Cliff Robertson RIP

[che2000]

News on the BBC that the actor Cliff Robertson passed away on 10th September. For genre fans his most noteworthy roles were in such classic sf television shows as The Twilight Zone and the Outer Limits as well as playing Uncle Ben in Spiderman 1 & 2. But his best known sf/ fantasy appearance was probably in the movie Charly, for which he won an Oscar, based upon Daniel Keyes' novel (and short story) Flowers For Algernon.

Me, I liked him in Robert Aldrich's powerful anti-war movie Too Late the Hero, where he appeared alongside Henry Fonda and Michael Caine (as well as a whole slew of great British character actors, Harry Andrews and Ian Bannen, Lance Percival and the very cool and excellent Japanese actor Ken Takakura.)

[John M. Whalen]

Charly. The screenplay was by my man Stirling Silliphant. One of the many great ones he wrote. Cliff Robertson's other sci-fi credit include his part in Escape from Los Angeles, where he played the President. He'll be missed.

[Jaqhama]

Cliff was a great actor, starred in some great movies. The Devil's Brigade is one of my favourites.
Like the three of us have said before...there's no one replacing the superb actors we grew up with.
I'm guessing Clint Eastwood may well be the last of the actors we so admire. Is there anyone else left?

James Garner and Sean Connery I guess..anyone else?
I always think of them together, because Garner was in Duel at Diablo and Connery was in Shalako...very similar westerns. They even wore the same style of clothes.

Here's a great tribute to men and women who starred in The Professionals...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW4TQPm6fFw

Man, I love that movie.
Western author James Benteen based his Neal Fargo character on Lee Marvin's Rico. And Ben Hass, writing as John Benteen wrote the best westerns I've ever read. His Sundance series is good, his Fargo series is even better.

[che2000]

It's sad that the western has (largely) gone the way of the dodo, both in print and on screen, it's even getting harder to find western titles in second hand and remainder shops. I know that some are still being printed in the USA and Uk but these seem to be mostly specialist titles from people like Black Horse and not the mass market paperbacks I remember from my youth (fond memories of GG Gilman).

Still, there are odd gems to be stumbled across - a couple of years ago I found a novel called .44 by HA DeRosso in a local remainder shop and, man, is that a good book, so much so that it prompted me to track down DeRossa's back catalogue online. He only wrote a few novels and a bunch of short stories in the genre but they are some of the best that the western has to offer (I reckons). Short hand version: sorta like a sagebrush Jim Thompson, lean, lyrical and deeply pessimistic - I would compare .44 to Thompson's Savage Night in terms of its visceral power.

And, of course, the genre will raise its head on occasions on screen - The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, comes to mind as does the recent True Grit remake (although arguably both films owe more to mainstream 'art' cinema than, say, John Ford or Budd Boetticher) and certainly the days are gone when journeymen actors and directors could cut their teeth on low-budget 'oaters'.

Makes one feel a little old, dunnit?

[Jaqhama]

Makes me feel glad I grew up when I did.

We've been fortunate to know the very best of movies, TV series and novels.

I keep hoping that the pulp fiction books we read as young men might make a come back via ebooks. But probably not.

Blackhorse westerns are mainly found in libraries only now, even Blackhorse says that.

I'm just re-reading the entire Simon R Green Deathstalker saga. If you haven't read the series you owe it to yourself to do so. It's an epic sword and sorcery/mad science/psi-force/space western/space opera/horror/action/adventure gem.
The Book Depository has the whole series, complete with the old style front covers for very cheap prices. It's one of the few SF series written in recent times that has all the flair and pulpy goodness of earlier era SF stuff.

[che2000]

I know that one of the big UK publishers (I'm not entirely sure which one, Gollancz maybe) is planning to reissue a huge back catalogue of sf and fantasy in ebook form quite soon, so a lot of well respected but sadly out of print authors will be available again, albeit in digitised form. No word of any westerns, though, so I'll keep those old Picadilly Cowboys paperbacks close to hand.

My local library has literally hundreds of Black Horse titles and, from what little I know, they do rather well in that particular market, so somewhere there must still be an audience for such tales (ain't nobody gonna get rich writing westerns these days though).