and food are just getting stranger and stranger. Weird plots, weird ingredients, weird methods of cooking/acting. And so to sound sophisticated people will say "it's this, or it's that" and use fancy words. If you don't get on board you are just on the outside and "don't understand" or "don't have a sophisticated pallet." It's sad, and the Lone Ranger is terrible I am sad to report.
 
aphelion said:
Unforgiven is an interesting movie. The popular take on it by critics who up to that time dismissed Eastwood as an actor and director was that Eastwood was atoning for all the violence and bloodshed in his previous movies by depicting negative consequences to violence. After that, Eastwood was the critic's darling. I thought the same thing the first time I saw it, no doubt being primed somewhat by the reviews I had read. But on subsequent viewings I realized Eastwood is a sly dog. The shootout toward the end is a classic western dealing out to the bad guys what they have coming to them by an invincible hero. Is Eastwood repudiating violence as a solution to violence? Check out the look on the cut-up whore's face at the end if you think he is.
Click to expand...

Wow, very well said.
 
I think a lot of the problem is the production design. Look at movies like Lonesome Dove, Quigley Down Under, Tombstone, The Outlaw Jose Wales, Open Range etc. And then look at the 3 new examples in the OP. The difference is obvious. In the Lone Ranger the freaked out looking Tonto is at least one of the deal killers in that. I watched that show on tv in the 50s and this new version just violates the heck out of my concept of the way the characters look and how they went about their actions.

cowboys and Aliens is just a stupid concept. I thought they did an okay job with it but It is just out right preposterous. The whole time I kept shaking my head and thinking...no, no, no.

Jonah Hex is too dark. Too far fetched. And again the production design just misses the values you get in traditional westerns.

Time changes all thing even in entertainment. The producers of movies and music and printed fiction are always looking for new and better things. New generations come along and preferences change over time, it's inevitable. But I think that the western movie genre is still pretty rigid and people (regardless of age) are not ready to leave the old type western movies. It's probably coming but for now, thank goodness, we seem to be safe from "change".
 
shouldazagged said:
d.
"Lonesome Dove" was brilliant.
Click to expand...

Lonesome Dove was filmed in full widescreen even though it was a made for TV mini-series in the days of 4:3 ratio TV.

The movie really shows its brilliance on HD Blue Ray or DVD and a big widescreen TV. Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones and company OWN their characters in one of the best screen adaptations of a novel ever filmed. Honor, valor, true friendship, love, love lost and living life to its fullest. Yes Lonesome Dove is brilliant.
 
Last night we went and seen the lone ranger. A farce as a western but not a bad comedy. I actualy liked it for the special effects, authentic guns but most of all I liked it best for the makeup artists work on the charactors. One very fast small shot was looking up this villians nose and seeing all his white hair in his nostrils! I laughed in bed last night thinking about it! Theresa told me mine looked just like that when we met.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Back
Top