Special Collections
Included in the Reading Room display were a diverse collection of materials taken from our Special Collections, which holds a unique array of television and film ephemera. A collection of pressbooks from Western films were displayed in the Reading Room throughout the month of May, including the following:
Red River
The cover for the pressbook of Howard Hawks' Red River (1947), starring John Wayne and Montgomery Clift. Long before Brokeback Mountain, there was this film, with a classic scene of coded homosexual desire as Montgomery Clift and John Ireland compare guns.
High Noon
The pressbook for High Noon (1952) capitalises on the star value of its ageing lead, Gary Cooper, who went on to win an Oscar for this performance. As Marshal Kane he resolves to face down the newly released convict who is returning to town on the noon train to take revenge on him. Kane's friends and townsfolk fail to support him, a point which has led to the film being read as an allegory of the contemporaneous failure of America to speak out against McCarthyism.
Naked Spur
An image from the pressbook for Naked Spur (1952), directed by Anthony Mann and starring James Stewart and Janet Leigh. The pressbook gave publicity ideas to local movie theatres on how to promote the film - in this example, male staff are encouraged to dress up as cowboys, wearing overlarge cardboard spurs. In addition, a "Miss Slacks" contest is proposed, to find the woman who looks most attractive in slacks, as Janet Leigh's character does indeed look very attractive whilst wearing slacks throughout the film.
Johnny Guitar
"I'm a stranger here myself": the style of Nicolas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954) made it something of an outsider within the Western tradition. Its bright colours and melodramatic tendencies were quite a departure from the sombre tones of the classic Western. It was also unusual in its foregrounding of the female leads, Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge, in a boy's own genre.
The Magnificent Seven
The pressbook for The Magnificent Seven (1960) imaginatively targets the pint-sized cowboy market, with a colouring competition for the local papers, and a suggestion for a series of road safety instruction cards, entitled MAGNIFICENT SEVEN RULES FOR SAFETY.
McCabe & Mrs Miller
The cover for the pressbook of Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. Altman called this an "anti-Western" film, as it struggles against the conventions found in the typical Western genre film.
