Saturday Dreaming

 Saturday mornings I arise early and watch three hours of old Hopalong Cassidy films. Oh, I play them in the background and multitask. Still, one might wonder why such a dashing urbanite and intellectual would spend a morning a week while involved in such activities. Well … it relaxes me. It takes me back to more gentle times. Not a bad way to spend some time.

Hoppy respected the law, protected immigrants, supported our neighboring country, Mexico, and defended our Indian friends. He advised his “little pals” to respect police officers, obey their parents, and look both ways before moving. He makes me think of what America might have become.

Sometimes, though, it makes me think of ludicrous thing in movies. I’ve mentioned my favorite, so I won’t bring up the issue of semi-automatic pistols again. Oh heck, yes I will. They just don’t go “click click” when you fire the last shot. Everyone but scriptwriters knows that. Here are some more examples.

- Cowboys riding across deserts with no provisions for their horses or themselves.

- Cowboys, or stage coaches, galloping a horse(s) all day without food or rest.

- Raising cattle on a farm in Monument Valley.

- Never noting on Gunsmoke that Miss Kitty was a prostitute.

- Oh, and speaking of pistols, shooting and hitting someone with one at more than 20 feet.

- I won’t mention women’s hairdos that match the period at which the film was made.

- Indians riding horses with saddles under a blanket.

- There was the time that Hoppy got shot in the shoulder and then proceeded to whip the bad guy in an extended fistfight.

Oh. And the ludicrosity (Is that a word?) doesn’t end with westerns. How about the following?

- In Saving Private Ryan, a buck private refusing an order from an Army Ranger captain.

- War scenes in which everyone in a rifle company carries a sub-machine gun.

- Filming 1965’s Battle of the Bulge in the desert, sans snow.

- In the most dishonorable war movie in history, The Green Berets, John Wayne patting a young Vietnamese boy on the head while they watch the sun set to the east over the South China Sea.

- Clark Kent taking off his eyeglasses and nobody recognizing him as Superman.

- Oh, and hats that never fly off when people drive or ride in convertibles.

Then there is the matter of casting. How about David Carradine as Woody Guthrie in Bound for Glory? From all my reading and delving, Woody was sort of what Southerners call, “a little piss ant,” talented but small and feisty, far from how he was portrayed as “Kung Foo Woody.” And there was that cute and adorable little doll that played hard-nosed Mattie Ross in the regrettable Coen brothers remake of True Grit in 2010.

Okay, I’ll stop. I think there’s a neat film coming on that features Tom Cruise as adventure-novel hero Jack Reacher. Stay tuned.

Woody, not David