Sagebrush Trail (1933)

Posted on August 16, 2011
Filed Under films

An excellent example of the early sound-era Western is Sagebrush Trail (1933), starring 26-year-old John Wayne, the second in a series of low-budget Wayne pictures produced by Lone Star Films for Monogram Pictures. Wayne plays a man wrongly accused of murder who escapes custody and joins an outlaw gang to find the real killer. Yakima Canutt plays the head of the outlaw band—he has an evil scar on his face, perhaps a brand—and Nancy Shubert, in her only credited film role, plays the upstanding storekeeper’s daughter Wayne wins at the end of the picture. Despite its tinny-talkie stiffness, Sagebrush Trail is a worthwhile slice of cowboy action fodder distinguished by a couple of commendable flourishes.  Read more

Guns: The Great Train Robbery (1903)

Posted on August 13, 2011
Filed Under films, silent films

The most famous shot in the most famous of all pre-nickelodeon films is literally a gunshot—or rather, several gunshots. It’s the moment at the end of Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) when Justus Barnes, playing one of the train robbers, empties his pistol directly at the camera. (11:25 in the above.) It’s a medium close-up made with the camera right in front of the player. Edison’s sales circular suggested that the exhibitor could place the shot at either the beginning of the film or at the end. Placing it at the beginning made more sense, given that the audience sees the bandits shot down by a pursuing posse in the film’s climactic gunfight, but most exhibitors placed it at the end, because it made for a sensational close. Read more

I Love Lucy: the “Lost Pilot” (March 2, 1951)

Posted on August 6, 2011
Filed Under early television

I Love Lucy is high on the list of brilliant entertainments nearly derailed by corporate obtuseness. CBS and prominent sponsors objected to nearly everything about Lucille Ball’s proposed TV show: her demand that the show be shot in California, that it be shot on film in front of a live audience, and most of all to Ball’s insistence that the show co-star her real-life husband, Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz. Part of the resistance was good old-fashioned American racism—the suits were certain that the audience would reject the notion of an “all-American” girl like Lucy being married to a Cuban—and part of it was sober showbiz common sense. Read more

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