Western

The Wild Bunch is one of my favorite movies. It’s in my top five, for sure. Made in 1969, it’s an epic western directed by Sam Peckinpah, with a cast of veteran Hollywood actors: William Holden, Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson, Warren Oates and Edmund O’Brien. The Wild Bunch is a landmark work filled with artistic accomplishments in the way the film is edited and its revolutionary use of slow motion. Several great directors had already used these techniques for grea

If there was a DNA test to identify the family tree of my lifelong love of movies, I have no doubt that my strongest and deepest tap root would be the western. I was born in 1953, and the myth of the American frontier has always been there for me—a parade of iconic images, both on tv and on the silver screen. I have been obsessed with the genre as long as I can remember. once I even attended a 48-hour film festival that showed westerns and only westerns, with no break between

I was about 16- or 17-years old when I wrote a gushing fan letter to John Ford, the man who directed many of my all-time favorite movies—movies like My Darling Clementine, The Searchers and The Grapes of Wrath. As a teenager I didn’t yet knew that Ford was considered the greatest director of Hollywood’s Golden Age. All I knew was that I’d grown up watching movies “Directed by John Ford” whenever they were on TV, watching them over and over again with a kind of rapt, obsessive

In 1970, the movie MASH was a box office hit. Directed by Robert Altman, it defied all industry expectations of what a traditional war film should be. In this case it was the Korean War, and the film played it mostly for laughs, with a wild spirit of anarchy. The men and women working in the MASH surgical field hospital cracked jokes and played tricks on each other—just to keep their sanity in the face of so much pain and death. So, the following year, in the same vein, Altma

Made in 1958, Man of the West is a western directed by Anthony Mann and starring Gary Cooper, forever identified with his iconic role as the brave, noble sheriff in the classic movie High Noon. Audiences loved Coop, as he was called. As for Anthony Mann, during the 1950s he made his own mark on the western genre by directing five gritty westerns starring actor Jimmy Stewart. But when it came time for him to make Man of the West, Mann chose to work with Gary Cooper instead, an

Film critic Roger Ebert once said that the great comedy writer and director Mel Brooks is so uniquely likeable and funny that he has the ability to “say anything, do anything” and people will let him. For proof, look no further than Brooks’ 1974 box office hit Blazing Saddles. It’s a comedy western made up of such outrageously funny excess that it’s a good bet you’ll laugh out loud at the chaotic humor and firehose of jokes, no matter how irreverent, racist, sexist, and sat