Michael R. Pitts

A reference book with almost all of the western movies. Less useful in the time of internet databases, but if you are a fan of the genre it's still nice to have all the information together.

An alternative to this book is "The Encyclopedia of Westerns" by Herb Fagen. However, Fagen's book is less comprehensive, with 3500 movies vs the 5000 in this book. That may matter to you if you are interested in very obscure movies, but for more mainstream ones you will find them in both. Also, Pitts' book is a bit more recent (2012 vs 2003). And also, this book has the complete cast for each movie, rather than the most important actors, if that matters to you.

The advantage Fagen's book has over this one is that the entries for each movie are more complete, particularly for important movies. In the Encyclopedia of Westerns you get some interesting trivia, while in "Western Movies" you just get an one-sentence synopsis and one-sentence opinion. Because of that, this book is less entertaining to browse around.… (más)

This listing of recordings made by motion picture performers primarily focuses on album recordings. These include long-playing [LP] records, original cast albums, soundtrack albums, compilation LPs, and spoken word recordings. In some listings, selected 45 rpm recordings are included, but they do not purport to be a complete listing of the performer’s 45 rpm recordings. The discography listings are alphabetical according to the performer’s last name. Sprinkled throughout the listings are photographs of some of the performers.

In some cases [think Judy Garland or Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra], readers will recognize the many recordings listed, but others [think Steve McQueen or Jay Silverheels or Lana Turner] may surprise them. No matter how well-acquainted readers believe themselves to be with a particular performer, there are sure to be a few surprises waiting to be discovered within the pages of this book.

Highly recommended.… (más)

Western Movies: A Guide to 5,105 Feature Films delivers what it promises: paragraph-long entries on 5,105 Westerns, each listing the title, release date, run time, director, writer, and cast, along with a one-sentence plot synopsis and a one-sentence evaluation. The entries take up 412 three-column pages, and the name index takes up 58 five-column pages printed in even smaller type. Sandwiched between the two are a half-page appendix listing the names of Western stars’ horses, a page-and-a-half appendix listing the screen names of actors who worked under more than one, and a scattershot “Selected Bibliography.”

Pitts defines his scholarly territory succinctly—any extant film, available for public viewing in some form, that depicts life on the North American frontier or has a generically “Western” plot—and covers it exhaustively. Western Movies catalogs obscure serials, made-for-television films, foreign productions, and hybrid-genre pictures as well as familiar classics like Stagecoach, Red River, Shane and Unforgiven. There are, inevitably, omissions—Sukiyaki Western Django, for example, and Back to the Future, part III—but they are balanced by Pitts’ inclusion of thematically “Western” films set outside the genre’s traditional boundaries of time and place: Drums Along the Mohawk (Colonial-era upstate New York), The Yearling (rural Florida, circa 1900), Bad Day at Black Rock (post-WWII California), and Ned Kelly (nineteenth-century Australia).

Pitts preference for classic Westerns over modern ones, though never explicitly articulated, is evident in his critical judgments of individual films. He praises many of the short, stylized “B” features made to fill the bottoms of double bills in the 1940s and early 1950s, and tersely dismisses most of the genre’s post-1960 landmarks—The Wild Bunch, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and Unforgiven, for example—as overly violent, overlong, or simply overrated. His description of the 2010 remake of True Grit as a “well-photographed box office success” feels like praising with faint damns. Pitts’ judgment is consistent in its idiosyncrasy, however, and most readers will find it easy enough to compare his taste to theirs and embrace or discount his judgments accordingly.

Even for movie fans whose judgments match up with the author’s, however, the books is of little use in answering the question: “What should I watch next?” The plot summaries, far shorter than the back-cover blurb on a DVD case, are too terse to give the reader any real feel for the film, and the critical judgments are akin to the capsule reviews in a newspaper or magazine. Three-quarters of a typical entry is simply an authoritative summary of the film’s credits: information now readily available online. The entries—all 5,105 of them—are simply listed alphabetically, with no categorization or analytical indexing (even in appendices, as in the Videohound guides) that would allow a user to sift out Westerns by decade, setting, or theme.

Western Movies is, in the end, a reference book in the strictest and narrowest sense: a book designed to be consulted, rather than read, by users seeking a brief, authoritative shot of data on a film whose exact title they already know. Fans of the Western who relish the idea of such a book should certainly buy this one. Like the final print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica or the Oxford English Dictionary, it is the last, highly refined expression of a type of work whose day has passed.… (más)