Michael R. Pitts

This listing of recordings made by motion picture performers primarily focuses on album recordings. These include long-playing [LP] records, original cast albums, soundtrack albums, compilation LPs, and spoken word recordings. In some listings, selected 45 rpm recordings are included, but they do not purport to be a complete listing of the performer’s 45 rpm recordings. The discography listings are alphabetical according to the performer’s last name. Sprinkled throughout the listings are photographs of some of the performers.

In some cases [think Judy Garland or Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra], readers will recognize the many recordings listed, but others [think Steve McQueen or Jay Silverheels or Lana Turner] may surprise them. No matter how well-acquainted readers believe themselves to be with a particular performer, there are sure to be a few surprises waiting to be discovered within the pages of this book.

Highly recommended.… (mer)

Western Movies: A Guide to 5,105 Feature Films delivers what it promises: paragraph-long entries on 5,105 Westerns, each listing the title, release date, run time, director, writer, and cast, along with a one-sentence plot synopsis and a one-sentence evaluation. The entries take up 412 three-column pages, and the name index takes up 58 five-column pages printed in even smaller type. Sandwiched between the two are a half-page appendix listing the names of Western stars’ horses, a page-and-a-half appendix listing the screen names of actors who worked under more than one, and a scattershot “Selected Bibliography.”

Pitts defines his scholarly territory succinctly—any extant film, available for public viewing in some form, that depicts life on the North American frontier or has a generically “Western” plot—and covers it exhaustively. Western Movies catalogs obscure serials, made-for-television films, foreign productions, and hybrid-genre pictures as well as familiar classics like Stagecoach, Red River, Shane and Unforgiven. There are, inevitably, omissions—Sukiyaki Western Django, for example, and Back to the Future, part III—but they are balanced by Pitts’ inclusion of thematically “Western” films set outside the genre’s traditional boundaries of time and place: Drums Along the Mohawk (Colonial-era upstate New York), The Yearling (rural Florida, circa 1900), Bad Day at Black Rock (post-WWII California), and Ned Kelly (nineteenth-century Australia).

Pitts preference for classic Westerns over modern ones, though never explicitly articulated, is evident in his critical judgments of individual films. He praises many of the short, stylized “B” features made to fill the bottoms of double bills in the 1940s and early 1950s, and tersely dismisses most of the genre’s post-1960 landmarks—The Wild Bunch, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and Unforgiven, for example—as overly violent, overlong, or simply overrated. His description of the 2010 remake of True Grit as a “well-photographed box office success” feels like praising with faint damns. Pitts’ judgment is consistent in its idiosyncrasy, however, and most readers will find it easy enough to compare his taste to theirs and embrace or discount his judgments accordingly.

Even for movie fans whose judgments match up with the author’s, however, the books is of little use in answering the question: “What should I watch next?” The plot summaries, far shorter than the back-cover blurb on a DVD case, are too terse to give the reader any real feel for the film, and the critical judgments are akin to the capsule reviews in a newspaper or magazine. Three-quarters of a typical entry is simply an authoritative summary of the film’s credits: information now readily available online. The entries—all 5,105 of them—are simply listed alphabetically, with no categorization or analytical indexing (even in appendices, as in the Videohound guides) that would allow a user to sift out Westerns by decade, setting, or theme.

Western Movies is, in the end, a reference book in the strictest and narrowest sense: a book designed to be consulted, rather than read, by users seeking a brief, authoritative shot of data on a film whose exact title they already know. Fans of the Western who relish the idea of such a book should certainly buy this one. Like the final print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica or the Oxford English Dictionary, it is the last, highly refined expression of a type of work whose day has passed.… (mer)

"Western Movies: A Guide to 5,105 Feature Films" by Michael R. Pitts (McFarland) can certainly be described as exhaustive. It includes listings for any western film you can think of, as well as many you might not even think of as western films. Some of them have titles like “Quebec” and “Harpoon.” Remember the 1983 movie "Never Cry Wolf" about a scientist who spends a winter in a remote area of Alaska to study wolves? That's in here.

Although the title mentions "feature films," Pitts lists movies that were made for television, including those Hallmark Channel romances like "Loves Comes Softly." We find musicals like "Naughty Marietta" and "The Harvey Girls," plus such films as "The Sugarland Express" set in more contemporary times. There are movies we might regard as science fiction, like "Westworld" and "Alien Encounters," plus some Charlie Chan and Bowery Boys movies.

There is even a Cary Grant movie. Didn't know Cary Grant ever made a western? Turns out it is "The Howards of Virginia," a 1940 Revolutionary War drama. Other westerns are set in equally unlikely places, such as Hawaii, Africa and Europe.

So I am not sure how Pitts defines "western," but I am not sure how I would define it either, and better a definition that's too broad than one that's too narrow.

Pitts skimps a bit in summarizing the plots of these 5,105 movies, and a rating system might be helpful, but he does list every cast member, including the bit players. Using the index one can discover that the actors making the most western movies were not heroes like John Wayne and Tom Mix, but people you've probably never heard of like Steve Clark and Tom London.

With a little digging, fans of western movies can discover all sorts of intriguing trivia. Did you know Roy Rogers made two westerns under the name Dick Weston? (I can remember once seeing Rogers play a villain in an early Gene Autry movie.) People, other than Cary Grant, you might never expect to find in a western include Louise Brooks (she made two near the end of her career, including one with John Wayne), Audrey Hepburn, Henny Youngman and Hugh Hefner.

In one appendix, Pitts even lists the names of many of the movie cowboys' horses. Do you remember that Rex Allen's horse was named Koko? Do you even remember Rex Allen? For those who do (and for almost anyone else who enjoys western movies), this book will be a treasure.… (mer)