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Vanity Street.Broke and homeless, a young woman hurls a brick through the window of a drugstore, hoping to go to jail because at least “they feed you there.” Instead of arresting her, a kindly cop gets her a job as a showgirl at the theater next door; soon she’s wearing furs and fending off passes from top-hatted stage-door Johnnies. So it goes in lightning-paced B movies such as Vanity Street (1932), directed by Poverty Row maestro Nick Grinde. The plot may be flimsy, but Max Ophuls could have been proud of the long, breezy tracking shot that glides past the windows of the drugstore, packed with a motley crowd of chorus girls, costumed actors, and burlesque comedians. This casually terrific sequence is representative of the treasures that were to be found in the retrospective honoring the 2024 centenary of Columbia Pictures at this year’s Locarno Film Festival. Most of the films were short.

Notebook is covering the Locarno Film Festival with a series of correspondence pieces written by the participants in the Critics Academy.Illustrations by Lucy Jones.What happens to the body at a film festival? Over the course of the Locarno Film Festival, we tried—as much as decency allows—to investigate this very broad question. These responses seek to tie together the films we’ve seen with our embodied experiences of Locarno, both inside and outside of the cinema, grappling with the limits of our attention, our exhaustion, and our desires. Bitter Victory.Pierre Jendrysiak:Far from the expected glamor, attending a film festival can sometimes feel like the trek through the desert pictured in Nicholas Ray’s Bitter Victory (1957): a dreamy haze, almost a struggle. Under the heat of the Locarno sun, one wanders the streets, looking for a nice bartender to refill their water bottle, a little bit...

Robert Benton’s Bad Company does for the western what Bonnie and Clyde, Benton’s earlier collaboration with screenwriter David Newman, did for the gangster movie, only without that film’s veneer of star-powered sex appeal. The scrappier Bad Company consistently undermines the romanticized notions of the frontier that underpinned several generations of genre filmmaking. The film especially takes direct aim at two of our nation’s dearest held myths: the Horatio Alger notion of economic self-sufficiency, and the destiny of political expansion manifest in Horace Greeley’s famous dictum: “Go west, young man!”

The film is also decidedly of a piece with the year of its release in 1972, evident from the very first scene, wherein we see a young man dragged kicking and screaming from his home by blue-clad Army soldiers to be conscripted into the Union cause. The moment is given a surreal punchline by the fact that...

Clint Eastwood was already 30 years old when he landed his breakout role in the CBS Western "Rawhide." The actor had spent much of the 1950s getting by on bit parts in B movies (most notably the Jack Arnold monster duo of "Revenge of the Creature" and "Tarantula"), and guest roles on TV series like "Maverick" and "Death Valley Days," so you'd think he would've been thrilled. But Eastwood was displeased with his character Rowdy Yates, who, early on in the series' run, was a wet-behind-the-ears ramrod. At his age, he was eager to play a grown, capable man with enough years behind him to allow for a bit of mystery.

Eastwood's restlessness coincided with a shift in filmmakers' approach to the Western genre. Though maestros like John Ford, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, and Budd Boetticher had allowed for moral ambiguity in their movies, the vast majority of Westerns were white...

Nearly 40 years after he made his big screen debut with a brief appearance in the James Bond picture “A View to a Kill,” Dolph Lundgren is still best known as an actor thanks to a series of iconic roles in ’80s and ’90s favorites like “Rocky IV,” “Masters of the Universe,” and “Universal Soldier.” (More recently he’s been a fixture in the “Expendables” and “Aquaman” franchises.) Yet for the past couple of decades, Lundgren has been quietly forging a side career as an accomplished writer and director of low-budget action films, movies that belie their limited resources in ambition and craftsmanship. Like the scrappy genre directors of Hollywood’s past — filmmakers like Budd Boetticher, Sam Fuller, and Don Siegel — Lundgren uses the creative freedom of lower budgets to smuggle his personal obsessions and stylistic preoccupations into accessible entertainments that are as intelligent as they are lively.

Lundgren’s latest release,...

Ever since Martin Scorsese‘s “Killers of the Flower Moon” premiered at Cannes, critics have celebrated it as Scorsese’s first real Western after decades in which the genre’s influence could be felt at the edges of movies like “Casino” and “Gangs of New York.” The director himself sees it a little differently. As the guest on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast’s 250th episode, he said, “How can I make a Western? I come from the Lower East Side. The guys who made Westerns, when they came out [to Los Angeles], they were riding horses. The old cliché of the director wearing jodhpurs? Well, that’s what they did — you got around on a horse, you had to wear boots, you had to have a riding crop.”

Scorsese feels that the Western as he knew it in childhood ended with Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” in 1969, and that it’s...

There was no doubt in any IndieWire editor’s mind when selecting our list of the Best First Films of 2023: Felipe Gálvez’s “The Settlers” had to be on there. The otherworldly Western, which Mubi is opening in theaters January 12, is Chile’s submission to the 96th Academy Awards, and you can see why: It’s bold, uncompromising storytelling — for a story that needs to be told. Watch the IndieWire exclusive trailer for “The Settlers” below.

Set in the 1890s, “The Settlers” is about the genocide of the Indigenous Selk’nam people who lived in Tierra del Fuego, where the landscapes look more like Iceland than what you might first associate with South America. This is a history that hasn’t often been taught in Chile, and it’s a mark of the nation’s reckoning with its own history that its selection committee for the Oscars would pick...

The holidays are upon us, so whether you looking for film-related gifts or simply want to pick up some of the finest the year had to offer in the category for yourself, we have a gift guide for you. Including must-have books on filmmaking, the best from the Criterion Collection and more home-video picks, subscriptions, magazines, music, and more, dive in below.

Giveaways

In celebration of our holiday gift guide, we’ll be doing a number of giveaways! First up, we’re giving away My First Movie Vol. 2, a three-part ‘lil cinephile series by Cory Everett and illustrator Julie Olivi, featuring My First Spaghetti Western, My First Yakuza Movie, and My First Hollywood Musical.

Enter on Instagram (for My First Yakuza Movie), Twitter (for My First Hollywood Musical), and/or Facebook (for My First Spaghetti Western) by Sunday, November 26 at 11:59pm Et. Those that enter on all three platforms...

The end of the Hollywood studio system in the late 1950s is an oft-mourned loss by anyone who spends an inordinate amount of time watching Turner Classic Movies or browsing the tiles on the Criterion Channel. Hollywood still makes great movies all the time, of course, but what has been lost is the volume of modest and unassuming but expertly crafted mid-range genre films. What made the classical era unique wasn’t the groundbreaking art of an Alfred Hitchcock or a John Ford; every age has its titans, and one could argue that in just the past few months we’ve had several Hollywood movies as bold and distinctive as any in the industry’s past.

What the now-defunct studio system gave us was a robust slate of movies from directors whose names were not known to the general public — directors like Michael Curtiz, Mitchell Leisen, Budd Boetticher, and several...

In the opening scene of the 1957 western The Tall T, a man on horseback is spotted from afar by a boy and his father, prompting the elder homesteader to fetch his rifle. The audience shares their uncertainty, seeing this figure through a telephoto lens from a great distance, but when the stranger gets closer to the ranch, he’s recognized by the boy as an ally.

It’s the film’s hero, Pat Brennan (Randolph Scott), a fellow rancher, and the gun is therefore set aside. The Tall T is the first in a series of westerns grouped under the name Ranown (after producer Harry Joe Brown and Scott’s production company) that director Budd Boetticher made in the late ’50s and concluded with the release of Comanche Station in 1960, and in this inaugural scene, Boetticher establishes a crucial theme and visual pattern of this spiritually unified set of potboilers.

And now for something completely different: After attracting attention and appreciation with his debut feature, “Monster,” a riveting contemporary drama about a Black high school honor student charged as an accessory to a fatal shooting in his Harlem neighborhood, director Anthony Mandler continues to impress with his sophomore effort, “Surrounded,” an exceptionally well-crafted Western that spins a gripping, racially charged tale of suspicion, deception and survival in post-Civil War New Mexico. Echoes of Sergio Leone, Budd Boetticher and John Ford abound throughout the sturdy screenplay by Andrew Pagana and Justin Thomas. But the movie is less a genre pastiche than a multifaceted character study in which perfectly cast lead players Letitia Wright (“Black Panther”) and Jamie Bell (“Snowpiercer”) do most of the narrative heavy lifting.

It’s 1870, and ex-slave Mo Washington (Wright) is determined to start a new life by journeying westward. Disguised as a man for her own protection,...

In Budd Boetticher’s 1959 parable of how we remember violence, “Ride Lonesome,” Randolph Scott confronts the man who killed his wife at the very spot where he murdered her.

“That was a long time ago,” the killer said. “I’d almost forgot.” Scott’s reply? “A man can do that.”

So too can a society. Especially when it’s all too convenient to forget things so unpleasant they may shake our very sense of identity. Felipe Galvez’s Chilean Western “The Settlers” may remind some viewers of a Boetticher film when they’re watching it: following three men on horseback on a cross-country journey, it dramatizes questions of identity and belonging, and how these things can be written in violence. Most Boetticher-like, in a tight 98 minutes “The Settlers” says more than a lot of films double its length. It’s one of the most chilling art-Westerns to come along in some time,...

July 2023 will sizzle no matter where you live, judging by what the Criterion Collection plans to release that month. Martin Scorsese's After Hours, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, and Carl Franklin's One False Move are all significant films that are getting upgrades to 4K Uhd editions, as are the five films that comprise The Ranown Westerns: Five Films Directed by Budd Boetticher. These are all essential purchases for your personal movie library, if you don't already own one or more of them. In that case, it becomes a question that you will need to consider: is it worth the upgrade to 4K? We will see: are you a fan of Westerns? Then Boeeticher is one of the the finest to ever direct them. Do you rejoice...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

How many movies are roundly better than Martin Scorsese’s After Hours? Whatever the number (seriously: six?) it is now surely among the greatest in the Criterion Collection, which will add a 4K Uhd edition in July––sufficiently packed with features, among them a new interview between Scorsese and Fran Lebowitz, who I assume will expand on her main talking point (New York used to be different). Breathless, as established a title as they have, is also getting an upgrade that fortunately retains all features from their earlier release, while Carl Franklin’s One False Move scores 2,160 pixels.

But the most purely sizable July offering is their Budd Boetticher 4K Uhd set, Criterion’s first such, boasting five films: The Tall T, Decision at Sundown, Buchanan Rides Alone, Ride Lonesome, and Comanche Station. Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman “only” getting Blu-ray seems small in comparison, but few restorations from...

Quentin Tarantino crowned Sergio Corbucci as the second-best director of Italian westerns, but our vote goes to Sergio Sollima — this is the most satisfying Spaghetti oater outside of the Leone corral. In his first starring role, Lee Van Cleef is lawman Jonathan Corbett, who pursues Tomas Milian’s killer into Mexico for an American millionaire. Political screenwriter Franco Solinas helped cook up the story, which pitches frontier ethics against ‘establishment’ corruption. The two-disc special edition presents the show in 4 versions, if we count a clever English-Italian language hybrid.

The Big Gundown

Region B Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1967 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 110, 90, 95 min. / La resa dei conti / Street Date February 13, 2023 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £22.99

Starring: Lee Van Cleef, Tomas Milian, Walter Barnes, Nieves Navarro, Gérard Herter, Manolita Barroso, Robert Camardiel, Ángel del Pozo, Luisa Rivelli, Luis Barboo, Benito Stefanelli.

Cinematography: Carlo Carlini

Set decorators: Carlo Leva, Carlo Simi, Nicola Tamburo

Costumes: Carlo...

There is no more precarious moment in a movie star's career than the day they wake up, flush with box office success, and declare, "What I'd really like to do is direct!" Slightly less dangerous is a star's inclination to produce –- i.e., to diversify their career by generating material that reflects their taste or broadens their brand.

Two years after the end of World War II, John Wayne, who'd sat out the civilization-saving conflict while colleagues like James Stewart and Henry Fonda served, realized he was the biggest star in Hollywood and ought to start calling his own shots. Rather than direct, he found a quaint Western called "Angel and the Badman" written by James Edward Grant, in which a Quaker woman nurses a wounded gunfighter back to health. For an actor who'd made his name as a kickass, take-charge hero in Westerns and war movies, this was an oddly anti-violent movie.

The closing title card of the new Western Dead for a Dollar includes the dedication “In Memory of Budd Boetticher.” Had director Walter Hill worked during Boetticher’s era, he too may have churned out exceptional, modestly budgeted Westerns at a clip of roughly one a year, like Boetticher did for Columbia Pictures in the 1950s. Instead, Hill has settled for being one of a handful of contemporary repeat practitioners of the Western, a disparate group ranging from Clint Eastwood to the Coen Brothers, Kevin Costner to Quentin Tarantino. Hill’s first Western, The Long Riders—a retelling of the Jesse James story that […]

The post “Don’t Shoot Too Many Takes”: Walter Hill on Dead for a Dollar first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Once the biggest staple of Hollywood filmmaking, the Western has seen ebbs and flows through the history of cinema. In recent decades you’d be hard-pressed to find many examples in multiplexes near you—especially ones that fit the traditional mold of the genre, rather than tongue-in-cheek revisionist takes. It’s fitting, then, that it would be Walter Hill who would deliver a new gift onto audiences eager for a journey into that gunslinging world.

Hill has said that all his films are Westerns, which can certainly be seen for anyone familiar with his oeuvre—from his directorial debut in 1975’s Hard Times through 1987’s neo-Western Extreme Prejudice, his own revisionist streak of Westerns in the early ‘90s with Geronimo: An American Legend and Wild Bill, and even into 21st century actioners like Bullet to the Head. Whether he’s in the traditional milieu of the genre or not, those...

Walter Hill’s Dead for a Dollar is the kind of movie they don’t make anymore. A rough and tumble Neo-western, despite a modest budget Hill’s assembled a strong Western programmer (read my review). He’s helped along by a top-shelf cast, including Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, Benjamin Bratt, and Warren Burke. I recently spoke to all five guys in one interview block as part of the junket for the movie.

Christoph Waltz, who plays the bounty hunter hero Max Borlund is, as always, an eccentric interview, with a comment about his unique cowboy hat leading to a bit of a rant about hat makers and the chemicals they used to make them. Interesting.

As Joe Cribbens, Borlund’s lifelong enemy, Willem Dafoe discusses his first time making a western, while Walter Hill explains the movie’s dedication to his mentor, Western director Budd Boetticher. Meanwhile, the awesome...

Walter Hill is back with "Dead for a Dollar." The influential writer and director behind "48 Hrs," "Streets of Fire," Southern Comfort," "The Driver," and "The Warriors" has returned with another western. For Hill, all of his movies, in one way or another, are westerns. He tends to follow cowboys whether in the streets of New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, or in this case, Mexico. 

Hill's latest follows a bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) sticking to his guns, both morally and literally. It's an ensemble film also starring Benjamin Bratt, Rachel Brosnahan, Willem Dafoe, and Warren Burke. Hill doesn't delight in the times he's depicting, only in the genre. "Dead for a Dollar" is now in good company with Hill's previous big-screen westerns, "Geronimo: An American Legend," "The Long Riders," and "Wild Bill." Recently, the filmmaker talked to us about his love of westerns and his exceptional contributions to the genre.

Plot: In 1897, a veteran bounty hunter, Max Borlund (Christoph Waltz), is hired to find Rachel Price (Rachel Brosnahan), the wife of a businessman who’s supposedly been abducted by a black soldier, Elijah Jones (Brandon Scott) and is now being held for ransom. He soon discovers that Rachel is far from a captive and is with Elijah by choice, putting him on a collision course with her husband, plus a Mexican land baron named Tiberio Vargas (Benjamin Bratt). He also has to worry about his sworn enemy, Joe Cribbens (Willem Dafoe), who’s working for Vargas and is bent on killing the bounty hunter.

Review: Walter Hill’s Dead for a Dollar is an interesting Neo-western with an agreeably off-kilter cast and a solid premise. Hill’s one of the few directors still working in the sphere, directing a handful of solid, modern westerns, including The Long Riders, Wild Bill and Geronimo: An American Legend.

(From left) Warren Burke, Rachel Brosnahan, and Christoph Waltz in Walter Hill’s Dead For A Dollar Photo: Quiver Distribution Director Walter Hill is 80 years old, so unless he cranks out something real good real fast, his most widely remembered directing effort will be the 1982 Eddie Murphy-Nick Nolte action comedy 48 Hrs.

This review originally ran Sept. 6, 2022, for the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

Maybe you can judge a film by its title. Consider “Dead for a Dollar:” It certainly sounds like a Western, doesn’t it? The “dollar” might call to mind some of the classics of the genre, while the “dead” at least promises a few good shoot-outs, a bit of bloody fun.

Only taken together, the name does have a somewhat frictionless quality — “timeless,” if you want to be generous, “generic” if you don’t. Which makes it so perfectly apt for Walter Hill’s perfectly perfunctory new film.

The fact that the filmmaker behind “48 Hrs.” and “The Warriors” will be honored with a career achievement prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival no doubt pushed his latest, low-budget Western towards such a tony debut, while the cast of Willem Dafoe and...

(From left) Rachel Brosnahan, Christoph Waltz, and Warren Burke in Walter Hill’s Dead For A Dollar Photo: Quiver Distribution A disciple of Sam Peckinpah and Budd Boetticher—the latter of whom he dedicates Dead For A Dollar to—Walter Hill has been a fixture of American filmmaking for more than five decades.

In his 1962 essay, "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art," critic Manny Farber comes firmly down on the side of filmmakers and actors who are completely at odds with the zeitgeist or trends, and nibble away at the edges of genre and ever present B-Film tropes and ideas with skill and verve. He called this kind of filmmaking Termite Art. I am not sure what position Farber would take on Walter Hill's latest film, a simmering small budgeted Western shot in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a talented and diverse set of character actors all spinning slowly, spokes on familiar axis of the classic American Western. Dead for A Dollar is dedicated to Budd Boetticher, perhaps the ultimate...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Henry Silva, an actor with a striking look who often played villains and had credits in hundreds of films including “Ocean’s Eleven” and “The Manchurian Candidate,” died of natural causes Wednesday at the Motion Picture Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, Calif., his son Scott confirmed. He was 95.

One of Silva’s most memorable roles came in John Frankenheimer’s classic thriller “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962), in which he played Chunjin, the Korean houseboy for Laurence Harvey’s Raymond Shaw — and an agent for the Communists — who engages in a thrilling, well-choreographed martial arts battle with Frank Sinatra’s Major Bennett Marco in Shaw’s New York apartment.

Silva appeared in a number of other movies with Sinatra, including the original, Rat Pack-populated “Ocean’s Eleven” (1960) with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., where he was one of the 11 thieves, and 1962 Western “Sergeants 3.”

His death was...

For many years now Venice has been a respectful platform for those big-name directors of the 1970s and early ’80s who are happy to go back into the fray long after those juicy studio budgets dried up: Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, Paul Verhoeven, John Carpenter and — to a lesser extent — George Romero all found a home here for their late-period passion projects. Walter Hill, now 80, joins their ranks with an improbably youthful horse opera, and while it shows up the limitations of both writing and shooting a Western in the modern age, it’s nevertheless a wickedly enjoyable genre romp and full of violent surprises.

Hill dedicates his film to Budd Boetticher, which is a shame as it has already given critics permission not to think any harder...

The title of Walter Hill’s “Dead for a Dollar” makes it sound like a spaghetti Western, and the picture opens with stunning vistas and a wistfully valorous neo-Morricone score that gives you the impression — maybe the hope — that it will be. It ends on a very different note: a series of titles explaining, with precise dates and details, what happened to each of the main characters, as if the film were based on a true story. It’s the “American Graffiti” gambit of treating fictional characters as though they were real, only in this case it ends up revealing something essential about the drama we’ve been watching. Namely, how it could be so avid, specific, and scrupulously carpentered…yet remote.

Hill, who is now 80 but still directs with his lean-and-mean vigor and classical rawhide stoicism, builds “Dead for a Dollar” around a vintage confrontation between two men: Max Borlund,...

Budd Boetticher’s excellent semi-autobiographical film may be Hollywood’s most uncondescending depiction of high-end Mexican culture. Robert Stack is the pushy Gringo who only slowly understands Latin society’s definitions of loyalty and machismo; his rocky relationship with Joy Page’s cultured señorita is as important as the bullfighting story with Gilbert Roland. It’s Boetticher’s best film, presented for the first time in two encodings, the 87-minute release version and the UCLA Film and TV Archive’s restoration of the full 124-minute seen South of the Border. The extra commentary and featurettes are welcome too.

Bullfighter and the Lady

Region B Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1951 / B&w / 1:37 flat Academy / 124 + 87 min. / Torero, Muerte en la arena, Tarde de toros, L’amante del torero, El torero y la dama, Death in the Sands / Street Date , 2022 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £15.99

Starring: Robert Stack, Joy Page, Gilbert Roland, Virginia Grey,...

Wendell Corey plays bank clerk Leon Poole whose mild-mannered demeanor disguises a ruthless killer. Joseph Cotten plays the detective who killed Poole’s wife and makes his own wife a target for the deranged Poole. Director Budd Boetticher and cinematographer Lucian Ballard took a break from sagebrush dramas to shoot this atmospheric crime picture on the mean streets of L.A. in just 15 days—those authentic locales and that harried schedule made this 1956 thriller even more riveting.

The post The Killer is Loose appeared first on Trailers From Hell.

Kino’s Noir boxes offer interesting noir-adjacent crime and mystery pix. This seventh return to the well of darkness brings up the organized crime ‘meller’ Chicago Confidential with Brian Keith and the more ambitious The Boss, starring John Payne and written by Dalton Trumbo. The third show The Fearmakers is a real oddity. Starring Dana Andrews and directed by Jacques Tourneur, it’s a political conspiracy tale about manipulating opinions with fraudulent polls. It sounds a lot like the fractured state of modern America, 65 years later. With commentaries by Jason A. Ney and Alan K. Rode.

Film Noir the Dark Side of Cinema VII

The Boss, Chicago Confidential, The Fearmakers

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1956-1958 / B&w / Street Date June 7, 2022 / 249 min. / available through Kino Lorber / 49.95

Starring: John Payne, Gloria McGehee, Brian Keith, Beverly Garland, Dana Andrews, Marilee Earle.

Directed by Byron Haskin, Sidney Salkow, Jacques Tourneur

Kino treads the dark...

It’s the final theatrical western of the legendary director Budd Boetticher, and he also wrote the screenplay! Ace cinematographer Lucien Ballard was behind the camera, and Audie Murphy produced and plays Jesse James! This disc release is a gift to die-hard western fans that want to see everything, but the film itself remains a mystery — oddly nihilistic and cruel, but also awkward, with amateurish acting, slack direction and a TV-movie appearance. The one gotta-see factor for completists is Victor Jory’s three scenes as Judge Roy Bean: he nails the sleazy, gross-out charm of the Texas threat to civilization, chewing the scenery like a pro.

A Time for Dying

Region Free Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1969 (1982) / Color / 1:85 widescreen + 1:37 Academy / 72 min. / Zeit zum Sterben / Street Date March 22, 2022 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £15.99

Starring: Richard Lapp, Anne Randall, Robert Random, Beatrice Kay, Victor Jory, Audie Murphy, Burt Mustin, Peter Brocco,...

The Stranger Wore a GunIn the pantheon of great Western collaborations sits three mantels: John Wayne and John Ford, James Stewart and Anthony Mann, Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher. There is another mantelpiece, unvarnished and dirty from disuse: Randolph Scott and André De Toth. Does it belong there? Elements, directions, suits in a deck—the trappings of the West always come in fours. Why does this cycle of films lack a reputation, good standing, or even a quick moniker? Skronky where Ford is rhythmic, constricted where Mann is open, jagged where Boetticher is smooth, the De Toth films, six all told with Scott, give, rather than a cohesive persona or moral treatise, a cluster of pictures and ideas on a centerless society. Brass lanterns blown dark, drawn-out fistfights, flaming wagons streaking across the plains, gunfights in pitch-black bars; these images run across the sextet, fogging the hopeful vision of the American West.

There is a distinct flavor of the brawnily austere Westerns that comprise Budd Boetticher’s cult-favorite Ranown Cycle — and more than a hint of another showcase for the great Randolph Scott, Sam Peckinpah’s “Ride the High Country” — in director Michael Feifer’s “Last Shoot Out,” a small-budget indie that aims to please the currently underserved niche audience for oaters.

To be sure, no one will ever confuse this slow-paced concoction with one of the classics that so obviously influence it. But it’s definitely a cut above some of the recent streaming-ready attempts to sustain the genre — indeed, it’s a marked improvement over Feifer’s own “Catch the Bullet,” released just last September — and it features a ferociously nasty turn by Bruce Dern in a role that recalls a character from yet another golden oldie, Walter Brennan’s vicious Old Man Clanton in “My Darling Clementine.”

Dern doesn...

The holidays are upon us, so whether you looking for film-related gifts or simply want to pick up some of the finest the year had to offer in the category for yourself, we have a gift guide for you. Including must-have books on filmmaking, the best from the Criterion Collection, Kino Lorber, and more home-video picks, subscriptions, magazines, music, and more, dive in below.

4K & Blu-ray Box Sets

There’s no better gift for a cinephile than a beautiful Blu-ray box set. Leading the pack in this regard is a collection that actually arrived much earlier this year: World of Wong Kar-wai, the long-awaited Criterion release that features the Hong Kong master’s most celebrated works, along with the first U.S. release of his short The Hand. Another must-own trio of sets from Criterion: Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films, featuring four bold films from the late director, The...

MGM sends James Stewart and Anthony Mann to Colorado high country locations for their third big-ticket western, a tight & tense psychological drama with a select cast: Janet Leigh, Robert Ryan, Ralph Meeker and Millard Mitchell. Stewart’s anguished bounty hunter is a sick man on a mission he knows is self-destructive and just plain wrong; it’s the actor’s most fraught western performance. The landscape itself is psychological, with treacherous rocky outcroppings and a dangerous river. Even more impressive is the new restoration from Technicolor elements: this is one of the most beautiful westerns yet out on disc.

The Naked Spur

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1953 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 91 min. / Available at Amazon.com / Street Date September 21, 2021 / 21.99

Starring: James Stewart, Janet Leigh, Robert Ryan, Ralph Meeker, Millard Mitchell.

Cinematography: William C. Mellor

Art Directors: Cedric Gibbons, Malcolm Brown

Film Editor: George White

Production Illustrator: Mentor Heubner

Stunt Performers: Virginia Bougas, Ted Mapes,...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Bisbee ’17 (Robert Greene)

Over the past decade, Robert Greene has carved out a place as one of the most vital American documentarians working today, and with Bisbee ’17, he has produced perhaps his most accomplished work to date. A chronicle of the centennial reenactment of the forced deportation of mining workers that occurred in the eponymous Arizona town, the film emerges as a clear-eyed, blistering look into contemporary political divisions through an entire spectrum of viewpoints, while still possessing some of the most lucid and impressive filmmaking of 2018. – Ryan S.

Where to Stream: Mubi (free for 30 days)

The Evening Hour (Braden King)

Has there been a great feature made about the opioid crisis in America? Director Braden King is determined to answer the...

Next month’s lineup at The Criterion Channel has been unveiled, featuring no shortage of excellent offerings. Leading the pack is a massive, 20-film retrospective dedicated to John Huston, featuring a mix of greatest and lesser-appreciated works, including Fat City, The Dead, Wise Blood, The Man Who Would Be King, and Key Largo. (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre will join the series on October 1.)

Also in the lineup is series on the works of Budd Boetticher (specifically his Randolph Scott-starring Ranown westerns), Ephraim Asili, Josephine Baker, Nikos Papatakis, Jean Harlow, Lee Isaac Chung (pre-Minari), Mani Kaul, and Michelle Parkerson.

The sparkling new restoration of La Piscine will also debut, along with Amores perros, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth, Cate Shortland’s Lore, both Oxhide films, Moonstruck, and much more.

See the full list of August titles below and more on The Criterion Channel.

Abigail Harm,...

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By John M. Whalen

In “Wings of the Hawk” (1953), Van Heflin stars as Irish Gallagher, an American mining for gold down in Mexico. He and his partner Marco (Mario Siletti) are ripped off by local military ruler Coronel Paco Ruiz (George Dolenz), who takes over the mine and kills Marco. Irish barely manages to escape on horseback and is rescued by insurrectionists led by Raquel Noriega (Julia Adams), who gets a bullet in the shoulder for her trouble. Irish patches her up in exchange for his freedom and romance rears its ugly head. Jealousy also flares when revolutionary leader Arturo Torres (Rudolpho Acosta), who had been her lover, sees what’s going on. Enter Pascual Orozco who asks for Arturo’s help in taking Ciudad Juarez. They’ll need $5,000 to buy 200 rifles but the revolutionaries have no money. However, they come up with a brainstorm.

Film history is filled with notable directors who made a Western after establishing themselves in other genres. That list includes Robert Altman (“McCabe and Mrs. Miller”), Charlie Chaplin (“The Gold Rush”), Ethan and Joel Coen (“True Grit”), John Huston (“The Unforgiven” 1960), Louis Malle (“Viva Maria”), Alejandro G. Inarritu (“The Revenant”), Sydney Pollack (“Jeremiah Johnson”) and Sam Raimi (“The Quick and the Dead”).

Joining that lofty roster is Paul Greengrass, with Universal’s “News of the World,” starring Tom Hanks and Helena Zengel. This horse opera, as Variety used to call the genre, follows Greengrass’ high-adrenaline movies such as “United 93,” “Captain Phillips,” three “Bourne” films and the riveting 2018 fact-based “22 July,” about a 2011 terrorist attack in Norway.

Greengrass tells Variety, ” ’22 July,’ which is on a dark subject — right-wing extremists — left me with a question as a parent: What is the road out of this bitter division that we’re in? I...

Director Budd Boetticher made dozens of movies ranging from romantic comedies and noirs to science fiction and prison pictures, but he’s long been known primarily for the seven Westerns he made with Randolph Scott between 1956 and 1960. While those films are all terrific and worthy of the praise bestowed upon them by the likes of Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, and Quentin Tarantino, their canonization has kept many other worthwhile Boetticher works from discovery. I’ve always been partial to the movies he made as a contract director at Universal in 1952 and 1953, a period during which he made a […]

The post Wings of the Hawk, The Parallax View, Smooth Talk: Jim Hemphill's Home Video Recommendations first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Director Budd Boetticher made dozens of movies ranging from romantic comedies and noirs to science fiction and prison pictures, but he’s long been known primarily for the seven Westerns he made with Randolph Scott between 1956 and 1960. While those films are all terrific and worthy of the praise bestowed upon them by the likes of Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, and Quentin Tarantino, their canonization has kept many other worthwhile Boetticher works from discovery. I’ve always been partial to the movies he made as a contract director at Universal in 1952 and 1953, a period during which he made a […]

The post Wings of the Hawk, The Parallax View, Smooth Talk: Jim Hemphill's Home Video Recommendations first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

All hail Blu-ray 3-D … a format still hanging on as one of the best features of home theater. Budd Boetticher’s trim action meller gives us Van Heflin (good) and Julie Adams (respectable) in a Mexican rebellion mini-epic with a backlot feel but rather good 3-D. The 3-D Film Archive’s experts have optimized the depth effect and included a colorful, very depth-y Woody Woodpecker cartoon. And Boetticher advocate Jeremy Arnold provides the audio commentary.

Wings of the Hawk

3-D Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1953 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 81 min. / available through Kino Lorber / Street Date February 9, 2021 / 29.95

Starring: Van Heflin, Julie Adams, Abbe Lane, George Dolenz, Noah Beery Jr., Rodolfo Acosta, Antonio Moreno, Pedro González González, Paul Fierro, Mario Siletti, Rico Alaníz, Rodolfo Hoyos, Jr., Rosa Turich, Lyle Talbot.

Cinematography: Clifford Stine

Film Editor: Russel Schoengarth

Original Music: Frank Skinner

Written by James E. Moser, Kay Lenard from the novel by Gerald Drayson Adams...

What we know as Chino is a Charles Bronson star vehicle all the way, and less interesting as a western than for explaining the state of the film business in the early 1970s. A good coming of age story is reshaped to appeal to Bronson fans, while the formerly front rank director John Sturges is frustrated by star demands and producer re-shoots. The extras on Pi’s disc show what a free-for all the set must have been — even the writer sees fit to boast about how he told Sturges where to head in.

The Valdez Horses

Region B Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1973 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 97 min. / Chino, Valdez il mezzosangue / Street Date January 25, 2021 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £15.99

Starring: Charles Bronson, Jill Ireland, Marcel Bozzuffi, Vincent Van Patten, Fausto Tozzi, Ettore Manni, Melissa Chimenti, Corrado Gaipa, José Nieto, Diana Lorys, Conchita Muñoz, Annamaria Clementi.

Cinematography: Armando Nanuzzi

Film Editors: Vanio Amici,...

When things get tough, I’ve always turned to the Western for clarity and reassurance. Maybe it’s because most of these films are about finding solace during uncertain times, pursuing peace where none has existed before. Though central themes of sacrifice and redemption are certainty well-trodden in the genre, filmmakers from Budd Boetticher to Kelly Reichardt remind us why they can be infinitely tweaked and subverted to reveal something new within the familiar.

Watching Paul Greengrass’ sturdy new saddle opera News of the World in the late stages of 2020 felt thoroughly cleansing in this regard. Set in post-Civil War Texas, it doesn’t shy from acknowledging the racial violence, ideological bitterness, and economic distress Reconstruction has brought to the region. Tom Hanks plays Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd, who in the years since the war has traveled from one Panhandle town to the next reading out-loud the latest news to captured (and sometimes enraptured) audiences.

Region B Blu-ray-capable noir fans have a formidable six-pack of noir crime pictures on tap: a WW2 espionage thriller, two caper pix and the show that launched the notion of a hit man who’s both charismatic and psychopathic. The list of leading actors is stellar as well: Glenn Ford, Kim Novak, Eli Wallach, Brian Keith, James Whitmore and Nina Foch. Do you like extras? Like to read about the movies you see? No video extra has been left behind, and Pi’s big yellow box contains a 120-page book. Plus — several newly remastered Three Stooges shorts. Don’t forget, Noir and Stooges go together like sanity and American politics!

Columbia Noir #1

Region B Blu-ray

Escape in the Fog, The Undercover Man, Drive a Crooked Road, 5 Against the House, The Garment Jungle, The Lineup

Powerhouse Indicator

1945-1958 / B&w / 1:85 widescreen, 1:37 Academy / 8 hours, 11 min. / Street Date November 30, 2020 / available...

Rhonda Fleming died last Wednesday in Santa Monica, California. The 97-year-old actress, who had left a successful 15-year career as a leading lady in studio films 60 years ago, was correctly noted in her obituaries as “the Queen of Technicolor” because of her flaming red hair, as well as her significant presence as a film noir actress, particularly in Jacques Tourneur’s masterpiece “Out of the Past” (1947).

Her films included a number of now-acclaimed auteurist titles like Budd Boetticher’s “The Killer Is Loose,” Allan Dwan’s “Slightly Scarlet” and “Tennessee’s Partner,” and Fritz Lang’s “While the City Sleeps,” to go along with more mainstream titles like “The Spiral Staircase” and “The Gunfight at O.K. Corral.”

Unlike actresses like Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren, and others who made multiple films with Alfred Hitchcock, Fleming is less identified with the master. But he provided her with her breakout role in 1945’s “Spellbound.

Trucks for victory! No deadheads on this run! Bald Tires for Adolf! Budd Boetticher’s two-fisted teamsters haul General Patton’s supplies through a France not completely cleared of German resistance, a gearshift in one hand and a buxom mam’selle in the other. The movie is not bad, especially in the casting department — it least includes some black troopers to portray a mixed outfit that was more than half black. Red Ball Roughneck roll call: Jeff Chandler, Sidney Poitier, Alex Nicol, Hugh O’Brian, Charles Drake, Bubber Johnson, Davis Roberts. At Ease.

The Red Ball Express

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1952 / B&w / 1:37 flat Academy / 83 min. / Street Date , 2020 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Jeff Chandler, Sidney Poitier, Alex Nicol, Hugh O’Brian, Charles Drake, Jacqueline Duval, Judith Braun, Bubber Johnson, Davis Roberts, Frank Chase, Gregg Palmer, Jack Kelly, Howard Petrie .

Cinematography: Maury Gertsman

Film Editor: Edward Curtiss

Dialogue director: Irvin Berwick...

Audie Murphy Collection

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1952, 1958, 1959 / 242 min.

Starring Audie Murphy, Stephen McNally, Walter Matthau, Charles Drake

Cinematography by Irving Glassberg, Harold Lipstein

Directed by Don Siegel, Jesse Hibbs, Jack Arnold

“My temper was explosive… perhaps I was trying to level with my fists what I assumed fate had put above me.” – To Hell and Back, Audie Murphy, 1949

A remarkably self-aware assessment for such an angry young man. To hear him tell it, Audie Murphy came out of the cradle itching for a fight—when Pearl Harbor was attacked, he got one. He was only 16 at the time so he marched down to the recruiting center and lied about his age. In 1945 Murphy left the Army as the most-decorated soldier of World War II. In 1971 his twin-engine plane crashed into a mountainside in Virginia’s Roanoke County killing everyone on board. In the 26 years between the end of the war...

The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.Above: The Great Train RobberyThe western has been around since nearly the advent of cinema. Some of Thomas Edison’s earliest films incorporated standard conventions of the genre, established in preceding works of popular fiction, and other key tropes were solidified in Edwin S. Porter’s pioneering The Great Train Robbery (1903). Primarily originating on the East Coast, American motion picture production soon made its general migration west where the geographic consequences only amplified the form, enticing the likes of producers and directors including Thomas Ince and Cecil B. DeMille. The western swiftly flourished as an exuberant, manifold survey of idealized, often exaggerated themes concerning heroism, progress, and the myth of the American dream. The genre became a beloved compendium of cultural dichotomies, iconic symbols, locations, and character types, evincing countless variations alongside the tried and true.