In the 30s and 40s Westerns were mostly a staple of B-minus movies. Cimarron, a generational tale from Edna Ferber, was declared Best Picture at the fourth Academy Awards convocation. De Mille's The Squaw Man and John Ford's The Iron Horse in the silent era. It began with the first smash hit at the nickelodeons, The Great Train Robbery, and continued with Cecil B. Whatever its historic validity, the notion of the big shootout kept Westerns going strong for the first 70 years of Hollywood cinema. ![]() Yet there he is, at the wrong end of Main Street, about to be perforated by the unerring trajectory and superior moral gumption of the man in the white hat.įans of the Western will say that trope simply proves the purity of the form: that it's a fable, a parable, a chivalric test of manhood. ![]() Surely he will not wait for a sporting opportunity to murder. Does that make any sense? Surely the villain will have had more practice, and with more live targets. Follow all the strange genre conventions in movies that the rich girl will fall in love with the poor boy, or that people will choose to express themselves by bursting into song surely the goofiest is the one at the heart of the traditional Western: that the good guy will be the best shot.
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