Have a Bang Up Time at the Burns

Don’t be a coffee boiler! Put on your best bib and tucker and head to the Burns at high noon every Saturday beginning Feb. 6 for our new Westerns series, Saddle Up Saturdays with Jonathan Demme! Hear from Jonathan himself why Westerns are such an important and exciting genre and get your tickets today!

“Westerns were my first window into movies, an art form that quickly gobbled up my imagination and put me on the road that led to a life of making movies as well as watching them. I must have been around five, maybe six, when I went with my mom to visit her friend Martha Caldwell. We knocked, we were admitted to the Caldwell house, and there right in front of me, on my eye level, was a big wooden box with a tiny little screen that was filled with cowboys shooting guns at each other from horseback, and a careening wagon smashing into the rocks. It was my introduction to television and the overwhelming allure (for boys of my generation, anyway) of six-guns, cowboy hats, chaps, boots, wide open spaces—all of those elements that could quicken the pulse even more than horror movies, sci-fi, war flicks, gangster epics, etc., etc.

My love of Westerns deepened throughout my teenage years, and by the time I became a full-fledged card-carrying film buff in my early 20s, it was thrilling to see how many of the directors I admired the very most had been introduced to me via amazing Westerns they had directed. Sam Fuller, Anthony Mann, John Sturges, Delmer Daves, even Sydney Pollock, fit into this category—my heroes, these makers of the finest of Westerns, the noblest of genres.

It’s going to be an extraordinary journey for me to revisit some of my all-time favorite Westerns over the next several months in the hallowed viewing rooms of the JBFC. It will be particularly interesting to reassess the primacy of white male cowboys in this, as testosterone-fueled a genre as exists. What is the place of women in the Western? (William Wellman’s Westward the Women will provide a highly idiosyncratic response to that question.) What is the role, the portrayal of indigenous Americans in these films (especially those of John Sturges, whose Westerns usually put white men, sometimes in cavalry uniforms, at deadly odds with Native Americans defending their homes and territories)? African Americans are pretty few and far between in Westerns. When they do appear (as Ossie Davis does, so magnificently in The Scalphunters), how is a person of color viewed and dealt with in the white world of the Wild West?

Don’t get me wrong! This series is emphatically not happening so that we can trash the American Western for being a frequent reservoir of white patriarchal prerogatives (though it will be fun to see how that plays out in these stories). This series exists to try and recapture the heady thrill of settling into a cinema seat for the delicious ritual of getting immersed in a full-tilt Saturday Western matinee—yahoo! Let’s saddle up, cowpokes across the spectrum!

See you at the Burns corral Saturday mornings, starting soon!”

—Jonathan Demme, Academy Award–winning filmmaker and JBFC board member, who hosts Rarely Seen Cinema and many other events at the Burns