#b-westerns

DeForest Kelley in Waco (1966)

Disclaimer: I still haven’t made it through this movie...it’s kinda tedious. It ticks all the usual De western movie boxes - Smarmy bad guy who struts around growling and smirking? Check. Gets his no-good ass kicked and then shot by the hero? Check. You get the idea.

R.I.P. Peggy Stewart June 5, 1923 – May 29, 2019

Welp, here we go folks. As promised, William Shatner in White Comanche (1968)

What can I say about this movie. We have a Trek-era Bill Shatner (this was filmed between the first and second seasons) playing not just one Native American, but twins. Well, their dad was Comanche. This means we get the trope of the twins who look just a bit different from each other (one has blue eyes and the other brown) but are as different as can be. Guess which twin is good and which is chaotic evil? Yeah. If anyone was expecting an ounce of nuance from this, just throw that right out the window. This was filmed in the same era as pregnant ladies falling in love with Starfleet doctors who hit them, and it shows.

(Real quick, trigger warning on the video below - De’s character is once again a total asshole, and the scene here involves him slapping his on-screen wife.)

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Confession: in addition to being a Trekkie, I am a *huge* Little House on the Prairie nerd.

So I was super excited when I heard that not only (1) were DeForest Kelley and Michael Landon good friends IRL, but (2) Landon once made it his personal mission to be De’s stunt man for a movie. (As in, the studio heads didn’t want Landon to do it bc he was a big star on Bonanza and they didn’t want him hurt. Trek, OTOH, had not happened yet, so no one really cared what happened to Kelley.)

Landon persisted, though, and got his way. The results are below:

This was the only stunt work Landon ever did for another person. Later, another director asked Kelley who was doing his stunts for him lately. He replied, “Michael Landon!” Sadly, it was only a one-time thing.

A short while ago Adam-Troy Castro posted a piece on the 1966 Ralph Nelson Western, Duel At Diablo.

Adam-Troy’s take?  It’s an okay Western, nothing special.

I disagree.

Duel At Diablo is one of my favorite Westerns.  While I would put it in the top ten, it’s a film I’ve watched several times and would be more than willing to watch again should the chance present itself.

I find Duel At Diablo quite compelling even though it’s essentially a program Western. It called on audiences to examine their own thoughts regarding race and sex. Remember SCOTUS did not declare miscegenation laws unconstitutional until the year after Duel At Diablo was released.

Casting an actor with Native American ancestry (James Garner) and another who was African American (Sidney Poitier) in starring roles in a major motion picture was a very gutsy move at the time. Almost half the people who populated the West in the 2nd half of the 19th century were black, Hispanic, Native American, or of mixed ancestry but the popular narratives about the West -- from dime novels to B-Westerns -- relentlessly whitewashed that history. From that perspective Duel At Diablo is historically more accurate than almost all Westerns preceding it.

But Garner and Poiter’s casting is just the beginning. Garner is a widower whose wife was Native American; he carries her scalp with him and early on there’s a scene where a lout offers to buy it from him, thinking it just a souvenir trophy. Bibi Anderson is a white woman forever tainted in the eyes of white society by being captured / raped / impregnated by a Native American. That she wants her child back is a further disgrace in white society’s eyes. The recovery of her child and the subsequent battle with Apache warriors led by the child’s grandfather who doesn’t want to lose an infant he loves elevates the Native Americans from their typical faceless antagonist standing to a far more humanized role.

One thing that caught audiences by surprise at the time was the upending of the “Sacrificial Negro” trope.

We’ve all seen it a thousand and one times:  The loyal safari guide killed by savages, the heroic manservant who dies protecting the white family, the good cop gunned down by a street gang…

Yeah, that guy.

Even if you are not consciously aware of the trope, you’ve been primed to accept it through countless movies / TV shows / books / comics.

So imagine how shocking it must’ve felt to audiences – white and black – that though wounded, Poitier makes it all the way through the movie!

He not only survives, he remains the best dressed person in the cast.

And, yes, I’m aware Native American audiences probably view this movie through an entirely different set of lens.  Duel At Diablo ain’t perfect, but it’s several notches above everything that came before it.

In very many ways, Duel At Diablo is a counterpoint to The Searchers, one that shows the racial / sexual matrix of the West as far more messy and complex and hence more realistically than its predecessor. Director Ralph Nelson’s next projects included …tick…tick…tick… and Soldier Blue, both of which unflinchingly confronted the issue of race in America. Duel At Diablo (and Lillies Of The Field, which he also directed) are early steps along that journey.

Speaking of Nelson, did he know how to start a movie or what? The opening scene and credits (great Neal Hefti score BTW; Morricone redefined Western soundtracks but Hefti was no slouch) kick this film into high gear immediately.

Caveat:  For wholly irrational / nostalgic reasons, I love this serial so while I will try to analyze its strengths and weaknesses fairly, don’t expect me to be objective.

Riders Of Death Valley is one of the first serials I remember seeing -- indeed, one of the first things I ever saw on television.  I know my parents purchased our first TV set no later than October 4, 1957 because I remember watching news about Sputnik on it.  We lived in Rocky Mount, NC at the time and I watched afternoon cartoons and cowboy shows on Channel 5 out of Raleigh (the afternoon kid show host called himself Captain Five and used a submarine backdrop for his set).  We moved to Barnardsville, NC (near Asheville) prior to my going to first grade in 1960, so my exposure to Riders Of Death Valley occurred sometime in that three year period.

It made quite an impression on young little Buzzy boy.  Decades later I found myself surprised at how many scenes and set pieces I remembered accurately (not to mention my first exposure to Felix Mendelssohn's “Fingal’s Cave” movement from The Hebrides, which helped cement my lifelong love of classical music).

Called “the million dollar serial” at the time of its release (it wasn’t; the final budget was $460,000 which represented a hefty chunk o’change back in the day), Riders arguably has the most stellar -- and expensive --- cast of any serial if we go by B-movie standards.*

I’ll go on about the ecology of B-movies in a bit, but right now let’s just focus on Riders’ cast.  These were major names in the B-Western genre and the B-Western genre is nothing to sneeze at; several times stars like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers made the top box office draw list even though appearing only in B-Westerns.

And man, if you’re familiar with the world of B-Westerns, you’ll recognize what a stellar cast this was for the day:

Dick Foran (Jim Benton) appeared in 163 movies and TV episodes, often as a supporting character in A-films but better known as a hero of B-movies including horror flicks and Abbott & Costello movies but most famously as one of several singing cowboys in the wake of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. 

Leo Carrillo (Pancho Lopez) is best known today for his role as Pancho on The Cisco Kid TV series but appeared in literally hundreds of films and TV episodes.

Buck Jones (Tombstone) found stardom in the silent era, being one of the most popular cowboy stars in the 1920s.  When he balked at becoming a singing cowboy, his career stalled out in the early 1930s though he soon made a comeback with a series of successful B-Westerns.  After completing Riders he went on to make nine (!) B-Westerns in the next twelve months, dying tragically in the infamous Coconut Grove fire while reportedly saving the lives of others.

Charles Bickford (Wolf Reade) played small parts in big pictures and big parts in small pictures, and was nominated three times for a best supporting actor Oscar.

Guinn "Big Boy" Williams (Borax Bill) appeared in over 220 movies and TV episodes in a career dating back to the silent era, starring in Westerns in the 1920s and early 30s but moving into amicable sidekick roles by the 1940s.

Lon Chaney, Jr. (Butch) is most famous for his roles in The Wolfman and other horror films, but he made Riders just two years after being nominated for a supporting Oscar in Of Mice And Men as well as appearing in numerous Westerns of the era.

Noah Beery, Jr. (Smokey) is best known today as TV’s Rockford Files dad, but he appeared in hundreds of films and TV episodes as well as starring in a few B-Westerns as an unconventional low key cowpoke.  (By astonishing coincidence, he was recently married to Buck Jones’ daughter at the time of Riders filming.)

The rest of the cast includes such recognizable names as Glenn Strange (Frankenstein’s monster and Matt Dillion’s bartender), Roy Barcroft (Republic studio’s go-to guy for screen villainy, freelancing for Universal this time), Monte Blue (silent matinee idol now playing supporting roles), and in an early role, Rod Cameron (who in addition to playing an unnamed bad guy also doubled for Buck Jones…but more on that below).

Lest one think the testosterone levels are off the scale, there are two females in the serial:  Jean Brooks played Mary Morgan, heir to a lost gold mine, and Ruth Rickaby as Kate, wife of one of the outlaws.

Of Rickaby, there is no biographical information; she made 21 movies between 1939 and 1961 but nothing else is known about her.   

Of Brooks, a sad tale to tell.  Though she made 41 films and serials, she’s best known as the suicidal devil worshipper in Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim.  Her early film career saw her using the names Jeanne Kelly (as in Riders) and Robina Duarte in Spanish language films (she was bilingual).  Changing her name after marrying screenwriter Richard Brooks, she continued working until 1948 when alcoholism rendered her unemployable.  She and Brooks divorced, she married twice after that (and apparently was married before Brooks but no information on that can be found), and eventually died of cirrhosis at age 47.

There’s a point to be gleaned in all that, but I’ll leave it to others to do so.

Riders Of Death Valley was directed by Ford Beebe and Ray Taylor, two old hands at this sort of thing.  Screenplay is by Basil Dickey, Sherman L. Lowe, Jack O'Donnell (as Jack Connell), and George H. Plympton off an original story by Oliver Drake.  Of O’Donnell little can be gleaned; he apparently enjoyed a career in the 1920s as a successful playwright, did a few stories and screenplays for Hollywood, then ended his professional writing career with Riders, dying in 1965 at age 75.

The other four have screenplay and story credits in B-movies and serials -- particularly Westerns -- stretching into the hundreds.  Dickey even wrote the great-grandma of them all, The Perils Of Pauline in 1914!

That being said -- and loving this serial as much as I do -- I gotta say, “It took five of you to come up with this?”

Because to be frightfully honest, this is a paper thin story, on par with comic book writing of the era.  Everybody tends to speak in declarative sentences, the writing and characterization is too on the nose.

And ya know what?  Who gives a rat’s patoot?  The onscreen chemistry of Foran / Jones / Carillo / Williams is what makes this a delight.  It’s not a Western, it’s four grown men playing cowboys & outlaws and they know they’re playing cowboys & outlaws and they know the kids in the audience know they know they’re just playing cowboys & outlaws but they’re telling the kids, “We want you to play along, too!”

Now do you understand why I love this serial?

I gotta say, for the most purportedly expensive serial Universal ever made, they sure spent their money in the right place with their casting.  Yeah, you can pick this story to shreds easily, but why would you want to do that?  It’s four guys and their friends having a good time playing cowboys & outlaws and they want you to have a good time watching them.

The serial was shot in Death Valley and the Alabama Hills in California, familiar territory to B-Western and B-sci-fi fans.

  © Buzz Dixon

Peter David recently posted a short essay on the current brouhaha over Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola saying the Marvel movies aren’t real cinema, not genuine works of art, but just “thrill rides”.

Before going further, let me state my unabashed respect and admiration for Peter David.  He’s a creator who certainly earned his spurs, he has a massive body of work, he is an all around mensch, and his opinion is hard earned and well informed.

Except in this case, his conclusions are wrong.

To prove my point, let me ask Peter a question:

What was the name of Gene Autry’s horse?

Those of you wondering what Gene’s horse has to do with the Marvel cinematic universe (hence MCU), my explanation is this: The single largest genre of films made before 1960 were Westerns.

Add to that television programs, where Westerns remained a staple until the mid-1970s.

And radio shows.

And pulp novels.

And comic books.

They were the definitive American movie genre from 1903’s The Great Train Robbery until Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid drove a stake through the heart of the standard genre offering in 1969.

There are some who claim Blazing Saddles did the genre in, but Westerns had endured numerous comedy and parody versions in the past.

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid killed the Western as a popular genre by simply having Butch and Sundance do the most logical thing at the first sign of danger, the thing the real Butch and Sundance did in real life:  They ran away.

And thus a genre trope was forever slain…

This is not to say they’ve never made another film that falls into the broad category of “Western”, but there’s no audience clamor for more of the genre.

Westerns are now simply historical films set in the American west during the period from the fall of the Alamo (1836) to Arizona becoming a state (1912).

There are films that employ Western genre tropes that take place in the contemporary era (Road House and Extreme Prejudice to name two) or transplant the Western genre to other lands (Sukiyaki Western Django and Tampopo, f’r instance), but as a genre it is dead-dead-DEAD.

Yet at one time, Westerns were so popular that not only did everybody know the name of Gene Autry’s horse, but said horse starred in his own TV series!

So what happened?

Well, several things.

I could cite the changing audience in America, going from 80% rural prior to WWII to 80% urban / suburban after WWII (with a corresponding rise in detective and spy genres, as well as sci-fi), or I could cite a huge glut of material made even more accessible by television, but the truth is this:  The overwhelming bulk of American Westerns were nothing but product.

It was actually built into the genre.  I’ve been trying to locate the original essay, but a scholarly study some years back concluded only 8 basic plot conflicts drove Western stories, and only 17 stock characters carried said stories (they can be good, bad, or neutral characters, effectively tripling their number).

The essay went on to liken American Westerns to Japanese noh or kabuki dramas:  Far from familiarity of material being a problem, audiences came expecting certain tropes and stock characters, and gained their enjoyment from how well said tropes and characters were presented.

Sound familiar?

This is not to say there weren’t films that fell into the Western genre that also aspired to art, but you either had to be a Hollywood heavy hitter to get a chance at making a film like that or, at the tail end of the genre, flying so low under the radar that nobody recognized what you were doing until you did it.

Does that sound familiar?

But the overwhelming majority of Westerns, while possessing technical craftsmanship, were just product:  So many feet of gunfights. So many reels of stampedes.

Big budget A-picture or bare bones B-movie, they all fell into the same general patterns, and studios, large or small, promoted them the same way.

And audiences were fine with this.  Tom Mix, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans frequently wound up among the top 10 box office draws in Hollywood during their careers.

Where are those Westerns now?

I’m a big fan of old B-Westerns, having grown up with them on TV as a kid, and know a fair amount about the personalities and production companies involved, seeking out B-Westerns on Amazon Prime and YouTube and the multi-pack bargain bins at big box stores.

How many of today’s superhero fans could identify William Boyd or Red Barry or Rocky Lane or Buck Jones?

They might remember hearing the names of Roy Rogers or Gene Autry since those stars were involved in mainstream marketing such as fast food restaurants or baseball teams (and Autry donated a museum to Los Angeles that’s named after him), but how many have actually seen any of their movies?

We have two competing superhero universes today, DCU and MCU.

Where are the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents movies?  How come there’s no Dr. Solar or Brain Boy or Magnus, Robot Fighter films?

Answer:  No large corporation stand to make billions promoting those characters and licensing them to toys, video games, vitamin, and Underoos.

Corporations possess no sense of integrity to the original creators’ concepts.  They will change things in the blink of an eye if they think it will boost their profit margin.  They’ll promote the silliest and the most self-damaging ideas if they think it will make them a few extra bucks today.

Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman succeeded at DC bcause nobody there cared what the creators did so long as they turned their work in on time.

Product.

Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and Jim Steranko blazed exciting new trails at Marvel because Martin Goodman couldn’t have cared less what they were doing so long as they delivered on schedule and under budget.

Product.

They flew under the radar.  They worked in a fast and grungy fashion, knocking the books out as quickly as they could.

To amuse themselves they trafficked in big ideas, eccentric art, outre stories.

That it caught on and blazed a new trail proved a combination of talent and luck.

There was no similar boom for romance comics or nurse comics or Western comics during the same period.

Right now the MCU movies are riding high and they are made with a great deal of technical care and they are amusing and entertaining.

So were Westerns.

MCU movies aim at too specialized an audience.  They appeal to this generation, but there’s no guarantee they’ll appeal to the next.

Indeed, there’s a strong argument that the next generation will reject the previous generation’s entertainment simply because it’s…well…theirs.

The films of Coppola and Scorsese will be watched.

They’re not product.

Oh, there were financed to make money, sure enough, but they were financed to make money by expressing the director’s personal taste and vision.

Further, they tend to transcend genre.

Yeah, two generations from now people who really love gangster movies will probably look up The Godfather and GoodFellas.

But people who love film, people who love art will be watching them as well.

They’ll also watch Public Enemy and Little Caesar, but unless they’re film buffs with specialized tastes, they’re going to skip the dozens of “programmers” cranked out in the 1930s to satisfy fans of that genre.

And the reason?  The Godfather and GoodFellas and Public Enemy and Little Caesar transcend their genres.

They are about people, not thrills and chills.

Consider classic Universal horror films.

James Whale & co. snuck one bona fide brilliant work of art past Carl Laemmle with Bride Of Frankenstein but after that the brakes clamped down hard and fast.

Uncle Carl couldn’t have geniuses running around doing whatever they felt like, thus risking the audience for Universal’s product.

Consistent mediocrity is better than risky genius in the eyes of the corporations.

The classic Universal monsters?  Reduced to The Munsters now; familiar icons, to be sure, but empty jokes, shadows of their former selves.

Replaced by newer monsters who in turn have been replaced by newer monster who in turn have been replaced by newer monsters and who will be replaced by newer monsters still.

‘Twas ever thus.

I begrudge the enjoyment no nobody who enjoys MCU movies.

Have fun.  Knock yourselves out.

But never mistake popcorn for caviar.

    © Buzz Dixon

As depression era theaters introduced double features to attract cost conscious audiences in the 1930s, the most important features -- and typically, the newest -- ran first as the A-movie while the B-movie was either an older (and thus more affordable) main feature or a low budget movie.  As double features became more and more popular, especially with the rise of drive-in theaters -- which on rare occasions might run a triple or quadruple bill with C and D-movies -- both independent producers and major studios made shorter, less expensive “programmers” i.e., movies tailored to fit the B-movie slot. Because of this, “B-movie” came to mean cheap and exploitive fare.  

The Motion Picture Association of America classified a feature film as one that ran 65 minutes or longer, but this was frequently honored more in the breach than the observance, and many a B-Western ran 55 minutes or less.  As such, they were the perfect length for an afternoon movie slot, all of which is a long winded way of saying little Buzzy Boy watched a lot of B-Westerns as a child.

Somewhere I read an essay (I want to say in a British Film Institute publication but may be wrong) that called B-Westerner programmers the equivalent of American kabuki drama, relying heavily on stock characters and situations, varying only in their arrangement and the skill with which the tropes and clichés and stereotypes were executed.

And, yeah, for all of us remaining who still love B-Westerns, that familiarity is indeed a big hunk of their appeal.

(Ironically, I think this is the same thing that keeps Dungeons & Dragons and related role-playing games popular:  Their reliance on universally known clichés and stereotypes that do not have a corresponding real life equivalent which players can easily absorb and enjoy. The hardest part of D&D for a newcomer is figuring our the character chart; once you do that everything else flows instinctively.)