Kova, Frank De

The Mechanic

Charles Bronson delivers [in this] action-drenched (Variety) gangster thriller that delves into the dangerous minds of the underworld's most elite killers. Visually alive (Cue) and 'totally engrossing (The Hollywood Reporter), The Mechanic is a movie you won't want to miss! Arthur Bishop (Bronson) is a mob hit man who operates in a world of his own an uncompromising world where conventional rules of morality don't apply and where one wrong move could cost himhis life! He's always worked alone but, as age catches up with him, Bishop takes on a competent andruthless apprentice (Jan-Michael Vincent) and teaches him everything he knows. Together they becomean unmatchable team of globetrotting killers until the pupil's ruthlessness puts him on a collisioncourse with his teacher!

The Robe

When Roman tribune Marcellus Gallio (Richard Burton) is sent to Jerusalem, one of his assignments is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Marcellus, a cynical and hardened man, wins the robe Jesus wore to the crucifixion while gambling with other Roman soldiers underneath the dying savior. He later becomes convinced that his hallucinations and violent outbursts are the result of a curse received from the robe, which is now in the possession of his escaped slave, Demetrius (Victor Mature), somewhere in the Middle East. He sets out to find Demetrius in order to destroy the robe and the curse and finds faith instead, converting to Christianity. This was the first movie to be filmed in CinemaScope, and won Oscars in 1953 for costume design, art direction, and set decoration. The visual aspects of the film are stunning, and it may be worth viewing for that alone; however, the script and acting leave much to be desired, and you won't find inspiration in these areas if that's what interests you. If, however, you are more interested in this film for its religious matter, the story of the conversion of the hardened Marcellus is inspiring. --James McGrath

The first movie ever filmed in CinemaScope, THE ROBE ws nominated for five Academy Awards in 1953, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Richard Burton. Burton stars as Marcellus Galilo, the Roman centurian charged with overseeing the crucifixion. But when he wins Christ's robe in a gambling game at the foot of the cross, his life is forever changed.

Follow That Dream

Elvis Presley is at his dreamboat peak in this musical comedy that finds the sexy star crooning five original songs in an amusing and fast-paced (Variety) romp boasting a delightful mixture of songs romance humor and good old homespun warmth (Citizen-News)!When his scheming pop decides to homestead the family on a public beach Toby Kwimper (Presley) digs the exotic setting but hates the attention he is suddenly receiving. Though he just wants to play his guitar Toby finds himself up to his baby blues in trouble with government bureaucrats crime bosses and even two smitten kittens an adopted little sister who feels more than sisterly love for him and a social worker with more than his welfare on her mind!System Requirements: Running Time 109 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY Rating: NR UPC: 027616903969 Manufacturer No: 1006194

Elvis hadn't dyed his hair a permanent midnight black yet in Follow That Dream, which is another way of saying this is still the point in his career when he was making movies, not just Elvis Presley vehicles. Elvis road-trips with his crabby, anti-government pop (Arthur O'Connell) and an adopted brood to a Florida beach, which by a legal quirk they can homestead. The authorities and some fairly unbelievable gangsters would like to stop them. The songs are undistinguished but not awful, the scenery is nice, and Elvis--looking well-fed and relaxed--shows off good comedic chops doing a dumb-guy shtick. Screenwriter Charles Lederer and director Gordon Douglas are a class act by Presley picture standards, keeping the sitcom-style plot moving along. No fancy clothes or cars in this one, just Elvis and some beachcombing and an old git-tar, and not a bad time-killer for all that. --Robert Horton

The Man From Laramie

An intensely satisfying drama of rugged primitive justice THE MAN FROM LARAMIE marked the final and finest collaboration of one of the most important teams in Western films: director Anthony Mann and star Jimmy Stewart. Together this perfectly-matched pair provided audiences with eight classic pictures including Winchester '73 and Stategic Air Command. Under Mann's superb direction Stewart departs from his well-loved "ordinary hero" role and gives a riveting performance as a resolute vigilante obsessed with finding the man responsible for his brother's death. Among the suspects are an arrogant cattle baron (Donald Crisp) his sadistic son (Alex Nicol) and his ranch foreman (Arthur Kennedy in the best performance of his career). One explosive confrontation in which Stewart is dragged by a wild horse and shot in the hand at close range is one of movie history's most memorable sequences. Among the first Westerns filmed in CinemaScope THE MAN FROM LARAMIE uses the widescreen technology to emphasize the scope and power of this harrowing action-drama making it a perfect example of the Western as America's epic art form.System Requirements:Running Time: 103 Min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: WESTERN/MISC. Rating: NR UPC: 043396041707 Manufacturer No: 04170

Only John Ford excelled Anthony Mann as a purveyor of eye-filling Western imagery, and Mann's best films are second to no one's when it comes to the fusion of dynamic action, rugged landscapes, and fierce psychological intensity. The Man from Laramie is the last of five remarkable Westerns the director made with James Stewart (starting with Winchester '73 and peaking with The Naked Spur). This collaboration marked virtually a whole new career for Stewart, whose characters are all haunted by the past and driven by obsession--here, to find whoever set his cavalry-officer brother in the path of warlike Indians.

The Man from Laramie aspires to an epic grandeur beyond its predecessors. It's the only one in CinemaScope, and Stewart's personal quest is subsumed in a larger drama--nothing less than a sagebrush version of King Lear, with a range baron on the verge of blindness (Donald Crisp), his weak and therefore vicious son (Alex Nicol), and another, apparently more solid "son," his Edmund-like foreman (Arthur Kennedy). There are a few too many subsidiary characters, and the reach for thematic complexity occasionally diminishes the impact. But no one will ever forget the scene on the salt flats between Nicol and Stewart--climaxing in the single most shocking act of violence in '50s cinema--or the final, mountaintop confrontation.

For decades, the film has been seen only in washed-out, pan-and-scan videos, with the characters playing visual hopscotch from one panel of the original composition to another. It's great to have this glorious DVD--razor-sharp, fully saturated (or as saturated as '50s Eastmancolor could be), and breathtaking in its CinemaScope sweep. --Richard T. Jameson

Heavy Traffic

Michael a young artist who lives with his neurotic mother and two-timing father escapes the absurd and often ugly side of life on New York's tough streets by satirizing its rich yet wacky characters in wildly entertaining cartoons. From the gruff homeless and wisecracking prostitutes to gun-toting gangsters and corrupt cops Michael's world becomes an outlandish kaleidoscope of shocking images and horrifying events that are either a testament of his wild imagination...or a reminder of the strangeness of reality.System Requirements:Directed By: Ralph Bakshi Running Time: 76 Min. Color Copyright 2003 MGM Studios.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: ANIMATION/ADULT SWIM Rating: NR UPC: 027616852854 Manufacturer No: 1000979

Heavy Traffic is writer-director Ralph Bakshi's follow-up to Fritz the Cat, so if you're looking for a little something to watch with the kids, you might want to search elsewhere. It's an odd little movie, one that seems to both condemn and celebrate depravity at the same time. The hero is Michael, an artist who still lives with his battling parents. Michael is far too sensitive for the cruel city, though he sure seems to draw an awful lot of pictures of it. Michael hooks up with cool bartender Carole and the two of them set off to... well, they plan to do something. More engaging than the story are Bakshi's visual techniques, which include blending animated and live-action sequences and layering old film clips into cartoon backgrounds. Though interesting as a piece of animation, Heavy Traffic is difficult to recommend. There is a running thread of misogyny that makes the film off-putting, to say the least. Yes, all of the characters are unpleasant and yes, most of the violence is over-the-top enough to make a case for it being comic. It is the constant, casual misogyny that's unsettling--at one point Michael backhands Carole across the face and everyone, including Carole, seems to be fine with that. Keep an ear out for Jamie Farr and watch it for the animation, not the plot. --Ali Davis

Elvis Presley MGM Movie Legends Collection (Clambake / Frankie and Johnny / Follow That Dream / Kid Galahad)

No Description Available.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: NR
Release Date: 24-JUL-2007
Media Type: DVD

Cowboy

Glenn Ford and Jack Lemmon star in this Western depicting life on the cattle trail.System Requirements:Running Time: 92 Min. Copyright 2002 Columbia TriStar.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: WESTERN/MISC. Rating: NR UPC: 043396078741 Manufacturer No: 07874

This sturdy Delmer Daves picture--his third with Glenn Ford, following Jubal and 3:10 to Yuma--is one of the most offbeat Westerns ever. And it must be the most writerly, with Frank Harris's memoirs as the source and a picaresque screenplay by Edmund H. North and Dalton Trumbo (a blacklistee, credited only posthumously). There's a pileup of oddities and complications at the outset, with Chicago hotel clerk Harris (Jack Lemmon) already in mid-romance with a daughter of the Mexican aristocracy (Anna Kashfi--Mrs. Marlon Brando at the time), and Texas cattleman Tom Reese (Ford) storming in to commandeer an entire floor of the hotel for him and his drovers so they can party till, well, the cows come home. Partying is curtailed when Reese loses big at cards; Harris bails him out with his savings, and Reese finds he's taken on not only an unwanted partner but a tenderfoot besides. Soon everyone is headed south.

Cowboy merits its bedrock title. This is a rare Western in which the job of breaking horses, trail herding, etc. figures as a dynamic aspect of the storytelling. The film also has a blunt and original way of looking at death, not as a genre convention but as something abrupt, ungainly, and often absurd, in both senses of the word. (This applies equally to men and cattle, by the way.) The camerawork is trim, angular, and somehow precarious, and the jagged editing hustles the very eventful proceedings to a close in barely an hour and a half. Saddle up. --Richard T. Jameson

Arrowhead

Set in Texas, ARROWHEAD stars Charlton Heston as Chief of Scouts Ed Bannon, an arrogant man raised by Apache who hates them with a vengeance. When the new Apache chief, Toriano, returns to his people after schooling in the Eastern U.S., Bannon senses the man isn't trustworthy and does not believe the Apaches will uphold the peace plan they have agreed to. With the U.S. Army anxious to send the Apaches to a reservation in Florida, they hope Bannon will not interfere.

The Ten Commandments (Special Collector's Edition)

Legendary silent film director Cecil B. DeMille didn't much alter the way he made movies after sound came in, and this 1956 biblical drama is proof of that. While graced with such 1950s niceties as VistaVision and Technicolor, The Ten Commandments (DeMille had already filmed an earlier version in 1923) has an anachronistic, impassioned style that finds lead actors Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner expressively posing while hundreds of extras writhe either in the presence of God's power or from orgiastic heat. DeMille, as always, plays both sides of the fence as far as sin goes, surrounding Heston's Moses with worshipful music and heavenly special effects while also making the sexy action around the cult of the Golden Calf look like fun. You have to see The Ten Commandments to understand its peculiar resonance as an old-new movie, complete with several still-impressive effects such as the parting of the Red Sea. --Tom Keogh

The Ten Commandments

Legendary silent film director Cecil B. DeMille didn't much alter the way he made movies after sound came in, and this 1956 biblical drama is proof of that. While graced with such 1950s niceties as VistaVision and Technicolor, The Ten Commandments (DeMille had already filmed an earlier version in 1923) has an anachronistic, impassioned style that finds lead actors Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner expressively posing while hundreds of extras writhe either in the presence of God's power or from orgiastic heat. DeMille, as always, plays both sides of the fence as far as sin goes, surrounding Heston's Moses with worshipful music and heavenly special effects while also making the sexy action around the cult of the Golden Calf look like fun. You have to see The Ten Commandments to understand its peculiar resonance as an old-new movie, complete with several still-impressive effects such as the parting of the Red Sea. --Tom Keogh