The issue of Stepin Fetchit deserves a real response, which I made and which was erased, so I’ll follow up later.

-Aside from Stagcoach and My Darling Clementine, the other John Ford movie that I think laid alot of the groundwork for the golden age of Classic Hollywood Westerns was Fort Apache.

-The deer I was talking about appears right after the bad guys steal the gun and flee town. It’s on stage for about a second or two. They talk about how they want to shoot it but don’t have bullets. TBH, I looked at it again on and DVD it doesn’t look as bad, I’m sure it looked worse on the taped-of-tv-vhs I watched many times. It’s mismatched stock footage that I think was at a different frame rate (maybe from a silent movie) and a trick of the light on its back makes it look like it was pasted into the frame or something. The first time I saw it I actually thought it was animated. I think on the print I had taped off TV that shot was blurrier than the rest of the movie, but they probably fixed it when it was digitally mastered. So it still looks weird, but not as weird as I remembered.

Remember that “Million Dollar Jewish Lady” rant I keep posting, from Dave Kehr’s old blog? Mike Grost, who wrote it, also wrote that “Gay Peace” thing.

Letters from Iwo Jima got more attention than Flags of Our Fathers, but Letters is in most ways a conventional war movie, just told from the other side. Flags has a bunch of combat sequences, but alot of the movie is about how they used the iconic Iwo Jima flag photo to sell war bonds.