The 50 greatest western movies
Cast involved: Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Harry Dean Stanton
The Penn is mightier
It's in the deep cuts of the Missouri River as it snakes through Montana that we find the soggy-bottomed romance and pantomime sadism of Arthur Penn's schizophrenic range western.
Rustling is the name of the game but the plot rides pillion to a series of darkly comic existential vignettes in which death and desperation play out an escalating series of uneasy two-handers.
As such, it's a complex/clever-clever western that doesn't work for everyone. Does Jack Nicholson's inalienable urbanity distract from his performance as a raggedy-ass dirt farmer?
Do the ludicrous acting choices afforded Marlon Brando by his star-power detract from the lethality of his character? Does Arthur Penn's hands-off direction allow the plot eventually to settle into a roundelay of psychic showdowns and pornographic violence? The answers to all are 'yes'.
But then, the frontier was replete with displaced Easterners, insane poet-warriors and purposeless brutality, so maybe it's time a film that's too often dismissed as a top-heavy, blow-dried vanity project is given its dues. ALD
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Western Telegraph
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Aldi launches temporary Specialbuy tattoos like air fryers
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South Wales Argus
05-08-2025
- South Wales Argus
Aldi launches temporary Specialbuy tattoos like air fryers
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Telegraph
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- Telegraph
For true film fans, Netflix and Amazon Prime will never replace Blu-ray
The first time I saw a Blu-ray playing on a high-definition television, it changed my life. I was in the electricals department of a shop in Cambridge, and the film was Guys and Dolls. The clarity was such that I felt I could shake hands with Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons. Within days, I had blown all my pocket money on such a television and a Blu-ray player. Then came an even more significant moment of revelation. I bought the Blu-ray of Brighton Rock, and even though it is in black and white, my breath was taken away by one of the early scenes. When Pinkie and his gang are chasing Kolley Kibber through the back streets of the town, the definition was so perfect, I felt I was there with them, in 1947. Not only did it drag me into the film in a way I had never felt before, but it gave me an entirely new conception of the past. I started upgrading my DVD collection to Blu-rays as those of my favourite films came out. Some were only minor improvements – Kind Hearts and Coronets was not quite of the standard I had hoped for – but others were stunning. The Cruel Sea transports you to the North Atlantic; the restoration of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is surely one of the greatest cultural feats of our times. But several really rather wonderful films are not on Blu-ray. I know there is talk of the format disappearing as everything is streamed, but (as with the streaming of music and compact discs) the quality is never as good, and real fanatics will always want a hard copy and good machinery on which to play it. Rely on streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime for viewing films and you risk an unreliable Wi-Fi connection scuppering your viewing. There is also the fear that a cherished title will be dropped from the service's library without warning, before you've had a chance to (re)watch it. Blu-ray presents no such problems. So, in an attempt to be helpful, I thought I'd suggest a few British cinema classics that someone really ought to set about restoring and putting on Blu-ray. First, however, there is one magnificent American film that one can get on Blu-ray only by buying an import, which requires a different region's player on which to watch it: William Wyler's masterpiece The Best Years of Our Lives, from 1946. It is hardly a marginal work – it won eight Oscars – and it defies belief that no British distributor has brought out an edition for our market. Similarly, two great British films can be had as imports, with all the related problems, but are not available in British editions: Powell and Pressburger's 49th Parallel, and Anthony Asquith's moving film of Terence Rattigan's The Browning Version, with an awesome performance by Michael Redgrave. One very culturally significant British film, Chance of a Lifetime, from 1950, is not even available at the moment on a commercial DVD, let alone a Blu-ray, and would seem ripe for the attentions of the British Film Institute. It was part-funded by a state film-finance corporation set up by the Attlee administration to help the native film industry survive some idiotic trade and economic policies that had almost brought it to its knees. It tells the story of a West Country agricultural-machinery firm where the workers become so militant that the owner invites them to run it. It is to an extent allegorical with the state of the country at the time; and another allegory, the charming 1944 film Tawny Pipit, should also be on Blu-ray. Instead of Nazis attacking innocent nations, bird's-egg thieves try to attack the nest of a rare bird. It is a profound gem. Will Hay's best film, My Learned Friend, is not on Blu-ray, while some of his less brilliant films are. And one of the darkest and most superbly acted films of the 1940s, The Rocking Horse Winner, about a boy with a manipulative mother, is only on DVD. The two worst omissions are, however, two of the finest films of the Second World War. Launder and Gilliat's Millions Like Us overwhelms by its realism and its sheer projection of decency and courage, and is one of the most important historical documents of the period. Even more inexplicable has been the failure to restore, Colonel Blimp-style, the film I regard as Powell and Pressburger's finest, A Canterbury Tale. Written by Emeric Pressburger, a Hungarian Jewish refugee from the Nazis, it is for me the most English film ever made, projecting all our finest values. The BFI, which does much excellent work in this regard, should start there.
