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Tag Archives: Burgess Meredith
MacKenna’s Gold: gold, ghosts and frontier violence

1969 was arguably the year Hollywood fully embraced the revisionist western. In addition to Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, there was True Grit, Tell Them Willy Boy is Here, Death of a Gunfighter, and Midnight Cowboy. As well as playing with notions of ‘the cowboy’ and ‘the West’, they contained more stylised violence, more sex and stories that overtly fed off the cynicism and disillusionment of America’s war in Vietnam and domestic racial strife.
Released in May that year, Mackenna’s Gold straddles the divide between the classic big studio western and its revisionist successors. Headed up by Gregory Peck and Omar Sharif, the film boasts a cast to kill for. It is also a story filled with supernatural elements, in which humans are haunted not only by spirits guarding a lost canyon full of gold but by their own greed and paranoia.
In my debut for a website I have admired for some time, Diabolique Magazine, I wrote about gold, ghosts and frontier violence in MacKenna’s Gold. You can read the entire article on their site via this link. Enjoy.
Posted in 60s American crime films, Crime fiction and film from India, Gregory Peck, Westerns
Tagged Anthony Quayle, Burgess Meredith, Carl Foreman, Carmilla Sparv, Eduardo Ciannelli, Edward G Robinson, Eli Wallach, Gold in westerns, J Lee Thompson, Jilie Newmar, Keenan Wynn, Lee J Cobb, MacKenna's Gold (1969), Omar Shariff, Revisionist westerns, Ted Cassidy, Westerns
James Coburn’s Hard Contract
American actor James Cobrun had a long and varied career that stretched from 1957 to his last role in 2002. He got his start playing tough guys in westerns on TV and then on the large screen, including his break out role in The Magnificent Seven (1960). He starred in the 1963 classic, The Great Escape, then rode the mid-sixties spy film craze with Our Man Flint (1966) and In Like Flint (1967). He spent the seventies appearing in action, crime and Westerns. Most of which were pretty average, notable exceptions being Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) and Walter Hill’s wonderful 1973 boxing film, Hard Times. The eighties and nineties were similarly varied in terms of his output, the highlight being Affliction, the 1999 film that won him a best supporting actor Oscar.
I have always liked Coburn for reasons I’ve found it hard to identify. I wouldn’t say he was a great actor. In nearly all the films I’ve seen him in the word that comes to mind to describe his performances is solid. He did have charisma of sorts and was good looking in an unconventional way, especially when he flashed that giant grin of his. I think I probably like him because of his work in the sixties and seventies, one of my favourite periods of US film making.… Read more
Posted in 60s American crime films, Crime film, Sterling Hayden
Tagged Affliction (1999), Burgess Meredith, Claude Dauphin, Duffy (1968), Hard Contract (1969), Hard Times (1973), In Like Flint (1967, James Coburn, Karen Black, Lee Remick, Lilli Palmer, Our Man Flint (1966), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Patrick Magee, S Lee Pogostin, Sterling Hayden, The Magnificent Seven (1960), The President's Analyst (1967)