Randolph Scott

Errol Flynn Westerns Collection (Montana / Rocky Mountain / San Antonio / Virginia City)

Errol Flynn Tames the West in these Four Classic Westerns!MONTANA - Big Sky Country is cattle country! But sheep rancher Flynn has other ideas in this gun-blazing range-war saga. Alexis Smith co-stars.ROCKY MOUNTAIN - The Civil War comes to California and rebel leader Flynn finds that marauding Shoshones may be fiercer foes than the Union Army. With future Mrs. Flynn Patrice Wymore.SAN ANTONIO - A man is only as good as his aim when Flynn rides into ol' San Antone to hunt cattle rustlers. A landmark of Western excitement with an amazing saloon shoot-'em-up...and lovely Alexis Smith.VIRGINIA CITY - Union officer Flynn goes undercover to stop a gold-laden Nevada wagon train rolling to Dixie. With Randolph Scott and yes Humphrey Bogart as a pencil-mustached desperado.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: WESTERN/CLASSICS UPC: 085391188216 Manufacturer No: 1000027305

Colt .45 / Tall Man Riding / Fort Worth

Lanky icon Randolph Scott saddles up for three Westerns making their home video debut. He buckles up a brace of six-shooter "hand cannons" in Colt .45 (Side A) to chase a desperado who uses similar weapons to terrorize locals. No one messes with Texas - not in Fort Worth (Side B). Gunsmoke and glory combine as newspaperman Scott backs up his fiery editorials with a blaze of bullets when lawlessness threatens. Finally, Scott is a Tall Man Riding (Side B) - and brawling and shooting - as he rights an injustice involving a gambler's attempted land grab. The well-worn Stetson Scott wears is his "lucky" hat, and Tall Man Riding marked the 27th time Scott wore it in a movie. We tip our hats to one of the genre's all-time greats!

The Man Behind the Gun / Thunder Over the Plains / Riding Shotgun

This terrific triple-feature of Randolph Scott "B-movie" Westerns shows how Scott's image as a quiet, reliable gunman grew more refined and complex as the 1950s progressed. Scott is best remembered for the definitive Westerns he made with director Budd Boetticher in the late '50s (under the imprimatur of his Ranown production company, co-owned with producer Harry Joe Brown), and Hollywood historians would later speculate on Scott's allegedly intimate relationship with closeted gay star Rock Hudson, but the Warner Bros. Westerns on this DVD represent a period of transition, as Scott's screen persona underwent a fascinating and resonant makeover. Under the direction of Felix Feist (who would soon migrate to a prolific career in television), Scott plays an undercover Army officer in The Man Behind the Gun (1953), a standard-issue oater that pits Scott against secessionists in 1850s California, with a cast that includes Patrice Wymore (as Scott's schoolteacher love interest) and future Gilligan's island skipper Alan Hale Jr. Thunder Over the Plains (1953) and Riding Shotgun (1954) are two of the six Westerns that Scott made with one-eyed director Andre de Toth, signaling a maturity that would continue to deepen his screen persona. In the former, Randy's a Texas Ranger whose loyalties are tested when he's charged with capturing a carpetbagger (Charles McGraw) who's threatening to overrun the state. Riding Shotgun finds Scott doing just that, guarding stagecoaches and defending himself against a vigilante mob that suspects him of robbery.

All three films deal with Scott defending his honor in a lawless land where honor (and expert handling of a six-gun) is all that a man can claim for his own. As action-packed B-movie programmers they can hardly be called classics, but this is sturdy, well-crafted entertainment, bolstered by the efficient Warner Bros. stable of contract artists including veteran cinematographer Bert Glennon and composer David Buttolph, whose work on all three films is characteristically superb. And while Warner Home Video hasn't lavished their full restoration process on this two-sided DVD (resulting in Technicolor films that look good but still show signs of mild fading, scratches, etc.), the budget pricing and triple-feature capacity make this an irresistible bargain by any standard. If you're going to buy this disc, you shouldn't hesitate to add its tandem partner that includes another Randolph Scott triple-feature of Fort Worth, Colt .45, and Tall Man Riding. If you're a Western buff seeking a greater appreciation of Scott's laudable career, you simply can't go wrong. --Jeff Shannon

Tall Randolph Scott is every inch a hero in three bullet-laced Westerns. The secessionist fervor of the 1850s comes to California, and undercover Army officer Scott aims to thwart the separatist passions in The Man Behind the Gun (Side A). There's Thunder over the Plains (Side B) and lightning in Scott's holsters in the second film. He portrays an army captain assigned to a lawless area of Texas after the Civil War. Next, Scott is Riding Shotgun (Side B) and heading into a whirlwind of trouble: a mob bent on vigilante justice wrongly suspects him of robbing a stagecoach. An action bull's-eye all the way!

The Specialist

Just awful enough to qualify as someone's guilty pleasure, this convoluted thriller was supposed to cash in on the supposedly sexy teaming of Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone (then hot from her ample exposure in Basic Instinct), but their naked groping in a shower provides one of the film's unintentionally funny highlights. Ray Quick (Stallone) is a former CIA bomb expert whose former colleague (James Woods) is now in cahoots with a Miami drug cartel led by kingpin Joe Leon (Rod Steiger), who chews the scenery while his son Tomas (Eric Roberts) proceeds with a greedy hidden agenda. May Munro (Stone) hires Quick to kill off Roberts. The Specialist, featuring lots of explosions and redeemed by a dandy role for James Woods, is best suited for ardent Stallone and Stone fans. --Jeff Shannon

A woman hires an ex-CIA explosives expert to get rid of the mobsters who murdered her parents.
Genre: Feature Film-Action/Adventure
Rating: R
Release Date: 14-SEP-2004
Media Type: DVD

Seven Men From Now (Special Collector's Edition)

Not many Westerns can claim to be original. Seven Men from Now can. Its making, for the B-picture arm of John Wayne's Batjac company, was a modest enterprise. The screenwriter, Burt Kennedy, was just starting out; the director, Budd Boetticher, was a matador-turned-filmmaker with only one film of distinction (The Bullfighter and the Lady) in a journeyman career; the star, Randolph Scott, was regarded as "over the hill." Yet the three men's talents blended uncannily, producing not just a terrific Western but a cinema masterpiece--an ironical, beautifully spare bit of storytelling that became the ideal showcase for Scott's sandy reticence.

You don't want anybody synopsizing the story for you; there's little of it, really, yet how it's told makes it complex and compelling. We know, from a memorable first scene, that Scott is hunting down seven men who did something terrible. He will be thrown together with several other characters, including Lee Marvin as an affable but deadly rascal with whom he shares some history. Everybody has private reasons to be traveling through Apache country. Savor every syllable of the laconic dialogue, what people say and what they don't quite say--what they think they understand about one another's motives, except that that understanding keeps getting rearranged.

Seven Men from Now went missing after Wayne's death in 1979 threw the Batjac library into limbo. (Its success had inspired Scott, Boetticher, and Kennedy to collaborate on three other remarkable Westerns--The Tall T (1957), Ride Lonesome (1959), and Comanche Station (1960)--which, because they weren't made for Batjac, we've had little trouble seeing over the years.) The movie became legendary, a Holy Grail for film buffs. Now, with a beautiful restoration on DVD, it gets to be a movie again. A great one. --Richard T. Jameson

Ride the High Country

Ride the High Country is the one Sam Peckinpah movie about which there has never been controversy--save at MGM in 1962, when a new studio regime opted to dump this beautiful, heartbreakingly elegiac Western into the bottom half of a double-bill. Westerns rarely even got reviewed back then, so it's wellnigh miraculous that critics discovered the movie and raved about it. Newsweek called it the best American picture of the year.

Veteran cowboy stars Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea portray aging gunslingers in the twilight of the Old West. McCrea's character, Steve Judd, signs on to transport a shipment of gold from a remote mining camp. Gil Westrum (Scott), an old crony now trick-shooting in a carnival, agrees to help but really aims to seduce Judd into stealing the treasure. The slow-building tension between longtime friends--one still true to the code he's lived by, the other having drifted away from it--anticipates the tortuous personal dilemmas played out to the death by Peckinpah's Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Benny and Elita in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.

The action scenes are powerful, if only beginning to suggest the radical technique with which Peckinpah would astonish audiences in just a few years. But his feeling for flavorsome dialogue, Rabelaisian humor, and full-blooded character acting is already unmistakable. Warren Oates, L.Q. Jones, and John Davis Chandler are among the "redneck peckerwoods" complicating the journey, and Mariette Hartley is fresh and saucy in her big-screen debut. As for McCrea and Scott, they are simply superb. The two proposed that they swap roles before filming got underway, and the question of who got first billing was settled by flipping a coin. Both men retired once the film was in the can. They knew they'd never top it. --Richard T. Jameson

An ex-lawman agrees to escort a shipment of gold cross-country, but runs into trouble when the men hired to help him turn out be not be as moral as their boss, and plot to steal the gold.

Jesse James

The legend of Jesse James stars Tyrone Power as the most infamous bandit in the history of the West. Jesse James was a young Missouri farmer forced outside the law after ruthless agents for the transcontinental railroad kill his ailing mother and steal his family's land. Together with his brother Frank (Henry Fonda) Jesse forms a gang of masked outlaws to strike back at the railroad company and the banks that have joined forces to swindle the oppressed farmers.System Requirements:Running Time: 106 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: WESTERN/MISC. UPC: 024543244424 Manufacturer No: 2234442

No studio was better than Darryl Zanuck's 20th Century-Fox at dishing out lovingly textured Americana, of which this movie is a prime example. The outlaw gets canonized as an American Robin Hood, an honest farmer who, with post-Civil War Missouri overrun by corrupt agents of the Railroad, had no choice but to start robbing banks and trains to achieve a measure of social justice the System wouldn't provide. Tyrone Power as Jesse is quietly out-acted by Fox's emerging star Henry Fonda as brother Frank. The supporting cast is solid--Randolph Scott, Nancy Kelly, Brian Donlevy, John Carradine (as Bob Ford), Jane Darwell, Donald Meek--but the liveliest thing in the movie is Henry Hull, playing a newspaperman whose editorials invariably prescribe that whomever he's denouncing be "taken out and shot like dawgs." Fonda, Hull, and Carradine re-created their roles the following year in The Return of Frank James. --Richard T. Jameson

Randolph Scott

Albuquerque

The Spoilers