Ericson, John

Bedknobs and Broomsticks (30th Anniversary Edition)

When a mail-order apprentice witch (Angela Lansbury) is saddled with three sibling refugees from London during World War II, the outlook is grim. But the kids soon discover her secret and sign on for adventure in the name of England. With the aid of a magical bed, they track down her fraudulent headmaster (David Tomlinson) to find the spell that will aid the Allies. Fascinated that she has actually achieved results with his lessons, he joins forces. The quintet does battle with corrupt booksellers, animated-lion royalty, and, eventually, invading Germans. Songs include Lansbury's Oscar-nominated "The Age of Not Believing." This film is often compared to director Robert Stevenson's earlier effort, Mary Poppins, and for good reason. In addition to Tomlinson, the movies share a fondness for magic at the hands of a good woman, light romance with an understanding male, and wide-eyed children. Stevenson also graces both films with interaction between humans and animated animals. Disney is wise to play up that aspect on its box this time around as both the underwater ball and the subsequent island soccer match are the most visually interesting and appealing parts of the film. Adults may find the 1971-vintage mixing of actors and animation a bit creaky, but kids used to a variety of animation quality will find the action a hoot. Ages 4 and up. The movie has been recut several times but was restored to the original length of 139 minutes for its 30th anniversary in 2001. --Kimberly Heinrichs

An Academy Award(R) winner for Best Visual Effects (1971), BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS is a magical blend of live action and animation that makes it one of Disney's most enduring classics. This magical 30th anniversary edition version of the film is now yours to enjoy in digital splendor on this remastered, fully restored DVD! BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS is the enchanting story of an amateur witch who, along with three precocious orphans, flies into one fantastic adventure after another aboard a bewitched bed. The legendary Angela Lansbury is charming as the witch, and the inimitable David Tomlinson (MARY POPPINS) delights as the amusing professor whose help Lansbury and the children enlist in order to find an ancient incantation that will save the country from hostile invaders! This special edition BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS DVD includes many bonus features and is sure to be a film the entire family will want to watch again and again!

Seven Faces of Dr. Lao

A mysterious traveling circus unleashes a torrent of magic and mysticism in a dusty Arizona town. "In what may be the finest performance in a fantasy film" (Guide for the Film Fanatic), Tony Randall charms and spellbinds as ringmaster Dr. Lao and his multitude of faces, a virtuoso turn that earned a special Oscar for Outstanding Makeup Achievement. Step inside the tent...and marvel.

Bad Day at Black Rock

One of the first Hollywood films to deal openly with white racism toward Japanese Americans during World War II, this drama directed by 1950s action maestro John Sturges (The Great Escape) stars Spencer Tracy as a one-armed stranger named MacReedy, who arrives in the tiny town of Black Rock on a hot day in 1945. Seeking a hotel room and the whereabouts of an ethnic Japanese farmer named Komoko, MacReedy runs smack into a wall of hostility that escalates into serious threats. In time it becomes apparent that Komoko has been murdered by a local, racist chieftain, Reno Smith (Robert Ryan), who also plans on dispensing with MacReedy. Tracy's hero is forced to fight his way past Smith's goons (among them Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin) and sundry allies (Anne Francis) to keep alive, setting the stage for memorable suspense crisply orchestrated by Sturges. Casting is the film's principal strength, however: Tracy, the indispensable icon of integrity, and Ryan, the indispensable noir image of spiritual blight, are as creatively unlikely a pairing as Sturges's shotgun marriage of Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen in The Magnificent Seven. --Tom Keogh

Spencer Tracy stars with Robert Ryan Lee marvin Ernest Bornine and Walter Brennen in this offbeat and chilling tale of a man pitted against an entire town. Year: 1954 Director: John Sturges Starring: Spencer Tracy Robert Ryan Anne Francis Dean Jagger Walter BrennanRunning Time: 82 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 012569690226

Forty Guns

Forty Guns is the most rampantly sexualized Western ever made, and the most outrageous of Samuel Fuller's late-'50s B movies. Fuller's original title was "Woman with a Whip," referring to the hard-riding range baroness--Barbara Stanwyck, sporting silver hair and (most of the time) black, skintight man togs--who's "the boss of Cochise County" and a law unto herself. The forty guns are an army of pistoleros who accompany her just about everywhere, and Fuller misses no opportunity to exaggerate their macho assertiveness in black-and-white CinemaScope, whether thundering along the horizon or formed up on either side of a preposterously long dinner table with Stanwyck at its head. Barry Sullivan costars as a Wyatt Earp-like gunfighter who both threatens Stanwyck's empire and awakens her lust for something besides power. As one of his brothers, Gene Barry (soon to star in Fuller's mind-blowing Vietnam movie China Gate) enjoys a passionate liaison with a gunsmith's busty blond daughter (Eve Brent) whom he romances down the bore of a rifle--an image Jean-Luc Godard would memorialize in Breathless. In the relentlessly double-entendre dialogue and the blocking of scenes, everything takes on sexual overtones: power and impotence, political advantage and exclusion. Fuller and cameraman Joseph Biroc capture many sequences in single, minutes-long takes that often end in a death--and in one perverse instance, the revelation of a death that has occurred midway through without our knowing it. (It's a T.S. Eliot moment, though we won't insist on it.) Style is all in this movie, which will leave you either astonished or aghast. More likely, both. --Richard T. Jameson

Classic Western Collection - The Outlaws (The Proud Ones, Forty Guns, Broken Lance, The Culpepper Cattle Co.)

The Proud Ones: The main draw (and quick draw) of this 1956 Western is the marvelous presence of Robert Ryan in the lead role. This underappreciated actor plays a Kansas marshal with a history of perceived cowardice in his past. Everything comes to a head in a single week: a cattle drive ends in town, bringing shootin' and hollerin'; Ryan's nemesis, a casino-runner played by veteran bad guy Robert Middleton, arrives to soak the suckers; and young hotshot Jeffrey Hunter, whose father was killed by Ryan, arrives with revenge on his mind. Oh, and Ryan himself begins to suffer from blinding headaches. Despite the crowded plot, the results are Fifties Western boilerplate, with few distinguishing features beyond the cast. But the supporting ranks are crowded with essential horse-saga actors: Walter Brennan, Arthur O'Connell, Rodolfo Acosta, and of course the bearded, lizard-eyed Middleton. Virginia Mayo plays Ryan's hotel-keeper ladyfriend. Ace cinematographer Lucien Ballard gets a few good outdoor CinemaScope set-ups into the generally backlot feel of the thing. But the reason to see the film is lanky Robert Ryan, whose compelling mix of neurosis, gentleness, and fury is on full display here. --Robert Horton

Forty Guns: Forty Guns is the most rampantly sexualized Western ever made, and the most outrageous of Samuel Fuller's late-'50s B movies. Fuller's original title was "Woman with a Whip," referring to the hard-riding range baroness--Barbara Stanwyck, sporting silver hair and (most of the time) black, skintight man togs--who's "the boss of Cochise County" and a law unto herself. The forty guns are an army of pistoleros who accompany her just about everywhere, and Fuller misses no opportunity to exaggerate their macho assertiveness in black-and-white CinemaScope, whether thundering along the horizon or formed up on either side of a preposterously long dinner table with Stanwyck at its head. Barry Sullivan costars as a Wyatt Earp-like gunfighter who both threatens Stanwyck's empire and awakens her lust for something besides power. As one of his brothers, Gene Barry (soon to star in Fuller's mind-blowing Vietnam movie China Gate) enjoys a passionate liaison with a gunsmith's busty blond daughter (Eve Brent) whom he romances down the bore of a rifle--an image Jean-Luc Godard would memorialize in Breathless. In the relentlessly double-entendre dialogue and the blocking of scenes, everything takes on sexual overtones: power and impotence, political advantage and exclusion. Fuller and cameraman Joseph Biroc capture many sequences in single, minutes-long takes that often end in a death--and in one perverse instance, the revelation of a death that has occurred midway through without our knowing it. (It's a T.S. Eliot moment, though we won't insist on it.) Style is all in this movie, which will leave you either astonished or aghast. More likely, both. --Richard T. Jameson

Broken Lance: Broken Lance is a noble entry in the trend of adult Westerns of the early 1950s, scoring on a couple of fronts: (1) as a multigenerational saga, with Shakespearian overtones, of a family bickering over a giant ranch, and (2) as a grown-up look at the dilemma of the Native American... its title perhaps inspired by the Indian-friendly Broken Arrow? Spencer Tracy stars as the blustery patriarch of a cattle spread, threatened by pollution from a nearby copper mine as well as the shiftiness of his older sons (Richard Widmark, Hugh O'Brian, and Earl Holliman). Tracy's bluff characterization--as ever, he seems to be yanking at the script like a cat unraveling a ball of yarn--carries the film effortlessly along. The central character is actually his youngest and wisest son, played by Robert Wagner, who's not especially convincing as the mixed-race issue of Tracy's second marriage, to an Indian woman (Oscar nominee Katy Jurado). Edward Dmytryk directs in a style that could be called "intelligent," which is another way of saying "not very exciting." The early CinemaScope probably accounts for some of the static set-ups, although there are exteriors that are breathtaking (watching this film in its full-screen version would be crazy). The cast is certainly tops; Widmark is overqualified to play a third lead, but who's complaining? Most memorable is the loving relationship between Tracy's cattleman and his Indian wife, although the subject of Native Americans is secondary here (check out The Devil's Doorway and Apache for more overt Fifties looks at the topic). Veteran screenwriter Philip Yordan won an Oscar for his "original story," a curious and long-defunct Academy Award category. --Robert Horton

The Culpepper Cattle Co.: The Culpepper Cattle Company is a worthy example of a certain kind of early-1970s Western: deglamorized, unromantic, and frankly violent. This one begins in familiar terms, as a greenhorn lad (Gary Grimes, recently deflowered in Summer of '42) joins a cattle drive, surrendering himself to the extremely focused leadership of boss Frank Culpepper (the authentically Western Billy "Green" Bush). The episodes that follow are engrossing and colorful, and the drive gets more interesting when a quartet of lethal hombres (among them Bo Hopkins, Luke Askew, and wild-eyed Geoffrey Lewis) join the ride. The business of frontier justice--which here usually means shooting strangers just to be on the safe side--is worked out in refreshingly unheroic ways. Clearly director Dick Richards (making his debut in a relatively brief directing career) is responding to the revisionist era, and specifically to the films of the great Sam Peckinpah; this movie's climax is a scaled-down nod to The Wild Bunch. Probably too scaled-down, given the somewhat abrupt ending. The music uses themes from Jerry Goldsmith's terrific score for The Flim-Flam Man, released five years earlier. Culpepper got lost in the flurry of revisionist westerns that sounded similar themes: The Cowboys, The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid, and by far the best of this group, Robert Benton's Bad Company. All were released in 1972, a high-water mark for re-thinking the genre. --Robert Horton

Episode Description: GiftSet Includes the Following Titles:

**Culpepper Cattle Co. **The Proud Ones **Broken Lance **Forty Guns

Starlite Drive-In Theater: Hustler Squad/Wild Riders

This collection presents a double feature of 1970s drive-in classics: in HUSTLER SQUAD (1976) Allied forces use combat-trained prostitutes to infiltrate a Japanese brothel during World War II; and in WILD RIDERS (1971) two murderous biker-gang members terrorize women at a secluded mansion only to have the tables turned on them in an orgy of revenge.System Requirements:Running Time 189 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: MISCELLANEOUS/OTHER Rating: R UPC: 787364738199

The House of the Dead

A stranger in town seeks shelter in a funeral parlor where a mortician reveals several coffins, and relates the tale of how each occupant met their demise.

Last Stop on 13th Street

Last Stop on 13th St: A grindhouse anthology that takes place during a horrible storm. A man lost in the rain makes the mistake of finding refuge at the last stop on 13th street. Here he meets the resident mortician who gladly shares the stories of his recently acquired customers. Some of the undertaker's customers meet their demise at the hands of demonic children, some are killed for the eye of the camera and others aren't even that fortunate. AKA: House of The Dead, 1978, 100 minutes.

Pretty Boy Floyd

Writer/director Herbert J. Leder dramatizes the life of the Depression era's most legendary outlaw with his gangster classic PRETTY BOY FLOYD. John Ericson turns in a fine lead performance as the notorious bankrobber who was dubbed "the sagebrush Robin Hood" for his habit of sharing his stolen booty with the poor of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl (for which he was immortalized in song by fellow Okie Woody Guthrie). While there are many conflicting accounts of the folk hero's exploits Leder's version finds Floyd entering into a life of crime after the murder of his father and hastening his own death by crossing paths with the New York City mafia. Herb Evers Barry Newman Peter Falk and a pre-MUNSTERS Al Lewis round out the stellar supporting cast for a little-seen slice of cinematic gangster history.System Requirements:Running Time: 96 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: CHILDREN/FAMILY Rating: NR UPC: 796019797771 Manufacturer No: LVD52141

Gangsters Guns & Floozies Crime Collection: Pretty Boy Floyd

Based on the blood-stained life story of the legendary Depression-era gangster known as "the sagebrush Robin Hood, "this classic cop-vs.-robbers thriller stars John Ericson as the infamous Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd. An ex-con and would-be boxer whose looks and charm attracted women and trouble in equal measure, Charles Floyd begins a life of crime when he avenges the death of his father by committing his first murder. Embarking of a cross-country spree of bank robberies, Floyd shares his ill-gotten loot with friends back in the Oklahoma hill country-and earns a reputation as America's favorite outlaw-hero. But after running afoul of the New York mafia, it's just a matter of time before this "Public Enemy Number One' is tracked down by cops or cut down by his one-time gangster pals. Sharp-eyed viewers will notice a young Peter Falk (Columbo) in a minor role.