Films @ Dave’s Info Cafe

I watched Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” last night again and marvelled at the screenplay by David Webb Peoples. There are many things to admire about it.
As most of you will know the premise of Unforgiven is that a killer comes out of retirement after 11 years to do one last killing for money when he hears [...]

The western as a genre was dead until 1989 but was revived by, of all things, a made for TV mini series directed by an Englishman. That series was Lonesome Dove, a four part drama, that rekindled an American love for the western. It was made for the small screen but it had epic ambitions [...]

The western died out in the early 1980s following the monumental disaster of Heaven’s Gate (1980). Not only did it bring a film studio to its knees financially but it made other studios extremely wary of investing in the genre. The underlying reasons though are not so much about the financial profligacy of the film [...]

John Ford’s westerns have influenced so many directors throughout the world so it was not so much of a surprise when “westerns” started being made outside the Hollywood system.
The most famous mutation of the traditional western was the spaghetti western. These were films made largely in Europe (Spain being the most believable location to double [...]

Westerns have been around since the  era of silent film. They have been the staple of early cinema and early TV. I can remember watching many western series on the box during the sixties such as Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Rawhide and many more.
But the western started to become more of an art form in cinema [...]

I haven’t really posted anything about genres so far so I thought I would start with one of my favourite genres – the western. Genres are a way of categorizing films that have a loose set of similar characteristics. They are inevitably vague with flexible boundaries but include sets of conventions that recur in many [...]