Simon's Movie Reviews

With his great Western Rio Bravo (1959) Howard Hawks set the template for what could be described as the siege movie genre. It’s a simple enough premise: you have the good guys holed up in a location with a limited amount of weapons and ammunition while outside you have the bad guys trying to get in with a lot more henchmen, guns, and bullets. Hawks himself would make two more variations on this story structure throughout his career, and decades later John Carpenter would use it as an inspiration for Assault on Precinct 13 and Ghosts of Mars . Of course it had to be all-American cowboy John Wayne to be the star of Rio Bravo and start this tradition of holding up against the bad guy no matter what. In yet another rare instance of homework being fun, I discovered this classic while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema at the University of British Columbia in the summer of 2009, and wrote an essay on it and The Searchers , another John Wayne classic. I think I got a good grade, but ...

Ever since it was discovered people would pay to see movies, Westerns have been popular in one form or another with many towering American actors willing to strap on a pair of six-shooters and ride into the sunset. I have a preference for Clint Eastwood’s movies, but John Wayne can definitely boast being the king of the genre. His politics off-screen became too far to the right for many audience members as time went on, but he remained an American screen hero until his dying day. In The Searchers (1956), one of many films he made with master director John Ford, Wayne does not play a hero or a straight-up villain, but rather a man caught in between because of his intentions and quest for vengeance. This is what makes this John Wayne movie a great movie whether you like Westerns or not. Some movies are so good you could write essays on them, which is exactly what I did with The Searchers while spending a semester at the University of British Columbia in 2009. The class was Hollywood...