Burl reviews Last Man Standing! (1996)

Blam-blam-blam, it’s Burl, here with a tale of genre-splicing gun-fu from the mid-1990s! What are the genres in question, you might wonder? Well, they took Kurosawa’s great picture Yojimbo, and, as Sergio Leone had done thirty years earlier, transplanted the story to the Old West! Except they made it less old – although everything is set in what looks like the typical Western town, the action takes place in the 1930s, and the cowboys have been replaced by bootleggin’ gangsters! Ha ha, and the result they poured out of the genre-mixing cocktail shaker is titled Last Man Standing!

It’s a Walter Hill picture, but more on the Extreme Prejudice end of things than, say the Brewster’s Millions one! This means the story is full of manly men with stone faces expressing manly sentiments and punctuating these with cannon-like blasts of their guns! Bruce Willis, whom we know so very well from festive pictures like The First Deadly Sin and Die Hard, is the stoniest-faced of them all, and he’s the nameless hero who rolls into town and quickly divines that there are two gangs nearly at war with one another, and that he might profit from this conflict!

One gang is Italian and is led by Strozzi, played by Ned Eisenberg from The Burning and Moving Violations! The other more consequential gang is Irish, and while the nominal kingpin is Doyle, played by David Patrick Kelly from Commando and Dreamscape, the real terror in this bunch is a fearsome scarface essayed by Christopher Walken, well known from The Sentinel and A View to a Kill and of course The Prophecy! Initially neutral parties in the town include a corrupt but redeemable sheriff played by Bruce Dern, a fine actor we’ll recall from The King of Marvin Gardens and The Laughing Policeman, not to mention Hill’s The Driver; and innkeeper William Sanderson from Blade Runner and Nightmares, who I guess was cast not just because he was perfect for the role, but because he’d already been in an earlier picture called Last Man Standing! Ha ha!

If you’ve seen Yojimbo – and I assume and hope you have, ha ha! – you know how it goes! Willis joins up first with one gang and then the other, playing both sides against the other and appearing to be a step ahead of them all the time! But then of course he gets ahead of even himself and suffers the sort of beating that would have any actual person hospitalized for months, but which Willis weathers with only a limp and the occasional pained wince! Of course it’s not giving away much to indicate that yes, despite this punishment, by the final frames of the film he indeed is the last man of the title!

Walter Hill’s in full Peckinpah mode here, though the movie conspicuously lacks the poetry and profundity not only of Peckinpah’s best works, but of Hill’s! (I don’t call it a rip-off, though, especially because Hill knew and worked with ol’ Sam, so that gives him a certain leeway in this arena!) Whatever resonance there was to this particular story had already been wrung out of it by Kurosawa and Leone, I guess, and so when this iteration comes to an end, and as entertaining as it may be while it’s on (and given the cast and Hill’s well-honed craft, it is entertaining), the only reaction possible is a sort of shoulder shrug! I give Last Man Standing two ahh-ooga cars!

Burl reviews Westworld! (1973)

 

Beep-boop-blorrrrttt, it’s Burl, here with a tale of fatal malfunction! Yes, I’m talking robots, and how many times in movies have we seen them get their wires crossed and go on a rampage? Plenty, I think! But today’s picture is one of the granddaddies of the malfunctioning robot subgenre, and I think you’ll agree when you hear the movie’s name: Westworld!

It’s the story of the world’s most unlikely theme park, or anyway the most unlikely one until its writer/director, Michael Crichton, came up with Jurassic Park! Ha ha, Crichton was a funny guy - a doctor who became a novelist of medical thrillers, who became a filmmaker of medical and sci-fi thrillers, who became a novelist again, and then became a crank who claimed climate change was some kind of big conspiracy! Then he died, and all of these things he accomplished while being very tall!

Westworld was his first picture as a director, and you can kind of tell! The picture is structured oddly and peopled very sparsely - we have our two heroes, played by Richard Benjamin, who was in The Last Married Couple in America and then became a director and made movies like The Money Pit, and James Brolin from Von Ryan’s Express and The Car; and then the main robot villain, essayed by Yul Brynner from The Magnificent Seven and The Ultimate Warrior; and then everyone else is pretty much window dressing!

The window dressing includes fellow Westworld guests Norman Bartold from Moving Violation and Dick Van Patten from Lunch Wagon, and Alan Oppenheimer from The Groundstar Conspiracy as the chief scientist in charge! In charge of what, you may be asking, if you’ve never seen or heard of the picture! Well, it’s an amusement park filled with robots, where nothing can possibly go worng! There are three components: an Old West one, where we spend most of our time; a Medieval one; and a Ancient Rome one, which mainly seems to cater to the more sexually-inclined guests!

But of course things do go worng, and all the guests and technicians get slaughtered, and pretty soon it’s just Benjamin and Brynner playing six guns across the park! Ha ha, and can we talk about how implausible this park is? For example, everyone in Westworld, both human and robot, carries a real gun! And even though there’s supposed to be a device on the guns that makes it impossible to shoot a warm-blooded entity, that seems an imperfect safety device to say the least, and in any case it’s forgotten about when Brynner starts a-blastin’! And honestly, who really wants an authentic Old West experience? I spend lots of time being grateful I wasn’t around in that era!

It’s a clunky story made inexpertly, but it’s still an enjoyable picture! It’s always seemed a picture that might benefit from a remake, being as it has a pretty zippy premise! I know there was a sequel, Futureworld, and I’ve heard tell of a TV series from a few years back, but I haven’t seen any of those! And I guess there’ve been plenty of other berserk-bot pictures, so maybe my remake idea’s not so hot after all! No, let’s have an original story about berserk-bots, please!

It’s wafer thin and easily forgotten once terminated, but it has enough pleasures - the premise, the dweeby charms of Benjamin, Brynner’s proto-Terminator determination - to warrant some attention! Ha ha, I give Westworld two shots of bourbon!

Burl reviews McCabe and Mrs. Miller! (1971)

 

Oh sweet wingalls, it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m sorry I’ve been so sporadic with my reviews lately - I’m hoping to ramp it back up a bit, or at least avoid a Great Interruption such as we experienced in 2016-19! In the meantime, here’s a review of a movie I’ve long enjoyed, from a director who has brought us many fine films! I’m talking about Robert Altman, whose marvelous The Long Goodbye we all adore; and this picture is his stab at an oater (well, his first one anyway), McCabe & Mrs. Miller!

Warren Beatty from The Parallax View plays McCabe, a wandering cardsharp who strolls into the nascent town of Presbyterian Church one day and espies an opportunity! He’s got a completely unearned reputation as a fearsome gunfighter, which he promotes so as to avoid conflict, and a businessman with an eye for the main chance, but he’s otherwise a fairly small-minded and dim fellow! Nevertheless, he sets up shop as the town pimp, and is soon doing a steady if small-scale business!

The town is populated by Altman regulars like Rene Auberjonois from the 1976 King Kong, John Schuck from Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, Bert Remsen from Fastbreak and Lies, and of course Shelley Duvall from The Shining! Ha ha, and the Iron Buffalo himself, Don Francks from Fast Company and My Bloody Valentine, is in there too! But now along comes Julie Christie, well known from Demon Seed, in the role of Mrs. Miller, and she’s a much savvier cabuncas than McCabe could ever be! She persuades the bearded chancer that when it comes to brothels, bigger (and cleaner, and nicer) is better!

That’s all well and good until some big-business reps, played by Michael Murphy from Phase IV and Shocker and Antony Holland from Housekeeping, come to town with an offer to buy out McCabe and Mrs. Miller’s business! McCabe, being a dimwit, makes fun of them, offers outrageous counteroffers, and then just ignores them, and in one of the moments that crystalizes this picture’s themes, the pair casually decide to leave future negotiations to another group - ha ha, a group of hired killers! Thus is the soulless ruthlessness of big business robber baronry expressed!

Well, the rest of the picture has McCabe slowly realizing the pickle he’s got himself into, and we realize it too once the killers have arrived in town and, just for sport, plug a friendly, innocent, horned-up young cowpoke played by Keith Carradine from Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle! McCabe visits a lawyer played by William Devane from Rolling Thunder and The Dark, but he’s no help at all, and finally, in a shoot ‘em up climax it’s just the lone would-be businessmen against the rapier’s edge of the business world!

Ha ha, with its snowy oater vibe and Leonard Cohen songs and its fantastic dirty verisimilitude, this picture is a true pip! It’s quite funny too, as movies with dopey main characters often are, and, being a movie about a man who turns out to be dumber than we thought, it makes a nice contrast with The Long Goodbye, a movie about a man much smarter than he first appears! Boy, Robert Altman sure made a lot of good movies in the 70s! McCabe and Mrs. Miller is surely one of them, and I give it three and a half wisps of opium smoke!

Burl reviews Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid! (1973)

 

Yaw-houyyy pardners, it’s Burl with a taste of the oat for you! Yes, here’s a movie made by that most pickled of productionsmen, Mr. Sam Peckinpah! He directed plenty of outdoor horse operas, great pictures like Ride the High Country and the unstoppable glory that is The Wild Bunch, but of them all, this one, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, is probably the one that gave old Sam the most headaches and the most morning-afters! Oh, he had to fight some battles, all right, and the different versions of this picture attest to the fact that he didn’t win them all! (The version reviewed here, by the way, is the 116 minute Special Edition!)

Like The Wild Bunch, the picture starts with an instance of animal cruelty that serves as a presentiment of the situation in which the characters will find themselves! In the earlier movie it was a scorpion stinging itself to death rather than be eaten alive by ants; here, rather more gruesomely and less elegantly, it’s a bunch of unfortunate chickens buried up to their necks and having their heads blown off for target practice by Billy and his gang! Ha ha, I’ve been known to chew on a drumstick, but I could have done without seeing that!

Mr. Patman himself, James Coburn from Hard Times and Eraser, plays Pat Garrett, a lawman in the employ of the Chisum concern! He’s pals with William Bonney, the Kid; in classic homoromantic Western parlance, they used to ride together! But no more, for Pat has been ordered to get that Kid, and after an opening scene in which he gives the Kid fair warning and advises he decamp forever to Mexico, we follow the two legendary figures as this pursuit plays out! Ha ha, it’s an oft-told tale!

Kris Kristofferson, the songsmith known for appearances in such pictures as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Trouble in Mind, is Billy, and the picture takes on an episodic quality as it bounces back and forth between the adventures of its dual protagonists! Bob Dylan, another popular recording artist, is Alias, a character seemingly inserted so Dylan could be cast to play him! Of course Zimmy also provides the excellent soundtrack material, and a great moment for me was seeing the scene for which “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” was written, and how well the song works in that moment, and for once knowing that, in considering the lyrics, I was now seeing the same images Dylan himself had when he wrote the song, since those Peckinpah visuals were the ones that inspired it!

The cast in this thing is mind boggling! Ha ha, it’s as though Peckinpah decided he wanted to cast everyone he’d ever worked with before and make sure they all died bloody gunfight deaths! Why, familiar grizzled faces are popping up around every corner: we get gemstones like Slim Pickens from Dr. Strangelove and This House Possessed, who gets an amazingly touching death scene scored to the aforementioned Dylan tune! My longstanding fave, the great R.G. Armstrong from The Car and The Beast Within, is a Bible-thumping deputy who gets blasted with his own shotgun full o’ dimes! “Ha ha, keep the change,” quips Billy!

We get Richard Jaeckel from The Dark and Starman; Luke Askew from Rolling Thunder; Matt Clark from Buckaroo Banzai and The Horror Show; Charles Martin Smith from Herbie Goes Bananas; John Beck from Paperback Hero, Sleeper, and Deadly Illusion; and of course Harry Dean Stanton from Repo Man, UFOria and Christine - and these are only the relatively young guys! Bringing the grizz are old bars like Chill Wills from Fireball 500, and who was also of course the voice of the mule in Francis, and who here has his hat pulled down over his head and is frightened into a self-befouling; growly old Jack Elam from Creature From Black Lake as Alamosa Bill; Mapache from The Wild Bunch, Emilio Fernández, as an ill-fated member of Billy’s gang, who also gets a brutal and touching send-off; plus L.Q. Jones from White Line Fever, Paul Fix from Force of Evil and Jet Pilot, Elisha Cook Jr. from ‘Salem’s Lot, Gene Evans from It Happens Every Spring and many Sam Fuller pictures, and Dub Taylor from The Best of Times! And then there’s Barry Sullivan from Earthquake playing Chisum, and a special appearance by Jason Robards from The Paper as the Governor!

Phew! And that’s just the men! There are a few ladies in the picture too, though not many! There’s songstress Rita Coolidge, plus Rutanya Alda from The Long Goodbye and The Fury, and in the role of Slim Pickins’ wife, who deals out not a little carnage herself, Katy Jurado from Under the Volcano! I can hardly state it with greater vociferousness: this picture has a hell of a cast! And, ha ha, just listing it has practically doubled the length of this review!

So I’ll try to wrap it up quickly! It’s a marvelous-looking picture, and the old character pros who populate it, the terrific script by Rudy Wurlitzer (who later wrote Alex Cox’s Walker, which I should get around to reviewing one day), and the weird mix of tender and brutal left by Peckinpah’s singular touch, give it an emotional heft that might surprise you, and anyway surprised me! Gunfights erupt out of nowhere and character actors burst open in globs of red tempera, and boy howdy, it’s a good, entertaining oater! I’m pleased to give this iteration of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid three and a half cans of dried goods!

Burl reviews A Lawless Street! (1955)

 

Boy howdy, it’s Burl, here to review a pistol-packin’ oater for you! This one features that cowboy non compare Randolph Scott, whose long career in Westerns ended with the great Ride the High Country! In today's duster he plays the legendary Marshal of Medicine Bend, and indeed the book the picture is based on was titled just that, The Marshal of Medicine Bend! But in its journey to the big screen, the title was changed to A Lawless Street!

Now, I’d seen A Lawless Street before, being as how it was made by a director I admire, Joseph H. Lewis! I watched it again the other day, having just found a used DVD of it, and afterward realized that I had the book around somewhere, so I found it and over the next day or so I read The Marshal of Medicine Bend! So I’m well steeped in this particular story at the moment, though there are still one or two things I can’t quite figure out about it, even after reading the book! I’ll get to that in a moment!

Scott plays Calem Ware, whose assiduous marshalry has helped the Colorado town of Medicine Bend on its way to peace and respectability and the sort of long life and steady growth that places like Dodge City, Deadwood, and Tombstone never got! He has a fearsome reputation as a gunfighter and is the sort of peacemaker who won’t hesitate to spill blood all over the floor! He doesn’t have many friends; his only buddies are the local doctor, played by Wallace Ford from Freaks, and his landlady, played by perennial fussbudget Ruth Donnelly, who of course appeared with Ford in Scatterbrain!

But trouble’s a-brewing in Medicine Bend! A local badman rides into town looking for trouble, but before he can gun down old Calem Ware (and he is old - in the book he’s thirty-six, but Scott here was pushing sixty!), the Marshal, draped in a sheet getting a shave in the barber’s chair, pulls a High Plains Drifter on him! There are more badmen where he came from, however, and it transpires that a pair of sharpies, played by Warner Anderson from Bad Bascomb and Week-End at the Waldorf, and John Emery from Spellbound and Rocketship X-M, are in some strange and ill-defined way hoping to take advantage of the town’s impending boom status by taking it over by killing the Marshall and keeping it lawless, and this in some way will hugely enrich them! Ha ha, I never did figure out the precise workings of their scheme, though it also involved terrorizing the local rich rancher, played by James Bell, who played doctors for Val Lewton in pictures like I Walked With a Zombie and The Leopard Man! Ha ha!

Calem Ware’s life is further complicated by the arrival in town of his estranged wife, a songbird played by Angela Lansbury, whom we know so well from The Manchurian Candidate, The Company of Wolves, and The Mirror Crack’d! She warbles a tune or two, but the reunion is fraught because she doesn’t want to be married to a man who might be killed at any moment! The risk of this worsens still when Calem first has to fight a scarred Mongo figure played by Don Megowan from The Werewolf and Truck Turner, and then must battle hatchet-faced gunman Harley Baskam, played by Michael Pate from Howling III! And let me tell you, it looks bad for Calem Ware!

A strange thing is that the characters say Calem Ware’s name over and over again: everybody from the landlady to the doctor to the bad guys and the hired guns and a widow played by Jeanette Nolan from The Manitou and Cloak & Dagger seem to want to say his name, usually in full, as many times as they can! Calem Ware, Calem Ware, Calem Ware! And yet the plot synopsis on the back of my DVD earnestly explains that the movie is about the tribulations of a Wild West Marshal by the name of “Coleen Wave!” Ha ha! How they got that one wrong, I do not know!

That aside, A Lawless Street is a strong little horse opera! It moves at a good pace, and Scott, despite being twenty years older than the character is meant to be, does his usual upright job; and the plot, no matter the confusion it invites, is compelling! And while we think of Joseph H. Lewis as an artiste du noir, with moody pictures like My Name is Julia Ross, The Big Combo, and of course Gun Crazy to his credit, he was originally a thoroughgoing oatsman! Ha ha, after all, he made The Man From Tumbleweeds! He did a terrific job here, anyway, and I very much enjoyed A Lawless Street! I give it three flaming tar barrels!

Burl reviews The Return of Frank James! (1940)

 

Yodel-ay-hee-hoo, it’s Burl, presenting a new movie review for you! Ha ha, today it’s a review for a sequel to a movie I’ve never actually seen, 1939’s Jesse James! But of course I know the story in its broad strokes - don’t forget, it was covered in the more recent picture The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and you only need to read the title to get the gist of it, ha ha - and so I was never at a loss during my recent screening of The Return of Frank James!

Henry Fonda, well known from Tentacles and City on Fire, plays Frank, just as he did in Jesse James! The picture opens with Jesse’s killing at the hands of the coward Robert Ford, who here is played by the terrific John Carradine, whom we recall from pictures as diverse as Sunset Cove, Man of Grey Testes, The Boogey Man, and many, many others! His brother Charlie is played by Charles Tannen from Gorilla At Large! Frank, living the quiet life on his farm along with his pals Pinky and Clem, hears about the killing of his brother, straps on his six-guns, and heads out to get ram tough like a rock on those Ford boys!

Nothing, but nothing, will dissuade his little buddy Clem from tagging along, and Pinky later becomes a very important factor in the story too, though what the poor man must have gone through is not dwelt upon and his heroism is mainly implied! Lovely Gene Tierney from Heaven Can Wait plays a newspaper baron’s reporter-daughter Miss Stone, and Frank and Clem’s attempt to use her to spread a counterfeit story of Frank’s demise only brings a shady but persistent detective onto their trail! Ha ha, and the detective is memorably played by J. Edward Bromberg from Strange Cargo!

Henry Hull from Werewolf of London plays old Major Cobb, Frank’s excitable old pal! (I have to admit that for a while I thought the actor was Frank Morgan! I was certainly wrong about that!) Ha ha, Frank engages the old Major as his lawyer in the courtroom finale, and for a time one is not convinced that choosing to be defended by an apparent crazed hayseed was Frank’s best call; but it turns out that James truly is being judged by a jury of his peers: they all belong to the bumpkin class just like him!

But is Frank James really a bumpkin? Fonda, in some ineffable but fundamental way that is in no sense his fault, is ill-suited to play an old west character, whether an outlaw and gunfighter or the humble man of the soil he is at the beginning of this story! He does it well however, and somehow becomes the character in a different and more oblique way than that which we commonly associate with good acting! It’s like seeing The Elephant Man on stage with the actor wearing no makeup: you know he’s not physically an elephant man, but you watch the performance instead and the makeup becomes wholly unnecessary!

With a supporting cast that includes Donald Meek from Love on the Run (not playing aptly to his surname, for once), Russell Hicks from Hold That Ghost!, and of course Jackie Cooper in the role of the puppy-like Clem; along with several exciting gunfights; nice colour photography; and solid direction from none other than Fritz Lang, who later brought us Human Desire, it’s an entertaining and well-paced oater! It doesn’t stand out in the way of other Lang Westerns, most notably the terrific Rancho Notorious, but it’s a darn good show anyway! Ha ha, I’ll have to look out for the original Jesse James, but in the meantime I give The Return of Frank James two and a half plummeting dummies!

Burl reviews City Slickers! (1991)

 

Yee-haw girls and boys and all points in between, it’s Burl, here with a tale of city-slick friendship and cowpunching! Ha ha, I recall that this was a big fat hit when it came out back in June of ’91, but, as with Backdraft, Point Break, and The Rocketeer, movies released that same summer, I didn’t bother seeing it for years and years! I didn’t go to see all that much that summer, as I believe I myself was working on a movie through pretty much all of July and August, but I did make it out to see such gems as Barton Fink, Terminator 2, Slacker, The Commitments, and What About Bob!

All of this is just plain beside the point, because the movie we’re talking about is City Slickers! It’s the simple tale of three New York buddies, each with their own problems, who take two weeks and join a dude ranch cattle drive led by a stern and leathery trail boss! Ha ha, and guess who plays the boss? Well, he won an Oscar for it I guess, so you probably remember that it was none other than Jack Palance from Without Warning!

The middle-aged trio are played by Billy Crystal, whom we remember from the time he was slathered in oldman makeup for The Princess Bride; Bruno Kirby from The Young Graduates and Between the Lines (and of course both Crystal and Kirby were in When Harry Met Sally together); and Daniel Stern from Get Crazy and C.H.U.D.! Stern’s problem is that he has a monstrous wife and that he might have impregnated Yeardley Smith from Maximum Overdrive; Kirby’s conundrum involves resolving whether to settle down with his latest girlfriend and have kids, or continue his life as an aimless, unlikely stickman; and Crystal is, at forty (ha ha!), feeling old and used up and, in the words of his long-suffering wife, has “lost his smile!”

After a long New York build up, she commands him to go and find his smile with his buddies on this cattle drive caper, and then the string of incident begins! Other dude ranchers on the trek include Helen Slater from The Secret of My Success, as the lone pretty lady; Tracey Walter from Repo Man, in charge of the chuckwagon; Josh Mostel from The King of Marvin Gardens and David Paymer from This House Possessed, playing ice cream brothers modeled on Ben and Jerry; and Bill Henderson from Silver Streak as a dentist on the outing with his adult son; and the ranch is owned and operated by Noble Willingham from Butch and Sundance: The Early Days!

The trip is full of gaggery and straight talkin’ 90s man discussions, and the script tries hard to be relatable and sometimes even comes close! There’s also some death and a cow birth and a stampede and assorted other such stuff! Ha ha, I just made up a term for movies like this, which have all the trappings of Westerns but really aren’t themselves Westerns: we’ll call them “faux-ters!” As in oaters, but faux! Do you think the term will catch on, and we’ll soon see it used in all the new academic stuff as well as on random blog posts? Well anyway, it’s a professionally put together comedy movie, quite likeable despite its whole “it’s tough being a straight white guy” vibe, occasionally funny, sometimes cheesy, but for all that, pretty entertaining! Nothing about it is great (though the cast is pretty exceptional) and nothing about it is surprising, and it could have jacked up the Palance a bit, but it’s okay! I’m going to give City Slickers two smiley-faced moons!

Burl reviews Devil Rider! (1989)

Hi-yo and ha ha, it’s Burl, here to review a horror Western! This one is called Devil Rider, and it fits into a long if sporadic tradition of sprinkling horror into the common oater! We’ve seen this in movies like Billy the Kid Vs. Dracula, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, Jack the Ripper Goes West, The Shadow of Chikara, Ghost Riders, Ghost Town, Dead Birds, The Burrowers, and Bone Tomahawk! And there are others too, so you can see there’s no shortage, ha ha!

Devil Rider gets a little lost among all these titles, and with good reason: it’s not terribly good, or memorable, or the least bit scary or thrilling! That doesn’t mean there aren’t some nice things to say about it, though - ha ha, I never want to be an all-negative nellie! No, I’m sure that if I give it some good old-fashioned pondering, something admirable will show itself! Or, on the other hand, possibly not, ha ha!

Now, you’re saying “Ha ha, Burl, but what’s the story?” Well, we start in old western times, where a homesteader is banging his stake! A big grumpy cowboy shows up, and, after some rasslin’, the big grumpus spears the homesteader with his sabre! Ha ha, this meanie is the Devil Rider of course, and he claims a bunch of victims right away, like the homesteader’s wife (who is bathing Pigkeeper’s Daughter-style) and a nearby gang of prospectors! And of course, grumpy as he is, he doesn’t forget to issue regular laughs as he conducts his reign of terror! A posse catches up with him and the next thing you know he’s dangling from a rope, but not dying! They shoot him, yet still he laughs!

Tiring of this he pulls off the noose, and the next thing you know it’s a hundred years later and his territory has become a dude ranch in the process of being invaded by a horde of ill-tempered yuppies! The leader of the yuppies is a reincarnation of the pole-smacking homesteader from the beginning, and he’s dragged his friends along to convince them to invest in the place as some kind of dude ranch hotel or something! Ha ha! And off to the side is the requisite old doom-crier, grooming horses and grumping about durn fools!

Of course the Devil Rider shows up, his duster unblemished from his years in Tartarus or wherever, and begins anew his campaign of shootin’, pokin’, and hackin’, along with a draggin’ or two! The most objectionable of the yuppies is Buddy, played by David Campbell, known from prior appearances in Deadly Prey and Killer Workout, as well as his role in Scarecrows! He lasts a surprisingly long time before succumbing to the depredations of the Devil Rider! Finally, after a head-chopping with his own sabre - the only way to get rid of this homely, bearded menace - the Devil Rider is slain! Ha ha, or is he? The picture ends with a headless horseman and the sound of that old familiar heh-heh-heh!

Devil Rider, as noted, is not a good picture! There’s no art to the filmmaking, no apparent attempt to make the goings-on scary, and not much else to fall back on, like gore or vim or pep or style! There’s a fair bit of carnage but not many Special Makeup Effects, except for the head-chop and a scene in which the Devil Rider flays one of his less fortunate victims with brands of fire! But even in these scenes, vim, pep and tomato paste are kept to a minimum! If only they had worked harder to make the Devil Rider a scary, mythological figure rather than just showing him constantly in full daylight, showing him off to be just a burly guy in a long coat! Ha ha! I’m going to give Devil Rider one single groat, which is half the number of groats we find in the film itself!

Burl reviews Rio Bravo! (1959)

The sun is sinkin’ in the west, the cattle look out at the view, the red bird settles in her nest, and it’s time for a Burl to review! Ha ha, yes, I’m here to talk about that great late-period Howard Hawks picture Rio Bravo, a longtime favourite of mine! Now, I don’t think I’ve reviewed a Hawks picture yet, but rest assured, he’s a director I admire!

And this was one of his best! Yes, it’s got John Wayne, whom we all know so well from Randy Rides Alone, in one of his finest roles in all of Dukedom! He plays Sheriff John T. Chance, who finds himself in a typically Hawksian siege situation with a colourful passel of allies! There’s a great, wordless opening in which Chance’s deputy, a bestubbled inebriate played by Dean Martin in perhaps his finest performance ever, scrounges for a silver dollar tossed into a used spittoon by Claude Akins of TV’s Lobo; this leads to a sudden, pointless murder and the jailing of Lobo!

The movie gets right to it from the beginning, and then unfolds at a leisurely but never draggy pace! In fact, the pace of things is one of this movie’s greatest achievements! Ha ha, all credit to Hawks, screenwriters Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, and editor Folmar Blangsted, who has one of the great names in Hollywood editorial department history, for this accomplishment!

The situation comes down to this: Chance with help from his deputy Dude (that’s the shaky-hands played by Dino), his other deputy Stumpy, played by Walter Brennan, the young pistoleer Colorado, essayed by Ricky Nelson, and a cardsmith called Feathers played by Angie Dickenson from Dressed to Kill, must keep Claude Akins in jail long enough for the Marshalls to collect him, without getting plugged by all the fellas who want to break Akins out! Because Akins, you see, is Joe Burdette, brother of Nathan Burdette a local richman with enough fifty dollar gold pieces to hire all the gunmen he wants!

There are all sorts of terrific scenes in the movie, and one of the best is when Chance and Dude follow a muddy-booted gunman into a Burdette saloon! Dude takes the lead in unearthing the fugitive and the scene unfolds beautifully, thanks to some blood dripping into a mug of beer! And of course you can’t have Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson in a movie without a couple of songs, and we get the marvelous “My Rifle, My Pony, And Me,” which I used to sing to my son every night at bedtime! Ha ha, I really do love all the scenes where the fellows are just hanging out in the jailhouse, kicking back, drinking beer and kicking back, waiting to see what will happen!

And there’s a solid gold climax with shootings, punchfights, and explosions! Ha ha, it’s kind of amusing how many Burdette men get plugged by our heroes throughout the movie, in fact, and by the end the bad guys are slinking out with their hands up, claiming to have simply had enough!

It’s one of the most purely enjoyable Westerns ever made, relaxed, professional and beautifully done in every respect! No doubt just about all of you have seen it before, but it’s intensely rewatchable, so I recommend giving it another spin whenever you get the chance! I give Rio Bravo four tumbleweeds and an extra donkey face suddenly appearing at the window! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Randy Rides Alone! (1934)

Ha ha and horseshoes, it’s Burl, here to review another elderly oater! This one stars none other than the Duke himself, but a young Duke, early in his ten-gallon career! It’s called Randy Rides Alone, and yes, the Duke essays the role of Randy, and yes, he frequently rides alone!

This picture has an unexpectedly crackerjack opener, ha ha! Randy is just arriving at a roadside rest stop called the Half-Way House, and he comes in the front door to find the barman and all the patrons completely massacred stone dead! A player piano is tinkling out a tune to the corpses, and mysterious eyes are watching through the cut-out eyes of a portrait! Whoa, spooky!

Randy finds a note on the wall from the culprit, while meanwhile, outside, the sheriff pulls up with his pal Matt the Mute and a full posse! Matt mutely hands the sheriff a note telling him and everybody else to be quiet too! Ha ha, so far not a word has been spoken in the picture, and it looks as though everyone will be communicating by notes the whole way through! Sadly this is not to be, however! That old familiar drawl starts up pretty quick, with the Duke protesting his innocence when he’s accused of perpetrating the massacre! Aii yai yai!

Well, from here things mosey along the expected trail, ha ha! There’s a gang, and a secret bad guy played by Gabby Hayes! It’s a duel identity thing, you see, and somehow the way Gabby disguises himself is to become mute, yet to leave notes under his real name, Marvin, in the same exact writing he uses in his guise as Matt the Mute to shove notes in people’s faces all day! I thought that was going to be the big clue, but nope! No one ever mentions the manifestly identical script!

Alberta Vaughan, whom you all probably know from Meet the Quince, is the new owner of the Half-Way House, which, along with the land upon which it sits, is the object of Gabby’s plunder! There’s also a bag of money, just so everybody knows how high the stakes are! And, ha ha, there’s a badguy hideout to rival the one in Ridin’ on a Rainbow!

As in Susanna Pass, explosives have been strewn all about, but an explosion only happens in a fairly hilarious scene at the end, in which the Duke shows how ruthless he can be! He just straight-up lures Gabby into a trap and then blows him up! Or at least arranges for him to be blown up! Ha ha, law enforcement was a slippery concept back then, as it still so often is today!

Anyway, it all goes by in about fifty-three minutes, so why not take a gander at this little oater? The opening is great, though I’d love to see what Edgar Ulmer or Fritz Lang would have done with it; and the Duke is, well, the Duke; the hideout is superb; and it’s nice to see Gabby Hayes in a role where he isn’t just hamboning around advising people to put a poltice on that! Although, ha ha, I like those roles too! Otherwise Randy Rides Alone is pretty standard el-cheapo fare, and I give it one and a half fake moustaches!

Burl reviews Ridin' on a Rainbow! (1941)

Yee-ha-ha, it’s Burl! Yes, I’ve got another oater for you, and, like Susanna Pass, it features a singin’ cowboy! Not Roy Rogers this time though, but Gene Autry, starring as himself, or rather as a guy named “Gene Autry,” in a picture called Ridin’ on a Rainbow!

Yes, Gene’s here, a-warblin’ his tunes, and his good pal Frog, played as ever by Smiley Burnette, is right thar by his side! Ha ha! Gene plays a rancher who persuades his ranching buddies to put all their money into the bank, which is then promptly robbed by two badmen and a clown! The clown escapes the bank by mixing in with the crowd, who somehow fail to notice an enormous harlequin in their midst! And of course Gene is left feeling badly for having helped lose all his friends their money!

The clown, played by prolific performer Byron Foulger from The Man They Could Not Hang, is part of a showboat ensemble which happens to be docked in town and conducting a parade! He’s not really a bad guy, just a little misguided, and his doting daughter, also a showboat performer, promises not to tell where he is! The badmen who cold-bloodedly shot down the old bank manager are the real bad guys!

Nevertheless, we have a clown on the run, which is a great scene because so rarely in these dime-book Westerns do we get to see a stagecoach pounding through the sagebrush with a Pierrot at the reins! He’s got the fuzzbuttons, the Elizabethan collar and everything! Ha ha! And this remarkable scene closely follows a mindbending showboat number with a holiday theme, such that, before the act is over, the stage is crowded with a clutch of Pilgrims, a cherub, a goblin, a demented Easter Bunny, and Santa! Ha ha!

Of course Gene and Smiley go undercover as entertainers as part of their campaign to catch the bandits! They seem a lot more interested in performing than in solving the crime, it must be said, but some time is also given to scenes of contrived drama wherein friction is created by having the other characters simply refuse to listen to what Gene is saying! He’s always right of course, and they should have listened to him and believed him!

Ridin’ on a Rainbow has a supporting cast of journeymen, of that there’s no doubt, with recognizable faces like Ferris Taylor from You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, Anthony Warde from Rear Window, and many others! I even liked the songs, except that holiday one and the title track, which really is a miserable ditty! Ha ha! But I enjoyed watching it, and found the relationship between Gene and Smiley to be the most compelling! Evidently it was spread across dozens of movies, and it would be interesting to watch them all and try putting their interactions into chart form, proving exactly what, I cannot say, but something noteworthy no doubt!

Anyway, Ridin’ on a Rainbow has some tapdancing, which I always love to see, and lots of great entertainment, and the showboat setting is novel for a Western, and the clown stuff is good for a chuckle! Give it a watch, why not! I give Ridin’ on a Rainbow two missing puffbuttons!

Burl reviews Son of Paleface! (1952)

Git along cowpokes, it’s Burl here! Ha ha, yes, I have another oater to declaim on for you today! Yes, it’s a comedy oater, featuring the old ski-slope nose himself, Bob Hope, whom we all know from his golfing cameo in Spies Like Us, ha ha! The picture is the sequel to The Paleface, which I’ve never seen, and it’s called Son of Paleface!

Now, I couldn’t tell you what went on in The Paleface, though there are clues salted throughout this sequel! Frankly it doesn’t seem to matter much, as this is a Frank Tashlin picture, so what it’s mainly concerned with is crazy absurdist cartoon humour! And of that, believe me, there is plenty!

Hope of course plays the titular offspring, Peter Potter Jr., a Harvard manchild who travels West in his flivver to pick up the fortune allegedly left to him by his blackguard of a father! But when the trunk supposed to contain the gold proves empty, Potter must pretend to be rich anyway, because otherwise the townsfolk of this Old West burg will tear him limb from limb, so eager are they to have all the debts left by Potter pére repaid! Ha ha!

In the meantime, the town is being plagued by robberies! Someone nicknamed “The Torch” is ransacking buggies and then retreating to a fabulous lair hidden beneath a covered bridge; and the culprit turns out to be the inexplicably-named “Mike,” a saloonkeeper and, ha ha, torch singer played by the incomparable Jane Russell! Hot on her trail are two faces familiar from such pictures as Susanna Pass, namely Roy Rogers and Trigger, the Smartest Horse in Movies!

All of this is a framework for songs, a little romance, some action and, more than anything else a rapid-fire selection of jokes and tomfoolery! Things frequently get strange, as when Potter drives his car through a desert, picks up a pair of buzzards who perch on the back, then drives through a so-called mirage of people ice-skating, then finds the buzzards on his car have transmorphed into penguins! And that’s just a taste of the oddballitry!

Trigger again proves worthy of his oats by performing some amazing tricks! At one point he and Hope share a bed, and the chilly horse repeatedly pulls the blankets up over himself! Ha ha, I hope he got a nice carrot or a sugar cube after that one! And I also want to mention the amusing cameos, like Bing Crosby appearing as a nameless “old character actor on the Paramount lot we try to keep working,” and the director of Madame Satan himself, Cecil B. DeMille, appearing as a photographer!

Ha ha, this movie made me say “ha ha” a number of times, and frankly I wasn’t expecting it to! So many of the gags are so outlandish that the movie approaches Hellzapoppin’ territory, and it’s all very colourful and bubbly and marvelous! Hope is funny, and Roy is very straight ahead, except that he prefers horses to ladies! Ha ha! I’m going to give Son of Paleface a rousing three donkey hats!

Burl reviews Spaghetti Western! (1975)

Rrrrrr-a-t-a-t-a, it’s Burl! And you know, I’ve got another movie review for you, ha ha! This is a review of, yes, a spaghetti western, but it’s a spaghetti western by the name of Spaghetti Western! It’s also known as Cry Onion I believe, perhaps better known as that in fact, and I seem to recall the video box with that title from a long time ago! I never knew what the heck it was, though!

Ha ha, I sure know now! It’s a crazy movie starring none other than Franco Nero, well known for his appearances in The Visitor, Die Hard 2 and Django Unchained, and also from some Italian movies! Here he plays Onion, an onion-eating ex-gunfighter turned sodbuster with a wavering Jimmy Stewart voice who travels in a cart full of onions pulled by a horse wearing a straw hat! He plans on being an onion farmer and arrives in Paradise City ready to take up that noble profession!

But sad to say that Superoil, a petroleum concern headed by Mr. Lamb (Martin “Psycho” Balsam sporting a fake Robert Mitchum voice and a mechanical hand, which I suppose you’d call a touch of steampunk if you were that way inclined) has overrun the area with badmen who’ve bullied and killed the land out from under the farmers and citizens! Onion quickly becomes Mr. Lamb’s bête noir, and the next thing you know he’s battling dozens of henchmen at a time, beaning them with onions, spraying onion spooge in their eyes and razzle-dazzling them Pixie and Dixie style with onion-juggling tricks! Ha ha! He also knocks people out with his murderous onion breath and has trained his horse to bedevil enemies with face-melting bumfarts!

Onion allies himself with Pulitzer, a newspaperman played by Sterling “The Long Goodbye” Hayden, and his lovely daughter, whom he falls in love with on sight, complete with animated hearts! There are also a couple of kids who help him out, and the older of them has been dubbed with an adult’s voice while the younger remains mute – but he speaks at the end in the voice of an elderly Jewish cantor! And then there’s a horse-bike chase; three rats wearing tribute hats (a Chaplin bowler, a Keaton porkpie and, I think, Harry Langdon’s straw boater); lots of crazy slapstick; a dirtbike gang in football attire, or at least an Italian simulacrum of same; and of course onions, onions, always onions!

In the end, after a final fight in which Mr. Lamb is defeated despite the magical extension-punches of his golden hand, Onion puts the deposed oilman to work harvesting onions! Ha ha, it’s the most fitting punishment! And I’ll tell you, it was great to see a movie with such a scornful attitude toward oil and oil companies! It was like Thunder Bay turned inside-out! The oil company is evil, full stop, and once the people have chased them away, they blow up the forced-perspective oil derricks, plug up the wells and go back to raising crops! Ha ha, very satisfying!

This is a crazy picture, and pretty funny in many parts! It’s got lots of dumb parts, don’t get me wrong – it often seems made up mostly of dumb parts actually! But it’s so weird, and the dubbing particularly is so crazy, that I enjoyed it! Just make sure you see the dubbed version, ha ha! Anyway, I give Spaghetti Western three very special Dick Butkus cameos!