It's Christmas Eve and something has been bothering me. You know that song "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year"? You usually hear Andy Williams singing it while you're shopping for last minute gifts for people you don't really like at the K mart around the corner or on that lite music station that goes all-Xmas all-the-time on the day after Thanksgiving. Anyway, there's this one line: "There'll be scary ghost stories and tales of old glories of Christmases long, long ago." Who tells "scary ghost stories" on Christmas? Did the lyricist get yuletide mixed up with Halloween like in that Tim Burton movie? That's always bothered me.
In a similar vein, there was one Christmas when my family was visiting us upstate and we didn't tell scary ghost stories, but we did watch Westerns. American Movie Classics was showing a marathon of westerns. I think they called it Cowboys at Christmas or something. This was when the network actually lived up to its name and showed old movies instead of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and 1980s movie bombs. I'l watch a Western if it's good--like The Searchers, High Noon, or Stagecoach. But my dad likes anything with horses and guns--literally, he will watch the worst piece of crap you can imagine as long as there is a shoot-out in it somewhere. So after turkey dinner, we gathered round the electronic fire and viewed Winchester 73 and Bend in the River, both starring Jimmy Stewart.
Winchester 73 has everybody you could think of in it--Stewart, Shelley Winters, Tony Curtis (when he was still Bernie Schwartz), Will Geer (Grampa Walton as Doc Holliday), Dan Dureya as a snivelling coward (his usual role), Rock Hudson as an Indian brave, and that guy who played the studio head in Singin' in the Rain.
Bend in the River was later in Stewart's career. Big, technicolor epic. You can picture seeing it at the drive-in with the whole family on a Saturday night and being overwhelmed by the color and the wide vistas. Stewart co-starred with another big cast, agin with Rock Hudson (he was still doing second leads), Arthur Kennedy as the villain, Henry Morgan before Dragnet and MASH,and Aunt Bee from the Andy Griffin Show. It was almost like we were out on the plains, because it gets really dark upstate.
The "guy who played the studio head" was Millard Mitchell, who also played the sheriff in "The Gunfighter," where a producer freaked when he found out the director had put a black mustache on Gregory Peck, Hollywood's handsome b.o. draw.
ReplyDeleteStewart told the story about coming back from WWII to a changed movie scene, and feeling lost, with no scripts for him. A friend told him W73 script had been kicking around Hollywood for a few years, and he should take a look at it. He did, and it reignited his career. He said, after that, every western he made, he wore the same sweat-stained hat and rode the same horse.
Merry Christmas, David!
Thanks for the fun notes on the movie. Merry Christmas, Roger.
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