Editorial Product Review: essential video:Written by Carl Foreman (who was later blacklisted during the anticommunist hearings of the '50s) and superbly directed by Fred Zinnemann, this 1952 classic stars Gary Cooper as just-married lawman Will Kane, who is about to retire as a small-town sheriff and begin a new life with his bride (Grace Kelly) when he learns that gunslinger Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald) is due to arrive at high noon to settle an old score. Kane seeks assistance from deputies and ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:When it comes down to naming the best Western of all time, the list usually narrows to three completely different pictures: John Ford's The Searchers, Howard Hawks's Red River, and Hawks's Rio Bravo. About the only thing they all have in common is that they all star John Wayne. But while The Searchers is an epic quest for revenge and Red River is a sweeping cattle-drive drama ('Take 'em to Missouri! Yeeee-hah!'), Rio Bravo is on a much ...
Editorial Product Review: :One of very few widescreen productions filmed at the dawn of the talkies, The Big Trail was dismissed by reviewers of the day, little seen, and soon shelved and forgotten--for more than half a century, as it turned out. For movie buffs, it became a sort of Holy Grail. After all, the esteemed Raoul Walsh had directed, the early 70mm angle was tantalizing, and wasn't this the movie that was intended to make a star of Duke Morrison, a 22-year-old ...
Editorial Product Review: :Although scarcely seen in its original 3-D, and entirely out of sight for a decade and a half after its producer-star died, Hondo has maintained a high rep among John Wayne fans--and it wasn't even directed by Howard Hawks or John Ford. (Actually, Ford did shoot some second-unit stuff while visiting Wayne on location.) Half-breed Hondo, companioned only by an antisocial dog, tends to be more sympathetic toward the Apaches than toward the white society he occasionally scouts for. He ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Clint Eastwood (the Man with No Name) is good, Lee Van Cleef (Angel Eyes Sentenza) is bad, and Eli Wallach (Tuco Benedito Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez) is ugly in the final chapter of Sergio Leone's trilogy of spaghetti westerns (the first two were A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More). In this sweeping film, the characters form treacherous alliances in a ruthless quest for Confederate gold. Leone is sometimes underrated as a director, but the ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Consciously crafted by director George Stevens as a piece of American mythmaking, Shane is on nearly everyone's shortlist of great movie Westerns. A buckskin knight, Shane (Alan Ladd) rides into the middle of a range war between farmers and cattlemen, quickly siding with the 'sod-busters.' While helping a kindly farmer (Van Heflin), Shane falls platonically in love with the man's wife (Jean Arthur, in the last screen performance of a marvelous career). Though the showdowns are exciting, and ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:This 1969 film has never lost its popularity or its unusual appeal as a star-driven Western that tinkers with the genre's conventions and comes up with something both terrifically entertaining and--typical of its period--a tad paranoid. Paul Newman plays the legendary outlaw Butch Cassidy as an eternal optimist and self-styled visionary, conjuring dreams of banks just ripe for the picking all over the world. Robert Redford is his more levelheaded partner, the sharpshooting Sundance Kid. The film, written ...
Editorial Product Review: :John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara were born to star in 'The Taming of the Shrew,' and this is the closest they ever got. Wayne plays a cattle baron whose estranged wife (O'Hara) wants a divorce. The film is basically one long, funny brawl between them, ending with a mud pit melee and Wayne publicly spanking O'Hara, which doesn't look quite so politically correct anymore. This is no great shakes--director Andrew V. McLaglen is simply hosting a party here--but it's worth ...
Editorial Product Review: :John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara were born to star in 'The Taming of the Shrew,' and this is the closest they ever got. Wayne plays a cattle baron whose estranged wife (O'Hara) wants a divorce. The film is basically one long, funny brawl between them, ending with a mud pit melee and Wayne publicly spanking O'Hara, which doesn't look quite so politically correct anymore. This is no great shakes--director Andrew V. McLaglen is simply hosting a party here--but it's worth ...
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. ...
Editor Annalee Newitz reveals the inspiration for the futurism-focused site's name, shares her obsession with the scientifically taboo and tells why sci-fi is going mainstream.
Editor Annalee Newitz reveals the inspiration for the futurism-focused site's name, shares her obsession with the scientifically taboo and tells why sci-fi is going mainstream.
It's June 29th and Apple is finally ready to let the public play with the iPhone. The past six months have shaped up to be the highest profile mobile phone launch ever, Apple has conjured up an...
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