Word: western
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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ABOUT 3 p.m., we pulled into town, Milford is one of those small New England villages (population 5200) whose picturesque colonial atmosphere has succumbed to the 20th century. Many of the old wooden structures (even a colonial church) have been transformed into grimy liquor stores, Western Auto discount stores, small grocery stores. The center of town is surround by gas stations. And in the dead center of the main square is a deserted and forlorn bandstand, its white wooden sides smudged with dirt and exhaust, its green platform sagging at the middle...
...BESET by a crop of western about extremely competent people. In Sam Whiskey, a dreary little film which proceeds shakily on the mistaken assumption that the audience is interested in what's going on, the title character engineers and executes a gold heist--crushing his adversaries and winding up in a clinch with Angie Dickinson. Along the way, he meets with no serious obstacles. In Support Your Local Sheriff, a food picture by Burt Kennedy, James Garner cleans up the town and wins the girl with computer-like dispatch, supremely faster, smarter, and better looking then anyone--and well aware...
Support Your Local Sheriff earns most of its laughs by subverting western clichés; a mayor referring to his daughter says to Garner, "She takes after her dear departed mother." "Mother died?" Garner says with appropriate sobriety. "No, she just departed," says the mayor dryly, exiting screen left. The film abounds with set-up/tag-line jokes which work well, carrying it through a story line which parodies both Hawk's Rio Bravo and Ford's My Darling Clementine (Sheriff holds murderer despite efforts of murderer's family). One takes Burt Kennedy seriously; he wrote a series of Budd Boetticher...
...digress. As a patient reader may have guessed, I felt like seeing some westerns last week, and though I'd better review them in order to justify my lunacy. The western is a great art form and a truly heavy genre. The lightweight western is all fine and good, but we must remember that three or four of the ten greatest American films are westerns, serious and important works. If for no other reason the traditions of the form should be understood and on occasion maintained, lest corruption weaken and ultimately destroy an invaluable part of American art. Burt Kennedy...
...political kidnaping. Otto John, head of Germany's BFV-a counterespionage organization devoted to maintaining political order in West Germany-was either kidnaped or "defected" to East Germany in 1954. Walter Linse, head of Germany's League of Free Jurists (UFJ)-one of the "main instruments of Western propaganda policy, guiding and directing anti-Soviet forces in East Germany"-was abducted in front of a witness in 1952. By 1959, Hagen says, recording an astonishing statistic, "there had been 255 abductions and 340 attempted abductions in West Berlin alone...