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 by William Goldman (The Princess ...
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 by William Goldman (The Princess ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video: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 ...
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 Widmark ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Winchester '73 is the first in a remarkable string of five classic westerns that James Stewart made with Anthony Mann in the 1950s (followed by Bend of the River, The Man from Laramie, The Naked Spur, and The Far Country). It is also distinguished for having helped revive the Western at the box office, and for being the first film in which the star forsook a huge up-front salary in favor of a share of the profits--a strategy that made Stewart rich and ...
Editorial Product Review:Description:One of the finest westerns ever made, this 'monumental, sweeping and powerful' masterpiece (Variety) features impassioned performances, stunning cinematography and adventure on a grand scale. Starring John Wayne, Montgomery Clift (in his screen debut), Walter Brennan, Harry Carey, Sr. and Noah Beery, Jr., Red River is a hard-hitting, action-packed adventure that captures the grandeur, majestyand dangerof the wild American West.Wayne gives 'one of the best performances of his career' (Cinebooks) as Tom Dunson, a self-made cattle baron who'll do anything to protect his way of ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Any short list of the all-time greatest Westerns is bound to include this 1948 Howard Hawks classic about an epic cattle drive. Red River features one of John Wayne's greatest performances. Like his Ethan Edwards in John Ford's 1956 masterpiece The Searchers, the Duke plays an isolated and unsympathetic man who is possessed by bitterness. Wayne is Texas rancher Tom Dunson, who adopts a young boy orphaned in an Indian massacre. That boy, Matthew Garth (played as an adult by Montgomery Clift in ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video: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 ...
Editorial Product Review:Description:Spectacular gun battles, epic-sized heroes and an all-star cast that includes Academy Award(r) winners Yul Brynner* and James Coburn**, together with Steve McQueen, Eli Wallach and Charles Bronson, make The Magnificent Seven a legend among westerns. Spawning three sequels and a successful television series, and featuring Elmer Bernstein's Oscar(r)-nominated*** score, thisstunning remake of The Seven Samurai is 'a hard-pounding adventure' (Newsweek) and 'an enduringly popular' (Leonard Maltin) cinematic classic. Merciless Calvera (Wallach) and his band of ruthless outlaws are terrorizing a poor Mexican village, and ...
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 the story simple but involving, ...
