Volume 23, Number 12 · July 15, 1976
Hi ho, Silver!
By Michael Wood
Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western
by Will Wright
University of California, 217 pp., $10.00
The Missouri Breaks
directed by Arthur Penn
Buffalo Bill and the Indians
directed by Robert Altman
In John Sturges's Last Train from Gun Hill (1959), a western much preoccupied with varieties of guilt, as many Fifties westerns were, Kirk Douglas asks a bartender if he can tell him where he might find the men who killed his wife. The bartender, knowing that one of the killers is the son of the rancher who controls the town, says, 'Mister, I wouldn't tell you where they were if they were standing next to you.' Douglas looks down at the bar and then up again, and with a surprising lack of bitterness says, 'I can understand that.'
Review, 3254 words
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