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...

(Before I get into today's film-- Duel in the Sun --I wanted to note that while the remake of Stagecoach was not nearly as good as the original, it did have a few elements that I rather liked. While the guy playing Ringo did not have the personality of John Wayne, his relationship with Dallas was more believable in the remake because they actually had more conversations. And, speaking of Dallas, the remake version has a lot more personality to her, and she and this Mrs. Mallory have far more interesting interactions in the remake than in the original. The remake's reliance on more violence seems unnecessary, but as we will see when we catch up to that era in Western films (the remake came out in 1966), violence was de rigueur at the time. But, turning Ringo's fight with the Plumbers into a more elaborate thing in the remake makes Ringo less special--no longer can he win a gunfight with exactly the minimum number of bullets he needs; instead, he barely wins and ends up do...