The enduring popularity of the Billy the Kid myth has less to do with the actual rise and fall of fair-faced outlaw William Bonney than his memorable big-screen portrayals—by dudes like Kris Kristofferson (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) and possibly Emilio Estevez (Young Guns, Young Guns II). The murderous Peter Pan of the Old West lived fast, died young (in a blaze of glory, of course) and showed that youth isn’t wasted on the dead. But even this unruly tween needed a role model, no? He gets one in the lighthearted, factually flexible rambler, 1943’s The Outlaw. Can I really learn how to be a man from a Kid? Read more »

Our Westerns obsessive is lured by the dead man’s necktie.

There wasn’t a helluva lot to do for fun in the Old West. It wasn’t like you could just log on to Frontier Facebook and spend hours on end there. On that rare day off from clerking at the general store, the best you could do would be to score a bottle of free hooch, get in a fight over a doe-eyed whore and, if you were really lucky, see (or better yet, take part in) a hanging.

Now, I don’t personally understand the appeal of seeing a man dropped from a scaffold and having his neck broken. Call it the bourgeois Brooklyn pacifist in me. But that bloodlust is at the heart of the 1943 high-plains morality tale The Ox-Bow Incident. When drifters Gil Carter (Henry Fonda) and Art Croft (Harry Morgan) ride into town, it is with scheming eyes that the townsfolk gaze upon their unthrottled necks. Not that they need much of an excuse to string someone up, but the locals are particularly on edge due to the murder of a local farmer. In no time, a posse is formed to track down and punish the killers; Carter and Croft, despite their reservations about the entire vigilante enterprise, have no choice but to tag along, if only to ensure that the bloodthirsty “deputies” don’t turn on them. Read more »

When you’re holed up in a saloon, surrounded by federal marshals, with no way out and no whiskey left, whom do you want by your side covering the bar entrance with the scattergun? Do you want a person you can trust, or just someone, in the memorable words of Josey Wales, “plum mad-dog mean”?  And what does your choice of wingman in the prairie-dog hole say about you? Trust is for sissies, you might say. Just give me the “fightenest” hombre around, no matter how unpredictable they are, and things will sort themselves out.

This is essentially the pickle that professional outlaws Cole Younger (Cliff Robertson) and Jesse James (Robert Duvall) find themselves in the rollicking 1972 bank-heist flick The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid. Younger is the de facto leader of the gang, a position owed mostly to his much-used bulletproof chest piece. Younger is a bright guy, but his judgment can be suspect, and he erroneously assumes that James shares his goal of getting rich and receiving amnesty for the gang’s crimes in “Missoura.” James, though, is ruled by a great and murderous passion, one that demands only that the “smug Yankee town” of Northfield “weep.” That sounds right unpleasant, but the question remains: Is it more becoming for a man to be ruled by intellect or rage? Read more »

Our Westerns obsessive returns. In his saddlebags: more belated wisdom, applied to the Brooklyn prairie.

Near as I can figure, being an adult in New York requires no more than engaging in an ongoing squabble for scraps of discount deli food and violently cutting off the occasional old lady for an open subway seat. (Get in the game, Grandma!)

The karmic bleakness of my “grown-up” existence was brought into painful, Blu-ray-level clarity after a recent trip out of town to visit a high-school chum. Dan is happily married, a homeowner with a little cowpoke on the way and is looking to buy a boat, for Duke’s sake. Not to belabor the point, but as we recovered from our Saturday-morning hangovers, the dude made us pancakes with blueberries he had saved in the freezer from back when they were “in season.” Did I mention that his darling wife’s closet could pass for a sizable Manhattan apartment?  Delicious, syrupy envy.

So you can imagine my level of personal crisis as I returned to the city, settled in to the small apartment I share with three other men and prepared to watch 1939’s Destry Rides Again. Just what could Jimmy Stewart teach me that my life-savvy buddy couldn’t? Plenty. Read more »

Our intrepid Westerns obsessive continues his Wednesday plunge into classic oaters and, hopefully, a bit more manliness.

“Once more, sir, you overrate your strength in supposing that I can be taken against my will,” says Raymond Massey, completely owning the role of John Brown in the 1940 Civil War horse opera Santa Fe Trail.

“Is that your final answer?” responds Jeb Stuart, a smirking military officer played by Errol Flynn.

“It is. We prefer to die here,” goes Brown’s reply.

Hard words, but these are hard days—days when a man ate sun-baked sod patties for breakfast and smoked hand-rolled sod cigarettes after lunch. (You had to enjoy sod—a lot.) Meanwhile, if such an ultimatum were put to me with the United States Army crouched at my gates, there is little doubt that my final answer would go something like: “Esteemed sir, you can take that foul odor emanating from my shorts as proof of my unconditional surrender.” Read more »

Our intrepid Westerns obsessive continues his Wednesday plunge into classic oaters and, hopefully, a bit more manliness.

A fella I know put it best when he told me that Kirk Douglas has only two onscreen emotions: suppressed rage and rage. Whether savagely retorting arguments in Paths of Glory or pillaging about in an eye patch in The Vikings, Michael Douglas’s old man had a butt-clenched intensity that must’ve cracked more than a few unlucky camera lenses. Contrarily, I am cut more from the cloth of early-19th-century American statesman Henry Clay, known alternately as “The Great Compromiser” and “The Great Pacifier.”

Although some things get my hackles up (e.g., people long out of high school who cite SAT scores in passing conversation), I am generally very slow to anger, often to my detriment. I say detriment because sometimes white-hot rage and murderous intent are laudable qualities—like when a no-good varmint rapes and kills your wife. This is the unenviable situation in which Kirk Douglas’s Matt Morgan finds himself, in the John Sturges 1959 revenger, Last Train from Gun Hill. Read more »