My Alfred Hitchcock Experience. Share this Rating Title: Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Photos Add Image Add an image Do you have any images for this title? Edit Cast Episode complete credited cast: Himself - Host Henry Jones George Tiffany Mildred Dunnock Louise Tiffany Sam Buffington Rhody as Russ Thorson Charles Watts Mayor Herbert Ayers James Stone Customer as James F. Edit Storyline George Tiffany is not just a taxidermist -- he's an artist. Edit Did You Know? Trivia The author of the original story, J.
Cahn , is best remembered today for his articles debunking the 'crashed flying saucer' story of Frank Scully's popular book, "Behind the Flying Saucers. Quotes [ first lines ] Customer: Well, I know Harry's gonna like it, George. Among the writers who studied at Irvine and whose careers Mr.
Hall helped to launch are Richard Ford and Michael Chabon. Founded writers' group In , Mr. Hall co-founded the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, an annual summer writers' conference in the Sierra Nevada, where emerging writers gain world-class instruction from famous authors and mingle with literary agents and publishers in a beautiful setting. Hall and his wife of 65 years, the photographer Barbara Hall, lived half of each year in Squaw Valley and half in San Francisco.
Amy Tan credits the Squaw Valley Community of Writers with guiding her from fledgling writer to published author. They are deep-hearted and stalwart, generous and kind and giving. Hall read from his most recent novel, "Love and War in California" - published last year by St. His former student, Michael Chabon, introduced him. Both books are set in San Diego in the years leading up to World War II and feature a young man with literary ambitions.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to Doctors Without Borders, Seventh Ave. Box , Nevada City CA Jun 19, Howard rated it it was amazing Shelves: May 16, Carl R. Maybe the title put me off because I thought I might be getting into an Ann Rice world of vampires.
Warlock (Legends West, #1) by Oakley Hall
Writer Working readers know my admiration for Hall see my obit piece, May 5, , and Warlock has only increased the admiration. But Hall is not writing a simple historical novel. He chooses the incident at his Acme Corral in a town named after a man they called a witch but who self-corrected to change the word to Warlock. There are a few civic-minded folks who have hopes for its future and are in a Babbit sort of mode. We find the stock western characters--gamblers, gunfighters, renegade cowhands, a cattle boss bent on running the town, a wannabe judge with a drinking problem, a virtuous young woman running a boarding house.
The law-abiders and others with a stake in stability hire a gunfighter to put stop to the terror of rampaging cowhands, and things proceed from there. But not in your stock western way. These hard-bitten people are soul-searchers, it turns out. Even the best of these characters do ugly things from time to time. They are always worried about why they or anyone else is doing something, searching for motives, ascribing motives out of their own wishful thinking, just as we lay upon our public figures our own wishes and wants and get disappointed when they are unable to divine and carry out our aspirations.
He does a great job at the Acme corral. However, much as they wanted the dead men to be dead, some begin to talk about the justice of it, whether he did it right, and for the right reasons. And they begin to fear and envy him, and they divide into camps of people who revere him and others who despise him. I could go on and on, for this is a complex book. Men are like corn growing. The sun burns them up and the rain washes them out and the winter freezes them, and the cavalry tramps them down, but somehow they keep growing. And none of it matters a damn so long as the whisky holds out.
My mother was a timber wolf and my daddy a mountain lion and I strangled them both the day I was born. Jan 10, Joaco rated it really liked it Shelves: I can understand why this book is regarded a classic of the Western genre. It took me some time to understand this since I am a bit culturally far away from it, but when I finally did and started researching the references every piece fell into place. Hall uses some of the most cherished characters from the American mythos retells and humanizes the events of Tombstone, Arizona.
That is, the Gunfight at the O. This in itself was really entertaining to read, as I had always encounter the Hollywood version of the accounts. However, the book proved to have much more depth than that. The reason for it is that Hall not only messes with the mythical Doc Morgan , Wyatt Blaisedell and Kate Miss Dollar , but also performs an open heart surgery on American society and institutions.
The expansion to the west and the cowboys and gunfighters proving to love a lawless society where might is right but being honest and truthful men; the ineptitude of the military embodied in a senile General Peach which would only concern himself with the destruction of the Apache; the uncommitted attitude from law enforcement through Sheriff Keller; the exuberant power of mine owners and the other face of the coin: While doing the above, Hall provides a detailed description of society's frailty and the inner workings of human beings, never losing a bet with his descriptions that make you feel you are one more of the townsfolk.
This was an excellent book to kick start the year. Jun 04, M. Rudolph rated it it was amazing. The shootout at the OK Corral. I once lived in Arizona. I visited Tombstone and walked those mythic steps made memorable thanks to TV, movies, the generally accepted version of the settlement of the Wild West. As always, the physical reality of Tombstone and the Corral was a million times smaller than the version modeled on my imagination.
Oakley Hall takes that mythic wester Oakley Hall takes that mythic western moment and reduces it to its human elements, reduces the heroes to actors in a play not of their making, reduces every human actor to a slave of community. Imagine the shootout as not the end of the story but the beginning.
How did the showdown come about and then what did those sorry actors end up doing after those thirty seconds of gunplay? And what about the real power players, pulling the strings of those gun-toting marionettes? Hall peoples this corner of the Wild West with characters that make you feel that if you were among them, you would have struggled to find your place.
And probably with as little success as most of them had. Just like today, we can only play the cards we're dealt, at the time they're dealt, for the stakes on offer by the other sharks at the table. We are all a bundle of strengths and weaknesses, of aces and twos, of hearts and clubs.
I don't know why this book doesn't get more attention. It's so much more than a Western. By exploring the human elements of the western myth, Hall creates a mythic tale. Amarezza, polvere e cieli tersi. Potranno mai placarsi le forze che conducono Amarezza, polvere e cieli tersi. May 23, BeerDiablo rated it did not like it Shelves: Unfortunately, reading this book well over 30 years past its publishing has dated it severely.
Perhaps this is in part due to it influencing writers that would far outstrip this book on all facets. Slow moving, weak prose best read by intellectual wanna-be's with too much time on their hands. Apr 15, Joe rated it it was amazing. Warlock left me with both a profound sense of literary satisfaction, and a less definable, more visceral sense of extreme unease.
What, exactly, happened here? To these people, to this place, to the idea and ideals they were all striving for and living up to? What does it mean, that anybody can change so much, and yet nobody really changes at all? There is a feeling, upon closing this book, that the story of this one wild, small town has devastating ramifications for all of us, though I am not s Warlock left me with both a profound sense of literary satisfaction, and a less definable, more visceral sense of extreme unease.
There is a feeling, upon closing this book, that the story of this one wild, small town has devastating ramifications for all of us, though I am not sure what they are: But if these characters, who are so real and so flawed and so nuanced, these proto-heroes and -villains, who morph so swiftly into their own antitheses and back again in the eyes of their peers and, also, in themselves; if these human symbols can suffer so much, just by trying so hard to do what is right, what hope do the rest of us have? The more exceptional you are, Warlock seems to say, the more you are destined to fail.
The more you think you know what you are, the worse your one moment of truth will be. The more you care about somebody else, the more chance you stand of injuring them beyond their own imagining. More than these small interpersonal struggles, Warlock tries to crack apart the very idea of "society.
Other residents include Johnny Gannon, a former associate of McQuown's, who returns from a long sojourn away after an unspeakable incident of violence; the suspicious and callous Tom Morgan, Blaisedell's close and loyal friend, who always seems to be at the center of controversy; a whiskey-bloated judge whose holier-than-thou harangues often comprise the only backbone of Warlock's morality; a mysterious woman in black who rides in on a coach and adds an explosive element to Warlock's chemical makeup; an insane General who holds the town's fate in his hands; a romantic do-gooder whose virgin love wreaks havoc with the primary players.
All of these characters' fortunes rise and fall on a dime or a draw, as they each try to remain immovable, even while the townspeople try to bend them to their will—and, indeed, to their very sense of morality. The results are exciting, heartbreaking, explosive, breathless, and beautiful.
Add to the mix a burgeoning miners' strike that takes the story well beyond the Warlock borders, into the bank vaults and business offices of San Francisco, and you have a Genuine American Tale. Hall's writing is mostly impeccable, and his handle on the characters and the language allows the reader to effortlessly slip from a monosyllabic exchange, to a poetic passage on the lonely-raw beauty of the land, to a page-long diatribe on the nature of man and law that might seem better fit in the writings of Rousseau. But you buy it all the while because, as you might expect, there is romance and humor and blood here, too, and enough to drown the philosophy when necessary.
Can real and lasting law truly be forged out of violence or, perhaps more to the point, is there ever any other way to forge it? This seems to be the biggest question of them all, in this amazingly crafted novel and moral tale.
- A Gathering at Oak Creek.
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- "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" The West Warlock Time Capsule (TV Episode ) - IMDb.
- Two Wyatts from Henry Fonda - True West Magazine?
But, more relevant to me, can any of us ever live up to our own ideals; and if so, is it worth it? Oct 12, Patrick rated it it was amazing. An excellent existential, noir western. The only familiarity I had with Oakley Hall was through Thomas Pynchon, who has raved about Warlock at various points. I, like many others, picked it up because of Pynchon's mentions. It was published in and apparently at that time, the literary agent Candida Donadio Pynchon, Heller, Robert Stone was pushing it on her friends and clients. It is sort of an alternate take on the gunfight at the OK Corral mythology.
I guess it could also be thought of a An excellent existential, noir western. I guess it could also be thought of as a Baroque Western. The narrative is very complex, there are multiple unreliable narrators, the spoken language is high-Victorian western. It's not so much that there are reversals as that everything is always contingent and fluid. Hall respects the reader in the sense that he does not telegraph meaning or import in the way that many writers do--he presents scenes and the reader has to decide how to fit them together--in this way the writing is kind of oblique.
Miller, or the series Deadwood would like this. In fact, as far as I can tell, Hall got there first--this has got to be one of the first revisionist Westerns. I think it internalizes a certain monotony of the West as well-i breezed throught most of the book, but bogged down towards the end, only to speed up at the very end.
The book is chock full of cowboys, gunslingers, whores, racism, plutocrats, burgeoning wobblies, miners, laudenum addicted doctors, itenerant and doomed piano players. Just about everyone who lived in Warlock makes an appearance as a character in the book at some point. One of the aspects of the book I found very interesting was its focus on the process of the mythologization of the west in real time as the events being mythologized were actually occurring.
View all 5 comments. Mar 05, Ryan Chapman rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: I am hesitant to give this novel four stars, as it might warrant five upon a reread. For a plot-heavy book such as this one, I've learned to be a little reticent in doling out hyperbolic praise so soon after finishing it. Certainly, this should be read in tandem to Cormac McCarthy's anti- western novels, which I do give that perfect rating to. But about the book. I'd heard about it from Richard Farina and Thomas Pynchon, who both championed Hall's work as a masterpiece of 20th century fiction.
T I am hesitant to give this novel four stars, as it might warrant five upon a reread. Then the great New York Review of Books rescued the title from the out-of-print oblivion, so I pretty much had to read it. I was not dissapointed. In the same way that McCarthy simultaneously grounds his western settings as the establishment of modern America while allegorizing them for every society, every attempt at civilization, every base interaction between men - so does Hall with the town of Warlock.
It's impressive the way Hall picks up the town's citizens strategically to speak to us whether it's through the general store owner's journal, the town doctor, or the new deputy. He retains expert control and restraint over his page narrative. As the plot unfolds, we sense the greater conflict is not between the "wild west" and the 20th century, but between how a person should act and what they actually do.
Warlock is two books: For the world of the novel is very much our own, and asks us to question how much of our idea of America can create, interfere with, and ruin the reality of it. Update from a year later - I'm giving it 5 stars. This book grows and grows on me. Me ha dado todo lo que espero de un buen western pero aumentado y mejorado. Son muy interesantes los temas planteados con una gran objetividad que se aleja de maniqueismos. Los personajes son extraordinarios, muy complejos, con muchos matices, nadie es del todo bueno o malo. Un error conduce a otro error, una muerte lleva a otra muerte.
En Warlock el odio reina, el rencor florece, las lenguas hieren, los hechos se tergiversan. Los hombres matan y mueren por orgullo, por una palabra, porque es lo que se espera de ellos o por simple mala suerte. En Warlock la muerte juega con cartas marcadas. Muy recomendado para amantes del western. May 13, wally rated it it was amazing Shelves: Introduction by Robert Stone.
A portion of Oakley Hall's note at the start: Seems like an understanding of Tombstone would pay dividends I'm thinking this is true The Fight in the Acme Corral 1.
The wind from the West
Carl Schroeder to undertake position of deputy. McQuown, is the bad man, introood in 1.
Others come by to repeat the news. The Judge is the foil. Things are complicated, of sorts. Eager for a change, but there was no change. Miners, also in bar. Jack Cade comes in.
Clay and Schroeder leave to gander town. Murch will blast the back-shooter, etc. Showdown in the bar. Blaisedell wins this round. John tells brother Billy that he will be staying on in town. He takes advantage of the situation to kill Bob Nicholson unseen. Lily arrives in town and sees Morgan there. She believes that he pulled the trigger, although this is based on intuition rather than evidence. The robbers are arrested without incident by Blaisedell and a posse. Before taking them to Bright City for trial, the sheriff , who disapproves of Blaisedell, accepts Gannon's offer to become Warlock's new deputy.
Gannon takes his law enforcement duties seriously. The robbers, one of whom is Gannon's younger brother Billy, are cleared by a jury intimidated by McQuown. The cowboys, led by Billy, immediately confront Blaisedell and Morgan in the street. The deputy asks them to leave and tells Billy, "I ain't backin' him, because you're my brother, and I ain't backin' you, because you're wrong. Blaisedell kills two others, including Billy, after giving him a fair chance to back down. McQuown's smooth-talking man Curley posts wanted notices for Blaisedell, declaring the cowboys "regulators" in mockery of his quasi-legal status.
Gannon vows to stop any regulators who come to town and McQuown angrily stabs him in his gun hand. Townspeople begin resenting the presence of Blaisedell and Morgan, exactly as Blaisedell had predicted. However, he has started a relationship with Jessie Marlow and decides to marry and settle down, much to the surprise of Morgan, who wants to move on to another town.
The West Warlock Time Capsule
Despite his injured hand, Gannon must face the cowboys alone after Morgan pulls a gun on Blaisedell, who had volunteered to back the deputy. With help from the citizens and from Curley, who promised him "a fair fight", Gannon unexpectedly kills McQuown and breaks up the regulators for good. Warlock has outgrown its need for the two gunfighters, but Morgan cannot tolerate the idea that Gannon is now more of a hero than Blaisedell, and he resents Lily's attraction to the deputy, too.
In the course of an argument, Blaisedell learns the truth about the deaths of the Nicholson brothers and turns his back on Morgan. That evening, in a drunken state, Morgan shoots up the town and calls out Gannon, intending to kill him.