Blazing Saddles Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Did the Western make a comeback in 2007, with 3:10 to Yuma (371 screens), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (294 screens), and last spring's Seraphim Falls? That's a tough question, but the better question would be: did it ever go away? Those three movies earned a lot of attention this year, and it showed that, if nothing else, filmmakers and actors are eager to make Westerns once again, as they did back in the 1950s. How much more of a indication do you need when Pierce Brosnan, Russell Crowe and Brad Pitt don cowboy hats and mount horses? Other actors, such as Matt Damon and Colin Farrell have suggested how much fun they had while making recent Westerns. Unfortunately, audiences don't seem so interested, and conversely, producers don't want to put up the money for actors to play if audiences don't want to share in the fun.

Director James Mangold told me that no studio would touch 3:10 to Yuma, and that he had to secure financing from a bank. It opened, happily, in the #1 box office slot, but after eight weeks, it has started to slide, and is still just shy of recapturing its $55 million budget. And this is a terrific, crowd-pleasing movie with a great performance by Crowe. It's directed with energy and clarity, with an innovative use of an authentic Western soundtrack. It has exciting gunfights and chases and escapes. And if aesthetes and elitists wish, they can see bonus allusions to Iraq in the film, even if they're not actually mentioned or hammered home. It's unpretentious in every way. (Paul Haggis could take a few notes from this movie.) So why has the box office slowed down so drastically?

• Richard Curnock (1922-2007) - British actor who appears in Paradise. He died February 6, in Stratford, Ontario. (CBC)
• Donfeld (1934-2007) - Oscar-nominated costume designer for Prizzi's Honor, Days of Wine and Roses, Tom Sawyer and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? His other credits include Spaceballs, Viva Las Vegas, The Great Race and the television series Wonder Woman. He had a brief stint as a set director in the mid-'70s. He died February 3, in Los Angeles (LA Times)
• Victor Griffin (c.1918-2007) - Singer, dancer and actor who appears in Annie. He died February 3, in Syosset, New York. (Variety)
• Griffith Jones (1910-2007) - British actor who appears in Olivier's The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France, as well as The Wicked Lady and Miranda. He died January 30. (Telegraph)
• Frankie Laine (1913-2007) - Singer of the title songs to a number of westerns, including 3:10 to Yuma, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and Blazing Saddles. He also appears in Blake Edwards' He Laughed Last and Bring Your Smile Along, as well as Meet Me in Las Vegas and Make Believe Ballroom. He died of complications from hip surgery February 6. (LA Times)

Every year the Library of Congress announces that it will shelter 25 films for posterity and here's the list for this year, from Variety. Joining the 450 films currently in the vaults are a range of pictures from features to documentaries. This year's pack includes the 1913 protest film Traffic in Souls, a very early American feature film with a then-stunning budget of $25,000. A film "so fast-moving and so packed with direct and veiled references to the vice trade that it's a wonder audiences could keep pace with it," comments ace silent film historian Kevin Brownlow.

More familiar inductees include recent hits like Blazing Saddles, sex, lies and videotape, Rocky and Halloween. Then you have classics like Notorious, and key works like The Big Trail by Raoul Walsh, The Last Command by Josef von Sternberg, the debut of Rouben Mamoulian, and the first Garbo-Gilbert picture Flesh and the Devil. The rarities are perhaps even more interesting: the early Chinese-American film The Curse of Quon Gwon and long-time experimental filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas' Reminiscence of a Journey to Lithuania. A couple of the entries are performance films: St. Louis Blues (1929), a two-reeler that is the only existing film of Bessie Smith, seen singling the W. C. Handy song. And for more current relevance, the documentary The T.A.M.I. Show. with the late lamented James Brown performing "Night Train" and the Supremes doing "Where Did Our Love Go?" for purpose of comparison with The Dreams in Dreamgirls.