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Old 07.07.2013, 03:12 PM   #17217
demonrail666
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Originally Posted by Murmer99
Clementine and Stagecoach are amazing. Shane has been recommended to me numerous times, and I haven't gotten around to it yet. I actually had a chance to see it in a theater and missed the opportunity...

Shane is very minimal, as though the main themes of the western have been boiled down to a hard core. It's not a 'great' film, in any general sense, but it's a 'great western'

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I feel like the films of Hawks and Ford offer the most observation, and seem to have a strong understanding of the true nature of the themes they deal with.

Ford treated the West as national myth. Shane does too but in a far less epic way. I'm not sure about Hawks. I love him but tend to think he was never really suited to Westerns. Rio Bravo is fantastic but it's perhaps telling that John Carpenter relocated it to an urban setting for his remake, Assault on Precinct 13. Hawks' was at his best for me when making more big city-based gangster films or screwball comedies.

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As for The Searchers, Ford is flat-out one of the best artists of all time. His framing of his characters with long stretches of land behind them give his films such a natural feel to them. They're some of the most beautiful visuals.

I think that nails why Ford was so well suited (in terms of style) to the western. Plus his politics were fairly in tune with the deep underlying conservatism of the genre at that time (he dismissed more 'liberal' Westerns like High Noon as 'anti-westerns'). Ford was a romantic sentimentalist in a way that I don't think Hawks ever was and the classical western anyway was about as romantic and sentimental as American cinema probably ever got.

Anyway, just watched ...

 


The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Loved it. I'm becoming a really big fan of Casey Affleck.
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