The Rawhide Terror

My memory of this is rather vague. But I remember reading about a Japanese art filmmaker who made a film based on a haiku that was written five hundred years ago.

Haikus are so short. I found it surprising that they keep track of them. Even if there was an especially good haiku written hundreds of years ago, there must be so many of them. Is it really possible for a haiku to stand out to the point that you'd make a movie based on it?

I feel the same way about this movie I just watched. A "B" western from 1934. I tried watching some others, but they were just terrible. But when I looked up this particular movie on the internet, there were some discussions of it, people had posted comments on it and talked about where it lay in the director's body of work. I was amazed people could distinguish one B western from another.

The movie was The Rawhide Terror. Strange film. Pretty grim, really. It starts with children watching their parents murdered, it had a child abuse subplot, but it opens with some circus-like music playing over the opening credits.

One sort of interesting thing is that the B westerns seem to all lack non-diegetic music. And I avoided the ones that had diegetic music. I never understood the appeal of singing cowboys.

So many of the B westerns were about men robbing stage coaches to get even with the crooked bankers and rich ranchers who took their ranches or their gold mines or killed their parents. Those sort of stories may have tapped into something during the Great Depression.

But the poverty row studios in Hollywood cranked out so many of these movies, it's surprising that anyone is able or willing to distinguish one from another.


Now. Here's a joke.

A dog walks into a bar. He jumps up on the barstool. Orders a drink. He's sitting there drinking when a fight breaks out. Someone pulls a gun and fires a shot and the dog is hit in the foot. He jumps down and runs out of the bar on three legs.

The next day, the dog comes back. He steps into the bar. His injured foot is bandaged. He's wearing a little cowboy hat and a little leather vest. He has some guns strapped around his waist.

He says, "I'm looking for the man who shot my paw."