Product Description
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Warner Home Video Western Classics Collection (DVD)
Includes the following titles: Escape from Fort Bravo (1954) Many
Rivers To Cross (1955) Cimarron (1960 Remake) The Law and Jake
Wade (1958) Saddle The Wind (1959) The Stalking Moon (1958)
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There's plenty in this set for Western fans to enjoy, but let's
note that none of these movies rises to the classic status the
box title cls. If the term "Western classic" is to mean
anything--and it should--it has to be reserved for the likes of
Stagecoach, The Naked Spur, Seven Men from Now, and Unforgiven.
What we have here are half a dozen pictures that came out in
mid20th century, have recognizable professionals going about
their business, and agreeably remind us of how they made 'em
before they stopped makin' 'em the way they used to. And for a
pleasant weekend's viewing, that'll do nicely. The Civil Warera
Escape from Fort Bravo (1953), the first of director John
Sturges's many Westerns, has flint-hard U.S. Cavalry officer
William Holden riding herd on Confederate POWs in Arizona. Once
Holden has fallen for his colonel's daughter's best friend
Eleanor Parker, who's also secretly the fiancée of Rebel officer
John Forsythe, the film itself is allowed to escape Fort Bravo
and echo off the walls of some picturesque canyons well-supplied
with hostile Indians. Sturges had a good eye for staging action,
and the big climax involves a kind of Apache Agincourt, a
patiently lethal tactic on the part of the Mescaleros.
Cameraman Robert L. Surtees was forced to abandon Technicolor for
Ansco color, which has a pleasing palette for standard scenes but
tends to go greenish and speckly in desert longs. This was
MGM's first production in modest widescreen (1.77:1), which your
flat-screen TV may shave a mite. The other five films in the set,
all full Cinema (2.35:1), look fine.
The Law and Jake Wade (1958) is another Sturges-Surtees picture,
one of three vehicles for fading MGM star Robert Taylor. He's a
reformed outlaw turned town marshal who springs former partner
Richard Widmark from jail, thereby paying off an old debt. But as
Widmark sees it, they still have unfinished business, best
settled by dragging Taylor and fiancée Patricia Owens off to a
ghost town haunted by old guilt and savage Indians. As a journey
Western, the movie pales alongside the great Budd Boetticher
films of the same era, but the felonious traveling companions
include Henry Silva, Robert Middleton, and DeForest Kelley, and
the derelict town and its Boot Hill make a memorable killing
ground. The credits of Saddle the Wind (1958) feature two
unlikely names to be connected with a Western: the script is by
Rod Serling (preTwilight Zone), and the wind in need of saddling
is personified by John Cassavetes, doing an 1860s variation on a
1950s juvenile delinquent. He's kid brother to Robert Taylor, an
ex-fighter who's turned rancher with the blessing of range
baron Donald Crisp. The peace of their valley is variously
threatened by man Charles McGraw, an extended family of
squatters (headed by Royal Dano in anguished righteousness mode),
and most of all the volatile, -happy Cassavetes. Saddle the
Wind turns out to be something of a discovery, thanks to
Serling's metaphor-rich dialogue and intriguingly oblique
direction by Robert Parrish. There's some facile '50s-TV
psychologizing, but mood trumps plot, and the inevitable showdown
takes a surprising turn. Plus it never hurts to have Julie London
around to gaze soulfully and sing the title song.
The final Robert Taylor item, Many Rivers to Cross (1955), is
the one out-and-out clinker in the bunch, an excruciating attempt
at frontier comedy largely set against painted vistas à la Seven
Brides for Seven Brothers. As it happens, both films were
produced by Jack Cummings, a veteran of MGM musicals--only this
is no musical, and the ill-cast Taylor seems poleaxed as
free-living vagabond Bushrod Gentry (a rascal role that cries out
for Kirk Douglas or Burt Lancaster). Eleanor Parker is fun as the
fire-haired "she-fiend" who sets her cap for Bushrod, but really
only James Arness hits the right note in a too-brief appearance
about an hour in. Master Western director Anthony Mann is
credited with Cimarron, the 1960 remake of the 1931 Academy Award
winner. However, Mann left in mid-production ("creative
differences"), and the movie seems more typical of the MGM
contract director who took over, Charles Walters. E Ferber's
novel of pioneer Oklahoma offers a plethora of themes--several
species of prejudice, capitalism vs. charity, sons unhappily
following in hers' footsteps, and the irreconcilable tensions
between a stability-craving wife and her footloose husband--but
the action is front-loaded and the husband, Glenn Ford, is
offscreen for years at a time. Most of the large cast comes and
goes without establishing identities, and Maria Schell's Sabra
Cravat is tiresome as both ditz and pill. However, the Oklahoma
land rush gives grand spectacle. That leaves The Stalking Moon
(1969), an odd-film-out since it's the only non-MGM production in
the set and a decade more recent than the rest. Gregory Peck
plays a scout trying to protect a white woman (Eva Marie Saint)
and her half-breed son from an Apache warrior, the woman's
captor-husband of ten years. The mostly unseen Apache is a
veritable monster of determination, cunning, and
bloodthirstiness: Peck and his charges doom entire Southwest
communities to extermination just by passing through the
neighborhood. This fierce amalgam of Western and horror movie was
the last of seven collaborations between director Robert Mulligan
and producer Alan J. Pakula--a distant cousin of their To Kill a
Mockingbird. As a palm-sweater it's demonically effective, and
fascinating as prelude to the great paranoid trilogy Pakula went
on to direct, Klute, The Parallax View, and All the President's
Men. Robert Forster has an early role as a fellow, part-Indian
scout. --Richard T. Jameson