I’ve always been a fan of good westerns. My father was a fan of western history and had in his library several 19th century First Editions, including “The Life of Colonel David Crockett, As Told By Himself”, copyright 1836. For as much as I have learned about the legendary Davy Crockett in the years since I first read that at age 10, he did a lot of the legend-building himself, which can be found in the book.
TC, thank you so much for this review and for the personal and larger historical perspective.
You have had such an interesting life, from your early years on. I like it when you weave your own memories in with what is happening now in politics and the arts. I would not have watched Billy the Kid but will now!
Thanks Tom. I appreciate historic westerns too, and have always watched for new ones to slip out. The DEADWOOD series, LONESOME DOVE, and a few other well researched and skillfully written gems remain tucked into my DVD collection. I need a break from the shitstorm of greed based foolishness that the pols in government display. They are the group who stopped their creative educations, obtained law degrees and correctly concluded that the next frontier was going to be the courts not the wilderness. They put away their guns and abandoned the old western gangs structure and instead formed law firms and became by-the-hour thieves with suits, ties and appointment schedules. Their store bore the living crap outta me.
THANK YOU for pointing me towards this show. I'm a big fan of westerns -- or as you point out, good westerns. And the Billy the Kid/Pat Garrett story has always been intriguing. Looking forward to diving into this series!
Thanks Tom - my son recorded the series & brought it over but I havent watched it yet. will do. Just watched the 2 seasons of Perry Mason - a very different view from the old tv series. But it was interesting - kept my attention right to the end. With my usual recorded shows being off the past months - lucky I have Roku.
I really liked it - actors did a great job - believable!! Now if they just dont cancel it. Two of my favorites already have been - Joe Pickett (CJ Box) AND the Jon Stewart show on Apple. Seems Apple didnt want the issues Jon Stewart covers!!!!!!!
And yet - all those so-called reality things - for all those dead braincells, I guess.
well, it's gonna be, consider how long Billy lived.and once you bring in Pat Garrett, the conclusion is the conclusion, unless you're one of those Billy the Kid Death Truthers, in which case...
I dug the shit out of it and was looking forward to more.
unfortunately, it was canceled. if enough fans object, it wouldn't be the first time a canceled series was continued on a different venue. but, as every "expert" on "media" will tell you, times have changed.
the era of the Great Cable Series is, they say, DONE. there will be more great ones (there always are), but those days of everyone you know waiting anxiously for Sunday to roll around have definitely gone.
Cancelled because of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes and WBD's desperate attempt to sell off the family jewels to pay the debt of letting the poor cousins get access to the jewels to begin with.
TC, I think you presented a storyboard for a 2023 'Western'. Thanks. I know the screenplay will not not be directed by John Ford. Have you got a working title?
I love the Peckinpah almost as much as I love "The Wild Bunch." it's a shame it was so butchered for its first release...now, it makes a lot more sense. I also really liked the first season of the new series and I like Tom Blyth, a Brit whose ambition was to study acting in Julliard...at this point, you probably get better classical chops than you do in RADA nowadays, where they do very little Shakespeare. he's going places for sure. the one picture of BTK looks like he was a pretty short guy who was also short on good looks and Tom Blyth is very tall and, of course, good-looking. I read that Barry Keoghan (who was heartbreaking in "The Banshees of Inisherin," which I remember you didn't like) is developing his own Billy the Kid series, and he seems more like MY vision of Billy. I saw a very tough recent western on TV recently that embraced the theory you mentioned about BTK's death being faked and the older Billy was played by Tim Blake Nelson ("Old Henry"...I looked it up). more of a "chamber western," very claustrophobic, dark and gritty as hell.
some of the best and most physically beautiful westerns were the ones made by Anthony Mann in the '50s; most of them had Jimmy Stewart playing much darker roles than he had before the war. but Mann made two other westerns in that decade. one was "The Tin Star," with Henry Fonda and Tony Perkins (okay but not great) and "Man of the West" with Gary Cooper (a masterpiece). a few years ago, I picked up a reasonably priced box set of the six or seven westerns Randolph Scott produced and starred in, all directed by Budd Boetticher. they have more or less the same plot structure and make an interesting binge.
obviously, I've loved westerns all my life. nowadays, when I start to list my favorite movies, the Shocking Truth is that there are at least two or three westerns at the very top of that list, assuming you can count "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" as a western (there ARE guns and gambling and drinking and a big shootout at the end, but...). but even if you can't, "The Wild Bunch" will always be at or very near the top, depending on the day.
The difference between Jimmy Stewart pre-war and post-war is explained by 35 missions over Germany in 1944-45 as pilot-in-command, rising to squadron commander and then deputy group commander of the 445th Bomb Group.
I toldja...he was one of my old man's COs in Wymondham in Norwich, where there's a small shrine for the Eighth Air Force in Norwich Cathedral. I found it very moving. I've always made the same distinction with the same cause whenever I talk about Jimmy Stewart, and that's because,whatever his personal politics, he busted his ass to be a great officer under the most difficult circumstances available and, by everyone's account, succeeded. but he DID take that job very personally and daily proximity to violent death over which one has a tiny measure of control on the best days, topped with the responsibility to save thousands of lives besides his own...it's easy to see that could give somebody pause for the rest of his life.
but then again, I'm the guy who needs to watch "Twelve O'Clock High" at least once a year, so...
I have a couple stories about his time in the Air Force. One is funny: they took an 88mm hit in the nose - the shell went straight through and came out about 3 feet in front of the cockpit. They wondered what the structural damage was, so when they landed back in England Stewart kept the nose high as long as he could, but when he gently dropped it onto the gear, the nose gear and the nose collapsed. According to his wingman, who I interviewed, they all got out and everyone was safe, and Stewart looked at the nose and scratched his head and then "in a perfect Jimmy Stewart movie line" as the guy described it, said "Well, I guess it's true what they say - any landing you can walk away from..."
that IS a very good story. yeah, all my dad's stories have people starting out not very happy they had some fucking movie star trying to show the world how cool he was when their lives were in the balance, but eventually, nobody was skeptical anymore. he actually flew on lots of bomber missions sort of halfway incognito...didn't make any kind of big deal about it. I know a famous story from somewhere else about him trying to get volunteers and saying something like: " it won't be easy and I'm not blaming you for not wanting to but I'm gonna be going..."
with that voice and affect, right away you've got an advantage in trying to get a group to do its best work.
I remember telling you one time about that unexploded bomb on my dad's first mission when he found himself a bombardier who didn't know how to drop a bomb (trained on B-17s, suddenly finding himself in a B-24). when the bomb fell out upon landing and started bouncing down the landing field, Jimmy Stewart was there to witness it and he, very wisely, got the fuck out of there.
Very interesting! (And that 1836 book!!!) However, I'm utterly baffled about who is Billy the Kid. Is he the 10-year-old Henry McCarty whose father dies? Does he then change his name to his stepfather's, Henry Antrim? And who dies and orphans him again, at age 15? Thanks for any clarification.
for me, the definitive account of these issues in covered--and then some!--in Richard Slotkin's terrific trilogy, the most relevant volume being the third, appropriately called "Gunfighter Nation." highly, highly recommend it, especially if you're concerned with the larger cultural implications of westerns. obviously, those implications are HUGE.
so glad I spent a lot of time in graduate school hanging out with American History Ph.D candidates.
Reagan’s ranch was 2 hours NW of Malibu beyond Santa Barbara, up Refugio Canyon Road, nearer to Goleta, CA. Such a lovely location in a very low density area. Fresh and wild.
Susan, I used stay in the State Park & body surf at the Refugio beach break .
The Reagans had several CA properties but, his Malibu "ranch" was well inland in the TV- Movie Colony there where some Western scenes were shot against a painted, blue sky back drop. An historical site has been made out of the home.
I didn’t know that he had a ranch there. I used to camp at the campground up top above Malibu, probably near the area you refer to. I also loved the camping at Refugio.
Going from dark to light in westerns, I'll take Hackman and Eastwood in "The Unforgiven" and Newman and Redford in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." Grew up watching the after-school westerns of Hoot Gibson, Bob Steele, and Ken Maynard with their intense clarity about good and evil with little room for nuance. Thanks for the high praise of this western. Will give it a look.
My mom was a Kansas farm girl who once lived near the location of the Kate Bender Museum, a tribute(?) to Bloody Ma Bender and her evil sons.
but let's remember that "Butch Cassidy..." was released exactly the same time as "The Wild Bunch," which is a real western (and possibly the best). "BCATSK" was a movie in western drag for hip potheads.
I didn't say I didn't LIKE it, just that it's not really what I'd call a "western."
whatever affection I have for it might be related to the fact that the girl I was with back then (for much too short a time, alas) was mobbed by people after the movie who thought she was Katherine Ross.
is the "Bloody Mama" you mention the person Angie Dickinson played in "Bloody Mama?" terrible movie, but Angie had a scene of simulated sex (with, of all people, William Shatner!) which involved her being naked from the waist up and if one had thought she had great legs...
in the interests of maintaining a modicum of seriousness in this venue, I leave the rest of that last sentence to be finished by others. and in my own defense, I was in my TWENTIES, for godsake.
.
PS--I looked it up and I mixed up two movies. "Big Bad Mama" was the Angie Dickinson one. "Bloody Mama" had Shelley Winters with a very young Robert DeNiro as one of her sons. it's still on my "not yet seen" list.
I think Shelley Winters played the Ma Barker character who headed up a gang with her sons during the Depression. Kate Bender along with her brothers killed people who stayed at their rooming house some time after the Civil War. By the time the law figured out something was amiss with so many victims who'd stayed at the same place, the Benders disappeared farther into the West.
"The Wild Bunch" with its violent ballet was very troubling for me. I guess I was too young to have been sufficiently brined in US gun violence.
Watch Wild Bunch again, Judith - but be sure to get "extended version" the director's cut, so it makes sense. The Good Guys are the Bad Guys, the Bad Guys are the Good Guys, it couldn't have been made any other year than 1968.
if that was your reaction to the slo-mo deaths in "The Wild Bunch," I'd say you were close to a perfect audience. Peckinpah repeatedly told everyone who asked that the violence was intended to be shocking, especially in showing what a bullet can do to human flesh. he also intended it to serve as an allegory about Vietnam, which was pretty obvious in 1969. Peckinpah also cited Kurosawa as a major inspiration and you can see it..."Seven Samurai" has a lot of slow-motion mayhem which is, at the same time, very beautiful.
unfortunately, recent history seems to tell us that Peckinpah (and other directors of that era) might have been rather naive about their ability to shock America out of its gun thing...it's gonna take a lot more than a few movies, no matter how great they might be.
TC, thank you so much for this review and for the personal and larger historical perspective.
You have had such an interesting life, from your early years on. I like it when you weave your own memories in with what is happening now in politics and the arts. I would not have watched Billy the Kid but will now!
Thanks Tom. I appreciate historic westerns too, and have always watched for new ones to slip out. The DEADWOOD series, LONESOME DOVE, and a few other well researched and skillfully written gems remain tucked into my DVD collection. I need a break from the shitstorm of greed based foolishness that the pols in government display. They are the group who stopped their creative educations, obtained law degrees and correctly concluded that the next frontier was going to be the courts not the wilderness. They put away their guns and abandoned the old western gangs structure and instead formed law firms and became by-the-hour thieves with suits, ties and appointment schedules. Their store bore the living crap outta me.
Always take your likes seriously. Most westerns have been Matt Dillon hero types. Sounds like a nice change
THANK YOU for pointing me towards this show. I'm a big fan of westerns -- or as you point out, good westerns. And the Billy the Kid/Pat Garrett story has always been intriguing. Looking forward to diving into this series!
Thanks Tom - my son recorded the series & brought it over but I havent watched it yet. will do. Just watched the 2 seasons of Perry Mason - a very different view from the old tv series. But it was interesting - kept my attention right to the end. With my usual recorded shows being off the past months - lucky I have Roku.
The Perry Mason series is much closer to the original stories, with some 2023 updates that make it better.
I really liked it - actors did a great job - believable!! Now if they just dont cancel it. Two of my favorites already have been - Joe Pickett (CJ Box) AND the Jon Stewart show on Apple. Seems Apple didnt want the issues Jon Stewart covers!!!!!!!
And yet - all those so-called reality things - for all those dead braincells, I guess.
It's a limited series, can't go more than another season before coming to the end.
The Stewart one?
The Billy the Kid series
well, it's gonna be, consider how long Billy lived.and once you bring in Pat Garrett, the conclusion is the conclusion, unless you're one of those Billy the Kid Death Truthers, in which case...
Sorry - in the middle of writing to my 2 Senators - telling them how I feel about the current revenge tour of ;the Israelis.
Time for the US to back off & start thinking. Past time. WE are not on the side of right at this point. Maybe there is no right side - who knows.
Its going to come back to haunt this country.
I dug the shit out of it and was looking forward to more.
unfortunately, it was canceled. if enough fans object, it wouldn't be the first time a canceled series was continued on a different venue. but, as every "expert" on "media" will tell you, times have changed.
the era of the Great Cable Series is, they say, DONE. there will be more great ones (there always are), but those days of everyone you know waiting anxiously for Sunday to roll around have definitely gone.
Cancelled because of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes and WBD's desperate attempt to sell off the family jewels to pay the debt of letting the poor cousins get access to the jewels to begin with.
very elegant summary, Tom.
TC, I think you presented a storyboard for a 2023 'Western'. Thanks. I know the screenplay will not not be directed by John Ford. Have you got a working title?
I laughed out loud.
How the West was Lost?
I love the Peckinpah almost as much as I love "The Wild Bunch." it's a shame it was so butchered for its first release...now, it makes a lot more sense. I also really liked the first season of the new series and I like Tom Blyth, a Brit whose ambition was to study acting in Julliard...at this point, you probably get better classical chops than you do in RADA nowadays, where they do very little Shakespeare. he's going places for sure. the one picture of BTK looks like he was a pretty short guy who was also short on good looks and Tom Blyth is very tall and, of course, good-looking. I read that Barry Keoghan (who was heartbreaking in "The Banshees of Inisherin," which I remember you didn't like) is developing his own Billy the Kid series, and he seems more like MY vision of Billy. I saw a very tough recent western on TV recently that embraced the theory you mentioned about BTK's death being faked and the older Billy was played by Tim Blake Nelson ("Old Henry"...I looked it up). more of a "chamber western," very claustrophobic, dark and gritty as hell.
some of the best and most physically beautiful westerns were the ones made by Anthony Mann in the '50s; most of them had Jimmy Stewart playing much darker roles than he had before the war. but Mann made two other westerns in that decade. one was "The Tin Star," with Henry Fonda and Tony Perkins (okay but not great) and "Man of the West" with Gary Cooper (a masterpiece). a few years ago, I picked up a reasonably priced box set of the six or seven westerns Randolph Scott produced and starred in, all directed by Budd Boetticher. they have more or less the same plot structure and make an interesting binge.
obviously, I've loved westerns all my life. nowadays, when I start to list my favorite movies, the Shocking Truth is that there are at least two or three westerns at the very top of that list, assuming you can count "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" as a western (there ARE guns and gambling and drinking and a big shootout at the end, but...). but even if you can't, "The Wild Bunch" will always be at or very near the top, depending on the day.
The difference between Jimmy Stewart pre-war and post-war is explained by 35 missions over Germany in 1944-45 as pilot-in-command, rising to squadron commander and then deputy group commander of the 445th Bomb Group.
I toldja...he was one of my old man's COs in Wymondham in Norwich, where there's a small shrine for the Eighth Air Force in Norwich Cathedral. I found it very moving. I've always made the same distinction with the same cause whenever I talk about Jimmy Stewart, and that's because,whatever his personal politics, he busted his ass to be a great officer under the most difficult circumstances available and, by everyone's account, succeeded. but he DID take that job very personally and daily proximity to violent death over which one has a tiny measure of control on the best days, topped with the responsibility to save thousands of lives besides his own...it's easy to see that could give somebody pause for the rest of his life.
but then again, I'm the guy who needs to watch "Twelve O'Clock High" at least once a year, so...
I have a couple stories about his time in the Air Force. One is funny: they took an 88mm hit in the nose - the shell went straight through and came out about 3 feet in front of the cockpit. They wondered what the structural damage was, so when they landed back in England Stewart kept the nose high as long as he could, but when he gently dropped it onto the gear, the nose gear and the nose collapsed. According to his wingman, who I interviewed, they all got out and everyone was safe, and Stewart looked at the nose and scratched his head and then "in a perfect Jimmy Stewart movie line" as the guy described it, said "Well, I guess it's true what they say - any landing you can walk away from..."
that IS a very good story. yeah, all my dad's stories have people starting out not very happy they had some fucking movie star trying to show the world how cool he was when their lives were in the balance, but eventually, nobody was skeptical anymore. he actually flew on lots of bomber missions sort of halfway incognito...didn't make any kind of big deal about it. I know a famous story from somewhere else about him trying to get volunteers and saying something like: " it won't be easy and I'm not blaming you for not wanting to but I'm gonna be going..."
with that voice and affect, right away you've got an advantage in trying to get a group to do its best work.
Yes, everyone ended up respecting him - he never asked anyone to do anything he wouldn't do and likely already had.
I remember telling you one time about that unexploded bomb on my dad's first mission when he found himself a bombardier who didn't know how to drop a bomb (trained on B-17s, suddenly finding himself in a B-24). when the bomb fell out upon landing and started bouncing down the landing field, Jimmy Stewart was there to witness it and he, very wisely, got the fuck out of there.
Very interesting! (And that 1836 book!!!) However, I'm utterly baffled about who is Billy the Kid. Is he the 10-year-old Henry McCarty whose father dies? Does he then change his name to his stepfather's, Henry Antrim? And who dies and orphans him again, at age 15? Thanks for any clarification.
Billy the Kid is all those people. His mother dies at 15 and leaves him orphaned.
I wonder if he'd had his parents till adulthood if he'd have become the person he became. (Lots of different last names for one person!)
various aliases
Are you with Heather Cox Richardson’s analysis of the place of westerns in American culture?
To an extent.
for me, the definitive account of these issues in covered--and then some!--in Richard Slotkin's terrific trilogy, the most relevant volume being the third, appropriately called "Gunfighter Nation." highly, highly recommend it, especially if you're concerned with the larger cultural implications of westerns. obviously, those implications are HUGE.
so glad I spent a lot of time in graduate school hanging out with American History Ph.D candidates.
Well,, we know that neither Goldwater nor Regan were "Cowboys". Reagan's "'ranch" was in Malibu.
Reagan’s ranch was 2 hours NW of Malibu beyond Santa Barbara, up Refugio Canyon Road, nearer to Goleta, CA. Such a lovely location in a very low density area. Fresh and wild.
Susan, I used stay in the State Park & body surf at the Refugio beach break .
The Reagans had several CA properties but, his Malibu "ranch" was well inland in the TV- Movie Colony there where some Western scenes were shot against a painted, blue sky back drop. An historical site has been made out of the home.
I didn’t know that he had a ranch there. I used to camp at the campground up top above Malibu, probably near the area you refer to. I also loved the camping at Refugio.
In his earlier days, before politics I believe, he had a house on the street behind my family house in Pacific Palisades. 1962.
Yup
Thank you.
Thanks for the tip. I’d like to know more about western history.
Going from dark to light in westerns, I'll take Hackman and Eastwood in "The Unforgiven" and Newman and Redford in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." Grew up watching the after-school westerns of Hoot Gibson, Bob Steele, and Ken Maynard with their intense clarity about good and evil with little room for nuance. Thanks for the high praise of this western. Will give it a look.
My mom was a Kansas farm girl who once lived near the location of the Kate Bender Museum, a tribute(?) to Bloody Ma Bender and her evil sons.
I've come around to respecting "Unforgiven."
but let's remember that "Butch Cassidy..." was released exactly the same time as "The Wild Bunch," which is a real western (and possibly the best). "BCATSK" was a movie in western drag for hip potheads.
I didn't say I didn't LIKE it, just that it's not really what I'd call a "western."
whatever affection I have for it might be related to the fact that the girl I was with back then (for much too short a time, alas) was mobbed by people after the movie who thought she was Katherine Ross.
is the "Bloody Mama" you mention the person Angie Dickinson played in "Bloody Mama?" terrible movie, but Angie had a scene of simulated sex (with, of all people, William Shatner!) which involved her being naked from the waist up and if one had thought she had great legs...
in the interests of maintaining a modicum of seriousness in this venue, I leave the rest of that last sentence to be finished by others. and in my own defense, I was in my TWENTIES, for godsake.
.
PS--I looked it up and I mixed up two movies. "Big Bad Mama" was the Angie Dickinson one. "Bloody Mama" had Shelley Winters with a very young Robert DeNiro as one of her sons. it's still on my "not yet seen" list.
I think Shelley Winters played the Ma Barker character who headed up a gang with her sons during the Depression. Kate Bender along with her brothers killed people who stayed at their rooming house some time after the Civil War. By the time the law figured out something was amiss with so many victims who'd stayed at the same place, the Benders disappeared farther into the West.
"The Wild Bunch" with its violent ballet was very troubling for me. I guess I was too young to have been sufficiently brined in US gun violence.
Watch Wild Bunch again, Judith - but be sure to get "extended version" the director's cut, so it makes sense. The Good Guys are the Bad Guys, the Bad Guys are the Good Guys, it couldn't have been made any other year than 1968.
yea verily. MASTERPIECE. and it MIGHT be around time for my annual viewing. next time the grandnephew shows up, so I can continue his movie education.
thanks for the disambiguation.
if that was your reaction to the slo-mo deaths in "The Wild Bunch," I'd say you were close to a perfect audience. Peckinpah repeatedly told everyone who asked that the violence was intended to be shocking, especially in showing what a bullet can do to human flesh. he also intended it to serve as an allegory about Vietnam, which was pretty obvious in 1969. Peckinpah also cited Kurosawa as a major inspiration and you can see it..."Seven Samurai" has a lot of slow-motion mayhem which is, at the same time, very beautiful.
unfortunately, recent history seems to tell us that Peckinpah (and other directors of that era) might have been rather naive about their ability to shock America out of its gun thing...it's gonna take a lot more than a few movies, no matter how great they might be.
at this point, I'm out of ideas.
Tom your writing inspires me…you’re honest and trustworthy ! Love, Marsha
just for general information's sake, the new season of "Slow Horses" begins on Dec. 1.