In the Cable Hogue bracket of westerns about stubborn men who don’t realise their time is up, and a kind of anti-High Noon in structure. A minor classic and a nice precursor for Siegel to his later The Shootist.
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Don Quintin the Bitter 1935
My version has no subtitles - I should probably have watched Buñuel’s 1951 remake Daughter of Deceit first - but it’s a straightforward studio-bound melodrama with the odd interesting moment.
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Bullfighter and the Lady 1951
Very odd by the standards of 1951 Hollywood, this is near anti-Hemingway in its depiction of both the femininity (see various interplay between Page, Grey, and Jurado) and the queerness (see Stack and Roland’s training scenes) of bullfighting. It’s easy, watching the extended version, to see why Johns Ford and Wayne felt funny in their tummies and hacked 40 minutes out. Beyond that, it’s a romantic paean to the culture of the Mexican bullring, successfully conveying Boetticher’s own youthful fascination, whilst always retaining the status of outsider - it’s scrupulously respectful in its depiction of the locals.
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Red Roses of Passion 1966
Profoundly odd sexploitation film, almost hippie-feminist in its dreamlike evocation of a quasi-mystical gynocentric sexuality. Men barely get a look in, except to be devoured by the women. Never explicit, never violent, the New York exploitation film was not all roughies.
