Anthony Mann

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 06, 2007

Steve Badger - Anthony Mann

The older I get the more the closer I to the work of Anthony Mann. I suppose being a crazed paranoid loser helps but my appreciation for his skills both with character and style grow every time I see one of his films.

I don't know who Steve Badger is. I ran across this site yesterday and think it's worth checking out. Here are a couple samples of his assessments of Mann's work.

3) The Naked Spur, 1953. Jimmy Stewart made eight films with Anthony Mann. Five were westerns. Many film critics consider The Naked Spur to be the finest western ever made. Besides Stewart there are four other characters, played by Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh, Millard Mitchell (also in Winchester '73) and the always watchable Ralph Meeker (memorable in Jeopardy and as Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly). Technically Ryan is the villain, but each male character is nuts in his way. Meeker in particular personifies heroic villainy, if that is possible. When watching the sunny, breathtaking scenery of The Naked Spur, I always think of the darkness of Mann’s film noir movies. Mann’s command of both interior darkness and panoramic light is an amazing accomplishment.

6) Raw Deal, 1948. Here we discover something Anthony Mann loves to film as much as shadows: co-star Marsha Hunt’s face. Aside from how beautiful it is, one reason may be because she is the only sympathetic character in this movie -- and she isn’t even the most likeable! (That honor goes to the #2 villain played by John Ireland.) The lead bad guy here is perhaps the heaviest heavy in the history of American film: Raymond Burr. Perry Mason fans unfamiliar with Burr’s film noir work are in for a jolt here when he throws burning alcohol on a party guest when she accidentally bumps him: "She should have been more careful." True to Anthony Mann movies though, that scene isn’t the creepiest. That distinction goes to John Ireland and the deer antlers... YOW!

http://www.suspense-movies.com/directors/anthony-mann/

Richard Sale

Ed here: One day back in the eighties when I was editing Mystery Scene the phone rang and it was Richard Sale. I don't remember exactly how this came to pass--maybe I contacted his agent and said I'd like to interview him for the magazine. Anyway we talked for a long time about the pulps, his time in Hwood (he was very successful there) and some of the writers he'd known. He was a treat to listen to. And he wrote one hell of a memoir for the magazine.

And then last night I reread one of my favorite mystery novels (one of R Chandler's too) Lazarus #7, which I  heartily recommend.  Here's a piece about Sale from what-when-how. BTW His most famous script as for "Suddenly"with Frank Sinatra.

(1911-1993)

The man once known to his readers as “the Dumas of the pulps,” Richard Sale was one of the top journeymen writers in the 1930s and 1940s. He was not a superstar like Max brand or Edgar Rice burroughs, but his name was on countless magazine covers in the golden age of the pulps. Sale guaranteed to developers a reliable supply of first-rate fiction and to readers the certainty of an hour or two well spent. He was barely out of his teens when his name started appearing in Detective Fiction Weekly, Dime Detective, Argosy, Bluebook, Thrilling Mystery, Double Detective, and more.

“From the start . . . even as a small kid,” he told this author, “I sold some stuff to the New York Herald Tribune. Poems, and I mean bad. But I had no other ambition except to write.” Sale studied journalism at Washington and  University, in Lexington, Virginia. While still at school, he began sending out stories to magazines. He sold one to Street & Smith’s College Stories: “I got $100 and that was a lot of money in those Depression days.” He sold a second story with a school setting, and then got nothing but rejections for two years. He left school before graduating, got married, and worked for a couple of New York newspapers, but mostly devoted himself to trying to make a living from his fiction. Before long it happened. His stories for the pulps started selling—and selling. In a 10-year period Sale published around 500 stories, nearly one a week. But at his busiest, Sale’s schedule was actually more grueling than that. “A story a day. A story was 3,000 words, 5,000 words. It depended how it flowed. I’d do it in a day, sometimes it carried over to the next day. If you were doing novelettes, that would be 12,000 words and that would carry over into the next day . . . First draft was a last draft,” he said. 

Sale took his place among the speed demons of the pulps, the legendary million-words-a-year men like Brand, Arthur J. Burks, and Lester dent. Sale wrote mysteries, exotic adventures, horror and terror tales, air war stories, and sea stories week after week, throughout the depression and into the first years of World War II. “You couldn’t sit around and wait for ideas to come. Sometimes you’d sit there and just look around the room and pick an object . . . Or think of something impossible and then solve it.” Sale was such a reliable storytelling machine at this time that an editor thought nothing of grabbing him in the hallway as he was leaving the developer’s office and demanding a publishable story on the spot: “He needed a story in a hurry. Emergency. So he sat me down and I knocked out a 3,000-word story. I came up with a story about what goes through a man’s mind when he drifts down in a parachute. Turned out to be a good story. I gave him the story, went to the window and they issued me a check right then and there and I went home.”

for the rest go here:
http://what-when-how.com/pulp-fiction-writers/sale-richard-pulp-fiction-writer/

A little B pic I've always liked 5 AGAINST THE HOUSE

From Cinema  Retro

Ed here:  This is based on a fine little Jack Finney Dell  pb original. BTW Lee is right is citing Brian Keith  for his work here. He really never did get his due as a dramatic actor. I caught him recently in a 
anold "Fugitive" as a wife stalker would be-killer and he was chilling.

SCROLL DOWN

By Lee Pfeiffer

Sony has released the 1955 crime drama 5 Against the House as a burn-to-order DVD. The little-remembered film is interesting on a number of levels and boasts an impressive, eclectic cast. The low-budget flick depicts four young ex-G.I.s who fought in Korea who return to the States and enroll in college. Al (Guy Madison) is a straight-as-an-arrow type who is engaged to sultry nightclub singer Kay (Kim Novak). Ronnie (Kerwin Matthews) is a brainy upstart with delusions of grandeur and a superiority complex. Roy (Alvy Moore) is an affable joker who is very much a follower, not a leader. Brick (Brian Keith) is the most troubled of the group. He bares psychological problems from his combat experience and has a hair-trigger temper. The guys' only vices are taking an occasional trip to Reno, Nevada and engaging in some minor gambling and womanizing. However, Ronnie concocts an audacious plan to prove he can outwit the authorities and rob a casino.

for the whole piece go here:http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php

An Excellent 10 Memorable Spy Novel Film Adaptations (VIDEO) by Max Allan Collins

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From Huffington Post
Max Allan Collins:

The success of the first four film adaptations of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, beginning with Dr. No (1962), ignited a world-wide explosion of spy movies, fueled by the realities and anxieties of the Cold War. But movies made from spy novels had been around since the silent days.

E. Phillip Oppenheim (1866-1946), the Ian Fleming of his era, had several dozen of his works adapted to the screen before the advent of sound. In 1936, both Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham were source material for Alfred Hitchcock during his British years -Sabotage from Conrad's Secret Agent (1907) and, confusingly, Secret Agent adapted from Maugham's Ashendon: Or the British Agent.

British author Eric Ambler - more the John Le Carre of his day than the Ian Fleming - provided the source novels for such films as The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), Journey into Fear (1943) and Topaki (1964), parodied in The Pink Panther (1963). A screenwriter himself (notably A Night to Remember, 1958), Ambler's success as a master of fictional espionage undoubtedly inspired many other novelists and filmmakers, but did not spark a craze in the manner of Fleming. Of course, in fairness to Ambler, neither has anyone before or since.

Fleming had little if any basis in the espionage novelists just mentioned. Despite Fleming's own WW 2 service in counter-espionage, James Bond was derived in large part from fanciful UK sources - the jingoistic adventures of Sapper's Bulldog Drummond, the sophisticated crime-fighting of Leslie Charteris' the Saint, and the super-villainy of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu. American tough guy fiction played a big role, as well, in the development of Bond - Fleming was much an admirer of Raymond Chandler and his private eye Phillip Marlowe, though the guns-and-girls approach of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer was the major commercial influence.

for the rest  go here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-allan-collins/memorable-spy-novel-film-_b_3294130.html

A great review of Plan 9 from Outer Space by the folks at TCM

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Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Beneficiary of more than its fair share of critical brickbats, Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) is not onlynot the worst film ever made, it's not even the worst Ed Wood film ever made. Written and shot around existing footage of aging Dracula star Bela Lugosi in the sad days leading up to his 1956 death and cobbled together with enthusiasm, determination and whatever Hollywood leavings could be scavenged, Plan 9 has become the whipping boy of midnight movies for its technical gaffes, flat acting, continuity errors and tautological dialogue ("Future events such as these will affect you in the future"). Guilty as charged-- but the film deserves honorable mention as an unsung milestone in American independent filmmaking.

Highly personal, brazenly cross-pollinated from a genre standpoint and openly critical of the Western atomic stockpile, the self-financed Plan 9 also utilizes the non-professional actors and guerilla production tactics that distinguished the Nouvelle Vague in France a few years later. However risible Wood's script may be, his dialogue is endlessly quotable and images of Tor Johnson and Vampira doing the zombie shuffle are forever burned into the retina of horror fandom's collective eye. While few would argue its artistic superiority, Plan 9 is viewed, discussed and quoted more times in any given year than John Cassavetes' Shadows (1959), Hal Hartley's Trust (1990) or Darren Aronofsky's Pi (1998), none of which have, for all their indie credibility, inspired so much as a single refrigerator magnet. Could respected A-list filmmakers such as Nora Ephron, Neil LaBute or even Tim Burton, if denied the studio perks on which they rely to facilitate the creative process, produce a work as enduring as Plan 9 from Outer Space, which is still being discussed and enjoyed fifty years after it was made?

Director: Edward D. Wood, Jr.
Producer: J. Edward Reynolds
Screenplay: Edward D. Wood, Jr.
Cinematography: William C. Thompson
Editing: Edward D. Wood, Jr.
Cast: Bela Lugosi (Ghoul Man), Gregory Walcott (Jeff Trent), Mona McKinnon (Paula Trent), Tor Johnson (Inspector Clay), Paul Marco (Patrolman Kelton), Duke Moore (Lt. John Harper).
BW-79m.

by Richard Harland Smith

BACK TO TOP

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Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

As a condition of the contract between Ed Wood and a Baptist organization covering production costs, many of thePlan 9 from Outer Space cast and crew had to be baptized in a swimming pool in Beverly Hills.

Producers J. Edward Reynolds and Hugh Thomas, Jr. appear in the film as gravediggers.

A Hollywood chiropodist and hypnotist named Thomas R. Mason was hired to double for Bela Lugosi.

The footage featuring Bela Lugosi was shot for an aborted project called The Vampire's Tomb. The house belonging to Lugosi's "Old Man" was owned by Swedish wrestler-turned-actor Tor Johnson, who had performed with Lugosi in Wood's Bride of the Monster (1955) and Reginald Le Borg's The Black Sleep (1956).

During principal photography, Plan 9 from Outer Space was called Grave Robbers from Outer Space, which was considered blasphemous by the film's Baptist financiers. The original title is still used in Criswell's opening monologue.

Maila Nurmi was paid $200 for one day's work on Plan 9 from Outer Space and rode to and from the shoot on the Santa Monica Boulevard bus in full Vampira makeup and costume.

After an argument with Ed Wood, veteran makeup man Harry Thomas insisted that his name not be used in the film's credits. Thomas' assistant, Tom Bartholemew, received sole credit.

Location footage of an actual graveyard was shot in a San Fernando Valley cemetery slated for relocation.

Forgotten Books:How Like An Angel by Margaret Millar

How Like an Angel

How Like an Angel

I've always held the opinion that some writers are just too good for the mass market. This is a true of a number of literary writers but it's also true of at least one writer of crime fiction, the late Margret Millar. For all her many deserved awards, she never became the enormous commercial success she deserved to be.

For me she's the single most elegant stylist who ever shaped a mystery story. You revel in her sentences. She used wit and dark humor in the direst of novels long before it was fashionable in the genre. And she was a better (and much fairer) bamboozler than Agatha Christie.

I recently reread her How Like and Angel and its richness, its darkness, its perverse wit make me repeat what I've said many times before--if this isn't the perfect mystery novel, it comes damned close.

The story, complex as it becomes, is simple in its set-up. Private eye Joe Quinn, having gambled away all his money, begins hitchiking from Reno to Caifornia. Along the way he sees the Tower, the symbol of a religious cult that eventually offers him not only shelter but a chance to put his skills to use. Sister Blessing asks him to find a man named Patrick O'Gorman. The man is dead. Which makes Quinn suspicious of why they want him located.

Among its many pleasures is the way this novel, published in the early sixties, anticipates some of the fringe cults that would grow out of the flower power days. There's more than a touch of ole Charlie Manson in the Tower.

Call your favorite mystery bookstore for this one. If they don't have it, I'm sure they can get it. I think you'll be as amazed by it as I am. This is one of the most artfully rendered novels of any kind I've ever read.

MORE OLD WEST NOIR by Fred Blosser

Posters

MORE OLD WEST NOIR
by Fred Blosser
A few weeks ago on Ed’s blog, I mentioned the great, gritty 1932 Western LAW AND ORDER as a cowboy/Noir mash-up several years before the term “Film Noir” was coined.  ONE FOOT IN HELL (1960) is a relatively more recent example of Noir nihilism in a frontier setting.  It isn’t the grim masterpiece that LAW AND ORDER was, and it doesn't seem to have a lot of champions, if comments on the web are an indication, but it deserves a look from genre fans.

This CinemaScope Western from Alan Ladd’s final years was scripted by Aaron Spelling and Sydney Boehm from a story by Spelling.  In plot, mood, and characterization, it would have worked wonderfully well as a ‘50s Gold Medal paperback Western.

Passing through on his way to settle a new homestead, Mitch Garrett (Ladd) stops in the town of Blue Springs desperately seeking a room and emergency medical care for his pregnant wife.  Because he’s a stranger, the hotel owner forces him to pay up front for a room.  And then the town's storekeeper refuses to give him the medicine his wife needs because he can't pay for it: the hotel payment left him short of the necessary $1.87.

Frantic, Mitch takes the medicine at gunpoint, and the storekeeper calls the sheriff.  By the time Mitch can explain his situation and get back to the hotel, his wife has died.

Mitch settles in and pretends to join the community, even getting sworn in as deputy sheriff, but it’s only a ruse.  Nursing his hatred, he’s biding his time until he can exact biblical justice against the hotel owner, storekeeper, and sheriff whom he blames for his wife’s death, and pull off a bank heist that will ruin the town financially.  He assembles a team of mutually distrustful misfits: an alcoholic ex-Confederate officer (Don Murray), an opportunistic saloon girl (Dolores Michaels), a coldblooded gunslinger (Barry Coe), and a wastrel Englishman (Dan O’Herlihy).

Like Delmer Daves’ THE BADLANDERS from two years before, ONE FOOT IN HELL shrewdly synthesizes Ladd’s Film Noir and Western credentials.  He’s no longer the sleek young tough guy of THE GLASS KEY or THIS GUN FOR HIRE, and in fact he even looks much older than his 47 years.  But his somewhat puffy, sagging features fit the embittered character he plays.  The big-heist elements of the story are all present and accounted for.  Icy, single-minded ringleader?  Check.  Team of skilled but unpredictable specialists?  Check.  Indications that things will fall apart violently, either during or after the robbery?  Double-check.

James B. Clark’s direction is serviceable, but the script really calls for the hard-edged sensibility of a Phil Karlson or Joseph H. Lewis.  Had Karlson or Lewis directed, I suspect that the film would have become a cult favorite instead of a nearly forgotten product from a time when Western movies and TV series were a dime a dozen.  A negative1960 New York Times review excoriated the “soured ugliness” of the plot -- like that’s a bad thing for us fans of heist/revenge stories.

When I looked for ONE FOOT IN HELL on DVD a couple of years ago, the only legitimate commercial release was a widescreen Spanish import rather charmingly translated as UN PIE EN EL INFIERNO.  Since then, it’s become more readily available in the U.S. as a Vudu and Amazon download.

Forgotten Films: One Foot In Hell Fred Blosser

Posters

MORE OLD WEST NOIR by Fred Blosser

A few weeks ago on Ed’s blog, I mentioned the great, gritty 1932 Western LAW AND ORDER as a cowboy/Noir mash-up several years before the term “Film Noir” was coined.  ONE FOOT IN HELL (1960) is a relatively more recent example of Noir nihilism in a frontier setting.  It isn’t the grim masterpiece that LAW AND ORDER was, and it doesn't seem to have a lot of champions, if comments on the web are an indication, but it deserves a look from genre fans.

This CinemaScope Western from Alan Ladd’s final years was scripted by Aaron Spelling and Sydney Boehm from a story by Spelling.  In plot, mood, and characterization, it would have worked wonderfully well as a ‘50s Gold Medal paperback Western.

Passing through on his way to settle a new homestead, Mitch Garrett (Ladd) stops in the town of Blue Springs desperately seeking a room and emergency medical care for his pregnant wife.  Because he’s a stranger, the hotel owner forces him to pay up front for a room.  And then the town's storekeeper refuses to give him the medicine his wife needs because he can't pay for it: the hotel payment left him short of the necessary $1.87.

Frantic, Mitch takes the medicine at gunpoint, and the storekeeper calls the sheriff.  By the time Mitch can explain his situation and get back to the hotel, his wife has died.

Mitch settles in and pretends to join the community, even getting sworn in as deputy sheriff, but it’s only a ruse.  Nursing his hatred, he’s biding his time until he can exact biblical justice against the hotel owner, storekeeper, and sheriff whom he blames for his wife’s death, and pull off a bank heist that will ruin the town financially.  He assembles a team of mutually distrustful misfits: an alcoholic ex-Confederate officer (Don Murray), an opportunistic saloon girl (Dolores Michaels), a coldblooded gunslinger (Barry Coe), and a wastrel Englishman (Dan O’Herlihy).

Like Delmer Daves’ THE BADLANDERS from two years before, ONE FOOT IN HELL shrewdly synthesizes Ladd’s Film Noir and Western credentials.  He’s no longer the sleek young tough guy of THE GLASS KEY or THIS GUN FOR HIRE, and in fact he even looks much older than his 47 years.  But his somewhat puffy, sagging features fit the embittered character he plays.  The big-heist elements of the story are all present and accounted for.  Icy, single-minded ringleader?  Check.  Team of skilled but unpredictable specialists?  Check.  Indications that things will fall apart violently, either during or after the robbery?  Double-check.

James B. Clark’s direction is serviceable, but the script really calls for the hard-edged sensibility of a Phil Karlson or Joseph H. Lewis.  Had Karlson or Lewis directed, I suspect that the film would have become a cult favorite instead of a nearly forgotten product from a time when Western movies and TV series were a dime a dozen.  A negative1960 New York Times review excoriated the “soured ugliness” of the plot -- like that’s a bad thing for us fans of heist/revenge stories.

When I looked for ONE FOOT IN HELL on DVD a couple of years ago, the only legitimate commercial release was a widescreen Spanish import rather charmingly translated as UN PIE EN EL INFIERNO.  Since then, it’s become more readily available in the U.S. as a Vudu and Amazon download.

Please God No! Will Smith Sets Sights on 'Wild Bunch' Reboot

Also read: Will Smith Nearing Deal to Star in WB's 'Focus,' Sans Kristen Stewart (Updated)

FROM THE WRAP:

Ed here: I  realize that I am alone in the universe finding Will Smith's acting flashy, cloying  and empty. He's  a showboat.

Now whatever you thought of Sam Peckinpah he was a serious man with a serious vision about this vale of tears we inhabit. Watch "The Deadly Companions" sometime or of course "The Wild Bunch." These are  bold and violent and heartbreaking statements. Will Smith ruined "I Am Legend" (apparently he's about to ruin it again with a sequel or prequel). 

Maybe he'll try "Caligula" next. With some dancing it.  

Will Smith is in talks to star in and produce Warner Bros.' reboot of Sam Peckinpah's classic 1969 Western "The Wild Bunch," individuals familiar with the project have told TheWrap.

Smith would produce through his Overbrook Entertainment banner along with Jerry Weintraub, who recently worked with Smith on "The Karate Kid" remake.

Also read: Will 'Chronicle' Star Michael B. Jordan Be Human Torch in 'Fantastic Four'? (Exclusive)

The original "Wild Bunch" followed a group of aging outlaws that plan one last score on the Texas-Mexico border as the traditional American West changes around them in 1913.

A modern remake involving cartels south of the border, the "Wild Bunch" reboot is expected to follow a disgraced D.E.A. agent who assembles a team to go after a Mexican drug lord and his fortune.

Warner Bros. and Weintraub have been looking to reboot the property for years. David Ayer was hired to write a script and most recently, Tony Scott was developing the project with Oscar winner Brian Helgeland ("L.A. Confidential"), who wrote about half of the screenplay before Scott died last year.

Also read: 'Shameless' Star Jeremy Allen White Lands Lead in DreamWorks' 'Glimmer' (Exclusive)

The studio and producing team are currently looking to hire a new writer for the project, which provides the opportunity to surround Smith with a strong ensemble. The original "Wild Bunch" starred William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O'Brien, Warren Oates, Jaime Sanchez and Ben Johnson.

Smith has never done a proper Western before, though he was sought to star in Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained" and Kathryn Bigelow's since-abandoned "Triple Frontier." WB's 1999 movie "Wild Wild West" was set in the Old West but the material was played for laughs.

NY Times Peckinpah DVDs excellent

Maureen O’Hara and Brian Keith in Sam Peckinpah’s western “The Deadly Companions” (1961).

May 10, 2013

Early Salvos From ‘Bloody Sam’

By DAVE KEHR

Sam Peckinpah’s life, like many of his movies, ended in a kind of apocalyptic debacle. Too many arguments with producers, too much alcohol-fueled misbehavior and (always the real problem) too many disappointments at the box office had rendered the director of “The Wild Bunch” (1969) effectively unemployable by the time he died in 1984, at 59.

But the romantic myth of the visionary rebel destroyed by the system is a powerful one, and Peckinpah’s has steadily grown in the decades since his death. Amazon lists over a dozen biographies and critical studies of Peckinpah currently in print, and the Internet overflows with fan sites and tributes. The cult of personality inspired by “Bloody Sam” now threatens to overwhelm the films themselves — a shame, since there is much to be rediscovered in Peckinpah’s work, and particularly in those movies that don’t necessarily conform to the sanguinary image: films like “Ride the High Country” (1962), “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” (1970), “Junior Bonner” (1972) and the 1966 television drama “Noon Wine.”

Peckinpah wasn’t always the fierce and terrible contrarian he became in later years. He seems to have come up through the system in a standard way, from college theatrics to television work, and eventually a job as a dialogue director with the gifted genre specialist Don Siegel, who would later mentor Clint Eastwood’s directing career. (Peckinpah makes a brief appearance, as a gas meter reader, in Siegel’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” from 1956, a nonconformist parable that Peckinpah seems to have taken to heart, and later dubiously claimed to have extensively rewritten.)



Ed here: This section refers to "The Deadly Companion based on the finest western Gold Medal ever published, Yellowleg (he wrote many thrillers for both GM and Ace). The author of both book and screenplay was A.S.Fleischmann who went on to become one of the most revered and successful children's book writers in American history.




Dave Kehr:

Reportedly Peckinpah was not allowed to modify the script (by A. S. Fleischman) or participate in the final editing. But “The Deadly Companions” seems like pure Peckinpah from its opening scene, in which a group of children are seen torturing, not a scorpion as in “The Wild Bunch,” but one of their own; the outcast is the fatherless son of a dance hall girl, Kit Tildon (Ms. O’Hara). When a spasm of violence breaks out, the boy is accidentally shot and killed by a stranger in town, a former Union officer who goes by the generic name of Yellowleg (Keith).

Refusing to bury the boy amid the townspeople who had scorned him (and her), Kit resolves to haul his small coffin across unsettled territory, back to the now-abandoned outpost where her husband was killed and lies buried. Gallant and guilt-ridden, Yellowleg offers to accompany her, an offer Kit refuses until two quintessential Peckinpah villains — a half-crazed card shark (Chill Wills) and a sadistic young gunslinger (Steve Cochran) invite themselves along for the ride.

Although he’s working with a star (Ms. O’Hara) and a cinematographer (William H. Clothier) associated with John Ford, Peckinpah already seems determined to dissociate himself from Ford’s West: his frontier community is not an early bloom of civilization but rather a center of cruelty and hypocrisy; the Apaches the travelers will encounter on route are not Ford’s noble warriors but savages, pure and simple; the characters are driven not by the pioneer spirit but by vengefulness, bitterness and base profit. Though there had been anti-westerns before (notably Robert Aldrich’s caustic “Vera Cruz” of 1954), “The Deadly Companions” leaves no doubt that a corner has been turned.

for the rest of this fine arthttp://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=36271824#editor/target=post;postID=5155952748034581792;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=0;src=linkicle go here: