Ireland, John

Red River

Any short list of the all-time greatest Westerns is bound to include this 1948 Howard Hawks classic about an epic cattle drive. Red River features one of John Wayne's greatest performances. Like his Ethan Edwards in John Ford's 1956 masterpiece The Searchers, the Duke plays an isolated and unsympathetic man who is possessed by bitterness. Wayne is Texas rancher Tom Dunson, who adopts a young boy orphaned in an Indian massacre. That boy, Matthew Garth (played as an adult by Montgomery Clift in his screen debut), becomes Dunson's assistant and heir apparent--until Dunson's temper gets out of control during a long cattle drive and Matt intervenes to stop him. From that moment on, Dunson swears he will kill Matt. Red River has everything a great Western ought to have: a sweeping sense of history, spectacular landscapes, stampedes, gunfights, Indian attacks, and, of course, Walter Brennan as Dunson's crusty old cook and comic sidekick, Nadine Groot. As a special bonus, the film also features the legendary Harry Carey (upon whom Wayne would base some of his gestures in The Searchers) and his son Harry Carey Jr., who became a fixture in Ford and Hawks Westerns. Red River is essential for anyone who loves Westerns, or movies in general. This one's a real beaut. --Jim Emerson

A cattle baron and his adopted son head the first drive over the Chisolm trail when he can't find a local market for his herd.
Genre: Westerns
Rating: NR
Release Date: 1-MAY-2001
Media Type: DVD

Spartacus

Stanley Kubrick was only 31 years old when Kirk Douglas (star of Kubrick's classic Paths of Glory) recruited the young director to pilot this epic saga, in which the rebellious slave Spartacus (played by Douglas) leads a freedom revolt against the decadent Roman Empire. Kubrick would later disown the film because it was not a personal project--he was merely a director-for-hire--but Spartacus remains one of the best of Hollywood's grand historical epics. With an intelligent screenplay by then-blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo (from a novel by Howard Fast), its message of moral integrity and courageous conviction is still quite powerful, and the all-star cast (including Charles Laughton in full toga) is full of entertaining surprises. Fully restored in 1991 to include scenes deleted from the original 1960 release, the full-length Spartacus is a grand-scale cinematic marvel, offering some of the most awesome battles ever filmed and a central performance by Douglas that's as sensitively emotional as it is intensely heroic. Jean Simmons plays the slave woman who becomes Spartacus's wife, and Peter Ustinov steals the show with his frequently hilarious, Oscar-winning performance as a slave trader who shamelessly curries favor with his Roman superiors. The restored version also includes a formerly deleted bathhouse scene in which Laurence Olivier plays a bisexual Roman senator (with restored dialogue dubbed by Anthony Hopkins) who gets hot and bothered over a slave servant played by Tony Curtis. These and other restored scenes expand the film to just over three hours in length. Despite some forgivable lulls, this is a rousing and substantial drama that grabs and holds your attention. Breaking tradition with sophisticated themes and a downbeat (yet eminently noble) conclusion, Spartacus is a thinking person's epic, rising above mere spectacle with a story as impressive as its widescreen action and Oscar-winning sets. --Jeff Shannon

Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat

Bruce Campbell co-stars with David Carradine in a terrifying tale of bloodthirsty horror. The townsfolk of Purgatory are mean and ornery for one very good reason-they're vampires! Hidden away in their secret community, the come out at night and feast with gusto! Now the Harrisons, an unsuspecting family from "outside" have ventured into Purgatory. Count Margulak, the ruler of the vampires, has ended their tradition of human bloodletting. Now the vampire get their fix from synthetic bottled blood, a drink so distasteful it's making the natives crave the "real thing." Rebel leader Shane and his army plan to overthrow the count- but it won't happen without a fight! The battle for the "right to bite"- begins at SUNDOWN!

My Darling Clementine

The most famous and sublime treatment of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, John Ford's My Darling Clementine is by any measure one of the most classically perfect Westerns ever made. Henry Fonda plays a hard, serious Wyatt Earp leading a cattle drive west with his brothers when a stopover in the wild town of Tombstone ends in the murder of his youngest brother. Wyatt takes up the badge he had turned down earlier and tames the wide-open town with his brothers (Ward Bond and Tim Holt), all the while waiting for the wild Clantons (led by Walter Brennan's ruthless Old Man Clanton) to make a mistake. Victor Mature delivers perhaps his finest performance as the tubercular gambler Doc Holliday, an alcoholic Eastern doctor escaping civilization in the Wild West. Ford takes great liberties with history, bending the story to fit his ideal of the West, a balance of social law and pioneer spirit. Though the film reaches its climax in the legendary gunfight between the Earps (with Doc Holliday) and the Clantons, the most powerful moment is the moving Sunday morning church social played out on the floor of the unfinished church. As Earp dances with Clementine (Cathy Downs)--Fonda's stiff, self-conscious movements showing a man unaccustomed to such social interaction--Ford's camera frames them against the open sky: the town and the wilderness merge into the new Eden of the West for a brief moment. --Sean Axmaker

Henry Fonda, Victor Mature and Walter Brennan star in John Ford's acclaimed film that climaxes with the famous gunfight at O.K. Corral. As Wyatt Earp (Fonda) and his brothers head for a peaceful life of ranching in 1880's California, tragedy moves Wyatt to pin on a badge once more. But when he becomes the law in Tombstone, home to Doc Holliday (Mature) and the Clanton boys, it's only a matter of time until the Earps and Doc face the Clantons in one of the most remembered battles of the Wild West. Featuring Linda Darnell and Ward Bond, My Darling Clementine is considered to be one of Ford's finest films.

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

Novelist Leon Uris wrote the script for this Western directed by John Sturges (The Magnificent Seven) and based on the life and times of Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster) and his sickly companion, Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas). The action inevitably leads to the legendary battle between the two heroes and the villainous Clanton gang, but the film is also very much about the conflicts each man faces with women, with one another, and with their own destinies. Lancaster is terrific as the downbeat Earp, and Douglas has one of his best roles as the consumptive Holliday. The thoughtfulness of the tale is matched by Sturges's captivating way with the dramatic duel. All in all, the film appeals both as a solid action piece and as a fascinating, two-character study. --Tom Keogh

Treasure of the Amazon

No Description Available.
Genre: Feature Film-Action/Adventure
Rating: R
Release Date: 29-MAR-2005
Media Type: DVD

Somewhere in the Night (Fox Film Noir)

"Somewhere in the Night" is an exemplary title for a film noir, and the shellshocked pilgrimage of an amnesiac WWII veteran through an L.A. shadow-zone of hotels, bars, steam baths, sanitariums, and creepy private dwellings casts an uncanny spell. The plot is so byzantine, and the interlayering of the banal with the bizarre so pervasive, we may occasionally feel we've wandered into a Raul Ruiz mindgame in the guise of a '40s mystery-melodrama. The situation is primal: a man searching for his own identity, dreading what that identity will prove to be, yet so monastically dedicated to his mission that he won't reveal his dilemma to anyone even when it might ease his quest.

The script is shot through with contradictions and improbabilities, though these loom more glaring in retrospect than during the viewing. In his sophomore directorial outing, Joseph L. Mankiewicz--who would soon evolve into a multiple-Oscar-winner (Letter to Three Wives, All About Eve)--occasionally bungles action setups that any journeyman director could have handled in mid-yawn. But he¹s also written some choice dialogue and slivered some engaging business into the proceedings--especially for Lloyd Nolan as a drugstore-philosopher homicide cop, and German-Expressionist refugee Fritz Kortner (Pandora's Box), whose arias of Continental fatalism and duplicity are sheer delight. The always-assured Richard Conte is slick as an affable nightclub operator, and there are fine bits by a host of unbilled character players (Whit Bissell, Henry "Harry" Morgan, Jeff Corey, Houseley Stevenson). But Hodiak makes a charismatically challenged leading man, and a better actress than neophyte Nancy Guild ("rhymes with wild!") would have found it tough to bring off the combination of worldliness and devotion required of the nightclub chanteuse who offers him aid and comfort. --Richard T. Jameson

George Taylor returns from the WWII with amnesia. Back home in os Angeles, he tries to track down his old identity, stumbling into a 3-year old murder case and a hunt for a missing $2 million.

Waxwork / Waxwork II - Lost in Time

The main draw of these low-budget horror pictures is their unabashed affection for the great horror movies of the past. In Waxwork, Zach Galligan and his teen friends investigate a wax museum, where they are menaced by the re-animated tableaux. It's about as energetic as a wax dummy. The sequel is livelier, with Galligan now passing through a time portal that transports him to various classic film scenarios: Frankenstein, Dawn of the Dead, Alien, and, briefly and amusingly, Nosferatu (that's Drew Barrymore as one of the virgins cowering in bed). But why no parody of Vincent Price in House of Wax? It goes on too long, but there are weird celebrity guest stars aplenty (Bruce Campbell, David Carradine, Martin Kemp). Director Anthony Hickox helmed both offerings, without quite deciding how much humor was too much humor. In short, genre cultists are pretty much the exclusive audience here. --Robert Horton

Ford At Fox Collection: The Essential John Ford Collection (The Frontier Marshall / My Darling Clementine / Drums Along the Mohawk / How Green Was My Valley / The Grapes of Wrath / Becoming John Ford)

This film collection is devoted to legendary director John Ford. Included are the films DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK THE GRAPES OF WRATH MY DARLING CLEMENTINE HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY and the documentary BECOMING JOHN FORD. See individual titles for synopsis information.System Requirements:Run time: 611 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: WESTERN/CLASSICS Rating: NR UPC: 024543483113 Manufacturer No: 2248311

Wild in the Country

Elvis plays a roughneck country boy, seething with hostility but gifted with literary talent. In the occasionally precious Clifford Odets script, this comes across as James Dean by way of a Thomas Wolfe novel--and not a bad shot at respectable acting by Elvis. His monologue about his dead mother, delivered to sympathetic shrink Hope Lange, is one of the most affecting things the King ever did in a movie. The songs are kept to a minimum, and Presley has some good, thrumming energy with the young Tuesday Weld (bad girl) and Millie Perkins (good girl), two uncommonly smart actresses. This is one of many Hollywood melodramas suggesting the angst brewing beneath the prosperity of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era, and it holds up decently, if not spectacularly. For Elvis fans, it's a poignant glimpse at a performer still in the young-buck stage of exciting possibilities. --Robert Horton

Possibly the sexiest of all of The King's movies, this film finds Elvis playing a backwoods delinquent blessed with great literary talents with Millie Perkins as his childhood sweetheart. Co-starring Tuesday Weld.