Editorial Product Review: essential video:Jack Crabb is the only white survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn and the centenarian shares his story in this picaresque fable of the Old West. In Arthur Penn's adaptation of Thomas Berger's novel, Dustin Hoffman plays Jack from teen years into old age in a bravura performance. And Jack's story is a fantastic one: captured by Indians as a boy, reared as an Indian, shuttling back and forth between the white and Indian worlds. In the process, he befriends ...
Editorial Product Review: :'The legend of Union Pacific is the drama of a nation, young, tough, prodigal and invincible, conquering with an iron highroad the endless reaches of the West.' This stemwinder of a foreword strikes the pseudo-biblical/American Empire keynote for Cecil B. DeMille's 'history' of building the transcontinent railroad. Only the bombast--and Arthur Rosson's second-unit direction--rises to the film's epic mission. The mustache-twirling villainy is right out of 19th-century melodrama, and the romantic triangle of Joel McCrea's railroad troubleshooter, Barbara Stanwyck's aggressively 'Oirish' postmistress-on-wheels, and their ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Talk about epic grandeur! This magnificently photographed account of the first cattle drive on the Chisholm Trail has everything you could ever want in a western: gunfights, stampedes, Indian attacks, hangings, betrayal, revenge, romance, glorious scenery, and a towering performance by John Wayne that prefigured his definitive portrayal of the bitter Ethan Edwards in John Ford's The Searchers eight years later. Tom Dunson (Wayne) adopts a young boy, Matt (brilliantly played as an adult by Montgomery Clift), whose family has been massacred ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Talk about epic grandeur! This magnificently photographed account of the first cattle drive on the Chisholm Trail has everything you could ever want in a western: gunfights, stampedes, Indian attacks, hangings, betrayal, revenge, romance, glorious scenery, and a towering performance by John Wayne that prefigured his definitive portrayal of the bitter Ethan Edwards in John Ford's The Searchers eight years later. Tom Dunson (Wayne) adopts a young boy, Matt (brilliantly played as an adult by Montgomery Clift), whose family has been massacred ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:William Wyler directed this epic Western, about the clash of East and West, intellect and action. Gregory Peck stars as a sea captain who moves way out West to marry Carroll Baker and become part of the ranch owned by her father (Charles Bickford). But he discovers that daddy's top hand (Charlton Heston) carries a torch for Baker and doesn't particularly like Peck stepping into his place. Peck also finds himself caught in the midst of a power struggle between Bickford and ...
Editorial Product Review: :This massive, in-depth study of the dark Western icon comes off with mixed results. Trying to capture the whole life, (warts and all) of the lawman-criminal-brother-fortune hunter, director Lawrence Kasdan gains points for sheer scale, giving us a rich epic painted in dark colors with gritty settings. But the visual poetry and extensive foreshadowing ruin the dramatic drive. Some scenes have as much impact as stalker movies; you're just waiting for someone to get knocked off. As Earp, Kevin Costner is not afraid to ...
Editorial Product Review: :John Wayne drew on what he learned from John Ford, Howard Hawks, and practically everyone who directed him during his long career when he made his own directorial debut on this labor of love. The Alamo is a sprawling, unabashedly patriotic epic of the sacrifice made by 187 men defending the Alamo from Santa Ana's bigger and better equipped army. Wayne stars as Col. Davy Crockett, the straight-talking, fun-loving frontiersman turned senator, with Laurence Harvey as the stiff, by-the-book Col. William Travis and Ricahrd ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Kevin Costner's 1990 epic won a bundle of Oscars for a moving, engrossing story of a white soldier (Costner) who singlehandedly mans a post in the 1870 Dakotas, and becomes a part of the Lakota Sioux community who live nearby. The film may not be a masterpiece, but it is far more than the sum of good intentions. The characters are strong, the development of relationships is both ambitious and careful, the love story between Costner and Mary McDonnell's character is captivating. ...
Editorial Product Review: :Released almost exactly 11 years after Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, Kevin Costner's Open Range proved yet again that the Western is the classic American genre. While it lacks the thematic impact of Eastwood's masterpiece, Costner's first film since 1997's ill-fated The Postman returns the actor/director of Dances With Wolves to the open prairies of America--in this case the free-range frontier of 1882--where legal 'free-grazing' cattle drives were falling prey to empire-building land-owners. In the wake of territorial murder, free-grazing cowboys Boss (Robert Duvall) and Charley ...
Editorial Product Review: :In the tradition of Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo, this three-hour Hallmark miniseries ranks among the finest TV Westerns ever produced. With a deft balance of rugged action and richly drawn characters, Johnson County War captures the essence--if not the precise historical details--of the range wars that raged between Wyoming homesteaders and cattle barons in the early 1890s. Fighting for the legal settlers are the Hammett brothers Cain, Harry, and Dale (Tom Berenger, Luke Perry, Adam Storke), along with Dale's tough-as-leather wife (Michelle ...
The Web Services Policy Working Group has published two Web Services Policy 1.5 - Working Drafts: an update to the Primer and a First Public Working Draft of Guidelines for Policy Assertion Authors. The new Guidelines document provides ...