Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

This 1954 offering from director Nicholas Ray has to be the strangest Western from that period. For a start, notwithstanding the title it is two female characters who totally dominate, with the male characters taking a back seat for the most part. I was aware coming into this film that Joan Crawford has a lead role.   She plays Vienna, a woman with a dodgy past (probably prostitution, don’t ask) who has somehow managed to build a saloon bar/casino.   It's in the middle of nowhere for now but Vienna knows that a railroad depot is going to be built there any day soon. Vienna just wants to be left alone to make money but there's no hope of that whilst the other female character, Emma, is around.   The entire plot of the film is driven by Emma's attempts to destroy Vienna, such is the intensity of her hatred for her.   Emma is played by an actress new to me, Mercedes McCambridge, who gives an extraordinary performance as a seething ball of anger. I w...

I started watching 'Challengers' but after half an hour or so I gave up trying to be interested in young people talking about, or having, sex.  Instead I retreated to my comfort zone and watched this 1950s Western.  Some 90-odd minutes later I very much felt I had made the right choice. The backdrop to this 1954 film, directed by Robert Aldrich, is the Franco-Mexican War of 1861-7, which (as we all know) was a conflict between conservative Mexican forces, headed by Emperor Maximilian and supported by France, and Mexican rebels, known as Juaristas.  Thankfully the film does a good job of conveying the bare minimum you need to know about all this. The US Civil War has just ended, and defeated Southerner Ben Trane (played by Gary Cooper) is in Mexico to lick his wounds and earn himself some money.  There he teams up with a younger and less civilised gunslinger, Joe Erin (Burt Lancaster).   They are employed by the Emperor, for a handsome fee, to transport a co...