Ray Nazarro

Ray Nazarro (left).

I turned on a Ray Nazarro movie last night. He directed scores of B westerns from 1929 to 1958. After '58, he started directing TV shows.

The movie was made by Columbia Pictures in 1946. Nazarro directed 13 movies that year. Rather astonishing. They weren't the greatest movies in the world, I'm sure, but they weren't terrible.

Woody Allen's movie-a-year doesn't seem so great anymore now, does it? Yes, I know. Allen writes his movies, too, and he wins an occasional Oscar. But his movies don't have stunts.

Wikipedia says that Nazarro went on to direct spaghetti westerns, but that's not true. Hiring an American B movie director would defeat the whole purpose of having spaghetti westerns. They were all directed by Italian Communists. They had American stars, not American directors.

I don't know why B westerns were so bad. They're full of violence. They kill people freely. They should be good. If anybody thinks "political correctness" is ruining movies, show them a few of these things.

I guess their problem is that they were made for children. Like horror movies used to be. Read Roger Ebert's original review of Night of the Living Dead. He saw it as part of a triple feature on a Saturday afternoon in a theater full of children. He was outraged.

 

 

 

 

This may be from the movie I saw. It had the overweight guy in it.