This is my favorite Western of all time. Can't say enough good things about it.
If you ever rooted for the bad guys...
then you should get a kick out of this one! fans of the offbeat and bruce Dern should like this western.this movie plays out like kind of a chess game between pat garrete and billy the kid,with whole trains and towns as pices. kirk douglas plays the railroad backed 'all guns, guts, and glory'marshal Nightingale who at a closer look reveals a darker side.his ambition makes him even worse than pat garrette.all he really cares about is winning a election to become a powerful U.S. senator.Evidence of this is in the way he makes arrests;his professionism is thrown out the window-He uses a Janet Reno style method to catch outlaws,taking no prisioners,caring little about taking them in alive,or recovering robbery mony. The two people who see through him the most are Dern,and a local journalist,who having lost limbs in war hates railroads and ambitous people.Kind of like the old Hamilton vs Jefferson;Hamilton represnting big banking and progress-while others dont like it they know its the way of the future.Many people dident like RxR's either. Bruce Dern is the outlaw Strawhorn,with a great understanding of human nature.Evidence of this is in the scence where just after shooting someone,in front of a horrified crowd,he shuts up a barking dog by throwing him a pice of meat.always trying to cloud good and evil,one of his most memorble quotes is when he tells Nightingale:'honest men only stay honest til it stops paying,thats why your a liar and Im a theif.' Nightingales' plan is simple:elimiate strawhorns gang, and to get elected-capture Strawhorn himself- simple plan but he finds it not as simple to carry out. After a member of Nightingales own posse ponders his future because he is an indian(Indians were often hired by the white man often performing beyond expectations but once the mission was over they were left out to dry)sets the scence to the climatic ending-its Stawhorn vs Nightingale: a chess match playing itself out to the end! Another quote I liked was 'what do we pay taxes for?' If you never saw this movie before try starting it 105 minutes into the movie then watch it again. Another offbeat Kirk Douglas western I would recomend is 'Lonely are the brave' with walter Mathau as sheriff.
Anthony Mann made some of the greatest Westerns of the 1950s, all in partnership with James Stewart. Perhaps needing to prove himself as his own man, in 1957 Mann dropped out of Night Passage to do this film. It's a rather schematic character study about a lawman-turned-bounty-hunter (Henry Fonda) who undertakes the professional shaping-up of an effete young sheriff (Anthony Perkins) too tentative to police the streets of his town. Those streets are compositionally present right outside the oversize window of the office where Perkins undergoes a lot of his soul-searching and arguments with Fonda. That's typical of the film--scrupulously designed, yet abstract to the point of dramatic aridity. The VistaVision black-and-white of cameraman Loyal Griggs (Oscar®-winner... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Henry Fonda - Anthony Perkins Director(s): Anthony Mann DVD Release Date: Released the 11 May 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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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... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Henry Fonda - Linda Darnell Director(s): John Ford DVD Release Date: Released the 06 January 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Ranking No. 21 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American films, this 1940 classic is a bit dated in its noble sentimentality, but it remains a luminous example of Hollywood classicism from the peerless director of mythic Americana, John Ford. Adapted by Nunnally Johnson from John Steinbeck's classic novel, the film tells a simple story about Oklahoma farmers leaving the depression-era dustbowl for the promised land of California, but it's the story's emotional resonance and theme of human perseverance that makes the movie so richly and timelessly rewarding. It's all about the humble Joad family's cross-country trek to escape the economic devastation of their ruined farmland, beginning when Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) returns from a four-year prison term to discover... More Info about this DVD Director(s): John Ford DVD Release Date: Released the 06 April 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Just maybe the most shamelessly enjoyable of Cecil B. DeMille's pseudo-historical epics, this rumbustious frontier saga offers a three-for-one Western legends combo--Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Calamity Jane, all cutting up in the 1870s, with George Armstrong Custer and Abraham Lincoln thrown in for good measure. (Wait a minute, Lincoln was assassinated in 1865--oh, never mind.) Truth to tell, Buffalo Bill doesn't really pull his weight, since (1) he is hopelessly distracted by virtue of having recently married and (2) he's played by James Ellison, an eternal juvenile normally relegated to second-banana duty in Paramount's Hopalong Cassidy series. However, Gary Cooper's Wild Bill and Jean Arthur's Calamity supply enough star power to light up the Dakotas and parts of... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gary Cooper - Jean Arthur Director(s): Cecil B. DeMille DVD Release Date: Released the 01 June 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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