Posts from Paula in thread „Duke's Movies- Blu-Ray/DVD Releases“

It's a typo -- they've now released a corrected release. Here's the corrected language:

• THE MAKING OF RIO GRANDE (1993 – 23 MINUTES) - NARRATED BY LEONARD MALTIN
Includes Interviews with MICHAEL WAYNE | BEN JOHNSON | HARRY CAREY JR.

Rio Grande on Blu-ray (and standard DVD) on August 7!

PRESS RELEASE FROM OLIVE FILMS:

FROM THE DIRECTOR OF THE SEARCHERS & SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON
REMASTERED IN HD FROM AN ARCHIVAL 35MM PRINT
FIRST TIME ON Blu-ray©
DAY & DATE (DVD and Blu-ray)

JOHN WAYNE | MAUREEN O’HARA in
RIO GRANDE (1950)
Directed by JOHN FORD (THE GRAPES OF WRATH)
with BEN JOHNSON | VICTOR McLAGLEN | HARRY CAREY JR. | CHILL WILLS

PREBOOK 7/10/12 STREET 8/7/12

DVD UPC# 887090044905 CAT# OF449 $19.95srp
BLU-RAY UPC# 887090045001 CAT# OF450 $29.95srp

In the John Ford (The Quiet Man) classic, John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara (First of five films together) are embroiled in an epic battle with the Apaches and each other. Wayne leads his Calvary troops to the Rio Grande to fight a warring tribe. His toughest battle lies ahead when his unorthodox plan to outwit the elusive Apaches leads to a possible court-martial. Locked in a bloody war, he must fight not only to save his family, but also to redeem his honor. This was the third and final of the John Wayne/John Ford Cavalry films, which started with Fort Apache and was followed by She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. The great supporting cast includes Ben Johnson, Harry Carey Jr., Victor McLaglen and Chill Wills.

1950 | B&W | 105 Minutes | Not Rated

SPECIAL FEATURES:
• THE MAKING OF HIGH NOON (1993 – 23 MINUTES) - NARRATED BY LEONARD MALTIN
Includes Interviews with MICHAEL WAYNE | BEN JOHNSON | HARRY CAREY JR.
• THEATRICAL TRAILER

An Argosy Production JOHN WAYNE MAUREEN O’HARA in “RIO GRANDE” co-starring BEN JOHNSON CLAUDE JARMAN JR. HARRY CAREY JR. CHILL WILLS J. CARROLL NAISH VICTOR McLAGLEN

Screenplay by JAMES KEVIN McGUINNESS Based on a Saturday Evening Post Story by JAMES WARNER BELLAH

Produced by JOHN FORD and MARIAN C. COOPER Directed by JOHN FORD
RIO GRANDE © 1950 MELANGE PICTURES LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

(Olive Films will also release Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar on Blu-ray and DVD on August 7. Olive Films has licensed for Blu-ray/DVD release about 200 titles from Lionsgate, which currently owns much of the Republic Library.)

Paramount will release Hondo on Blu-ray on June 5. Looks to be just Blu-ray, though, NOT 3-D. Alas. Not that I have a 3-D television (nor am I interested in getting one). But there are folks out there who do have 3-D TVs now and I'm sure they'd love this in 3-D.

Here's an article about the filming of Hondo in 3-D:

http://www.3dfilmpf.org/info.html

I suspect that Big Trail artwork is a Photoshop composite of John Wayne close-up and landscape longshot. But it would nice to see the original Wayne photo.

I expect these will be available from other retailers than Walmart eventually.

Love the cover of The Big Trail! Saw this on the big screen at the TCM fest a couple of years ago and it was amazing. I have the DVD but it can convey only so much of what was truly a spectacular undertaking. Looking forward to the Blu-ray though.

Archivist and preservationist Robert Harris (his preservation work includes Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus, Vertigo and My Fair Lady, and he has been hoping to restore The Alamo but the funding never came through) weighs in on the new Fort Apache blu-ray:

http://www.hometheaterforum.co…ut-fort-apache-in-blu-ray

Dear Wtrayah, the answer is yes, there is a BIG difference. Blu-ray can seem so vivid and so clear that at times I think the people in the movie are actually in my living room, not just on a screen.

However, you have to have a 1080p television with a 40 inch screen at least or the improved resolution really won't make an impact. If picture quality is important to you, and you have the werewithal, then a new television is a purchase you will get a lot of pleasure from.

Not John Wayne, but John Wayne's sidekick... Bite the Bullet (with Ben Johnson, Gene Hackman, James Coburn, and Candace Bergman) comes out on Blu-ray on March 13. It's being released by a specialty label, Twilight Time, and it's only offered for sale through the Screen Archives Entertainment website, so if you're interested, go here to pre-order:

http://www.screenarchives.com/…HE-BULLET-1975-PRE-ORDER/

Cover art:

Inside art:

Now here is Blu-ray.com's review of the Fort Apache Blu-ray:

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/…che-Blu-ray/33581/#Review

Make sure to click on the "screenshots" link to see 20 pictures from the Blu-ray.

P.S. If you haven't checked my last post in the She Wore a Yellow Ribbon thread -- you should.

DVD Beaver has posted its review of the Fort Apache blu-ray.

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film3…6/fort_apache_blu-ray.htm

Amazon is listing a Blu-ray release for Hondo, but without a release date. Paramount has not yet made an official announcement either.

No mention of whether this Blu-ray will include the 3-D version. They really should, since 3-D players and televisions are now available. Actually I'd love to see this re-released into theaters since so many are now 3-D enabled, too.

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.

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

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.

Dave Kehr's May 27 Sunday New York Times DVD column takes a look at the new John Wayne blu-ray releases:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05…ay.html?_r=1&ref=davekehr

And... preservationist Robert A. Harris weighs in on The Horse Soldiers blu-ray:

http://www.hometheaterforum.co…horse-soldiers-in-blu-ray

He rates it "acceptable."

Here is blu-ray.com's review of The Horse Soldiers:

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/…ers-Blu-ray/21665/#Review

From the screenshots with the review, this looks like a HUGE improvement over the DVD. I'll have to get it.

I watched the Comancheros Blu-ray and it looks great. Thumbs up.

The Horse Soldiers has been running in HD on one of the HD channels -- it looks great. So does Rio Grande on HDNet (alas no Blu-ray of that yet).

The DVD of The Quiet Man received universally negative reviews (I'm referring to the Region 1/North American release). It may come out on Blu-ray someday (I sure hope it does) but not without a significant restoration. The DVD was the topic of a lot of discussion at Home Theater Forum when it came out -- everyone was really disappointed with it, alas.

Unfortunately The Quiet Man is not currently scheduled for a Blu-ray release.

I believe it would need a thorough restoration. The elements exist. It's only a matter of money and time.

The Quiet Man needs a major major restoration. The current DVD looks terrible. So far I have not heard about anyone (we're looking at YOU, Paramount, you own the rights to this film now) paying for the required restoration. The elements exist -- it's only a matter of money and labor. Until that happens, I doubt we'll be seeing it on Blu-ray. Alas.