Richard Lutz ploughs through the tv listings to unearth the film gems you should watch this week

‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’

Well, that quote about sums up the intrigue of the myth of the old west; of cowboys, shootouts in the dust, lonely ranchers, bad guys and good guys.

It is so ingrained in the American soul that one of the first ‘movies’ to be made  commericially was The Great Train Robbery (1903) that was actually produced in staid old New Jersey, near New York

So to the legend. And on tv in Britain this week (sorry, Americans, you’ll have to put up with this), there is a monumental film that is part of the cowboy iconography along with another  beauty that helps dismantle the rough and ready legend.

First stop is Gunfight at the OK Corral from 1957  (Mon; 16.20, Film 4). The historical bust-up took 30 seconds. The one you see on a 40 foot screen with Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and a young Dennis Hopper took four days to slap down on celluloid. That’s Hollywood. the legend is fact.

I saw it with my dad and younger brother Bill in the drive in. A black and white film that had Kirk Douglas and his famous chin coughing his guts out as a TB-ridden Doc Holliday.  This movie, directed by John Sturges, is a stark gem of good v bad. But hardly fact. Burt is Wyatt Earp taking on the evil Clanton gang. Kirk helps out despite his terminal illness and his kinship with the bottle. It betters all the previous and future attempts to sum up this tawdry little episode that evolved into the myth- the legend that ‘was printed.’

The screenplay was written by Leon Uris (he also wrote Exodus and many other big time novels) and watch out for names you might want to pick out in minor roles:  Lee Van Cleef (later in some great Clint movies), deForest Kelley (Bones the doctor in Star Trek), the aforesaid Dennis Hopper and Jo van Fleet later seen as Paul Newman’s dying mother in Cool Hand Luke.

Talking about fact and legend: the actual Clanton gang were so upset at the fatal shoot-out by Wyatt Earp, the survivors  didn’t ride into the dark looking for vengeance but brought murder charges agianst the lawmen. They lost.

Now….on to a film that untangles the cowboy story. And it looks as if someone in the bowels of the Film4 office must have had a thinking cap on: for exactly 24 hours after the above film comes The Electric Horseman (Tues, 16.20, Film4).

The Tough Guy has been reduced from a rodeo star to a walking advertisement who has to get all glammed up to sell a breakfast cereal in Las Vegas. Instead of eating dust and wearing chaps, he is forced to wear a dude ranch outfit decorated with electric lights. The west, says this movie, is dead.

Robert Redford stars as the cowboy who rebels against his corporate bosses (the Clanton gang in 3 piece suits) and takes off for the great outdoors when his finds his evil paymasters are drugging the racehorse that accompanies him on his cereal nonsense. By the way he takes the horse too- that remnant of the dead west,. In other words, Redford rides out to find a legend that has been altered to non-recognition.

Good roles for Jane Fonda and singer Willie Nelson in this, a film about how the legend turned into money making tv fodder. Will Redford find the west? Will his horse be able to roam free on the plains and mountains (that ironically were stolen anyway by white settlers) and will Jane Fonda, not as a stoic ranch woman  but as a tv reporter, hitch up with modern day icon Redford as the west slowly dies?

Sydney Pollack directs and that means it’s a good film with lots of undertones.  Electric Horseman was made 2 decades after the Burt/Kirk movie  and kills stone dead the OK Corral and other dusty legends that were seen as a cornerstone of American culture..