Tag: westerns

Rio Bravo (1959) – A Movie Review

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“Rio Bravo” is supposed to have been made in reaction to the movie “High Noon.”  In that movie Gary Cooper is a sheriff who can’t find any townsmen to help him stand against an outlaw gang gunning for him.  Howard Hawks and John Wayne were so affronted by what they saw as the whiny, “woe is me” feel of that movie they decided to make Rio Bravo as an alternative.  Wayne would play the sheriff but with no angst.  Basically, he refuses to deputize a large number of civilians to stand down a gang of outlaws who threaten to kill the sheriff if he doesn’t release the gang leader’s brother.

Wayne is Sheriff John T. Chance.  His sometimes deputy but mostly just alcoholic friend is Dude, played by Dean Martin.  They’re joined in their desperate but light hearted stand by Stumpy, a gimpy and hot-tempered old man played by Walter Brennan and Colorado, a resourceful young cowboy with a fast gun hand and a guitar played by Ricky Nelson.  And finally, Angie Dickinson is a professional gambler who will be the love interest for Chance.  For whatever reason the only name we’re given for her is Feathers.

The setup is as follows.  While involved in an altercation with Dude in the saloon Joe Burdette (played by Claude Akins) kills a man.  Chase arrests Joe and has Stumpy keep guard over him basically for the duration of the movie.  Meanwhile an old friend of Chance’s, Pat Wheeler (played by Ward Bond) arrives in town with his crew and supplies.  When he hears what is going on with Chance, he offers his associate Colorado as a deputy to help Chance hold off the Burdette gang that numbers in the dozens.  Chance declines because he doesn’t want to involve Wheeler in the trouble.  But Wheeler is murdered that night.  After some back and forth in which members of the gang take Chance and Dude hostage more than once, Colorado comes aboard as a deputy.

As a side story Feathers arrives in town to play poker in the saloon but when a wanted poster shows up that seems to implicate her as a card cheat Chance tells her to leave town.  But Colorado defends her saying that another player in the game was cheating.  After catching the cheater with several aces up his sleeve, Feathers tells her side of the story.  The poster was about her and her late husband.  He had gotten into a crooked card game and paid for his crime with his life.  For the rest of the movie whenever Chance and Feathers are together, they maintain an odd and annoying sort of awkward bickering cum flirting.

Meanwhile the climax of the movie arrives when Dude is taken hostage by Burdette’s gang and they demand a swap of Joe for Dude.  The transfer involves the two men crossing a clearing in opposite directions.  Joe is walking away from the barn where Chance, Colorado and Stumpy are holed up and Dude is walking away from the commercial building where the whole Burdette gang is arrayed.  But when they reach each other in the middle Dude tackles Joe and forces him into some cover that is somehow much closer to Chance’s building than Burdette’s.  After subduing Joe, Chance and his deputies begin a lively gun battle with Burdette’s gang.  Eventually Chance’s side gets ahold of some dynamite and he does some fancy shooting to set off the explosives as Stumpy hurls it across the clearing toward the Burdette building.  And finally Stumpy ties several sticks together and the final explosion takes most of the building down and the surviving gang members stumble out of the wreckage and surrender.

All that remains is for Chance and Feathers to complete their awkward courtship and declare their weird and annoying love.

So, this is a strange movie.  It’s part western, part buddy movie and I guess a love story.  Mixed into this is the fact that Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson are allowed to sing a few songs.  I know I haven’t made it sound like a conventional western but the main story around the Burdettes is done extremely well, especially the action scenes.  Wayne, Martin, Brennan and Nelson make for a very interesting team.  I have seen this movie many times and still consistently enjoy this part of the plot.  Now as for the “love story” I don’t know what to say.  It’s just so out of place and unconvincing that I can’t even dislike it.  It’s just this bizarro incursion into an otherwise normal movie.  All I can do is hope that sometime in the future, technology will allow it to be excised from the movie.

I can highly recommend this to fans of westerns and John Wayne.  Even the songs were very much in the tradition of the Roy Rogers, singing cowboy style.  A good western.

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966) – A Movie Review

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The Good, The Bad and the Ugly is the third movie in Sergio Leone’s “Man with No Name” trilogy.  As in the second movie, “For a Few Dollars More,” Lee Van Cleef joins Clint Eastwood.  And to round out the three eponymous characters we have Eli Wallach.  Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach are the Good the Bad and the Ugly in that order.  Eastwood is a nameless bounty hunter and con-man.  Lee Van Cleef is a killer for hire that goes by the name of Angel Eyes.  And Eli Wallach is a Mexican criminal named Tuco.

Eastwood’s racket is to capture criminals for the bounty but when the town gets ready to hang the criminal Eastwood shoots the rope just in time allowing the criminal to escape and Eastwood then sells him all over again in the next town.  After several iterations of this Eastwood takes two shots to sever the rope and when Tuco complains about this treatment Eastwood dissolves the partnership leaving Tuco to walk seventy miles through the burning desert and swearing revenge.

Meanwhile Angel Eyes is helping a man locate some stolen army gold that was hidden by a man named Bill Carson.  But then he decides he’d rather keep the money for himself so he kills his client.  He finds out Carson is in the Confederate Army in Texas so he joins the Union forces and searches for Carson among the prisoners.

Tuco survives his trek through the desert and hunts down Eastwood or Blondie as he calls him.  Eventually he catches up with him and forces him to walk bareheaded in the desert until he is close to death.  But just at the point where Tuco prepares to shoot Blondie a Confederate stage coach filled with dead and dying men rolls up to Tuco and he finds Bill Carson dying but willing to tell him the whereabouts of the gold.  Carson tells him it’s buried in a certain graveyard but he withholds the name on the grave until he gets a drink of water.  But when Tuco gets back with the water he finds Carson dead and Blondie next to him.  Carson told him the name before he died.  Now Tuco brings Blondie to a Mexican mission for medical care for his sun stroke and the two men ride to find the gold.  But dressed in confederate uniforms they are captured by Union forces and taken to a prison camp.  By a coincidence Angel Eyes is at this camp and he knows Tuco and when he learns that he is pretending to be Bill Carson he has Tuco tortured to learn the location of the gold.  Tuco tells him the name of the cemetery and tells him that Blondie knows the grave name.

After several escapes and gunfights Tuco and Blondie escape from Angel Eyes and head for the cemetery.  On the way they run into a Union force that is waging a futile daily battle over possession of a bridge across a river.  Blondie is struck by the futility of all these men dying over a bridge that has no intrinsic value.  But it also occurs to him that as long as the bridge is there, they won’t be able to get past the Confederate forces to reach the cemetery so he dynamites the bridge and the two armies end the operation.

Finally, Tuco and Blondie reach the cemetery.  But before the gold can be dug up there is a three-way duel between Tuco, Angel Eyes and Blondie.  The form an equilateral triangle and blast away.  Blondie kills Angel Eyes and Tuco discovers that Blondie took the bullets out of his gun the night before.  So, Blondie reveals where the gold is buried and makes Tuco dig it up.  But while Tuco is rejoicing Blondie has set up a hangman’s noose over one of the grave crosses and force Tuco to climb onto the cross and put his neck in the noose.  After tying Tuco’s hands behind his back, Blondie leaves him suspended there and rides off with half the gold.  But when he’s half a mile away he takes his rifle and shoots the rope and Tuco is freed to scream epithets at Blondie as he rides away.

This is the most entertaining movie of the trilogy.  Although technically Tuco is as much a hardened criminal as Angel Eyes he manages to become a somewhat sympathetic villain probably because of the large dose of comic relief he adds to the film.  Angel Eyes is the sadistic villain but he also is an interesting portrayal by Van Cleef.  And Eastwood’s character is, as always, resourceful, cool under fire and damn lucky.  This movie is highly recommended for fans of westerns and action-adventure films.  And it has a fantastic main theme song.

For a Few Dollars More (1965) – A Movie Review

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This is the second movie in director Sergio Leone’s “Man with No Name” trilogy but Clint Eastwood actually does have a name in this story.  He’s called Manco.  This is the story of two bounty hunters.  Manco (played by Eastwood) and Colonel Mortimer (played by Lee Van Cleef) are killing outlaws and collecting bounties when they meet up.  After a contest to see whose marksmanship is better, they team up to take down “El Indio” and his gang.  El Indio is a psychopathic killer whose gang has just broken him out of prison by killing all the guards and the warden.  Indio has a pocket watch with a music box built into it.  When he wants to have a shootout with someone he says, “Draw when the song ends.”  And usually, he kills the opponent.  But the song is so long and annoying I think most of the victims decide to die of gunshot wounds rather than live with the memory of the boredom of that song.

Indo is planning to rob the El Paso bank and Mortimer convinces Manco to join Indio’s gang and act as the inside man to allow Mortimer and Manco to finish off the gang.  The plan sort of works.  Manco manages to kill three of Indio’s men during a diversionary operation and Mortimer is able to gain Indio’s confidence too by helping Indo open the stolen safe using powerful acid to dissolve the lock.

But when Manco and Mortimer try to steal the bank money from Indio they are caught and beaten savagely in advance of their deaths.  Then a bunch of weird stuff happens that has Indo and some of his lieutenants murdering each other to increase their share of the loot.  As part of this plan Indio allows for Manco and Mortimer to escape and they finish off killing the gang.  By the finale it’s just Manco, Mortimer and Indio.  This sets up the duel between Indio and Mortimer.  We discover that Indio murdered Mortimer’s brother-in-law then raped his sister causing her to commit suicide.  The musical watch was stolen by Indio from the sister.  With a little help from Manco the duel is run fairly and Indio is killed.  Then Mortimer tells Manco that he can have all the bounties for Indio and the rest of the gang.  Mortimer just walks away, apparently finishing his stint as a bounty hunter and Manco loads the bodies on a wagon and takes the bank’s money along too.  It’s not at all clear whether he is going to return the money, which is much more than the bounties on the gang, or keep it.

This is a very enjoyable action film.  Eastwood and Van Cleef shoot a lot of bad guys.  The bank heist is a good chapter and little touches throughout the story keep the audience’s interest throughout.  There are several very humorous situations between the “partners” including a scene where Mortimer proves to Manco that a long-barreled gun trumps a Colt .45 even if the pistolero is the fastest draw around.

Indio is such a despicable psychopath that making his death the climax of the movie seems like a reasonable scenario.  But unfortunately, the whole musical watch thing is just too annoying.  It happens I think three times and by the finale I just wanted Mortimer to shoot Indio as soon as the watch started playing and then shoot the watch just to end the torture.

I think this second installment in the trilogy is even better than the first (A Fistful of Dollars).  Van Cleef is a welcome addition to the atmosphere providing a sort of older brother for the Eastwood character.

Highly recommended.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – Favorite Westerns

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My favorite western is Once Upon A Time In The West, followed by True Grit/ Rooster Cogburn (I consider them to be part one and two of a whole story), followed by Eastwood’s spaghetti trio. After that I like western comedies such as the Trinity movies with Terrence Hill and sometimes Bud Spencer. Blazing Saddle is a joy but could not be made today. Honorable mention goes to Quigley Down Under as it is set in Australia, and besides Selleck as the protagonist, it has an absolutely smashing musical score. I grew up watching westerns on TV and at the drive in. Roy and Dale. Lash LaRue, Rin Tin Tin, Sky King, Gene Autry, Gabby Hayes, Cisco and Poncho, you name it. I even belonged to the Rin Tin Tin fan club.

Stagecoach (1939) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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Stagecoach was considered a classic western at the time it was made.  It also proved to be the breakout performance for John Wayne’s career.

The plot involves a stagecoach making a run straight through an Indian uprising under Geronimo.  The passenger list is a cross section of various types found in westerns.  Driving the coach are a lawman named Curley Wilcox and for comic relief Buck, played by Andy Devine.  There’s a prostitute with a heart of gold named Dallas who’s been thrown out of town by the ladies of the Decency League.  There’s a southern gambler named Hatfield played by John Carradine.  There’s the drunken Doc Boone played by Thomas Mitchell.  There’s the obnoxious town banker Mr. Gatewood who has secretly absconded with the bank’s money.  There’s Mr. Peacock who is a mild-mannered whiskey salesman.  There’s Mrs. Lucy Mallory the pregnant wife of a cavalry officer.  And last but not least, the Ringo Kid played by John Wayne.  Ringo has busted out of jail and is headed to Lordsburg like the rest of them but in his case, it is to find and kill the three Plummer brothers who killed his father and brother and framed him for one of their crimes.

The passengers represent the various class and moral differences that make for friction and hard feelings between them.  The main story is the journey through Apache territory and the gun battle with Geronimo’s men but along the way the drunken doctor sobers up long enough to deliver Mrs. Mallory’s baby.  Dallas and Ringo strike up a romance.  Doc Boone finishes off all of Mr. Peacock’s whiskey samples.  Gatewood and Mrs. Mallory discover that he served under her father the general in the Civil War.

But the final chapter is the showdown between Ringo and the Plummers.  And after Ringo finishes off all three of them (with just three bullets!) he gives himself up to Curley to finish out his sentence in jail.  But Curley decides to take the law into his own hands and frees the Kid and sends him off with Dallas to start their new life together across the state line at Ringo’s family ranch.  The storybook happy ending.

For our generation the story probably seems a little too stereotyped, the acting too broad and the ending too pat.  The idea that a lawman would release his prisoner on his own recognizance to allow him to engage in a gunfight after which he would just walk back into custody to be brought back to prison seems like some kind of fantasy.  The expectant mother travelling on a stagecoach through an Indian attack seems even crazier.  But the movie does provide an enjoyable story.  I wouldn’t consider it any kind of best in class western.  I think it’s a good story with several good actors, especially Thomas Mitchell and John Carradine.  And it’s fun to see a young John Wayne navigating around actors who were much bigger stars than he was at the time.

I recommend this movie to fans of westerns, John Wayne and movies of this era.

A Fistful of Dollars (1964) – A Movie Review

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“A Fistful of Dollars” was Clint Eastwood’s first spaghetti western with director Sergio Leone.  As it turned out it was an unauthorized western remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai film Yojimbo.  These spaghetti westerns were produced in Europe and cost only a fraction of Hollywood movies and so could make a profit with a much lower box office.  Leone featured Eastwood as “The Man with No Name.”  He was an anti-hero who drifted from place to place and although of ambivalent morals he always ended up on the side of the less powerful.

In this story the stranger (Eastwood) shows up in the Mexican village of San Miguel and learns that two criminal gangs, the Rojos and the Baxters are in competition for control of the town.  The stranger offers his services as a gun fighter to both gangs and by playing them off each other he slowly whittles away both gangs.  There is a sub-plot about a family that is being victimized by the Rojos.  The wife has been taken as a concubine by one of the Rojos while her husband and small child are hostages.  The stranger manages to free the wife and aids the small family to escape San Miguel.  For this he is tortured by the Rojos to learn where the woman has gone.  The stranger manages to escape and the Rojos, assuming that the Baxters helped him, burn down the Baxters’ house and shoot down the whole gang as they flee the burning building.

The stranger is helped to escape the town by the undertaker hiding him in a coffin.  He heals up and returns to save his friend Silvanito who is being tortured by the Rojos to find out where the woman has gone.  The stranger faces off against all the remaining Rojos and with the help of a sheet of steel plate hidden under his poncho he shoots them all dead and frees his friend.

So, what’s the verdict?  The acting is minimal, the characters are cartoons.  The story is straight forward and transparent.  But it is altogether an enjoyable hour and a half of pulp fiction.  Good vanquishes evil.  Violence gets splashed all over the screen and the stranger leaves town just as he entered it.  A man with no past or future living by his wits and his gun.

As a final note, the film this was based on, Yojimbo, is a much different film because of the cultural and aesthetic differences between a Leone western and a Kurosawa samurai film.  But it is a great picture in its own right.  And if you enjoy Kurosawa’s films it is a good one.  If you’ve never seen one before then start with his “Seven Samurais” first.  It’s an excellent film.

“A Fistful of Dollars” is highly recommended for fans of the western and anyone with a simple taste for action.

Hang ‘Em High (1968) – A Movie Review

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Clint Eastwood stars as Jed Cooper, a former law man who is mistaken for a rustler and murderer by a posse and is hanged.  A U.S. Marshall comes upon him and cuts him down in time to save his life.  The Marshall brings Cooper in and his story is corroborated.  And the local judge Adam Fenton offers him a job as a Marshall with warrants for the arrest of the men who hanged him.

The rest of the movie revolves around Cooper’s attempts to bring the eleven men who hanged him to justice.  In the interim there is a love story between Cooper and Inger Stevens who plays a store owner named Rachel Warren who was also the victim of violence.  Ed Begley, Bruce Dern, Alan Hale, Jr and Dennis Hopper appear as members of the posse in supporting roles.  But this is Eastwood’s movie.

I found some parts of the story were overly drawn out and dragged.  The action scenes were good.  In addition to Eastwood, I would say Pat Hingle who played the judge was the most interesting character.  Overall, I enjoyed the movie.  But I am a western fan.

So, what’s the verdict?  As a specimen of the “new western” this is a good representative.  If you’re a western fan I think you’ll like this film.  If you’ve never seen a western it might seem stilted and slow.  I enjoyed it within the limitations I mentioned.

Wyatt Earp and Tombstone, A Comparison – Movie Review – Part 2

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Wyatt Earp and Tombstone, A Comparison – Movie Review – Part 1

Kevin Costner was originally going to be Wyatt Earp in Tombstone.  But he and the director/screenwriter disagreed on how much of the movie was supposed to center on Wyatt Earp and his background.  He left the production and decided to make the movie “Wyatt Earp” instead.

Wyatt Earp is a sort of biography of Earp.  It starts with Wyatt as a teenager trying to run away to fight in the Civil War, shows him falling in love, marrying and losing his young wife to typhus.  Giving in to a drunken despair he commits some capital crimes and has to flee his old life never to return.  He went out to the frontier and worked first as a buffalo skinner and then as a lawman.  These chapters effectively chronicled the background and events that formed the man that we recognize in the various versions of the legend.  And it shows his links to other characters of legend like Holliday and Bat Masterson and his brother Ed.  And we get the particulars of all of the Earp brothers and their wives.  And what does Wyatt Earp end up as?  He’s a man hardened to the realities of life in the West.  And someone who trusts his family and very few others.  This sets up the events that transpire in Tombstone and afterward.

Costner plays the part with his typical understated style.  The supporting cast is interesting and probably the best of them is Dennis Quaid as Doc Holliday.  The production is done in high style with excellent cinematography and a full musical score.  The direction and scene selection seemed well thought out and deliberate and didn’t produce any confusion over plot elements which was important considering the length of years and progression of different characters covered in the film.  It is a very long film coming in at three hours.  And the deliberate pace and varying importance of the scenes probably was too much for some viewers who really came to see the Gunfight at the OK Corral.  In fact the film was neither a financial or critical success.

So, what do I think of it?  I like it.  I think it comes closer to the actual facts of the story than Tombstone.  And I think despite his unflamboyant acting manner Costner does a much better job of portraying Wyatt Earp as he actually was.  Where I would fault the effort is being so unreservedly faithful to the facts.  Neither The Gunfight at the OK Corral or the subsequent vendetta appear as grandiose and mythic as they do in Tombstone and other descriptions.

It’s a shame when a critic complains about an historical account being too accurate.  It almost seems like nostalgia for mendacity.  But that’s an occupational hazard when dealing with the Old West.  In fact, there’s Holy Writ that covers it. In the western epic “The Man Wo Shot Liberty Vanlence,” one of the characters who I believe is a newspaperman says, and I paraphrase, When the legend becomes the facts, print the legend.

In Part 3 I’ll tie these two films together and ramble on about all thing cinematically Earpish.

 

Wyatt Earp and Tombstone, A Comparison – Movie Review – Part 3

Open Range – A Short Movie Review

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True Grit: The Duke, The Dude and The Dutiful Daughter; Part I

True Grit – Part 2, Rooster Redux

Having been born in the fifties of the last century I am familiar with westerns from the early days of Hollywood and the later era in the sixties.  Now these two styles were as different as night and day.  The earlier movies represented a simpler more idealized version of the old west.  The sixties represented the era of the anti-hero and the anti-heroic west.  Both of these periods produced memorable films.  I have favorites from both periods and depending on the mood can enjoy either.  In the last twenty years, some good westerns have been made.  Interestingly they represent an evolution that contains aspects of both these earlier film types.  Unlike the earlier films, they do not represent an idealized world and at the same time they lack the relentlessly negative depiction of the sixties western.  Let’s say it’s a more balanced approach.  So, some of these new movies appeal to me for a variety of reasons.  Some are remakes of earlier classics.  One of these, True Grit, I’ve already reviewed.  Some are new stories like Open Range.  I’ll say what I like about this story and why.

The plot of the story is a familiar one.  It’s settlers versus herders.  A small herd owner passes through a town run by a rich tyrannical landowner, Denton Baxter (played to the hilt by Michael Gambon) who controls the sheriff and attacks and kills any free grazing herders that come through his land.  His men attack and kill one of the cowboys and injure another.  The herd owner, Boss Spearman (Robert Duvall), and his lead man, Charlie Waite (Kevin Costner), come back to the town to get a doctor for their shot friend and to get justice.  The narrative runs to a climactic gun fight.   Mixed in is a love story between Waite and the doctor’s sister, Sue Barlow (Annette Bening).  Seeing as Costner and Bening aren’t kids anymore, the love story is appealing to people of my generation and fits in with the theme of a changing world closing off one familiar lifestyle while opening up a better one to those willing to see.

So, this is a pretty standard plot.  Why do I like it?

First off, the look and feel of the movie.  It must have been filmed in the Canadian Rockies.  The panoramic views and the outdoor scenes are fantastic to look at.  The scenes in the town look good.  They spent enough money to make the sets look authentic.  The soundtrack is first rate.

Second, the portrayals by all the leads and many of the supporting characters are well done and very engaging.  I’m a fan of Duvall’s and the chemistry between him and Costner makes the movie work.  The Costner/Bening love story is understated and enjoyable.

Third and most important, the gun fight at the end is epic.  Our heroes Duvall and Costner line up against five men and then fight their way through the rest of the gang to stay alive and win the day.  So why is it so good?  Well first off, these have to be the loudest guns ever fired.  Even sitting in my living room, I can feel the percussion rattling my teeth.  Honestly, I doubt there were Iowa Class battleships with guns this robust.  Secondly, Kevin Costner was lucky enough to own revolvers that were twenty-five-shooters.  He would peel off ten shots at one adversary before moving on to another dozen shots at the next opponent.  This can be both dramatically useful and conducive to a gunfighter’s health.  And finally, the bad guys are so enjoyably bad.  One villain even brags about how much he enjoyed shooting someone in the head just as he himself gets shot practically right between the eyes.  The lead villain, Baxter is continuously issuing threats and insults at anyone he sees and is thoroughly despicable.  It’s truly a pleasure seeing him dispatched by our heroes’ thunderously loud and apparently infinitely loaded shooting irons.

Open Range is one of my favorite modern westerns.  In style, I think it throws back more to the pre-sixties westerns.  But it is so well-acted and generally well made that it actually updates many of the conventions it adheres to and gives them new life.  I highly recommend it.  And the ladies like it too.  So, throw it in for date night.  You can’t go wrong.

 

Brings the Lightning by Peter Grant: A Short Book Review

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Peter Grant’s “Brings the Lightning” is a western.  It is the story of a confederate soldier who heads west after the war to make a fresh start.  Of course, this is well mapped territory.  Recently I reviewed the movies and novel called “True Grit” and that broadly falls into this sub-genre.  But a time-tested plot can still be entertaining.  What is required is the ingredients of any good story.  The action needs to be interesting, the characters engaging and the writing style appropriate to the intended readers.  For instance, if you intend to attract the extreme literary type reader to a tale of the west, then you probably select a highly introspective confederate protagonist.  This will be the sort of hero who, when faced with danger, falls into a reverie and expounds (either to himself or to his companions) about the philosophical and theological ramifications of the action at hand.  An extreme example of this would be the epic poems of Homer or Virgil.  In these stories a hero will interrupt a battle to discuss his ancestry with the enemy.  Doubtless there is some charm in this approach.  This is not the style taken by Grant in the present book.  The story tracks the progress of Walter Ames as he goes from cavalry soldier, to post-war civilian in the occupied south, to westbound settler.  And the form of the narrative resembles the character of the protagonist.  The approach is straightforward and direct.  Ames encounters the altered reality of his new life and determines a plan for escaping it and overcoming his circumstances.  He shows himself resourceful and flexible (as any good protagonist should) and proceeds to pick up the interrupted thread of his life and direct it where the great drama of the American West is being written.  During this action, we will become acquainted with the paraphernalia of settler life.  We learn about how the great army surplus of the Civil War is made available to civilians (either legitimately or through bribery) and details of the weapons and transport equipment enlisted into the settlers’ quest.  We meet all sorts of people.  There are riverboat gamblers, army officers and NCOs, tradesmen, craftsmen, thieves, murderers and schoolmarms.  We meet trail scouts, freed black slaves, indian braves and outlaws from North and South.  By the end of the story Ames has navigated from the Old South to the Rocky Mountains and gone from a young soldier in retreat to a tested and respected individual on the frontier.

On the cover, we see the subtitle, “The Ames Archives Book One.”  So, this is a series.  And the stage has been set for expansion of the plot in several directions and dimensions.  It can be anticipated that several of the characters will have added importance later on and some unfinished business will resurface.  All these things are expected and even necessary to expand the scope of the story to encompass some of the larger themes that exist within the western genre.  But it’s important to tell the potential reader what he’s letting himself in for, more volumes.  It’s an episodic story in a planned series.

Now for my opinion.  I like it and recommend it.  The prose is clean and uncluttered.  The characters are sketched sufficiently and enjoyably.  The subject matter is interesting and the plot contains enough excitement to justify its inclusion in this genre.  It’s a good western.  But just to be perfectly clear, you’re not getting James Joyce or Thomas Mann.  This is more in the mold of Charles Portis.  It’s an adventure story.  If that is what you are looking for and you have similar tastes to mine, you may be happy with this book.  If you’re looking for Hamlet, move on.