Here at Frontierado Headquarters we’re doing a mini-marathon of the holiday’s Top Three films for today. Below are my reviews of those three which are perfect for Frontierado (August 7th this year.):
NUMBER ONE
Top Frontierado Movie
SILVERADO (1985) – I’ve never made any secret about how Silverado is, to me, THE official movie of the Frontierado holiday. The film has all the high spirits and family appeal of Star Wars plus the well-choreographed action scenes of Raiders of the Lost Ark. On top of that Silverado features all the highly stylized gunplay of the best Spaghetti Westerns but NOT the mud, blood, sweat and brutality of that genre.
This movie is pure escapism and features the kind of preternaturally accurate gunslingers that I jokingly describe as “Jedi Knights in the Olllld West”. These guys (as well as most of the villains) can literally shoot the needles off a cactus, simultaneously draw and shoot with pin-point accuracy and can just “sense” when some low-down hombre might be pulling a gun on them, even with their backs turned and from half a room away. Continue reading
AH TOY – This Chinese American woman rose to notoriety in the San Francisco sex trade of the 1800s. Yes, Frontierado is about the myth of the Old West, not the grinding reality but I’ve never done a blog post specifically about a Madame of the time period. It’s a fine line to walk and I want to make it clear that this item is more of a True Crime story than anything like an adventure. 
TWENTY-SIX MEN (1957-1959) – This television series ran for two seasons and 78 half-hour episodes. It dramatized the early years of the Arizona Rangers, who were established on March 21st, 1901, and for years consisted of just 26 men. Stories were based on the Arizona Rangers case files.
THE RECRUIT – In this 1st episode of the series, Captain Rynning and Clint Travis receive an emergency telegram from a newspaper editor in Wilcox, Arizona. They ride there, but find the editor has been lynched, so they set about investigating what happened. With Don Haggerty as Big Red Monahan.
HUGH ANDERSON – Born in 1851, Hugh was the son of a successful Texas rancher. Anderson learned every aspect of the business from his father but had a tendency to fall in with rowdy crowds and sometimes engaged in hell-raising with mad dog gunfighter John Wesley Hardin. 
SARTANA: For the record, the Sartana movies starring Gianni Garko as the gambler-gunslinger are my favorites. His personality is a bit lighter than that of my top favorite Spaghetti Western gunslinger –
The Sartana movies start out pretty grounded (for Spaghetti Westerns) but as the franchise goes along the installments grow closer to Robert Conrad’s Wild, Wild West series and our hero’s trick guns almost equal James Bond’s gadgets. Sartana himself stops just short of being a swashbuckler as he boldly tweaks the villains with more and more audacity. 
IF YOU MEET SARTANA … PRAY FOR YOUR DEATH (1968) – Sartana shadows a gold shipment being handled by stagecoach across the desert in one of the most distinctive Spaghetti Western entrances this side of Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West. From there, the double-crosses fly like shrapnel among the main characters. 
CIMARRON ROSE DUNN – Poco wrote a song about her. She appears in a 1915 Silent Film about Oklahoma Outlaws. She’s often mistakenly believed to be the subject of the 1952 western The Rose of Cimarron. And it’s not even certain if that’s really her in one of the alleged surviving photos of her. Rose Dunn may embody the embellishments that fight with the truth when it comes to various figures from the Old West. 
JOHNNY RINGO (1959) – Don Durant starred as the one and only Johnny Ringo, the real-life gunslinger. The fictional setting of this program takes place between Johnny’s original rise to fame during the Mason County War in Texas and his final years in Arizona as part of the Clanton-McLaury Crime Faction led by Curly Bill Brocius. Aaron Spelling was the producer.
IRISH NELLIE CASHMAN – Nellie Cashman was born Ellen O’Kissane in 1845. Sometime between 185o and 1852 her family moved to Boston, where the ambitious young woman was later working as a bellhop at Boston hotels. During the U.S. Civil War Nellie did some spying for the Union cause, following which she and her family moved to San Francisco in 1866. 
Irish Nellie used part of her growing fortune to finance the Sisters of Saint Anne. When snowstorms trapped dozens of gold seekers in the Cassiar Mountains in a series of avalanches, Irish Nellie heard that Canadian authorities were advising against rescue attempts due to how dangerous the Cassiars were. 
THE STEAM MAN OF THE PRAIRIES (1868) – Written by Edward Sylvester Ellis. Before the Frank Reade stories came this work that is often hailed as the first Dime Novel with a science fiction theme. 
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