Doris Day is an incredible talent and she is brilliant in the musical Calamity Jane. Released in 1950, this film closely patterned on Annie Get Your Gun, though less stagebound and with a more wholesome star in Day. Calamity Jane follows the lengthy wooing of Howard Keel’s Wild Bill Hickok by tomboy Day. The plot read more…

Written by my favorite author, Dorothy Johnson, The Who Shot Liberty Valance is western fiction at its best.  The Summary of the story is as follows:  In 1910, Sen. Ranse Stoddard and his wife, Hallie, arrive in the small town of Shinbone to attend the funeral of Tom Doniphon. A reporter questions him about his read more…

Tom Selleck is perfect in this classic Louie L’Amour story set against the backdrop of Wyoming.  Selleck plays a cowboy who makes a promise to a dying friend to watch over the man’s ranch and wife, and means to keep his word. Crossfire Trail also contains one of the best final shootouts I’ve seen. Not only is read more…

In 1965 television took a new turn in programming, cashing in on the James Bond craze.  What developed was a sudden trend of secret agent and spy shows that literally controlled the prime-time airwaves.  The Western format that was so prominent in the 1950s and early 1960s was virtually being pushed aside, making way for read more…

The few Westerns seen on television during the early 1950s starred old-style movie heroes such as the Lone Ranger and Hopalong Casssidy, and had little to do with the real West.  Westerns were considered another form of obvious fantasy strictly for kids.  Two shows, Gunsmoke and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp changed all read more…

Support Your Local Sheriff uses as the basis for its comedy the many clichés that have become part and parcel of the Western genre.  Whether it’s the town dominated by a tyrant, the never-missing gunfighter, the absolutely pure hero, the chaste but unchased maiden , the growth of the territory – they’re all dealt with read more…

Director Walter Hill’s superior movie The Long Riders (1980) was an accurate depiction of the James gang’s Northfield, Minnesota bank raid, starring Stacy Keach as Frank, and his brother James (looking like William S. Hart) playing Jesse.  It’s told in gory, post-Peckinpah fashion, complete with slow-motion gunplay, whizzing bullet sound effects and a twanging Ry read more…

The Richmond Timed Dispatched called author Sharyn McCrumb’s book “a novel of mesmerizing beauty and power.” I was captivated at how McCrumb tied two stories together in one novel – set apart by at least a hundred and twenty years. This book starts out with sheriff Spencer Arrowood recovering from a shotgun wound, and his read more…