Following the success of screenings of The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) and Gunman’s Walk (Phil Karlson, 1958) at the 2024 Sag Harbor Cinema Festival of Preservation - as well Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959) at the 2023 Festival and Canyon Passage (Jacques Tourneaur, 1946) at the 2022 Festival - the Cinema announces a special salute to the western. Our weeklong program Go West will accent the 1950s and feature the work of Anthony Mann, Raoul Walsh, André de Toth, Delmer Daves, Sam Fuller, Nicolas Ray, and Budd Boetticher.
“Jean-Luc Godard called the western ‘the most cinematic genre of all.’ For French critic André Bazin it was ‘the American film par excellence.’ It is perhaps inevitable for a European to love westerns. I always did. With this program we wanted to pay homage to the great masters of the genre, as well as focus on the moral and psychological complexities of the post war and Cold War eras, when westerns often came tinted with a shade of noir,” says SHC’s Artistic Director Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan. “I anticipate we will explore the Sixties next.”
The Cinema will screen Delmer Daves’ 1957 classic 3:10 to Yuma starring Van Heflin as Dan Evans, a small-time rancher tasked with putting outlaw Ben Wade (played by ‘the fastest gun in Hollywood’ Glenn Ford, against type) on the 3:10 train to Yuma while outrunning Wade’s gang. Halsted Welles, a prolific TV writer in the 50s and 60s (“Suspense,” “Bonanza,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”), adapted the 3:10 to Yuma script based on a short story by Elmore Leonard. Welles’ son of the same name, a renowned garden designer and a Sag Harbor resident, will join the Cinema at Saturday’s screening to present the film and participate in a Q&A.
Another special screening of Go West includes Raoul Walsh’s 1953 Gun Fury in 3D (this was his only 3D film). In the film, Rock Hudson stars as a rancher at odds with a demented ex-Confederate (Phil Carey) who kidnaps his bride-to-be (Donna Reed).
Go West will also screen with André de Toth’s 1959 Day of the Outlaw, the Hungarian-American director’s final western. Shot on location in snowy Central Oregon and starring Robert Ryan (The Wild Bunch, The Dirty Dozen), Burl Ives (The Big Country, ‘Snowman’ in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer), and Tina Louise (Gilligan’s Island’s ‘Ginger’), Outlaw is a gritty story of a town trapped by a gang of outlaws and an impending snowstorm, against the backdrop of the power struggle between cattlemen and farmers. Film author, collector, and Western aficionado Bob Rubin (Richard Prince Cowboy, Vanishing Point Forever) will introduce the film through a video specially recorded for the screening.
Also presented in the the Go West series is Anthony Mann’s newly restored by Universal in beautiful Technicolor Bend of the River (1952), an adaptation of Border Chase’s book Bend of the Snake with Rock Hudson, Julia Adams, and James Stewart as a man with a violent past in search of redemption in the Oregon wilderness. Nicholas Ray’s wildly baroque 1954 Johnny Guitar (“dream-like, magical, delirious,” according to François Truffaut), featuring Joan Crawford as a ruthless saloon owner will also screen along with Samuel Fuller’s 1957 playfully subversive Forty Guns, featuring Hollywood legend Barbara Stanwyck as a high-riding rancher. Finally, Budd Boetticher’s celebrated Ranown cycle of low budget westerns—made with Randolph Scott, produced by Harry Joe Brown, and written by Burt Kennedy—will be represented by Ride Lonesome (1959) a revenge tale, with Scott as a bounty hunter and James Coburn in his film debut.
Go West runs from February 15-19th, with each film playing twice (except Gun Fury in 3D, which only plays once on Sunday). Tickets are available individually or as a ‘Canyon Pass’ which is $55 for non-members or $30 for members and permits guests to attend each film one time.
The full lineup with times, tickets and passes will be available at the box office or sagharborcinema.org.
ABOUT THE FILMS
3:10 TO YUMA
Directed by Delmer Daves
USA, 1957; 92 mins, in English
In this beautifully shot, psychologically complex western, Van Heflin is a mild-mannered cattle rancher who takes on the task of shepherding a captured outlaw (played with cucumber-cool charisma by Glenn Ford) to the train that will deliver him to prison. This apparently simple mission turns into a nerve-racking cat-and-mouse game that tests each man’s particular brand of honor. Based on a story by Elmore Leonard, 3:10 to Yuma is a thrilling, humane action movie, directed by the supremely talented studio filmmaker Delmer Daves with intense feeling and precision.
BEND OF THE RIVER
Directed by Anthony Mann
USA, 1952; 91 mins, in English
Rugged cowboy Glyn McLyntock (James Stewart) struggles to hide his dark past as he guides a wagon train through the treacherous Oregon wilderness. To help the settlers survive the hostile conditions, he must choose his allies wisely and confront the ghosts of his former self when he rescues thief Emerson Cole (Arthur Kennedy) from execution. Bend of the River was the second of eight films James Stewart and Anthony Mann made together and marked a turning point in Stewart’s career showcasing the actor’s darker side.
DAY OF THE OUTLAW
Directed by André de Toth
USA, 1959; 92 mins, in English
In the quiet frontier town of Bitters, Wyoming, a dispute between cattleman Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) and farmer Hal Crane (Alan Marshal) is about to boil over into a bloody feud. But the fighting takes a back seat to a new threat when a rogue cavalry captain, Jack Bruhn (actor and singer Burl Ives), rides into town with his band of thugs. Now, with the citizens of Bitters held hostage by Bruhn and his men, Starrett must somehow rescue his town and restore his broken reputation. Also starring Tina Louise a few years before becoming Ginger on Gilligan’s Island.
FORTY GUNS
Directed by Samuel Fuller
USA, 1957; 80 mins, in English
Hollywood legend Barbara Stanwyck saddled up with writer-director Samuel Fuller for the pulp maestro’s most audacious western, a boldly feminist spin on the genre that pivots effortlessly between ribald humor, visceral action, and disarming tenderness. High-riding rancher Jessica Drummond (Stanwyck) commands a forty-strong posse of cowboys, ruling Cochise County, Arizona, without challenge. When U.S. Marshal Griff Bonell (Barry Sullivan) and his brothers arrive in town with a warrant for one of her hired guns, Jessica begins to fall for the lawman even as he chips away at her authority.
With astonishing black-and-white CinemaScope photography, hard-boiled dialogue laced with double entendres, and a fiery performance by Stanwyck at her most imperious, Forty Guns is a virtuoso display of Fuller’s sharpshooting talents.
GUN FURY in 3D
Directed by Raoul Walsh
USA, 1953; 83 mins, in English
California-bound rancher Ben Warren (Rock Hudson) is shot and left for dead when a demented ex-Confederate, Frank Slayton (Phil Carey), kidnaps his Southern bride-to-be (Donna Reed). Revived, Ben sets out to rescue her. Along the way, he picks up Jess Burgess (Leo Gordon), a slighted former member of Slayton's gang, and American Indian local Johash (Pat Hogan), who has his own beef with the outlaws. Together they embark on a perilous chase toward the Mexican border to stop Slayton. Lee Marvin and Neville Brand bring extra 3-D menace to the gorgeous Arizona locations, and was the only 3-D movie by one-eyed Walsh.
JOHNNY GUITAR
Directed by Nicholas Ray
USA, 1954; 110 mins, in English
On the outskirts of town, the hard-nosed Vienna (Joan Crawford) owns a saloon frequented by the undesirables of the region, including Dancin' Kid (Scott Brady) and his gang. Another patron of Vienna's establishment is Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden), a former gunslinger and her lover. When a heist is pulled in town that results in a man's death, Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge), Vienna's rival, rallies the townsfolk to take revenge on Vienna's saloon -- even without proof of her wrongdoing.
RIDE LONESOME
Directed by Budd Boetticher
USA, 1959; 73 mins, in English
Mysterious motivations drive taciturn bounty hunter Ben Brigade (Randolph Scott) to capture a wanted murderer—but his quest is complicated when he is accosted by a pair of outlaws who have their own inscrutable reasons for riding along. Masterfully scripted by Burt Kennedy, who weaves a complex web of ambiguous loyalties and motives, and featuring supporting turns by genre icons James Coburn (in his film debut) and Lee Van Cleef, the first of the Ranown westerns to be shot in CinemaScope makes striking use of the enlarged frame—with a final shot that stands as perhaps the single most unforgettable image in the series.
ABOUT THE GUESTS
ABOUT HALSTED WELLES:
Halsted S Welles is an artist, place maker and the founder of HWA with a long and successful practice designing and building urban ecological spaces. He applies his knowledge of natural systems to bring balance to our built environments. More recently Welles has founded Systemthink LLC a collaborative organized by initiatives to create products for well-being. A fundamental precept is the urge to leave a project, a site, or life itself in a state to which one would wish to return.
A horticulturist by upbringing, sculptor and designer by training, Halsted S works at the intersection of natural and built systems. He studied at Yale University's School of Art and Architecture (BFA, MFA) and its School of Environmental Studies. As an undergraduate at Antioch College (BA), he worked for Fish and Wildlife in Michigan, Marine Fisheries in Maryland, and nurtured his taste for aesthetics with a year apprenticing to a sculptor in Paris.
The integration of art, design, horticulture and the well being of mankind present and future, manifests in all the work Halsted S produces. His art explores spaces between things and things within context. He loves the Biome as he loves his family.
In 2000 Welles received the Monuments Conservancy Perennial Wisdom Award for the human and moral values expressed in his design for a memorial to the 1915 - 1927 Armenian genocide. His professional views have been heard in lectures, critiques, consultations and classes; images of his work can be found in numerous publications.
ABOUT BOB RUBIN: Rubin has written about Pierre Chareau, Jean Prouvé, Alexander Calder, Buckminster Fuller, Reyner Banham, Richard Avedon, Allen Ginsberg, Glenn O'Brien, Jack Kerouac, Jeff Koons, and Richard Prince. He has contributed to Bookforum, Art in America, Cahiers d'Art, Le Monde, and Libération, as well as museum and gallery publications. He also curated the exhibitions Richard Prince: American Prayer (2011), and Avedon's France: Old World, New Look (2017), both at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, as well as Walkers: Hollywood Afterlives in Art and Artifact (2015) at the Museum of the Moving Image. His most recent book is Vanishing Point Forever (2024).
About the Sag Harbor Cinema
As a not-for-profit 501(c)3, community-based organization, Sag Harbor Cinema is dedicated to presenting the past, present and future of the Movies and to preserving and educating about films, filmmaking, and the film-going experience in its three state-of-the-art theaters. The Cinema engages its audiences and the community year-round through dialogue, discovery, and appreciation of the moving image – from blockbusters to student shorts and everything in between. Revitalized and reimagined through unprecedented community efforts to rebuild the iconic Main Street structure after a fire nearly destroyed it in 2016, SHC continues a long historic tradition of entertainment in the heart of Sag Harbor Village.