A Fistful of Horror Westerns from the 1940s to Today: Cowboys, Cannibals, Cults, and More

I've been involved with the Seattle edition of Crypticon, a convention for fans of the macabre, for eight years now.

In 2018, Tony Kay encouraged me to participate. Since then, I've served as a panelist and moderator, and I've also suggested topics. Favorites have included French and Spanish horror--two separate panels presented with Jason Weiss, who definitely knows his stuff--Canadian horror, the filmography of Ti West, and bold new takes on the Frankenstein myth.

This year, I suggested a panel on the horror western, so I put together a list of films I've seen, like Michael Crichton's Westworld, and films I've been meaning to see, like Craig Zahler's Bone Tomahawk, which I found on Netflix. Then I turned to social media, and got so many suggestions, I created this post for those who would also like to explore the subgenre.

Unlike years past, I forgot to come up with a colorful title for the panel, so I hope "Horror Western" is sufficiently compelling. For Spanish horror, I proposed "Slicing Up Eyeballs with Spanish-Language Horror from Luis Buñuel to Guillermo del Toro and Beyond" since, as you can probably guess, we began with the 1929 Buñuel/Salvador Dalí short Un Chien Andalou.

Many would probably consider the B&W short closer to surrealism than horror, and yet it sets the scene for the unsettling visions to come. 

Arguably, it did the same for Italian horror, since that eyeball-slicing sequence predicts similar moves from Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci (in case you missed it, Tony wrote a terrific review of Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling on the occasion of the Arrow Video release).

As for the horror western, I'm not certain when it began. The earliest examples I could find were from the 1940s, but since horror and western films date back to the silent era, I would imagine there are qualifying titles from the 1920s and 1930s, though they're probably harder to find, so consider this list a work in progress. As I come across more, I'll add them.

Some of these films barely qualify, while others may not qualify at all, but I would need to watch or re-watch them to be certain. One friend, for example, has already suggested that John Carpenter's The Thing doesn't belong, and she may be right, but I'm leaving it on for now. For what it's worth, I've seen it twice so far, but a third watch wouldn't be out of order. 

I've also gotten suggestions for Gordon Douglas's The Fiend Who Walked the West and Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff. 

Though I hadn't heard of the former before, I gave it a try, and I'm glad I did, not least because future producer Robert Evans plays a sniveling psycho killer, but I don't feel it fits, so I removed it. Though I get why others have suggested the latter, I disagree, so I've left it off. It's possible, however, that both may find their way back to this list at some point. None of this is set in stone, and it's almost as fun to talk about these movies as it is to watch them.

If I watched the film online, I've noted the streaming service in brackets.  

1940s-1970s
The Leopard Man (Jacques Tourneur, writer Edward Dein, 1943) [YouTube]
Curse of the Undead (Edward Dein, 1959) [Tubi]
El Pueblo Fantasma (Alfredo B. Crevenna, 1965)
Billy the Kid vs Dracula (William Beaudine, 1966)
Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot! (Giulio Questi, 1967)
The Valley of Gwangi (Jim O'Connolly, 1969)
And God Said to Cain… (Antonio Margheriti, 1970)
El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970)
Cut-Throats Nine (Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent, 1972)
Godmonster of Indian Flats (Fredric Hobbs, 1973)
Hex (Leo Garen, 1973)
High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1973)
Westworld (Michael Crichton, 1973)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977) [YouTube]
Welcome to Blood City (Peter Sasdy, 1977)

1980s-1990s
The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)
Eyes of Fire (Avery Crounse, 1983)
Pale Rider (Clint Eastwood, 1985)
The Aurora Encounter (Jim McCullough Sr., 1986)
Hitcher (Robert Harmon, 1986)
Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)
Ghost Town (Richard McCarthy, 1988)
Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (Anthony Hickox, 1989)
Grim Prairie Tales (Wayne Coe, 1990)
The Reflecting Skin (Philip Ridley, 1990)
Tremors (Ron Underwood, 1990)
Clearcut (Ryszard Bugajski, 1991)
Dust Devil (Richard Stanley, 1992)
Mad at the Moon (Martin Donovan, 1992)
Cannibal! The Musical (Trey Parker, 1993)
Ghost Brigade (George Hickenlooper, 1993)
Silent Tongue (Sam Shepard, 1993)
Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995)
From Dusk Till Dawn (Robert Rodriguez, 1996)
Vampires (John Carpenter, 1998)
Purgatory (Uli Edel, 1999)
Ravenous (Antonia Bird, 1999)

2000s-2020s
Dead Birds (Alex Turner, 2004)
Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (Grant Harvey, 2004)
Tremors 4: The Legend Begins (S.S. Wilson, 2004)
The Proposition (John Hillcoat, 2005)
No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)
The Burrowers (J.T. Petty, 2008) [Plex]
Legion (Scott Stewart, 2010)
Gallowwalkers (Andrew Goth, 2012)
Chowboys: An American Folktale (Adam Brooks, Jeremy Gillespie, Matthew Kennedy, Steven Kostanski, Conor Sweeney, 2018) [short]
Bone Tomahawk (Craig Zahler, 2015) [Netflix]
Southbound (Roxanne Benjamin, David Bruckner, Chad Villella, Patrick Horvath, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Justin Martinez, Tyler Gillett, 2015)
Brimstone (Martin Koolhoven, 2016)
Let the Corpses Tan (Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, 2017)
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2018)
The Wind (Emma Tammi, 2018)
Nope (Jordan Peele, 2022)
They Call Her Death (Austin Snell, 2024)*
Blood in Them Hills (Kellen Garner, Christopher Sheffield, 2025)
Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025)

*They Call Her Death returns to Seattle on June 14 at SIFF Film Center.

The Horror Western panel takes place on Sat, May 3, at 3pm with co-panelists Jeff Dean and Eric Li. Find more Crypticon information here. 

Images from RLJ Entertainment / Slash Film (Kurt Russell and Matthew Fox), La Cinémathèque Française, the IMDb (Robert Evans and Dolores Michaels), and Las Furias Magazine (Robert Carlyle and Guy Pearce).

The Dead Don't Hurt (Like the Living) in David Cronenberg's Reflective Reverie The Shrouds

THE SHROUDS 

(David Cronenberg, 2024, Canada, 119 minutes) 

Since it premiered at Cannes, David Cronenberg's 21st feature, The Shrouds, has been described as his most personal film. 

Near as I can tell, this is meant as a compliment; at the very least, it's simply a neutral observation. The filmmaker has also said as much, but at worst, it implies that his previous films weren't personal, and I believe many of them are, and not just because he has a distinctly recognizable style or because he's been exploring certain themes since 1969's Stereo, which established a template for an ongoing project involving attempts to connect, a willingness to experiment, and the rejection of societal norms. 

In a recent conversation with Jim Jarmusch for Interview, Cronenberg regrets that his films have often been described as "cold." That isn't how he sees them. Stanley Kubrick was bedeviled by the same descriptor--even as he ended his career with a film about a marriage that wasn't just an adaptation of a text with which he had long been obsessed, but played, intentionally or otherwise, as a reflection on his own 41-year union. 

Cronenberg was married to editor Carolyn Cronenberg, who passed away in 2017, for nearly as long. Though his last film, 2022's Crimes of the Future, relied on a script he had written 20 years before, it also revolves around a marriage. One that has its challenges, but is built to last for as long as Saul (Viggo Mortensen, director of last year's The Dead Don't Hurt) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux, who was originally cast in the film) remain on Earth. 

Because it's a Cronenberg production, these performance artists (left) aren't tempted by other people so much as their desire to push the human body as far as it can go, and not just as a vocation, but because it unites them, despite--or even because of--the physical risks. 

The director's films may incorporate elements of horror and science fiction, but that makes them no less personal than those that exclude such trappings, and Crimes of the Future played as a reflection on his own marriage, not least because it was his first feature since Caroline's passing (significantly, it followed the Bruce Wagner-written Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars, which seems less personal and less characteristic alike). 

The Shrouds plays like a successor to Crimes of the Future (the second, and not the first film with the same title that appeared a year after Stereo). It isn't just personal, but more overtly biographical. If Crimes touched on the fear of losing a partner, the new film takes place after a partner has died. 

Cronenberg introduces silver-haired doppelgänger Karsh (Vincent Cassel from Eastern Promises), co-owner of a high-tech cemetery, after the death of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). On the surface, he's moved on, since he's dating again, but his health has been suffering. Unlike Saul, this isn't by choice. "Grief," his dentist tells him drily, "is rotting your teeth." 

There are many ways to deal with grief, but Karsh's is uniquely Cronenbergian, because at any time he can log on to his GraveTech app to activate the Shroudcam connected to Becca's grave in order to view the nude, decomposing body of a once-attractive woman. Oddly, she recalls the nude, decomposing, once-attractive woman from Kubrick-by-way-of-King's The Shining--but without the zombie element. 

GraveTech plans to expand so that European mourners can also watch their loved ones decompose. No doubt the company seeks to boost their profits, as well. I can't think of anything I would want less, but I've never felt Cronenberg is asking audiences to sympathize with the methods in his movies--to the extent that he once made a Freudian film called A Dangerous Method--so much as the reasons why a protagonist would want to use or invent the means to fill a certain need. The main thing is the need. 

Karsh isn't a solitary figure. He maintains friendships with computer guy Maury (Guy Pearce) and Becca's ex-veterinarian sister, Terry (also played by Kruger), Maury's ex-wife (in contrast with his industrialist in The Brutalist, Pearce is in twitchy, geek mode here). The women's resemblance establishes a link with 1988's Dead Ringers and its twin doctors and twin patients. 

When Karsh notices polyps on his wife's corpse, he consults Terry, but she dismisses the whole GraveTech thing as creepy. When a stranger sends him video in which they're desecrating the cemetery, The Shrouds turns into a mystery, and Karsh consults Maury, who finds the whole GraveTech thing both weird and beautiful, noting that Becca's body looks like its floating in outer space. 

The desecration ends the Shroudcam transmissions. Beyond Terry and Maury, Karsh also turns to his AI chatbot-style personal assistant Hunny (voiced by Kruger). Instead of a simulacram of a human being, Hunny looks like a bubbly cartoon version of Becca, an odd choice on Cronenberg's part, but then the tech in his films isn't always especially sleek or sophisticated. EXistenZ, from 1999, with its gristle guns and umbilical cord-like cables is a case in point, though the makeup effects here are quite convincing.

While Karsh meets with people who might know what's going on--when he isn't cavorting with wealthy, visually-impaired client Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt)--he dreams about his wife. Cassel and Kruger appear nude in these sequences, though DP Douglas Koch's hazy lighting obscures as much as it reveals. Becca starts out intact before losing body parts and gaining stitches and staples as the result of cancer. This isn't presented as body horror, necessarily. Karsh accepts her changed body, reminding me of Rosanna Arquette's post-accident form in Cronenberg's Ballard adaptation Crash. 

 

Karsh gets answers as he goes along, but I'm not sure we're meant to take them literally. 

 

It's suggested, for instance, that certain nefarious forces were using Becca as a test subject. This adds intrigue to the scenario, and if it were a thriller like Michael Crichton's corpse-filled Coma from 1978, Karsh would become a target while trying to bring these forces to justice. On the contrary, when a loved one dies, some survivors would rather blame a conspiracy theory than accept the facts. 

 

Russell Banks in his original novel and fellow Torontonian Atom Egoyan in his 1997 adaptation explored this impulse in The Sweet Hereafter. It's possible that these scenarios aren't even real; that they're all in Karsh's head. 

Though I've never thought of Cronenberg as an impersonal filmmaker, The Shrouds is personal in ways that go beyond the obvious. For one, his Jewishness is integral to the plot. Though Karsh isn't Jewish, Becca was, and she didn't believe in cremation (though some adherents do). If Karsh had acted against his wife's wishes, this would be a different film--more likely, it wouldn't exist at all. Karsh and Maury are also particularly fond of a Jewish deli from which the former orders in a pastrami sandwich and matzo ball soup to keep his friend fortified while he works on the central mystery.  

Then there's Cronenberg's country of origin. Though he has often filmed in Canada and worked with Canadian actors, his films tend to feel more placelessly Cronenbergian than specifically Canadian. In this one, however, Toronto plays Toronto. It's only on screen for a few seconds, but when Maury lifts a paper cup to his mouth, I noticed the unmistakable logo of a certain national coffee chain: a white maple leaf against a red background. 

Later, Karsh and Terry are silhouetted against the picture window of his high-rise as the city lights twinkle below. Off to the left, and impossible to miss: the tall, spindly outline of the CN Tower. Since Crimes, Cronenberg has also worked with a local cinematographer rather than a British one. As he told The Film Stage, Douglas Koch is "a very Canadian, very Toronto guy."

 

The Shrouds concludes with what Cronenberg considers a happy ending, while acknowledging that it's pretty ambiguous. 

 

Throughout the film, Karsh has been seeing signs of Becca in other women, and with her sister Terry, it's unavoidable. He flies off into the future with a version of that image that may or may not be real. Because Cronenberg is at the controls, Karsh never comes across as mentally unstable, and since he's such an unruffled figure throughout, as exemplified by the Zen-like home decor complete with koi pond, it's hard to tell if he's just imagining things. 

The filmmaker, who is 82, has said The Shrouds may be his last film, and it certainly has a reflective or valedictory feel, though the widowed Karsh gets plenty of action, so it isn't as if he--or his director--has lost all interest in other women. The cool effect, however, doesn't always play to the film's benefit. It may not be cold, and Vincent Cassel is fine, but a more charged atmosphere or urgent performance wouldn't have been amiss, since it feels more like a coda or an epilogue than a final statement, though you can always count on Cronenberg to steer clear of self-pity and sentimentality.

The entire film, a surprisingly wry affair in light of the somber subject matter, is handily summed up by an early exchange between Karsh and Maury. "That's your grief strategy?" Maury asks about his friend's obsession with his wife's decaying body. "Well," Karsh shrugs, "It's an approach."

The Shrouds opens at SIFF Cinema Uptown on Friday, April 25. Images from Janus Films by way of the IMDb (Vincent Cassel), Artforum (Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux), Awards Watch (Kassel, Diane Kruger, and the high-tech cemetery), Indiewire (Kassel and Guy Pearce), Salon (Kassel and Kruger), and The Hollywood Reporter (Kassel after the desecration).

Art for Everybody: Illuminating Doc Explores the Agonies and Ecstasies of Thomas Kinkade

ART FOR EVERYBODY 

(Miranda Yousef, 2023, USA, 99 minutes) 

"If you like Kinkade, you're an asshole."--Ralph Bakshi 

I grew up wanting to be an artist. Once I learned how to draw, I drew all the time. It made me happy, and the praise buoyed me when I felt insufficient in other areas. As I moved from grade school to high school, I figured it's what I would do professionally, so I majored in studio art, but shortly after graduating from college, I gave up. Instead of waiting to be rejected as an artist, I rejected myself, and pursued other interests. 

Thomas Kinkade also grew up wanting to be an artist, and knew that the odds were stacked against him. In an audio recording made when he was 16, Kinkade admits that he doesn't want to end up like Van Gogh; not appreciated until well after his death. Unlike me, however, he didn't give up. 

He could have simply developed a style and settled on a theme, but Kinkade went further by turning it into a lifestyle. Director Miranda Yousef doesn't just look at the paintings, prints, and ancillary products that made him rich, but behind the pious image to reveal what he really thought and the kind of art he really wanted to make, which might suggest an unauthorized documentary, except his family–brother, sister, wife, and four daughters–chose to participate, even though her portrait is troubling at best. 

Kinkade turned to art as a refuge from a youth in Placerville, CA he found unsatisfying, since his parents were divorced and had little money. He also thought he was a genius, which makes him sound like a lot of fun to be around. That confidence, though, helped him to get a job working on 1983's Fire and Ice from animator Ralph Bakshi, who marveled at his skill and discipline. He left to strike out on his own.

Kinkade moved on to landscape paintings he sold at local galleries, but he was committed to making art that everyone could afford, so he switched to printmaking. Just as significantly, he traded impressionism for kitsch. 

When he met Ken Raasch, who became his business partner, they decided to turn him into a brand. He wasn't just Thomas Kinkade, but the Painter of Light™. It’s like the way Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll, was succeeded by Michael Jackson, the King of Pop. Granted, Jackson wasn't what I would call kitsch, but Kinkade set himself up as a successor to 17th-century Dutch painter Vermeer, who was known posthumously as the Master of Light, except his work was marked by subtlety and naturalism. 

In the film, former Washington Post art critic and Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik cites Turner rather than Vermeer, but Kinkade had little in common with either, though his brother Patrick sees the brightly-lit cottages as an attempt to recreate the childhood he wishes he had. It's like the opposite of the immortal Santana lyric, "My house is dark, and my thoughts are cold." 

By the 1990s, Kinkade had gotten his wish, and his art was everywhere. 

He was a QVC staple with shops in malls filled with plates, mugs, lamps, candles, pillows, greeting cards, snowglobes, illuminated paintings–you name it. 

He could've simply revelled in his success, but then he wouldn't have been Thomas Kinkade. He wanted more. Knowing he'd never have the respect of critics, he positioned himself in opposition to the art they championed. He wasn't just an artist and an entrepreneur, he was a cultural warrior.

Like many cultural warriors, he had a public persona and a private one. To family and friends, the former wasn't fake necessarily. It's just that there were other aspects of his life that weren't as marketable, so he kept them under wraps. He had a storage room, for instance, filled with art that looked nothing like the "sentimental, a little garish, kind of twee" paintings, to quote New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean, that became his stock in trade. 

Though his wife and daughters come across as intelligent people, they believe the marketing around their patriarch prevented him from being himself in public. I take their point, but it's a part he chose to play. He wasn't a child, and no one forced his hand. His maudlin art and faithful façade combined with the evangelical and conservative figures with whom he appeared in photo ops–including the future 45th and 47th president of the United States–left little room for originality and free expression. 

Nor did it leave much room for Kinkade to be the kind of father his wife and daughters wanted and needed, because he was always working. Something was bound to give, and the trouble began when the teetotaler began to drink. Since he had a tendency to do everything to excess, he never should have started, but it was the socially acceptable stress reliever he chose. 

By 2001, the bloom was off the rose as he had oversaturated the market. Stores closed, sales declined, and the stock tanked. He could've cut his losses and returned to the more personal paintings with which he began as an art student at Berkeley, but egomaniacs never know when to quit.

Yousef recounts the many ways in which it all went to shit. It's easy to feel a sense of glee, or at least schadenfreude, when karma catches up with an evildoer, except Kinkade was more complicated than that, and throughout the film, she reveals the challenges he spent his life trying to overcome. 

The second half of the film isn't as fun as the first, and that isn't her fault. Some heavy drinkers, like Oliver Reed, go out in a blaze of glory--partying with sailors in Malta during the making of Gladiator--but Kinkade comes across as sad and pathetic in his final days. He was free to finally be himself, but it was too late. 

I believe this was the right approach in light of the alternatives. Yousef spoke with art critics, curators, and professors, but avoided standup comedians, satirical cartoonists, and others who might have chosen to make fun of Kinkade and his art. She didn't speak with many collectors, but it wasn't really necessary, not least when some of the speakers in the film, like Bakshi and conceptual artist Jeffrey Vallance, were fans of a kind. 

In the end, she finds a touching way to end an unhappy story that doesn't rely on false uplift, but rather genuine appreciation from the insiders who got to know the work–and the man–beyond the brightly-lit cozy cottages.

Art for Everybody, which premiered in Seattle at SIFF 2023, opens in Los Angeles on Fri, April 18, with Susan Orlean and Jeffrey Vallance in attendance, and expands in the weeks to come. Find more screenings here. 

Images: Tremolo Productions (Thomas Kinkade at work), The Art Newspaper via The Kinkade Family Foundation (A Quiet Evening, Places in the Heart I/1998 and Self-Portrait with a Paint Stained Shirt/photo Jeff McLane/approx 1979), Pinterest (Kinkade with The Garden of Prayer/1997).

Stranger Flashback: Strange Fruit Captures the Semi-Forgotten Harvest of Apple Records

This is a revived version of a 2012 Line Out post (The Stranger purged them from the internet some time after they pulled the plug on their music blog in 2014). 

Blogs Mar 23, 2012 at 2:46 pm

The Semi-Forgotten Harvest of Apple Records

Kathy Fennessy

Even before I knew the driving force behind it, namely the Beatles, I was aware of Apple Records (1968-1975), because my divorced parents owned a few of their releases. Mom had James Taylor's 1968 self-titled debut and Badfinger's 1970 No Dice and Dad had John Lennon and Yoko Ono's 1968 Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (separate households, separate collections).

I don't recall Dad ever playing the latter, but at least he didn't hide it from my underage eyes—then again, he was a regular consumer of Playboy and Hustler. Oddly enough, my parents didn't own any Beatles records that I can remember, but I was as familiar with the foursome as any child of the 1970s.

Watching Thomas Arnold's Strange Fruit: the Beatles' Apple Records got me thinking about the label all over again. My friend, Alan, describes Sexy Intellectual, the company that released the documentary, as "demi-hemi-semi-legit," which sounds about right. They previously issued Tom O'Dell's From Straight to Bizarre: Zappa, Beefheart, Alice Cooper and L.A.’s Lunatic Fringe, so Apple makes sense as a label-oriented follow-up.

Aside from the hit makers, like Badfinger, who moved on to bigger labels, there were other musicians who made less of an impact and, in some cases, no impact at all. I was particularly taken by Jackie Lomax and Mary Hopkin. The former had no hits, while the latter sold eight million copies of the charming 1968 single "Those Were the Days," but neither figures among the first artists that come to mind when I think about Apple.

Aside from the Beatles, notable label employees included Mal Evans, Derek Taylor, and Peter Asher, the brother of Paul McCartney's girlfriend Jane Asher and a former member of Peter and Gordon. Lennon's infamous associate Allen Klein would become ringmaster in 1969, but the signing rules remained much the same from start to finish: at least one Beatle had to approve each artist.

So, McCartney went to bat for Hopkin, an 18-year-old from Wales, while George Harrison threw his lot in with Lomax, who had been fronting Merseybeat combo the Undertakers when he caught the attention of the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein, who signed him to a publishing contract through NEMS. After Epstein's untimely passing in 1967--he was only 32 years old--the Beatles signed him to a recording contract with Apple.

Lomax, who appears in the film, believes the imprint tried to do too much too soon. Instead of a staggered release schedule, they issued four singles at the same time, including "Those Were the Days" and "Sour Milk Sea."

George Harrison wrote and played on Lomax's side, along with McCartney, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, and Nicky Hopkins, but it drummed up little business. The music writers in the documentary believe the timing was off, since the UK was shifting from R&B and blues rock toward psychedelia.

It's ironic, because "Sour Milk Sea," which almost ended up on The White Album, holds up better than "Those Were the Days," though the latter was always intended to have an old-timey, music hall feel, like an outtake from 1968 musical Oliver!

By the time they released their full-length albums, the pattern would repeat: Hopkin's Post Card sold well, while Lomax's Is This What You Want? did not. Other than the music featured in this film, I'm unfamiliar with his work, but I like what I've heard, and 1960s specialist (and Stranger contributor) Mike Nipper* rates his first three records highly.

Despite her initial success, though, I rarely hear Hopkin's name anymore. I wouldn't say she's forgotten, but other Apple signings like Billy Preston appear in today's musical conversations more often, due in part to the fact that he once served as a Fifth Beatle--he also steals the show at Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh, an Apple double-LP that featured Badfinger.

Apparently, Hopkin was never especially interested in pop, but I guess it was hard to say no to the Cute Beatle, who remade the blonde soprano in his musical image. Success, fortunately, emboldened the one-time Eurovision singer, and she would move in more of folk direction in the years to come. 

Hopkin's relationship with producer Tony Visconti, who supported the move, may have also helped her to stand up to McCartney and Apple. After that, her record sales began to dwindle, but the documentary gives the impression that she valued art over fame and commerce.

While Lomax, the ultimate road warrior, continues to record and perform, Hopkin took a three-decade break from full-time music-making, reemerging in 2007 with a trio of self-released albums. The documentary also features David Peel, Joey Molland of Badfinger, and Gary VanScyoc of Elephant's Memory, the Lower East Side collective who backed Lennon on 1972's Some Time in New York City.

Like the Bizarre/Straight documentary, Strange Fruit plays almost like a miniseries, because it clocks in at 160+ minutes. Though "unsanctioned by the Beatles or Apple Records," it contains an impressive array of audio-visual material, including Beatles and Yoko Ono tracks, like the below number from Fly, which makes Lomax sound like a commercial-minded chart-topper by comparison. If the latter was too "retro" for the hipsters of the 1960s, the Ono of the 1970s was too hip for most everybody—then and now.  

*Nipper has heard more singles from the era than I ever have or will.

Sexy Intellectual/Chrome Dreams/MVD releases Strange Fruit on April 12, 2012. Images from the IMDb (home video cover art), Discogs (Jackie Lomax single cover art), eil.com (Mary Hopkin single cover art), and centerfield maz (Billy Preston wowing the MSG crowd at the Concert for Bangladesh).