Dialogue Of The Day: Hell Bent For Leather (1960).

Audie Murphy’s last seven films for Universal International, all produced by Gordon Kay, don’t get a lot of love. Not sure why. At their best, they’re tight little Westerns in the Ranown mold. At their worst, they’ve got Audie Murphy in them, which is good enough for me!

George Sherman’s Hell Bent For Leather (1960), the first of the seven, is excellent — and may be my favorite Murphy movie. It’s certainly worth another look if you haven’t seen it in a while. 

Janet (Felicia Farr): I used to love this country. Now it seems so ugly.

Clay Santell (Audie Murphy): It’s not the country. It’s some of the people who live in it.

Hard it believe that was written 60-something years ago. Sounds like today to me.

Read Full Post »

50s Western Dialogue Of The Day: No Name On The Bullet (1959).

Here’s a great little speech from No Name On The Bullet (1959), maybe Audie Murphy’s best picture. He plays a gun-for-hire who rides into town and creates a wave of paranoia — as everybody’s convinced he’s here to kill them.

John Gant (Audie Murphy): “Take two men. Say they have robbed and lied, and have never paid. The man whom one of them has robbed comes to me and says, ‘Kill that man who’s robbed me.’ And I kill him. The other man becomes ill and would die, except for a physician who returns him to health to rob and lie again. Who’s the villain in this piece? Me or the physician?”

Read Full Post »

50s Western Dialogue Of The Day: Last Train From Gun Hill (1959).

Over at my other blog, I’ve had this Dialogue Of The Day thing going for a while and have been meaning to start it up over here. The dialogue in these movies is often so rich, this should be a lot of fun.

To kick things off, here’s some tough stuff from Kirk Douglas in Last Train From Gun Hill (1959), which they say Dalton Trumbo helped write.

Matt Morgan (Kirk Douglas): “I know an old man who’d like to kill you, Belden — the Indian way: slow. That’s how I’m gonna do it: slow — but the white man’s way. First you stand trial. That takes a fair amount of time, and you’ll do a lot of sweating! Then they’ll sentence ya. I never seen a man who didn’t get sick to his stomach when he heard the kind of sentence you’ll draw. After that you’ll sit in a cell and wait, maybe for months, thinking how that rope will feel around your neck. Then they’ll come around, some cold morning, just before sun-up. They’ll tie your arms behind you. You’ll start blubbering, kicking, yelling for help. But it won’t do you any good. They’ll drag you out in the yard, heave you up on that platform, fix that rope around your neck and leave you out there all alone with a big black hood over your eyes. You know the last sound you hear? Kind of a thump when they kick the trapdoor catch — and down you go. You’ll hit the end of that rope like a sack of potatoes, all dead weight. It’ll be white hot around your neck and your Adam’s Apple will turn to mush. You’ll fight for your breath, but you haven’t got any breath. Your brain will begin to boil. You’ll scream and holler! But nobody’ll hear you. You’ll hear it. But nobody else. Finally you’re just swingin’ there — all alone and dead.”

Read Full Post »