Raoul Walsh’s Gun Fury

It is hard to believe that Raoul Walsh, the man who directed The Roaring Twenties (1939), High Sierra (1941), They Died with Their Boots On (1941), Objective, Burma! (1945), White Heat (1949) and other classic genre films for Warner Brothers, never received an Oscar nomination. Film historian David Thomson pondered this in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, writing, “Was it just that he was so reliable, so direct and “simple” an entertainer? Or was it a matter of not making the proper “big” pictures?” Even after his peak years at Warners, Walsh continued to make audience pleasing hits such as Battle Cry (1955), the fourth biggest box office success of its year. Even some of the B-pictures Walsh made during his final years in Hollywood look like A-pictures now such as the 1953 western, Gun Fury.

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John Wayne in 3-D

Out of distribution for years, Hondo (1953), one of the key Westerns starring “The Duke,” was finally restored by the John Wayne Society in 1995 and made available for viewings again. It was said to be Wayne’s personal favorite of all of his Westerns and the storyline has a classic simplicity which captures the true spirit of the frontier: a cavalry scout (Wayne) comes to the aid of a homesteader (Geraldine Page) and her son (Lee Aaker) when the Apaches go on a rampage. Based on a novel by Louis L’Amour, Hondo was also surprisingly liberal in its attitude toward Native-Americans for its time and subtly addressed racial issues through the romance between the half-breed scout and the white heroine.

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