Revisionist Western

The film, “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” directed by Sergio Leone, the father of Spaghetti Westerns, is considered one of the best Westerns of all time. It launched Clint Eastwood into stardom as, “The Man with No Name” also known as Blondie “The Good”, through his interactions with his co-stars Lee Van Cleef, Angel Eyes “The Bad”, and Eli Wallach, Tuco “The Ugly”. The hero here, Blondie, is not the typical hero that you would expect, but through an analysis of several scenes, one begins to…

Jane Tompkins’s West of Everything is an energetic and lively account of the most beloved and legendary American genre—The Western. Western films and novels have become a large part of many American’s lives and continues to influence filmmaking to this day. People from all over the world visit western states to have what they think is the cowboy experience. West of Everything expresses a heavy concern with the role of gender in the genre, however, and points out that it is a male dominated field…

There is nothing more classical in film then the Western, and no one tackled the Western better than John Ford. Shawn Dwyer a classic movie expert states, “if there was ever a director-actor tandem that defined the Western genre, it was John Ford and John Wayne” (Dwyer 1). His film Stagecoach was the first of it’s kind in the film industry as being the first talking picture in the Western genre. The film included everything known to the classic Western, however, Ford wanted to question some…

The movie, “Border Bandits” was produced and directed by Kirby Warnock, the grandson of Roland Warnock, and included the real voice of Roland Warnock to describe the events occurred in 1915. The movie featured the role of Mexican Immigrants and Texas Rangers. The story began through the rise of Mexican banditos raiding the McAllen Ranch, one of the largest in South Texas. Then, several Texas Rangers arrived and eliminated the perpetrators, but it does not reveal the entire story. It started with…

Brokeback Mountain has both the aspects of a western film and a drama. In the western genre of film the men are normally fighting their way through the wilderness since it is their job and the way that they support themselves and their families. Another aspect of the western is the codes of honour. The men/cowboys are supposed to live their lives in a way that they follow all of the rules that society expects of them. The men are meant to follow all of the social norms, they are the providers…

Unforgiven Morals The grey line between right and wrong is hard for anyone to define and so was the case in Clint Eastwood’s movie Unforgiven which released in 1992. The movie takes place in the old west at a town called Big Whisky. The film stars Clint Eastwood as William Munny a retired gun slinger who decides to come to the aid of a prostitute called Delilah, portrayed by Anna Levine, which was disfigured by the local town gang. William has been living on a farm, raising his two children,…

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly fits greatly in the history of the western. The movie was film in the West America because of the desert, mountains, small town frontier, railroads, saloons, and military forts of the Wild West. Most of the western movies had cowboys armed with a revolver gun, wearing boots, hats, spurs, and bandanas abound their necks while riding horses. Western movies usually had the same story lines about lawman and bounty hunters tracking down wanted people for a living. Most…

A group of seven misfits comes together to save a town from an evil, money seeking man in the film The Magnificent Seven directed by Antoine Fuqua. James Horner and Simon Franglen’s film score in The Magnificent Seven transported me back to the old west. Horner and Franglen effectively utilized the unique timbres of select instruments, texture, and foreshadowing making the audience feel as if they are riding along side the misfits, a character in the story experiencing all that unfolds on the…

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance examines the Old West in a flashback. It compares and contrasts how the past emerges into the present. As viewers, we are trying to understand how the forces of civilization, now the present, can conquest “the law of the West,” from the past. In the duration of the present, the heroes of the Old West are only called a myth. There are three different individuals in the movie. There is Ransom Stoddard, Tom Doniphon, and Liberty Valence. Random Stoddard is an…

The Searchers, a film directed by John Ford (1956) is a classic American Western featuring America’s original cowboy John Wayne. In the film, the main protagonist Ethan Edwards comes home to Texas after fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Both John Ford and John Wayne depict Ethan Edwards as an extremely isolated, bitter, and misunderstood character. When Ethan finally comes home from the war he mistakes one of his brother’s children for another child that has since full grown in…