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

Actors: John Wayne, Rock Hudson, Stuart Whitman, Stewart Granger, Antonio Aguilar
ASIN : B00008OTUD
Sales Rank : 55386
Director : John Wayne, Andrew V. McLaglen, Henry Hathaway, Michael Curtiz
Brand : TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT
Studio : 20th Century Fox
Region Code : 1
Format : Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 0024543078920
UPC : 024543078920
Release Date : December 20, 2003
Publisher : 20th Century Fox
Manufacturer : 20th Century Fox
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Label : 20th Century Fox
Running Time : 347

Description

Disc 1: *Comancheros

Disc 2: *North To Alaska

Disc 3: *The Undefeated

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Dark Command

Actors: Claire Trevor, John Wayne, Walter Pidgeon, Roy Rogers, George 'Gabby' Hayes
ASIN : 0782011195
Sales Rank : 22496
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
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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.

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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

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The Magnificent Seven / The Alamo (Double Feature)

Actors: Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, John Wayne, Richard Widmark
ASIN : B000O77LY2
Sales Rank : 34861
Director : John Wayne, John Sturges
Brand : Unknown
Studio : MGM (Video & DVD)
Region Code : 1
Format : Color, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 0027616068798
UPC : 027616068798
Release Date : December 08, 2007
Publisher : MGM (Video & DVD)
Manufacturer : MGM (Video & DVD)
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Label : MGM (Video & DVD)
Running Time : 290

Description

Disc 1: The Magnificent Seven WS Disc 2: The Alamo WS

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Controversial Classics Collection (Advise and Consent / The Americanization of Emily / Bad Day at Black Rock / Blackboard Jungle / A Face in the Crowd / Fury / I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang)

Actors: Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Anne Francis, Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal
ASIN : B0007TKNKQ
Sales Rank : 45099
Director : Arthur Hiller, Elia Kazan, Fritz Lang, John Sturges, Mervyn LeRoy
Brand : Warner Brothers
Studio : Warner Home Video
Region Code : 1
Format : Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 9781419809378
ISBN : 1419809377
UPC : 012569701793
Release Date : December 10, 2005
Publisher : Warner Home Video
Manufacturer : Warner Home Video
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Label : Warner Home Video
Running Time : 710

Description

The Controversial Classics Collection features the debut DVDs of seven groundbreaking motion pictures, released in America over three decades from the '30s to the '60s that had dramatic social impact, changed attitudes and brought important political and social reforms. The films include A Face in the Crowd, Blackboard Jungle, Fury, Bad Day at Black Rock, Advise and Consent, The Americanization of Emily and I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. These films, which all took on hot button -- some even taboo -- topics such as prison injustice, racial tension, juvenile delinquency, homosexuality, mob violence as well as political corruption in Washington, the military and the media, caused America to take notice and do something about the issues the movies raised. Each film features either a commentary or documentary examining the film's historical context and political impact.

Blackboard Jungle (1955)
Richard Dadier, a new teacher at inner city North Manual High, is a man eager to make a difference. Topics such as racial and sexual tensions, gang violence and apathy were topics Blackboard Jungle tackled 50 years ago that are still hot-button issues in schools. Glenn Ford as Dadier clings to his ideals and pays a price vying with teen misfits led by Vic Morrow and, in a star-making performance, a young Sidney Poitier. Featuring Bill Haley's classic "Rock Around the Clock," the film is often remembered as being responsible for the breakthrough of rock 'n' roll to the media and consumer mainstream. Richard Brooks (In Cold Blood) directed, based on Evan Hunter's best seller. DVD special features include: Commentary by co-stars Paul Mazursky and Jamie Farr, Glenn Ford's son Peter Ford and Assistant Director Joel Freeman, Droopy Cartoon Blackboard Jumble, theatrical trailer.

A Face in the Crowd (1957)
Andy Griffith made a stunning movie debut as Lonesome Rhodes, whose meteoric rise to TV fame is paralleled by his plunge into booze, sex and political corruption. From On the Waterfront's Academy Award. -winning collaborators, director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg, A Face in the Crowd reflects the authenticity of filmmakers who know the media world from the inside out. Lee Remick also made her screen debut in this film which featured cameos from Mike Wallace, Walter Winchell, Betty Furness, Bennett Cerf and Burl Ives as themselves. DVD special features include: New documentary Facing the Past (an all new retrospective with new interviews with stars Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal and screenwriter Budd Schulberg) and theatrical trailer.

Fury (1936)
Joe Wilson, a wrongly jailed man thought to have died in a blaze started by a bloodthirsty lynch mob, is alive. Now, Joe aims to ensure his would-be executioners meet the fate Joe miraculously escaped. Spencer Tracy is Joe, Sylvia Sidney is his bride-to-be and Fury lives up to its volatile name with its searing indictment of mob justice and lynching. In his first American film, director Fritz Lang (Metropolis, The Big Heat) combines a passion for justice and a sharp visual style into a landmark of social-conscience filmmaking. DVD special features include: Commentary by Peter Bogdanovich, with interview excerpts of director Fritz Lang and theatrical trailer.

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
Spencer Tracy (a 1955 Best Actor Oscar. nominee for this film) plays World War II veteran John J. Macreedy, who keeps his own counsel about why he's come to Black Rock and who keeps his wits about him when confronted with threats and violence. John Sturges (The Great Escape) directed; Robert Ryan, Walter Brennan, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin are among the town's thugs and other denizens. DVD special features include: commentary by film historian Dana Polan and theatrical trailer.

Advise and Consent (1962)
Three years after Anatomy of a Murder, Otto Preminger examined the body politic in Advise and Consent, a story of power and procedure where deals become extortion, closets reveal skeletons and careers are crushed. It was also one of the first mainstream films to deal with homosexuality. History buffs may think they recall real-life counterparts to the characters depicted while movie fans can revel in a rare array of star power: Henry Fonda, Walter Pidgeon, Don Murray, Gene Tierney, Peter Lawford, Franchot Tone and Charles Laughton in his final role. DVD special features include: Commentary by film historian Drew Casper and theatrical trailer.

The Americanization of Emily (1964)
Julie Andrews and James Garner headline this earlier milestone from screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky (Network) and director Arthur Hiller (also teamed later on The Hospital). Garner plays Charlie Madison, a U.S. Naval officer stationed in London, who cares nothing about glory. That attracts war widow Emily Barham (Andrews), who's had her fill of seeing men go to war and never retim. DVD special features include: Commentary by film historian Drew Casper, featurette Action on the Beach, theatrical trailer.

I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)
Paul Muni gives a joltingly realistic performance in this powerhouse classic directed by Mervyn LeRoy (Little Caesar), based on autobiographical writings by chain-gang escapee Robert E. Burns. Like many '30s crime sagas, this deals with gritty realities. Yet it also stands apart as a film that made a difference, igniting protests that led to vital penal reforms and Burns himself received a commuted sentence. DVD special features include: Commentary by film historian Richard B. Jewell, vintage musical short 20,000 Cheers for the Chain Gang, and theatrical trailer.

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Otto Preminger expanded his vision in the 1960s with a whole series of ambitious, expansive dramas with huge casts and big themes. Advise and Consent (1962), an examination of deal making, party politics, and congressional diplomacy in Washington's legislative halls (based on the novel by Allen Drury), is one of his best. Preminger broke the blacklist with his previous film, Exodus, and it rings through in this drama about a controversial nominee for secretary of state (a confident, stately Henry Fonda) accused of being a Communist. The nomination process becomes the center ring of the political circus, with fidgety accuser Burgess Meredith in the spotlight; devious, silver-tongued Charles Laughton cracking the whip as a southern senator with a grudge against Fonda; and party whip Walter Pidgeon lining up votes behind the scenes. Arm twisting and diplomatic hardball turns to perjury and blackmail, and a melodramatic twist gives this lesson in party politics a salacious soap opera dimension.

With The Americanization of Emily (1964), screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky (Marty) sinks his satirical fangs into a story of an American naval officer (James Garner) selected to be the first victim at the invasion of Normandy. Julie Andrews plays a prim, British war widow who falls for him. Cynical in tone, the story becomes an interesting collision of manipulative interests and renewed life, the same formula that worked so well in Chayefsky's scripts for Network and Hospital.

One of the first Hollywood films to deal openly with white racism toward Japanese Americans during World War II, Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) (directed by action maestro John Sturges, The Great Escape) stars Spencer Tracy as a one-armed stranger named MacReedy, who arrives in the tiny town of Black Rock on a hot day in 1945. Seeking a hotel room and the whereabouts of an ethnic Japanese farmer named Komoko, MacReedy runs smack into a wall of hostility that escalates into serious threats. In time it becomes apparent that Komoko has been murdered by a local, racist chieftain, Reno Smith (Robert Ryan), who also plans on dispensing with MacReedy. Tracy's hero is forced to fight his way past Smith's goons (among them Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin) and sundry allies (Anne Francis) to keep alive, setting the stage for memorable suspense crisply orchestrated by Sturges. Casting is the film's principal strength, however: Tracy, the indispensable icon of integrity, and Ryan, the indispensable noir image of spiritual blight, are as creatively unlikely a pairing as Sturges's shotgun marriage of Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen in The Magnificent Seven.

Novelist Evan Hunter burst America's postwar bubble when he described an inner-city school terrorized by switchblade-wielding juvenile delinquents. Director-screenwriter Richard Brooks's 1955 adaptation of Blackboard Jungle still packs a tremendous wallop (even if it was shot mostly on the back lot). A forerunner of Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story, this black-and-white classic--set to Bill Haley and His Comets' "Rock Around the Clock"--is part exposé, part melodrama, part public-service announcement. Glenn Ford, at his slow-to-rile best, plays Richard Dadier, an incoming English teacher at North Manual High School. An idealist who knows how to handle himself in a dark alley, Dadier stands his ground and earns the begrudging respect of school thugs led by Vic Morrow and Sidney Poitier. Anne Francis plays Ford's especially vulnerable wife; Richard Kiley is the timid math teacher with the priceless jazz-record collection; Louis Calhern and John Hoyt are among the more cynical North Manual High veterans. See if you can ID Jamie Farr and director Paul Mazursky as gang members. The film was nominated for four Oscars.

More timely now, perhaps, than when it was first released in 1957, Elia Kazan's overheated political melodrama Face in the Crowd explores the dangerous manipulative power of pop culture. It exposes the underside of Capra-corn populism, as exemplified in the optimistic fable of grassroots punditry Meet John Doe. In Kazan's account, scripted by Budd Schulberg, the common-man pontificator (Andy Griffith) is no Gary Cooper-style aw-shucks paragon. Promoted to national fame as a folksy TV idol by radio producer Patricia Neal, Griffith's Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes turns out to be a megalomaniacal rat bastard. The film turns apocalyptic as Rhodes exploits his power to sway the masses, helping to elect a reactionary presidential candidate. The parodies of television commercials and opinion polling were cutting edge in their day (Face in the Crowd was the Network of the Eisenhower era), and there are some startling, near-documentary sequences shot on location in Arkansas. An extraordinary supporting cast (led by Walter Matthau and Lee Remick) helps keep the energy level high, even when the satire turns shrill and unpersuasive in the final reel.

Fury is tough stuff from director Fritz Lang (M), making his first American film with this 1936 story of an innocent man (Spencer Tracy) who escapes a lynch mob and then orchestrates his apparent murder at their hands. Tracy is superb, and the film is uncompromising, until studio interference takes some of the wind out of Lang's sails right at the end. But as the portrait of a character who comes to reflect the destiny he is trying to avoid, this is still essential Lang and a pre-noir classic.

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) is one of the toughest and most uncompromising movies to ever come out of Hollywood. Paul Muni stars as a regular Joe, just back from World War I, who is unjustly convicted of a crime and sentenced to 10 years of bruisingly unfair treatment on a chain gang. Even a successful escape can't shake the spectre of the chains, nor the amazingly fatalistic twists the screenplay has in store. This picture could only have been made at Warner Bros., where social-justice movies flourished in the 1930s and criticism of judicial systems and prisons was sanctioned. Muni's weird acting style (he was recently off Scarface) somehow fits the film's furious tone, and director Mervyn LeRoy--as in his earlier Little Caesar--was dexterous enough to build the action to an unforgettable ending. It's a film that filters the American Dream through Depression realities and noirish pessimism (with a streak of pre-Code sexual frankness--note the one-night "friend" Muni makes the night of his escape). This one holds up, folks; it's a stunner.

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Gary Cooper MGM Movie Legends Collection (The Cowboy and the Lady / The Real Glory / Vera Cruz / The Winning of Barbara Worth)

Actors: Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster, Merle Oberon, David Niven, Denise Darcel
ASIN : B000Q6774A
Sales Rank : 37112
Director : H.C. Potter, Henry Hathaway, Henry King, Robert Aldrich
Brand : TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT
Studio : MGM (Video & DVD)
Region Code : 1
Format : Box set, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 0027616076533
UPC : 027616076533
Release Date : December 22, 2007
Publisher : MGM (Video & DVD)
Manufacturer : MGM (Video & DVD)
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Label : MGM (Video & DVD)
Running Time : 371

Product Description

Disc 1: THE REAL GLORYLegendary screen icons Gary Cooper (High Noon) and Burt Lancaster (Elmer Gantry) teamup for a magnificent action-packed western from director Robert Aldrich (The Dirty Dozen) and screenwriters Roland Kibbee and James R. Webb. With sweeping vistas and larger-than-life heroicsit's a tale as bold and rugged as the characters it so brilliantly depicts. Cooper and Lancaster portray Benjamin Trane and Joe Erin two daredevil mercenaries who journey to Mexico in search of adventureand cold hard cashduring the 1866 revolution. But they get more than they bargained for when the wealthy and beautiful Countess Duvarre (Denise Darcel) hires them to escort her (and a fortune in gold!) to Emperor Maximilian's fighting forces in Vera Cruz. The trail is fraught with danger betrayal and murder...and when Ben is swept up in the revolutionaries' fervor he and Joe find themselves at odds with the Mexican Armyand each other!Disc 2: VERA CRUZDisc 3: THE WINNING OF BARBARA WORTHDisc 4: COWBOY AND THE LADYRuntime: 375 minsFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 027616076533 Manufacturer No: M107655

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It actually underscores the power and distinctiveness of Gary Cooper's movie stardom that this isn't so much a true collection as gleanings from the odds-and-ends table. That's not a knock; three of the four films are solid entertainments and would be well worth recommending on their own. But the only thing unifying them is the beauty and enigma Cooper brought to them, and the professionalism with which he addressed these wide-ranging assignments.

Three of them date from the '20s and '30s and were produced by Samuel Goldwyn. The 1926 silent The Winning of Barbara Worth gave Western stunt man and bit player Cooper his first featured role (by accident--the actor originally cast didn't report for work!). A cowboy whose visionary surveyor father aims to "redeem the desert and make it one fine garden," Cooper's character is the third corner of a romantic triangle, ordained by the Hollywood caste system to lose lifelong sweetheart Vilma Banky to engineer Ronald Colman. Colman has lots more screen time than Cooper and bears the moral-ethical brunt of the eco-conscious drama; he's also surprisingly persuasive wearing a sweat-stained Stetson and trading gunshots with the bad guys (if this were a sound film, Colman could never have gotten away with it). But the camera and the audience are locked onto Cooper whenever he's on screen. In longshot or vulnerable closeup, he's already one of the gods of the cinema. As for the movie, the quality of the print is excellent, its clarity intensified by bronze, yellow, and moonlit-blue tinting that often seems on the verge of resolving into full color. Director Henry King shows a good eye for action and bold vistas, and a visual adventurousness mostly absent from his later work.

Next up chronologically is The Cowboy and the Lady (1938), and the best thing about this misbegotten movie is Garson Kanin's description, in one of his Hollywood memoirs, of how Leo McCarey sold the idea for it to Sam Goldwyn. McCarey was, of course, a comedic master (recently Oscared for directing The Awful Truth), and his exuberant pitch convinced Goldwyn and his staffers that audiences would "piss" themselves laughing at this romantic comedy about a daughter of privilege (Merle Oberon) who falls for a rodeo rider (Cooper) and learns homespun values. Goldwyn paid McCarey off, assigned some writers to the script, then realized there was no real story--"no there there," as Gertrude Stein might have put it. The resultant unfunny and unromantic endeavor oozes bad faith from every pore, with neck-snapping life changes foisted on the hapless Cooper and Oberon from reel to reel, and excruciating scenes (jitterbugging in a drawing room, playing house back on Cooper's ranch) that strain charmlessly for McCarey's patented brand of fey. H.C. Potter directed, understandably without conviction.

We and Cooper are back on track with The Real Glory (1939). The reliable Henry Hathaway helmed this second cousin to his and Cooper's The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, with Cooper as an Army doctor assigned to the Philippine Constabulary on Mindanao in 1906. The movie was well-received when it came out; encountered in the shadow of the Iraq War, its tale of U.S. occupiers trying to help the local populace "stand up" against a fanatical and murderous insurgency takes on new fascination. There are some amazing passages--two horrendous murders by bolo knife--and the final battle sequence puts the CGI-riddled action films of the present day to shame. But the most impressive element is Cooper, and we can't improve on the verdict of that astute film critic Graham Greene: "Mr. Cooper ... has never acted better.... Watch him inoculate [Andrea King] against cholera--the casual jab of the needle, and the dressing slapped on while he talks, as though a thousand arms had taught him where to stab and he doesn't have to think any more."

For the final film in the set we jump into the '50s--the century's and Cooper's. Vera Cruz (1954) casts him as a former Confederate officer who's ridden into Emperor Maximilian's Mexico, hoping to make a fortune in the new civil war south of the border so that he can rebuild his own devastated homeland. Costar Burt Lancaster (whose company Hecht-Lancaster was producing) plays another mercenary, a real sociopath, and it's fascinating to watch these two stellar icons of very different Hollywood eras make common cause--Lancaster at the height of his grinning-predator mode, Cooper an aging knight whose aim is still true. Director Robert Aldrich keeps finding dynamic uses for the SuperScope format and flavorfully fills it with sublime uglies like Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam, Charles Horvath, Jack Lambert, and Charles Buchinsky-about-to-become-Bronson. Pieces of this movie found their way into the dreams of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone. --Richard T. Jameson

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The Stranger Wore a Gun

Actors: Randolph Scott, Claire Trevor, Joan Weldon, George Macready, Alfonso Bedoya
ASIN : B000A1OG0Y
Sales Rank : 45060
Director : André De Toth
Brand : Sony
Studio : Sony Pictures
Region Code : 99
Format : Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Subtitled, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 9781404971356
ISBN : 1404971351
UPC : 043396094550
Release Date : December 06, 2005
Publisher : Sony Pictures
Manufacturer : Sony Pictures
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Label : Sony Pictures
Running Time : 82

Product Description

Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 09/06/2005 Run time: 82 minutes Rating: Nr

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André De Toth directed seven of producer-star Randolph Scott's Westerns; The Stranger Wore a Gun is the most disappointing, especially since its original 3-D is now moot. That gimmicky process obliged the one-eyed director to concentrate on framing every shot with foreground clutter (and matte eerily mobile "rocks" onto the chase scenes), as well as dream up reasons for people to shove torches and hurl water pitchers at the camera. Scott's trajectory takes him from Confederate officer in league with Quantrill's Raiders to riverboat gambler to undercover detective. On the upside, Claire Trevor is always welcome as a Western leading lady, and George Macready as chief villain. Macready's henchmen are the prestellar Lee Marvin--who grossed out '50s audiences with his 3-D spitting of tobacco juice while lolling in a chair--and Ernest Borgnine, who gets into a laughing duel with Alfonso Bedoya over which one is really "The Face That Kills." --Richard T. Jameson

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A Lawless Street

Actors: Randolph Scott, Angela Lansbury, Warner Anderson, Jean Parker, Wallace Ford
ASIN : B000A1OFZU
Sales Rank : 56159
Director : Joseph H. Lewis
Brand : Sony
Studio : Sony Pictures
Region Code : 99
Format : Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 9781404969834
ISBN : 1404969837
UPC : 043396091238
Release Date : December 06, 2005
Publisher : Sony Pictures
Manufacturer : Sony Pictures
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Label : Sony Pictures
Running Time : 77

Description

Randolph Scott stars as Marshal Coleen Wave, a lawman who moves from town to town in the Colorado Territory, ridding each of its outlaws. His dedication to his gob causes his wife, played by Angela Lansbury (TV's "Murder She Wrote"), to leave him. She will not come back to him until he has hung up his guns for good. But he is determined to clean up one last town, run by bandits, who don't want to see the territory become a state.

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It would be nice to say that hiring Joseph H. Lewis (Gun Crazy, The Big Combo) to direct A Lawless Street led to its becoming a classic Randolph Scott Western. Can't do it. At this point in his career, Randy was cutting corners as star-producer, scoping out his next oil well, and not worrying that a blind grandma could see he was being doubled in the fight scenes. Scott plays a town marshal who's had enough of "taming the beast," just when greedy men are conspiring to destroy him. One of them (Warner Anderson) is also a rival for Scott's onetime music-hall flame (Angela Lansbury). Director Lewis is stuck in a back-lot Western town with a juiceless cast (apart from Jeanette Nolan's frontier widow and Michael Pate's gloved assassin), but his rigorous eye keeps framing scenes as if they had some classical urgency. Every once in a while, through the fierce purity of his style, they do. --Richard T. Jameson

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My Darling Clementine (The Ford at Fox Collection)

Actors: Henry Fonda, Linda Darnell, Victor Mature, Cathy Downs, Walter Brennan
ASIN : B000WMA6FK
Sales Rank : 35023
Director : John Ford
Brand : TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT
Studio : 20th Century Fox
Region Code : 1
Format : Black & White, Dubbed, Subtitled, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 0024543482666
UPC : 024543482666
Release Date : December 04, 2007
Publisher : 20th Century Fox
Manufacturer : 20th Century Fox
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Label : 20th Century Fox
Running Time : 168

Description

Henry Fonda, Victor Mature and Walter Brennan star in John Ford's acclaimed film that climaxes with the famous gunfight at O.K. Corral. As Wyatt Earp (Fonda) and his brothers head for a peaceful life of ranching in 1880's California, tragedy moves Wyatt to pin on a badge once more. But when he becomes the law in Tombstone, home to Doc Holliday (Mature) and the Clanton boys, it's only a matter of time until the Earps and Doc face the Clantons in one of the most remembered battles of the Wild West. Featuring Linda Darnell and Ward Bond, My Darling Clementine is considered to be one of Ford's finest films.

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The most famous and sublime treatment of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, John Ford's My Darling Clementine is by any measure one of the most classically perfect Westerns ever made. Henry Fonda plays a hard, serious Wyatt Earp leading a cattle drive west with his brothers when a stopover in the wild town of Tombstone ends in the murder of his youngest brother. Wyatt takes up the badge he had turned down earlier and tames the wide-open town with his brothers (Ward Bond and Tim Holt), all the while waiting for the wild Clantons (led by Walter Brennan's ruthless Old Man Clanton) to make a mistake. Victor Mature delivers perhaps his finest performance as the tubercular gambler Doc Holliday, an alcoholic Eastern doctor escaping civilization in the Wild West. Ford takes great liberties with history, bending the story to fit his ideal of the West, a balance of social law and pioneer spirit. Though the film reaches its climax in the legendary gunfight between the Earps (with Doc Holliday) and the Clantons, the most powerful moment is the moving Sunday morning church social played out on the floor of the unfinished church. As Earp dances with Clementine (Cathy Downs)--Fonda's stiff, self-conscious movements showing a man unaccustomed to such social interaction--Ford's camera frames them against the open sky: the town and the wilderness merge into the new Eden of the West for a brief moment. --Sean Axmaker

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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 : 50510
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
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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.

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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

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True Grit

Actors: John Wayne, Kim Darby, Glen Campbell, Jeremy Slate, Robert Duvall
ASIN : 6305754934
Sales Rank : 11433
Director : Henry Hathaway
Studio : Paramount Pictures
Region Code : 1
Format : Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
Binding : DVD
EAN : 9786305754930
ISBN : 0792160770
UPC : 097360683349
Number Of Discs : 1
Release Date : December 21, 2000
Publisher : Paramount Pictures
Manufacturer : Paramount Pictures
Label : Paramount Pictures
Running Time : 127

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A wonderful/rueful running gag in El Dorado involves the Edgar Allan Poe line "Ride, boldly ride" being mangled by toupee-wearer Wayne into "Ride, baldy, ride." Two years later, in True Grit, Wayne put the joke in italics by donning an eyepatch and several inches of girth to play cantankerous territorial marshal Rooster Cogburn. Critics belatedly noticed that he could be a marvelously entertaining actor, and Hollywood finally gave him the Oscar they'd failed to nominate him for in Red River, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, et al. But make no mistake: True Grit is a splendid movie, with lovingly textured storytelling and sturdy characters, Henry Hathaway's finest high-country action set-pieces, intoxicatingly ornate frontier language, and a couple of formidable bad guys (Jeff Corey's Tom Cheney and Robert Duvall's "Lucky" Ned Pepper). It's a compliment to say that, from a technical standpoint, the movie could have been made any time in Hathaway's 40-year career, yet its feeling for the reality of violence ceded no ground to The Wild Bunch, released around the same time. Still, the film's most sublime passage falls between bursts of gunplay: Rooster sitting on a hilltop at night recounting his life story, as John Wayne metamorphoses ineluctably into W.C. Fields. --Richard T. Jameson