Word: frontierisms
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...World According to Garp is mostly about the true final frontier--human sexuality, the hysteria and madness and cool fun and hot passions therein...
Masterson's namesake of television is William Barclay "Bat" Masterson. The original Bat Masterson was a frontier lawman fabled for his panache as a dresser and highstakes gambler. Born in Iroquois County, Ill. in 1853, Masterson became deputy sheriff of notorious Dodge City, followed the gold rush prospectors to Deadwood, S.D., and then went to enforce the law at aptly named Tombstone, Ariz. at the behest of Marshall Wyatt Earp. Masterson closed out his career as a sportswriter for the New York Telegraph...
...West (Soprano Carol Neblett, Tenor Placido Domingo, Baritone Sherrill Milnes; Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Zubin Mehta, conductor; Deutsche Grammophon; 3 LPs). Fanciulla (1910) is a second-rate Italian opera comically posing as a shoot-'em-up thriller. Neblett makes a dramatic frontier heroine. Domingo, as her lover, sings everyone else under the bar, and Milnes is dashingly villainous. With Mehta in the saddle, chorus and orchestra ride smartly home...
This scene lasts only two or three minutes, yet, like the movie as a whole, it fatally undermines the American romantic vision of the frontier West. Carradine's half-drawn gun technically fulfills the requirements of frontier etiquette, but it's a false fulfillment--a fraud. And so, Altman is suggesting, are the conventions of the Western. Justice didn't triumph on the frontier, brutality and greed did, and that's the real story of the growth of America...
...Altman has rendered ludicrous some overused Hollywood techniques of establishing mood and tone, he has developed and refined others. His use of color is particularly striking. The monochromatic brown shading of McCabe and Mrs. Miller conveys the cold bleakness of the northwestern frontier, and the blue tones of The Long Goodbye are appropriate to the twilight world inhabited by Philip Marlowe. Perhaps Altman's most effective, moving use of color to establish mood is in Thieves Like Us (1974), a beautiful, elegiac story of innocent young love in the Depression-era South. He saturates his images with green and yellow...