(Note: I
learned of the death of James Garner too late to include in this week’s
Round-up, but I will next week.)
NATIONAL DAY OF THE COWBOY NEXT SATURDAY! – 2014
This coming Saturday, July 26th, 2014,
will be the Tenth Annual National Day of
the Cowboy! Over forty events are
planned all over the country – in New Hampshire, New York, California, Texas,
Kansas, Nevada, Idaho, Indiana, Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico, Illinois, Ohio,
Mississippi, Nebraska, and Colorado! To
find the events nearest to you, go HERE.
In Griffith Park, the Day of the Cowboy & Cowgirl At The Autry will
feature a full day of cowpoke family fun, which in addition to visiting the
museum galleries includes trick-roping demonstrations, leather-craft,
square-dancing, drop-in roping, sketching with live horses at the corral,
scavenger hunts, hands-on work with cowboy tools, storytelling, screenings of
GENE AUTRY SHOW episodes, barbecue, and a root-beer saloon! It’s free for members, $10 for non-members,
$6 for students and seniors, and $4 for kids 12 and under.
Bethany Braley, Executive Director of the NDOC has
been spearheading the campaign, crisscrossing the country for a decade, and
she’ll be celebrating in Chatsworth, at the Valley
Relics Museum, 21630 Marilla Street 91311, home to an astonishing
collection of items highlighting the history of the San Fernando Valley. The $20 per-person event, a fund-raiser for
the Museum and the NDOC, will feature music by Steve Hill and by The Bob Staley
Band. Highlights include a 90th
birthday celebration for WAGON TRAIN star Robert Horton – with a special Western Legends Award presentation by
Martin Kove. There will be a celebrity
item auction, meet-and-greets with actor Dan ‘Grizzly Adams’ Haggerty and
daughter of Clayton ‘Lone Ranger’ Moore, Dawn Moore, as well as Ben Costello,
author of GUNSMOKE: AN AMERICAN INSTITUTION, author and NDOC spokeswoman Julie
Ann Ream. There will be an exhibit of
clothes and vehicles by legendary designer-to-the-western stars Nudie Cohn, and
the all-important food trucks!
RED RIVER – from the Criterion Collection – A Review
I’ve heard friends talk about a movie getting ‘The
Criterion treatment,’ but I never fully understood what was meant until now:
there is nothing a sane person could want in a video of Howard Hawks’ classic
RED RIVER that is not provided in spades in this set!
First, the quality of sound and image is without
flaw. Russell Harlan shot it, and I
believe it’s one of the most breathtakingly beautiful black and white movies
ever made. The set includes both DVD and
BluRay formats, and while the DVD is stunning, the clarity of the BluRay is
even more so. Made in 1948, it was
Howard Hawks’ 32nd film, but incredibly, his first Western –
although he did uncredited work on both VIVA VILLA and THE OUTLAW. Hawks’ ability to place you in the action is
unsurpassed. You will feel that you are
in the heart of a cattle drive, with exhilaration, monotony, exhaustion and
panic that were a part of them.
Based on Borden Chase’s novel, BLAZING GUNS ON THE
CHISHOLM TRAIL, which is included – yes, the whole novel – it’s the story of
two men and a boy, and the first great cattle drive. Thomas Dunsan (John Wayne) and Nadine Groot
(Walter Brennan), leave a wagon train to start a ranch, and are soon joined by
an orphaned boy, Matt Garth (Mickey Kuhn – whose character will grow up to be Montgomery
Clift). Fourteen years later, Matt comes
back from the Civil War to find Dunsan rich in cattle, but broke. There is no money in the south, hence no
market for beef, and Dunsan has decided to drive the cattle, on what will
become the Chisholm Trail, to Missouri.
That drive, and the character relationships with each other, drovers
like Harry Carey Jr., Noah Beery Jr., Paul Fix, Hank Worden, Chief Yowlachie,
and ‘the Hawks woman’ in the person of Joanne Dru, make up the bulk of the
movie which has been described as MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY on a cattle-drive.
The three leads are at the absolute top of their
game. Brennan is the worshipful but
still cantankerous unequal partner of Wayne, who still states his mind when he
must – a younger version of the role he’ll play to Wayne in Hawk’s RIO BRAVO a
decade later. Wayne’s Dunsun is so
icily determined to succeed at all costs that it opened up a new career for
him, playing heroes so mean and tough you hate to love them. Clift’s performance is fascinating in its
quirky intensity – he plays it somewhere between a war hero and a bashful
juvenile delinquent. John Ireland plays
Cherry Valance, by turns a rival and friend to Clift. With an overlooked but extensive catalog of
excellent western performances, Ireland would go on to play Billy Clanton in
Ford’s MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, Bob Ford in Sam Fuller’s I SHOT JESSE JAMES, and
Johnny Ringo in John Sturges’ GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL. In Europe, he was excellent as a hateful
villain opposite Robert Woods in GATLING GUN, and even starred as Ben
Cartwright’s brother in a failed attempt to revive BONANZA.
The two women in the film, Colleen Grey and Joanne
Dru, are terrific as the sort of tough and independent-minded but feminine
women that Hawk’s loved, though Hawks says he was disappointed in Dru: she was
a rush replacement for Margaret Sheridan, who showed up for work noticeably
pregnant.
A couple of once-big cowboy stars turn up for small
but striking roles. Old Leather is
played by six-time Wayne co-star Hal Talliafero, who was a popular leading man
going back to the 1920s, as Wally Wales.
The chillingly monotone Tom Tyler, who plays a cattle-drive deserter
here, was also a leading man in silent and talkie westerns, starred as CAPTAIN
MARVEL, but among his five roles with Wayne is best-remembered as nemesis Luke
Plummer in STAGECOACH.
The score by Dimitri Tiomkin is one of the finest
ever written for a western, or any movie.
Interestingly, he would use the theme again for Hawks and Wayne in RIO
BRAVO, with new lyrics to make it into My
Rifle, My Pony and Me. The editing
by Christian Nyby is uncluttered and almost invisible in its perfect
efficiency.
There are four discs, because there are two
different versions of the film, both presented in DVD and BluRay, the
pre-release version and the release version.
The main difference is that in the earlier, previewed version, frequent
shots of a hand-written journal bridge the sequences. Hawks decided to take the shots out in favor
of a narration by Brennan. The ending is
a bit different as well, due to the interference of Howard Hughes, and as the
story is told well in the extra features, I won’t give it away here.
And speaking of those features, you have on-camera
interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, Molly Haskell, and Lee Mitchell. You have an audio interview with Hawks,
conducted by Bogdanovich. You have an
audio interview with novelist and co-screenwriter (with Charles Schnee) Borden
Chase – and Chase’s life-story alone is worth the price of admission! You have a paperback of the original novel. You have a booklet with an essay by critic
Geoffrey O’Brien, and an interview with editor Chris Nyby. You have the trailer. You even have the LUX PRESENTS HOLLYWOOD
radio show, featuring Wayne, Brennan, Dru, and in Clift’s role, Jeff Chandler
(he does a fine audio job, but on camera, such a big guy would have been all
wrong!).
Simply put, this is the best
possible presentation of one of the finest movies ever made in any genre. I can’t recommend it highly enough. To link up with Criterion, go HERE.
WRITER JOHN
FASANO – THE MAN WHO SAVED ‘TOMBSTONE’ – DIES AT 52
John Fasano in HANNAH'S LAW
Properly,
much will be written about John Fasano’s career in horror and crime films, but
he also had a passionate interest in westerns and in firearms. He wrote frequent articles for gun magazines,
and in August, one of his last articles, about the weapons of Commodore Perry
Owens, will appear in GUNS OF THE OLD WEST MAGAZINE.
He wrote
three western films: THE HUNLEY (1999), about the Civil War submarine; THE
LEGEND OF BUTCH AND SUNDANCE (2006); and HANNAH’S LAW (2012). But for his most important contribution to
the genre, he neither sought nor received credit: he saved TOMBSTONE (1993). Writer-director Kevin Jarre had written a
brilliant but over-long script for the movie.
An inexperienced director, he soon ran behind schedule and over budget,
and was fired by the producers. George
Cosmatos took over the direction, but it was Fasano -- working in conjunction
with Cosmatos, and a cast that had committed to the project based on the
screenplay -- who reshaped the script without extensive rewriting, preserving
the essence of it, and saving the film.
Longtime
friend and associate writer C. Courtney Joyner says of Fasano, “He was a true,
devoted writer, a devotee of the industry 100%, and his legacy with TOMBSTONE
is going to stand.” Peter Sherayko, who
played Texas Jack Vermillion in TOMBSTONE, and worked with John on a half-dozen
other films, had three more co-projects in the works. “He was a friend for 26 years, and in this
town he was a friend I could always count on.”
When I
interviewed John for the Round-up in 2012, I told him, “An on-line list of your credits
included a passing reference that you’d done script doctoring on TOMBSTONE. Which
in my circle is like casually mentioning that you did a draft of the New
Testament.”
John laughed. “Thank you. That’s the script
that, when I get to Heaven, Saint Peter says, ‘He wrote JUDGE DREDD?’ And
I say, ‘No, no – look just before that.’ And he says, ‘He wrote TOMBSTONE? Come
on in.’ That’s the film that’ll get me into heaven, because everyone
I’ve ever met not only saw it; they bought it.”
You can read the rest of my
interview with John HERE.
AND DON’T FORGET ‘COPS & COWBOYS’ JULY 26!
On Saturday night, July 26th, head to the
historic Leonis Adobe Museum in Calabasas for the annual Mid-Valley Community Police Council
COPS & COWBOYS celebration!
There’ll be toe-tappin’ music, dancing, delicious barbecue, Black Jack
and Poker in the saloon, silent and live auctions and more! To learn more, read my write-up HERE.
‘GUNSLINGERS’ – 6 PART DOCUDRAMA, PREMIERES ON
‘AMERICAN HEROES’ TONIGHT!
Don’t know much about this mix of reenactments,
commentary and historical photos, but it features all of our favorite people –
Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickock, John Wesley Hardin
and Tom Horn – so I’ll certainly give it a shot! I haven’t been able to get any of the videos
to play, but follow the link and maybe you’ll have better luck! http://www.ahctv.com/tv-shows/gunslingers/gunslingers-video/gunslingers.htm
EGYPTIAN
TO SHOW TWO SERGIO LEONES AND D.W. GRIFFITH SILENTS NEXT WEEKEND!
On Friday,
July 25th, the Egyptian Theatre will play ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, on
Saturday, July 26th THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY. On Sunday, July 27th, the
Retroformat 8mm series of D.W. Griffith films continues. For details, visit their link: http://www.americancinemathequecalendar.com/egyptian_theatre_events
That’s a wrap!
Have a great week, and I’ll catch you next weekend!
Happy Trails,
Henry
All Original Contents Copyright July 2014 by Henry
C. Parke – All Rights Reserved
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