We have recommendations ranging from a fascinating documentary about Navajo Police training to classics starring Clint Eastwood and Kirk Douglas.
With so many options available now on cable, streaming platforms, digital networks, and broadcast television, you might spend more time searching for something to watch than actually watching anything. So we decided to introduce a weekly guide to nudge you toward some of the best programming of special interest to C&I readers. Here are some highlights for Oct. 23-29. Happy viewing.
Pick of the Week: Navajo Police: Class 57
While you’re waiting for Season 3 of Dark Winds, the highly acclaimed crime drama starring Zahn McClarnon as Lt. Joe Leaphorn, and streaming the first two seasons on AMC+ only increases your appetite for more stories about Indigenous peacekeepers, we heartily recommend this three-part documentary focused on a group of recruits at the Navajo Police Training Academy. We follow the hopefuls, known collectively as Class 57, as they undergo arduous physical and emotional training over the course of a year while they prepare for what might seem like a true mission impossible: Enforcing the law and protecting the citizenry in the Navajo Nation, the largest Indian reservation in the United States, with a landmass the size of West Virginia and a population of over 190,000 people. The newbies will have their work cut out for them: The Navajo Police Department (NPD) has just 180 police officers, and the attrition rate is estimated at 50 percent.
Available on Max.
Movies
Blood on the Moon (1948): Arguably more film noir than horse opera, this dark and moody Western from filmmaker Robert Wise (whose credits range from editing Citizen Kane to directing The Sound of Music) finds Robert Mitchum perfectly cast as Jim Garry, a strapping young drifter who finds himself smack dab in the middle of a conflict between cattle owners and homesteaders. Robert Preston co-stars as Tate Riling, Garry’s smooth-talking frenemy, who wants our hero to join him in forcing a rancher to sell his herd below market value. Complications arise, as they always do in movies like this, when Garry falls for the rancher’s beautiful daughter (Barbara Bel Geddes, decades before she assumed the role of matriarch Ellie Ewing in TV’s Dallas).
October 26 at 6:30 pm ET on TCM.
Man Without a Star (1955): Dempsey Rae (Kirk Douglas) is the title character, a straight-shooting drifter who lacks both a lawman’s badge and a clear sense of direction as he wanders into a range war between an unscrupulous lady rancher (Jeanne Crain) bent on taking over all the open range in Wyoming, and owners of smaller spreads who must use barbed wire to protect grazing land for their own herds. Rae hates barbed wire, lusts for the lady rancher — and serves as mentor for a novice cowpuncher (William Campbell) who proves to be an all-too-apt pupil when Rae teaches him how to handle a gun. Douglas smoothly runs the gamut from smug stud (the movie indicates he’s getting more than cash as compensation from Crain’s amoral rancher) to psychologically (and physically) scarred misanthropist to, inevitably, reluctant defender of underdogs.
October 28 at 12:53 pm ET on Starz Encore Westerns.
Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Josey Wales
The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976): It was the movie Clint Eastwood had to make, before the impassive persona he created through the Sergio Leone films and his other signature character, Dirty Harry, became a typecasting trap. In his 1976 book The Filming of the West, movie historian Jon Tuska predicted that Eastwood’s career likely didn’t have staying power. That same year, The Outlaw Josey Wales introduced a new type of Eastwood character: Still quiet, still deadly, but also compassionate and emotionally vulnerable. The title describes how society will judge Josey Wales — an outlaw only by circumstance — but when his quest is complete, he returns to being the farmer Josey Wales in a scene that offers hope for the future.
October 27 at 9 pm ET on INSP.
Quigley Down Under (1990): Under the confident yet unobtrusive direction of Simon Wincer (Lonesome Dove), Tom Selleck gives one of his finest performances as Matthew Quigley, a sharpshooting good guy who makes the mistake of answering a help-wanted ad by a truth-twisting bad guy (Alan Rickman of Die Hard), a wicked Australian rancher who wants to annihilate Aboriginal people with fair claim on the villain’s land. When Quigley refuses to cooperate, the rancher’s men take our hero and a half-crazed heroine (Laura San Giancomo) out into the Outback, and leave them to die. Not surprisingly, Quigley doesn’t take kindly to this.
October 28 at 9 pm ET on INSP.
Sommersby (1993): It’s an Americanized remake of Daniel Vigne’s The Return of Martin Guerre, a highly regarded 1993 film set in 16th-century France, but don’t let that keep you away. This version, directed by Jon Amiel (Copycat, Entrapment), works splendidly well on its own terms as a drama of uncommon intelligence and emotional resonance, with Richard Gere offering an ambiguously appealing performance as John Sommersby, a chronic ne’er- do-well who returns to his Tennessee village after the Civil War as a changed man — gentler to his wife (Jodie Foster), savvier in his business dealers, and eager to help his neighbors revive the local economy. Trouble is… Well, maybe he isn’t really the man he claims to be.
October 23 at 7:05 pm ET on Encore.
Streaming
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957): Neither as sentimentally mythic as My Darling Clementine (1946) or as guns-a’blazin’ exciting as Tombstone (1993), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is a dramatically tense and psychologically intense western, very typical of ’50s cinema — with a surprising amount of screen time devoted to the sadomasochistic relationship between a brazenly suicidal Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas) and Kate Fisher (Jo Van Fleet), his slatternly sometime lover. There are Howard Hawks-style gestures of male bonding on display as director John Sturges charts the relationship between Burt Lancaster’s stern but fair Wyatt Earp and Douglas’ cynical yet loyal anti-hero. (Note how, at one point, Doc pours himself a drink, but Wyatt claims it; a few scenes later, Doc gulps down the whiskey Earp poured for himself.) And there’s something quite affecting about Douglas’ fatalistic tone as Holliday explains why he’s placing his bet on Earp: “If I’m gonna die, at least let me die with the only friend I’ve ever had.” (Available on multiple platforms)
Dead for a Dollar (2022): Django Unchained Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz is back in the saddle again as another ruthlessly efficient bounty hunter in this rugged Western from veteran director Walter Hill (Geronimo, The Long Riders, Broken Trail). It’s 1897 when Max Borlund (Waltz) journeys deep into Mexico, where he encounters professional gambler and outlaw Joe Cribbens (Willem Dafoe) — a sworn enemy he sent to prison years earlier. Borlund is on a mission to find and return Rachel Kidd (Rachel Brosnahan), the hostage wife of a wealthy Santa Fe businessman. But after learning Mrs. Kidd actually isn’t a hostage, and instead fled from an abusive marriage, Max is faced with a choice: Finish the dishonest job he’s been hired to do, or stand aside while ruthless mercenary outlaws and his long-time rival close in. Max and his partner Alonzo Poe (Warren Burke) have nothing to gain if they resist. Nothing, that is, except their honor. (Available on multiple platforms)
Series
Native America: Season 2 of the well-received documentary series kicks off a four-episode run by focusing on Native Americans who are leading revolutions in music, building, and space exploration. From the surface of Mars to the New York City hip-hop scene to the Pine Ridge Reservation, Native traditions are transforming life on Earth and other worlds.
October 24 at 9 pm ET on PBS.
Billy the Kid: The second season run continues with “The Agony,” Episode 203, in which the legendary outlaw (Tom Blyth) takes the law into his own hands and vows to kill anyone involved with the murder of an ally. Naturally, this disappoints Billy’s sweetheart, Ducinea (Nuria Vega), who had hoped his gunslinging days were behind him.
October 29 at 9 pm ET on MGM+.
Quick Draw: Both seasons of this underrated 2013-14 Western spoof continue to stream on Hulu, giving viewers the opportunity to discover (or rediscover) the inspired goofiness of a semi-improvised mishmash that is by turns affectionately satirical and boisterously raunchy as it recycles the clichés common to TV Westerns of yesteryear. You can read more about it here.
Yellowstone: CBS has scored impressive ratings with edited Season 1 episodes of the popular Taylor Sheridan-produced drama, so the broadcast network has opted to continue with Season 2. “A Thundering,” the season premiere, has Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes) settling into his new role at the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch while a damaging article threatens to expose John Dutton (Kevin Costner), and Chief Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) pitches his new plan to the tribal council.
October 29 at 9 pm ET Oct. 29 on CBS.
Switching Channels: Grit
Each week, we aim to showcase a different free-to-watch digital channel available through streaming and/or cable. First on our list: Grit, which programs a plethora of classic TV and movie Westerns. Among the series currently in its daily lineup: The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, The Virginian, Tombstone Territory, Bat Masterson, The Texan, Tales of Wells Fargo, Death Valley Days, The Deputy, and Zane Grey Theatre. You’ll also find a passel of movies, such as the Alan Ladd double bill of The Badlanders (1958) and Drum Beat (1954) starting at 8 pm ET Oct. 23. For up-to-date schedules and access information, check out the Grit website.
