Browse Westerns. Biography

List Price: $49.98
Price: $29.49
You Save: $20.49 (41%)

Leading Ladies Collection, Vol. 2 (A Big Hand For The Little Lady / I'll Cry Tomorrow / Rich And Famous / Shoot The Moon / Up The Down Staircase)

Actors: Susan Hayward, Sandy Dennis, Candice Bergen, Diane Keaton, Patty Duke
ASIN : B000UPMZ0S
Sales Rank : 28461
Director : Joanne Woodward, George Cukor
Brand : Warner Brothers
Studio : Warner Home Video
Region Code : 1
Format : Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 0085391144816
UPC : 085391144816
Release Date : December 06, 2007
Publisher : Warner Home Video
Manufacturer : Warner Home Video
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : Warner Home Video

Product Description

Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 11/06/2007

Amazon.com

A truly random collection of movies comprises Leading Ladies Collection Volume 2, five films offering juicy roles to esteemed actresses. The ladies in question are, without a doubt, acting up a storm.

The oldest title in the bunch is I'll Cry Tomorrow (1956), a look at the troubled life of alcoholic singer Lillian Roth, given a typically from-the-guts performance by Susan Hayward. Hayward even does her own singing, although her style can best be described as "belting." She and director Daniel Mann seize on the new frankness of the era, providing a no-holds-barred description of addiction as well as some handy psychoanalyzing. Hayward snagged an Oscar nomination for her work; a couple of extra features give a taste of the real Roth at work.

A Big Hand for the Little Lady (1966) has the feel of a TV Western upgraded with a spiffy big-name cast. Henry Fonda and Joanne Woodward are the rube couple sucked into a high-stakes poker game in Laredo one day, where the wife must take over the cards when hubby falls ill. A delicious cast of character actors (Jason Robards and Charles Bickford among them) and a twisty plot make this an enjoyable, if modest, outing. Up the Down Staircase (1967) is one of the cinema's signature "inspirational teacher" movies, with Sandy Dennis (fresh from an Oscar win for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) as the idealistic instructor at an inner-city school. The movie still has appeal, in the form of Robert Mulligan's realistic direction and Dennis's Method-acting fragility.

Rich and Famous (1981) was the final film for a Hollywood legend, director George Cukor, who made many a classic "women's picture" in his time. Thus it's fitting that he guide Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen in performances that appealingly tweak their usual images, and still represent some of their best work. It's a remake of a Bette Davis-Miriam Hopkins picture, Old Acquaintance, about the enduring bond between two frequently-bickering writers. Finally, Shoot the Moon (1982) is a view of divorce that rarely gets below the surface, despite the full-bore performances by Albert Finney and Diane Keaton as the tormented couple. Director Alan Parker brings his slick approach to bear, and Finney and Keaton sneak in whatever subtlety they can around the edges. --Robert Horton

List Price: $14.98
Price: $13.49
You Save: $1.49 (10%)

Dark Command

Actors: Claire Trevor, John Wayne, Walter Pidgeon, Roy Rogers, George 'Gabby' Hayes
ASIN : 0782011195
Sales Rank : 21687
Director : Raoul Walsh
Studio : Republic Pictures
Region Code : 1
Format : Black & White, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 9780782011197
ISBN : 0782011195
UPC : 017153100303
Release Date : December 16, 2000
Publisher : Republic Pictures
Manufacturer : Republic Pictures
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : Republic Pictures
Running Time : 94

Description

In this pre-civil War saga, Walter Pigeon, as Confederate renegade William Cantrell, along with his raiders, clashes with the new marshal of Kansas City, Bob Seton (John Wayne). Their long-standing rivalry of love and power reaches dangerous proportions when Seton exposes Cantrell and his guerillas, who have been raiding both Union and Confederate lines. Roy Rogers co-stars in one of his earliest film roles.

Amazon.com

Historically dubious but vigorously entertaining, Dark Command is the best of John Wayne's many movies for Republic (not counting Wayne's lovely producing debut Angel and the Badman and those two John Ford films). Set in "Bleeding Kansas" just before and during the Civil War, it highlights the romantic triangle of amiable but unschooled Texan Wayne, banker's daughter Claire Trevor, and schoolmaster Walter Pidgeon--just long enough for the earnest pedagogue to become embittered, turn into bushwhacker William Quantrill (here Cantrell), and start wreaking havoc in the Border States. This was Republic's first star vehicle for Wayne, following his breakthrough in Stagecoach (away from Republic), and it's an uncharacteristically impressive production: good writers working from a W.R. Burnett novel, Raoul Walsh brought in to direct, music by Victor Young, and strong costars and supporting cast (Marjorie Main, Porter Hall, Raymond Walburn--and Roy Rogers and Gabby Hayes!). Wayne himself is delightful. --Richard T. Jameson

List Price: $59.98
Price: $53.99
You Save: $5.99 (10%)

The John Ford Film Collection (The Informer / Mary of Scotland / The Lost Patrol / Cheyenne Autumn / Sergeant Rutledge)

Actors: Victor McLaglen, Heather Angel, Richard Widmark, Carroll Baker, Katharine Hepburn
ASIN : B000F0UUHS
Sales Rank : 50358
Director : John Ford, Leslie Goodwins
Brand : Warner Brothers
Studio : Warner Home Video
Region Code : 1
Format : Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 0085393980429
UPC : 085393980429
Release Date : December 06, 2006
Publisher : Warner Home Video
Manufacturer : Warner Home Video
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : Warner Home Video
Running Time : 554

Description

WHV celebrates on of the true masters of American cinema with the release of The John Ford Collection. Four-time Academy Award?-Winning director John Ford is perhaps best known for his Westerns and collaborations with John Wayne, however, this Ford collection runs the gamut of genres and shows the diversity and genius of John Ford at his most impressive. Featured here will be the DVD debuts of five classic titles - all will be exclusive to the five-disc boxed set.

Amazon.com

John Ford remains the consensus choice as America's greatest director, and his critical eminence dates from two films in this set. By 1934 he had been directing for 17 years, building a solid reputation as a Hollywood professional with maybe the best eye in the movie business. With The Lost Patrol (1934) and The Informer (1935)--made for RKO rather than his accustomed studio base, Fox--he took a decisive step toward establishing himself as a personal, at least semi-independent artist. Both films were stark dramas free of box-office compromise, glib heroics, or any expectation of facile happy endings. They were also more relentlessly stylized than anything Ford had done before ... which both distinguished them in their day and left them vulnerable to dating when some of their experimentation proved rather dead-ended.

The Lost Patrol began Ford's association with producer Merian C. Cooper, a partnership that would lead to the independent production company Argosy and the making of such fine, ultrapersonal films as The Quiet Man, The Searchers, and Ford's celebrated cavalry trilogy. The story, by Philip MacDonald, concerns a handful of British soldiers cornered at an oasis in the Mesopotamian Desert (now Iraq) during World War I and slowly decimated by an unseen enemy. The strong visuals--baking sun, the undulating vastness of the dunes, the drift of ghostly mirages--befit a crucible of character-testing, with an unnamed Sergeant (Victor McLaglen) striving to keep at least one man alive as desperation, madness, and implacable Arab snipers take their toll. This DVD release restores six minutes of footage cut for a 1949 rerelease and rarely seen since.

Ford won the first of his four best-director Oscars for The Informer, an intense tale of "one night in strife-torn Dublin, 1922" when a slow-witted I.R.A. strongman named Gypo Nolan sells out his best friend for 20 British pounds. On a budget that obliged him to obscure canvas sets with deep shadows and a persistent fog that underscores Gypo's mental and spiritual confusion, Ford created a visual world akin to the German Expressionist classics of the 1920s. But the film's inventive use of sound and an ambitious music score (by Max Steiner) commingling leitmotifs for half a dozen key characters also encouraged '30s critics to hail it as the first classic of the sound era. That was overstating it (and more than a little amnesiac on the critics' part!). Overstated, too, was Ford's relentless Christ symbolism paralleling Gypo's betrayal to that of Judas. Still, Victor McLaglen's portrayal of the title character remains a triumph (McLaglen won an Oscar as well), and the film abounds in brilliant strokes: the silhouette of a British soldier shining his flashlight on the wanted poster of Gypo's friend, while Gypo lurks just outside the beam; the giant Nolan forever knocking his head on hanging signs or seeming to be crushed by low ceilings; the cacophony of cries and gunfire, and then crashing silence, as the Black and Tan raid the I.R.A. rebel's home. Initially overrated, then relegated to museum status, The Informer awaits rediscovery as a dynamic motion picture.

The John Ford Collection includes one more mid-'30s RKO endeavor, Mary of Scotland (1936). Although handsome, this adaptation of a Maxwell Anderson blank-verse play about Queen Elizabeth's northern rival never finds credible footing as a movie. Andrew Sarris is dead right in lamenting Ford's version of Mary, Queen of Scots, as "a madonna of the Scottish moors"--Katharine Hepburn, inevitably. The most interesting thing about the production is the offscreen story, that Ford and Hepburn fell passionately in love, yet (perhaps) resisted becoming lovers.

From there we leap to the 1960s and two Westerns made under the aegis of Warner Bros. (Warner now owns the RKO library, hence this rather arbitrary set.) Sergeant Rutledge (1960) has markedly improved with age, with what once seemed creaky dramaturgy now playing as bold stylization. Using a jagged flashback structure occasioned by a court-martial at a Southwest outpost, Ford took an unflinching look at the legacy of race in America. The then-unknown black actor Woody Strode has a showcase role as a magnificent "Buffalo soldier" accused of the rape-murder of his commanding officer's blond, white daughter and the murder of the commandant himself. Unfortunately, Ford's once-masterly handling of character actors had grown lax, and he indulged some tedious bombast from Willis Bouchey and Carleton Young as the presiding judge and prosecutor, respectively; and Jeffrey Hunter, however effective in The Searchers, made a weak protagonist as Rutledge's defense counsel. But the veteran cameraman Bert Glennon almost winds things back to Stagecoach days, occasionally turning the film's Technicolor to very nearly black and white.

Another debt to race relations is addressed in Cheyenne Autumn (1964), a beautiful title to grace John Ford's final Western. The film has moments of grandeur as Ford attempts at long last to "tell the story from the Indians' point of view," and it's a pleasure to report that William H. Clothier's majestic Technicolor compositions have been restored to their Panavision dimensions on the DVD. Ford is unambiguously supportive of the Cheyennes' resolve to bolt their reservation in the desert Southwest and trek north to their ancestral lands. By contrast, most of white society, the military, the bureaucracy, and the sensationalist press are portrayed as insensitive, foolish, or hateful. However, the Cheyenne are nobly wooden, with all key roles played by non-Indians: Ricardo Montalban, Gilbert Roland, Sal Mineo, Victor Jory, and Dolores Del Rio (breathtakingly beautiful as ever). As for point of view, it's sympathetic cavalry officer Richard Widmark and Quaker missionary Carroll Baker through whose eyes most of the epic narrative unfolds. --Richard T. Jameson

Price: $6.99

Outlaw, The

Actors: Jane Russell, Jack Buetel
ASIN : B000054OU3
Sales Rank : 30876
Studio : Echo Bridge Home Entertainment
Region Code : 1
Format : Black & White, Dolby, DVD-Video, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 0096009008291
UPC : 096009008291
Release Date : December 06, 1999
Publisher : Echo Bridge Home Entertainment
Manufacturer : Echo Bridge Home Entertainment
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : Echo Bridge Home Entertainment
Running Time : 123

Product Description

The tale begins with law-enforcer Pat Garrett's ruse to trap and cage legendary outlaw Billy the Kid. But Billy is wise to the lawman's scheme and lies low at pal Doc Holliday's ranch. Trouble soon begins to brew, however, when The Kid falls for Doc's lover Rio. Although Billy is responsible for the death of Rio's brother, she returns the desperado's affection, and the two marry on the sly. But the betrothed couple has a volatile relationship, and as the trio runs from Garrett and his gang of lawmen, the group quarrels amongst themselvesmaking it difficult to escape.

Amazon.com

A fast-paced, entertaining lark of a film, The Outlaw is known today mostly for the buoyant performance of Jane Russell, whose career was engineered by the film's director, Howard Hughes, otherwise infamous for his reclusive millionaire ways. But more than that, the film boasts a set of finely tuned performances in the retelling of the story of Billy the Kid (Jack Beutel), whose burgeoning friendship with Doc Holliday (Walter Huston) arouses an intense hatred in Sheriff Pat Garrett (Thomas Mitchell, arguably the greatest character actor who ever lived). As Rio, Doc Holliday's girl, Jane Russell creates an irrepressible presence that lends an ample foundation to the story when her affections for Billy cleave his relationship with Doc. There are enough psychosexual rumblings to go around that the pace never sags. --Jim Gay

Price: $9.98

Frank and Jesse

Actors: Rob Lowe, Bill Paxton, Randy Travis, Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, Maria Pitillo
ASIN : 6305245460
Sales Rank : 39289
Director : Robert Boris
Brand : Lions Gate
Studio : Lions Gate
Region Code : 1
Format : Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 9786305245469
ISBN : 6305245460
UPC : 031398691730
Release Date : December 05, 1999
Publisher : Lions Gate
Manufacturer : Lions Gate
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : Lions Gate
Running Time : 105

Product Description

When the civil war ended frank and jessee returned to their family farm. A railroad agent after the brothers land kills their younger brother while yankee soldiers do nothing. This and other atrocities by the soldiers start them on their legendary life of crime in the west. Studio: Lions Gate Home Ent. Release Date: 02/18/2003 Starring: Rob Lowe Bill Paxton Run time: 106 minutes Rating: R Director: Robert Boris

Amazon.com

The story of Jesse and Frank James, the real-life robbers whose exploits earned them a Robin Hood reputation, has been portrayed in dozens of films that are more faithful to myth than to history. Only in the revisionist 1970s did the romantic shadings come off in a few genre-busting examples (notably The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid and The Long Riders). Oddly enough this 1994 feature takes more than a few factual liberties to restore the romantic portrait of the bank-robbing brothers. Four years after the Civil War, in a South crawling with carpetbaggers and occupied by Union troops, the hotheaded Jesse (Rob Lowe) and his clearheaded older brother Frank (Bill Paxton) take to the trail in a campaign of bank jobs, train robberies, and stage holdups while evading the dogged efforts of Allan Pinkerton (William Atherton) and his detective agency. Writer-director Robert Boris presents the boys as heroes of the defeated South, gentleman robbers avenging the pillage of their people by the railroad and bank concerns pouring in from the North and pursued by a maniacally driven Pinkerton on a personal quest for revenge. In the wake of Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven this film comes off as old fashioned and a little naive, but the measured pace and the casting of country singer Randy Travis (who plays Cole Younger and narrates with a voice like molasses) gives the film, in moments, the intimacy of a ballad. --Sean Axmaker

List Price: $14.98
Price: $13.49
You Save: $1.49 (10%)

Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson

Actors: Paul Newman, Joel Grey, Kevin McCarthy, Harvey Keitel, Allan F. Nicholls
ASIN : B000059TFT
Sales Rank : 16982
Director : Robert Altman
Brand : Buffalo
Studio : MGM (Video & DVD)
Region Code : 1
Format : Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 9780792849544
ISBN : 079284954X
UPC : 027616861047
Release Date : December 08, 2001
Publisher : MGM (Video & DVD)
Manufacturer : MGM (Video & DVD)
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : MGM (Video & DVD)
Running Time : 123

Description

From director Robert Altman (M*A*S*H, The Player) comes an uproarious, high-spirited look at "Buffalo Bill" Cody, the legendary Western adventurer. With a fine cast that includes Paul Newman, Harvey Keitel, Burt Lancaster, Joel Grey and Geraldine Chaplin, Buffalo Bill and the Indians is a hilarious yet poignant comedy that shows the Old West as you've never seen it before! Although Buffalo Bill (Newman) has fought Indians and Civil War battles, nothing can prepare him for his newest challenge: show business! His "Wild West Show" is hugely popular, but when he signs a former enemy, Sioux Chief Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts), for a featured role, a hysterical clash of cultures reverberates far beyond the boundaries of their sprawling outdoor theater. And the complications only multiply when the troupe discovers it must put on a special command performancefor none other than the President of the United States!

Amazon.com

Robert Altman was often ahead of his time--once at the cost of being behind himself. Buffalo Bill and the Indians, a snorting exposé of the U.S. predilection for buying into heroic myths, opened on July 4, 1976. Clearly the film was positioned as the ultimate bicentennial event, Altman-style. But Altman had already delivered that a year earlier: the splendiferous, deeply disenchanted yet exhilarating Nashville. Both Nashville and Buffalo Bill are films about America-as-show business, hucksterism, and the rare miracle of performance. But everything Altman got so thrillingly right in Nashville, which teems with life and mystery and widescreen dynamism, came out flatfooted and obvious in Buffalo Bill, a cramped, smirky inside joke that ends up being on the joker.

The setting is the base camp for Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, where the blustering Indian fighter of legend is gearing up for his latest national tour. Apart from sharpshooter Annie Oakley (Geraldine Chaplin) and her great friend, the Sioux chieftain Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts), the show is populated by phonies and opportunists. Biggest phony of all is Cody (Paul Newman), whose fame has been based more on the penny-dreadful scribblings of Ned Buntline (Burt Lancaster) than on any real accomplishments; even his long blond tresses are fake. Altman and cowriter Alan Rudolph (working from a play by Arthur Kopit) thump their insights about the Establishment's feet of clay as if they were breaking-news bulletins instead of countercultural clichés. Only the occasional ineffably mysterious Altman zoom shot offers relief. --Richard T. Jameson

List Price: $14.98
Price: $13.49
You Save: $1.49 (10%)

Custer of the West

Actors: Robert Shaw, Mary Ure, Ty Hardin, Jeffrey Hunter, Lawrence Tierney
ASIN : B0001GF2FG
Sales Rank : 47264
Director : Robert Siodmak
Brand : TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT
Studio : MGM (Video & DVD)
Region Code : 1
Format : Color, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 9780792860471
ISBN : 0792860470
UPC : 027616905802
Release Date : December 25, 2004
Publisher : MGM (Video & DVD)
Manufacturer : MGM (Video & DVD)
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : MGM (Video & DVD)
Running Time : 141

Description

From decorated war hero to doomed commander, General George Armstrong Custer is brilliantly portrayed by Robert Shaw (Jaws, The Sting) in this stunning, "giant spectacle of a film" (Motion Picture Herald). With an all-star cast that includes Jeffrey Hunter and Robert Ryan, thisepic adventure vividly chronicles the rise and fall of this larger-than-life legend! Afterhis triumphs in the Civil War, General Custer becomes one of the most renowned military figures of his time. But he infuriates as many people as he impresses never more so than in the days leading upto the Battle of Little Bighorn, where his sense of pride overshadows his dedication to duty with disastrous consequences.

Amazon.com

General George Armstrong Custer has been portrayed as everything from a vain but ultimately honorable hero (Errol Flynn in They Died with Their Boots On) to an insane, pompous incompetent (Richard Mulligan in the biting Little Big Man), but few have attempted an ambitious look at the man in all his contradictions. Robert Siodmak's Custer of the West, his final American production, attempts the task with fine results, portraying the career soldier as a pragmatist, a disciplinarian with a bullying streak, a loner, and ultimately an Old World romantic in the modern age. Robert Shaw gives the role a regal bearing (though his continental accent keeps drifting in) and a sense of dignity, depicting a man who ironically identifies more with the Indians than with the U.S. Army. Jeffrey Hunter and Ty Hardin costar as his battling junior officers and Robert Ryan is memorable in a brief appearance as a gold-mining deserter. Shooting in handsome widescreen and vivid Technicolor, Siodmak makes his outdoor settings come alive and nimbly handles the many action scenes, most notably a chase that sends an escaping soldier whooshing down a log water chute like a Disney ride. Siodmak's sweeping visuals deliver both grand images and ironic counterpoint, but ultimately Custer of the West eschews the heroism of Hollywood adventures for a portrait of the corrupt state of the American military and one man's hopeless fight against it. --Sean Axmaker

Browse Biography Online

Leading Ladies Collection, Vol. 2 (A Big Hand For The Little Lady / I'll Cry Tomorrow / Rich And Famous / Shoot The Moon / Up The Down Staircase)

Product Description

Amazon.com

Dark Command

Description

Amazon.com

The Last Days of Frank & Jesse James

Description

Legends of Hollywood - Bob Hope Series

Product Description

The John Ford Film Collection (The Informer / Mary of Scotland / The Lost Patrol / Cheyenne Autumn / Sergeant Rutledge)

Description

Amazon.com

Outlaw, The

Product Description

Amazon.com

Frank and Jesse

Product Description

Amazon.com

Rodeo Girl

Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson

Description

Amazon.com

Custer of the West

Description

Amazon.com