Duke's Movies- Blu-Ray/DVD Releases

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    Worthy of note for The Comancheros Blu-ray is the documentary The Duke at Fox, which confirms that he played a police officer in Four Sons (1928). I have a clip of that scene in my filmography, and some time ago it was debated whether this was indeed John Wayne. Someone here posted the clip on YouTube, too. Anyway, it's Wayne!

    Also worthy of note in the documentary are two scenes from Girls Demand Excitement. Some dubious sites on the 'net say they have the entire film for download, but I don't trust them enough to pay and subscribe to confirm. It's certainly plausible since the film played at a New York festival in 2006, and someone may have used a camcorder.

    For reasons unknown to me my webspace is down at the moment, but I'll put online the two scenes from Girls Demand Excitement.

    Quote from RoughRider

    Worthy of note for The Comancheros Blu-ray is the documentary The Duke at Fox, which confirms that he played a police officer in Four Sons (1928). I have a clip of that scene in my filmography, and some time ago it was debated whether this was indeed John Wayne. Someone here posted the clip on YouTube, too. Anyway, it's Wayne!


    Here is the thread
    FOUR SONS
    including the video clip

    Best Wishes
    Keith
    London- England

    Quote from ethanedwards

    Here is the thread
    FOUR SONS
    including the video clip



    And here is a link to the Girls Demand Excitement clips, which were edited together and a small bit of narration deleted. It's only 19 seconds.

    http://members.shaw.ca/n_rough…rls_Demand_Excitement.wmv

    or, for Mac users or those who prefer Flash:

    http://members.shaw.ca/n_rough…rls_Demand_Excitement.flv

    I would love to see the entire film, missing reel or not.

    I do subscribe -- remember I am your friendly neighborhood liberal! :) -- so here you go, with a little cutting and pasting. :)


    VIDEO
    The Many Shades of Wayne



    John Wayne in “Rio Lobo” (1970). Fox is releasing Blu-ray editions of two films from Wayne's late-middle period: “The Horse Soldiers” and “The
    Comancheros.”


    By DAVE KEHR
    Published: May 27, 2011


    AS Father’s Day draws nigh, the studios traditionally shake out their libraries for films presumed to have paternal appeal — pipe-and-slippers movies, suitable for showing on big-screen TVs in wood-paneled dens.



    John Wayne in “Big Jake” (1971), with hints of Peckinpah.


    In practice this means turning to the three W’s — war movies, westerns and Wayne. That’s Wayne as in John Wayne, an actor whose towering (6-foot-4-inch) presence came to dominate those two genres, and who in a sense constituted a genre all by himself. More than a performer, Wayne was (and remains, 32 years after his death) an entire assembly line of stories and themes, of intuitions and associations that continue to resonate in American culture.


    This year Fox is releasing Blu-ray editions of two films that belong to Wayne’s late-middle period: “The Horse Soldiers,” directed by John Ford and released in 1959, and “The Comancheros,” a 1961 release that would be the last directed by the prolific Michael Curtiz. And Paramount is releasing two late Wayne films that originally came out through National General Pictures: “Rio Lobo,” the 1970 western that would prove to be the last film directed by Howard Hawks, and “Big Jake,” a 1971 release that would be the last screen credit for the director George Sherman, a hard-working and undervalued genre filmmaker who had worked with Wayne back at Republic in the 1930s.


    These aren’t among the best films that Wayne ever appeared in, but each one offers another chapter in the story of the singular character that Wayne, with the help of several important collaborators, invented for himself. A strikingly handsome tabula rasa in his first leading role, in Raoul Walsh’s “Big Trail” (1930), Wayne steadily added elements to his screen persona through his 1930s apprenticeship in Poverty Row westerns.


    By 1939, when Ford called upon him for the self-consciously mythic “Stagecoach,” Wayne had developed the distinctive, stop-and-start speech patterns that give his line readings the swinging cadences of blank verse, and the peculiarly delicate, dancerlike way in which he carries his big (and ever bigger) body along, coming to rest with his hip cocked in the contrapposto pose of classical statuary.


    Exempt from the draft because of his age and having a large family, Wayne moved into A pictures during World War II, when many established stars were away for the duration. But he didn’t become a major box-office attraction until the war was well over and his youth had faded. Beginning with Hawks’s “Red River” in 1948, continuing through the three chapters of Ford’s “cavalry trilogy” (“Fort Apache” 1948, “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” 1949, “Rio Grande” 1950) and his first Oscar nomination, as the implacable Sergeant Stryker in Allan Dwan’s “Sands of Iwo Jima” (1949), Wayne assumed a new stature and significance.


    Frequently graying up to play older characters, Wayne in middle age came to represent a complex strain of paternal authority, sometimes warmly protective (as in the cavalry trilogy), sometimes frankly unhinged (as in “Red River” and Ford’s 1956 masterpiece, “The Searchers”). Here was a man who could get you through the worst the world had to offer. Here was a man who could kill you without a second thought.


    “The Horse Soldiers” is an important, personal film that merits a more detailed appreciation than it will receive here (as indeed it has, in the voluminous literature on Ford). But in the context of Wayne’s career the movie offers an unusually harsh version of the commanding-officer character Wayne began playing during World War II.


    Rather than the protective, sympathetic figure reluctantly forced into a position of authority, he here plays a surly, distant Union officer (set during a violent campaign through Mississippi, the film might more accurately be classed as a “southern”), whose harsh pragmatism is played in contrast to the warm humanism represented by William Holden’s chief medical officer. When he finally allows some sign of emotion to escape, Wayne’s Colonel Marlowe erupts in bitterness and self-disgust over the death and destruction it has been his duty to inflict.


    Made in the wake of Wayne’s financially disastrous personal production, “The Alamo” (1960), “The Comancheros” plays it safe, casting Wayne as a Texas ranger who goes undercover to investigate arms merchants operating out of a sort of proto-fascist commune (a strange, promising idea that the movie never really develops). It’s said that Wayne took over the direction from an ailing Curtiz, and the movie shows few signs of Curtiz’s meticulous craftsmanship. But it does further the tactic established in Hawks’s “Rio Bravo” of pairing the now visibly middle-aged Wayne with a younger co-star (in this case, Stuart Whitman), toward whom he can behave as mentor and moral exemplar.


    Fatherly in the 1960s, Wayne became a feisty grandpa in the ’70s, thanks in no small part to his self-parodic (and, consequently, Oscar-winning) performance in “True Grit” (1969). Hawks’s “Rio Lobo” backs off from the cuddliness, though age remains very much an issue. The young female lead (Jennifer O’Neill, the last in a long line of Hawks discoveries) snuggles up to Wayne’s character because she finds him “comfortable,” reserving stronger feelings for the hunky second lead (the Mexican star Jorge Rivero). The film begins vigorously with a magnificently staged train robbery (likely the work of the second unit director, Yakima Canutt, Wayne’s frequent stunt double in the 1930s) but seems itself to succumb slowly to the effects of age, turning into a slow, pleasant ramble through past ideas (many copped from “Rio Bravo”).


    Significantly “Rio Lobo” ends, not with a heroic gesture from the Wayne character, but with a violent act of vengeance from a suddenly empowered woman (Sherry Lansing, who went on to become a major production executive at Columbia, Fox and Paramount).


    The times, indeed, were changing, a factor that “Big Jake” specifically addresses with an opening montage that places the action in 1909, at the end of the American West’s mythic period. This is Sam Peckinpah territory, with the modern (in the form of cars and motorcycles) bumping up against the traditional, and while the film never goes to Peckinpah’s extremes, the influence of “The Wild Bunch” can be felt in the startlingly graphic violence.


    Again, it is said that Wayne took over the directorial reins when the aging George Sherman faltered, but traces of Sherman’s distinctive use of landscape remain in the finely executed opening sequence, in which an outlaw gang (led by Richard Boone) slowly approaches a ranch from the distant end of a deep valley. The tiny figures gradually expand into view as the lady of the ranch (Maureen O’Hara) wonders who they might be.


    “Big Jake” was one of two films written by the husband and wife team of Harry J. Fink and Rita M. Fink released in 1971, the other being a certain cop picture called “Dirty Harry.” Wayne would continue to work for another five years, but this was now the era of Clint Eastwood, who was taking the themes of the western into areas Wayne could not penetrate.


    Here’s hoping that Paramount gets around to a Blu-ray release for “The Shootist,” Wayne’s final film (1976) and, as directed by the “Dirty Harry” director Don Siegel, perhaps the most sensitive and appropriate valedictory film ever composed around a major star. It helped, of course, that Wayne didn’t see it that way. He still had other projects in the works when he died in 1979 — 72 years old but, as we now know, ageless.

    I have been enjoying the BluRay movies out and have expecially enjoyed the ones that have Duke in it. So far we can see John Wayne in The Searchers, Rio Bravo, True Grit, The Commancheros, The Green Berets, Rio Lobo, Big Jake, The Horse Soldiers, How the West was Won, The Longest Day, and Stagecoach (movies released in the US).

    Here is my question; If you could pick one movie that you would like to see on BluRay starring John Wayne, what would it be?

    And what five movies would you like to see out on BluRay with the Duke in it?

    I'll start out by saying that the one movie I'd like to see on BluRay with Duke would be The Quiet Man. And the other four movies would be (no particular order), Red River, The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, McLintock!, and The High & The Mighty.

    What are yours?

    Cheers :cool: Hondo Duke Lane



    Quote

    "When you come slam bang up against trouble, it never looks half as bad if you face up to it"

    - John Wayne quote

    Those other westerns are okay but I want to see She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Hondo, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Sons of Katie Elder, El Dorado, Chisum, and The Train Robbers on Blu-ray.


    But especially Hondo, with a 3-D option on the menu.


    Now, please.



    Richard

    [CENTER]
    [/CENTER]

    Warner Bros. is releasing Fort Apache on Blu-ray on February 21! Sure hope that means She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande are on the way.


    Press release and cover art:


    Fort Apache, acclaimed for pairing one of the greatest director-star combinations in Hollywood history, gets the Warner Home Video Blu-ray treatment.


    Roughhouse camaraderie, sentimental vignettes of frontier life, massive action sequences staged in Monument Valley – all are part of FortApache. So is Ford’s exploration of the West’s darker side. Themes of justice, heroism and honor that Ford would revisit in later Westerns are given free rein in this moving, thought-provoking film that, even as it salutes a legend, gives reasons to question it.


    Master director John Ford, leading man John Wayne and many familiar Ford “stock company” supporting players saddle up for the first time on Blu-ray in the film that is part of the director’s famed 1948 cavalry trilogy(She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande are the others). Henry Fonda (The Grapes of Wrath, On Golden Pond), Shirley Temple (reunited with her director from Wee Willie Winkie), Temple’s then-current-husband John Agar, Victor McLaglen, Ward Bond and George O’Brien join Wayne in the stellar cast.


    Special Features:


    · Commentary by F.X. Feeney


    · Vintage featurette Monument Valley: John Ford Country


    Fort Apache BLU-RAY DISC™
    Street Date: February 21, 2012
    Order Due Date: January 17, 2012
    Not Rated
    Black & White
    Feature Run Time: 128 minutes
    Pricing: $19.98 SRP
    Cat / UPC: 1000246443/ 883929222087


    Oh yes, that's right, I forgot Ford had made Rio Grande for Republic. Oh well. Maybe Lions Gate will be inspired to put out Rio Grande on Blu-ray if Fort Apache and (presumably forthcoming) She Wore a Yellow Ribbon sell a lot of copies.

    Hi Everyone,


    To us Duke fans, it's no secret that getting quality releases of his early movies can be a chore. There is an endless supply of collections that have been released by companies such as...


    Mill Creek, Delta, Pop Flix, Good Times Video, Madacy, Passport, Alpha Entertainment, Image Entertainment, Plus More...


    My question is this...


    Has anyone here gone through the process of buying and comparing the quality of these releases to see which set has the best quality both in terms of video and audio?


    This information would be immensely valuable to me, and surely to the other members of our community.


    Thanks and happy new year!
    Chris Elliott

    Hi Chris!
    Well, I don't buy the early movies. ( if you are refering to the movies he made in the thirty's) not a big fan of those. But i can tell you about one of those on your list. My copy of the Conqueror was made by Good Times video and the quality is A+.
    I also have The Barbarian and the Geisha on VHS. This was put out by a company called Key Video. Again, ( for being an older tape) quality is very good. Not sure if this helps you any, but i thought i'd throw it out there. bill