Movies

You are probably wondering why I was never stuffed like Trigger even though I was in 181 of Tom Mix's films and he kissed me on the nose and I was so valuable that I had six doubles because they couldn't wear me out or anything.

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Essential Westerns, 1924-1962
March 4 through 31
Film Forum

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• Tom Mix

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Well, I was never stuffed because Tom, the bon vivant who had five wives—Grace, Kitty, Olive, Victoria, and Mabel—died two years before me. He got hit in the head with a suitcase. I was never even given a grave marker. President Harding adored me. You should see me in The Great K&A Train Robbery (1926) with the shots of the Colorado gorges and steamy trains that look like moving paintings and I'm running alongside this train by myself and, boy, am I pooped. There's another scene where I have trouble standing still. It's a silent but who needs to hear me whinny. You know it's just as well I'm not alive today. Horses hardly mean anything in the business. In the A films, they didn't even have names. Now it's worse. I saw the first episode of Deadwood, just men slapping the women around and making their noses bleed. What kind of world is this? Where is the socially constructed violence? What happened to the genre? Anyway, I'm up here watching my body of work. What nobody knows is that when you're dead, you get to watch movies all the time.