Some kids find a magical creature — perhaps Frankenstein’s Monster or an extra-terrestrial — who sends them on a wild and magical adventure where they learn life lessons. Other kids find Lee Marvin, and embark on a wild and wacky adventure where they become bank robbers. Only one of these youthful scenarios has a happy ending. But what do you expect when you find Marvin copiously bleeding outside of your barn?

The Spikes Gang initially sells itself as a lighthearted, Cat Ballou type of Western. Will (Gary Grimes), Les (Ron Howard), and Tod (Charles Martin Smith) decide to be kindly and patch Harry Spikes (Marvin) up. They do the typical teen thing, and hide him away from their parents, bringing him clothes, food, and money.

He generously turns down the money, revealing that he’s a well-padded bank robber, and sells the boys tales of silk shirts, women, Cuban cigars, and expensive bourbon. They’re drooling. Who wouldn’t? Marvin could use that raspy voice to tell me the sky was green, and I’d ride off with him in a heartbeat.  (Or live in polygamy — but that’s another Marvin movie.)

But these are better boys than I, and they morosely watch Spikes ride off.  The damage has been done, though, and those tales of bourbon and babes prey on their young, impressionable minds.  Their grubby, poor, and sternly Christian lives seem more unbearable than before, and it takes only one belt-whipping before they ride out into the sunrise.   For farm boys, they’re woefully unprepared, and it isn’t long before they’re starving and desperate enough to do like Spikes would do, and rob a bank.

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“What did you expect? ‘Welcome, sonny’?  ‘Make yourself at home’? ‘Marry my daughter’? You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know . . . morons.” — Blazing Saddles

But dang, did they cut a dashing figure in a gray uniform. I’m talking about you, Rock Hudson. Look at the rakish bend of your hat brim! Aren’t you just the handsomest Confederate I’ve seen since Bill Compton traded his uniform for a pair of fangs!

One of my new cinematic fascinations (if you’ll forgive such a pompous label) is the way Hollywood and pop culture imagines the Civil War. It’s not something I ever thought about beyond Gone With the Wind,  Firefly, and True Blood, but it’s an intriguing subset of American culture.

Since no cannonball has been left unturned when it comes to the War Between the States, I’m sure there are already twelve books about this very topic. If there’s not, well, maybe I will write one when Western Wednesdays is through.

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Before there was Avatar, before there was even Dances With Wolves, there was Broken Arrow.

I wasn’t expecting much out of this film. I picked it solely because it had Jimmy Stewart, and he’s been missing from this feature for too long. I knew from the description that it was about the wars with the Apache, who have always been the genre’s favorite villainous redskins. Again, I wasn’t expecting much.

If there was one thing that was pounded into my head in college, it was that no movie ever portrayed Native Americans fairly. They were all John Wayne propaganda pieces that justified our rape and pillage of the land over and over again. It was one of those little facts that justified my disdain for Western movies for years.

But it turns out my American history classes weren’t entirely right, at least in the case of one film. Broken Arrow was the first film to actually portray the Native Americans in a sympathetic and fair light, and while it stumbles in authenticity, it deserves an A for effort. The fact that it comes from one of Hollywood’s stauncher Republicans (Stewart was a proud conservative) is a nice surprise.

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The fun part of Western Wednesdays is discovering little gems like Rio Conchos that were lost in the shuffle of giants like John Wayne.  Lacking any big stars or cult iconography like Django’s coffin, they just sit on Netflix waiting for someone to dig them up.

Rio Conchos is a slow burn of a movie, more of a Western noir than a real shoot ‘em up. Everyone has an agenda, no one can be trusted, and you’re just not sure who is going to screw it all up and make off like a bandit. It also starts off rather typical with the usual trope of “There’s been a raid, a bunch of rifles are missing, and they’re going to wind up in the hands of Apaches!”

Naturally, a disparate bunch of men are assigned the task of tracking down the rifles — a bitter ex-Confederate (Richard Boone), a Buffalo Soldier (Jim Brown), an ambitious Army Captain (Stuart Whitman), and a smooth-talking Mexican mercenary (Tony Franciosa). Of course, they don’t get along. The ex-Confederate makes no secret of his dislike of blue coats or black men, and while they come to a grudging understanding and respect, they never really become friends.

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“A Western like you’ve never seen before … An exciting new look at the Old West.”

Oh, taglines. I like when you do my work for me. You just described what Silverado isn’t!

I’ve had this one on my queue for quite awhile. I’ve anticipated it greatly. It was written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, who is no slouch with pulp-oriented films like The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark to his credit. If there’s one thing Kasdan knows, it’s action adventure, right? Not when it came to Silverado, a film that misses the mark so often that I fail to see how it’s garnered 2-disc collector sets and such enthusiasm among Western fans.

I suppose it’s all due to Costner. Little baby Costner. This is the film that made him a star and a dreamy genre successor to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. They seem to have costumed him with that very idea, because he’s wearing a variation on every famous Western and cowboy look ever filmed.

At one point, he even wears a serape. He’s a weird, goofy character — I can’t tell if he’s special or just supposed to be extremely young — and the highlight of the film is undoubtedly when he decides his horse needs to wear a hat.  It just comes out of nowhere.  Costner walks down the street, happy as a clam, and his horse is wearing a cowboy hat.

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Is there a film you’ve tried to watch only to have Fate thwart your efforts again and again? Cat Ballou was on that list for me. I had it recorded on my DVR and lost it, and I don’t know how many times I’ve fired it up via Netflix only to be interrupted or decide I needed a movie with a bit more edge to it. But when I took on Western Wednesdays, I resolved I’d conquer Cat Ballou once and for all.

Perhaps all the build-up and fan enthusiasm (It’s been recommended to me so many times) raised my expectations too high, because Cat Ballou didn’t do much for me. It’s such a classic film I feel like the blame lies with me. I have this kind of abusive relationship with older films, you know. If I don’t love it, it’s my fault. I mean, the AFI ranked it as the tenth best western of all time. It has to be me.

I do have to give Cat Ballou credit for its swinging ’60s enthusiasm. Only in the 1960s could you get away with an action-comedy that features a rousing, continuous sing-a-long by Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye. I like to picture these production meetings. “How about Jane Fonda as a sexy gunslinger — and she leads a gang — and we’ll have this singing Greek chorus highlighting the action — and Lee Marvin will play two roles!” “Whatever! Sure! Go for it!”

Nowadays, studios freak out when Johnny Depp shows up on a pirate set with gold teeth and dreadlocks. But a silver nose for Marvin? Hell, why not! We may enjoy a lot more sex and violence, but our films have become far more bland when it comes to sheer wackiness.

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My Name is Nobody looms large among spaghetti western and Sergio Leone fans — and probably Henry Fonda’s too, since it was the last Western this legendary range rider appeared in. The legend of its creation is an amusing one, and a rare one among directors who are generally sensitive about the worlds they created. Leone, appalled at the spaghetti western industry that he had wrought, decided to gleefully destroy it with his protege,  Tonio Valerii.

If the Italian western was going to become a joke led by actors dubbing themselves Flint Westwood, then by Tuco they were going to make it the biggest joke of all. And the film certainly is. It’s like Mel Brooks by way of Leone — every sacred scene of Leone’s films is mocked and beaten dead of its coolness.

The only thing missing is that they never shoot a blonde fellow in a serape, or kick around a guy smoking a big yellow pipe. Perhaps they couldn’t quite bring themselves to do it. There’s a crying clown under all the pranks, and when Fonda’s character gives his grand speech about the dying West and its romantic gunslingers, you know that Leone, Valerii, and Fonda mean every word of it.

They also refused to slum it. They may be burying the genre, but Leone and Valerii couldn’t resist showing their country copycats how it was done. It may be a satire, but every shot is perfection. Leone personally directed the opening scene, and I think even a blind film fan could tell. It oozes the tension and raw sound that always made his openings a thing of epic, cruel beauty.

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Once upon a time, Jack Nicholson was a screenwriter. He has six films to his credit, and I’m not entirely sure why he stopped. Perhaps it took too much time away from being one of Hollywood’s most notorious bad boys.

Ride in the Whirlwind was his third script, as per IMDB, and his second collaboration with director Monte Hellman. It’s touted as being inspired by “actual frontier journals.” After sitting through the weird and lonely experience, I’ve decided that means Nicholson paid a lot of attention to how horses were saddled, how uncomfortable boots were, and how people ate a lot of biscuits.

Ride in the Whirlwind has a fervent cult following because of its sparse realism, and the fact that it feels like it could have happened. There’s truth to that. There are a lot of great little details here (cowboy boots being unfit for hiking), and it’s certainly devoid of epic shootouts, squinting close-ups, and prostitutes with hearts of gold. It has a lot of atmosphere on a tiny budget, undoubtedly due to the guidance of Roger Corman.

But I’m not convinced Ride in the Whirlwind is deserving of such lavish underground praise. This film is far from poetry. The characters aren’t interesting, the performances (except for Nicholson’s) are weak, and a lot of the dialogue is pretty corny. A lean script isn’t necessarily a brilliant one, and it doesn’t always make for compelling viewing.

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When I grow up, I want to be Claudia Cardinale.

There are plenty of beautiful women in movies, but few goddesses. Cardinale is a goddess. Even when she’s sunburned and running around in a rag, as she is in The Professionals, she has more charisma, beauty, and sex appeal than most actresses working today. I hesitate to call her “sexy” because that word seems so Maxim Magazine these days — but Cardinale is sexy in such a powerful and womanly way that it’s not threatening, but inspiring.

She also had great hair. What demon do I have to bargain with to end up with a perfect bouffant every day? Hers looks good even in the desert. It’s unfair.

Watching old movies can be a bittersweet experience. They don’t make them like Cardinale anymore, and you’d be hard pressed to find a Lee Marvin or a Burt Lancaster on the big screen these days. I cherish retro crushes on both (especially Lancaster — what a grin he had!) and The Professionals is so chock full of old time machismo that turning it off may actually cause you to experience symptoms of withdrawal.

Which is, oddly, what The Professionals is kind of about.   It’s the kind of movie I love in any genre — the adventure story that’s sandwiched in between the heroes’ misspent youth and their retirement.   These are men with pasts.  They’ve had near misses, they’ve experienced terrible tragedies, and they’ve woken up in their union suits with nothing but a pounding headache to remind them of the night before.   They’re men who die with their boots on out of a sense of nobility and because they have nothing else to do.

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Welcome to another Western Wednesdays. Today is the very special installment that I promised last week in which I would reveal my favorite Western, the one that not even The Searchers can dethrone.  Yes, my love belongs unreservedly to The Outlaw Josey Wales.

As popular legend goes, Clint Eastwood wasn’t respected as a director until Unforgiven. A hard look at his directorial credits through the 1970s and 1980s can speak as to why. But I believe The Outlaw Josey Wales was a really notable moment of his career, and it’s perplexing why he didn’t enjoy the kind of watershed approval he did in 1993.

I imagine it’s because he promptly went and made The Gauntlet. Sadly, Josey Wales kicked off a very dark period of his career that it’s polite to ignore, and if you know your tabloid romances, you know why. But would it have happened if his career had been reversed, and he won all his Oscar gold for Josey Wales? Would he have taken himself a little more seriously and avoided Pink Cadillac? I’d like to think so.

Of course, that lament implies Josey Wales was a failure, which it wasn’t. But it didn’t receive any Oscar nominations beyond one for its soundtrack.  Roger Ebert even recognized it as an unusual and revisionist Western, but I don’t think that critical consensus or popular culture ever followed suit.

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When I set out on this long and dusty trail, one of my goals was to highlight the classic (or not so classic) films people could watch online. It’s never been my intention to restrict it to online selections, but I feel like the “Instant! Now! Yes!” can excite people to go watch a film like The Searchers immediately instead of putting it off yet again.

That said, we are talking about the wild wild west here. There are no rules! Guidelines are meant to be broken!  Especially when Django arrives in the mail.

Django exists in the murky world between “completely obscure” and “well known classic,” that world Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, and Takashi Miike live in and gleefully borrow from.   Despite that it was the one of the most violent films of the 1960s (it was even banned in England and Sweden), type it into Google and the top results are websites for the Python web framework.

How did Django fall so low?  I’m not sure, except there does seem to be a suspicion or a distaste for the spaghetti westerns that followed Sergio Leone. For moviegoers, and the bastions of film criticism, it seems to have  ended with Once Upon a Time in the West, and nothing else was worth watching.

Especially not a film that reportedly spawned 100 unofficial sequels, and a German following that was so desperate for more that they pretended every Franco Nero movie was a Django installment.  In Germany, Camelot was renamed Django Lancelot. (No, not really. At least, I don’t think so ….)

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In some alternate dimension, it’s Lee Van Cleef who rocketed to squinty-eyed fame after The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Clint Eastwood just kept doing spaghetti westerns in Europe, never to be seen in a serape again and starring in movies like Captain Apache.

I don’t know much about Van Cleef, and why he favored working in Italy and Spain. I’m guessing it was because Hollywood would only give him villainous roles, and he wanted to be the laconic badass who got the girl. Overseas, he was a star. But it also meant he had to make films like Captain Apache where all that presence is completely and utterly wasted. But hey, he did get to sing the theme song!  (See, he is Bizarro World Eastwood.)

The plot is incomprehensible. Van Cleef informs us over the theme tune (I’m not kidding) that they call him Captain Apache and that “they” try to trick him regularly.  He’s a franchise character without a franchise in that mythic way that only 1970s cinema could aspire to. For the record, “they” don’t actually call him Captain Apache, they call him “Red Ass.” I can’t imagine why they didn’t use that as the title.

Captain Apache is sent to investigate a murder, which has something to do with a man selling guns to Mexicans and Indians, and something called “April Morning.” From there on, you’re on your own. But there’s a witch, a peyote trip, creepy twins dressed as the Mad Hatter, and women who will go to bed with anyone.

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