Out of the Past

Great post about one of the best films ever made.

That's what I'd like to know

Filling in the gaps

If you’re anything like me and you’ve seen the 1947 movie with Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas, called “Out of the Past“, you think of it as one of the best of its kind, from an era when making good movies seemed to come easy. You’ve probably watched the thing through more than once, and each time you do, you wind up admiring the mood, the style, the characterizations, the dialog, and the acting; but as turns out to be true of quite a few other films of that time and nature, the plot’s sufficiently complicated that when it’s all over and done, you come away dissatisfied with how much of what was going on you actually understood.

I finally got around to reading the book the movie was based on (Geoffrey Homes’ “Build My Gallows High”), and I took account of…

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Stephen Crane and Audie Murphy

Great post!

That's what I'd like to know

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Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1871. He wrote his second and most famous novel, The Red Badge of Courage, at the age of 24 and died of tuberculosis four years later.

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The Red Badge of Courage is a fictional account of a young man who joins the Union Army during the Civil War and the things he goes through in his first couple of days of battle. Although it’s written in the third person, the reader sees everything through the eyes of its protagonist, Henry Fleming. One of the most striking things about the story is that Crane had had no experience in combat so his descriptions were based on things he had read or were told to him by others. In spite of that apparent disadvantage and the fact that the historical events he wrote about had taken place before he was…

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The Last Valley (1971)

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Culture Club, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?”

via Culture Club, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?”

More Audie Murphy is always a good thing.

50 Westerns From The 50s.

The Murphy family has given some significant artifacts — Audie’s uniform, guns, scripts and more — to the Audie Murphy/American Cotton Museum in Greenville, Texas. The expanded exhibits will be in place for Audie Murphy Days, April 20-21st.

The full article from Texas Insider can be seen here. And here’s more about the museum.

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Roy Rogers And Audie Murphy (And Eddie Arnold).

50 Westerns From The 50s.

All this debate about colorization and Shane in 1.66 is making me tired.

So here’s a picture of Eddie Arnold, Roy Rogers and Audie Murphy. We believe it’s from a 1959 episode of The Chevy Show. Eddy Arnold and Audie Murphy were Roy and Dale’s guests. A quick check shows that a copy sits in the Library Of Congress.

Thanks to Mike Richards for sorting this out.

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50s Westerns DVD News #150: The Unforgiven (1960).

I love this movie!

50 Westerns From The 50s.

On August 12, Kino Lorber will be bringing The Unforgiven (1960) to Blu-ray and DVD. It has an amazing cast: Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn, Audie Murphy, Lilian Gish, John Saxon, Charles Bickford and Doug McClure. It’s based on a novel by Alan Lemay, who wrote The Searchers.

Audrey Hepburn broke her back during this film, a few crew members died in a plane crash and John Huston abandoned the film during post-production (some say he was detached long before that). People’s opinions of this one are all over the place (I’m kinda in the middle), but one thing’s for sure: even up against heavyweights such as Lancaster and Hepburn, Audie Murphy really shines. He alone is worth the price of admission.

Thanks for the tip, Paula.

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Throwback Thursday: Audie Murphy, WWII Hero & Movie Star

From the battlefield to the box office, Audie was a true American hero.

Source: Throwback Thursday: Audie Murphy, WWII Hero & Movie Star

Audie Murphy: Role Model

Just discovering Audie’s films and he was a very interesting screen presence. Great blog!

Cinema Sojourns

Audie Murphy plays an angel of death in the semi-allegorical western western, No Name on the Bullet (1959), directed by Jack Arnold

Clint Eastwood certainly carved out his own genre niche as “The Man With No Name” gunslinger of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western trilogy but he wasn’t the first to craft his screen persona as an archetype of the tight-lipped, deadly frontier drifter. Audie Murphy had already perfected the prototype in No Name on the Bullet (1959), a much darker variation on the heroic lawmen the actor usually played in westerns.

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The Dollars Trilogy Pt 1: A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (United Artists 1964)

cracked rear viewer

If the American Western film wasn’t completely dead in 1964, it was surely on life support. Television had saturated the market with weekly oaters to the point of overkill. John Wayne’s starring vehicles were still making money, but the rest of Hollywood’s big screen Westerns were mainly made to fill the bottom half of double feature bills, from Audie Murphy outings to the low budget, veteran laden films of producer A.C. Lyles.

Meanwhile in Italy, writer/director Sergio Leone was as tired of the sword & sandal films he was making as was his audience. He had a notion to revitalize the failing western genre by giving it a new, European perspective. Leone grew up on Hollywood westerns, and wanted to turn them on their ear by showing a more realistic, grittier version of the Old West. Searching high and low for an American name actor to star, Leone was turned down by the likes of Charles Bronson, James Coburn, and Rory Calhoun…

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