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Sam Peckinpah's Legendary Westerns Collection (The Wild Bunch / Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid / Ride the High Country / The Ballad of Cable Hogue)

ASIN : B000BRP4B2
Sales Rank : 28202
Director : Sam Peckinpah
Brand : Warner Brothers
Studio : Warner Home Video
Region Code : 1
Format : Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 9781419806827
ISBN : 1419806823
UPC : 012569693883
Release Date : December 10, 2006
Publisher : Warner Home Video
Manufacturer : Warner Home Video
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : Warner Home Video
Running Time : 597

Product Description

Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 01/10/2006

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Here's how director Sam Peckinpah described his motivation behind The Wild Bunch at the time of the film's 1969 release: "I was trying to tell a simple story about bad men in changing times. The Wild Bunch is simply what happens when killers go to Mexico. The strange thing is you feel a great sense of loss when these killers reach the end of the line." All of these statements are true, but they don't begin to cover the impact that Peckinpah's film had on the evolution of American movies. Now the film is most widely recognized as a milestone event in the escalation of screen violence, but that's a label of limited perspective. Of course, Peckinpah's bloody climactic gunfight became a masterfully directed, photographed, and edited ballet of graphic violence that transcended the conventional Western and moved into a slow-motion realm of pure cinematic intensity. But the film--surely one of the greatest Westerns ever made--is also a richly thematic tale of, as Peckinpah said, "bad men in changing times." The Wild Bunch is a masterpiece that should not be defined strictly in terms of its violence, but as a story of mythic proportion, brimming with rich characters and dialogue and the bittersweet irony of outlaw traditions on the wane. --Jeff Shannon

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid may be the most beautiful and ambitious film that Sam Peckinpah ever made. The time is 1881. Powerful interests want New Mexico tamed for their brand of progress, and Sheriff Pat Garrett (James Coburn) is commissioned to rid the territory of his old gunfighting comrades. He serves fair notice to William Bonney--Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson)--and his Fort Sumter cronies, but it's not in their nature, or his, to go quietly. Peckinpah's theme, more than ever, is the closing of the frontier and the nature of the loss that that entails. But this time his vision takes him beyond genre convention, beyond history and legend, to the bleeding heart of myth--and surely of himself. This is one strange and original movie. In 1973 most American reviewers responded by panning it and deriding its director, whom they saw as having betrayed the promise of Ride the High Country, been swept up in his own cult of violence, and become incoherent as a storyteller. Coherence wasn't helped by MGM's cutting at least a quarter-of-an-hour out of the finished film and removing a bitter, retrospective prelude. Subsequent releases have restored a lot of material, and now there's more widespread appreciation of the depth and power of Peckinpah's achievement. The cast, teeming with fine character actors, is extraordinary, making the gallery of frontier denizens vivid and resonant. --Richard T. Jameson

What does it tell us that Sam Peckinpah's most joyous and life-affirming movie is also his most underappreciated? The Ballad of Cable Hogue was made in that singular moment when, having just completed The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah knew he was back in the game as a feature-film director; and before anyone (including Peckinpah himself?) had an inkling of how completely he was about to redefine the Western genre, contemporary American filmmaking, and his own personal legend. Cable Hogue is a splendiferous entertainment: a grufty Western tall tale, a lusty comedy, and also (in critic Kathleen Murphy's phrase) "a musical about the economic and emotional complexities of capitalism." Its title character--Jason Robards in a great, exuberant gift of a performance--is an ornery varmint left by two scurrilous partners (L.Q. Jones and Strother Martin) to die in the desert. Besides such Peckinpah regulars as Slim Pickens, R.G. Armstrong, and Gene Evans, the movie features Stella Stevens in her career-best role as Hildy, Hogue's best reason for getting into town now and again, and David Warner, an itinerant preacher and full-time lech who becomes his soulmate. Lucien Ballard photographed, and there's a charming song score (by Richard Gillis) whose neglect is as mystifying as that of the film. Above all, there is Sam Peckinpah exulting in the lyrical, heart-filling possibilities of making a motion picture, trying just about anything, and finding it beautiful. This film was his personal favorite. --Richard T. Jameson

Ride the High Country is the one Sam Peckinpah movie about which there has never been controversy--save at MGM in 1962, when a new studio regime opted to dump this beautiful, heartbreakingly elegiac Western into the bottom half of a double-bill. Westerns rarely even got reviewed back then, so it's wellnigh miraculous that critics discovered the movie and raved about it. Newsweek called it the best American picture of the year. Veteran cowboy stars Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea portray aging gunslingers in the twilight of the Old West. The slow-building tension between longtime friends--one still true to the code he's lived by, the other having drifted away from it--anticipates the tortuous personal dilemmas played out to the death by Peckinpah's Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Benny and Elita in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. The action scenes are powerful, if only beginning to suggest the radical technique with which Peckinpah would astonish audiences in just a few years. But his feeling for flavorsome dialogue, Rabelaisian humor, and full-blooded character acting is already unmistakable. McCrea and Scott are simply superb. The two proposed that they swap roles before filming got underway, and the question of who got first billing was settled by flipping a coin. Both men retired once the film was in the can. They knew they'd never top it. --Richard T. Jameson

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Griffith Masterworks (The Birth of a Nation / Intolerance / Broken Blossoms / Orphans of the Storm / Biograph Shorts 1909-1913)

ASIN : B00007CVSB
Sales Rank : 25619
Studio : Kino Video
Region Code : 1
Format : Box set, Black & White, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Silent, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 0738329027025
UPC : 738329027025
Release Date : December 10, 2002
Publisher : Kino Video
Manufacturer : Kino Video
Availability : Usually ships in 1 to 2 days
Label : Kino Video
Running Time : 986
Actors: D.W. Griffith, Lilian Gish

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Although the DVDs included in Griffith Masterworks are available separately, they gain even greater significance in this stupendous boxed-set compilation. The title is no understatement: These four features and 30 short films comprise the crowning achievements in D.W. Griffith's pioneering legacy, spanning the director's progress from cinematic innovator (the Biograph shorts, 1909-13) to his ambitious creation of the controversial epics The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), and his mastery of the emotionally intense melodramas Broken Blossoms (1919) and Orphans of the Storm (1921). Griffith's artistic growth is evident throughout, as he moves from the static camera of the Biograph years to his groundbreaking development of cinematic grammar including close-ups, parallel editing, and mobile-camera action. The historical importance of these films has long been established; they're available here in the best available condition, carefully preserved with the illuminating perspective of history.

That perspective extends to the set's impressive bonus features, representing an unprecedented wealth of archival material exclusive to these DVDs. Appropriately, The Birth of a Nation is closely examined through vintage and latter-day materials, including a peculiar 1930 prologue featuring Walter Huston and Griffith himself, musing over the film's ongoing battle with censorship; archival documents further examine the charges of racism that plagued the film for decades. Other highlights include Lillian Gish's introduction to Broken Blossoms, filmed for the 1970s TV series The Silent Years; two filmed introductions featuring Orson Welles (for Intolerance and Orphans of the Storm); and a rare look at Griffith acting in the 1908 short "Rescued from the Eagle's Nest." A veritable goldmine for home or classroom viewing, Griffith Masterworks is an essential addition to any collection of classic silent cinema. --Jeff Shannon

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The John Wayne Film Collection (Without Reservations / Allegheny Uprising / Tycoon / Reunion in France / Big Jim McLain / Trouble Along the Way)

ASIN : B000O599XA
Sales Rank : 39046
Director : Edward Ludwig, Jules Dassin, Mervyn LeRoy, Michael Curtiz, Richard Wallace
Brand : Warner Brothers
Studio : Warner Home Video
Region Code : 1
Format : Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 0085391145394
UPC : 085391145394
Release Date : December 22, 2007
Publisher : Warner Home Video
Manufacturer : Warner Home Video
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : Warner Home Video
Running Time : 614
Actors: John Wayne, Donna Reed, Nancy Olson, Joan Crawford, Claudette Colbert

Studio description

Includes: Without Reservations (1946), Allegheny Uprising (1939), Tycoon (1947), Reunion in France (1942), Big Jim McLain (1952), Trouble Along the Way (1953).

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Pilgrim, let's talk. John Wayne starred in something like 150 feature films, and the most loyal Duke devotee cannot insist that all of them were U.S. Grade A, even if the man himself never stinted. So what we have in this boxed set--now that the classics have been corralled in previous collections--is a mixed bag. A couple of these movies should be happy discoveries. A couple are honorable misfires. A couple are downright (to borrow a disturbing word from McLintock!) unprepossessing. But all are new to DVD and all are welcome, because there's no such thing as a John Wayne movie that isn't worth checking out.

The likable Allegheny Uprising (1939) was made at RKO half a year after Wayne achieved stardom in Stagecoach. It's an odd little picture: a "Western" set in Pennsylvania, a "forgotten footnote of history" about a rebellion against King George III's forces a decade-and-a-half before the American Revolution, and a basically B-movie production (over and done with in 80 minutes) with some middling-large action scenes and lots of fresh air and sunlight. Wayne plays a thoughtful fellow named Jim Smith who leads his "men of the Conococheague" in a brief shooting war in which they scrupulously strive not to kill anybody; they're still loyal British subjects, for all their buckskinned orneriness. Just as buckskinned and just as ornery is love interest Claire Trevor, and George Sanders gives yeoman service as the obdurate Brit officer responsible for a lot of the civil unrest.

Reunion in France (1942) finds Wayne out of his element at chintzy MGM in a Parisian-set WWII melodrama conceived for and dominated by Joan Crawford--the only occasion these stars worked together. She's a cosseted but curiously principled fashionista shaken by the Nazis' inconsiderate invasion of France--and still more by the willingness of her millionaire industrial designer fiancé (Philip Dorn) to collaborate with Hitler's war machine. The Duke makes a delayed entrance as a Yank whose RAF plane has crashed in the French countryside. Crawford shelters him, against her better judgment, then begins to be drawn to someone with even more imposing shoulders than her own. In later years everybody involved in this film preferred to forget it had ever happened, but its wackiness can be endearing.

In Without Reservations (1946), the Duke again is essentially a featured player in a woman's picture, with Claudette Colbert as a novelist searching for "the Man of Tomorrow" to play the main character in the film version of her visionary bestseller. That turns out to be the Marine she bumps into on the transcontinental train taking her to Hollywood. The script, like their much-interrupted journey, is all over the map, and the comedy scenes are shockingly mishandled--though it looks as if director Mervyn LeRoy was trying to imitate Preston Sturges in some of them and Ernst Lubitsch in others. Cary Grant has a charming cameo, as himself.

Tycoon (1947) inspired a sublime one-sentence review from James Agee: "Several tons of dynamite are set off in this movie; none of it under the right people." Wayne's an engineer trying to drill and blast through the Andes, and his worst obstacle is the aristocratic railroad magnate (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) he's working for--chiefly because Wayne and the magnate's daughter (Laraine Day) have fallen for each other. The script spins its wheels (the film runs two hours plus), and neither the corporate politics nor the romance makes a lick of sense, but fans of vibrant Technicolor will O.D. on this movie's psychedelic palette. The supporting cast (able but wasted) includes James Gleason, Anthony Quinn, Judith Anderson, and Paul Fix, and the Andes are played by the Alabama Hills at Lone Pine, Calif.

The kindest and most damning thing to say about the 1952 Big Jim McLain is that it's a Cold War artifact, a snapshot of that American moment when Sen. Joseph McCarthy could pass for a patriot and a hero. Wayne, companioned by equally big Jim Arness, actually plays an investigator for McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee, searching out Commies in Hawaii. The Red agents on view are a robotic bunch who look as if they couldn't menace a dog pound, but that was consistent with such contemporary portrayals of fifth-column lifestyle as the TV series I Led Three Lives. Latterday liberal sentimentality about the Party can be as absurd as '50s paranoia was, so the point here is not to condemn Wayne's politics, but to deplore how completely he lost his moviemaking savvy whenever he set out to crusade. This personal production of the actor's own company is an embarrassingly shoddy piece of work. Still, it is a window into its time.

Even John Wayne fans have tended to skip the dubious-sounding Trouble Along the Way. Well, don't. This comedy-drama about a former big-time football coach signing on at a venerable Catholic college turns out to be an intriguingly complicated entertainment. The title invokes the sentimental classic Going My Way, with the great Charles Coburn taking the doddering-but-sly priest (and school administrator) role. Besides the threatened shutdown of the college, there's the vicious campaign of Wayne's ex-wife Marie Windsor to regain custody of daughter Sherry Jackson, who pretty much lives out of the bar where her disreputable dad runs a bookie operation. Donna Reed plays a social worker who has to make the call in this contest. The script by future Bob Hope writers Melville Shavelson and Jack Rose and direction by Michael Curtiz combine to scuff up Wayne's heroic image, and instead of the sappy big-game climax we think we see coming a mile away, the movie veers toward a finale in which several "happy endings" are put on hold. For his part, Wayne gets to deliver more syncopated dialogue than usual, and seems both refreshed and startled by the experience.

The packaging of the six feature DVDs falls a mite short of the wraparound "Warner Night at the Movies" extras in other collections: one live-action short, one cartoon, and sometimes the movie's trailer. The cartoons are fine, and the live short packaged with Allegheny Uprising is one of those Technicolor history lessons featuring studio contract players that Warners used to win awards for--the 1939 "The Bill of Rights." There are no commentaries. --Richard T. Jameson

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Dark Command / A Lady Takes A Chance (Double Feature)

ASIN : B000N4SHWQ
Sales Rank : 32463
Director : Henry Hathaway, Raoul Walsh, William A. Seiter
Brand : Lions Gate
Studio : Republic Pictures
Region Code : 1
Format : Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Original recording remastered, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 0017153213188
UPC : 017153213188
Release Date : December 08, 2007
Publisher : Republic Pictures
Manufacturer : Republic Pictures
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : Republic Pictures
Running Time : 180
Actors: Claire Trevor, John Wayne, Jean Arthur, Walter Pidgeon, Roy Rogers

Description

DARK COMMAND - John Wayne is good guy Bob Seton in Raoul Walsh's star-studded thriller set in the dark days before the Civil War. During this strained period in America's history, emotions run high and tension fills the air, especially during political contests. In the race for Federal Marshall of Kansas, Seton defeats William Cantrell (Walter Pidgeon), causing increased animosity between these two powerful figures. Their mutual ill will peaks when Cantrell steals Seton's girl (Claire Trevor), manipulating her into marriage to get even with Seton. Their rivalry reaches dangerous proportions when Seton exposes Cantrell and his guerrillas who have been raiding both Union and Confederate lines. Roy Rogers co-stars in one of his earliest film roles. A LADY TAKES A CHANCE - Finding men has never been a problem for city girl Molly Trousdale (Jean Arthur) - finding the right man is another matter. And women have never been a problem for cowboy bachelor Duke Hutkins (John Wayne) - until they want to marry him. If it's true that opposites attract, they're obviously made for each other. When Molly sets out from New York on a cross-country bus tour, she just wants to see America. But her plans take an unexpected turn out West, when she collides (literally!) with Duke while he's competing at the rodeo. He assumes she's just another pretty gal who'll fall into his arms, but she's a lady who won't be roped easily by a brawling, rough-and-ready cowboy. Jean Arthur shows the spunk that made her one of the biggest stars of Hollywood's Golden Era, and John Wayne is at his most charming when he falls for her against his better judgment. So get ready for the dust to fly when these two screen legends star in a truly classic romantic comedy, A LADY TAKES A CHANCE!

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More Dead Than Alive

ASIN : B0007O394S
Sales Rank : 36184
Director : Robert Sparr
Brand : TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT
Studio : MGM (Video & DVD)
Region Code : 1
Format : Closed-captioned, Color, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 0027616923585
UPC : 027616923585
Release Date : December 17, 2005
Publisher : MGM (Video & DVD)
Manufacturer : MGM (Video & DVD)
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : MGM (Video & DVD)
Running Time : 101
Actors: Clint Walker, Vincent Price, Anne Francis, Paul Hampton, Craig Littler

Description

Saddle up for a thrilling tale of heroes and villains in this "thought-provoking" western with "an ending that is truly different" (Film and Television Daily). Starring "tall, dark and handsome" (Hollywood Citizen-News) Clint Walker (Sam Whiskey) and the legendary Vincent Price(The Pit and the Pendulum) in one of his most colorful roles, this action-packed drama aims high and hits its mark! After serving 18 years, "Killer" Cain (Walker) is released from prison, determined never to touch a gun again. But the only job he can get is with Dan Ruffalo's (Price) traveling sideshow as the sharpshooting main attraction. As Cain works to build an honest future free of bullets and bloodshed, his enemies look to settle old scores. Now Cain must risk his new lifeto become the "Killer" once more or be haunted by his past forever.

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Sam Peckinpah's Legendary Westerns Collection (The Wild Bunch / Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid / Ride the High Country / The Ballad of Cable Hogue)

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This is the Army

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Griffith Masterworks (The Birth of a Nation / Intolerance / Broken Blossoms / Orphans of the Storm / Biograph Shorts 1909-1913)

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John Wayne Collection, Vol. 2 (Rio Grande / A Lady Takes a Chance / The Fighting Kentuckian / Dakota)

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Dark Command / A Lady Takes A Chance (Double Feature)

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John Wayne Collection ( North To Alaska / Comancheros / The Undefeated )

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Rhythm On The Range/Rhythm On The River - Double Feature

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