
Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum also figure into this week's lineup.
Here’s our weekly overview of choice options for home-screen viewing. (Note: All times listed are Eastern.)
Navajo Joe (1966)
Just a few months after of unleashing his classic Django on the world, director Sergio Corbucci served up another enduringly popular Spaghetti Western, this one starring Burt Reynolds as a Navajo avenger on the trail of the outlaw gang that massacred his village. A personal favorite of Quentin Tarantino — who recycled part of the movie’s Ennio Morricore score for his own Kill Bill Vol. 2 — Navajo Joe often has been described as the most physically challenging role Reynolds has ever played. Indeed, during one particularly exciting action sequence, Reynolds bulldogs a guy right off his horse, then rolls down the hill with him. “And the horse rolled with us, too,” Reynolds told C&I last year. “Yeah, that was a pretty amazing sequence, wasn’t it?” Laughing, Reynolds added: “But, you know, they never were very big on using stunt doubles in those Spaghetti Westerns.” (12:20 pm Tuesday, Encore Westerns)
Hour of the Gun (1967)
James Garter took a ride on the dark side in director John Sturges’ revisionist western, a semi-sequel to the filmmaker’s earlier, more romanticized Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957). Long after the legendary 1881 shootout, Wyatt Earp (Garner) and buddy Doc Holliday (Jason Robards) continue to clash with Ike Clanton (Robert Ryan) and his murderous flunkies in and around Tombstone, Arizona. For Earp, the peacekeeping process devolves into a personal vendetta after Clanton's men maim one of his brothers, and kill another. Garner told Sturges biographer Glenn Lovell that he welcomed the chance to portray the iconic lawman as something more ambiguous than an untarnished hero: “I saw [Wyatt Earp] as a vigilante out for revenge. He was a guy taken with his own power, who nobody could defy. He had no qualms about shooting those boys… I think the movie’s as accurate on that as any that’s been done.” (12:10 pm Wednesday, Encore Westerns)
Five Card Stud (1968)
As much a murder mystery as a traditional western, director Henry Hathaway’s offbeat drama has Dean Martin cast as Van Morgan, an honest cowpoke who tries, and fails, to stop fellow poker players from lynching a card shark they catch cheating. Months later, Morgan returns to the scene of the crime after hearing that members of the lynch party are being murdered, one by one. Among the likely suspects: Nick Evers (Roddy McDowell), one of the lynch-party instigators, and Rev. Jonathan Rudd (Robert Mitchum), a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher. (7:10 pm Thursday, Encore Westerns)
Hondo (1953)
John Wayne is said to have ranked this gritty drama — director by John Farrow, father of Mia Farrow — as his personal favorite of all his westerns. And while his diehard fans might hold other Wayne classics in higher regard, there’s no denying that Hondo remains one of his most popular movies. (So popular, in fact, that it inspired a short-lived TV western of the same title in 1967 — with Ralph Taeger serving as a game but unsatisfying substitute for The Duke.) As Hondo Lane, an Indian scout, ex-gunfighter, and dispatch rider for the cavalry whose best friend is his mangy dog, Wayne plays the rugged loner as surprisingly sympathetic to the Native American cause, even while protecting a homesteader (Geraldine Page) and her young son (Lee Aaker) from their increasingly (but not unreasonably) hostile Apache neighbors. (1:30 pm Sunday, Sundance Channel)