How the West was Won

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  Wild Western Weekend film sponsors Punky and Wally Penberthy pose with two of their favorite stars, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Courtesy photo

  Wild Western Weekend film sponsors Punky and Wally Penberthy pose with two of their favorite stars, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Courtesy photo
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  How the West was Won

  How the West was Won

Six films free to public at Bosque Film Society's Wild Western Weekend; award-winning Lomax documentary screening Sunday

Simone Wichers-Voss

Chisholm Country Magazine

The adventures of rugged cowboys on the cattle drives or a posse chasing outlaws in magnificent landscapes, the overworked lawmen trying to keep the peace battling outlaws and vagabonds intent on destroying the fragile fabric of life on the frontier, action set pieces on horseback, skirmishes with nature and her creatures, the grit and gumption of pioneers trekking West to a better life.

With all their hardships and triumphs, the historic significance of the stories on how the West was won all add to the enduring appeal of Western movies.

Catering to a large audience of Western movie enthusiasts, the Bosque Film Society hosts its ThirdAnnual Wild Western Weekend Free Film Festival featuring six free classic westerns in four days July 25-28 at The Cliftex Theatre in Clifton. The diversity of the movies scheduled for this Wild Western Weekend cover the gambit. And thanks to their generous members, patrons and sponsors, all six classic Western films will be offered to the public absolutely free of charge.

“After the success we’ve enjoyed with this event the last two years, we are very excited to once again offer exactly what we know everyone wants to see – four days of nothing but good, old classic westerns,” Bosque Film Society founder and board president Brett Voss said. “We hope to fill the house for all six films. We can’t say enough about the support we have received from our charter members and the community at large.

“It’s also exciting to be able to open up the longest continuously operating movie theater in Texas to anyone who wants to visit. When you really think about it, it’s hard to imagine that movie lovers have been coming to The Cliftex since 1916. When you walk through the doors, you are truly taking a step back in time.”

Prior to Sunday’s matinee feature film, the Bosque Film Society will be presenting an encore screening of the worldwide award-winning documentary short film “Voice of the Common Man: The Lomax Legacy” produced and directed by E. Brett Voss and William Godby beginning at 3:30 p.m.

After a year on the worldwide film festival circuit, the documentary has been selected to 29 film festivals internationally, nationally and in Texas, nominated for Best Documentary Short 23 times, winning the award 12 times, while Godby has won best editor four times, while Voss has been selected as best writer three times and best director once.

Narrated by Lane Talburt, the film asks viewers to imagine a world with no Blues explosion, no R&B movement, no Beatles, no Stones. It’s hard to measure the total impact John Avery Lomax had on music as we know it today.

But there’s no doubt the man who became known as the legendary Ballad Hunter “added the voice of the common man to the written history of America.” Chasing songs he came to love as a boy, Lomax went on the road to record over 1,200 discs containing some 4,000 songs for the Library of Congress.

Offering an air-conditioned break from the harsh Texas summer just before returning to school, the Bosque Film Society opens the festival with John Huston’s 1948 “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” Thursday, July 25 at 7 p.m. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston and Tim Holt, the story follows two down-on-their-luck Americans searching for work in 1920s Mexico who convince an old prospector to help them mine for gold in the Sierra Madre Mountains.

Friday’s matinee at 5 p.m. features Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 “High Noon” starring Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly and Thomas Mitchell in which a town Marshal, despite the disagreements of his newlywed bride and the townspeople around him, must face a gang of deadly killers alone at “high noon” when the gang leader, an outlaw he “sent up” years ago, arrives on the noon train.

On Friday evening at 7 p.m., an allstar cast with Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Powers Boothe, Michael Biehn and Charlton Heston star in the 1993 “Tombstone” directed by George P Cosmatos and Kevin Jarre. A successful lawman’s plans to retire anonymously in Tombstone, Arizona, are disrupted by the kind of outlaws he was famous for eliminating.

Offering a family afternoon at the movies on Saturday, the Walt Disney classic “Old Yeller” (1954) tugs at your heart strings at 4 p.m., Directed by Robert Stevenson, starring Dorothy McGuire, Fess Parker and Tommy Kirk the story features a teenage boy who grows to love a stray yellow dog while helping his mother and younger brother run their Texas homestead while their father is away on a cattle drive. First thought to be good-for-nothing mutt, Old Yeller is soon beloved by all.

The Saturday evening showing features Kevin Costner’s Academy Award-winning western epic “Dances with Wolves” (1990) at 7 p.m. starring Costner, Mary McDonnell and Graham Greene. Lieutenant John Dunbar, assigned to a remote western Civil War outpost, finds himself engaging with a neighboring Sioux settlement, causing him to question his own purpose.

The festival concludes Sunday with a 4 p.m. matinee showing of Clint Eastwood’s “Man With No Name” together with Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef in Sergio Leone’s 1966 epic spaghetti western “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” (1966) in which a bounty hunting scam joins two men in an uneasy alliance against a third in a race to find a fortune in gold buried in a remote cemetery.

Sure, many of these movies can be found streaming on television, but it adds a whole new dimension when seeing them on the big movie theatre screen with a delicious bag of buttered popcorn, some candy and a soda of choice in hand. Forget all daily strains, just sit back and relax and allow the Western frontier in all its facets transport you to a historic time in United States history that forged the nation’s psyche of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and justice for all.

Established in October 2020, the Bosque Film Society is a non-profit organization focused on promoting film appreciation, education and production in Bosque County, while serving as the “Friends of The Cliftex Theatre,” the longest continuously-operating movie theater in Texas, showing movies on the big screen since 1916. Visit www. BosqueFilm.com for more information about becoming a Bosque Film Society member.