Westerns

The first movie my mother remembered seeing was a western. (This may have been back in the silent era!) She found it really sad.  Afterward she said to the girl she was with, "Didn't you find that sad?" and the other girl said, "No, it was badly acted!"

I wasn't always interested in westerns.  When I was little, trailers for upcoming westerns scared me.  But I've seen some on video.

A lot of westerns are boring, but there are some I love.  One is John Ford's The Searchers, with John Wayne on an obsessive quest to find his niece, captured by Indians.  It's a western with a sense of tragedy. (Other John Wayne westerns I like are Stagecoach--one of my favorite romantic movies--and True Grit.) I also like the western star Gary Cooper:  he's one star who doesn't date!  And Jimmy Stewart made some good westerns too.

Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch also has a sense of tragedy.  That one's about an outlaw gang who flee the U.S. and get involved in the Mexican revolution, with lots of graphic violence.  Robert Ryan as the gang's turncoat is actually the most sympathetic character!  There's a great shot where a bridge blows up and horses and riders fall into the river in slow motion:  it looks like a classical painting.  Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West are grandiosely entertaining.

TV westerns were mostly before my time.  I used to watch Gunsmoke reruns on Sunday mornings.  I suppose Little House on the Prairie counts as a western, but I always found that show cheesy and shameless, though it's based on a wonderful series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  And there's a wonderful miniseries of Larry McMurtry's great western novel Lonesome Dove, with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones at their best.