-
Seasonal Offer:
This title is part of our Seasonal Offers promotion.
| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £1.05
Trade in 100 Westerns (BFI Screen Guides) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £1.05, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Special Offers and Product Promotions
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
The Western is one of Hollywood cinema's most potent and enduring genres, bound up with America's understanding of itself as a frontier nation. Ed Buscombe provides an illuminating guide to a hundred key films of the genre, from "Bad Day at Black Rock" to "The Wild Bunch", to "Butch Cassidy" and the "Sundance Kid", "A Fistful of Dollars", "The Searchers" and "The Magnificent Seven". Each entry includes a plot synopsis, major credits, and a commentary on the film's significance and its production and exhibition history. Ed Buscombe's introduction to the volume addresses the perennial appeal of the Western, exploring as an element of nineteenth century popular culture, and examining its relationship to the economic structure of Hollywood.He considers the defining features of the Western - the concept of the frontier and the key role of masculinity - and traces its main cycles, from the epic Westerns of the 1920s and singing cowboys of the 1930s to the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s and its marked decline from the 1970s. He also discusses the contribution of major auteurs such as Ford, Mann, Peckinpah, Leone and Eastwood.
About the Author
Edward Buscombe is the editor of The BFI Companion to Western and has written on Stagecoach, The Searchers and The Unforgiven in the BFI Film Classics series. His most recent book is Cinema Today, published by Phaidon.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
This is an excellent critique of the twentieth century cinematic artform known as Westerns. Apart from the efforts of Clint Eastwood, it is an artform now almost lost in the last twenty years. As such those captured here are the best from that genre as a body of work now entire to be considered. Anyone over fifty has probaly seen most of these, either at the cinema or re-runs on TV, but so out of favour is the form that they rarely turn up on the latter nowadays (check out Channel 4 and Film Four timetables.).
This work is easily accessible to anyone with a working knowledge of most Westerns held to be the foremost examples of the style. The writer has thrown in a few personal favourites and links many together to show the development of the form, as well as asking the reader to reconsider the merits of films considered routine at the time of their release.
So all the greats are here fom Stagecoach, Spaghetti westerns and Randolph Scott! (Check out Blazing Saddles).Best of all it is a wonderful list that can be the basis of a collection that Amazon can fulfil for the most part to relive these fine films once again.
As with all such lists one may quibble with some selections and the omission of others. So versatile was the form almost any tale could be set in the West without being considered to be a Western(Where are Cat Ballou (Comedy?) and Blood on the Moon (Film Noir?)? Everyone has their personal favourites, but this book does make the reader think about each film and try to have you re-run them to at least consider the writer's contentions.
Definitely a page turner with equal space to each of those listed. There is probably no better guide to the best westerns.
Well Done to BFI for publishing this (Check out their book 100 Film Noir).
This work is easily accessible to anyone with a working knowledge of most Westerns held to be the foremost examples of the style. The writer has thrown in a few personal favourites and links many together to show the development of the form, as well as asking the reader to reconsider the merits of films considered routine at the time of their release.
So all the greats are here fom Stagecoach, Spaghetti westerns and Randolph Scott! (Check out Blazing Saddles).Best of all it is a wonderful list that can be the basis of a collection that Amazon can fulfil for the most part to relive these fine films once again.
As with all such lists one may quibble with some selections and the omission of others. So versatile was the form almost any tale could be set in the West without being considered to be a Western(Where are Cat Ballou (Comedy?) and Blood on the Moon (Film Noir?)? Everyone has their personal favourites, but this book does make the reader think about each film and try to have you re-run them to at least consider the writer's contentions.
Definitely a page turner with equal space to each of those listed. There is probably no better guide to the best westerns.
Well Done to BFI for publishing this (Check out their book 100 Film Noir).
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2 reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
A Useful But Not Essential Guide For Western Fans
18 Oct 2009
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Buscombe has selected "100 Westerns" for this British Film Institute compilation of westerns from the silent era to those of today (few that there may now be). Each of the 100 entries includes a brief synopsis, the major film credits, and his personal comments on the film's historical or cultural significance and/or its influence on the genre. As a long time fan of the American West and of the Western, I read the volume with interest and while I wouldn't disagree much on Buscombe's commentaries which I found mainly congruent with most of the film critiques out there, I would disagree with his choice of the 100.
To be fair, the author points out that he tried to include a broad representaion of the Western genre including foreign, silent, and at least one from every decade since movies began. And in all honesty, any two western critics would never replicate one another's list precisely. That being said, I question the inclusion of "Oh, Susanna!", "Go West", "Lonesome Cowboys", "Calamity Jane" and "Support Your Local Sheriff" while excluding the acknowledged contributions of "The Virginian", "Tombstone", "Cheyenne Autumn", "The Ox-Bow Incident", "Jesse James",and "Lonesome Dove".
There are insightful comments regarding the directorial giants of the Western genre including John Ford, Howard Hawks, Sam Peckinpah, Anthony Mann, and Budd Boetticher but too little for my taste. To exclude some of their significant works from his top 100 seems a self defeating scheme to subsitute breadth of the genre for depth of the genre.
But this work is recommended to the reader who is either researching the American Western or the casual reader who remembers the fun of going to the movies while growing up to see bigger than life cowboys modeling good versus evil for our impressionable minds--and for those of us, who still revel in those films and those memories.
To be fair, the author points out that he tried to include a broad representaion of the Western genre including foreign, silent, and at least one from every decade since movies began. And in all honesty, any two western critics would never replicate one another's list precisely. That being said, I question the inclusion of "Oh, Susanna!", "Go West", "Lonesome Cowboys", "Calamity Jane" and "Support Your Local Sheriff" while excluding the acknowledged contributions of "The Virginian", "Tombstone", "Cheyenne Autumn", "The Ox-Bow Incident", "Jesse James",and "Lonesome Dove".
There are insightful comments regarding the directorial giants of the Western genre including John Ford, Howard Hawks, Sam Peckinpah, Anthony Mann, and Budd Boetticher but too little for my taste. To exclude some of their significant works from his top 100 seems a self defeating scheme to subsitute breadth of the genre for depth of the genre.
But this work is recommended to the reader who is either researching the American Western or the casual reader who remembers the fun of going to the movies while growing up to see bigger than life cowboys modeling good versus evil for our impressionable minds--and for those of us, who still revel in those films and those memories.
4 of 9 people found the following review helpful
pretty good guide..........
26 Aug 2007
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Discusions of 100 western films is entertaining and a useful reference. If I would have picked 100, I might have included a few not included in this volume, but hey, anything that talks western movies is OK with me.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Music, Stage & Screen > Film > Criticism & Theory
- Books > Music, Stage & Screen > Film > Film Genres > Westerns
- Books > Music, Stage & Screen > Film > Guides & Reference
- Books > Music, Stage & Screen > Film > Production & Technology > Direction & Production
- Books > Music, Stage & Screen > Performing Arts
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Communication Studies > Media Studies
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
