Bryan Burrough
speaker
583 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 5d ago
Bryan Burrough’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Granted today, the lead character's loneliness, his honor, his troubled past, the woman he left behind.
Yeah.
And weirdly, the movie actually holds up well today, I'd recommend it.
And it proved enormously influential.
All through the 1950s, Hollywood Studios cranked up dozens of Westerns much like it, from highbrow fair, like High Noon and Shane, to dozens of minor films best forgotten.
But the movie's real impact was on the new medium of television.
Westerns could be shot on a back lot for not a lot of money, and during the 50s, TV produced them left and right, 92 of them in all in just 10 years, and on just the three networks, 38 of which, by my count, were built around a gunfighter.
The television gunfighter was typically a good-hearted sheriff, defending his town from assorted bad guys, as in Gunsmoke, or just as often a wandering sort, who prowled the West righting wrongs, like in Have Gun Wheel Travel and Cheyenne and several more.
More than a dozen of history's gunfighters got their own shows too.
From Wyderp and Bat Masterson to total impostors.
And yes, I'll explain these guys in time.
Imposters like Wild Bill Longley at Tombstone's Johnny Ringo.
All of which finally made the Old West gunfighter a real cultural touchstone in America.
A newish figure popping up in dozens of movies and TV shows, which of course prompted a lot of obvious questions.
I mean, I wasn't the only curious 11-year-old out there.
How much of all this shooting and riding around in face-offs and tense little towns, how much of this could possibly be real?
Beginning in the 60s, a stream of new gunfighter books attempted to answer such questions.
One of the first, which suggests how iffy the concept remained, came out in 1967, written by Joseph Rosa.
It was called The Gunfighter, Manor Myth.
The upshot of this in other books was that, yes, a lot of the shootouts you saw on television were pretty much nonsense.
Showing 501–520 of 583 · page 26 of 30
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