Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

James Stewart is Will Lockhart, the man from Laramie, in this 1955 Western,  He arrives in a town called Coronado with supplies he is delivering, and so  as to avoid returning home empty-handed he and his men are loading salt from some salt flats when they are interrupted by a local hothead and a load of cowhands.   The hothead, Dave, summarily has Lockhart's wagons burned and his mules shot dead. So OK this is now going to be a film about how Lockhart gets revenge, right?  Well, not exactly.   It is indeed a film about revenge but not in the way it first appears.  The real reason why Lockhart has come to Coronado is to find the person who sold rifles to the local Apaches, because those rifles were used to massacre a cavalry troupe, including Lockhart's brother. This does rather beg the question of why Lockhart needed to come to the town with supplies, and then seemed to be planning to go straight back to Laramie, but best not to worry, the plot i...

This film musical was very expensive for its time - stars like Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra didn't come cheap, not to mention the cost of creating Times Square and its environs in the studio. This is one of those highly stylised and theatrical musicals where there would be no point in filming it on location because it's not interested in realism.  All the colours are bright and garish, and everyone is moving and talking in a heightened manner.   The source material for 'Guys and Dolls' is some stories by Damon Runyon, whose dialogue was slang expressed in a very formal style. This way of talking really  grated on me for some reason,  especially in the opening scenes which set up the world of illicit gambling in which the story is set. Or should I say stories, since the plot is really about two separate romances. The first is between Nathan Detroit (Sinatra) and his fiancée for the last fourteen years, Miss Adelaide (Vivian Blaine).  I didn't find their r...