THE VIRGINIAN (1946)

I've never read the novel "The Virginian" by Owen Wister which I've heard was really good, so I can't compare this film to the source material.  But I liked the movie.  Barbara Britton plays a young woman who travels out West to take a job as a school teacher in a small Wyoming town.  Upon her arrival she immediately gets the attention of all the men in town including two old cowboy friends Joel McCrea and Sonny Tufts.  At first they make a game out of winning the affections of Barbara, but then things take a darker turn when Sonny joins a group of cattle rustlers (ran by the all black wearing Brian Donlevy).

A bunch of the standard old western stuff happens...horses racing about, campfires, square dancing, trash talking, shootings, people can't read, gambling in a saloon, frontier justice, posse tracking down rustlers and so on.  The town of Medicine Bow is described as just a bump in the road, but it looked like your standard western backlot to me.  Some of the outdoor scenes were obviously shot on a soundstage and McCrea is quite a bit older than Britton, but despite all those things THE VIRGINIAN was still an entertaining film and one I would gladly watch again.

CYCLONE (1987)

Nerd/stud supergenius Jeffery Combs creates a motorcycle with all kinds of weapons on it: lasers, rockets...well, that's about it.  Also, despite the fact that it can deploy a parachute, it's not as fast as you would think, since it could barely even outrun an ancient station wagon!  What it does have though is an almost endless supply of energy thanks to a gadget that's about the size of a smartphone and can somehow extract hydrogen out of the air and convert it into energy.  Naturally, the bad guys want this energy supply and will stop at nothing (outside of hiring non-idiots) to get it.  So pretty much the entire film is just these morons making lame attempts at getting the power source...night club attack, car chase, kidnapping, torture and another car chase.  Boring.

Made with what looks to be the budget of an episode of "Knight Rider" or even "Street Hawk", CYCLONE is pretty lame.  The action scenes aren't even 80's television quality, the dialogue is stiff, top-billed Heather Thomas never even gets close to naked, Martin Landau slumming, silly story with a dumb as hell ending, cheap looking sets, an ear-destroyingly bad "punk" band and Jeffery Combs as a serious actor...hahaha, well alright that was pretty funny and the high point of the film. 

Worth a watch for fans of lower end action films.

COLORADO TERRITORY (1949)

This loose retelling of HIGH SIERRA, finds Joel McCrea in the Bogart character as a criminal who's hired for a big robbery job, but troubled by his growing conscience.  Along the way to meet his new partners, he foils a stagecoach robbery and takes a liking to a old man and his beautiful daughter.  Once he arrives at the ghost town where his team is waiting for him, he finds them not to his liking and even worse is there's a woman with them.  As expected, the tension among the men grows and the robbery doesn't go as planned.  Now on the run from a bloodthirsty posse, McCrea has to make some quick decisions.

Strong cast and a great director, but for whatever reason COLORADO TERRITORY didn't do a whole lot for me.  It was an entertaining watch, but I felt like I'd already seen all of this before...probably because I did in HIGH SIERRA!  Also, I didn't care for seeing McCrea as a bad guy.  I understand that he was having a change of heart, but he's still a criminal and a killer.

Worth watching, but unfortunately it doesn't bring anything new to the table.

Original - High Sierra (1941)
Remake 2 - I Died a Thousand Times (1955)