the groundhog day project

The opening scene of Rio Bravo plays a bit like the opening of West Side Story , choreographed like there's a dance number coming. Instead, Chance (John Wayne) tells a guy he's under arrest. The Western has moved indoors over the last few films. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral , 3:10 to Yuma , The Left Handed Gun ... it's remarkable how we think of Westerns as being about big, wide open spaces yet so many of them are a whole lot of dialogue until the situation explodes into violence. In a way, the more the Western stays confined to town, the more it plays like other genres, gangster films (or gang films more recently)... like West Side Story without the songs. Then again, I've argued before that all movies are basically the same. Genre is just details. Which is a weird thing to say when I'm only a week into this month of Westerns. Trying to build it up but I just can't help bringing it back down a little... How about a little Wright to set things right? (I ...

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...