WESTERN NIGHT AT THE MOVIES: AT GUNPOINT (**)
More melodrama than drama, AT GUNPOINT features Fred MacMurray as Jack Wright, the owner of the general store in the town of Plainview, who’s never handled a gun before but his very lucky shot wounds a bank robber who’s then shot dead by a local rancher. The robber’s brother, Bob Dennis (Skip Homeier), vows cruel vengeance.
WESTERN NIGHT AT THE MOVIES YELLOW SKY (***)
David Morrell chose the tough, tense and engaging YELLOW SKY (1948) for our April Western Night at the Movies viewing. This story of dust, lust and avarice set in what remains of the grim and gritty desert town of Yellow Sky concerns a mangy band...
Larry McMurtry, Author
I never met Larry McMurtry, but I was greatly saddened when I read that he died of heart failure yesterday, March 25, at the age of 84. He was the author of 29 books and 30 screenplays. He won the Pulitzer Prize for LONESOME DOVE and shared an...
WESTERN NIGHT AT THE MOVIES: FIRST COW (**)
This amusingly titled film tells the story of a couple of 1820s entrepreneurs, a cook named Cookie Figowitz (John Magaro) and King Lu (Orion Lee), a Chinese immigrant Cookie finds cold and shivering in the Oregon woods.
WESTERN NIGHT AT THE MOVIES: NEWS OF THE WORLD (** ½)
It was Kirk Ellis’s choice for our February film and he chose last year’s NEWS OF THE WORLD.
Based on the novel of the same name by Paulette Jiles, a National Book Award finalist (which I have not read), the story is set five years after the end of the Civil War in Reconstruction Texas still occupied by Union army soldiers.
WESTERN NIGHT AT THE MOVIES: HUD (****)
A contemporary Western and one of the best films about the changing West, HUD (1963) was my selection for our January meeting. It tells the story of a Texas cattle ranching family in bitter conflict over its past and future. Hud Bannon (Paul Newman) is a charming but womanizing scoundrel. His father, Homer (Melvyn Douglas), an honorable old Westerner, can’t abide his son’s reckless, selfish ways. Between them is Hud’s teenaged nephew Lon (Brandon de Wilde) who loves his grandfather but also wants to be like his uncle. And there’s Alma (Patricia Neal), the Bannon’s housekeeper. Vivacious and earthy, she brings some stability, though fragile, to the Bannon home.
