"You Hate Westerns"

Oh, I'm really not a big fan of horse opera movies, not even the gay one.  Only they weren't cowboys.  The only exceptions I'd make to that are Shane and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which aren't cowboy movies.   I don't much care for most Hollywood movies.  They're crap.  Nothing Hollywood produced can compete with the books of Mari Sandoz.   I prefer the de-mythified west instead of the B.S. west. 

"You have no right to falsify life. That's the cardinal sin of the writer."  Mari Sandoz

Update:  Stupy doesn't know the difference between cowboys and farmers.  No surprise there.

Update 2:  Just because I'm sure it will piss off Simels  the two-bit  fame-fucker and because it allows me to mention more about Mari Sandoz.

The Searchers: my most overrated film

Anyone who thinks that everything that John Ford ever did is close to or superior to what Mari Sandoz accomplished in her books is a friggin' idiot.   In the one case I know of where Ford impinged on her work, the botch he made of the masterpiece, Cheyenne Autumn, here's what Variety had to say about it:

Cheyenne Autumn is a rambling, episodic account of a reputedly little-known historic Cheyenne Indian migration 1,500 miles through almost unbelievable hardships and dangers to the tribe's home near the Yellowstone in Wyoming. Somewhere in the telling, the original premise of the Mari Sandoz novel is lost sight of in a wholesale insertion of extraneous incidents which bear little or no relation to the subject.

Considering how thoroughly Sandoz researched her writing, sometimes, literally, researching for a decade, perhaps more, before she wrote a book, that treatment of it is an abomination.   Ford was a falsifier, I don't really care how pretty he made it while he distorted.  I've got no use for that crap.   As a contrast to the practice and attitude of Hollywood, especially in the John Ford era, here is what Mary Dixon of Hastings College said about why Sandoz tried so hard to be accurate.

The motive of Mari Sandoz's truth-telling was not limited to setting the record straight; it was more along the lines of producing a faithful account that would illuminate the past in light of the motives of those involved, with a watchful eye directed toward her contemporary culture and the attitudes that tainted it. Dorman comments that in another work, Slogum House, Sandoz was "well on her way to a modernist conceptualization of history . . .  in which culture rather than fate, or Providence, or geography, or blind economic force-was the determinative factor in history."  In Crazy Horse, she resolutely sought to expose her readers to the culture of the Plains Indians, hoping that somehow through that exposure she could shape their future by educating the Euro-American population to appreciate that culture and not to obliterate it.

Update 3:  Dopey is repeating it, he figures everyone in the West was a cowboy when cowboys were those who worked in a particularly awful job, not even the majority of white men who were out there back then.   City boys are so ignorant.

Update 4:  Oh, I was just amusing myself on a day it was too hot to work outside.  I'm done with you again, till I feel like hurting your feelings by not falling into line with your common received POV.  What's wrong?  You're not automatically rushing to Clint Eastwood's defense this time.  Guess I was right about him all along, wasn't I.  Only now it's groovy to admit he is and always was a racist, misogynistic a-hole so you've jumped on my bandwagon.