Bøger i Reel West serien

Director Sam Peckinpah was just starting out when MGM released Ride the High Country in 1962. He was a new kind of director: young, brash, and in a hurry to help the Western "grow up" by treating it with adult themes. Ride the High Country was something new and different, a changing Western to match a changing West. Stars Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea were old hands at this sort of thing. Ride the High Country gave the two veteran actors one last job to do and a chance to go out with some dignity.Ride the High Country helped the genre mature and adapt to turbulent, changing times. It launched Peckinpah's career by invoking the themes of honor, loyalty, and compromised ideals, the destruction of the West and its heroes, and the difficulty of doing right in an unjust world--themes developed to their pinnacle in Peckinpah's later masterpiece, The Wild Bunch.

Thelma & Louise, the 1991 film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, has been described as a road movie, a buddy movie, a feminist parable, and only incidentally as a Western. An Oscar winner for first-time screenwriter Callie Khouri, Thelma & Louise catalyzed a national conversation about women, violence, and self-determination in a Hollywood still shrugging off the West of John Wayne and in an America that still viewed women as accessories to the national mythology.In this latest volume in the Reel West series, Susan Kollin recreates this watershed moment for women's movies in general and women's Westerns in particular.

"Of those movies categorized as "Noir Westerns" by writers and historians, Blood on the Moon is at the top of the list. Produced during the height of the post-World War II film noir movement, the picture transplanted the dark urban environs of the city into the western iconography. Instead of being framed in a Monument Valley sunset, Robert Mitchum's lone horseman opens the picture as a solitary figure in a dark rainstorm as the Arizona trail replicates the rain slicked streets of Los Angeles. Mitchum's existentialist character of Jim Garry is at odds with the traditional Western hero. Labeled as a "loose rider," he possesses nothing but a borrowed cattleman's outfit. Garry's loyalties shift during his sojourn in an alienist domain where things are assuredly not what they initially seem. The chiaroscuro lighting during the claustrophobic interior scenes and those at nighttime (comprising nearly half the film) depict isolated faces bathed in a stream of light against a black background. Blood on the Moon is a classic western immersed in the film noir netherworld of double crosses, government corruption, shabby barrooms, gun toting goons and romantic betrayals. Blood on the Moon was the first" A" picture directed by thirty-four-year-old Robert Wise (The Set Up, The Day the Earth Stood Still, I Want to Live, Odds Against Tomorrow, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, The Sand Pebbles)"--

"Loners. Drifters. Men bent on vengeance. Laconic in manner, economical in gesture, slow to anger but deadly when provoked. Begun unofficially in 1956 with Seven Men From Now, made under the auspices of John Wayne's Batjac Productions, director Budd Boettinger and actor Randolph Scott's "Ranown Cycle"would eventually encompass six films, of which Ride Lonesome is both the best, and representative of the whole cycle. Visually and aesthetically, Ride Lonesome more than justifies New York Times critic Richard T. Jameson's assessment of the entire Ranown cycle as "the most remarkable convergence of artistic achievement in the history of low-budget moviemaking (rivaled only by Val Lewton's 1940s horror films for RKO)." Shot in a mere seventeen days for under a half-million dollars, Ride Lonesome is a masterpiece of cinematic minimalism, at once epic and austere. Running a tight 73 minutes, Boetticher turns traditional Western tropes into rituals of re-enactment and revenge"--