Reviews

This movie has as much to do with the Battle of the Bulge as it does with penguin migration. During that battle Belgium was covered with snow. Apparently the makers of this movie could not afford snow or plastic snow. The men who fought in that battle would have loved to have had that sunny weather and spotty snow. Bastogne was iced over. Tanks slid sideways trying to get from one place to another. You want to see the battle? Look at The Brave Rifles, a 1965 PBS special. Or for an accurate re-enactment look at Battleground (1949). This movie is an insult to average intelligence.

Painful to watch for anyone who knows anything about Korea or the Korean conflict. Contrived and sophomoric. Made at a time when no one in the U.S., especially Hollywood, knew anything about the Korean war. Some Hollywood writers sat down to imagine what the war MIGHT be like and missed it by several hundred miles. Has nothing to do with what really went on between the Chinese intervention and the evacuations at Hungnam and Wonsan.

Before this cardboard farce the worst movie ever made about the Texas Rangers was King Vidor's 1936 sandbox play like. Then came the 1951 carnival sideshow starring George Montgomery. But that was not blasphemy enough. Now we have asinine coupled with patently absurd. Hollywood has nothing but absolute contempt for reality. This movie is the nailed down, undeniable proof. The problem is Hollywood is proud of that fact. First of all, when a man decided he wanted to join the Rangers he came to them with a good horse, saddle and tack. He also brought a rifle, a pistol and a big knife. This movie has urchins with only the clothes of their backs welcomed. Ranger badges did not even exist during the time period this picture is about. To show Ranger hopefuls taking target practice at Ranger badges is less real than them shooting at Ranger badges with ray guns. Everyone connected with this movie should be forced to watch Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde" three times a day every day for 10 years to understand what B.S. really looks like.

I was beginning to think this show was believable until I saw McQueen fanning the hammer on a sawed-off lever action rifle. The mistake most actors made, even big stars, was to jack the lever two or three time before shooting. As if moving the lever up and down gave them something to do to pass the time. Mutton-headed movie directors never seem to understand what that lever is for. Then I saw McQueen in at least two episodes fire his rifle twice without ever using the cocking lever. Just passing the palm of his hand over the hammer as if it were a single action pistol. That says out loud, we don't know what we are doing so just play along and act like you believe it.

I saw this movie many, many moons ago and I thought at the time, That has to be the dumbest movie since "Pony Express" with Charlton Heston. No doubt Mitchum thought about quitting the movies after he made this one. It would not surprise me to learn he thought about slitting his wrists. I watched it again to see if I remembered it right. Reminds me of the Hush-Puppy shoe commercials. The Japanese could have made it cheaper but they could not have made it dumber. Has all the stupid clichés. Outlaws chasing a stagecoach. No one did that. Not even the Indians. Saguaro cacti in a place they never grow. Fast draw duel. Man lights a candle and a 40 watt light bulb illuminates the room. One tap on the head and a man is unconscious with no ill effects. Don't know how many more times I will be afforded the opportunity to not watch this movie but I look forward to every one.

The saloon brawl and the runaway horse team scenes are from Dodge City (1939) with Errol Flynn and Victor Jory. Both Jory and Guinn Big Boy Williams can be seen if you look quickly enough. What a waste of film. On the up side it did provide some pay checks for a few out of work actors and other studio employees. As usual, after the big deal fist fight between our hero sheriff and the villain the villain's face is bloody and our hero's face doesn't have a mark. But in as much as the short was made to entertain little kids and to sell popcorn it served it's purpose. It's not like they were out to make Gone With the Wind or Ben Hur. It would be interesting to hear what the producer and director had to say about why they made it and how they got permission to use film from other movies.

Cop says to a guy sitting at a lunch counter and who is showing to much interest in their interrogation of the owner,"Eat your ice cream before it gets cold." And to a tattoo artist who offers the cops a discount. "No thanks. A guy named Angelo does all my art work. Mike Angelo. Ever hear of him?" The lead cop refers to the rookie cop, who is a "college boy" who believes forensic science can solve crimes, as the test tube baby.

Just seeing the lineup of old cars that were driven in 1950 makes the movie worth watching to a car buff. For those folks I also highly recommend Walter Matthau's "Gangster Story."

Semi-spoiler included. If you have not seen this movie,I envy you. I wish I could see it again for the first time. Acting is superb. Scripting is superb. A bunch of National Guardsmen try to schoolyard bully some Louisiana deer hunters and then laugh it off. They grab a tiger's tail they cannot release. Suddenly, instead of being on a pain in the butt training exercise, they are running for their lives thru a swamp.Brion James has a great line after he hangs Alan Autry from a railroad trestle. "Dis our home down here. Don't nobody fock wid us." It sums up America's attitude towards Vietnam before the reality sat in for good. Get it. Watch it. Enjoy.

The movie's makers get an A for effort. The cast gets an A+. A better story about how the west was "won" should include the aborigine welcoming the White man and the White man tricking him with lies and then treaties (more lies)and then, when that fails, extortion and when that fails armed robbery and cold-blooded murder. And voila, we "won." Be that as it may, my favorite line is when Jimmy Stewart is visiting his wife's grave and talks to her, as Southerners are wont to do. "I don't know what to tell you about this war, Martha. It's like all wars, I guess. The politicians are talking about the need for it and the Generals are talking about the glory of it. The undertakers are winning it and the young men just want to go home."

Starts out grim and just spirals downward. Entails the best characteristics of ALL wars; insanity, stupidity, senseless waste and cruelty. All presented tastefully by an all-star cast. My favorite line; James Stewart and his sons stop a Union prisoner train in search of his son-in-law. The engineer begs for his train to be spared. Stewart says, "Seems to me you have a kind of a sad train here, mister. It takes people away when they don't want to go and doesn't bring them back. BURN IT." Then he says to George Kennedy, the commander of a company of Confederate soldiers, "Are you in charge of this band of fools." You will want to watch it again.

I have in my lifetime watched 100s of Hollywood "westerns." Ninety-nine percent were cow flop. Some were superlative, like Shane. Some were so good they were almost perfect, like Conagher. Conagher might have made it except for the dust billowing up from a cattle drive trail during a "rainstorm." All failed in the horse apple test. Hundreds of horses on dirt streets, no horse apples ever. Horse dung ground into dust by hooves created a choking dust in New York City before the automobile, but never west of the Mississippi. According to Hollywood.

But back to Open Range. The amazing thing is Robert Duvall commanding a leading role at age 72. That has never been done in Hollywood to my knowledge. Open Range is the only Kevin Costner movie I have ever watched that I wanted to see again and again. Costner deserves credit for a fine role. He may never equal it. He may never again have such a fine (better than fine) supporting cast. Not since Shane have I seen such a memorable bunch of low life bad guys. They are all great. I could have done without Costner firing his six-shooter TWELVE times in rapid succession. But that is the only technical error I saw in a western shot in cinematography greatness.

If you are watching it for the first time, I envy you. If you are watching it for the fourth time, I am joining you.

There are three things true that are depicted in the movie. There really was an Eliot Ness. There really was an Al Capone. There really is a Chicago and it is still as corrupt as ever. If you read Eliot Ness's autobiography, and it can be found on the used book web sites, you find that during his entire time in Chicago as a Federal agent he fired a weapon (a pistol) once. Into a barrel of cotton. To make a ballistics test. His time there went from ho-hum to frustration. After Capone went to prison, and the Chicago mayor and police force had to find other crooks to sell their services to, Ness went to the hills of Kentucky to hunt for moonshine stills. All the cutesy scenarios in the move and the courageous shootouts are Hollywood mule muffens. Cheap entertainment. And a sick attempt to create history that never happened.

The master gunfighter(the character)is cut from the same glossy cardboard as Billy Jack. Same flat expression condescension, same arrogant and over done slow motion. Laughlin tried to borrow some of the childish, long and drawn out attempts to over dramatize that the spaghetti westerns make viewer suffer through. His versions were not as bad as the Italian directors. The movies only saving grace. He lost almost all the money he made on Billy Jack trying to make a dead horse get up and walk. The only other worse idea he ever had was running for President. The Master Gunfighter belongs on a list of the worst oaters ever made, along with The Outlaw and I Shot Jesse James. Where it should be listed (maybe #1) I'll leave up to someone else. If you have not seen this movie consider yourself blessed.

The war was still going on. No one, especially MacArthur, knew WHAT was going on. I spent a year in Korea and when I came back I asked my brother a lot about his experiences. He was in the 1st Cav which spent most of it's time running South and East towards Hungnam and pulling the 1st Marines out of the Changjin debacle after their mentally challenged commander refused to retreat and was cut off. I then began to study that war. My conclusion about this movie; it is as factual as Hollywood's movies about the Earp brothers, Billy the Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, et al. In other words, it was as much about the real Korean war as it was about life on Mars. The screen writers knew nothing about the war so they made up one. A God-awful grasping at sophomoric conjecture. An insult to the men from the 16 allied countries who served there.

Shortly after the movie was released it was screened for a former member of the Barrow gang. His comment: "I don't know who that movie was supposed to be about, but it sure as hell was not about Clyde Barrow." There are four things factual in the movie. There really was a Clyde Barrow. There really was a Bonnie Parker. There really was a Frank Hamer. Hamer was one of the ambushers. Other than that it is just another James Cagney gangster movie without Cagney. Total fabrication. Total. Barrow was sent to a brutal Texas prison for a minor crime where he suffered homosexual rape. He murdered the man who did it and when he was released from prison he swore he would come back, break IN and free all the prisoners. And he did. That would have made the movie more interesting.

An interesting note: Denver Pyle played Frank Hamer (a Texas Ranger who once said he had killed 50 men, not counting Mexicans) as an inept and almost comical oaf. After members of Hamer's family saw the movie they sued the producers for enough money to buy Texas and give it back to the Comanches. And won. Every other actual person portrayed in the movie was equally misrepresented. Penn was honored for the movie. He should have been tarred and feathered and dumped in downtown Dallas.

This movie is an insult to all men who fought in that battle. If you want to know about the battle I urge you to watch The Brave Rifles, a documemntary made the same year. The actual battle took place in the dead of winter. Deep snow. Sub-freezing cold. The makers of the movie couldn't come up with enough snow to make a sno-cone. Parts of it look like it was filmed in Arizona in the summer. The movie is absurd at best and why so many good actors with good reputations agreed to be in it I have no idea. I can only conclude they really, really needed the money. It has about as much to do with the actual battle of the bulge as the movie Bonnie and Clyde had to do with actual people or events.

I wondered from the first why anyone would get a military/combat medal for talking on the phone. Then I read an article in the Arizona Republic newspaper in Phoenix of interviews done with former "code talkers" on the Indian reservation. Here is pretty much what they said. The movie was amusing. It could have happened that way, but it didn't. We were trained to not only converse in Navajo but to memorize code words for things like tanks, artillery, etc. The brass would not let a code talker get within the longest range of a Japanese rifle. We talked inside bunkers from about a mile from any combat. We were too valuable to risk. Once trained we were all they had. Not replaceable. So, there you have it. The same Hollywood trumped-up, childish crap you see in every movie ever made about Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, Eliot Ness and now the code talkers. They didn't shoot any Japs. No hand to hand combat. No wounds. Just talk on the phone. Why doesn't my wife have a Medal of Honor and a grave site at Arlington? Hollywood is re-writing history, fellow Americans. With it's tongue in it's cheek and a thumb up it's bung hole. And your children and a few really slow adults are eating it up.

A low budget pot boiler made really enjoyable by a highly talented cast. First of all, Ray Faulkner (Christopher George) drafts, not recruits, six lifer convicts to help him destroy a moonshine gang and capture the leader (Ralph Meeker). He (Faulkner) is the seventh and he is joined by another federal agent later to make the eight. Meeker and George are underemployed in these roles and therefore it is easy for them to stand out. The plot is Faulkner will train these men in high speed "demolition derby" driving, hand to hand combat, use of explosives and firearms and then take them to Meeker's territory to disrupt his moonshine operation. Be forewarned, the special effects are really bad. Film editing is sub-standard. But all the character actors turn in solid, convincing roles, including Fabian Forte, who acts better than he ever sang, which is not a high compliment. A lot of well known actors tried to make moonshine movies, among them Richard Widmak and Gergory Peck. The difference is this movie never tries to be serious. Get a six pack, sit back and be entertained. It's lightweight but it never slows down. I watch it at least once a year and I still enjoy it.