Browse Westerns. Western Directors

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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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The Long Voyage Home

ASIN : B000O179JA
Sales Rank : 27282
Director : John Ford
Brand : Warner Brothers
Studio : Warner Home Video
Region Code : 1
Format : Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD-Video, Subtitled, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 0085391158615
UPC : 085391158615
Release Date : December 22, 2007
Publisher : Warner Home Video
Manufacturer : Warner Home Video
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Label : Warner Home Video
Running Time : 105
Actors: John Wayne, Thomas Mitchell, Ian Hunter, Ward Bond, Barry Fitzgerald

Description

The merchant ship Glencairn rolls and shivers in the black North Atlantic. On board, her anxious crewmen search the sky for German planes. And hope they'll survive The Long Voyage Home. Director John Ford and screenwriter Dudley Nichols adapted four Eugene O'Neill one-acts into this compelling, lyrical look at men at sea that O'Neill considered his favorite of all his filmed works. As his sailors, Ford cast members of his so-called "Stock Company:" Thomas Mitchell, Barry Fitzgerald, Arthur Shields, Ward Bond, John Qualen and the star of the previous year's Stagecoach, John Wayne. As sunny, sweet-natured Ole Olsen, Wayne does winning work in an atypical role. Nominated for six Academy Awards?* incuding Best Picture, The Long Voyage Home is a journey to remember. Come aboard! Director John Ford and screenwriter Dudley Nichols adapted four Eugene O'Neill one-acts into this compelling, lyrical look at men at sea that O'Neill considered his favorite of all his filmed works. As his sailors, Ford cast members of his so-called "Stock Company:" Thomas Mitchell, Barry Fitzgerald, Arthur Shields, Ward Bond, John Qualen and the star of the previous year's Stagecoach, John Wayne. As sunny, sweet-natured Ole Olsen, Wayne does winning work in an atypical role. Nominated for six Academy Awards incuding Best Picture, The Long Voyage Home is a journey to remember. Come aboard!

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Eugene O'Neill loved this feature-length adaptation of his one-act sea plays, with intelligent bridging material written by Dudley Nichols and a final movement, both hellish and elegiac, appropriate to the onset of World War II. John Ford directed, in his more self-consciously arty vein (à la The Informer) but with no loss of power or passion. It's entirely fitting that the director shared his panel in the credits with cinematographer Gregg Toland, who had just shot The Grapes of Wrath for him in hard, dust-bowl sunlight and would next enter the labyrinth of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane; you'd be thrilled to have any frame of this film blown up and hanging on your wall.

The focus is on the working seamen aboard a merchant ship making its way from the Caribbean to New York harbor and then England, with dangerous cargo on the transatlantic leg. Thomas Mitchell (who had won a 1939 Oscar in Ford's Stagecoach) gives a career-best performance as Driscoll; Ian Hunter plays the enigmatic shipmate known only as "Smitty"; Ford regulars Barry Fitzgerald, John Qualen, Ward Bond, Arthur Shields, and Joseph Sawyer fill key roles; and the top-billed John Wayne contributes a surprisingly effective supporting performance as Ole, a gentle Swedish giant who really belongs on a farm somewhere. Although neglected in recent years--and seriously in need of restoration to do justice to its magnificent images--this movie has a permanent place of honor in one of the most amazing three-year creative streaks (throw in Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, and How Green Was My Valley) any director ever had. --Richard T. Jameson

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Hour of the Gun

ASIN : B0007O393O
Sales Rank : 12279
Director : John Sturges
Brand : TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT
Studio : MGM (Video & DVD)
Region Code : 1
Format : Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 0027616923547
UPC : 027616923547
Release Date : December 17, 2005
Publisher : MGM (Video & DVD)
Manufacturer : MGM (Video & DVD)
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Label : MGM (Video & DVD)
Running Time : 100
Actors: James Garner, Jason Robards, Robert Ryan, Albert Salmi, Charles Aidman

Description

Guns don't stay in their holsters long when vigilantes Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday meet outlaws in the Wild West. James Garner (Maverick) and OscarÂ(r) winner* Jason Robards (All the President's Men) saddle up as the legendary gunslingers in this riveting, fact-based story that is "the closest filmmakers have ever come to the truth of the OK Corral gunfight" (LA Herald-Examiner). With the dust barely settling at the OK Corral, the notorious Clanton brothers unleash their revenge. One by one, they gun down Wyatt Earp's brothersbut they won't have the last shot. Using his US Marshal's badge as his authority, and Doc Holliday (Robards) as his deputizedright-hand man, Earp begins a zealous pursuit of vengeance that the west will never forget.

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Jubal

ASIN : B0007MANYY
Sales Rank : 15420
Director : Delmer Daves
Brand : Sony
Studio : Sony Pictures
Region Code : 99
Format : Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 9781404969766
ISBN : 1404969764
UPC : 043396091030
Release Date : December 05, 2005
Publisher : Sony Pictures
Manufacturer : Sony Pictures
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Label : Sony Pictures
Running Time : 100
Actors: Glenn Ford, Ernest Borgnine, Rod Steiger, Valerie French, Felicia Farr

Product Description

Found injured by rancher shep horgan jubal troop is offered a job as cowhand and soon gains sheps trust. Mae horgan feeling shes been trapped into marriage with shep takes a shine to jubal although he is more interested in naomi hoktor who is travelling with a wagon train camped on sheps land. Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 04/05/2005 Starring: Glenn Ford Rod Steiger Run time: 101 minutes Rating: Nr

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Despite incorporating elements of Shakespeare's Othello, Delmer Daves's CinemaScope Jubal is the first and least of three Westerns the director made with star Glenn Ford. Although not up to the measure of 3:10 to Yuma and the boldly original (and sadly neglected) Cowboy, it's still a well-above-average Western by a man whose sturdy sense of drama and pictorial ecstasies qualify him as a solid genre filmmaker. Ford plays a drifter who is rescued, then hired as ramrod, by rancher Ernest Borgnine, thereby stimulating the erotic interest of Borgnine's sexy young wife (Valerie French) and the Iago-like resentment of the former top hand (Rod Steiger). A range war and the persecution of a religious sect whose wagon train is camped on Borgnine's land complicate matters beyond the Shakespearean premise. The solid supporting cast includes Noah Beery Jr., Charles Bronson, and Felicia Farr, who would contribute a memorable interlude to 3:10 to Yuma. --Richard T. Jameson

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Pursued

ASIN : B00007GZQG
Sales Rank : 30982
Director : Raoul Walsh
Studio : Republic Pictures
Region Code : 1
Format : Black & White, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 0017153135992
UPC : 017153135992
Release Date : December 21, 2003
Publisher : Republic Pictures
Manufacturer : Republic Pictures
Availability : Usually ships in 1 to 2 days
Label : Republic Pictures
Running Time : 101
Actors: Teresa Wright, Robert Mitchum, Judith Anderson, Dean Jagger, Alan Hale

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Hollywood's first "psychological Western" and one of Robert Mitchum's best early films, Pursued boasts a dark scenario--by Niven (Duel in the Sun) Busch--about a man psychically scarred by a tragedy his mind refuses to recall. Modern-day audiences will have no trouble decoding the mystery, but that doesn't undercut the movie's dramatic power, or the rugged beauty of what's been put on screen by two master filmmakers, director Raoul Walsh and cameraman James Wong Howe. With seasoned professionalism, they accommodate all the newfangled Freudianism and smoothly integrate the bedrock Western with the inky film noir. The rest of the cast includes Teresa Wright (then Mrs. Busch) as Mitchum's adoptive sister, who may become his lover and/or his killer; Dean Jagger, smilingly sinister as a weasely in-law; and that grande dame of the Gothic, Judith Anderson, as a frontier matriarch. --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
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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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The John Wayne Collection, Vol. II (Big Jake / The Shootist / The Sons of Katie Elder)

ASIN : B00008CMR8
Sales Rank : 15958
Director : John Wayne, Don Siegel, George Sherman, Henry Hathaway
Brand : Paramount
Studio : Paramount
Region Code : 1
Format : Box set, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 9780792192060
ISBN : 0792192060
UPC : 097360562743
Release Date : December 29, 2003
Publisher : Paramount
Manufacturer : Paramount
Availability : Usually ships in 24 hours
Label : Paramount
Running Time : 328
Actors: John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, Richard Boone, Maureen O'Hara, Dean Martin

Product Description

Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 04/11/2006

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The Sons of Katie Elder
John Wayne recovered from his first bout with cancer to appear in this 1965 film as the brother of Dean Martin, Earl Holliman, and Michael Anderson Jr. All four characters are wandering souls prone to trouble, but after the funeral of their frontier mother, they set out to avenge her death. Directed by Henry Hathaway (Wayne's director on True Grit), the film moves like a conventional, latter-day Western, with good performances from Wayne and Martin, who'd already costarred with the Duke in Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo. Nice support from Dennis Hopper (who had a legendary conflict with Hathaway on this film), Strother Martin, and George Kennedy. --Tom Keogh

Big Jake
Big Jake (1969) is not one of the Duke's classics, but a diverting attempt nonetheless. Everyone seems to think that Jacob McCandles is six feet under ("I thought you was dead" is a running line throughout), so some bad men kidnap his grandson. They want a piece of the family fortune and will kill to get it. Patrick Wayne, the Duke's own son, plays one of Big Jake's kids, and together they start out after the boy's abductors. Richard Boone makes a worthy adversary to Jake's larger-than-life figure, and the final confrontation between the two contains some great gritted-teeth dialogue. Maureen O'Hara is barely in the feature, sharing the same fate as Bobby Vinton as the boy's father. He seems to be onscreen just to get shot. --Keith Simanton

The Shootist
The last film of John Wayne could not have been more fitting, full of details that can't help but make one reflect upon his legacy in the movies and his life as a star. Wayne plays a career gunfighter in the autumn of his life, trying to hang up his pistols after he discovers he's dying of cancer. Boarding in the house of an attractive widow (Lauren Bacall) and her son (Ron Howard), Wayne's character opts for peace in his final days but is dogged by his reputation when a handful of killers seeks him out for a final fight. Howard is fine as a fatherless boy who needs the strong mentor the hero represents, and James Stewart--who costarred with Wayne in the great Man Who Shot Liberty Valance--plays the doctor who gives the big man the bad news. Don Siegel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) thoughtfully directs a very special and sensitive production. --Tom Keogh

Browse Western Directors Online

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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The Long Voyage Home

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Last Train From Gun Hill

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Hour of the Gun

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Jubal

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Pursued

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

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Clark Gable Collection, Vol. 1 (Call of the Wild / Soldier of Fortune / The Tall Men)

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

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The John Wayne Collection, Vol. II (Big Jake / The Shootist / The Sons of Katie Elder)

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