Venture into the life of a failed prospector named Cable Hogue (Jason Robards) as he scrambles through the last remnants of the American frontier. Hungry, he growls at a lizard, which explodes right as Cable is about to nab him.

From the shadows, Cable’s partners, Taggart (L.Q. Jones) and Bowen (Strother Martin), played target practice with the lizard.

For all the biblical imagery, there are equal parts raunch and bawdy humor, darting camera shots from face to cleavage.

When they emerge from the dust, he points his rifle at them. They laugh.

Cable responds: “I appreciate humor, boys, but I’m beginning to think you’re cuttin’ it a mite thin.”

But he hesitates to shoot them. So they clobber him and steal his gun and his water.

“Cable is yella!” they taunt as they glide away, leaving Cable to die.

So he talks to himself. (A lot. Throughout the whole movie.)

Watching them fade into the dust, as he grits his teeth: “Yellow!” he exclaims. “Call me yellow! Leave me to dry and blow away! SING A SONG ABOUT IT! Laugh at old Cable Hogue, huh? I'll get out! I'll get out! Don't you worry none about that! You just ... worry about when I get out.”

He keeps hollering until he has no choice but to abandon his humiliation, for now, and wander into the rocks of Arizona red. He’s halfway to hell and looking for help. And he’s thirsty. In that picturesque landscape, the sunlight never ends. Two days without water. So he talks upward, to God. He promises to sin no more if he can just get a drop of water.

“I mean that, Lord.”

Nothing. No water.

Second day: No water. Just more blistering. He continues to beg for God’s mercy.

Then, on the fourth day, the sunlight is replaced by a sandstorm, total dryness. He collapses into a growing dune: “Lord, you call it. I’m just plain done in. Amen.”

And on this cruel deathbed, water begins to pool up from the ground.

Then, he does something that recurs throughout the film in countless ways by every character, even the extras without lines: He abandons high ideals without pause.

In this case, he ambiguously taunts the Lord, taking credit for his survival: “Told you I was gonna live. This is Cable Hogue talking. Hogue. Me. Cable Hogue. Hogue. Me. Me. I did it. Cable Hogue. I found it. Me.”

It’s a comically bleak and cathartic way to open a film. Like everything else we encounter, it’s slippery and ever-changing and impossible to pin down. As Cable puts it later, “I found water where it wasn’t.”

The president’s man

Jason Robards, who plays Cable Hogue, is a fascinating guy. He discovered the work of Eugene O’Neill in the library of the USS Nashville, and this set him toward his Hollywood career. Robards played Jamie Tyrone in the film rendition of Eugene O’Neil’s dour stage play “Long Day's Journey into Night.”

Robards was married to Lauren Bacall for most of the 1960s, until the marriage collapsed under the weight of his alcoholism, much like the character he played in O’Neill’s masterpiece.

As for Westerns, there’s his portrayal of Doc Holliday in “Hour of the Gun” (1967) — and who could forget his menacing performance in “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968)?

He won an Oscar for his portrayal of Washington Post managing editor Ben Bradlee in “All the President’s Men” (1976), then another for his hard-nosed depiction of detective-novelist Dashiell Hammett in “Julia” (1977). His final credit was “Magnolia” (1999).

When Robards died, then-President Bill Clinton issued a statement of condolence. Clinton had awarded Robards both a National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center Honors award.

His talent is largely why “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” stands as such a thematically and emotionally complex film, humourous and oddly relaxing, with a soft tone and leisurely pace.

The Bad Samaritan

"The Ballad of Cable Hogue" has Slim Pickens and the legendary Kathleen Freeman, who barked her way through “The Blues Brothers” series as well as appearances in a ton of blockbusters.

You’ll also recognize Strother Martin, whom we discussed in the entries about “True Grit” (1969) and “The Sons of Katie Elder” (1965). Also R.G. Armstrong, who played Kevin MacDonald in “El Dorado” (1967).

But perhaps most of all, the film is known as a creation of Sam Peckinpah.

Peckinpah is a legendary figure in cinema history, wild even by Hollywood standards. We’ll spend quality time with him in the entry for “The Wild Bunch.” “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” was the unexpected love child that followed it.

Over the course of the 19 days of filming, he got hammered and rowdy. At one point, he fired three dozen crew members. Inclement weather shuttered the set, and the cast rushed to a nearby bar. By the end, the tab had grown to $70,000. The film itself went $3 million over budget. The whole mess cost him his job with Warner Bros.

'Ten cents, you pious bastard, or I’ll bury you'

God plays a tremendous role in Cable’s journey, but so does the devil. Many of the characters quote Bible verses with ease, conversationally, although this habit is also used as device to unmask hypocrisy, like the impatient banker in the stagecoach.

The Christian message is strong but also playful and, often, unclear. Until, of course, it isn’t.

Like our introduction to Rev. Joshua Sloan, who spooks Cable enough that Cable shoots the reverend’s hat off.

“Peace and goodwill, brother,” Rev. Sloan pleads. “l come as a friend.” Waving a white handkerchief: “Careful, son, I’m a man of God.”

Cable, squinting: “Well, you damn near joined him.”

The sudden appearance of water is reminiscent of Jacob’s well and the outpouring of Psalm 107:35, “He turns a desert into pools of water, a parched land into springs of water.”

After shooting at the “reverend” again later in the film, Cable snarls: “What a blessing religion must be, preacher. It touches my heart.”

This ironic theological undercurrent is a useful way to embolden the ungodly elements that add sparkle to the story, which in turn elevate a reciprocity between the sacred and the profane. Like the way Hogue sadly mutters to the banker, “I’m worth something, ain’t I?” A sadness, of course, motivated by his desire to visit Hildy, the most prized prostitute in Dead Dog.

The optics are all askew, a slapdash rendition of heaven. Hogue’s pale horse is spotted like a Dalmatian. Death is life; life is rowdy.

He and the preacher talk about life from a grave-like hole. The preacher, in his clerical suit with white collar, oversees a “congregation” consisting of photos of naked people, women presumably.

Or how about the way he handles Frank’s death? That entire scene is both uncomfortable and hilarious.

Together, Cable and the preacher get drunk in the grave, then ride to Dead Dog, with visions of Hildy. After falling off the horse, the preacher loosens his collar: “If I cannot rouse Heaven, I intend to raise hell.”

The twist

Fluctuations like these are a hallmark of postmodern film. Nothing is what it appears to be. Irony abounds. Up is down … and over and under. Then — all at once — you land in a reality so crisp that it almost hurts to experience.

“The Ballad of Cable Hogue” is bursting with these moments and guided by this artful little surprise maneuver. For all the biblical imagery, there are equal parts raunch and bawdy humor, darting camera shots from face to cleavage.

The implication of prostitution, in “Stagecoach” (1939) for instance, is a thing of the past. “Cable Hogue” takes us into the stink of the henhouse. But right as the steam is about to boil, we cut to a scene full of clergymen and crosses amid a sermon: “The devil seeks to destroy you with MACHINES! Ask me how I know! ... Inventions are the work of Satan!”

This interplay is constant. The entire fight scene between Hildy and Hogue is swamped with it. A choir sings “Shall We Gather at the River" as Hogue sprints away from his dine-and-dash with Hildy, ducking into the sign for the big tent revival that says, “BE SAVED. SINNER REPENT.”

And of course Hogue deflates the tent, whiskey bottle in hand, pants half on, fleeing from his backroom mischief.

The townsfolk chase him out of Dead Dog. And more than one of them think it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever seen.

Then the movie can take a sudden turn, and you crash into these beautiful embraces, moments that knock you over because they’re so powerful.

As we fall into the love story, all the irreverence fades away. Or better yet, it becomes purified.

And there’s that moment, halfway through the movie, when Ben (Slim Pickens) dutifully hands Cable the American flag. You can feel each person’s emotions. And suddenly, you’re right there with them, smack dab in the middle of a treacherous desert, and you’re sweaty and you’re worried, but you’re safe and you’re free.

Wednesday Western: 'The Ox-Bow Incident' (1943)

The murder of a sacrificial victim has always been justified as a healing, purifying, strengthening, fortune-producing, or empowering act.

"The Ox-Bow Incident" is a movie about this mercy and violence. In the scene where the vigilantes gather under a hanging tree, they have a festive meal. Nooses dangle at the ready, but there’s no urgency, only shadow.

Fueled up, the members of the posse tear off toward their victim. When the town judge hears about the posse, he gasps, 'That’s no posse; that’s a lawless lynching mob.'

Then the lynch mob demands a sacrifice. Without even noticing, they get sucked into ritual, the presence of the sacred.

Someone guides some horses beneath the dangling ropes. Right before the victims mount the saddles, the vigilantes announce two minutes of prayer. They remove their hats and bow their heads.

The cinematography in these moments is frightening and beautiful. Otherworldly. Luminous. Gruesome. Deadly.

"The Ox-Bow Incident" does not look, sound, or feel like a Western from the early 1940s.

There’s a lot of silence, interrupted occasionally by a horn blast on the soundtrack. Other times, in heightened anxiety, the ugliest noises take over.

There are lots of long shots where the camera barely moves. Lots of shadow. Lots of one-sided lighting. If you paused at the right moment and put a fancy frame around the TV, you’d have highbrow art on your wall.

"The Ox-Bow Incident" could easily be a mid-1990s neo-noir Western. The only thing that kept it from winning Best Picture was a movie called "Casablanca."

There’s an attention to symbols — literal attention. The movie directs your focus until you can’t look away.

Something fishy

Dialogue is natural yet poetic and constantly evolving. There are strange moments of comedy, like the man who goes by Major Tetley and wears a full Civil War uniform. Further humor arises when Gil Carter (Henry Fonda) and his buddy Art Croft comment on it.

Gil Carter: “That renegade Tetley, strutting around in his uniform, pretending he's so much. He never even saw the South till after the war. Then only long enough to marry that kid's mother and get run out by her folks.

Art Croft: “Figured there was something fishy about him, dressed like that.”

Scandal and crisis

Among the group of men is a large lady named Jenny “Ma" Grier with an Irish accent and a gruff demeanor. She fits in without ever trying.

Some Westerns have bombshell pinups who shoot guns at outlaws. Others offer a woman whose motherhood is her refinement. In the case of "Ma" Grier, we have a wild lady with traits that seem masculine. Why else would she join a testosterone-fueled lynch mob?

Then there’s Rose Mapen, the Venus figure. When she glances at the lynch mob, all the men raise their hats in salutation. This is her power. Don't forget that Venus caused the Trojan War.

Mimetic violence

Many Westerns offer a display of violence. "The Ox-Bow Incident," instead, looks at the causes of violence and how it comes to life. The film doesn’t show the founding murder, the act of violence that instigated the entire scapegoating cycle, but only the discord that caused it and the explosive and primitive response.

This in-between is fascinating to me. It is a place of uncertainty, where people work together — or ought to. It’s the moment before a hangman yanks the lever, that pause when everyone is still alive, so the situation might take a sudden turn.

When violence is involved, this whole bubbling mess becomes even more volatile. One dumb remark could ignite a crisis that can’t be undone.

"The Ox-Bow Incident" finds its home in the strife between one tragedy and the next. So while the brutality is never directly shown, it is felt. And it becomes a noose to anyone who instigated the scapegoating.

"The Ox-Bow Incident" captures every stage of this process.

All against one

At the start of the movie, the vigilantes have not formed a posse yet. One by one, the men gather outside the saloon to discuss the murder of a man they all knew.

There is a slow escalation. At the start, all but one of them are practical. Then they begin to threaten one another in what seems to be a defensive maneuver. But nothing strengthens a lynch mob better than each person’s unspoken fear of becoming the victim.

The ratio flips: The violent contagion spreads to all but one of them. Suddenly they are unanimous in their hunger to kill.

This collective fever-mind transforms them into a single organism, ready to sacrifice the criminal. In these situations, the sacrifice is framed as a fulfillment of justice, with equal emphasis on compassion.

Fueled up, the members of the posse tear off toward their victim. When the town judge hears about the posse, he gasps, “That’s no posse; that’s a lawless lynching mob.”

In response, the deputy sheriff says he’ll deputize the men.

The judge balks: That is illegal; it wouldn’t hold up.

But the violent contagion spreads to the rest of town, and the lynch mob expands.

With a little coaxing from the judge and bartenders, the lynch mob dissipates, except for one of the men. But that’s all it takes: one person. He manages to revive the lynch mob.

Worse, the deputy sheriff follows through and deputizes the mob, so that the men can use their lawman status to make exceptions to the law.

The legal nature of this dilemma is no accident. Several times, the film offers commentary on the meaning and value of law. The tension of the movie arises from the barbaric expulsion of law. The fact that self-awarded sovereignty doesn’t work, that scapegoating doesn’t work, that semantics and force didn’t change the essence of the law are proof of the God-given nature of rights and freedoms.

But it’s difficult to stop a frenzy, because it usually reverts to majority rule and lynch mobs are full of people eager to enforce punishment — and eager to cede responsibility for their actions to the leader of the mob.

Sacrifice

In Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," Brutus suggests murdering Caesar “for the good of Rome.” He alters the meaning of words to incite and persuade his fellow conspirators, whom he calls “gentle friends.”

He tells them: Guys, let’s be sacrificers, not butchers. “We aren’t going to kill Caesar; we’re going to ‘stand up against the spirit of Caesar / And in the spirit of men there is no blood.’ I mean, we’ll kill him boldly, but not wrathfully.”

Unfortunately, he tells them, this will require dismembering Caesar — but just literally, and that’s not what matters. Then the most disturbing line of his speech: “Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods / Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds.”

This distinction is important. It offers two definitions for sacrificial murder. In the first, the victim is sanctified by his own death; he becomes sacred, acceptable to the gods. In the second, the victim is so far from sacred that he can’t even be considered human.

Neither one is correct. Both are murder. The scapegoater never wants the angry crowd to slow down enough to realize this. Anyone who tries to appeal to rationality and mercy becomes an outcast, making him a candidate for sacrifice.

Between these two extremes, we find humanity. It leads us back to the local, a gathering of people who choose law over violence. The tricky part is keeping a foothold on that middle ground.

"The Ox-Bow Incident" captures a view of this struggle, which each member of the lynch mob undergoes. It's a moral stress test. Everything is moving too fast for anyone to think clearly. It becomes a matter of instinct — and of hoping that your instincts won’t lead to tragedy, that you really are a good person.

Nobody wants to see his reflection in the tree with dangling nooses.

Provisions: Broken Bow Country

Broken Bow Country

Category: Art and Apparel
Founder: Colton Patterson
See also Align's interview with Patterson.
Founded: 2023
Representative products:Official John Wayne T-shirts, cowboy-themed T-shirts, art prints, stickers

At a glance:

In less than a year, Patterson has amassed nearly 750,000 followers with his Instagram posts and artwork.
He’s only 17 years old, a student at Columbine High School.
He has used his platform of over half a million followers on Instagram to raise more than $10,000 through the sale of original artwork for victims in the recent assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump.
Patterson has a sizeable following for the artwork and content he creates for country and Western music.

In their own words (CEO Colton Patterson):

What I realized very early on is that like no one will care about it until you just put it in front of them and you've shown that you can add value to their life. Because I imagine I could have started with the drawings, I could have posted them as much as I wanted, but until you're in front of people, until they know you have the credibility and the ethos, they're not going to care for the most part.

I just think cowboys are cool.

Regarding his Trump fundraiser:

This has nothing to do with politics. I was incredibly moved by what happened, and I wanted to use my platform to do something that extended beyond the controversy and the arguing.

I couldn't care less about what nasty things people have to say about it online and the politics around it. All I know is that at the end of the day, I used a unique privilege to give back to people that needed it, and that’s all that matters to me.=

My new Henry: Shooting the gun that won the West

I just bought my first Henry rifle, a .22 lever action. When one of my AR-loving friends saw it, he said, “Look out, squirrels!”

Most everyone else, however, responded with stories about their favorite .22 lever action. One of them, a novelist friend, said that he’s fended off thousands of prairie dogs with his .22 rifle.

Unless life in America gets real bad, real fast (definitely possible), I won’t be killing any critters with my Henry. But I am going to learn every part of this wonderful machine and, hopefully, get good at using it.

It’s not an AR-15 or an AK-47 or an M16. It’s their grandpa, the gun that won the West.

Technically, the Henry rifle was only made for six years, through all of the Civil War. During that brief period, the New Haven Arms Company produced 14,000 Henrys. The company even crafted a gold-adorned Henry for President Abraham Lincoln.

One Confederate officer described the Henry as 'that damned Yankee rifle that can be loaded on Sunday and fired all week.'

The Henry that I own is a modern reimagining of the original, made by Henry Repeating Arms, founded in 1996 by New Yorkers Louis Imperato and his son Anthony Imperato, who has since become the CEO. The company is headquartered in Wisconsin, with a factory there and another in Bayonne, New Jersey.

This article is not a promotion for Henry Repeating Arms. But the company sells a great product and espouses commendable values. It is an unabashedly pro-America company whose motto is “made in America, or not made at all.”

Kevin Ryan

Ringo the Kid

A good friend of mine loves Henry repeating rifles, so I’ve shot a variety of them. He also collects various lever-action rifles, including Marlins, Rugers, Spencers, and Brownings.

I love these Wild West rifles, especially the ones made by Henry. Brand loyalty, maybe. But it’s also a relationship based on feeling. How does the gun sit in your hands? Does it rest nicely on your shoulder? Is there an intuitive flow to its movements and anatomy? Cheesy as it sounds, you have to sync with the rifle.

I bought it for $370 at Whitey’s Pawn and Tools, just outside Tulsa, Oklahoma. The owner was enthusiastic about my purchase, as my daughter tore through the stacked aisles past banjos and swivel hooks.

I went with the cheapest lever-action sold by Henry Repeating Arms, the Classic. It has none of the ornamentation that makes the company’s rifles so elegant, like the Big Boy .45 caliber designed to honor John Wayne. I’ll work my way up to the Golden Boy, then the Big Boy.

My rifle weighs about five pounds, heavier than it appears. It’s got a hooded front sight — a tiny metal canopy at the end of the barrel. So when you look down the pointy rear sight, your field of vision contains a frame for the target.

The magazine is a tube with a loading port near the front end of the outer tube that is kept in place by a notch pin, a simple locking mechanism. There’s a bullet-shaped hole where you slot your .22 rounds. A skinny rod serves as the inner magazine tube. When you use it to shove the rounds into place, it feels like you’re a chimney sweep.

Cradle the stock into your shoulder. Squint at the target — we often use a metal spinner.

Then there’s the familiar motion of pushing the lever down then pulling it back up, in one decisive and swift movement. A snail-sized round flies into the rifle chamber, and the bolt has shoved the hammer into full-cock position. Time to shoot.

Release.

Then you get to do the John Wayne lever motion all over again. And again and again.

It’s a wonderful gun to take to the range. It’s accurate. But it’s not immediately easy. I like that. There’s zero recoil, and .22 caliber ammo is cheap.

It’s a great varmint rifle. It’s good for home protection, too, in case you would prefer not to liquify an intruder with a 12-gauge shotgun.

The loading process is difficult enough that kids couldn’t fire it by accident — especially for responsible gun owners who follow the rules of firearm safety.

I’m by no means a gun expert. Not at all, actually. I’m a student at best. I’m sure I even botched parts of the above descriptions. I couldn’t tell you why .22 cartridges are rimfire or how rimfire is different from centerfire.

But I am lucky enough to spend time with some actual experts. And it’s like one of them often says after I lower my rifle, “Doesn’t it just bring a smile to your face?”

My Rifle, My Pony, and Me

The original Henry 1860 has been used in a ton of Westerns, including “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) and “How the West Was Won” (1962).

In ”Silverado” (1985), Danny Glover’s character asks, “You ever seen what a Henry rifle can do in the hands of somebody who knows how to use it?”

You can find it in many of the Westerns slated to appear in this series: “Lonesome Dove” (1989), “The Man from Laramie” (1955), “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” (2018), “Heaven’s Gate” (1980), “Dances with Wolves” (1990), “Ride with the Devil” (1999), and “Django Unchained” (2012).

It also appears in the animated Western “Rango” (2011), which I excluded from the family-friendly list at the last minute — it’ll reappear.

Versions of the Henry rifle appear in a number of video games, including The Last of Us Part II, Fallout 3, Red Dead Redemption, and Red Dead Redemption 2. There are even some newer games that feature Henry Repeating Arms, including the great Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.

Those are only a few examples. Henry and Henry-derived lever-action rifles are nearly as ubiquitous in Westerns as six-shooters. When you hold one, you can feel the spirit of the West.

Winchester, a brutal man

In the mid-1800s, a young man named Benjamin Tyler Henry set out to be a gunsmith. During his apprenticeship, he worked alongside Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson (Smith & Wesson). From there, they founded their own firearms company. One of the investors was Oliver Winchester, who also has a famous last name and who quickly wrested control of the company, rebranded it, moved headquarters to New Haven, Connecticut, then renamed it New Haven Arms Company.

Benjamin Henry landed a supervisor role at the factory. Then, with America on the cusp of civil war, he designed the first lever-action repeating rifle. At a time of muskets, which had to be muzzle-loaded, Henry’s .44 caliber 16-shot rifle was formidable. The patent was registered on October 16, 1860.

Henry rifles played an interesting role in the Civil War. They were used primarily by the Union Army, most of whose soldiers bought them with their own money. Henry rifles allowed soldiers to rapid-fire 16 shots, giving them an incredible advantage over their wartime adversaries.

Confederate soldiers weren’t able to consistently get the ammunition. One Confederate officer described the Henry as “that damned Yankee rifle that can be loaded on Sunday and fired all week.”

The Henry was also used at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, only it was in the hands of the Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne tribes that obliterated Custer.

In 1864, Benjamin Henry soured on his boss, Oliver Winchester. Irked by his salary, Henry sought to wrest the New Haven Arms Company from Winchester. Before he could, in 1866, Winchester dissolved the New Haven Arms Company into the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Benjamin Henry died before the dawn of a new century. Winchester, meanwhile, modified the Henry rifle until it became the Winchester Model 1866.

From there, the Winchester took all the credit. The Winchester company pushed the promotional slogan for its newfangled rifle: “The gun that won the West.”

John Wayne used the Winchester Model 1892 in roughly a dozen films, beginning with “Stagecoach” (1939). It also appears throughout “True Grit” (1969). In 2021, the rifle sold for a whopping $88,500.

Of course the Winchester appears in “Winchester ‘73” (1950). One of my favorite scenes is early on, right as the shooting competition is about to begin and Wyatt Earp is presenting the coveted rifle, one of 1,000. He struggles to speak over a pair of fighting boys.

Boy 1: “My old man shoots a Henry, and he says it's the best gun there is!”

Earp: “Gentlemen, if you please!”

Boy 2: “Ain't no better than a Spencer!

Earp: “When the Winchester people —”

Boy 2: “A Spencer's better than anything you can get!”

Earp: “Young men, dry up!” (Everyone laughs.) “Without being unkind to either the Henry or the Spencer, do you suppose we could agree that this is the finest gun in the world?”

Please note that the company profiles and product recommendations that Align publishes are meant solely to inform and edify our subscribers; unless explicitly labeled as such, they are neither paid promotions or endorsements. Even in cases in which a company is a paid sponsor of Blaze Media, Align editorial content is created independent of any commercial relationships.

Wednesday Western: 'The Old Way' (2023)

“It wasn’t in the script for the trigger to be pulled,” said George Stephanopoulus.

"Well, the trigger wasn't pulled," replied Alec Baldwin. “I didn't pull the trigger.”

“So you never pulled the trigger?” asked Stephanopoulus.

“Oh no, no, no,” Baldwin insisted. “I would never point a gun at anyone and pull the trigger at them — never.”

The character Colton Briggs weeps through the body of Nicolas Cage. His brokenness is palpable, as he and his daughter confront the realities of death.

It was a fabrication so bold that even Stephanopoulus saw through it. The interview was huge news at the time: an exclusive with Baldwin a month and a half after the shooting on the set of the Western “Rust.”

A preventable death

Baldwin had been mostly silent. Or at least he didn’t give any interviews. We’d become acquainted with the photos of him sobbing on the set after the tragic accident.

We’ll get into the entire story in a future entry. For now, what matters is that a 24-year-old named Hannah Gutierrez was the armorer for “Rust.” That meant she was responsible for all of the guns on the set, including the replica Colt .45 that Baldwin haphazardly fired, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.

Hannah Gutierrez had been fast-tracked to the position, thanks to her highly connected stepdad. “Rust” was only her second movie as an armorer. Her first was the Nicolas Cage film “The Old Way."

She had raised red flags during filming. On two occasions, she fired a gun near cast members without warning. The second time, Cage shouted, “Make an announcement! You just blew my f***ing eardrums out!” then stormed off the set.

Shortly after the film wrapped, Gutierrez appeared on the “Voices of the West” podcast, crowing that “The Old Way” was a “really badass way” to launch her Hollywood career. She also described the process of loading ammo as “the scariest thing.”

The fatal shooting on the set of "Rust" was a little more than a month away.

She added: “You know, I was really nervous about it at first, and I almost didn’t take the job because I wasn’t sure if I was ready, but, doing it, like, it went really smoothly. The best part about my job is just showing people who are normally kind of freaked out by guns how safe they can be and how they’re not really problematic unless put in the wrong hands.”

Do you believe that anything happens without the will of God?

Cage begins “The Old Way,” his first Western, with a whopper of mustache.

Oddly, the film is exactly what you would expect from a low-budget Western from 2023 starring Nicolas Cage. To make it all the weirder, you can find it on Disney+.

Right out of the gate, we’ve got a man struggling to escape a noose as a preacher delivers a sermon, declaring, “Do you believe that anything happens without the will of God?”

Ominous figures loom in the shadows.

Cage plays Colton Briggs, a gunfighter who has to avenge his wife, and he’ll have to team up with his 12-year-old daughter to do it. This journey will bring them to — ah, what am I saying, none of this is interesting or new.

This movie is trash. I mean, it’s great to have on in the background. It’s relaxing. But it’s basically a hodgepodge of Western archetypes and tropes.

The centerpiece of the film is the father-daughter relationship. But Cage has played better fathers. Check out his performance in the suprisingly good animated film "The Croods" and its sequel.

The critical response to “The Old Way” seems apathetic and cold until you watch the movie.

The New York Times review is probably the most savage:

"The Old Way" is a cheap, run-of-the-mill western, which is an appealing quality … with Nicolas Cage sleepwalking through his role as the ruthless Montana cowboy Colton Briggs, roused from gunslinging retirement by a lackluster quest for revenge. … It’s a distinctly low-effort affair across the board, from the simplistic plotting (our heroes chase the bad guys, then find them) to Cage’s performance, absent any of the self-aware wit he demonstrated in last year's "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent." And while it’s true that a certain tepid aspect is common to most B westerns, those of the ’30s and ’40s were made with a baseline competence that "The Old Way" is woefully lacking.

Where you can find it

Disney+

Hulu

Amazon Prime - $3.99

Google Play - $3.99

AppleTV - $5.99

But still …

First, come on, guys, this is Nicolas Cage.

Second, the reviewers are absolutely right.

And, third, they’re also being lazy. “The Old Way” isn’t entirely awful. The cinematography is gorgeous; the sets are huge and elaborate.

But “The Old Way” wouldn’t appear in this series without Cage at its core. It’s a mediocre film, full of stereotypes and tropes that were maybe never original to begin with. It lacks the creative brilliance, the psychedelic flourishes that cascade throughout “Slow West” (2015), not to mention the special effects and storytelling.

The music resembles an AI attempt at a generic Western soundtrack. The plot is equally stilted and uneventful. The dialogue is paunchy and awkward — Cage flatly rushes his lines for much of the movie, while some of the other actors get too dramatic. Which is not their fault: The characters are uninspired. The themes are broad.

But with Nicolas Cage holding the reins , these failures are trifling or at least amusing.

Nouveau shamanic

People are drawn to Nic Cage because he delivers a costumed, ornamental version of Nic Cage. Nobody else talks or scowls or laughs like he does, the king of reaction shots. His career has all the variety of a mid-range buffet, a magnet for hangovers.

He has delivered some objectively stellar performances — “Adaptation” (2002), “Leaving Las Vegas” (1995), and “Raising Arizona” (1987).

But his cinematic mastery involves far more than great acting in the traditional sense. His prolific career, consisting of more than 100 movies, resembles a waterfall of brilliance and spam.

He played Benjamin Franklin Gates in the “National Treasure” series. He is Ghost Rider. Can you imagine any other actor being able to shape-shift so dramatically?

He doesn’t always make this transformation. Sometimes, in “The Old Way” for instance, he seems to phone it in. But even this is a spectacle worth beholding. You still get to watch Nicolas Cage navigate his craft, even if the movie is a stinker.

New York Times magazine described him as “Hollywood’s greatest surrealist, whose personal and creative unpredictability has led him to attain near-mythological status in certain corners of the internet.”

He’s so iconic that he has his own style of acting: nouveau shamanic, a process of surrender that Cage views as an authentic alternative to the traditional method of acting, which he views as deception: “I don’t act. I feel and I imagine and I channel.”

The goal of nouveau shamanic is to follow impulses. This wildness of heart and eagerness to explore the depths of the subconscious mind resonate with iconic director David Lynch, who characterized Cage as "the jazz musician of American acting."

Ethan Hawke has lauded Cage’s ingenuity, describing him as "the only actor since Marlon Brando that's actually done anything new with the art of acting."

Nouveau shamanic often results in “mega-acting,” an approach that some viewers and critics have interpreted as showy overacting. This assumption is a mistake. It forswears the possibility of a kind of cinematic enlightenment.

You can see it in Werner Herzog’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” (2009). Cage let his inner turmoil spill into the derangement of an unhinged police lieutenant who spirals into drug abuse and corruption — of every kind.

In “Matchstick Men” (2003), he unleashed the painstaking impulses of a con artist stricken with OCD. Cage really lets the pathologies breathe.

Done with acting

Nic Cage is pure Hollywood. He credits James Dean with inspiring him to begin an acting career — without needing to mention the fact that his actual last name is Coppola, as in “The Godfather,” “Apocalypse Now,” and “American Graffiti.”

Cage has appeared in big-budget movies and no-budget movies and every level in between.

Here’s a typical Cage paradigm: He shuffles through highbrow and lowbrow, sometimes all at once. After winning an Oscar for his portrayal of a suicidal alcoholic writer in “Leaving Las Vegas” (1995), he landed a string of empty yet lovable blockbusters.

They were all approximations of cinema. Pure blockbuster. Full of overacting done in total earnestness. We loved every moment of it. This string of films is now coded into the American experience.

He played gaudy characters, excessively makeupped and badly costumed. And he owned the big screen in the late 1990s — “The Rock” (1996), “Face/Off” (1997), “Con Air” (1997), “City of Angels” (1998), “Snake Eyes” (1998), “8MM” (1999), and who could forget his frantic yet cool appearance in “Gone in 60 Seconds” (2000)?

None of those films saw the slightest hint of critical acclaim.

It’s not until recently that his performances have earned him praise again. He has been sharp, with “Mandy” (2018), “Pig” (2021), and “Dream Scenario” (2023), all of which are lower-budget endeavors by independent production companies with lots of clout, including highbrow darling A24, which distributed “Dream Scenario."

In the “Western Movies Today” episode of the “How the West Was Cast” podcast, co-host Andrew Patrick Nelson points out that modern Westerns are made largely as passion projects and often with the intent of winning awards.

Compare this to the Western at its height, when over a hundred Westerns came out each year. In that same period, none of them won Best Picture. Westerns only really started winning Oscars after the genre had supposedly collapsed.

“The Old Way” doesn’t quite fit either paradigm, but for good reason.

I know I've disparaged the film for most of this article, but “The Old Way” does have at least one standout moment of cinematic brilliance.

An hour into the movie, there’s this lovely campfire scene. The setting is reminiscent of the powerful scene in “True Grit” (1969), when Rooster finally tells Mattie his story.

Briggs faces his daughter, surrounded by night, and unburdens his sorrow, the loss of his true love, crying for the first time. And the tears are genuine. The character Colton Briggs weeps through the body of Nicolas Cage. His brokenness is palpable, as he and his daughter confront the realities of death.

It’s the fullest example we get of Cage’s acting method. It’s just enough to inspire hope that there will be more Nicolas Cage Westerns in the future.

Late last year, Cage told Vanity Fair that he was done with acting: “I may have three or four more movies left in me.”

He said that after appearing in six films — some of his best work to date — in 2023 alone.

He has also since appeared in three additional films, including “Longlegs” (2024), with another three in various stages of production, including “The Gunslingers,” his second Western.

Still, it’s hard to forget what he said to Vanity Fair: ”I do feel I’ve said what I’ve had to say with cinema. I think I took film performance as far as I could. … I do want to get much more severe and stringent in my selection process. … I want to say ‘Bye’ on a high note.”

But who knows?

Who knows where Nicolas Cage’s performance starts and ends, how far it extends beyond the spectacle and mania of his presence on screen? Who knows if there are even limits to what he feels and channels and imagines?

Wednesday Western: SJ Dahlstrom

Wilder Good

Crowds shuffled through Arlington, a city of roller coasters and stadiums. The jumbotron declared that the temperature was nearing triple digits. It was June, after all, when Texas heat tightens its grip on the air.

Novelist/poet Nathan Dahlstrom and his son had driven here from Lubbock. Over the course of their five-hour trek, they played John Wayne DVDs on repeat.

And I drove from Oklahoma with my 4-year-old daughter, who was giddy on her first road trip.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

We met at Globe Life Field, where the Texas Rangers faced the New York Mets. Neither of our kids had been to an MLB game before. What a distinctly American rite of passage.

This convergence of fathers had all the markings of Nathan’s Western-tinged fiction and poetry, composed under the pen name S.J. Dahlstrom.

In an era when libraries have allowed the creep of ideology to spoil words and undermine literacy, Nathan delivers characters and scenes with backbone. He tells stories the way people used to, before popular art and literature fell to political whimsy.

Nathan’s books feature wise mentors who transform weak adults into protectors so that they can lead their children to wisdom. Strong families, sworn to unity.

Nathan is devoted to this upbuilding, where love is a matter of construction. He employs this in many ways, right down to his guidance as a creative writing teacher.

But here I am straying from his clearest advice: Don’t try to produce a message. Just tell the story, and maybe a message will appear.

Range life

The Rangers average 30,000 spectators at home games. There was a bright excitement to the atmosphere. Less than a year ago, the Rangers won their first World Series, finally able to hoist the Commissioner's Trophy.

The closed roof of the ballpark intensified the feeling that we — thousands of us waiting for fireworks — were as small and frantic as ants, color-coded and primitive. Bursts of high-intensity songs blasted out at random. Fans shrieked at cheerleaders with T-shirt cannons. It was a disorienting but electric setting for a pre-interview.

Nathan wore his trademark cowboy hat, a long-sleeve Wrangler pearl-snap, and cargo shorts. We lifted our hands to our hearts for the national anthem, and our kids followed our example.

The next morning, we would sit down for an interview at Mercury Studios, home of Blaze Media.

Nathan and I had originally planned to meet months earlier, in Oklahoma City, for the Western Heritage Awards, where Nathan won a Wrangler award, his fourth.

But a nasty virus struck the Ryan household, and I had to cancel my trip.

Nathan sent me a few updates from the ceremony and dinner, including pictures with John Wayne’s children.

We got along immediately, with a shared love for the 1962 John Wayne-Jimmy Stewart film "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." Coincidentally, that week, it was the feature Wednesday Western.

Without ever saying it, we also share a love for the writing of 19th-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, the first existentialist, who was a Christian, meaning that the basis of existentialism, a supposedly atheistic philosophy, is in fact centered on Christ.

In fact, Kierkegaard was alarmed by claims about the decline of Christianity. He wrote, “In the midst of the self-importance of the contemporary generation there is revealed a sense of despair over being human.” Kierkegaard describes reality as a tool God uses to teach us, guided only by His presence.

Be wilder

Nathan crafts lean stories that are carefully flowered with philosophy and grit. Reading them feels smooth, like floating down a river. They thrive with Hemingway’s deceptive minimalism.

It’s so easy to zip through a chapter, to land on a closing sentence that grips you. He weaves scenes full of emotion and upheaval and beauty and love, always cinematic. His characters might seem unremarkable in a market saturated with bizarre fantasy and surreptitious politics. But these sacred nobodies understand the fragility of life.

It’s only a matter of time before some wild creative turns the series into a TV show or movie. I believe that it would be a phenomenal hit. The Wall Street Journal included Nathan’s work on a list of children's books featuring "grit, audacity, and imagination."

Wilder Good is a 12-year-old boy with two married parents and a sister. Nathan modeled Wilder Good on himself, drawing from his own childhood. He grew up on a small ranch, surrounded by miles of unbroken nature, his private frontier. He learned to become a cowboy. His family attended a Church of Christ three times a week.

Compare this to Disney’s prolific use of characters without families. A whopping 30 Disney movies include variations of dead parents, roughly half of the company’s 62 animated films. Alongside animal sidekicks, dead or missing parents are quite possibly the most prevailing theme in Disney movies.

Why? If it’s merely a literary device or an irremovable part of the Disney formula, then it’s bad writing. Pure laziness.

But what if it’s more? As a cultural journalist, it intrigues me. As a writer, it annoys me. As an armchair philosopher, it fascinates or bores me — I can’t decide. As a parent, as a father, it riles me up with a special indignation.

Nathan offers an escape from Disney’s bizarre mythology. As Wilder’s mother tells him in "Texas Grit," while discussing her cancer treatment, “Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and get mad and hold on.”

Wilder Good is a hunter who loves riding horses and exploring the wild. As a result, we see the emotional complexity of the hunter who shoots Bambi.

The Wilder Good series opens with "The Elk Hunt," Wilder’s chance to use his grandpa’s 270 Winchester rifle. The book was a finalist for the 2016 Lamplighter Triple Crown Awards.

"Texas Grit" followed, winning the 2015 Will Rogers Gold Medallion Award for Young Readers. In it, Wilder gains even greater emotional depth, a strengthening of his resilience. You can see Nathan stretching out a little as he tells the story.

The downpour of awards began with his fourth volume, "The Green Colt," which garnered Nathan’s first Wrangler Award and his second Will Rogers Gold Medallion Award, as well as two finalist honors.

Nathan opens the book with an extended soliloquy, an almost stream-of-consciousness monologue by Papa Milam, Wilder’s grandpa. It’s longer than the previous Wilder Good novels, marking a shift in Nathan’s style and process, an advance in his creative play.

"Black Rock Brothers," the fifth, earned him a Will Rogers Silver Medallion Award. With his sixth, "Silverbelly," he was back to Gold. "Black Rock Brothers" also started his three-year streak of winning the Wrangler Award.

The seventh, "Cow Boyhood," also earned him another Will Rogers Silver Medallion Award.

His most recent Wrangler Award-winning book, "Heartwood Mountain," marks the eighth installment in his Wilder Good series. By now, Wilder Good is minted, heroic. Nathan doesn’t even begin the book with Wilder, in an adventurous approach.

Paramount

A former Paramount hub, Mercury Studios is the largest TV and film studio in Middle America.

It's the site for scenes in "JFK," "Walker, Texas Ranger," "Talk Radio," "Leap of Faith," "Prison Break," and — my favorite — the children’s show "Barney & Friends" — one of Barney’s beloved tree-mendous trees slumps outside Stage 19. It also served as the platform for music videos by an array of artists, including Garth Brooks, Phil Collins, Guns N’ Roses, and the Backstreet Boys.

Nathan and I chatted on one of the many couches in the 75-foot-ceilinged hallway.

We discussed the importance of creating redemptive and edifying but most of all entertaining children's literature, the influence of the Bible on personal lives and literary works, and the craft of writing. We shared our experiences and insights on mentorship, storytelling, and living a meaningful life. We discussed the role of leadership and governance in society, as seen in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," and the ability of the Western genre to explore the concept of the ideal man.

We lauded the fruits of creativity, hard work, and living life fully in the pursuit of success and personal growth.We pondered masculinity, discernment, order through wildness, and even kung-fu wisdom.

The searchers

Nathan grasps an ancient ritual of elders who mentor the youth. It’s one of the most unwavering themes throughout his work, often performed by the wise old man who guides boys to manhood and men to humility.

In Nathan’s case, this mentorship was also creative and professional. His friendship with John R. Erickson, author of the “Hank the Cowdog” series, launched him into a writing career. John Erickson taught Nathan how to use his gift, although first he had to find it. Nathan has done the same in turn, many times over.

He co-founded Whetstone Boys Ranch, a boys' home and boarding school that offers therapeutic ranching to troubled young men.

But this quality is also evinced with his own son, a wonderful, sharp young man who gives me hope for the future of our nation. It was cool to see their connection. They have a special bond, as if they can understand one another in a million unspoken ways. They could just as easily be the father and son from Cormac McCarthy’s "The Road," navigating a post-apocalyptic hellscape, always with a sense of continuity.

Nathan loves Teddy Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, and John Wayne, but most of all, he loves Christ Jesus. This is the height of manliness.

There are plenty of nonsensical rules in society. One of them is that creatives stand on one side of the battlefield and frontiersmen on the other. Nathan Dahlstrom upends this paradigm. Because the reality is quite the opposite: If a man can fight — and he ought to know how — he certainly better know how to speak, how to translate his emotions, how to be gentle, how to be kind, and how to honor women without degrading his masculinity.

Then there’s the gentleness of fatherhood, an experience that requires a man to be tender. But other times, a father must be a brute. A man has to bleed.

In one poem, Nathan describes “the glory of men talking low” as they wait for a hunt. You can hear that silence.

He likes to say that he’s “interested in all things outdoors and creative, he writes poetry while bowhunting and collects wildflower seeds when doing ranch work.” That description is fantastic. It should be a common goal among men, balancing nature with art.

He lives by the twin mottos "be Wilder" and "find beauty."

“Whetstones: 40 Manly Poems” is a chapbook themed around masculinity, although he certainly doesn’t exclude the role of girls and women.

Some of it is written using couplets or quatrains, with the formal rhyme schemes of ballads and sonnets. There’s also free verse, gorgeous lines like, “We held our cowboy hats to our bellies / as the wind stirred / the fall-yellowed cottonwoods / in the canyon below us.”

He writes, “Only hidden beauty is true.”

When creating their art, writers, poets, and musicians all must decide: Will my music conform to truth? Or does my truth conform to music? Most take the latter. It’s far easier. Great music arrives unexpectedly. It is forever passing through. Truth, however, does not bend so easily. It’s rigorous and unchanging.

Before having children, I saw life in abstractions, colors, melodies, poems. But then my kids changed everything into poetry. I used to understand only the potential of life. Now I see the endlessness of love.

The Ranch

It’s a joke at Mercury Studios: If someone’s in town, you take them to the Ranch, the finest steakhouse near the Blaze Media headquarters. Some of my colleagues groan at the mention of it. But not me. The cowboy ribeye and meat and cheese platter alone are worth any wait.

So naturally, we all went to the Ranch after our interview. My dad, my sister, my daughter, Nathan, and his son. My only regret is that we didn’t record the conversation. It centered largely on truth.

Nathan values authenticity. A real man, an authentic man, is both rough and gentle. An outdoorsman. A hunter. But equally a lyricist and a gardener.

Nathan is well educated, with a major in Bible studies and a minor in Greek. He’s incredibly well read. Yet he urges young folks to reject the absolutism of a college degree. An education can only have a heart if you also pursue the wildness of life and the order of nature. This theme courses through Nathan’s work: A rich education too often leads to pride; humility is better than credentials from the most impressive universities.

As the waiter began pulling plates from the table, Nathan quietly announced that one or all of us had to finish the meat. (No problem.) There’s something violent about tossing meat into the trash.

Nathan often explores this sacred connection to God’s lower creations. His first novel, "The Elk Hunt," contains vivid scenes driven by this tension. He applies a brokenhearted philosophy to the examination in his poem, “Watching a Deer Get Killed.”

In another, he describes cats with a funny disdain, “Something about their smell / and blasé nonchalance / doesn't seem American / seems arrogant without achievement. / Seems French.”

Humor aside, his reverence for animals is constant.

The truth of nature isn’t growth or motion; it’s self-preservation, followed by the hope of redemption. Life always fights to survive, or at least to have had a chance.

Wilder Good captures all of this, without guttering into condescension. He intuits the still sad music of humanity reflected in nature. Then there’s what nature does to herself, her red-clawed destruction, only, in the next breath, to sigh to us with a breeze. As Dante writes, we are calmed by “the bond of love that nature makes.”

The paradox doesn’t end.

Wilder Good is at peace in nature. But he also understands the painful realities of hunting. Killing is unnatural. Yet life can’t function without it. Look at Genesis 3:21: God provides Adam and Eve with clothing … made of animal hide, of skin. In order to survive, we have to continually destroy other creatures’ chance at survival. But this is not as bleak as it sounds.

In "Texas Grit," as Wilder crosses through untouched nature, he muses, “The world seemed as fresh and raw as it must have been at the beginning.”

Wednesday Western: 'El Topo' (1970)

Trying to write about "El Topo" took me by surprise. The short version is: The movies I admired in my 20s look and feel different to me now that I’m married and have kids.

I guess I didn’t expect parenthood to change my worldview entirely, including my standards and expectations for art.

So this week’s Wednesday Western is not about examining a film we all love. This is instead the story of a grown man looking back at the corduroy bell-bottoms he was famous for in college, back when the world was fundamentally different.

Weirder than weird

About a decade ago, filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky was a hero of mine. His 1973 film “The Holy Mountain” blew my mind. I watched it once a week, then branched into Jodorowsky’s other films, hoping to find another as beautifully strange.

I was not disappointed. Soon I stumbled upon “El Topo” (Spanish for “The Mole”), which the BBC deemed “the weirdest Western ever made.” It quickly replaced "The Holy Mountain" as my favorite Jodorowsky film. Not only did the Chilean-born director write the script, he scored the soundtrack and played the starring role.

Watching it today, however, I find plenty to be disappointed about.

Be warned: This is the weirdest movie we’ve examined so far on Wednesday Western. It will not sit right with many of you.

By the end of this article, you’ll be equipped with everything you need in order to make a decision: Should I even watch “El Topo,” which Jodorowsky himself described as “LSD without LSD”?

Acid Western

In a review of the film, the New Yorker coined the term "acid Western" to describe “El Topo.” The New York Times used the term “psychomagical realism.”

Few directors have captured the possibilities of surrealism better than Alejandro Jodorowsky.

"El Topo" has served as a license to be weird for many directors, writers, and actors, earning praise from an array of artists, including Frank Ocean, Marilyn Manson, David Lynch, Peter Gabriel, Peter Fonda, John Lennon, The Mighty Boosh, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and Patton Oswalt, the chubby little guy from the show "King of Queens."

During an interview, Jodorowsky said, “I wanted to do an image that a person will never forget in his life, to create mental change. To reach a state of enlightenment.”

The shadowy hero of this hallucination is the eponymous El Topo, whom we find wandering the desert on horseback with his naked son, Hijo, which is Spanish for “son.” They encounter a village that has just been ruthlessly gutted, the bodies of its citizens and animals lining the mud — Jodorowsky used actual dead horses.

Where you can find it

The easiest way to watch is probably via the Internet Archive or Vimeo.

Amazon Prime: $4.09 to rent; AppleTV: $19.99 to buy (I do not recommend this).

If none of those work, shoot me an email at kryan@blazemedia.com and I’ll get you sorted.

Anti-Westerns

The “El Topo” ratio is interesting: Most Western aficionados who aren’t as interested in other genres don’t like “El Topo,” if they’ve even heard of it. Meanwhile, “El Topo” is huge among movie snobs and eccentric cinephiles who don’t typically like Westerns. In this, it resembles "Brokeback Mountain," which I will not be covering.

Compare this to, say, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” which is lauded by both groups, or “Heaven’s Gate,” which is largely reviled by both (more on this in an upcoming entry).

Which brings us to another reason that "El Topo" may prove divisive for Wednesday Western readers: its status as an “anti-Western."

This was a term coined by Robert Altman to describe his iconic "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," which Screen Rant's Ben Sherlock writes “subverts and upends just about every trope of the genre in the bleakest, most cynical way possible.”

By now, you can guess where I stand on any movie or director whose goal is to “subvert and upend” a genre that, instead, should be enjoyed and preserved.

The terminology strikes me as a bit silly and pretentious. The presupposition is that Westerns didn’t become rebellious — or authentic — until the postmodern geniuses waved their wands and created morally ambiguous movies.

Budd Boetticher’s Ranown Cycle alone belies this claim.

To make things worse ...

As you may have gathered by now, Jodorowsky is a weirdo. In “El Topo,” he slaughtered a few dozen rabbits to use as set dressing. He also killed horses and sheep and at least one frog. He has since claimed that he killed all of the animals himself.

If that weren’t enough to polarize us, there’s the rape scene.

In his book “El Topo: A Book of the Film” (1972), Jodorowsky wrote: “I really raped her. And she screamed."

In 2019, the story emerged, and New York's El Museo del Barrio canceled an exhibit devoted to Jordorowsky’s work.

Jodorowsky waved away the controversy:

These words: ‘I’ve raped my actress,’ was said fifty years ago by El Topo, a bandit dressed in black leather that nobody knew. They were words, not facts, Surrealist publicity in order to enter the world of cinema from a position of obscurity. I do not condone the act of rape, but exploited the shock value of the statement at the time, following years in the Panic Movement and other iterations of harnessing shock to motivate energetic release.

In an interview with the New York Times, Jodorowsky’s wife, Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky, insisted that her husband is a “respectful, generous, and deeply good man,” that he has “never raped anyone,” and that he’s the victim of “attacks, scandals, intimidations, threats, slanders.”

To complicate the matter, Jodorowsky claims that his own mother is the child of a rape.

"There are terrible fathers and mothers. I show that already in 'Santa Sangre.' I myself come from a crazy family of raped immigrants in misery. My mother's mother was raped by a Cossack. My mother was born from rape. And I was born in 1929, the year of crisis."

Artist as jester of the universe

During a 1973 interview, Jodorowsky loosened from talk of the movie he was promoting and, in his elegant yet broken English, defined the artist as the jester of the universe.

When traversing Jordorowsky’s surreal and symbol-inundated imagery, this idea is helpful. The weirdness of his work is by nature playful. It is of course philosophical, spiritual, political, religious — all of those. But it functions clearest when appreciated as play.

“El Topo” has done a lot not just for Westerns but for film overall.

Criterion Collection detailed the four-decade career of Ben Barenholtz, beginning with the French "Les Enfants Terribles," followed by “Night of the Living Dead,” the original, in 1968. That year, he opened Elgin Cinema in New York City, where he began screening experimental movies at midnight.

“El Topo” is responsible for making the midnight movie a staple of American cinema.

Still, Jodorowsky’s prestige has waned in my little cinematic universe. Knowing the full story of "El Topo" — the animal cruelty, the accusation of rape — I couldn’t re-watch the movie that I once found so compelling.

A father now, I have to wonder what kind of man would unearth pure evil and total death with the giddiness of a deranged scientist.

John Wayne and the way, the truth, and the life

It’s been an incredibly difficult week for any sane American. Thank God Donald Trump survived that assassination attempt. Human civilization was roughly an inch away from a hellish dystopia unlike anything ever imagined. A successful assassination would have decisively ended American cohesion, the limits of what our nation can endure.

We’ve all spent the past few days watching that horrific yet beautiful clip of Trump rising from the ground, with blood streaming down his face, as he lifts his fist and shouts, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” It might be the most American moment of our time.

But it's also good to step aside and get a breather. Westerns can heal and strengthen us. I’ll give you a personal example.

I had a panic attack a few weeks ago, a pretty bad one. (I’m all better now, fresh from vacation.)

Burnout, basically. Dad life, work life, friend life, family life, church life — all dialed to the max. And then there’s pressure on the macro level: Everything is so expensive, every meal costs more each time, even fast food. An economy that squeezes us all tighter, a culture of constant data and creeping darkness.

Combine it all, and it just wears on a person. I am by no means alone in this.

In the aftermath of the panic attack, after I caught my breath and calmed down, I put on a movie, the 1960 John Wayne Western comedy “North to Alaska.” I had started it half a dozen times and backed out immediately. That day, it had to stay on.

What a wonderful film. Light, spry, fun, rowdy, and so funny. It was the perfect remedy for the haze I was under.

Today's "Wednesday Western" will be a less researched one, because its message is simple: There’s something profoundly special about Westerns. They offer us support in a unique way. They have a glow, an incredible power for an art form to have.

The bar scene, with the giant fight, led to the first laugh I’d had since the panic attack.

Most of all, “North to Alaska” reminded me that these movies that we love are so much more than entertainment. They are friends, companions. In a certain sense, they have our backs.

As I watched “North to Alaska,” it felt like God was saying, “Sit down and have a laugh, get swept up in a good story.”

I apologize if this comes off preachy or too personal. The last thing I want to do is embarrass myself or my family by oversharing. I just feel that the epiphany I had is one that many of you undoubtedly know well.

You, the readers, are a huge part of the reason I love writing for Align. I don’t have to hide my faith, the core of my existence, the animating spirit of my writing. If I had to do that, I would pick a different profession. Thank you for letting me be honest about my beliefs.

Where to watch “North to Alaska”

Amazon Prime: $3.79 to rent. AppleTV: $3.99. Google Play: $3.79. Fandango: $3.99.

My little cabbage

Is John Wayne’s character, Sam McCord, naive or lazy? Or is he actually one step ahead of everyone else? It's hard to tell.

There are many moments of subtle humor.

“Well, I’ve done the best I can. I just gotta face him.” Then his entire demeanor changes for the conclusion: “I think I’ll just lie to him.”

“I wouldn’t wish this on a goat, but right now I wish you were Jenny.”

“Yes,” she snarls, “a bullet to the head is always the best cure for love.”

The sound effects are hilarious. Wayne’s character is incredibly pure. And part of the joy of his journey is guessing whether he knows what’s actually taking place.

“Women,” he groans. “I never met one yet that was half as reliable as a horse.”

Every line he speaks, every bit of dialogue, is perfect.

“Why don’t you find the coldest spot in that hot creek and go sit down in it. Then change your clothes. Now beat it.”

There are so many moments of delightful irony, like the scene in the cabin between a smitten Billy Pratt and our confused protagonist, Sam McCord (Wayne).

“Sam, how do you know when you’re jealous?”

“Ohhh, how should I know?” he barks, riddled with jealousy.

“Well, I’m jealous.”

This irony also adds dimensions to a complicated love story.

I didn’t get drunk before … I got drunk after

There are several incredible fight scenes. The long one at the claim: From this, we get the fistfight, under a waterfall, between Sam and George.

Then we have a scene reminiscent of "Hondo," when Wayne’s character Hondo chucks a little fella into a pond.

But unlike "Hondo," "North to Alaska" is first and foremost a comedy. And its specific brand of comedy is so refreshing, more serious than “Support Your Local Sheriff!” but sillier than “True Grit,” with none of its tragedy.

The Good Book says

One of my favorite Christian philosophers wrote about truth. He said that there are three entry points to truth, three cultural pathways to discover Christ: history, language, and art. We find truth through our shared history, our human language, and capacity for art.

Of those three, language is the most important. Whoever has language has the world. Truth is linguistic. It exists in and through language. It is perishable, but it is forever renewable. All life moves toward the word.

Language, the voice of the word, is what allows us to be free. It is what separates us from animals. It is what allows us to connect with one another. We understand ourselves and the people around us through language. The word thrives in each of us as thought. Plato described thought as the infinite dialogue between the soul and itself.

As my philosopher put it, “Language has its true being only in conversation, in the exercise of understanding between people.’’

This entire process takes place through art, as well. Art — including the films that we are discussing — helps us understand ourselves, connects us to other people, and leads us to truth, to healing, to redemption.

You’re good medicine

Something miraculous happened during the panic attack, the reason I feel as though this movie was the medicine I needed. After the worst of the panic attack, I sat down at the kitchen table. I just sat there. The house got very quiet — a rarity in our home. I shut my eyes.

Then I heard my 4-year-old’s tiny voice: “Is this yours?”

She handed me an ornate bookmark that I had never seen. She ran away before I could ask where she got it.

The house grew quiet again as I read the words:

I am with you
do not be
anxious:
I am your God.
I will
strengthen you,
I will help you,
I will uphold
you with
My victorious
right hand.
—Isaiah 41:10

That was quite possibly the most humbling and resplendent moment of my life. I felt Christ’s arms around me.

Apparently the bookmark was in a letter from a church I’ve never been to that my daughter had opened. Which she never does, by the way. And think of the timing, that she would collect the mail at that exact moment.

She’s 4. She can’t read. She didn’t know what it says. And hopefully, she didn’t pick up on how much I needed that heavenly support.

Nothing could have been more perfect than those words, thousands of years old, empowered by the universality of Christ. Imagine the odds.There’s no logical explanation for it.

Another verse explains everything we’re discussing: "Ever since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities — God’s eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, because they are understood through the things God has made. So humans are without excuse." —Romans 1:20 (Common English Bible)

Wednesday Western: 'Ride Lonesome' (1959)

"Ride Lonesome" is part of Budd Boetticher’s six-movie Ranown Cycle. I covered much of this in the Wednesday Western article about "The Tall T," so I’ll keep this simple. “Ranown” is a portmanteau of Randolph and Brown, as in Randolph Scott, the leading man who was 61 years old at the time, and Harry Joe Brown, the executive producer.

Besides "Decision at Sundown" and "Buchanan Rides Alone," the Ranown films also share a location: Lone Pine, California, all dust and sky. It’s the perfect backdrop for these moody, violent films, God’s Earth in widescreen and CinemaScope.

Imagine if Boetticher had had 'Gone with the Wind'-level financial clout. With such a formidably talented roster, the Ranown Cycle films could very likely have launched Boetticher into John Ford territory, fundamentally reshaping the future of film.

"Ride Lonesome" evinces the bareness and minimalism that make the Ranown Cycle so desolate, only better, deeper, darker.

The imagery veers into an existential terrain that, in my opinion, is bleaker than the others. It’s a film pocked with anxiety and broken shelter, a bare life.

Bounty hunter Ben Brigade (Randolph Scott) unites with a murderer Billy John (James Best), and they begin their journey into a desert crawling with menacing outlaws and Mescalero Apaches.

Scott is soft-voiced but firm and assertive. Doesn’t talk much, but he’s exceedingly aware of his surroundings.

Even the houses are broken and minimal, whatever could be cobbled together in a land of scarcity. Nothing feels safe. The music whimpers like it knows something.

The characters are repeatedly confronted by the hanging tree, a symbol the camera returns to again and again. The ghoulish tree might even be the central figure of the entire story.

Meanwhile, the costumes and set design are colorful, stylish, bright. This dichotomy of light and dark is classic Boetticher.

And how about that closing scene? I would place it high on the list of perfect endings.

'Ben Hur'

Boetticher’s Ranown Cycle lasted a mere four years, between 1956 and 1960. Other classics released in 1959 include "Ben Hur," "Anatomy of a Murder," "North by Northwest," "Some Like It Hot," and "Black Orpheus." Disney’s "Sleeping Beauty" also came out that year. "Ben Hur" dominated the 1960 Academy Awards, with 11 Oscars. Boetticher, meanwhile, only ever got one nomination, for his first movie, about the bullfighter.

There weren’t many other Westerns released in 1959 — "Warlock," "Westbound," "No Name on the Bullet," and "The Hanging Tree." "Ride Lonesome" and "Rio Bravo" are probably the two most important.

"Ride Lonesome" mostly transcends its time, although the trumpet-driven soundtrack is characteristic of the era, as is Karen Steele’s cone-shaped bra.

Criterion

"Ride Lonesome" is as lean and tidy as most of Boetticher’s work, clocking in at 73 minutes.

All of the Ranown Cycle movies are short because Boetticher was cursed to the B-film circuit after John Wayne and John Ford clipped his first film, "Bullfighter and the Lady," so heavily that it finishes in under 90 minutes, relegating it to the lesser slot of the double feature.

These low-budget endeavors ("Ride Lonesome" was filmed in 17 days) serve as a connective style between the valiant Westerns of the early days and everything that followed.

Criterion Collection takes this idea further than it should go, in my opinion, claiming that the Ranown Cycle provides “a crucial link between the classicism of John Ford and the postmodern revisionism of Sam Peckinpah.”

I mean, they’re right — the Ranown Cycle is (mostly) a masterpiece, a feat of creative minimalism that departs from the so-called typical Westerns of the 1930s–1950s. But they’re also wrong, an accusation I don’t make lightly, against an iconic brand that, for a couple decades, has connected me to cinematic masterpieces.

I guess I just don’t like the “link” metaphor. It also feels like posthumous acclaim. Boetticher was blessed with Hollywood connections, earning admiration from lots of higher-ups and legends. Sergio Leone loved Boetticher’s Westerns. Lots of visionaries did and do.

But he still spent four decades in the shadows of B-movie status, locked into a scarcity mindset, with limitations on cast size and production and even storylines, which forced Boetticher and the gifted cinematic craftsmen at his side to strip every element to its essence.

The Ranown films were each made for less than $500k, and they didn’t exactly shovel in the money at the box office. They became popular in Europe, like many of the low-budget renegade Westerns from that era — Jean-Luc Godard once said of Nicholas Ray’s "Johnny Guitar" that “there is cinema. And the director is Nicholas Ray."

In hindsight, thank God for these restrictions and the inventiveness they inspired.

But what if the budget had been much larger? Imagine if Boetticher had had "Gone with the Wind"-level financial clout. With such a formidably talented roster, the Ranown Cycle films could very likely have launched Boetticher into John Ford territory, fundamentally reshaping the future of film.

It is shocking that budgetary hindrances didn’t ruin the artistic uniqueness and bravado that still explodes from the screen.

There’s also the issue of the Ranown Cycle’s place on the team bench. High-brow cultural elites love to dig up obscure remnants of culture and history, only to proclaim that all the rest of us don’t realize that we had been using a masterpiece as a footstool.

Draft Day

Boetticher was known for his ability to scoop up gifted actors before they got famous.

The natural-born villain Lee Van Cleef had nearly perfected the viciousness and scowl that would help deepen in the grit of Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy, after appearing in "How the West Was Won" and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," where his sneer made up for his lack of lines. The late 1950s marked an exciting period for Van Cleef. In the years leading up to "Ride Lonesome," he had worked with some of the most important directors of the genre — Samuel Fuller, John Sturges, Anthony Mann.

"Ride Lonesome" also marks James Coburn’s acting debut.

Budd's life

In the Wednesday Western article about "The Tall T," I only told the middle third of Budd Boetticher’s wild life. Let's rewind a bit.

He was born in Chicago, Boetticher’s mother died giving birth to him, and his father died shortly after when he was hit by a trolley car.

A wealthy family in Indiana adopted the infant orphan and named him Oscar Boetticher Jr. His adoptive father, Oscar Boetticher Sr., owned a profitable hardware company, Boetticher and Kellogg, and spoiled his kids.

Oscar Sr. was 50 when Budd was born, a disparity that grew as Budd got older. Their only shared interest was horses. So, young Budd ramped up his love for them.

His mother was 34 years younger than his father. Boetticher would joke that his father had bought the most beautiful woman in all of Ohio and Indiana.

His parents didn’t like each other much.

When he found out he was adopted, he was actually delighted.

He had always been bullied. So, he resolved to bulk up and fight back. Before long, he was a celebrated athlete in track and football.

Sports became his obsession. He went to a prep school so that he could tack on mass, gaining 20 pounds of muscle. He was football captain and track captain.

He earned a position on the Ohio State football team. Just as he was making a name for himself, a knee injury sent him to the bench. Boetticher recovered for the rest of the year, then a second injury blew out his knee. The doctors warned that if he continued to play and hit his knee again, he’d have a stiff leg for the rest of his life.

Boetticher’s doctor urged him to go on a trip in order to process the injury. So, he went to Mexico City, where he encountered bullfighting for the first time.

There Are Some Things a Man Just Can’t Ride Around

There aren’t many characters in "Ride Lonesome."

Men and women belonged to a different society than they do today, in the historic West as well as the Hollywood sets made as their imitation.

Plenty has been said about the superlatively masculine Western man. The women of Westerns don’t get enough admiration. In particular, their portrayal of women whose fullness reaches all the way back to Eve but not as far back as Adam’s rib.

In Westerns, the cruelty of a woman’s life back then takes on a new form. Redemption. Times have changed. Times are continuously changing. So, in these movies, portrayals of women, especially in motherly hardship, serve as testimony of survival. True grit.

Other times, the female characters reveal an empowerment that has long been ransacked by feminism. The sweep to occupy womanhood has led to the eviction of some of women’s most lovely and charitable strengths.

Masculinity is a primary theme within the Western. "Ride Lonesome" is no exception. Well, not exactly. These frontier men are as stoic as expected. But as the title reveals, "Ride Lonesome" contains a pervasive alienation at odds with the image of the Western man as an agent of freedom beholden to nobody.

Wednesday Western: Westerns to watch with your kids and grandkids

The movies on this list are, foremost, good Westerns. I’ve already written about "True Grit," so I won’t formally include it on the list, but just know that, for anyone with older kids, it ranks at the top.

These are Westerns that are objectively good, revealing the beautiful possibilities of the genre while also remaining within the limits of acceptable viewing for the younger fans.

These options vary depending on the age of your kids or grandkids, so I’ve tried to account for that in the descriptions. My personal favorite is "The Good, the Bad, and the Huckleberry Hound." In fact, I liked it so much that I’ll be devoting an entire Wednesday Western entry to it.

But first, let’s start with a prayer, from Roy Rogers:

Roy Rogers Cowboys Prayerwww.youtube.com

Home on the Range (2004)

The biggest surprise for me was "Home on the Range," an animated Disney movie from 2004 starring Roseanne Barr as a prize-winning cow.

It’s an objectively good Western, a good story. And, according to the little movie buffs at my house, this ranked the highest of all the Westerns on this list.

My kids are toddlers, so the movie might not land as well with older kids, although I doubt that. Every time we’ve watched "Home on the Range," it captures our attention.

There is some mild sexual innuendo, but that’s just modern Disney, nothing too bad.

"Home on the Range" is an absolute treasure hidden in the ideological morass that has taken over Disney and practically derailed its storytelling and art.

The opening song “(You Ain’t) Home on the Range,” for instance, is a men’s chorus. The singers belt out the words with a frontier wildness that typifies the Western cohesion between the concert hall and the saddle. The song resembles a maximalist choral piece like “Follow the River” from "Night Passage" or the more comical theme song to 'War Wagon."

But while “(You Ain’t) Home on the Range” sounds identical to the finest Western soundtrack gems, the lyrics are playful:

“Out in the land of the desperado / If yer as soft as an avocado / Yee-ha! Yer guacamole, son!”

Then, with the crack of the whip, the title rushes to the fore. Its bold, colorful fonts also pay tribute to the genre.

The rabbit performs the role of the yappy “DOGGONIT” grump established by Gabby Hayes and Walter Brennan.

There is absolutely no fat on this movie. Everything line is useful, and the story is impressive for its only 76-minute run time. Is there a more Western move than making the movie 76 minutes, solidly under 90 minutes, the onetime threshold for a B-movie?

It’s silly, sure. But this silliness has the effect of making heavy realities lighter.

Judi Dench plays a matriarchal dairy cow who serves as second in command of Patch of Heaven. Jennifer Tilly plays a spacey yet emotionally intelligent heifer; Steve Buscemi is perfect as a ratty cattle poacher. Cuba Gooding Jr. voices Buck, a race horse so eager for action that when it arrives, he spazzes.

The central tension of "Home on the Range" is characteristically Western: an elusive cattle rustler known as Alameda Slim (Randy Quaid). This yodeling villain has been stealing longhorns at night. The ranches he robs are forced to sell. Alameda Slim scoops them up at the auctions in a bid to control the entire region. His alter ego during these purchases is Yancy O’Del, or for short “Y. O’Del.” Get it? Yodel. There’s tons of wordplay and parody like this throughout the film.

Patch of Heaven is the Eden stuck right in the middle of Alameda Slim’s growing territory. Pearl, the owner of the farm, is buried in debt and has three days to pay an impossible amount ($750). But even this paradisiacal setting is full of lightness and parody: possessive goats, rambunctious piglets, naive hens, and headstrong cows who accept the call to action.

The soundtrack was scored by legendary Disney mainstay Alan Menken, who creates deceptively simple masterpieces. This is a musical, after all. The film’s emotional collapse — every hero’s low point — is darkened by rain. You can feel this heaviness. Then Bonnie Rait starts singing "Will the Sun Ever Shine Again?” a song Menken wrote in the wake of 9/11.

Of course, there’s plenty of redemption to be earned in "Home on the Range." All of the elements are there: rivalries that become alliances, slapstick violence, betrayal, shoot-outs, and singing. Lots of singing.

Which is possibly the most impressive part of 'Home on the Range." It’s able to capture the Western genre’s two branches: the Western hero (John Wayne) and the singing cowboy (Roy Rogers). These two factions typically remain separate. I do not know why.

Critics have been generally cold toward the film — no surprise there.

I prefer the more wholesome review by our friends at Common Sense Media: "I love it when Disney doesn't take itself too seriously. No one tried to reach for the stars or make this into a classic. 'Home on the Range' is just a cute little story about some not-so-contented cows who save the day. It modestly aspires to be nothing more than a lot of fun, and it does that job very well.”

Ridin’ Down the Canyon (1942)

I recommend "RIdin’ Down the Canyon" over the equally excellent "My Pal Trigger" because "My Pal Trigger" features scenes of horses being shot that could be upsetting. We still watch it, but I skip those parts.

"RIdin’ Down the Canyon" is part mystery, part musical, part coming-of-age story. It focuses on Bobbie Blake, a little boy who looks up to Roy Rogers. He dreams of starting a radio station with Roy Rogers someday.

It’s beautiful, wholesome stuff. Catholic Video sells it as part of its Classic Family Movies Collection.

The jail scene — wow, it is good. The man literally plays a saw in a jail cell, in what is one of the most bizarre musical scenes in a movie I’ve seen.

As always, the Sons of the Pioneers are next to Roy Rogers, and so is Trigger, the gorgeous palomino, “the smartest horse in the movies”

There’s a death scene at 33:50 that lasts until 35:16. My kids are toddlers, so I skip it, but for older kids it might be fine.

This movie is so calm. All of the characters are so kind; even the villains have good manners.

Don’t watch the colorized version.

“Ridin’ Down the Canyon” was the movie that really sold me on Gabby Hayes. I discovered Gabby Hayes after knowing Walter Brennan. Gabby Hayes is much sillier. Lots of slapstick Gabby is wild. At one point, he leads a dance train. He gets more extravagant with each step, until he squats himself too low.

“Hey fellas, I sprang an axle,” he shouts, and then the Sons of the Pioneers sprint over to help, only to sing “Blue Prairie.” It really just doesn’t get much better than that.

There's a lot of shooting. Good guys shooting bad guys. You get to show your kids and grandkids that if bad guys are a threat, there’s always a good man or woman able to rise up in the name of justice.

A Cowboy Needs a Horse (1956)

I’m stealing this one from film historian Andrew Patrick Nelson, who begins his 15-week Western movie college class with this Disney short film.

As he points out, “This film does something which, when I stop to think about it, the Western film in animated form tends to do especially well: It distills the Western down to a level that is appropriate for children, while simultaneously using those distillations as fodder for satire that can be appreciated by adult audiences.”

At just under seven minutes in length, it’s by far the shortest film on the list, but it’s a good one. The theme song is lovely, clip-clop and all. It was written by George Bruns, the four-time Oscar-nominated, three-time Grammy-nominated composer of scores for the likes of "Sleeping Beauty" (1959), "One Hundred and One Dalmatians" (1961), "The Sword in the Stone" (1963), "The Jungle Book" (1967), "The Love Bug" (1969), "The Aristocats" (1970), and "Robin Hood" (1973).

We begin in a retro-futuristic home, as a little boy is dreaming. His bed transforms into a horse. A giant pencil appears and slowly dresses him in boots, spurs, hat, and gloves.

Like most of the animated movies here, the setting hints at the majestic red plateaus of Monument Valley.

Once he’s fully decked out in cowboy gear, the action begins: Indians on a cliffside start launching arrows at him. Luckily, he’s got a couple of six-shooters.

It’s a fast-moving little film, with many of the most important Western tropes: an outlaw, a stagecoach, a train ambush featuring TNT. A damsel in distress. More outlaws.

You can watch "A Cowboy Needs a Horse" at the Internet Archive. You can also find it on YouTube.

West and Soda (1965)

Yes, there is such a thing as an animated spaghetti Western. In fact, director Bruno Bozzetto claims that it was his film, not Sergio Leone’s "A Fistful of Dollars," that launched the subgenre.

Whether or not this is true, "West and Soda" — Bozzetto's first feature — is an oddly impressive work. Like Leone’s films, "West and Soda" both satirizes and celebrates cinema of the American West.

The story centers on lovely girl named Clementina (surely an allusion to John Ford’s "My Darling Clementine") and a cruel land baron named Cattivissimo (Italian for “very bad”), who is also referred to as the Boss. Like Mario’s villian Bowser rapaciously chasing Princess Peach, Cattivissimo is dead set on marrying Clementina — mainly for the verdant spread of land she owns.

His two sneering goons, Ursus and Smilzo, perform a familiar role: twin-like morons who lack any autonomy, much like Liberty Valance’s heckling cling-ons Reese (Lee Van Cleef) and Floyd (Strother Martin).

Right as Cattivissimo’s violence starts to ramp up, a familiar event occurs. Thunder rumbles and lightning shoots across the darkening sky as wind whips the shutters and doors. The storm passes, and from the desert emerges a lone figure, a revolver-twirling cowpoke named Johnny,

As one reviewer puts it, the film's resemblance "to the spaghetti Westerns that were beginning to take shape" is not as pronounced as its debt to "the classic Gary Cooper and Glenn Ford ventures from the decade before.”

Your kids and grandkids will likely watch this out of curiosity. The animation style is scrappy yet bold, full of grime, imagery perfectly suited for the Italian Western. It almost resembles the 1948 version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," only with an edginess that gives it Western cred. Its total lack of realism is enjoyable and charming.

It’s a relaxing movie, with plenty of comedy. Excessive gunfights, lots of guns, war-prone Indians across the backdrop of Monument Valley. But in the middle of it all sits Clementina's paradise, where her dog loves to get hammered. Not exactly politically correct, but these days that’s exactly what we don’t want.

Toy Story 2 (1999)

I had the chance to sit down with Ranger Doug, the vocalist/poet/songwriter/guitarist from the band Riders in the Sky.

Among their many impressive achievements, they recorded the "Woody’s Roundup" portion of "Toy Story 2." It won them their first Grammy.

Ranger Doug and I talked about the experience:

“It was kind of strange and stressful,” he tells me. “We were in the studio, and there was the head of Disney records, and there was John Lasseter, the head of Pixar, and there was Randy Newman, who wrote the song. And we got to go up something good. No mistakes. So there were about half a dozen Disney lawyers, let's face it. But it worked out well.”

“There's something kids just seem to love about the beat or something about the Western music,” he adds. “When I was a kid, I just liked it because I didn't get broken hearts and love affairs. Who knew about that? But riding a horse with your friends and singing songs in the open range? Oh, yeah, I'm all about that."

At Ranger Doug’s most recent Grand Ole Opry, country singer Scotty McCreery was inducted into the Opry, and he specifically asked that Riders in the Sky be there to sing "Woody's Roundup" for his child.

This whole time, my 4-year-old thought I was going to interview Woody from "Toy Story." She told everyone we met. He laughs.

“I think she’s standing outside the door, actually, and as soon as I leave this room, she's going to ask me how that went.”

He smiles, “Tell her it went great.”

An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991)

On November 17, 1991, moviegoers had their pick of two competing animated features: "An American Tail: Fievel Goes West" or "The Little Mermaid."

"The Little Mermaid" clearly had top billing, with a budget almost three times bigger than that of "Fievel Goes West." Predictably, Ariel left Fievel in the dust, raking in $235 million compared to Fievel's box-office haul of $22.1 million.

Today "Fievel Goes West" is mostly noteworthy for having been forgotten.

I too had forgotten about it, but once I hit play, I was yanked back in time to doctor’s office waiting rooms and box-shaped TVs that had to be rolled into the classroom. The VHS grain, the warp of the soundtrack.

Produced by Steven Spielberg, "Fievel Goes West" has a lovely animation style, similar to the rotoscoping of its iconic predecessors. Right at the start, we hear a familiar voice: Jimmy Stewart. John Cleese plays a duplicitous cat; Jon Lovitz plays a heinous outlaw of a spider.

Like many parents, I watch a lot of cartoons. Specifically, I watch an incredible number of TV shows and movies that feature anthropomorphic mice, cows, and horses.

My wife gave up on the movie: “There are too many characters, the plot is muddled, I don’t get it, how’s a kid supposed to?”

At one point, a bald eagle soars into a nest, then fields of wheat turn into golden American flags. The “Way Out West” musical sequence is excellent pro-America content.

I watched it with my 4-year old daughter. She loved it. The experience was connective, which is what a parent looks for in a movie.

Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002)

Andrew Patrick Nelson and Matthew Chernov also included "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron" in the episode of their podcast, "How the West Was Cast," devoted to animated Westerns.

As with "Home on the Range," I was surprised to discover "Spirit." I figured I’d watched every animated kids' movie.

The animation style is bold, a meld of rotoscoping-esque hand drawing and digital animation, all the more bold considering that it was made by DreamWorks Animation, home of "Shrek" and "Kung Fu Panda."

The heavy-handed, though compelling, messages in the film aren’t contrary to rule #4 of Gene Autry’s Cowboy Code: “A cowboy must be gentle with children, the elderly, and animals.”

Its a strange movie: Matt Damon plays a horse. Soundtrack by Hans Zimmer, but Bryan Adams randomly starts singing at one point.

The concept is incredibly creative, almost like a loophole in the Western genre: the American frontier from the perspective of a wild horse?

Oklahoma! (1955)

Growing up in Oklahoma, I heard variations of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s "Oklahoma!" everywhere. Local productions of the musical were always a reliable field trip.

The color, the dialogue, the scenery. All fantastic. It’s an easy movie to watch. A bedtime movie. Those clouds.

A big reason that I love the 1940s-1950s era in film is that the content is extremely restrained and wholesome. I don’t see this as censorship but rather as quiet dignity. I have no problem with violence or nudity in movies. But I also admire any film, actor, or director able to reveal the depths of human comedy or drama without relying on either.

Beauty and the Bandit (1946)

This one is wacky enough to keep a kid’s attention.

The Cisco Kid is an interesting mythological figure in the history of the Western. The character is based on a sociopathic desperado in a story by O. Henry from 1907. Most subsequent portrayals depicted the Kid in a positive light, so in an oddity among Westerns, his legacy is far softer than his origin.

Ten years after "Beauty and the Bandit," the Cisco Kid would migrate to television, with Duncan Renaldo playing the Kid for a six-season run. He was also popularized by as a character in comic books and radio shows and, a few decades later, as a periodically recurring allusion in popular culture.

Part Mexican caballero, part Robin Hood, Cisco offered audiences the spectacle of a confident, dashing outsider in flamboyant outfits and confident facial expressions.

"Beauty and the Bandit" marked Gilbert Roland’s third appearance as Cisco the Kid, with three more to follow.

It’s an easygoing film, placing Cisco at the crossroads of love and money. Our bandido is flanked by beautiful women who threaten to distract him from his plot to seize a chest full of silver from a wealthy French businessman in a stagecoach. Certain that the silver actually belongs to peasants, Cisco pursues the Frenchman with his usual calm suavity. This threadbare plot unfolds into a story that’s wholesome in its dilemmas.

Stagecoach (1939)

Every kid needs to see "Stagecoach." I have watched it with my oldest toddler since she was 3. I skip Doc Boone’s drunk parts, but that’s about it. Keep your eye out for the Wednesday Western entry on "Stagecoach," by the way. It’s coming soon, and It’s got some neat surprises.

Honorable Mentions

"The Man from Snowy River" (1982)
"Support Your Local Gunfighter" (1971)
"Round-Up Time in Texas" (1937)
"Three Amigos!" (1986)
"The Shakiest Gun in the West" (1968)
"The Undefeated" (1969)
"Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier" (1955)
"Silverado" (1985)
"City Slickers" (1991)
"Maverick" (1994)
"Back to the Future Part III" (1990)
"Cat Ballou" (1965)
"The Big Country" (1958)
"The Apple Dumpling Gang" (1975)

The president’s man

The Bad Samaritan

'Ten cents, you pious bastard, or I’ll bury you'

The twist

Something fishy

Scandal and crisis

Mimetic violence

All against one

Sacrifice

Broken Bow Country

At a glance:

In their own words (CEO Colton Patterson):

Ringo the Kid

My Rifle, My Pony, and Me

Winchester, a brutal man

A preventable death

Do you believe that anything happens without the will of God?

Where you can find it

But still …

Nouveau shamanic

Done with acting

Wilder Good

Range life

Be wilder

Paramount

The searchers

The Ranch

Weirder than weird

Acid Western

Where you can find it

Anti-Westerns

To make things worse ...

Artist as jester of the universe

My little cabbage

I didn’t get drunk before … I got drunk after

The Good Book says

You’re good medicine

'Ben Hur'

Criterion

Draft Day

Budd's life

There Are Some Things a Man Just Can’t Ride Around

Home on the Range (2004)

Ridin’ Down the Canyon (1942)

A Cowboy Needs a Horse (1956)

West and Soda (1965)

Toy Story 2 (1999)

An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991)

Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002)

Oklahoma! (1955)

Beauty and the Bandit (1946)

Stagecoach (1939)

Honorable Mentions

We’ll keep you informed with top stories for conservatives who want to become informed decision makers.