the groundhog day project

Two movies today-- The Gunfighter and High Noon . Johnny Ringo was born in 1850 and died in 1882. He was involved in the Mason County War and was a part of the Cochise County Cowboys, a group of outlaws that we will see again this month, and he was in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. (Or he wasn't; highchapparal.com suggests that Ringo was actually in California at the time, though he would return to Tombstone soon thereafter. clantongang.com disagrees, putting Ringo in Tombstone at the time of the famous gunfight.) And, Ringo himself was inspiration for numerous Western film characters. Already, in 1939's Stagecoach and it's 1966 remake, we saw "The Ringo Kid" who said his "right name" was Henry. The real life Ringo was, of course, possibly involved in the murder of Morgan Earp and was definitely involved in a dispute with Doc Holliday, and in the 1986 TV remake of Stagecoach , the Doc was changed to be Doc Holliday, suggesting that, if we had n...

Let us just get right into this. We begin with Stagecoach (1939), directed by John Ford. A name we'll see again soon. We also see a bit of Monument Valley right away. That will be a familiar sight in the coming days. Same with John Wayne. A seeming conflict is set up right away--Geronimo is going to be involved. And, let us set up a regular commentary from Will Wright's (1975) Sixguns & Society: A Structural Study of the Western ... For most Americans, and for a large percentage of the world's population, this scene [I deliberately leave out the specific scene Wright is describing] is familiar, though few people have actually experienced it. It does not simply present a familiar setting, it envelopes the setting in social and moral meanings which are immediately understood. (p. 4) This is our genre. Something familiar even to those who have never really seen its exemplar. The scene literally tells a story... (Let's ignore the abuse of literally .) ...for i...