Talking Classic Movies with Mal MacDonald: Westerns

These days it seems like online streaming service provide us with a near limitless choice of home entertainment, but for unique and hard-to-find movies and memorabilia there’s Mal MacDonald.

His business REEL Memories has a catalogue of thousands of titles, many of which you will have trouble finding online or anywhere else.

Orange City Life once again sat down with Mal, this time to talk classic westerns.

O.K. Let's saddle up and hit the dusty trails! So first, no one was more synonymous with western movies than the actor John Wayne. He made so many great films — and quite a few bad ones early ones in his career —the list is endless but we'll cover just a few here.

His career really starts off in 1939 with the classic John Ford directed Stagecoach. He’d done many prior to that, but Stagecoach really changed the Western genre and from this period on his whole career changed and he went on to be a major star.

John Ford made some of his best films, like the Cavalry trilogy, which a lot of people would remember; Fort Apache being the first one in 1948 and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon 1949, and finally  Rio Grande in 1950, but there were so many great Ford films.

The searcher is still a classed as a classic. It was a big colour production from Joh Ford in 1956 with John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter Ward Bond, and a young Natalie Wood. It also had Patrick Wayne, John Wayne's son, who was in a number of his films.

In 1953, he made an interesting one for his own new production company called Hondo. It was originally shot in 3D and starred John Wayne and Geraldine Page, who was actually a stage actress, and this was her first screen appearance. It also had Australia’s own Michael Pate, who would go on about a decade later to be in another John Wayne western call McLintock.

Wayne’s last film was in 1976 and he went out with a bang in that one because he had a lot of his friends, including actors James Stewart, Richard Boon (from the TV series Have Gun, Will Travel), Hugh O’Brien, who famously played Wyatt Earp, and Lauren Bacall. It also had a very Young Ron Howard and Harry Morgan, who people would remember as Colonel Potter in the series M.A.S.H.

We'll leave Wayne now and let's fly back to a black and white 1952 film and one of the all-time classics High Noon. A real ‘good against evil’ story with Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, and Lloyd Bridges, who was in numerous of westerns.

In 1957 Burt Lancaster was in the famous Hollywood retelling of the Gunfight at O.K. Corral with Kirk Douglas and playing one of the Earp brothers was an actor DeForest Kelley, better known for playing Bones in the original Star Trek. Some of the things in the movie never actually happened, but it made for a good rollicking western!

Now an actress that you wouldn't normally find in a western, but she was quite good in this particular one was Marilyn Monroe of all people. She starred in a colour production from 1954 River of No Return with Robert Mitchum and Rory Calhoun, also a well-known western star.

Now Winchester 73 with James Stewart and Shelly Winters this was a 1950 gem of a western and it is one of my favourites.

Also made in 1950 with James Stewart, Jeff Chandler and Debra Paget was a film called Broken Arrow. And this is notable for being a little more sympathetic towards the native American point of view. 

Now we get to a truly classic western from 1952 with Alan Ladd and this is Shane. This is a fondly remembered film for a lot of people; Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Van Heflin and Jack Palance, who had a long career in westerns and in the spaghetti westerns over in Italy.

Can you tell us more about the spaghetti westerns?

Other countries shot westerns, but Italy of course was famous for what were known as Spaghetti Westerns. There were so many American actors who went over to Italy to star in western films and some you wouldn't think, like William Shatner.

The star that most people remember, that really kicked them off, is the Clint Eastwood and his character ‘The man with no name.’ Clint Eastwood was a big star on TV at the time in the series Rawhide and he was asked by director Sergio Leone to come over and do a series of westerns and they went to become famous: Fistful of Dollars, a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

These films brought about a change in Westerns, a bit more violence would creep into films, like in Nevada Smith a 1966 film with Steve McQueen.

By the late ‘60s American westerns were losing favour and other big films and action blockbusters were coming along but that all changed in 1969 with Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, a classic western! Sam Peckinpah also made the western Adventure film Major Dundee with Charlton Cheston, Richard Harris and James Coburn.

The Hunting party was released a couple of years after the Wild Bunch had come out and this was another quite violent western with Oliver Reed, Candice Bergen, and Gene Hackman.

Again things all started to change after The Wild Bunch. So there is a rough history of Hollywood westerns, and with that we've come to the end of the dusty trail.

Mal can be contacted by email reelmemories@outlook.com or by phone 0419 979 773. He also has a Facebook page where he shares images from his extensive stock of classic and genre movie posters.