Square Eyes; Two More Short Film Seasons From The Beeb… June 26, 2008
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Square Eyes , 8 commentsFollowing up the Westerns Weekend and the British B Movies Week (more of a long weekend, I suppose, than a week, but let’s not nitpick), BBC 4 continues its summer films season with two more helpings.
This weekend the digital channel plumps for a Courtroom Dramas Weekend, the three - count ‘em - movie showings tethered together with another 90 minute documentary Strictly Courtroom; after Rich Hall’s invigorating look at the western and Matthew Sweet’s entertaining and informative look at the cheap and cheerful, it looks as if we could be in for something a little more mundane with the choice of actor Martin Shaw to present.
Nothing against Mr Shaw per se; I think he’s a fine thesp, but I’ve got a sneaking feeling that he’s been chosen less for his expertise and enthusiasm and more for the fact that he’s TV’s Judge John Deed. Still, you never know; as I discovered with Hall’s How The West Was Lost, these things should not necessarily be prejudged - and some of the interviewees look interesting. The blurb:
Actor Martin Shaw narrates a documentary which looks at how trials have been portrayed on the silver screen in the past century, from 12 Angry Men and Alfred Hitchcock’s [sic] Anatomy of A Murder to A Few Good Men and George Clooney’s Michael Clayton. Contributors include Geoffrey Robertson QC, OJ Simpson’s defence lawyer Alan Dershowitz, author and advocate Scott Turow and death row campaigner Clive Stafford Smith.
The blurb writer has clearly got his directors in a twist; let’s hope the error didn’t originate with Beeb. Alas poor Otto…
The season gets under way this Saturday, June 28, at 7.00pm with Stanley Kramer’s 1960 Oscar-nominated screen adaptation of the notorious 1925 Tennessee ‘Monkey Trial’, Inherit The Wind, in which a young teacher stood accused of violating state law by teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. A quite fabulous cast including Fredric March, Spencer Tracy, Gene Kelly, Florence Eldridge, Dick York, Donna Anderson and Harry Morgan.
On Sunday Sidney J. Furie’s 1962 courtroom drama The Boys, shown last summer as part of the Beeb’s Festival of British Film, gets another airing. Four youths are accused of murdering a nightwatchman. The defence attempts to persuade the jury that the boys are guilty of a crime of passion and should not be executed - stars Richard Todd, Robert Morley, Felix Alymer, Dudley Sutton, Ronald Lacey & Tony Garnett.
Finally, on Monday night is Sidney Lumet’s wonderful The Verdict, from 1982, with Paul Newman (giving one of his finest performances), James Mason, Charlotte Rampling, Jack Warden and Milo O’Shea. An ambulance-chasing lawyer attempts to regain some integrity from one final case - a medical malpractice suit for a woman who lies in a coma. With his career fading, he has turned to drink for solace and finds himself in court facing one of the toughest lawyers in the country. An adaptation of Barry Reed’s novel, scripted by David Mamet.
As usual, Strictly Courtroom gets several outings; full details here.
The following weekend, and starting Saturday July 5, it’s British War Films - at 9.00pm look out for the documentary War Stories: Uncovering forgotten gems like Frieda and revisiting classics like Ice Cold in Alex, an exploration into how war films have changed with the times. They were a tool of government propaganda during WW2, and while the blockbusters of the1950s were part of national nostalgia, today they have been rediscovered and become celebrated icons of British culture.
No news on the presenter as yet, and it will, again, get several showings. Films in the season are:
We Dive at Dawn (kicking off the season on Saturday, July 5 at 7.30pm). Anthony Asquith’s World War II drama about a mission to hunt and destroy a dangerous German battleship in the Baltic which goes wrong when the British submarine runs short on fuel. Stars John Mills and Eric Portman.
The First of The Few (Saturday, July 5 at 10.35pm). Offered contracts and any number of enticing star roles after Gone with the Wind, Leslie Howard chose to leave Hollywood and return to England to make films designed to boost wartime morale. Here, he directs and stars as visionary aircraft designer R.J. Mitchell, the father of the Spitfire. The fine cast includes Rosamund John as his wife and David Niven as the test pilot, while William Walton’s score sums up an entire era of flying pictures. It was Howard’s final screen performance: his plane was shot down in 1943 on a mission that immediately became shrouded in mystery.
Ill Met By Moonlight (Sunday, July 6, 9.00pm). Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1958 war movie. I quote the Radio Times:Dirk Bogarde is on stirring form as a British officer given the task of working with the partisans in occupied Crete to kidnap the local German commander (Marius Goring), in a tale loosely based on a real operation in the Second World War. Fine acting, rugged scenery and a trenchant score all add to the film’s attractions. The Americans gave it the more prosaic title of Night Ambush.
Not my favourite P&P, but I’ve said it before, even second rate Powell & Pressburger is worth a watch. The RT insist, by the way, that Powell & Pressburger were not famed for their war films. Oh, really..?
Overlord (Monday, July 7, 10.00pm). Made over a period of several years and finally released in 1975; stars Brian Stirner, Davyd Harries, Nicholas Ball and Julie Neesam. The RT doesn’t reckon much to Stuart Cooper’s labour of love: Made with the co-operation of the Imperial War Museum, this account of the D-Day landings attempts to convey the grim reality of the soldier’s lot by combining newsreel footage with dramatic re-enactments. Unfortunately, too much time was spent rooting out clips and not enough on the script, which is a collection of clichéd ideas and utterances. Director Stuart Cooper - who, as an actor, played one of the original Dirty Dozen in the wartime blockbuster of the same name - seems content to allow his cast to remain inanimate, while his presentation of the combat sequences comes dangerously close to suggesting war may be hell, but is also grotesquely beautiful. A bold venture, but poorly executed.
Or as Criterion state: Seamlessly interweaving archival war footage and a fictional narrative, Stuart Cooper’s immersive account of one twenty-year-old’s journey from basic training to the front lines of D-day brings all the terrors and isolation of war to life with jolting authenticity. Overlord, impressionistically shot by Stanley Kubrick’s longtime cinematographer John Alcott, is both a document of World War II and a dreamlike meditation on man’s smallness in a large, incomprehensible machine.
All I can say is that if you haven’t seen it before, make an effort to do so; the Radio Times reviewer may have a point, but it is indeed a bold venture, and it is at times utterly gorgeous, with a climax that’s long telegraphed but still packs a wallop. It’s rarely shown on terrestrial TV; it’s highly recommended, if you not possess either the fine R1 Criterion or R2 Metrodome DVD sets. On that basis alone Overlord must not be dismissed.
The British War Films Weekend is yet to show on the BBC 4 website, but a quick search in a few days will bring you up the full schedule no doubt, should you wish to prepare your recorders.
How The West Was Hijacked? June 23, 2008
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Film & DVD Reviews, Westerns , 14 commentsHow The West Was Lost
Rich Hall’s BBC 4 documentary How The West Was Lost, screened as part of the digital channel’s recent Westerns Weekend, was, despite my earlier - and as it turns out totally unfounded - fears, really very good. The American comedian’s take on the western was perceptive, intelligent, thoroughly researched and neatly presented; I trembled at the thought of a low-brow gallop through the stereotypes of the genre. What we got was 90 minutes of literate, articulate and energetic dissection, enlivened by Hall’s acerbic wit, and all of it coming from someone who clearly loves the genre.
Attempting to cram the entire history of the western into a mere hour and a half is clearly an impossible task, and I suspect many fans could have taken issue with some of Hall’s observations, but I found myself riding by his side from the off, from the moment he kicked the ass of the ‘film geek’ with his laptop, his bluetooth headseat and his braying assertions (shades of Woody Allen - if only life were like this…), to his description of what he was trying to do was film a documentary; no, not at all like An Inconvenient Truth - that was a ‘Powerpoint presentation’…
My estimation of Hall rose considerably as he not only exonerated Peckinpah from those misguided souls who would have him carry the can for the stomach churning horror pornography that passes today for ‘graphic realism’, but he also visibly coloured as he spat out the sobriquet ‘fuckwit’ in relation to George ‘Dubya’ and his cowboy politics (favourite film; alledgedly High Noon, which is a little redolent of the T.U.C. adopting ‘The Strawbs’ Part of The Union as their anthem). Not only do I, as most of us surely, like a little affirmation, but I stand and whoop at the passion. Go Rich.
The only point in the How The West Was Lost where Rich (and note, I feel we are on first name terms, buddies even; Richie, Richmeister, The Richster…) and I parted company was during his clear dismissal of the Spaghetti Western, principally, the entire western canon of Sergio Leone. Hall (because now I recall the calumny, we’re back to formalities), chucked the whole bowl of spaghettis into the air, damned them with (very) faint praise, and then disdainfully smacked ‘em waaaay out over the bleachers.
The problem, as it appeared to Rich, (deep breaths; forgiveness kicking in) is that the Italians contaminated this purest of American film genres with their Marxist / Catholic sensibilities. These pantywaist Europeans pissed long and hard into the water hole. Rich grimaced and narrowed his eyes at the thought; I wanted the screen to transmogrify into an enormous Leone-esque ’scope close-up, and then for me and him to circle each other in that slow dance of death. Cue Ennio…
Over the past few years, I’ve stared deeply into the part of my soul that wants to be buried at John Ford Point and I’ve come to the conclusion that - gulp - I too, am not a huge fan of the Italian Western per se (now we eschew the ever so slightly xenophobic connotations ‘Spaghetti’ brings to the table).
But I am a huge fan of Sergio Leone and the westerns he fashioned with various talented collaborators; yes, they’re pretty much all ’something to do with death’, which is in itself particularly Catholic, still, aren’t all westerns? Good meets evil; someone has to end face down in the dust. Though in Leone’s case, good meets evil…and usually a third character who straddles both heaven and hell. As for the politics, well, that’s a little more complicated, and more of that later.
Yet all Leone’s westerns are undeniably made by a filmaker who has a genuine passion for the genre, the films of his youth, those halcyon days before Benito came to town, made himself sheriff and buggered up the idyll. Westerns may affirm an idealised view of America for a country that even now seems desperate to hang on to a myth of nation building and it’s pioneers as the very apotheosis of rugged individualism, but their appeal fell far outside the borders of the country from which they sprang.
The whole world over, westerns spoke to small boys, little pardners of all ages, who just needed heroes; Leone simply aped his heroes, those behind as well as in front of the camera, at the same time bringing something unique to the table, an outsiders view of the western legend. Art sometimes reflected reality in an era when Walter Cronkite was bringing increasingly bad, and increasingly graphic, news from South East Asia into America’s comfortable and cosy living rooms. In life as in fiction, the lines between the good, the bad and the ugly were blurring.
It wouldn’t be the first time, or the last; I’ve touched on American interventionism as inspiration before - Leone’s idol John Ford’s Rio Grande approves of and reflects American foreign policy in Korea, and surely Vietnam informed The Wild Bunch. Among others.
In the States particularly, the hoopla that surrounded Leone’s supposed ‘realistic’ violence was not only turning into a very queasy joke, but smacked of Americans circling the wagons to protect their mythos, their westerns from them thar pesky furriners. Leone was accused of hijacking the western, but the truth is, before he burst on the scene so dynamically, the genre, if not drowning, was certainly going down for the second time. Leone didn’t hijack it as much as point a genre that was losing it’s way into a whole other direction, one which some talented directors would pick up and run with, and lesser artists would grubbily exploit, even to this day.
Either way, Leone must now be seen, surely, as among the giants; at the very least, as the Richmeister generously pointed out, no Sergio, no Clint. He still unforgiven Rich..?
Duck You Sucker (1971)
Some spoilers, I should warn you…
Produced at the height of the Vietnam conflict, Duck You Sucker - aka (the director’s preferred title) Giù la testa, A Fistful of Dynamite, Once Upon A Time…The Revolution, depending on which country it was released in - was Sergio Leone’s corrosive look at revolutionary politics. I will, by the way, stick with Duck You Sucker as the title, my comments here referring to the U.S. R1 DVD of that name, restored, mono sound and all, with scenes reinstated from various cuts following the premiere. Cuts. ‘Twas ever thus for the burly Italian.
Duck You Sucker depicts a fly-blown, dirt poor Mexico, a country in complete turmoil with ragged arsed revolutionaries tearing at the throat of heavily armed Government forces, an army bolstered by foreign mercenaries and capable of breathtaking atrocities, the tools of any despotic regime.
The ruling classes, we are shown from the off, are powerful, rich, corrupt and contemptible of the poor. The poor simply want what the rich have; it’s the getting of it that’s at the heart of Duck You Sucker. Leone, scion of Italy, the country that down the centuries has embraced bloody change, opens his film with a quote from Mao Tse-tung:
“The revolution is not a social dinner, a literary event, a drawing or an embroidery; it cannot be done with elegance and courtesy. The revolution is an act of violence.”
We are, then, drawn into the first act of violence, but it’s hardly revolutionary; Mexican bandit Juan Miranda (a hugely enjoyable Rod Steiger, employing an outrageous accent) and his family of six boys (plus aging father), hold up a plush coachload of characters who are the very definition of bourgeois excess, killing the driver and shotgun, Juan raping the only woman in the group. If it’s a political statement, it is one that is pure and simple; you’ve got it, I want it. And I have the gun.
Moreover, Leone portrays this ship of fools as wallowing in a cesspit of their own excess. The coach itself is massive, a railway carriage affair pulled by eight straining horses through the pisspoor countryside. Inside the pampered posse gulp down an epicurean feast, swilling it down with copious amounts of wine, the camera focusing on their mouths so that they become glistening anuses. They are talking, literally, out of their backsides. The amoral Miranda has no time for them, only what they have, and at the end of his particular rainbow, where they put it; a nice juicy bank.
Providence sends him John Mallory (another excellent performance, and another outrageous accent from James Coburn), an I.R.A. explosives expert turned soldier of fortune. As we learn from a series of unfolding flashbacks - Leone follows the old Fordian dictum of there being little use in discarding a good trick - John is both a fighter and a lover, one-third of a ménage à trois, but an act of betrayal, or more correctly two acts of betrayal that lead to the same end, culminate in a devastating act of vengeance. On the run, he has quit his native Ireland.
Mallory is both a revolutionary and an idealist. But his tacit partnership with Miranda means that he’s soon forced to reassess not only what revolution means for those expendable agents of change, the poor bloody proletariat, but also for those chattering classes who promote it, urging others onto the guns, while at the same time sharing the same self-serving morals as those they seek to depose. Viva Zapata this is not.
Leone, and his fellow screenwriters Sergio Donati and Luciano Vincenzoni, gift Miranda the dialogue which reveal their own feelings on the nature of armed struggle. A pivotal speech comes as John studiously reads a copy of Bakunin’s political tract The Patriotism, and makes a throwaway comment about ‘the revolution’. Juan, who is, much to his disgust, becoming an unwilling and unwitting hero of the struggle, angrily turns to the Irishman:
“I know what I am talking about when I am talking about the revolutions. The people who read the books go to the people who can’t read the books, the poor people, and say, “We have to have a change.” So, the poor people make the change, ah? And then, the people who read the books, they all sit around the big polished tables, and they talk and talk and talk and eat and eat and eat, eh? But what has happened to the poor people? They’re dead! That’s your revolution.
Shhh… So, please, don’t tell me about revolutions! And what happens afterwards? The same fucking thing starts all over again!”
John gives a thoughtful grunt, then tosses his book, with it’s series of earnest page markers, into the mud. Essentially, Juan’s speech neatly underscores the apparently glib opening Mao quote; no revolution without blood and sacrifice, but whose blood? Whose sacrifice? Well, Miranda’s for a start. In a scene that seems to echo the Mai Lai massacre of then recent notoriety, Juan’s family is wiped out, their bodies among the heaps of corpses that the camera glides over, touching on this body and that before settling on the image of the bandit’s tiniest son, his startled, innocent eyes wide open, staring into the dark.
Later, Leone’s camera sweeps majestically over the rail yards as the army machine guns pits of prisoners by their hundreds; if the Italian director has already forced his viewers to draw parallels with a contemporary revolution, here he shows us an image the could easily have come from the conflict of his youth, drawing both together. This is what happens in war; Mussolini and Hitler (to name but two) held no exclusivity when it comes to the authorship of unspeakable crimes against humanity. And the madness goes on.
Mallory is again thrust before the realities when the revolutionary leader Dr. Villega (Romolo Valli) is captured and the Irishman, hidden in the shadows, spies him fingering compatriots for Government forces. When Villega is released and rejoins the struggle, presumably as a double-agent, only John knows the depths to which this hypocrite is capable of sinking and that there’s hardly a cigarillo wrapper between him and mealy-mouthed Governor Jaime (Franco Graziosi), the hated figurehead of the oppressive government forces.
It’s interesting that the Americans portrayed in the film are fat-cat peripheral figures; Donati and Leone’s story, however, has the U.S. as the country Juan and John choose as escape, to put the whole slaughterhouse of revolution behind them. America, a land of milk, honey and those ‘big fat juicy banks’. Another myth, and one that’s ultimately out of reach for them both.
If all this seems a little heavy going, then I apologise for giving that impression, for Duck You Sucker is a fun film. Time and again, Leone follows a great tradition (dare I mention Ford again?) of mixing sometimes grim narrative with humour and Steiger and Coburn (neither, incidentally, Leone’s first choices for their parts), consummate movie actors, are more than adept at both. In one scene, Juan contemplates his loss, and sits in twisted torment, tears streaming down his face as Mallory looks on unable to offer anything by way of comfort where no comfort can be found; from a cage above, a songbird shits on Juan’s head. Slowly he wipes the slime away, looks up in resignation and says; ‘But for the rich you sing…’ John’s face creases into that familiar toothy smile; tragedy and comedy - two sides of the same currency.
In the comparitively slight, but often astonishing, Leone canon, Duck You Sucker is usually overlooked. However, it is now being re-evaluated as one of his very best, beautifully shot by cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzolini and produced with all the love, care and budget which, from For a Few Dollars More onwards, fans had come to expect; the hundreds of extras that fill gorgeous - occasionally horrifying - vistas that go on forever in towering crane shots, the sets and costumes and particularly the period uniforms of the military, the wonderful Ennio Morricone score, the startlingly humongous explosions that put the wind up his leads who were cheerfully urged ‘closer, closer…’ by their safely out of range director.
There’s delight too in the ’Wicked Witch of The West’ outfit - to suggest a potent, but pantomime combination of power & evil - that he clads actress Rosita Torosh in for that opening scene. It’s that fine attention to detail, the smallest references which he enjoyed and knew would appeal to fellow film buffs, which underlines Leone’s love affair with movies and the western in particular. Leone didn’t simply hijack the western, he re-energised it, however briefly.
Incidentally, while Mallory’s I.R.A. backstory is another clear nod in the direction of Ford, one wonders if the very first shot of Duck You Sucker, of Juan urinating into a nest of ants - and onto his leg - is another sly dig at his rival Sam Peckinpah (Leone showed Sam dead and buried in My Name is Nobody), whose famous opening to The Wild Bunch, of a scorpion stinging itself as it is attacked by red ants is a clear foreshadowing of events to come. Leone’s ants end up drowning in foaming piss and trodden under foot - another foreshadowing; socio-political certainly, but Marxism be damned.
One can only imagine what the suits at MGM thought of that opening scene, not to mention a film that dealt with revolution, the caravan of chaos that routinely follows the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’, at a time when well-fed, privileged middle-class kids were tearing up the Berkeley campus. They probably choked on their martinis. And of course, at some 160 minutes long, the running time became - yet again - one of the battlegrounds on which Leone fought and lost.
As much as 40 minutes was hacked out following the premiere, dismantling one of the central themes - and one rarely addressed by the director up until this point - the fulcrum of real human relationships; desire, love, lust, revenge, loss, regret. It’s only recently, following MGM’s restoration on DVD can we appreciate the fuller picture that Duck You Sucker paints. Yes, it’s long and languid - it would hardly be Leone otherwise - but it’s a beautifully involving piece of work that actually belies the apparently bum-numbing length. Ironic that Leone actually didn’t want to direct (he had Peter Bogdanovich in mind), but both his leads threatened to walk unless he took the chair; the Italian wouldn’t do so again, officially, for another 13 years.
The final shot of Duck You Sucker is of a bereft, angry Miranda staring into the lens of the camera, into the eyes of you and I. ‘What about me?’, a plaintive line of Juan’s dialogue from earlier in the movie is repeated and in response up comes the title ‘Duck You Sucker’ - keep your head down, and run the other way when they urge you to fight.
Or simply steal their money; much safer…
Square Eyes; British B Movie Week on BBC 4 June 16, 2008
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Square Eyes , 4 commentsBBC 4 follows up last week’s Westerns Weekend with British B Movie Week starting next Saturday, June 21, featuring a number of movies rarely aired on British television and none of them available on DVD, to my knowledge, this side of The Pond.
Author and film historian Matthew Sweet introduces the films and hosts a new 90-minute documentary Truly, Madly, Cheaply reappraising over half a century of British B movies, from John Mills on the wrong end of a whipping in The Lash through to the giant gorilla Konga running amok in Croydon. Sweet argues that the cheapness of these films, unlike the A film, ensured they often portrayed Britain as it really was, even when (as in the case of 1970s sex movies) that wasn’t necessarily a nice place to be. Features interviews with the people behind the films including Sir John Mortimer, Patricia Laffan and Michael Winner. Truly, Madly, Cheaply will be shown several times during the short season.
Amongst the films being aired are quota-quickies from Michael Powell and Bernard Vorhaus, through to a cheap and cheerful Hammer style 70s zombie-bikers flick. They are:
The Last Journey; John Brahm and Bernard Vorhaus co-directed this 1936 portmanteau thriller. A train driver driven mad with jealousy after discovering his wife’s affair, embarks on his last journey before he retires. Should be the BBC’s restored and remastered version from National Film and Television Archive materials. Kicking off the week at 7.30pm on June 21.
Lazybones; Michael Powell’s 1935 65-minute romantic comedy, made at Twickenham Film Studios. Ian Hunter is cast as Sir Reginald Ford, an extremely idle baronet who, along with his titled father, is also completely penniless. Seeking a solution to his lack of solvency, Ford pursues American heiress Kitty McCarthy (Claire Luce)… The plot is predictable, but the film nevertheless displays the first hints of Powell’s inimitable style.
Psychomania; Don Sharp’s 1973 kitchy horror. The members of The Living Dead gang commit suicide believing they will become immortal, but things don’t turn out quite as they expect. Nicky Henson has a hoot as the Angel from Hell, and he is superbly supported by Beryl Reid as his devil-worshipping mum and George Sanders (alternately fighting off yawns, knowing winks and blushes) as her ghoulish butler. This British horror cheapie ends up so ridiculous, it works. It was available on DVD in R1 courtesy of Image Entertainment, sadly now OOP, but a couple of places are still listing a very cheap (so probably nasty) 4:3 version from Geneon / Pioneer.
The Black Rider; Wolf Rilla directs this 1954 ‘boys own’ crime thriller. A reporter (Jimmy Hanley) investigating sightings of a strange hooded figure on a motorbike is led to a castle hideout for a group of smugglers. And they would have got away with it but for that pesky father of the former ’Magpie’ presenter…
Cover Girl Killer; another crime thriller, from Terry Bishop (1959). A series of murders of magazine cover-girls baffles the police. Starring Hary H Corbett in a rare straight role and Felicity Young.
Marilyn; known as Roadhouse Girl in the US, Wolf Rilla in the chair again for this pretty entertaining 1953 quickie. In a fit of jealousy over his wife (Sandra Dorne), a garage owner (Leslie Dwyer) gets into a fight with an employee (Maxwell Reed).
Full details available on the BBC 4 website here.
Square Eyes; Showing Very Soon… June 13, 2008
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Square Eyes , add a commentFor digitally equipped UK based telly viewers, there’s a feast of westerns on BBC 4 this weekend that you might like to take note of.
As well as two-thirds of the ‘Cavalry Trilogy’ and two of the very finest John Ford / John Wayne collaborations (as I write that, I’m mindful that Ford would bristle at the suggestion…) - Fort Apache, essentially Ford’s coruscating take on Custer and featuring some breathtaking monochrome cinematography courtesy of Archie Stout, plus the Technicolor splendour (the Beeb print allowing) of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon - BBC 4 is showing Ford’s brilliantly realised Wagon Master, just released by Universal in the UK, with a fair to middling transfer, but unavailable in R1.
Kicking off the short season, at 7.30pm on Saturday June 14 is Sam Fuller’s superb Run of The Arrow, as yet sadly unavailable on DVD either side of The Pond, with Rod Steiger somehow managing to spellbind despite another of his ’Oirish’ accents that are as authentic as Guinness brewed in Cleveland. Alex Cox’s 2007 comedy drama Searchers 2.0 gets its first terrestrial telly outing on Monday, June 16, and you’ll also find a smattering of documentaries - a repeat for Reputations: John Wayne, a look at the life and times of The Duke, but I quake a little at the prospect of the newly minted How the West Was Lost in which: “…Comedian Rich Hall looks at classic westerns from Buffalo Bill to Unforgiven, and sees their influence on films such as Reservoir Dogs and Taxi Driver.”
Hey; western fandom is a serious business…full details of the Westerns Weekend on the BBC 4 website here.