11 Jul 80 word min regarding film
Question Description
This question has two parts. Please be sure to answer both parts.
Read – (Below) Westerns (2006) in the Week 4 Electronic Reserve Readings.Part One: Imagine you are an actor on the set of a Western and you think your character should have a catch phrase to express your unique brand.Determine the type of character you are and then think of a catch phrase to pitch to the director of the film. Think about how your catch phrase reflects common character types found in the Western genre.
Part Two: Please end your responses and comments with open-ended and thought-provoking questions that assist further discussion on the topic.
WESTERNS
IN FILM CATEGORIES AND GENRES
FROM CHAMBERS FILM FACTFINDER
History
Many other film genres belong to the whole of world cinema, but the western belongs to America. It was on the big screen that the USA rewrote its history of frontier pioneers, wagon trains, savage ‘redskins’, gunslingers, ranchers and cattlemen. Western themes appeared in moving picture shows as early as 1898, when the real cowboy era was still a living memory. By 1908, cinema had its first western hero in Bronco Billy, played by G M Anderson, and its first notable director in Thomas H Ince, on whose film Custer’s Last Raid (1912) a number of Sioux were employed as extras. The first silent western features were hymns to the pioneer spirit, but soon it was the promise of white-hatted US heroes shooting from the hip on horseback that gripped audiences in exciting matinée serials and B-movies.
Although Cimarron (1931) won a Best Picture Academy Award®, it wasn’t until 1939 that the major Hollywood studios properly entered the fray. For the next two decades, the western was the leading Hollywood genre. After World War II, the psychological and social dimensions of the western expanded, with film-makers using colour and stretching the size of the screen. Native Americans began to receive more respectful treatment in the likes of Broken Arrow (1950), but by the 1960s, young audiences were rejecting this most traditional of genres. Italy’s more cynical, stylized ‘spaghetti westerns’ better suited new tastes, and Hollywood westerns had to become more graphically violent and critical of US history in order to capture the modern mood. By the end of the 1970s, however, the great names in the genre – John Ford, John Wayne, Howard Hawks – were gone, and the western struggled to find its footing in the era of the blockbuster.
The genre today
Despite the efforts of Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner, and attempts to revive the western as a teen movie (Young Guns, 1988), romantic adventure (The Last of the Mohicans, 1992) or existentialist independent (Dead Man, 1995), this old-fashioned genre is more out of favour with the paying public than ever.
Key figures
Kevin Costner (1955- )
Actor and director who keeps flying the flag for westerns in modern Hollywood, playing the title role in Wyatt Earp (1994) and making his Academy Award® -winning directorial debut with Dances with Wolves (1990).
Clint Eastwood (1930- )
Actor and director who left 1960s television show Rawhide to star in a trio of spaghetti westerns as a cheroot-chewing, nameless bounty hunter; on returning to Hollywood, he adapted the Italian formula for High Plains Drifter (1973), the first of many westerns – including Academy Award® -winner Unforgiven (1992) – that he has also directed.
Henry Fonda (1905-82)
Actor most often cast as a tough but honest symbol of integrity, but who played some darker, more complex characters in westerns such as Fort Apache (1948).
John Ford (1894-1973)
The greatest western director of all time typically used the genre to celebrate the community spirit of pioneers, settlers and cavalry soldiers, and turned the wind-sculpted rocks of Monument Valley into the genre’s definitive backdrop.
Sergio Leone (1921-89)
Italian writer-director who transported the lone cowboy into a grotesque black-comedy world in a series of spaghetti westerns which brilliantly used widescreen frames and depth of focus to create dramatic compositions.
Anthony Mann (1906-67)
Director whose film noir background informed his series of westerns in the 1950s – including several starring James Stewart – which featured darker psychological themes, violent action and tragic, conflicted heroes.
Tom Mix (1880-1940)
Actor and former rodeo rider who was the first cowboy star to treat the genre as stunt-driven, fantasy entertainment, more worthy of a Wild West Show than a history book.
Sam Peckinpah (1925-84)
Director whose hard-living lifestyle caused inevitable clashes with the studios, but whose westerns – including Ride the High Country (1962) and The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) – often feature ageing heroes and an elegiac mood.
Roy Rogers (1911-98)
Actor who, along with Gene Autry, put the singing cowboy on the western map in a string of B-movies and television programmes that co-starred his horse, Trigger.
John Wayne (1907-79)
Actor who became the western’s most enduring symbol of manly bravery and traditional US values through an on- and off-screen persona combining rock-like confidence, grouchiness and old-fashioned chivalry.
Quick on the Draw
Glenn Ford, star of The Fastest Gun Alive (1956), was indeed credited in real life with a remarkable gun-from-holster speed of 0.4 seconds – reckoned to be the fastest of all Hollywood western stars in the 1950s.
Key films
The Iron Horse
John Ford, USA, 1924
The first clues that Ford would become the genre’s major director can be found in this early tribute to the pioneer spirit.
Stagecoach
John Ford, USA, 1939
The confined space of a stagecoach shared by passengers from different social backgrounds contrasts with the iconic landscapes of Monument Valley and the drama of an Apache attack, in the film that made John Wayne a star.
My Darling Clementine
John Ford, USA, 1946
Ford downplays western myths and heroics by casting Henry Fonda as a peace-loving Wyatt Earp in the best cinematic depiction of the gunfight at the OK Corral.
Red River
Howard Hawks, USA, 1948
Hawks transfers his trademark studies of male camaraderie to a cattle drive, tapping into a darker side of John Wayne’s persona as mutinous rumblings drive a wedge between his character and his adopted son (Montgomery Clift).
High Noon
Fred Zinnemann, USA, 1952
The western becomes an allegory for contemporary Communist witch hunts, as the typically taciturn Gary Cooper plays a marshal abandoned by the townsfolk and his new Quaker wife when he asks for backup in an against-the-clock showdown.
Shane
George Stevens, USA, 1953
The biggest western hit of the decade stars Alan Ladd as a gunman-drifter – the US equivalent of a knight on horseback – forced to revisit his violent past in order to protect the frontier family he has befriended.
Johnny Guitar
Nicholas Ray, USA, 1954
This bizarre, Freudian-themed western matches the intensity of its acting with the vibrancy of its colour schemes, as traditional gender roles are reversed in a showdown between casino boss Joan Crawford and lynch-mob leader Mercedes McCambridge.
The Searchers
John Ford, USA, 1956
Ford puts forward a less forgiving view of the West than ever before in the story of Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), who can find no peace in civilized society after his niece is kidnapped – and, he believes, tainted – by Native Americans.
The Magnificent Seven
John Sturges, USA, 1960
This popular western remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) established a pattern for star-studded all-male ensemble films in the 1960s.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo)
Sergio Leone, Italy/Spain/Germany, 1966
The final part of Leone’s ‘Dollars’ trilogy sets the scramble for a cache of gold against an epic Civil War backdrop, building to the most operatic and extended stand-off – complete with swirling cameras and Ennio Morricone score – in the genre’s history.
Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una volta il West)
Sergio Leone, Italy/USA, 1968
As harmonica-playing Charles Bronson stalks black-clad Henry Fonda like a ghostly avenger from the past, Leone paints a wider picture of the end of the Old West and the coming of a new age in the shape of the railroad and modern ‘progress’.
The Wild Bunch
Sam Peckinpah, USA, 1969
The slow-motion violence of Peckinpah’s bloody, destructive elegy to the passing of the Old West had a profound effect on not only the western, but all action genres.
Heaven’s Gate
Michael Cimino, USA, 1980
The box-office failure of this epic tale of immigrants and powerful cattle barons ruined United Artists, and effectively killed off the Hollywood Western.
Unforgiven
Clint Eastwood, USA, 1992
Eastwood’s Academy Award® -winning study of the nature of violence returned to traditional western themes, telling the story of a retired killer who picks up his gun again to avenge an abused prostitute and restore order to chaos.
Festivals
Tombstone Western Film Festival and Symposium
Held annually since 2001 in the historic mining town of Tombstone, Arizona, site of the gunfight at the OK Corral.
Website: www.tombstonewesternfilm.com
Further viewing
The Covered Wagon (1923), The Big Trail (1930), Jesse James (1939), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Bend of the River (1952), Rio Bravo (1959), How the West Was Won (1962), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Django (1966), True Grit (1969), Soldier Blue (1970), The Shootist (1976), The Long Riders (1980), Tombstone (1993), Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Chambers Harrap Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd 2006
APA
Chicago
Harvard
MLA
Westerns. (2006). In Chambers film factfinder. London, UK: Chambers Harrap. Retrieved from https://search-credoreference-com.contentproxy.pho…
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