Timeout London has tallied up their favorite Westerns. A wonderful list filled with movies I never heard of, and a few I now want to see.

Readers of Oregon Movies, A to Z will recognize:

#45. Meek’s Cutoff (2010) Dir. Kelly Reichardt, written by Jon Raymond, shot in Harney County

# 44. Day of the Outlaw (1959) Dir. by Andre de Toth, shot on Mt. Bachelor

#23. Stagecoach (1939) Dir. by John Ford, based on a short story by Ernest Haycox

#11. My Darling Clementine (1946) Dir. by John Ford, with Walter Brennan

#6. Dead Man (1995) Dir. Jim Jarmusch, scenes shot in Grants Pass, Takilma, Rogue River, Applegate River & the Oregon Coast

Born in Budapest in 1912,  Andre De Toth came to Hollywood in 1942 after an apprenticeship writing and directing for the Hungarian stage. De Toth is famous for directing House Of Wax (1953) in early 3D while simultaneously  holding full membership in the elite ophthamologically challenged group known as the eyepatch directors: John Ford, Raoul Walsh, Fritz Lang and himself.

Not everyone in Hollywood was interested in the A list. Andre de Toth kept his head down and worked with relative independence on lower budgeted films. Both his Oregon films, The Indian Fighter and Day Of The Outlaw, were B Westerns made with big names (Kirk Douglas, Robert Ryan).

Hungarian directors made a large contribution to Hollywood. Charles Vidor and Michael Curtiz also came from Budapest. Andre De Toth died in 2002, leaving behind seven wives and nineteen children.

]]> http://www.talltalestruetales.com/2010/12/andre-de-tothoregon-filmmaker/feed/ 0 http://www.talltalestruetales.com/2010/12/tombstone-1993/ http://www.talltalestruetales.com/2010/12/tombstone-1993/#comments Wed, 15 Dec 2010 05:14:36 +0000 Anne Richardson http://www.talltalestruetales.com/?p=14170

Oregon grown Sam Elliott began his career in Westerns. This one is a daisy.

Sam “Moustache Champion Of The World” Elliott plays Virgil Earp, brother to Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp in this big budget restaging of the gunfight at the OK Corral. Both Elliott and Russell step aside, and let Val Kilmer’s tubercular, sardonic, ferociously loyal Doc Holliday saunter off with the picture.

Students of the Western can move from Tombstone to the other OK Corral reenactments. Some are straightforward, as in Wyatt Earp (1994) which starred Kevin Costner. Some are revisionist, as in Open Range (2003), also starring Kevin Costner, which tells a similar gunfight story, but from the point of view of the Clantons/outsider figures.

John Ford’s contribution to this Western sub-genre is My Darling Clementine starring Henry Fonda. My Darling Clementine is an Oregon film, by virtue of  Walter Brennan’s ice cold performance as Old Man Clanton.

Why do American directors love this story, and perpetually re-make it? Must have something to do with the fact that a) it is based on a real gunfight and b) Wyatt Earp ended up in Hollywood. Then there’s the death dealing/death seeking ex-dentist, Doc Holliday, who remains one of  the most charismatic enigmas in the history of the West.

I hereby claim Tombstone as an Oregon film, on the basis of Sam Elliott’s performance as Virgil Earp.

Born: Kansas City, Missouri, 20 February 1925.

Education: Attended University of Missouri, Columbia (three years).

Military Service: Bomber pilot, U.S. Air Force, 1943–47.

Career: Directed industrial films for Calvin Company, Kansas City, 1947; wrote, produced, and directed first feature, The Delinquents , 1955; TV director, 1957–63; co-founder of TV production company, 1963; founder, Lion’s Gate production company (named after his own 8-track sound system), 1970, Westwood Editorial Services, 1974, and Sandcastle 5 Productions; made Tanner ‘88 for TV during American presidential campaign, 1988; directed McTeague for Chicago Lyric Opera.

Awards: Palme d’Or, Cannes Festival, and Academy Award nominations for Best Film and Best Director for M*A*S*H , 1970; New York Film Critics’ Circle Award, D.W. Griffith Award (National Board of Review), and National Society of Film Critics Award, all for Best Director, for Nashville , 1975; Golden Bear, Berlin Festival, for Buffalo Bill and the Indians , 1976; Academy Award nomination for Best Director, New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Film and Best Director, for The Player , 1992; Academy Award nomination for Best Director, for Short Cuts, 1993. more

Will 2010 mark the return of the Western? This year will see the release of Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff and  Jimmy Hayward’s Jonah Hex. Both are set in the West – one is based on real events, the other on a comic book.

But Stagecoach, recently released by Criterion on DVD, is based on a short story by Portland author Ernest Haycox. The grandaddy Western of them all, it was directed by John Ford and starred John Wayne as the Ringo Kid.

From the New York Times:

John Ford’s thrilling western about a group of travelers whose Arizona stage ride lands them smack in the midst of an Apache uprising has long been spoken of as a metaphor for how American civilization tamed the wilderness. But as Ford and his screenwriter, Dudley Nichols, portray it, civilization is something to escape. This is, after all, a movie where the hero, the young and charming John Wayne as the Ringo Kid, is an outlaw who has just busted out of prison. We never doubt the Kid’s goodness, just as we never doubt the rottenness of the banker Gatewood (Berton Churchill), even before we discover he’s an embezzler. And it’s a movie where the figure usually treated with tender solicitude, the pregnant young mother Mrs. Mallory (Louise Platt), is a cold snob toClaire Trevor’s Dallas, the hooker who tries to comfort her during their journey. (She accepts the protection of the gentleman gambler, and former Confederate soldier, elegantly played by John Carradine.)

Ford’s “Young Mr. Lincoln,” also from 1939, recalled D. W. Griffith. It’s Griffith’s own inspiration, Dickens, whom you can sense at moments in “Stagecoach.” Nowhere more so than in the faces of the Women’s Law and Order League, a group of crones without a whisper of compassion among them, who in the movie’s opening force Dallas and a drunken Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell) out of town. The faces of these meddling biddies become windows into their sour, gnarled souls. They seem to have existed before you even see them, the way the illustrations that sometimes accompany Dickens’s novels only confirm the picture you have already drawn in your mind.

Contrast those faces with those of the Apaches, presented to us as the other, but not the objects of any real animosity. The Apaches are not alienated from their nature, as those self-proclaimed moralists are. The raid on the coach, the movie’s dramatic and visual highlight (featuring the astounding stunt work of Yakima Canutt), remains one of the most thrilling sequences ever put on film. But the real narrow escape comes at the end, as Dallas and the Kid ride off into the night with Doc Boone’s prayer that they be spared the blessings of civilization. That’s when you know “Stagecoach” is a work as deep in the American grain as“Huckleberry Finn.”

CHARLES TAYLOR, in the New York Times

Warning: this film is made in response to John Ford’s Monument Valley Westerns, and takes place in an upside down universe called Minnesota.

When Missouri terrorist Jesse James (Robert Duvall) tries to avenge the fall of the South by robbing a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, Cole Younger (Cliff Robertson, pictured above) goes after him, thinking he can head off the robbery.

Here’s the real bank. You can visit it today. The bullet holes are still in the walls.

Jesse James was first played on the big screen by his own son,  Jesse James, Jr. Other Jesses include Tyrone Power, Roy Rogers, Audie Murphy (twice), Robert Wagner, Kris Kristofferson, Rob Lowe, Colin Farrell and Brad Pitt.

If you are a huge fan of Jesse James himself, you would be better off with any of the above alternatives. Kaufman’s telling of the story focuses on the role played by Cole Younger.

Philip Kaufman’s staging of the shootout carefully incorporates eyewitness accounts of participants. Apparently the real life James gang was not prepared for a bank where people would shoot back at them.

Fans of vintage baseball – there is a long scene involving the game the way it was played in 1876.

This film is good for history nerds, graduates of Carleton College (who can snicker at the ways Jacksonville, Oregon does not resemble Northfield, Minnesota) and those who can appreciate Kaufman’s Oedipal struggle against John Ford.

I claim The Creat Northfield Minnesota Raid as an Oregon film on the basis of the location shooting.

I don’t know what “personal” is. Is a picture that is a Western personal because John Ford made it? And, if so, is it also personal for Budd Boetticher? And is it personal for William Wellman? Bob Rafelson, unconsciously arguing that Five Easy Pieces can be classified as a Western, in interview

Anthony Mann (born Emil Anton Bundsmann) came to Oregon in 1952 to make Bend Of The River, his third Western with Jimmy Stewart. The leading practitioner of Cowboy Noir, Mann made movie history by transforming Jimmy Stewart from a kindly, slightly asexual, leading man to a troubled, brooding, gunslinging neurotic.

Impact on his peers: The Searchers (1956) shows signs that John Ford liked Anthony Mann Westerns. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958) both build on the screen persona Stewart created with Mann.

Striding out of Ernest Haycox’s imagination, and into the hearts and minds of generations of movie going Americans, here’s John Wayne as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach.

Notice the genius of Ernest Haycox. He stripped all the themes of The Covered Wagon, by some counts the first feature length Western, down to the essentials. Instead of hundreds of land hungry pioneers crossing the Great Plains, we have one horse deprived outlaw, waving down a stage coach.

John Wayne (born Marion Robert Morrison) was a USC college football player when he began acting, not a cowboy. One contemporary of John Wayne went on record with his opinion that Wayne adopted many of his cowboy mannerisms from close observation of Yakima Canutt.

Here’s an encounter between Dick Cavett, as fan boy, and  John Wayne, the actor.

Famed stuntman Yakima Canutt is not an Oregonian. He did compete at the Pendleton Round Up, until Hollywood proved to be a more interesting challenge.

He performed the above stunt in Stagecoach.