Word: hardes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...labored long and hard for bread...
Novelist Wister established the basic form of the modern sagebrush saga: the strong, silent, shy and virtuous hero; the hard-drinking, materialistic villain; the pretty, intelligent schoolteacher-heroine; the cattle politics; the slow drawl, the fast draw; the long, wary walk down Main Street to a blazing finish. And Zane Grey, a cactus-happy New York dentist who wrote 54 western novels that sold more than 25 million copies, started the mass exploitation of the Wister formula that soon turned the western story into a beltline business. Only since World War II have the cliches been rescued by a serious...
...first sight. The first real feature movie ever made, The Great Train Robbery (1903), was a western that introduced to the public a man who soon became the first of the great horse-opera heroes: Broncho Billy Anderson, a studio janitor who was drafted as a masked bandit. Hard on Broncho Billy's tracks came William S. Hart, a Minnesota farm boy who grew up among Indians. He rode a beautiful paint horse named Fritz, and when they stood side by side, it was hard to tell them apart. After Hart came Tom Mix, "the fearless...
...Prima Donnas. TV's Gunsmoke, originally a radio show, carried the revolution a step further. Gifted, Colorado-born Scriptwriter John Meston took pains to place the psychological realism in a setting of regional realism. When the show hit hard, a hasty passel of horse operators tried to follow his lead, but soon got lost in the chaparral cliches. Almost two years passed before a few of the more carefully written shows (Rawhide, Rifleman) began to get trailwise...
What the critters lacked in talent they made up in hard work. They wiggled through more walking lessons than Brigitte Bardot, and rasped themselves raw-handed to perfect the fast draw. Times without number they blasted holes in their own britches, and one of them, while poking his hat brim with a pistol, accidentally shot his own sideburns off. They became the prima donnas of horse opera, and sometimes it seemed as if they would rather pull hair than triggers. "Oh, Hugh O'Brian doesn't matter," Dale Robertson sniffed recently. "He's just a itty-bitty...