Project Twenty (TV Series) The Real West (1961) User Reviews

This man from Montana

[bkoganbing · 7/10 · 7 May 2015]

When Gary Cooper made his first released sound film The Virginian it was plain that this man from Montana had a career in talkies. His voice certainly reflected his upbringing on his English born father's cattle ranch in that state. Coop did many kinds of films, but always returned to the west. So identified with the genre that it was his voice chosen to narrate The Real West.

So point by point with 19th Century photographs of the hard working ordinary people who tamed the land, the ordinary and some of the legendary. Coop's Montana drawl perfectly suits the story. It was also obvious that the man was dying.

I remember seeing this on television when it was broadcast and weeks later the news of Gary Cooper's death was deemed worthy of notice by our new president John F. Kennedy. Coop seemed to have closed the circle by demythologizing the American West a place whose legend helped earn him a considerable living.

Montana is still a rugged place to make a living a Coop as a kid saw the cattle ranchers, the miners, the small farmers, and even the tragic American Indians living on subsistence on reservations as he grew up. His voice is mixed with pride, regret, and courage.

I was lucky to see this again on YouTube. The Real West is a wonderful coda to the career of Gary Cooper.

Memorable after 40+ years

[c382000 · 19 June 2002]

It was the last program made by Gary Cooper, one of my favorite stars, who was dying of lung cancer. I believe he passed away only a month or two after this program was done. At the beginning of the show, Cooper stated that he had appeared in many western movies, and these movies often gave an incorrect view of the American West, but that this show was an attempt to present the actual events and people of that era.

I remember seeing this show as a 12-year-old kid. I have only seen a short clip of it since that original airing, but the program is still vivid in my memory after 40+ years.

The real west narrated by the hero of "High Noon"

[qjfrmqzx · 10/10 · 8 January 2024]

I must have been about 11 when I first saw this. I was living in England and an addict of "shane", "Calamity Jane" and all those Warner Brothers TV westerns. The BBC announcer warned us just before the broadcast we might be surprised by what Gary Cooper had to say.

It was a spell binding documentary. Here, the much respected marshal from "High Noon" revealed all about the illusory world he'd made his career from.

It was a bit of a shock. Not only were the tooth fairy and Father Christmas a figment of the imagination but so it would seem was the way of life portrayed in the cinema and TV westerns.

Where were those neat, well clothed and well groomed townsfolk with their classy furniture and enormous barroom mirrors? Where was that comfortable little spruced up cabin in "Calamity Jane"? Not it would seem in the Real West and that's for sure. Cooper's matter of fact narration backed up by all the facts and photos was highly credible.

I recall that watching the programmes pushed me across a threshold into the real world where I learned to question the credibilty of everything. A good lesson to learn at the age of 11.

A recording of the TV programme happened to be on a VHS tape before the detective series we wanted to watch this evening. So I revisited the programme some 63 years after I first saw it.

Still spell binding.

History, Viewer Friendly.

[rmax304823 · 1 January 2015]

A dying Gary Cooper sits on the dilapidated porch of a wooden frame house on some "town" where Westerns used to be shot. In fact, what's left of the town looks like the setting for the climactic shoot out in Cooper's own "Man of the West." Cooper is obviously reading from cue cards held next to the camera but his drifting gaze only adds to the feeling of nostalgia.

You won't find the narration very challenging, although sometimes it's amusing. The original settlers "came for three reasons -- to get something, to get away from something, or just to get there." No nonsense about socioeconomic issues. The narration is plain spoken, like its presenter. Sometimes it trips on the overblown, "the greatest migration since the diaspora," or something like that.

The program focuses on the less glamorous part of the West. Just getting there was a risky business. We see many unfamiliar still photos of the period, an abundance of poor, hard, corrugated faces -- and not one of them as handsome as John Wayne or Clint Eastwood. You ought to see Belle Starr and Calamity Jane. They were pictured as beautiful by the myth-making writer, Ned Buntline, but in fact both of them looked less like Gene Tierney or Doris Day than like some murderous nanny out of a horror movies.

Several passages are read from diaries or letters. And one, accompanied by portraits of Indians, reveals the contempt the travelers had for "the people" and what the diarists saw as "sullenness" on the part of the Indians. (The musical score repeats the theme of the Atlanta Braves, portending menace.) Unlike some series, the usual outlaws are dealt with briefly, and harshly. (Doc Holliday: "Psychopathic dentist.") Also, as the wildest of the West began to quiet down, the low-hanging fruit having been gathered, nice ladies from back East began to arrive -- by means of the new railroads. Lawyers replaced the gunmen.

The travelers, the soldiers, and the government might not have treated the Indian fairly but this program does. The buffalo was, as one Blackfeet informant told me, "a supermarket for the Indian." When they killed a buffalo they used everything in it and out of it, from rawhide to buffalo chips for fire. I don't know how we would feel if sportsmen came out and eliminated the buffalo because it was fun to kill them. It would be rather like intruders burning down our supermarkets.

Cooper doesn't look ill on this film, although he must have been in considerable pain. He died of prostate cancer. One winces in the first minutes when he plops himself down on a bleached wooden step. He was visited in the hospital by his friend Ernest Hemingway, to whom he joked, "I bet I'll beat you to the barn." A nice, modest guy.