When
the Legend Becomes Legend
Nothing
on the screen has better dialogue than a
classic Western, and the best lines in Westerns
will stand up to anything Hollywood has written.
By
Dan Gagliasso
We
all remember them. John Wayne must have delivered
at least 20 memorable ones over his 50-year career
as America’s most popular film star. But
other actors—stars like Alan Ladd, Robert
Duvall, and Steve McQueen, and lesser-known supporting
actors—had them as well. Sometimes there
is more than one really good one—as is
the case in great Western films like The
Searchers, The Magnificent Seven, Hondo, and Lonesome
Dove.
They’re
the great Western film lines, sometimes taken
from equally well-written novels, but often conjured
up by talented screenwriters like James Warner
Bellah, Frank Nugent, Borden Chase, and James
Edward Grant, all of them with a real ear for
the West.
I’ve
said it before on these pages but it bears repeating
that I am nothing if not a traditionalist. So
if your taste runs to those silly Italian Westerns
of the 1960s (I know, I’m an Italian-descended
Westerner, but I still don’t like those
movies!), or the cynical foolishness of many
of the Westerns of the 1980s and 1990s, you won’t
find any such foolishness here.
What
you will see on this list are top-notch utterances
that
reflect the people and the times of the American
West. When a Western line of dialogue does
that, you know it’s enough to make even the most
lettuce-headed L.A.-type channel surfer stop,
prick his ears up, and give just a little grin...
Find
the rest of this exciting article and more by
subscribing to American
Cowboy magazine...
|
John
Wayne as Rooster Cogburn in True
Grit |
NEWS
PAPER EDITOR
"This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
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