Simon Gelten
'Regular Reviewer'
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He is not only wanted for writing the winning review of The Best Western Movie Review Contest, but also for committing the same tough deed repeatedly. His reviews don't hit you on point blank range and leave you longing for more but also bring you close to the Old West. His passion for western films shines like gold nudgets in his writing. So here's the man you all were looking for ! Simon Gelton..who else? And Folks! He is now the Regular Reviewer on Most-Wanted-Western-movies.com, which means we can catch him more often now onwards. Let's hear from his own mouth what he has to say. -Satty Kassoana, MWWM Editor |
I was born a long time ago in the city of Eindhoven (Holland). Today I live across the border, in Belgium, in the town of Turnhout. Western fiction has always been a passion of mine. As a kid I read the novels of Karl May and watched Rawhide and High Chaparral on TV. The first western I saw in cinema, was Mackenna's Gold. I was about fourteen years old and it must have been a school holiday because the theatre was filled with boys of my age. Temperatures nearly reached boiling point when Julie Newmar took off her clothes and jumped into a lake. Shortly after I saw the movie that has ever since then my all time favorite, Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. Like every western fan I adore Sergio Leone and John Ford, but Anthony Mann, Raoul Walsh, Sergio Corbucci and Giulio Petroni are among my personal favorites too. I prefer the more thoughtful westerns, especially those concerned with the passing of time and the transition from one era to another. Sam Peckinpah once called the western 'a universal frame that offers us the possibility to comment on today'. That probably is what's so wonderful about the genre: it's truly universal in the sense that people from all corners of the earth are familiar with it. Very often a western says as much about the period in which it was made, as about the period it actually describes.
Many American westerns of the thirties and forties glorified the taming of the frontier and the birth of a nation, while the westerns of the late sixties and early seventies, about the closing of the frontier, often were a bitter comment of the young nation's growing pains: what once had been glorified, now was a motive for reflection. And as such, westerns are also auto-referential, that is: they refer to, and comment on their own history, the history of the western movie.
In the meantime the Italians had created their own West, a dusty world of deserted Mexican villages, of ponchos, cigarillos and a lot of Eastwood and Van Cleef. And like good old professor Chris Frayling has pointed out, one of those Italians finally taught us what the term 'horse opera' really meant. We are very lucky people: thanks to such a wonderful inventions as DVD and widescreen TV, we're able to admire more westerns than ever in the format they were filmed. And while we're watching the old ones, new westerns are made. It's a great time to be a western fan.
Western Film Articles From This Cowboy Writer's Pen
Way To Go Simon !
Most-Wanted-Western-Movies.com Welcomes You !
You also want to be a 'regular' contributor on MWWM ? Well, then you have to earn it. Write informative and fun-to-read quality articles on MWWM and get known by all western film lovers world wide.
Take me Home Amigo!
