Stagecoach to Tombstone

The Filmgoers' Guide to the Great Westerns

Howard Hughes

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN:
  9781845115715
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857730466
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The true story of the American West on film, through its shooting stars and the directors who shot them…



Howard Hughes explores the Western, running from John Ford's 'Stagecoach' to the revisionary 'Tombstone'. Writing with panache and fresh insight, he explores 27 key films, and draws on production notes, cast and crew biographies, and the films' box-office success, to reveal their place in western history. He shows how through reinvention and resurrection, this genre continually postpones the big adios and avoids ending up in Boot Hill…permanently.



Major films covered include the best from genre giants John Ford, Howard Hawks and John Wayne, plus classics 'High Noon', 'Shane', 'The Magnificent Seven' and 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'. 'Stagecoach to Tombstone' makes many more stops along the way, examining well-known blockbusters and lowly B-movie oaters alike. It examines comedy westerns, adventures 'south of the border', singing cowboys and the varied depiction of Native Americans on screen. Hughes also engagingly charts the genre's timely renovation by Sam Peckinpah ('Ride the High Country' and 'The Wild Bunch' ), Sergio Leone ('Once Upon a Time in the West') and Clint Eastwood ('The Outlaw Josey Wales' and 'Unforgiven'). Presented too are the best of western trivia, a filmography of essential films - and ten aficionados and critics, including Alex Cox, Christopher Frayling, Philip French and Ed Buscombe, give their verdict on the best in the west.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface: Colt Movies
• Acknowledgements
• Out of the West: An Introduction to Westerns
• Ten Top Tens
• 1 ‘The Tumbril Awaits’
• 2 ‘Shakespeare in Tombstone’
• 3 ‘Your Heart’s Soft...Too Soft’
• 4 ‘Tomorrow’s All I Need’
• 5 ‘What Will I Do If You Leave Me?’
• 6 ‘You Can’t Break the Mould’
• 7 ‘I Never Shake Hands with a Left-Handed Draw’
• 8 ‘We’ll Fool Saint Peter Yet’
• 9 ‘I Came a Thousand Miles to Kill You’
• 10 ‘That’ll Be the Day’
• 11 ‘There’s a Hundred More Tombstones’
• 12 ‘I Bet That Rattler Died’
• 13 ‘There’s Some Things a Man Just Can’t Ride Around’
• 14 ‘I’d Hate to Have to Live on the Difference’
• 15 ‘We Deal in Lead, Friend’
• 16 ‘I Seen the Other Side of Your Face’
• 17 ‘All I Want is to Enter My House Justified’
• 18 ‘Ain’t You Got No Respect For Your Elders?’
• 19 ‘The End of the Line’
• 20 ‘The Fastest Finger in the West’
• 21 ‘This Time We Do it Right’
• 22 ‘Who Are Those Guys?’
• 23 ‘I Got Poetry in Me’
• 24 ‘Here in This Land, Man Must Have Power’
• 25 ‘Whooped ’Em Again, Josey’
• 26 ‘I’ve Always Been Lucky When it Comes to Killing Folks’
• 27 ‘I’m Your Huckleberry’
• Western Filmography
• Bibliography and Sources