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Westerns DVDs

Shane

Sales Rank:2562
List Price: $9.98
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
Dolby
DVD-Video
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Alan Ladd
Jean Arthur
Van Heflin
Brandon De Wilde
Jack Palance

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, what most people will remember about this movie is the friendship between the stoical Shane and the young son of the farmers. The kid is played by Brandon De Wilde, who gives one of the most amazing child performances in the movies; his parting scene with Shane is guaranteed to draw tears from even the most stonyhearted moviegoer. And speaking of stony hearts, Jack Palance made a sensational impression as the evil gunslinger sent to clean house--he has fewer lines of dialogue than he has lines in his magnificently craggy face, but he makes them count. The photography, highlighting the landscape near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, won an Oscar. --Robert Horton

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Broken Trail (Two-disc)

Sales Rank:2141
List Price: $19.94
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

AC-3
Closed-captioned
Color
Dolby
DVD-Video
Subtitled
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Robert Duvall
Thomas Haden Church
Greta Scacchi
Gwendoline Yeo
Chris Mulkey

The lives of two stoic cowboys and five abused Chinese women become intertwined in Walter Hill's sprawling miniseries Broken Trail. Print Ritter (Academy Award winner Robert Duvall) and his nephew Tom Harte (Thomas Haden Church, Sideways) agree to deliver a herd of 500 horses from Oregon to Wyoming. Along the way, they rescue the young women--most of them still just girls--who're being transported to a brothel to have their virginity auctioned off. When the madam sees she is about to lose the girls, she screams at Tom, "What about my property?" He shouts back, "That's the price of being a capitalist, lady." Unable to overcome the language barrier, Print assigns numbers to the girls. Number 3, Sun Foy (Gwendoline Yeo, Desperate Housewives) is the most fearless and perceptive of them. Though the others don't want to be called Number 4--an unlucky numeral in their homeland--Ye Fung (Olivia Cheng), the most tragic of the group, doesn't care. Targeted for her beauty, she finds herself unable to overcome the trauma. The number suits her, in her mind. Along the way, Print and Tom rescue Nola Johns (Greta Scacchi), the proverbial hooker with the heat of gold, who was forced into prostitution after her husband died.

The cinematography is gorgeous as the camera sweeps over the lush landscape (the Canadian Rockies subbing in for wild West of the late 1800s) and Hill does a formidable job of pacing this 3-hour drama with just the right balance of dialogue and action. For Duvall, Broken Trail is the last piece to his Western trilogy, which started with the miniseries Lonesome Dove followed by the feature film Open Range. He is instantly likeable as a father figure and the viewer never doubts that his intention for the girls is honorable. As for Haden Church, he has never been as appealing as he is in this role. Gruff and flawed, he softens when he exchanges shy glances with Sun Foy. The trek is long and hard and the unlikely band of travelers will face much hardship. If not as satisfying as the rich, detailed Lonesome Dove, Broken Trail makes up for it with a wonderful storyline and some fine acting by all involved. As for the conclusion, it may surprise some viewers who are expecting a more traditional version of the happy ending. --Jae-Ha Kim

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Unforgiven (Two-Disc Special Edition)

Sales Rank:3095
List Price: $26.98
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

Anamorphic
Closed-captioned
Color
Dolby
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Special Edition
Subtitled
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Rob Campbell
Cherrilene Cardinal
Beverley Elliott
Frances Fisher
Tara Frederick

Winner of four Academy Awards, including best picture, director, supporting actor, and best editing, Clint Eastwood's 1992 masterpiece stands as one of the greatest and most thematically compelling Westerns ever made. "The movie summarized everything I feel about the Western," said Eastwood at the time of the film's release. "The moral is the concern with gunplay." To illustrate that theme, Eastwood stars as a retired, once-ruthless killer-turned-gentle-widower and hog farmer. He accepts one last bounty-hunter mission--to find the men who brutalized a prostitute--to help support his two motherless children. Joined by his former partner (Morgan Freeman) and a cocky greenhorn (Jaimz Woolvett), he takes on a corrupt sheriff (Oscar winner Gene Hackman) in a showdown that makes the viewer feel the full impact of violence and its corruption of the soul. Dedicated to Eastwood's mentors Sergio Leone and Don Siegel and featuring a colorful role for Richard Harris, it's arguably Eastwood's crowning directorial achievement. --Jeff Shannon

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The Backyardigans - Surf's Up!

Sales Rank:2998
List Price: $16.99
Lowest New Price: $11.24
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Animated
Color
DVD-Video
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

LaShawn Jefferies
Jonah Bobo
Naelee Rae
Reginald Davis Jr.
Zach Tyler

The Backyardigans are a group of five young friends who get together daily to play in the backyard they share. Each day, their imaginations transform that backyard into a different fantastic, photo-realistic landscape, and they go off on a high-stakes quest full of song, dance, and adventure Title Overview: "Surf’s Up!" will be the fifth The Backyardigans home video title. The main episode centers around the Backyardigans as surfers searching for the perfect wave to Afro-pop tunes. The main program of the DVD will include 4 episodes, each approximately 24 minutes in length.

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The Backyardigans - Super Secret Super Spy

Sales Rank:4162
List Price: $16.99
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Animated
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Color
DVD-Video
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Director(s):

Actor(s):

"Super Secret Super Spy" takes the Backyardigans into a double length James Bond style world with super villains and super spies! The super special musical guest is Cyndi Lauper! The DVD includes three episodes for a total approximate runtime of 100 minutes.

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The Complete James Dean Collection (East of Eden / Giant / Rebel Without a Cause Special Edition)

Sales Rank:2569
List Price: $68.98
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MPAA Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)

Format:

Box set
Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
NTSC

Director(s):

Ara Chekmayan
Elia Kazan
George Stevens
Nicholas Ray

Actor(s):

James Dean
Natalie Wood
Elizabeth Taylor
Rock Hudson
Raymond Massey

The Complete James Dean Collection includes two-disc special editions of the three major films Dean made during his meteoric career: East of Eden (1955, never before available on DVD), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Giant (1956). In addition to new transfers, the films collect new and vintage documentaries, commentary tracks, publicity materials, and even the infamous "Drive Safely" commercial spot Dean filmed shortly before his death in an auto accident.

East of Eden is an acknowledged classic, and the starring debut of James Dean lifts it to legendary status. John Steinbeck's novel gave director Elia Kazan a perfect Cain-and-Abel showcase for Dean's iconic screen persona, casting the brooding star as Cal, the younger of two brothers vying for the love of their Bible-thumping father (Raymond Massey) in Monterey, California, at the dawn of World War I. Massey is a lettuce farmer, striving for market domination with an ill-fated refrigeration scheme. Having discovered that his presumed-dead mother (Oscar winner Jo Van Fleet) is a brothel owner in nearby Salinas, Cal convinces her to finance an investment that will restore his father's lost fortune, but neither money nor the tenderness of his brother's fiancée (Julie Harris) can assuage Cal's anguished need for paternal acceptance that comes nearly too late. Kazan's oblique camera angles and Dean's tortured emoting may seem extreme by latter-day standards, but their theatrics make East of Eden a timeless tale of family secrets and hard-won affection.

When people think of James Dean, they probably think first of the troubled teen from Rebel Without a Cause: nervous, volatile, soulful, a kid lost in a world that does not understand him. Made between his only other starring roles, in East of Eden and Giant, Rebel sums up the jangly, alienated image of Dean, but also happens to be one of the key films of the 1950s. Director Nicholas Ray takes a strikingly sympathetic look at the teenagers standing outside the white-picket-fence '50s dream of America: juvenile delinquent (that's what they called them then) Jim Stark (Dean), fast girl Judy (Natalie Wood), lost boy Plato (Sal Mineo), slick hot-rodder Buzz (Corey Allen). At the time, it was unusual for a movie to endorse the point of view of teenagers, but Ray and screenwriter Stewart Stern captured the youthful angst that was erupting at the same time in rock & roll. Dean is heartbreaking, following the method acting style of Marlon Brando but staking out a nakedly emotional honesty of his own. Going too fast, in every way, he was killed in a car crash on September 30, 1955, a month before Rebel opened. He was no longer an actor, but an icon, and Rebel is a lasting monument.

Giant got its name because everything in the 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 remembered for James Dean's final performance, as poor former ranch hand Jett Rink, who strikes oil and transforms himself into a flamboyant millionaire playboy. Director George Stevens won his second Oscar for this ambitious, grandly realized (if sometimes slow moving) epic of the changing socioeconomic (and physical) landscape of modern Texas, based on Edna Ferber's bestselling novel. The talented supporting cast includes Mercedes McCambridge as Bick's frustrated sister, put out by the new "woman of the house"; Chill Wills as the Benedicts' garrulous rancher neighbor; Carroll Baker and Dennis Hopper as the Benedicts' rebellious children; and Earl Holliman and Sal Mineo as dedicated ranch hands.

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Silverado (2 Disc Superbit Gift Set)

Sales Rank:3852
List Price: $19.94
Lowest New Price: $12.98
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MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)

Format:

AC-3
Closed-captioned
Color
Dolby
DTS Surround Sound
Dubbed
DVD-Video
Subtitled
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Kevin Kline
Scott Glenn
Kevin Costner
Danny Glover
Marvin J. McIntyre

Director Lawrence Kasdan (The Big Chill) clearly set out to make an old-fashioned Western, but he couldn't help bringing a hip, self-conscious attitude to the proceedings. Silverado thus finds its own funky tone--sometimes rousing, sometimes winking. Four cowpokes converge on a little Western burg called Silverado; they're played by Kevin Kline (a distinctly modern kind of Western hero), Scott Glenn, Danny Glover, and the rowdy young Kevin Costner. Kasdan peppers the somewhat generic action with smart dialogue and a parade of quirky supporting players, including John Cleese as a sheriff who seems to have stepped straight from a Monty Python sketch into an Old West saloon. Bruce Broughton supplies the music, a real throwback to the glory days of thundering Western themes. One thing's for sure: Silverado's a lot more fun than the later Kasdan-Costner Western, Wyatt Earp. --Robert Horton

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Rio Bravo (Two-Disc Special Edition)

Sales Rank:2797
List Price: $12.98
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MPAA Rating: Unrated

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
Dubbed
DVD-Video
Special Edition
Subtitled
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

John Wayne
Dean Martin
Ricky Nelson
Angie Dickinson

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 more modest scale. Basically, it comes down to Sheriff John T. Chance (Wayne), his sobering-up alcoholic friend Dude (Dean Martin), the hotshot new kid Colorado (Ricky Nelson), and deputy-sidekick Stumpy (Walter Brennan), sittin' around in the town jail, drinkin' black cofee, shootin' the breeze, and occasionally, singin' a song. Hawks--who, like his pal Ernest Hemingway, lived by the code of "grace under pressure"--said he made Rio Bravo as a rebuke to High Noon, in which sheriff Gary Cooper begged for townspeople to help him. So, Hawks made Wayne's Sheriff Chance a consummate professional--he may be getting old and fat, but he knows how to do his job, and he doesn't want amateurs getting mixed up in his business; they could get hurt. This most entertaining of movies also achieved some notoriety in the '90s when Quentin Tarantino (director of Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, and Jackie Brown) revealed that he uses it as a litmus test for prospective girlfriends. Oh, and if the configuration of characters sounds familiar, it should: Hawks remade Rio Bravo two more times--as El Dorado in 1967, with Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and James Caan; and as Rio Lobo in 1970, with Wayne, Jack Elam, and Christopher Mitchum. --Jim Emerson

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Gary Cooper - The Signature Collection (Sergeant York / The Fountainhead / Dallas / Springfield Rifle / The Wreck of the Mary Deare)

Sales Rank:3344
List Price: $49.98
Lowest New Price: $17.98
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Box set
Black & White
Closed-captioned
DVD-Video
NTSC

Director(s):

André De Toth
Howard Hawks
King Vidor
Michael Anderson
Stuart Heisler

Actor(s):

Gary Cooper
Patricia Neal
Walter Brennan
Charlton Heston
Raymond Massey

Springfield Rifle, one of five films included in this set, may miss the bullseye as a true Gary Cooper classic, but there's a line that speaks to his enduring status as a screen icon and "American Legend." In this 1952 Western, his follow-up film to High Noon, Cooper's character has been drummed out of the army and branded a coward. Suffice to say that all is not what it seems, and an observer is asked how Coop will handle the pressure. The response: "He'll stand up." That is quintessential Cooper. He's a stand-up guy, and the "dang swangest hero," as he is hailed in Sergeant York, this collection's calling card. Directed by Howard Hawks and co-written by John Huston, Sergeant York earned Cooper an Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Alvin York, a Tennessee mountain hellraiser who finds religion after surviving a lightning strike. His newfound pacifist beliefs are put to the supreme test when he is forced to enlist in WWI. Cooper also displays the (Frank Lloyd) Wright stuff as architect Harold Roark in The Fountainhead (1949), adapted for the screen by Ayn Rand from her towering and controversial bestselling novel about a "fool visionary" who refuses to compromise his principles or conform his work to popular taste. The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959), his penultimate film, finds Cooper desperately trying to clear his name before an inquiry determines what really happened aboard the mysteriously abandoned eponymous ship. Costar Charlton Heston gives him a run for Most Piercing Blue Eyes honors. Last, and least, but still entertaining, is Dallas (1950), in which Cooper stars as a Confederate outlaw who impersonates a sheriff to settle an old score. Cooper is not the most chameleon-esque of actors, but in these representative films, he displays intriguing shadings to his heroic persona. Roark in The Fountainhead has a definite dark side, while his "Reb" Hollister in Dallas is something of a rascal.

Of the DVD presentations, Sergeant York gets the two-disc "Special Edition" treatment, with dry, but informative commentary by film historian Jeanne Basinger, a made-for-cable TV special about Cooper hosted by Clint Eastwood, and a welcome Warner Bros. cartoon, Tex Avery's "Porky's Preview" and short subject, "Lions for Sale," that replicate an old fashioned night out at the movies. The Fountainhead DVD includes a featurette about the making of the film. Cooper stands alone among Hollywood's leading men, but beyond his formidable presence, classic film buffs will bask in the nostalgic pleasures of Max Steiner's music in four of the five films, and appearances by great character actors (Walter Brennan and George Tobias in Sergeant York, a young Richard Harris in Mary Deare). --Donald Liebenson

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The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford [Blu-ray]

Sales Rank:4770
List Price: $35.99
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

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AC-3
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Director(s):

Actor(s):

Brad Pitt
Casey Affleck
Sam Shepard
Mary-Louise Parker
Brooklynn Proulx

Of all the movies made about or glancingly involving the 19th-century outlaw Jesse Woodson James, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is the most reflective, most ambitious, most intricately fascinating, and indisputably most beautiful. Based on the novel of the same name by Ron Hansen, it picks up James late in his career, a few hours before his final train robbery, then covers the slow catastrophe of the gang's breakup over the next seven months even as the boss himself settles into an approximation of genteel retirement. But in another sense all of the movie is later than that. The very title assumes the audience's familiarity with James as a figure out of history and legend, and our awareness that he was--will be--murdered in his parlor one quiet afternoon by a backshooting crony.

The film--only the second to be made by New Zealand–born writer-director Andrew Dominik--reminds us that Dominik's debut film, Chopper (2000), was the cunningly off-kilter portrait of another real-life criminal psychopath who became a kind of rock star to his society. The Jesse James of this telling is no Robin Hood robbing the rich to give to the poor, and that train robbery we witness is punctuated by acts of gratuitous brutality, not gallantry. Nineteen-year-old Bob Ford (Casey Affleck) seeks to join the James gang out of hero worship stoked by the dime novels he secretes under his bed, but his glam hero (Brad Pitt) is a monster who takes private glee in infecting his accomplices with his own paranoia, then murdering them for it. In the careful orchestration of James's final moments, there's even a hint that he takes satisfaction in his own demise.

Affleck and Pitt (who co-produced with Ridley Scott, among others) are mesmerizing in the title roles, but the movie is enriched by an exceptional supporting cast: Sam Shepard as Jesse's older, more stable brother Frank; Sam Rockwell as Bob Ford's own brother Charlie, whose post-assassination descent into madness is astonishing to behold; Paul Schneider, Garret Dillahunt, and Jeremy Renner as three variously doomed gang members; and Mary-Louise Parker, who as Jesse's wife Zee has few lines yet manages with looks and body language to invoke a wellnigh-novelistic backstory for herself. There are also electrifying cameos by James Carville, doing solid actorly work as the governor of Missouri; Ted Levine, as a lawman of antic spirit; and Nick Cave, composer of the film's score (with Warren Ellis) and screenwriter of the Aussie "Western" The Proposition, suddenly towering over a late scene to perform the folk song that set the terms for the book and movie's title.

Still, the real costar is Roger Deakins, probably the finest cinematographer at work today. The landscapes of the movie (mostly in Alberta and Manitoba) will linger in the memory as long as the distinctive faces, and we seem to feel the sting of its snows on our cheeks. Interior scenes are equally persuasive. Few Westerns have conveyed so tangibly the bleakness and austerity of the spaces people of the frontier called home, and sought in vain to warm with human spirit. --Richard T. Jameson

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