Product Description
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Five DVD set.
.com
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The Big Trail: One of very few widescreen productions filmed at
the dawn of the talkies, The Big Trail (1930) was dismissed by
reviewers of the day, little seen, and soon shelved and
forgotten--for more than half a century, as it turned out. For
movie buffs, it became a sort of Holy Grail. After all, the
esteemed Raoul Walsh had directed, the early 70mm angle was
tantalizing, and wasn't this the movie that was intended to make
a star of Duke Morrison, a 22-year-old former prop man whom Walsh
had rechristened John Wayne for the occasion? For curiosity value
alone, surely it rated a look. Restored in the late 1980s and
warmly embraced by film festival audiences, The Big Trail proved
to be more than just a historical footnote. What were those 1930
reviewers thinking?! Wayne is fresh, exuberant, matinee-idol
handsome, and irresistibly charming (only a little purple prose
trips him up, and no one should have been asked to speak such
early-talkie flapdoodle anyway). The scenario winds through epic
settings from the banks of the Mississippi by way of the Grand
Canyon to the snows of Oregon and the ain vistas of
Washington, marking both a wagon train's journey and the settling
of a personal score between trail guide Wayne and Tyrone Power
Sr. as a veritable ogre of a villain. The Big Trail is now an
authentic classic, and a swell movie. Probably always was.
The Comancheros: Nobody made a fuss about The Comancheros when it
came out in 1961, yet it has proved to be among the most
enduringly entertaining of John Wayne's later Westerns. The Duke,
just beginning to crease and thicken toward Rooster Cogburn
proportions, plays a veteran Texas Ranger named Jake Cutter. When
we first see him (in a tongue-in-cheek delayed entrance), he's
catching up with a New Orleans dandy (Stuart Whitman) who killed
a judge's son in a duel just after that gentlemanly practice was
banned. Monsieur Paul Regret--or "Mon-sooor," as Jake insists on
calling him--is not a bad fellow, let alone a badman, and it only
follows that, after the requisite number of misunderstandings, he
and Jake will join forces to subdue rampaging Indians and the
evil white men behind their uprising. The Comancheros was the
last credit for Michael Curtiz, who, ravaged by cancer, ceded
much of the direction to Wayne (uncredited) and action spet
Cliff Lyons. With support from Wayne stalwarts James Edward Grant
(coscreenplay) and William Clothier (camera), the first of many
rousing Elmer Bernstein scores for a Wayne picture, and a big,
flavorful cast including Lee Marvin (the once and future Liberty
Valance), Nehemiah Persoff, Bruce Cabot, and Guinn "Big Boy"
Williams (in his last movie), they made a broad, cheerfully
bloodthirsty adventure movie for red-meat-eating audiences of all
ages. Even the liberal-pinko Time magazine had to second the
salute from leading lady Ina Balin at film's end: "Take care of
yourself, Big Jake ... we've sort of gotten used to you."
North to Alaska: Even people habitually hostile to John Wayne
movies tend to cast an indulgent eye on the rumbustious 1960
comedy-Western North to Alaska--partly because the Alaska gold
rush setting seems more exotic than, say, Texas or Arizona, and
because there are no Indians to discriminate against and no macho
play to fret about. As for John Wayne as all-purpose icon of
male chauvinism, Big Sam McCord (the Duke) spends much of the
movie in a state of growing discombobulation because he has
fallen in love with, and is thoroughly flummoxed by, "Angel"
(Capucine), the woman he's brought back from Seattle to marry his
heart partner George (Stewart Granger). Henry Hathaway
directs in a broader vein than usual, but he hits paydirt. Even
Fabian, the latest pop music idol to be dragooned into supporting
the elder roughnecks, is fun, and Ernie Kovacs is droll casting
as chief "villain."
The Undefeated: John Wayne, that pillar of machismo, was well
aware that costar Rock Hudson was gay, yet he prized him as a
boon companion, a fellow professional, and one hell of a bridge
player. Each plays a Civil War commander who, after the
ceasefire, leads a community of home folks into Mexico to make a
fresh start. Hudson is a Southern gentleman; Wayne commanded the
Yankee cavalry at Shiloh, where Hudson's brother died.
Nevertheless, Rock, with his extended family, and Duke, with his
troop of cowboys and 3,000 horses to sell to Emperor Maximilian,
soon join forces to out banditos and beam paternally over the
budding romance between their respective daughter and son (an
adopted Indian played by footballer Roman Gabriel with Crystal
Gayle hair). Lingering North-South animosities are celebrated in
an obligatory communal fistfight in the Andrew V. McLaglen
manner, and the showdown with both Maximilian's lancers and the
rebel Juaristas is disconcertingly perfunctory. --Richard T.
Jameson