The Packard Campus’ month of off-beat Westerns–“Off the Beaten Trail”–continues this Thursday and Friday with these two films.
Thursday, July 20 @ 7:30pm
“Buck and the Preacher” (Columbia, 1972)
Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte helped rewrite the history of the western, bringing Black heroes to a genre in which they had previously been sorely underrepresented. Combining boisterous buddy comedy with blistering, Black Power–era political fury, Poitier and a marvelously mischievous Belafonte star as a tough and taciturn wagon master and an unscrupulous, pistol-packing “preacher.” (Color, 102 minutes.)
Friday, July 21 @ 7:30pm
“Johnny Guitar” (Republic, 1954)
“There is really no other film quite like it. It is an intense, unconventional, stylized picture, full of ambiguities and subtexts that rendered it extremely modern. ”—Martin Scorsese. Joan Crawford is at her steely best as Vienna, an enterprising businesswoman who has opened a casino on the outskirts of a small town. Sterling Hayden plays Johnny Guitar, a guitar-slinging former gunman and Vienna’s old flame. But it’s Mercedes McCambridge (the voice in “The Exorcist”) who steals the film as an insanely powerful woman who wants Vienna dead. Director Nicholas Ray’s (“Rebel Without a Cause”) mastery of genre mechanics is on full display here, even as he deploys those mechanisms in service of unprecedented thematic and stylistic interventions. (Color, 110 minutes.)
For more information on LC screenings, see this link.