Works Cited Ezz
Bickel, Mary E. George W. Trendle, Creator and Producer Of The Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet, Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, the American Agent, and Other Successes. New York Exposition Press, 1971. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1976. -. God's Country, Las Vegas, and the Gunfighter. In Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture, 141-51. Madison University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Cline, William C. Kemo...
Generic Conventions and Gender
It should be observed at this point that Millay's intervention in the conflict between Dunson and Matt and the comedic resolution that it makes possible the film's ending in the promise of marriage are clearly inappropriate in terms of the conventions of the Western genre, according to which one of the two men should be killed. Nor is this ending in any way commensurate with the depth of the conflict established between the two characters over the course of the film. More than one critic has...
Works Cited Film Lone Star
Ansen, David. Movies Fresh Squeezed. Newsweek, June 24, 2002, 16. Beale, Lewis. He's the Lone Wolf behind Lone Star. Daily News, June 19, 1996, 38. Buscombe, Edward, and Roberta E. Pearson, eds. Back in the Saddle Again New Essays on the Western. London British Film Institute, 1998. Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel. Bowling Green, Ohio Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Howell, Peter. Gunning for an Audience, John Sayles Famous for Not Doing Things the Hollywood...
Stock Characters Reinforce Cultural Gap
Several film techniques augment the story line. The use of stock characters was particularly effective. Reviewers criticized Giant's creators for casting similar-looking individuals in the roles of Mexican servants. However, these characters provided a compellingly different image from that of the Anglo characters of the Benedict family. Dark-skinned and dressed in traditional apparel, the Mexicans in Giant contrasted sharply with the characters with light skin and modern clothing, a contrast...
Westerns and Americas Future
Popular culture in the United States presents an apparent chaos, but scholars who have taken films seriously know that movie Westerns are a touchstone to understanding the nation's concerns. At the mythic level, Westerns explore America's self-image as unique because of a proximity to nature, what Harvard scholar Perry Miller called an identity as Nature's Nation. Contemporary politics clearly affect the construction of Westerns witness the testimony in this collection to the pervasive...
Adult Legacies of a Juvenile Western
Lone Ranger Tonto, from this day on I'm going to devote my life to establishing law and order, to make the West a decent place to live. Enter the Lone Ranger, TV genesis episode of 1949 Born at Detroit radio station WXYZ in 1933, the Lone Ranger became a great twentieth-century mythmaking franchise. His trajectory ascended out of radio, comics, pulp novels, advertising endorsements, licensed merchandise, and fan clubs into the sphere of serialized television and the B Western. As the Ranger's...
Works Cited Qpe
Baird, Robert. Going Indian Dances with Wolves. In Hollywood's Indian The Portrayal of the Native American in Film, edited by Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor, 153-69. Lexington University Press of Kentucky, 1998. Buscombe, Ed, ed. The BFI Companion to the Western. New York 2nd ed. London Andr Deutsch BFI Publishing, 1993. Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique. Bowling Green, Ohio Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971. Faragher, John Mack. The Tale of Wyatt Earp Seven Films. In Past...
The Simultaneous Deconstruction and Reinforcement of Generic Conventions in the
Almost as long as the Western has existed as a genre in film there has been a subgenre ofWestern parodies from as far back as the 1920s with Buster Keaton, continuing down to the present with Jackie Chan, the Western has been a target of parody and a rich source for comedy. Comedy relies, to a large extent, on the reversal of expectations because of the familiarity of the highly codified conventions of the Western, it becomes a prime target. Parodies subvert the conventions of the Western in...
NationBuilding and Sexual Politics
From the very beginning of Red River, with its framing device of the expository titles and the manuscript called Early Tales of Texas, Hawks announces a much larger historical and cultural frame for this film than is typical of his work. Red River, as Robert Sklar has shown, is a film about empire, . . . about the territorial expansion of one society by the usurpation of land from others 169 clearly, this is a theme with social and political implications. At the center of this great enterprise...
Contents
Introduction. The West, Westerns, and American Character John E. O'Connor and Peter C. Rollins 1 Part One. Early Sound Era Westerns, 1931-1939 Chapter 1. The New Western History in 1931 RKO and the Challenge of Cimarron Chapter 2. Tradition, Parody, and Adaptation Jed Buell's Unconventional West Chapter 3. The Lone Ranger Adult Legacies of a Juvenile Western Part Two. The Post-World War II Western, 1945-1956 Chapter 4. Wee Willie Winkie Goes West The Influence of the British Empire Genre on...
Origins of Western Parody
A parody is a comical imitation of a genre that uses its existing codes to examine the subject in a humorous way. Parody often exists simultaneously with satire, but it can be distinguished from satire, which is designed more specifically to point out vices, follies, or problems with conventional beliefs, whereas parody is generally more lighthearted. Despite the tendency of Western parodies to undermine or spoof the codes of the more traditional Western, they are still situated within the...
Works Cited Hoj
Aleiss, Angela Maria. Hollywood's Ideal of Postwar Assimilation Indian White Attitudes in 'Broken Arrow.' M.F.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1985. Allen, Chadwick. BloodNarrative Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts. Durham, N.C. Duke University Press, 2002. -. Hero with Two Faces The Lone Ranger as Treaty Discourse. American Literature 68 1996 609-38. Arnold, Elliott. Blood Brother. 1947. Lincoln University of Nebraska Press, 1979. Arrow. Script file...
The Return of the Repressed
The key to both men's emotional self-discovery is Tess Millay. In her character, the repressed feminine principle that Dunson rejects at the beginning of the film and which remains completely banished throughout the ensuing two-thirds of the story suddenly erupts back into the narrative. The character of Millay in Borden Chase's original Saturday Evening Post serial, The Chisholm Trail, was a prostitute and a gambler, but Motion Picture Production Code officials demanded that she be softened...
Riding Off into the Sunset
Typically, these films end with the hero or heroes riding off into the sunset and, therefore, farther west into the frontier, the traditional exodus of the cowboy. In Shanghai Noon, Roy and Chon ride off into the setting sun, although there is no plot- or theme-mandated reason for this exit. The ending of Cat Ballou is played for its comic possibilities. Cat and her love interest, Clay Michael Callan , snuggle together in the back of a hearse as they ride into the distance. Rex calls attention...
TNT Westerns and Contemporary Audiences
This study found two main themes in four popular TNT Westerns Last Stand at Saber River, The Good Old Boys, The Virginian, Crossfire Trail those of nostalgia and a cynicism regarding social institutions. These themes are effective in engaging audiences primarily because they are already part of their everyday lives. For example, a nostalgia for Western myths and heroes is prevalent in Western novels, Hollywood films, paintings, country-and-western songs, and other popular cultural forms. These...
Keystone Comedy Meets the West in The Terror of Tiny Town
With high culture nowhere in sight, The Terror of Tiny Town, Buell's best-known, most controversial, and most baffling musical Western, was released in 1938. As with all Buell's musical Westerns, Tiny Town follows a standard format a hero, a villain, two feuding families, cattle, lots of songs, and a girl. The Preston and Lawson ranches are feuding, each blaming the other for mysterious cattle disappearances. Of course, the villain, Bat Haines Little Billy Rhodes , is behind the disappearances...
The Concept of Frontera in John SaylesS Lone Star
The idea of the frontier is extremely well established as cultural common property. If the idea of la frontera had anywhere near the standing of the idea of the frontier, we would be well launched toward self-understanding, directed toward a realistic view of this nation's position in the hemisphere and in the world. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Adventures of the Frontier in the My feeling, basically, is that i've made a lot of movies about American culture and, as far as i'm concerned, it is...
Works Cited Cxh
Calder, Jenni. There Must Be a Lone Ranger. London Hamish Hamilton, 1974. Carroll, No l. The Professional Western South of the Border. In Back in the Saddle Again New Essays on the Western, edited by Edward Buscombe and Roberta E. Pearson, 46-62. London British Film Institute, 1998. Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel. Bowling Green, Ohio Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Coyne, Michael. The Crowded Prairie American National Identity in the Hollywood Western. London...
The Western Parody as a Subgenre
Ironically, the Western parodies exhibit their own recycled conventions and clich s. An examination of Go West Edward Buzzell, 1940 , Cat Ballou Elliot Silverstein, 1965 , Blazing Saddles Mel Brooks, 1974 , Rustlers' Rhapsody Hugh Wilson, 1985 , and Shanghai Noon Tom Dey, 2000 will illustrate the variety of Western parodies and their similarities. When these parodies are examined together, patterns begin to emerge. These patterns indicate that the Western parody is in itself a generic form....
RRKO and the Challenge of Cimarron
In early 1931, RKO Pictures released Cimarron, a history of an Oklahoma pioneering couple's marriage from the opening of the territory to white settlement in 1889 to the film's 1930 production year. Even before the film's completion, the Hollywood motion picture community anticipated Cimarron as innovative American historical cinema, and following its premiere, the studio and the trade papers presented the film as both an authoritative historical document and a landmark of American cinematic...
Genre Markers in TNT Westerns
Because TNT Westerns' core audience consists of genre fans, the network takes great pains to identify its movies through publicity, promotional trailers, and press kits. This study found six genre markers used by the network to attract its audience. The first genre marker is basing its Westerns on the works of well-known Western writers. Many of TNT's movies are adaptations of popular novels written by Louis L'Amour, Zane Grey, and Elmore Leonard. TNT has even produced a cable film adaptation...
Bringing Harlem to the Prairie with Herb Jeffries The Bronze Buckaroo
Directly following The Terror of Tiny Town was another film that garnered Buell further criticism for exploitation, along with a few comments of praise for advancing the role of blacks in the cinematic West Harlem on the Prairie 1937 . The film brought the rich musical voice of Herb Jeffries to the frontier, along with a cast of black faces usually absent from the genre. The issue of black images in the early years of film is a complex one. More than thirteen hundred African American films were...
Reliance on Established Western Conventions
One of the most immediately obvious references to earlier Westerns is found in the titles of the parodies. Each of the films considered here somehow refers to an earlier Western film, often in a comedic way. Go West, as mentioned earlier, takes the same title as a Buster Keaton film and notably refers to Horace Greeley's famous injunction of 1853, Go West, young man. The title Cat Ballou came from the book on which the film was based The Ballad of Cat Ballou. Blazing Saddles, in addition to its...
Conventions of the Western Parody
Western parodies sometimes go a great deal further than borrowing conventions from the traditional Western. To ensure authenticity or tie themselves more tightly to the genre, they often use sets, costumes, and even actors from recognizable Western films. Parts of Cat Ballou, for instance, were filmed on the same set as High Noon. Rustlers' Rhapsody employed a similar technique to associate the film with its Western antecedents. The film made use of one of the frontier sets built in Almeria,...
TNT and the Production of Western Films
Turner Broadcasting System introduced the TNT cable network in 1988 after achieving profitability with superstation WTBS and CNN Cable News Network . Created as a venue for Turner's vast library of films, TNT consisted almost exclusively of theatrical and television releases. Indeed, the network's MGM UA film library includes twenty-two hundred MGM titles, along with older Warner Bros. and RKO films. TNT debuted on October 3 in 17 million cable homes by far the largest network launch to date in...