The Sag Harbor Cinema has announced “Go West: The Sixties,” a nine-film weeklong series that will open Friday with showings of David Miller’s “Lonely Are the Brave” and Sam Peckinpah’s “Ride the High Country,” both from 1962, and continue with films directed by Howard Hawks, Gordon Douglas, John Ford, Sergio Leone, and Monte Hellman.
“I am happy that westerns have proved to be popular at the cinema,” said Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, the theater’s artistic director. “I find it a particularly interesting moment to revisit the history of this country. This weeklong program will combine late, crepuscular works by the masters of the classic era, such as Ford and Hawks, while also introducing a new generation of filmmakers — Leone, Peckinpah and Hellman — who pushed the genre out of the confines of the studios’ aesthetic into new realms of formal and narrative invention.”
“Lonely Are the Brave,” which screens tomorrow at 4:30 and again next Thursday, stars Kirk Douglas as Jack Burns, a ranch hand with wanderlust; Gena Rowlands as the wife of his best friend, and Walter Matthau as a sympathetic sheriff who must chase Burns down after he breaks out of jail. The New York Times called it a “perfectly swell little Western drama, with Kirk Douglas giving one of the best performances of his career.”
Set for tomorrow at 7:30 and Monday, “Ride the High Country” was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1992. Joel McCrea plays Steve Judd, a retired lawman who recruits Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott) to help transport gold from a distant mine to a small-town bank. Unknown to Judd, Westrum and a young drifter who joins the group plan to steal the gold. “Messrs. McCrea and Scott mesh perfectly, with the latter getting the drollest lines — and there are plenty,” wrote Bosley Crowther of The New York Times.
Hawks is represented by “El Dorado” (1966), in which Ed Asner plays a heartless tycoon who hires a group of thugs to force a family off their land so he can claim it. Robert Mitchum plays a sheriff and John Wayne a gunfighter.
In Douglas’s “Gold of the Seven Saints” (1961), after discovering a fortune in gold nuggets, Shaun Garrett (Roger Moore) and his partner, Jim Rainbolt (Clint Walker), make their way toward the town of Seven Saints to redeem it for cash. A bandit (Gene Evans) has other ideas.
It’s no surprise that John Ford has two films in the series. Of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962), which stars John Wayne, James Stewart, and Lee Marvin as the outlaw Valance, Richard Brody of The New Yorker said, “There’s much to say about it; the simplest is that it’s both the most romantic of Westerns and the greatest American political movie.”
James Stewart also appears in Ford’s “Two Rode Together” (1961), in which Stewart plays a Texas marshal and Richard Widmark an army officer. Together, they search for a group of whites who were abducted years earlier by Comanche warriors.
The all-star cast of Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) includes Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson, and Claudia Cardinale in a struggle over a piece of land. Toby Young wrote in The Times (U.K.), “For a lesson in how to resuscitate a dying genre, you could do worse than ‘Once Upon a Time in the West,’ Sergio Leone’s masterpiece from 1968.”
Three years before his breakthrough in “Easy Rider” (1969), Jack Nicholson plays a volatile gunfighter in Hellman’s “The Shooting” (1966). Warren Oates is a bounty hunter and Will Hutchins his partner, who are hired by a secretive young woman (Millie Perkins) to guide her through the desert.
Known for its gritty violence, Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” (1969) stars William Holden as an aging outlaw, and Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, and Ben Johnson as members of his gang, who plan to retire after one last robbery. J. Hoberman of The Village Voice called it “Arguably the strongest Hollywood movie of the 1960s — a western that galvanizes the clichés of its dying genre with a shocking jolt of delirious carnage.”
More information and the full schedule are on the cinema’s website.
