Word: shots
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Taproot in Tradition. To provide stories for these heroes and for their dozens of less famous fellows. Hollywood keeps 100 or so writers busy. (One of them, Frank Gruber. once wrote four scripts in four days.) A great many of the shows have shoddy plots, ludicrous situations. They are "shot from the hip," as one director puts it, in three days or less, "take what you get." Studio filmed for the most part, they are ironically known in the trade as "four-wall westerns-as big as all indoors." It hardly seems the sort of climate in which creativity could...
...adult or infantile, psychological or just physical, the TV western is the No. 1 talking horse of the average trail-feverish American. A man in Pennsylvania, angered when his wife turned off Have Gun, Will Travel while he was watching it, ran for his revolver and took a shot at her. (He missed.) In Florida one priest bet another that Marshal Matt Dillon was faster on the draw than Paladin-loser to say early Mass on Sunday. Tie-in sales of toys suggested by TV westerns are expected to hit $125 million this year. And at last count...
...legend says, never gave a buffalo nickel to the poor. Wes Hardin, the tiny Texan who was probably the most dangerous gunman in the West, was as mean as a mountain boomer; he had killed twelve men before he started to shave, and by the time he was mercifully shot in the back, at 42, he had slaughtered more than 40. The lawmen were not much better. Most of them were coldblooded, cat-eyed killers who spent so much time in the gambling halls and brothels that the cowboys called them "The Fighting Pimps...
...hardheaded businessman, less interested in law and order than he was in the fast buck. He reorganized the red-light district while he was in Dodge City, charged a fat fee for protection, and collected besides a sizable percentage of every fine he levied. He rarely fired a shot, made his reputation pistol-whipping drunken waddies...
...experienced horse fan could predict the depth of the villain's depravity by checking the length of his sideburns. The villain chased the hero from right to left, but when the hero was winning, he was naturally headed right (with his pistol hand closest to the camera). Anybody shot was assumed dead, unless the audience was notified to the contrary. The stock situations had also been worked out-the stage robbery, the Indian attack, the big stampede, the necktie party, the chair-throwing brawl in the barroom-and in the subtitles, the dialogue had been perfected...