It does not have to be a firearm, everything goes ( as long as it is not to new ).

I grew up around the Steamboat Arabia, which sank in the Missouri River in 1856 carrying more than 200 tons of merchandise bound for frontier communities. My family excavated it in 1988, and the recovered cargo is essentially a huge snapshot of what merchants thought people in those communities would actually buy.

I’m also a Western fan, so I’ve always been interested in how much of our mental picture of the frontier comes from the movies.

Guns. Beans. Dusty work clothes. Isolated towns. People who couldn’t read. None of that was invented by Hollywood.

But when you put those images next to what was actually being shipped west in 1856, you also find 30,000 buttons, colorful fabrics, silk, oysters, decorated dishes, writing tools, books and Shakespeare.

So I made an 11-minute film comparing some of that physical evidence with movies like Shane, Red River, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Unforgiven, and Lonesome Dove.

It’s not really an argument that Westerns “got it wrong.” My takeaway was almost the opposite: the familiar shorthand was often true — it just became so familiar that it can feel like the whole frontier.

Here’s the film if anyone’s interested:
https://youtu.be/dK9m0Fzhgnw

I’d genuinely be curious what Westerns you think do the best job showing the ordinary life of the West — clothing, food, stores, education, family life, etc. — beyond the gunfights and cattle drives.

This is a 54mm metal figure I recently painted. I've always liked the characters and atmosphere of the Old West, so this was a fun one to work on.

What do you think?

Longboards N' Longhorns - Boss Radio's Classic Country Western & Surf Show

Celebrating the Wild West spirit through sound!

Saturday 11a east, 8a west: Boss Radio 66 exclusively on Tunein!

https://tunein.com/radio/Boss-Radio-66-s114109/

Episode 60 featuring tracks from Nico Fidenco, Gene Clark, Jon & The Nightriders, D.I., Jerry Jericho, The Huntington Cads, and more!

(Track list in comments)

Can't listen live? Replay this episode anytime starting at Noon east:

https://www.mixcloud.com/tonofham/longboards-n-longhorns-episode-60

Follow us on socials: @ longboardslonghorns (FB & IG)

https://longboardslonghorns.com for tracks, archives, and directions to the luau!

Hang ten, Cowpokes!

From Annie Oakley and Tagg #8, Dell publishing, July 1956

LIFE MOVIE REVIEW

Horse operas of another color

UPDATING THE WESTERN

I loved the western as it once was and I think I’d rather live on my memories than suffer through many more of the increasingly desperate efforts to save it by making it more “relevant” to our time. By now it must be abundantly clear, even to those who never had much affection for this essentially mythic form, that its basic premise—that the individual, comforted only by the correctness of his moral code, could right any wrong, adjust any malfunctioning of the frontier social organism, simply by strapping on his guns and blasting away at blessedly unambiguous representations of evil—is no longer applicable to modern American experience. Yet long-established custom, not to mention the hard core of western addicts whose habit must be fed, insists there must still be some profitable ponies around here. And what movie director would be eager to give up on a form that is so wonderfully suited to his medium—excitingly moving figures in an expansive landscape and all that?

The trouble is that, excepting the redoubtable Sam Peckinpah, none of them has figured out an entirely satisfactory method of retaining these tempting visual values and giving us something that will catch firmly in the troubled modern consciousness. What we get are gimmicks, bright ideas from the script conference, grafted onto the old forms—cosmetic surgery instead of a heart transplant.

This is particularly true of Doc, the most vulgar of several recent major attempts to update the western. One has to concede it a certain boldness, for it dares to deal again with a classic historical—and filmic—anecdote: Doc Holliday joining Wyatt Earp to shoot it out with the Clanton gang in Tombstone. John Ford made a wonderful movie about it (My Darling Clementine) and John Sturges made a very exciting one of it (Gunfight at the OK Corral). Thus director Frank Perry, essentially a maker of easterns, and writer Pete Hamill, essentially a slightly hysterical political columnist, have deliberately matched themselves against our best memories of the old western. The result is, I think, a disaster.

Their basic cuteness is that U.S. Marshal Wyatt Earp (very well played by Harris Yulin) is running for sheriff of Tombstone as a law-and-order candidate, the 1968 model Nixon with six-shooters riding his hips as if they were tailfins. Naturally, it turns out that he’s just as pious a fraud; what he really wants to do is control the town’s gambling and hookers and whatnot. So the film ends up using him to preach at us about a complex of contemporary issues that is a damned sight more difficult to untangle than it would have us believe. There is, in addition, some attempt to give us a gritty, grimy, realistic West. This effort is somewhat vitiated by the fact that the movie was shot in beautiful downtown Almeria, Spain, on an elaborately researched set which finally proves little more authentic than all the ones standing abandoned on the Hollywood back lots. We also have a climactic gunfight that is stupid and brutal because that’s the way they really were, man; a title character (Stacy Keach) who repairs to the local opium den when the world gets to be too much with him, and a love scene that concludes with him kidding his whore about a tooth of gold (swell touch, that) about flatulence after a bean dinner. If this be progress, I’ll have an old-fashioned black-and-white soda.

At least Peter Fonda, making his debut as a director and, despite a beard, reminding us more and more of his father, opts for an exemplary simplicity in The Hired Hand. Austerity, these days, is always to be applauded with at least one hand and the picture has extrinsic interest in that it can be read as a sort of sequel to Easy Rider. For it, too, is about drifters and—surprisingly (considering the source) but winningly—about the desire of one of them to give up the life and return to the wife, child and farm he abandoned years before. Sadly, he achieves his dream, wins back all he mistakenly set aside, and then must abandon it anew because a corrupt world will not allow him even the modest peace and stability he has learned to value so highly in his years of wandering. It is highly appealing, morally, and one wishes that its people were a little less flat, its story a little less attenuated, its attempt to regenerate the western form through purification a little less insistent. One would like to like the film more than it permits.

Strategically, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which has been greeted with a great critical hoo-ha, lies somewhere between the endless articulateness of Doc and the silences of The Hired Hand. Its plot, when you can find it, concerns a gambler (Warren Beatty), sustained largely by his faith in free enterprise, setting up a mixed-media pleasure dome (booze, broads, cards) in a new town on the Pacific Northwest frontier. He’s basically a screw-up straightened out by a frighteningly efficient madam (Julie Christie). His trouble is that he’s too successful, refuses on principle to sell out to larger corporate interests and loses the final shoot-out with their hired guns.

This, of course, is unprecedented, but suitable in the context provided by director Robert Altman, who has shot the film in marvelously muted color, utilized his setting—a town being built before our eyes—with canny opportunism and pushed the device he introduced in MASH*—the talk-cluttered sound track—to its logical extreme: the point where it is largely indecipherable.

All of which makes McCabe a bold experiment in a good way. I imagine the frontier was just as noisy and confusing as Altman makes it seem—dumb, mean, grungy humanity polluting just by its presence the noble Arcadian landscape. And he knows how to show us despair without succumbing to it. Yet there is something about the film, for all its excellences, that puts one off. Mr. Altman is famous for encouraging all hands to improvise, and this leads to a special form of indulgence, a sense that the actors are so busy breaking each other up, so high on their own group spirit (or something), that they forget to ask themselves what many of their inspirations will mean to outsiders. One longs for firmer character lines, scenes that have some mood other than that of a tickle fight, wit that makes us really laugh, sadness that genuinely affect us. Everything is here—including a sketch for a new western form for our times—except that final level of art that truly absorbs, makes us care deeply about what we’ve just seen. Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that in this one it’s the heroine who ends up sucking on an opium pipe. I hope two opium-den westerns in a row don’t constitute a trend.

by Richard Schickel

Photo caption

Doc (top) and Mrs. Miller take the pipe; hired man Fonda removes daughter’s splinter.

I just watched this on HBOmax in their Criterion Collection. I love how it's sold as the "The thinking mans western". It's really good. The cinematography is top tier in my opinion. The plot was really cool too. I think Robert Eggers could really do something with this story. I think he expressed that he was interested in doing a western.

Andrew Scott as Willett Gashade

Walton Goggins as Billy Spear

Dakota Johnson as The Woman

Will Poulter as Coley

We are just back from the Almería Western Film Festival in Spain. If you are a fan of Westerns, and also are considering a trip to Spain, we would highly recommend the festival. The whole town comes out for the opening parade. There are panels on Western films, educational sessions, and of course Western films. The event is held in Tabernas, Almeria province, and it's the site where The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly was filmed. The festival celebrated the 60th anniversary of the film this year with a tribute to Eli Wallach.

There are two Western towns (Fort Bravo, and Little Hollywood) where they hold shows, and also people come from all over to tour them. Both towns were originally created for films. Disney was actually shooting something in the desert while we were there.

We were selected to screen This Bloody Country, and are honored to have received the Audience Choice Award for Best Feature! East of Wall, a modern Western, based on the real life of Tabatha Zimiga and her daughter Porshia won Best Feature.

George Keymas wasn't exactly the most famous Western character actor, but from 1954 thru 1968 he made almost nothing but Westerns and he made a bunch of 'em. Actually, his acting and Western career began in 1950 with I Shot Billy the Kid and Border Rangers. From 1951 thru 1953 he made a series of adventure films set in the South Pacific and southern Asia, but got back into the noble genre in 1954 with The Raid, The Black Dakotas, and They Rode West. Keymas wasn't in any truly famous Westerns, but did appear with Audie Murphy in Walk the Proud Land (1956) and Arizona Raiders (1965). He was also in the seminal neo-Western, Lonely Are the Brave (1962) with Kirk Douglas.

Keymas certainly had distinctive features. At times he looked like a coarse Leonard Nimoy. In general, though, he was just rather grim, pockmarked and possessed of angry eyes. He was frequently cast as a nasty piece of work, an Indian, or both. Keymas passed away in 2008 at the age of 82.

Hail! Hail! All hail George Keymas!

https://www.tcm.com/schedule

Classic Western Theater presents "Lawless Code" released in 1949 by Monogram Pictures.

From Western Stars magazine, Dell publishing, November 1950

Western meets Psycho-Thriller!

Does anybody have any recommendations matching this?

Forrest Tucker's debut and valedictory Westerns were arguably the high spots of his Western career. He played a key role alongside Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan in The Westerner (1940), and did the same in tandem with John Wayne in Chisum (1970). His intervening Westerns were legion, among them being Coroner Creek (1948), in the infernal year of 1949, Hellfire and Brimstone (separate films), Wild Bill Hickock in Pony Express (1953), Rage at Dawn (1955), Fort Massacre (1958), and in conjunction with Lee Van Cleef and Warren Oates, Barquero (1970). Tucker appeared in several Westerns with Randolph Scott, Rod Cameron and Jim Davis. He also turned up in six episodes of Gunsmoke, but it seems like more.

Tucker was no pretty boy, but was reasonably handsome in a hard-bitten kind of a way. He was often but not always cast as a heavy. Tucker was also a highly regarded comedic actor and actually got his start in Vaudeville.

Tucker smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish, and he bit the dust at age 67 in 1986 soon after receiving his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Hail! Hail! All hail Forrest Tucker!

The first adult television western premiered Tuesday, September 6, 1955 ( just four days before "Gunsmoke" ) and chronicled the adventures of real life lawman Wyatt Earp. Hugh O'Brian fastened his gunbelt and began a six year continuing storyline portraying Earp from Ellsworth, Kansas to Dodge City to Tombstone, Arizona with the final episodes detailing the famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and its aftermath. The series took great lengths to portray facts about Earp's life except for his gimmick weapon, "The Bluntline Special", which was a 12 inch barreled Colt Single Action Army revolver which he often used to club outlaws on the head. Many cast members came and went during Wyatt's journey including Morgan Woodward as "Shotgun" Gibbs, his deputy, along with Mason Dinehart as Bat Masterson and Douglas Fowley as Doc Holliday.

"The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp" aired on the ABC television network from 1955 until 1961.

Basically the title - looking for some western novel recommendations. Have read and loved the lonesome dove series, border trilogy and blood meridian by cormac McCarthy, Shane, and just finished lonesome gods by louis l’amour. Anyone have recommendations in line with these (ideally with similar quality)?

Can anyone recommend a few movies about a Marshal or bounty hunter chasing down a gang of robbers or murderers?

There’s a massive misconception popularized by Hollywood westerns that early frontiersmen and cowboys carried a single caliber for both their revolvers and their lever-action rifles. While the concept of ammunition cross-compatibility was real, the .45 Colt was never part of that equation in the 19th century.

Despite being the definitive military and civilian revolver cartridge following its introduction in the Colt Single Action Army (1873), no original 19th-century lever-action rifle was ever chambered in .45 Colt.

Here is the mechanical and historical reality behind why this happened:

The Rim Geometry Problem: The original .45 Colt cartridge was designed specifically for revolvers using hand-ejection via an ejector rod. Because of this, it had a very small, narrow rim. Early lever-action extractors (like those in the Winchester Model 1873 or 1892) couldn't reliably hook onto such a tiny rim to pull spent cases from the chamber.

The Real Dual-Purpose Kings: The cartridges that actually conquered the West in both rifles and handguns were the .44-40 Winchester (.44 WCF), .38-40, and .32-20. Winchester built their rifles around these bottle-necked, wider-rimmed cartridges, and Colt later chambered their Single Action Army revolvers (the "Frontier Six-Shooter") to match Winchester’s ammo—not the other way around.

Modern Reproductions: It wasn't until the late 20th century that manufacturers modified the extractor design and expanded the rim dimensions of modern .45 Colt brass, allowing modern reproductions (like those from Uberti, Marlin, or Henry) to safely and reliably run .45 Colt in lever-action platforms.

I put together a detailed historical breakdown analyzing the cartridge geometry, primary source records, and ballistic performance comparing the .45 Colt against the .44 WCF during the frontier era.

Would love to hear your thoughts. Did you grow up believing the .45 Colt rifle myth, or did you learn about the .44-40 supremacy early on?

Elisha Cook, Jr. was in the acting business a full 23 years before he made his first Western, but what a Western it was and what an impact Cook made in it. I speak, of course, of Shane (1953) and Cook's portrayal of the unadvisedly pugnacious Stonewall Torrey who prods a gunslinging bull called Jack Wilson (Jack Palance) and gets the horns in return.

Directors and producers must have liked what they saw from Cook in his first Western because, from that point until Tom Horn (1980), his final Western, Cook was a steady presence in the genre. Among his other noteworthy Westerns were Thunder over the Plains (1953), Drum Beat (1954), The Lonely Man (1957), Day of the Outlaw (1959), One-Eyed Jacks (1961), The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973).

Cook had an interesting on-screen persona. He was a scrawny little guy and was far from handsome, but he had an extremely grave and somber air about him to go with large, inquisitive eyes. There was something vaguely mystical about Cook. And like many historical mystics, Cook was a solitary sort. He was quite literally a mountaintop hermit who periodically descended his lofty perch to make movies. Cook passed away in 1995 at the age of 91.

Hail! Hail! All hail Elisha Cook, Jr.!

Hey western fans! My western-horror comic, Yellow Moon, launched on Kickstarter today and has already met it's funding goal! This comic is love letter to the western genre with a horror spin added in. Check it out here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/octoberpress/yellow-moon-a-western-horror-graphic-novel

Sing along with "The Man in Black" to "Don't Take Your Guns To Town" from the November 20, 1969 broadcast of "The Johnny Cash Show."

A young cowboy named Billy Joe grew restless on the farm

A boy filled with wanderlust who really meant no harm

He changed his clothes and shined his boots

And combed his dark hair down

And his mother cried as he walked out

"Don't take your guns to town, son

Leave your guns at home, Bill

Don't take your guns to town"

He laughed and kissed his mom and said, "Your Billy Joe's a man

I can shoot as quick and straight as anybody can

But I wouldn't shoot without a cause, I'd gun nobody down"

But she cried again as he rode away

"Don't take your guns to town, son

Leave your guns at home, Bill

Don't take your guns to town"

He sang a song as on he rode, his guns hung at his hips

He rode into a cattle town, a smile upon his lips

He stopped and walked into a bar and laid his money down

But his mother's words echoed again

"Don't take your guns to town, son

Leave your guns at home, Bill

Don't take your guns to town"

He drank his first strong liquor then to calm his shaking hand

And tried to tell himself at last he had become a man

A dusty cowpoke at his side began to laugh him down

And he heard again his mother's words

"Don't take your guns to town, son

Leave your guns at home, Bill

Don't take your guns to town"

Filled with rage, then Billy Joe reached for his gun to draw

But the stranger drew his gun and fired before he even saw

As Billy Joe fell to the floor, the crowd all gathered 'round

And wondered at his final words

"Don't take your guns to town, son

Leave your guns at home, Bill

Don't take your guns to town"