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663 reviews in total

I had never heard of this short Japanese animated film before seeing it at a surprise screening at the Suginami Animation Museum in Tokyo. The title translates as "The Black Woodcutter and the White Woodcutter" and the film is approximately 15 minutes long. It offers fluid cell animation, in color, and its lush visuals and detailed backgrounds look forward to some of the early color animated features produced by Japan's pioneering animation studio, Toei Animation, five of which were directed by this film's director, Taiji Yabushita, including HAKUJADEN (PANDA AND THE MAGIC SERPENT), SHONEN SARUTOBI SASUKE (MAGIC BOY), SAIYUKI (ALAKAZAM THE GREAT), and ANJU TO ZUSHIOMARU (THE LITTLEST WARRIOR). The film is centered around an anthropomorphized animal trio, consisting of a bear, a fox and a squirrel, and their attempts to find warm shelter and food at remote cabins during a raging snowstorm in a thick forest. The simple story illustrates their encounters with the devious "black" woodcutter, who brandishes a gun, and the kindly "white" woodcutter, who welcomes them into his humble cabin. The different reactions of the woodcutters affect what happens to each of them later when a "snow queen"-type character courses through the forest seeking to freeze everything and everybody.

It's presumably based on an old folk tale, although I couldn't tell you whether its origin is European, Russian, Japanese or that of another culture. There's no dialogue, so it needed no translation. The animal characters walk on two feet and move like human beings. Their animated motions lead me to believe they were rotoscoped (animation traced from live-action footage, in which actors or models are filmed performing the actions that will be animated). I was reminded me of various Russian animated color shorts from the early 1950s, including "The Fisherman and the Goldfish" (1950) and "The Golden Antelope" (1954), the latter directed by Lev Atamanov, who went on to direct the influential animated feature, THE SNOW QUEEN (1957). "Kuroi Kikori to Shiroi Kikori" is quite a beautiful piece and I daresay it proved to be excellent training for the features Yabushita would undertake just two years later. I'm so glad I got the rare opportunity to see it. If you're ever in Tokyo, visit the Suginami Animation Museum. It's a treasure trove for anime buffs.

I've seen many movies starring John Payne and Dennis O'Keefe and I have to say I found their performances in PASSAGE WEST among the strongest of their careers. Payne plays a hardened escaped convict serving time for murder, who leads a pack of five other runaway cons in taking over a wagon train of settlers heading to California. The leader of the train is a minister played by O'Keefe, who is first seen conducting a funeral service for a boy who died during the journey. Payne runs roughshod over the wagon train and jeopardizes the settlers' lives with some rash commands, earning O'Keefe's undisguised contempt. Gradually, however, the men's relationship shifts, eventually reaching a point of trust and grudging respect. The turning point is a grueling fistfight between the two (the film's only action scene), a battle that is quite rough and messy, like a real fight and not a cleanly choreographed western brawl like we'd normally find in such films. O'Keefe even executes a few unusual moves that might seem out of place in the west of 1863, but are explained, in a clever bit of dialogue after the fight, as something he learned in a lumberjack camp and as a waterfront saloon bouncer in an earlier life before he found God.

The settlers are played by dependable character actors who come across as plausible migrants from the east seeking a better life. Only Arleen Whelan's character, a preacher's daughter who falls hard for Payne after he forces a kiss on her, smacks of Hollywood contrivance, but she plays the role with conviction and redheaded fury, with a layer of seething discontent just below the surface, and I found myself believing her, despite the cliché. In the final film of his career, Dooley Wilson, best known for playing singer-pianist Sam in CASABLANCA, plays a runaway slave among the convicts. The script briefly touches on his status when the group learns of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, but otherwise steers clear of racial issues. Other than a handful of interior scenes, the bulk of the film was shot on location and has the actors enduring a sandstorm, desert heat, rain and deep pockets of mud, among other hardships. This has some thematic similarities with another excellent underrated western of 1951, THE SECRET OF CONVICT LAKE, in which Glenn Ford leads a group of escaped cons into a snowbound mountain settlement populated almost entirely by women, whose men have left town to work a silver mine, leading to a series of uneasy encounters as the women take great pains to keep the convicts from getting the upper hand.

California FIREBRAND (1948) is a Republic Pictures western that was shot in Trucolor, the studio's exclusive two-color process and one that was used chiefly in Republic westerns from 1946 to 1956. Monte Hale, this film's star, made eight westerns in color during his tenure at Republic. The print of this film available for viewing on Amazon Prime is absolutely gorgeous and ranks with the better Trucolor prints of Roy Rogers westerns that I've seen on legit DVD and VHS editions (e.g. THE GOLDEN STALLION). The color values in this film rest on the red-and-blue side of the color spectrum and are a lot easier on the eyes than some of the green-and-orange two-color prints I've seen. The film itself is standard B-western fare, with a satisfactory plot and pleasing bursts of action weighed down by gratuitous comedy relief and an abundance of songs, as befitting the Republic "singing cowboy" format. Hale himself makes an amiable hero, but lacks the intensity and forthrightness one would find in the Trucolor westerns of Roy Rogers and Bill Elliott. There are some effective villains, though, as played by the formidable trio of Tris Coffin, Douglas Evans and LeRoy Mason.

Hale plays a cowboy, also named Monte Hale, who arrives in town looking to meet up with his uncle, only to learn that he's been killed. When Hale is mistaken for a hired gunslinger, he allows the deception to continue, even to the point of being appointed town marshal by the corrupt mayor (Douglas Evans), so that he can find out who killed his uncle. This puts a crimp in the romantic relationship Hale hopes to develop with the lady storekeeper, Joyce Mason (Adrian Booth), whose family is about to be evicted from their land for nonpayment of taxes, all so the mayor and his cronies can get access to the gold vein running under the Mason property. Hale is caught in the middle but eventually comes up with a plan to incriminate the mayor and his secret backer and aid the Masons. However, the real gunslinger, "Gunsmoke" Lowery (Daniel Sheridan), finally shows up and Hale and his partner Chuck (Paul Hurst) have to do some quick thinking.

Songs are provided by Hale singing solo and by musical performer Alice Tyrrell (a delightful brassy blonde who made too few movies) accompanied by the western group, Foy Willing and the Riders of the Purple Sage, who would replace Bob Nolan and the Sons of the Pioneers as Roy Rogers' musical sidekicks in 13 of Rogers' last 16 Republic westerns, from 1948 to 1951. Paul Hurst makes an excellent gun-toting "old coot" sidekick in the Gabby Hayes mode, but with a little more gravitas and not quite as exaggerated. Adrian Booth is a feisty and attractive brunette leading lady. There are some welcome familiar faces among the bad guys, including Glenn Strange and stuntmen Chuck Roberson and Dave Sharpe. The storyline was adapted from an earlier Roy Rogers western, SHERIFF OF TOMBSTONE (1941), which I still haven't seen. Hale has a pleasant personality and a good singing voice, but the plot here is strong enough to demand a more convincing and charismatic actor in the lead. Still, the Trucolor is so nice to look at I'd gladly watch this again.

MOKEY (1942) is a low-budget MGM melodrama set in a poor southern town where blacks and whites live in close proximity. Young Mokey (eight-year-old Robert Blake, a member of the "Our Gang" cast at the time) lives in a small but fairly comfortable house while his three closest friends, black siblings (two boys and one girl), live in a much more ramshackle place a short distance away. Mokey's guardian is a black maid (Etta McDaniel), who doesn't have much patience with Mokey and leaves the job when Mokey's dad remarries. (She later comes back temporarily.) The three black children (played by Cordell Hickman, William "Buckwheat" Thomas, and Marcella Moreland) live with an older woman, Aunt Deedy (Cleo Desmond), who is not their "blood kin." When Aunt Deedy gets sick she calls in a traditional healer, a "conjure woman" played by veteran black actress Madame Sul-Te-Wan (who was in D.W. Griffith's BIRTH OF A NATION). There are a total of seven black speaking parts, four of them quite substantial. A middle section of the film has Mokey running away from home and living with the black children as their cousin "Julius." They do him up in blackface and give him a cap to cover his straight hair. It fools Aunt Deedy—for more than three weeks! She doesn't bathe him or check his hair the whole time. The town searches high and low for Mokey but three weeks go by before Mokey's father (Dan Dailey) thinks to question Mokey's black friends about his whereabouts, which gives some idea of how invisible the black population was despite being so close. Along similar lines, we witness some disapproval on the part of Mokey's new stepmother (Donna Reed) after Mokey has introduced his three black playmates to her. When she later asks Mokey if he has any friends and he replies that she's already met them, she then asks, "But don't you have any other friends?," clearly implying that those three aren't good enough for him.

The young black actors are quite good, especially Cordell Hickman, who was active in the 1940s and, in the performances of his I've seen, always carried himself with a certain dignity. (He's best known for playing the white protagonist's close companion in THE BISCUIT EATER, 1940.) The little girl, Begonia (Marcella Moreland, daughter of actor Mantan Moreland), is quite sassy and addresses Mokey and the other white playmates as "white boy," with more than a hint of condescension. William Thomas, better known as "Buckwheat," was Robert Blake's co-star in the "Our Gang" series. The black characters speak in southern dialect, sometimes a tad more exaggerated than necessary.

My point in laying out this detail is to call attention to the extent of the film's investment in black life. We often see black characters in subservient roles in films from the 1930s and '40s, but we don't often see their lives away from the white folks. Here we do and it's quite refreshing. There are other films like this I can cite, but I'd most like to single out the horse-racing melodrama, MARYLAND (1940), which has a whole subplot set in the segregated black society which supplied the workers for the horse industry in Maryland at the time. I've reviewed that film on IMDb and my review is the only one to cite this subplot.

When I read comments complaining about racial stereotypes in films like MOKEY, I can only think that the tendency towards political correctness wants to whitewash this country's history. Without these characters we wouldn't get to see these remarkable performances by black actors trying to inject humanity into the stereotypes. It's easy to dismiss stereotypes when you don't see these characters as human beings. Which begs the question of who's the most racist. The creators of these films who sought to include black people in them to a degree that was rare in that period or the politically correct critics of today? Isn't the film somewhat noteworthy for at least acknowledging the racism of that time and setting rather than denying it?

For the record, Jim Gallaher, the son of the man who was the basis for the Mokey character, reports in a review here that his father did indeed live with a black family under an assumed name when he'd run away and traveled far from home, but is doubtful that he ever wore blackface. I'm assuming that because Mokey stays so close to home after he's run away in the film, the screenwriter had to come up with a tactic that would plausibly delay his discovery by the townsfolk for a significant amount of time and the blackface gimmick was the only one that could work.

Other reviews have adequately addressed the problematic aspects of Mokey's character and the difficulties such a boy causes for otherwise well-meaning people, so I'll leave that subject to them.

Yasuzo Masumura's GIANTS AND TOYS (1958) focuses on the antics behind a publicity campaign for a Japanese brand of caramel candy put out by a company, World Caramels, that's trying to wrest market share from two rivals, Giant and Apollo. Goda (Hideo Takamatsu), the ambitious publicity executive assigned to run the campaign, spots a teenage girl, Kyoko Shima (Hitomi Nozoe), on the street and recruits her to be the public face of the company, planning to put her in a space suit while promoting the candy. He hires Harukawa (Yunosuke Ito), a cynical, alcoholic photographer known for his work with young models, to take the pictures that will put Kyoko's face in popular magazines, and encourages a junior publicist, Nishi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi), to romance Kyoko since she seems to like him. Despite Kyoko's charms, Nishi wants no part of it and instead pursues the crafty Kurahashi (Michiko Ono), an attractive, slightly older counterpart working at the rival company, Apollo. Kyoko, an impetuous, gap-toothed wild child with a ready smile and a lack of inhibition, still has to be persuaded--even coerced--into posing for the initial set of photos, but she gradually comes to like the fame and, more importantly, the money, which enables her to leave her large family in a Tokyo slum district behind. Eventually, success goes to her head and she is soon mulling offers from the candy rivals, a testament to the power of Nishi's rejection of her. Goda, who is married to his department head's daughter, is under extraordinary pressure to increase sales, so he drives himself and everyone around him relentlessly. The satirical tone of the early scenes gives way to a very harsh critique of Japanese society in the postwar era on the verge of its highly-touted "economic miracle."

When the film focuses on Kyoko, it's very charming and often quite funny. She reminds me of a looney, working-class Audrey Hepburn. Her impulsive behavior around the male characters may not be the most ladylike but it's really cute and even a little sexy. The photographer, Harukawa, is also very funny. He's brutally frank, acerbic and full of thoughts on a wide range of subjects. When he's interviewed by a pack of reporters, he tells one of them, "Your magazine is full of crap," before launching into a rambling monologue on famous western poets and their writing and meditating habits ("Byron wrote poems while inflicting self-torture") before lamenting that "Japanese novelists meditate on the toilet." At one point, in a bar watching Japanese women dance with western men, he expounds on the reason for Japanese women's preference for western men, something to do with the difference in physiques between the two races. I could have listened to him for much longer. Unfortunately, the bulk of the film shifts from Kyoko and Harukawa to the two World publicity execs and they just aren't that interesting. Eventually, it comes down to a moral debate between Goda, who justifies every cutthroat tactic he can think of as part of some nationalist impulse, and Nishi, who questions the ethics of what they're doing, culminating in a bleak, unsatisfying ending.

There is lots of dialogue about the Japanese way in the postwar era and what's needed to survive and thrive, with Goda's position thought to be at odds with traditional Japanese values. Many on the staff side with Goda and when one character complains that what worked in America won't work in Japan, another executive declares, "America is Japan." Goda increasingly becomes a caricature as the film progresses. When Nishi objects to the way Kurahashi is trying to hire Kyoko away from World to work for Apollo, especially after he's revealed his company secrets to her during their affair, she dismisses it with this line: "Work is work and love is love. We love as we cheat. It's so thrilling. It's love that will last." Which struck me as a very odd thing to put in such a character's mouth, unless something was lost in the subtitled translation. The whole sales war between Giant and World becomes an unlikely media event, as if the public would even care about two caramel companies. The film hits us over the head with all these messages without really working them into the fabric of the story. They seem forced.

Other Japanese films from the postwar era managed to incorporate these kinds of criticisms in a much less heavy-handed way, making points through story and character. Akira Kurosawa's HIGH AND LOW (1963) examines the battle between a conscientious executive and the company directors' greed through the prism of a crime story involving a kidnapping. Keisuke Kinoshita's THUS ANOTHER DAY (1959) looks at the plight of a salaryman desperately trying to get ahead and the strain it puts on his family, but lays out its critique entirely through the way characters behave and the shifting of relationships. (I've also reviewed this film on IMDb.) Nagisa Oshima and Koreyoshi Kurahara, two directors who were even younger than Masumura, also managed to layer their films of the 1950s and '60s with incisive social critiques of Japan, but they did it without making Japan look foolish, which is what Masumura does here. GIANTS AND TOYS has been compared to such American counterparts as Frank Tashlin's WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER, Billy Wilder's THE APARTMENT, Alexander Mackendrick's SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS and Elia Kazan's A FACE IN THE CROWD, but those films managed to make their points without making America look foolish or hateful.

For far too long in Hollywood's history, Calamity Jane was given the glamorous treatment in westerns depicting her character, most notably in THE PLAINSMAN (1936), in which Jean Arthur played her, THE PALEFACE (1948), with Jane Russell, CALAMITY JANE AND SAM BASS (1949), with Yvonne De Carlo, and CALAMITY JANE (1953), in which a singing Doris Day played the title role. So I was pleasantly surprised to watch the "Death Valley Days" episode, "A Calamity Called Jane" (1966), in which Jane is portrayed as a homely, salty-talking, hard-drinking, two-fisted cuss in dirty buckskins, unkempt hair and no makeup. Fay Spain runs with the part and brings a rather sad and touching figure to life in a short tale that compresses her entire relationship with Wild Bill Hickok (Rhodes Reason) to the course of a few short days, from the time they meet to his untimely demise at the hand of an irate gambler. During that period, she is asked to join Hickok's Wild West Show to do trick shooting and riding, but has to contend with Hickok's disdain of her personal habits and troublesome behavior. Despite his criticism, she comes to realize she's in love with him and makes the impulsive decision to try and adopt a more ladylike image, after a visit to a dress shop, with disastrous results, leading to a moving scene in which she nurses her hurt feelings alone with a bottle of whiskey and we get a sense of the vulnerable human being beneath her crusty exterior.

I'd seen Fay Spain in more glamorous roles in AL CAPONE (1959) and HERCULES AND THE CAPTIVE WOMEN (1961), but I didn't recognize her here and was stunned to see her name in the end credits. It's quite a brave performance and is rivaled, as far as I know, only by Ellen Barkin's performance as Calamity in Walter Hill's WILD BILL (1995). It shows what a fine actress Spain was and I'm sorry it didn't lead to better roles for her. Rhodes Reason (KING KONG ESCAPES) portrays a stolid but dashing long-haired Wild Bill in fancy white designer buckskin and accompanied by an entourage of similarly-dressed companions, including Charlie Otter (Ed Peck), a friend of Jane's and the one who recruits her to join the show. My only criticism of this episode is that we never get to see a performance of the group's Wild West Show.

"Death Valley Days" often portrayed historical figures in its episodes, including newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst ("The Paper Dynasty," also reviewed here), mountain man Hugh Glass ("Hugh Glass Meets the Bear," also reviewed here), Lewis and Clark ("The Girl Who Walked the West") and the outlaw Dalton brothers ("Three Minutes to Eternity"). Such treatments were usually less sensational and a tad more accurate than most Hollywood portrayals of western historical figures and well worth seeking out. I watched this episode on the Encore Western Channel on January 19, 2016.

"Massacre at Gunsight Pass" (1961), a Season Five episode of the Warner Bros. western series, "Cheyenne," is packed with drama and action as Cheyenne Bodie (Clint Walker) and a group of stage passengers hole up at a stage relay station after one of the passengers has shot and killed a random Shoshone, arousing the ire of angry warrior Powder Face (X Brands) and his band. With only the guns they have in their possession, half a bucket of water, and a day's supply of food, the eleven occupants of the station have to keep the Indians at bay while also engaging in considerable squabbles among themselves. Cheyenne's prisoner, Johnny Eldorado (Sherwood Price), convicted of robbery and murder, has two confederates among the passengers posing as a married couple, but their efforts to free him and get the money he's hidden are delayed by the Indian attack. The station master (Robert Foulk) is a mean, bigoted drunk who routinely smacks his beautiful young wife (Kathie Browne) around, especially after an Indian friend of hers (Paul Mantee) returns from a white man's school and comes to see her, getting trapped there with the others when the shooting starts. One of the women on the stage is a spinster who has come out west as a self-styled do-gooder to help civilize the Indians. The most colorful character in the bunch is a battle-hungry Russian count (Jack Elam), a proud Cossack, who fired the shot that killed the Indian, thinking he was a threat. He may be the best fighter in the group (after Cheyenne, of course), but he's despised for provoking the trouble and getting them all in this mess. The Indians bide their time and pick off the station occupants one at a time until Cheyenne finds a way to resolve the whole mess.

It's quite exciting and suspenseful and the characters are interesting enough to keep the talk scenes between Indian attacks from dragging the narrative down too much. I liked the way Cheyenne's relationship with his prisoner grows deeper during the siege as Johnny comes to respect him ("I like Bodie's cut") and realize that his confederates are only interested in learning the location of the stolen money. Elam, as the Russian braggart who claims to be a captain of the Czar's army, gives quite a lively performance and plays it with enough inflection and style to cover up the occasional trailing off of his Russian accent. I was especially impressed with Kathie Browne as the gorgeous young blonde who married the abusive station master as part of a deal to keep her father out of jail and is now forced to live up to her part of the bargain even though she really loves Jimmy, the college-educated Indian. Even the scenes with the spinster who, upon facing death, laments the fact that she's never been kissed, offer an unusual layer of self-reflection as the character (played by Dee Carroll) finds reserves of strength and courage she didn't know she had, playing a crucial role in the action and earning a kiss from Cheyenne in the process.

There are slight similarities between this episode and Quentin Tarantino's latest film, THE HATEFUL EIGHT (2015), which also has a cabin full of stage passengers whose numbers include a bounty hunter transporting a prisoner and the prisoner's confederates hidden among the passengers. As such, it's worthy viewing for Tarantino fans eager to see THE HATEFUL EIGHT's varied antecedents, although the 1960 "Rebel" episode, "Fair Game," which I've also reviewed here, is much, much closer to Tarantino's film. In any event, Tarantino aside, fans of classic TV westerns have much to savor in this episode, which aired on the Encore Western Channel on January 19, 2016.

"Blind Marriage" is a 1960 episode of the half-hour western TV series, "The Rebel," and is significant for its plot about Chinese characters in the old west and its casting of both Lisa Lu and Philip Ahn. Ms. Lu had appeared in about 31 TV western episodes in the late 1950s and '60s, and I've written here about two later western roles she had, in the "Day of the Dragon" episode of "Bonanza" (1961) and the "Pocketful of Stars" episode of "Cheyenne" (1962). Philip Ahn had played a Chinese doctor in Virginia City in the "Bonanza" episode and plays Ms. Lu's father here. Unlike those two episodes, Lu plays a more passive character here, buffeted by the aggressive actions of men seeking either to protect her or do her harm, not to mention her father's plans for her. The plot involves Ahn's attempt to take her by stagecoach to Sacramento for an arranged marriage with a man she's never met. He is carrying a large dowry, which makes him a target of thieves. Early on, the father and daughter are subjected to bigotry when they are denied passage on a stagecoach and bullied by two of its passengers. Johnny Yuma (Nick Adams), the "Rebel" of the title, is riding shotgun on the stage and comes to the aid of Ahn and Lu. In gratitude, they invite Yuma back to their home, along with two other seemingly sympathetic passengers, Young (Victor Buono) and Collins (Wyatt Cooper), and show them works of Chinese art, including a 500-year-old vase from the Sung Dynasty, and treat them to a Chinese meal. Yuma is even forced to learn how to use chopsticks, recalling a similar scene in a Japanese-themed episode of "Laramie" entitled "Dragon at the Door," which I've also reviewed here. In the course of the meal, Lu and Ahn discuss Chinese culture, including the whole concept of arranged marriages, which Yuma opposes, but which Lu defends. Ahn happens to describe China's psychological approach to making people divulge information and provides details of the famous Chinese water torture. Chinese is spoken multiple times when Ahn gives instructions to his servant (Spencer Chan).

Eventually, Young hires a stagecoach and offers to take Lu and Ahn to Sacramento, but makes clear there is no place for Yuma on it. Suspicious of Young and mindful of the dowry Ahn is transporting, Yuma decides to follow the stagecoach from a safe distance and is soon forced to intervene again after the stage is held up on the road. Before too long, he finds an opportunity to make use of the Chinese water torture on two of the plotters behind the robbery.

Given the half-hour format, we don't get the most intricate of plots nor the finer points of cultural exchange between east and west that we get in the other Asian-themed TV western episodes I cited. But it's always good to see Ahn and Lu in western episodes playing Chinese characters who are not stereotyped. This episode was directed by Irvin Kershner, who made his name 20 years later with the second Star Wars film, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. I'm posting this on January 19, 2016, Lisa Lu's 89th birthday.

"Hugh Glass Meets the Bear," a 1966 episode of "Death Valley Days," tells basically the same story that would be told 50 years later in Alejandro González Iñárritu's 2015 film, THE REVENANT, starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of Hugh Glass. Glass was a renowned fur trapper and explorer, aka "mountain man," in the early years of the 19th century (he died in 1833) and his story has also been told in the 1971 film, MAN OF THE WILDERNESS, where he was played by Richard Harris. In "Hugh Glass Meets the Bear," Glass (John Alderson) is recruited by Major Henry (Tris Coffin) at Fort Kiowa to lead a scouting party through Indian territory to find a trail to Fort Henry at the mouth of the Yellowstone. In the course of the journey, he also employs his skills at hunting to kill game and secure meat for the party without firing shots that would alert nearby Indians. At one point, Glass scouts ahead to find water and is confronted at a stream by a bear who attacks him and leaves him badly mauled in a scene shot on location with a real bear (although closeups of Glass in the near-fatal embrace feature a stuffed bear). Two of the men, Fitzpatrick (Morgan Woodward) and Glass's protégé, Jim Bridger (Carl Reindel), are convinced that Glass, seen unconscious with bloody claw marks on his face, is mortally wounded and beyond hope and they leave him behind, going so far as to take his rifle. Glass slowly revives and has to make his way back to the fort, bitter at being left behind without a weapon in such a seemingly callous manner, especially since he'd done so much to mentor Bridger, then 19 years old, who would become a famous mountain man, scout and explorer in his own right. There's not much more to it than that, with very little time spent on Glass's journey back, and it's all told in a tidy 25 minutes. The new film takes 156 minutes to tell pretty much the same tale, in much greater detail, of course, and it casts Tom Hardy as John Fitzgerald, the real-life figure whom Fitzpatrick, in the TV episode, is based on, and Will Poulter as Jim Bridger. (In the TV episode, Bridger actually addresses Fitzpatrick as "Fitzgerald" in one scene.) I suspect that the real story of Glass's encounter with the bear and his journey back to Fort Kiowa lies somewhere between the simplified "Death Valley Days" episode and the R-rated THE REVENANT.

The terrain they travel in the TV episode, on locations in Kanab, Utah, seems pretty benign throughout, shot in sun-drenched color, with nary a drop of snow in sight, as opposed to the snow-covered landscape in THE REVENANT. (The actual events took place in South Dakota.) John Alderson plays Glass with a beard and wears clean buckskin, but doesn't look particularly grizzled otherwise (he was 50 at the time). He was an English actor who was active in Hollywood from 1951 to 1990 and I was unfamiliar with him when I saw this episode, even though I've seen several of his credits. This coming April 10th will mark his centennial. (He died in 2006.) The rest of the cast includes three familiar faces, the aforementioned Woodward and Coffin, as well as Victor French.

"Fair Game" (1960), a half-hour episode of the western series, "The Rebel," has enough elements in common with Quentin Tarantino's new film, THE HATEFUL EIGHT (2015), to make me think that Tarantino must have seen this episode at some point in his long history of feverish viewing and filed it away to use as a jumping-off point for his three-hour western drama about a brewing conflict among eight motley characters who become stranded in a saloon during a blizzard and get mixed up in a welter of hidden agendas. "Fair Game" takes place at a stagecoach way station as a group of passengers headed for Laredo spend the night before a scheduled departure in the morning. One of the passengers is a bounty hunter and another is his prisoner, a beautiful woman in handcuffs named Cynthia Kenyon and played by Patricia Medina. Johnny Yuma (Nick Adams), the rebel of the title, has lost the use of his horse and is eager to get to Laredo for a job. Two stage employees are on hand as well as two other passengers, a gambler, played by James Drury (future star of "The Virginian"), and a drummer (salesman), played by Stacy Harris. When one of the group is poisoned after being first to drink from a bucket of water put out by the station master, suspicion falls on the others and Yuma takes charge to make sure there are no more misdeeds and find out who's at the bottom of it.

It's a tidy little tale of suspense and it takes one sixth of the time as Tarantino's film, which offers, of course, a much more intricate plot and a much greater degree of spectacle, violence and bloodshed. This episode was directed by Irvin Kershner, who made his name 20 years later with the second Star Wars film, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.

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