|
|
|
The Rounders
: :Burt Kennedy wrote several of the finest Westerns ever for director Budd Boetticher in the late '50s--marvels of austere, subtle storytelling. Yet on his own, writer-director Kennedy tended to very broad comedy-Westerns. The Rounders, based on a novel by Max Evans, falls somewhere between Support Your Local Sheriff (high) and Dirty Dingus Magee (low). Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda play two bronc busters in the pickup-driving West who, by their own admission, 'ain't exactly the smartest cowboys that ever lived.' Somehow they always end up owing rancher Jim Ed Love (Chill ...
|
|
|
Francis Joins the Wacs
: :Burt Kennedy wrote several of the finest Westerns ever for director Budd Boetticher in the late '50s--marvels of austere, subtle storytelling. Yet on his own, writer-director Kennedy tended to very broad comedy-Westerns. The Rounders, based on a novel by Max Evans, falls somewhere between Support Your Local Sheriff (high) and Dirty Dingus Magee (low). Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda play two bronc busters in the pickup-driving West who, by their own admission, 'ain't exactly the smartest cowboys that ever lived.' Somehow they always end up owing rancher Jim Ed Love (Chill ...
|
|
|
Giant (2pc) (Ws Aniv)
: essential video:They call it Giant because everything in this picture is big, from the generous running time (more than 200 minutes) to the sprawling ranch location (a horizon-to-horizon plain with a lonely, modest mansion dropped in the middle) to the high-powered stars. Stocky Rock Hudson stars as the confident, stubborn young ranch baron Bick Benedict, who woos and wins the hand of Southern belle Elizabeth Taylor, a seemingly demure young beauty who proves to be Hudson's match after she settles into the family homestead. For many the film is chiefly ...
|
|
|
Giant
: essential video:They call it Giant because everything in this picture is big, from the generous running time (more than 200 minutes) to the sprawling ranch location (a horizon-to-horizon plain with a lonely, modest mansion dropped in the middle) to the high-powered stars. Stocky Rock Hudson stars as the confident, stubborn young ranch baron Bick Benedict, who woos and wins the hand of Southern belle Elizabeth Taylor, a seemingly demure young beauty who proves to be Hudson's match after she settles into the family homestead. For many the film is chiefly ...
|
|
|
Leave Her to Heaven
: :Leave Her to Heaven is one of the most unblinkingly perverse movies ever offered up as a prestige picture by a major studio in the golden age of Hollywood. Gene Tierney, whose lambent eyes, porcelain features, and sweep of healthy-American-girl hair customarily made her a 20th Century Fox icon of purity, scored an Oscar nomination playing a demonically obsessive daughter of privilege with her own monstrous notion of love. By the time she crosses eyebeams with popular novelist Cornel Wilde on a New Mexico-bound train, her jealous manipulations have driven her ...
|
|
|
McLintock! (John Wayne Estate Authorized Edition)
: :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 a few chuckles and the stars' broad performances. --Tom Keogh
|
|
|
Where the Boys Are
: :The movie that put the Break into Spring, Where the Boys Are inspired thousands of college kids to seek sun, surf, and even s-e-x on the beaches of Florida. A bevy of co-eds (including foxy Yvette Mimieux and delightful Paula Prentiss, in her film debut) make for Fort Lauderdale, finding fun but also quite a bit of heavy-breathing drama. It's a little like a dressier, glossed-up version of the Problems with Today's Youth movies that were filling up the drive-ins of the era. The movie's actually pretty frank for 1960, although ...
|
|
|
Rio Grande (1950)
: :The last and least memorable of John Ford's famous cavalry trilogy (following Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon), Rio Grande nonetheless has an interesting continuity about the gentlemanly rules of military conduct. Here the focus is on the family. While creating a heated controversy over his handling of the Apache war, John Wayne must also contend with disgruntled wife Maureen O'Hara and estranged son Claude Jarman Jr., a new recruit trying to earn his father's love and respect. Ford seems to suggest that there are two conflicting codes of ...
|
|
|
Western Union
: :Western Union is nominally one of those epic celebrations of great pioneer achievements, and its official heroes are an Eastern-bred, Harvard-trained engineer named Blake (Robert Young) and a visionary named Creighton (Dean Jagger), who dreams of a transcontinental telegraph system to unite a divided nation in the first year of the Civil War. But the film really belongs to Randolph Scott's Vance Shaw, a reformed outlaw trying to make good as a member of the team stringing 'the singing wire' across the plains. His past--which Creighton knows something of--keeps reaching out ...
|
|
|
The Alamo
:Description:John Wayne produces, directs and stars in this 'bigger than life' (Life) chronicle of one ofthe most remarkable events in American history. At the Alamoa crumbling adobe mission185 exceptional men joined together in a sacred pact: they would stand firm against an army of 7,000 and willingly give their lives for freedom. Filmed entirely in Texas, only a few miles from the site of the actual battle, The Alamo is a visually stunning and historically accurate celebration of courage and honor. Co-starring Richard Widmark, Laurence Harvey and Chill Wills, and garnering ...
|
|
