Not-so-hot Blu-ray transfer for Anthony Mann's very good 1954 western, THE FAR COUNTRY

Arrow Video's Blu-ray transfers are usually so good (second only to Criterion's--and maybe no longer even second) that coming upon a new transfer, the quality of which looks like something between an old VHS tape and a DVD, is quite a surprise. Unless I received an incorrect shipment, the quality level of transfer for THE FAR COUNTRY is way below par for Arrow. Which is especially too bad because the film itself holds up well enough to be taken seriously as one of Hollywood second-tier "classic westerns."

Handled so well that we're kept on-track at all times by journeyman director Anthony Mann (shown at left) and starring James Stewart in one of his grumpy-on-the-outside/decent-on-the-in roles at which he became expert in the middle-to-late stage of his career, and with a crackerjack supporting cast surrounding him, the movie also boasts a better-than-average screenplay (by Borden Chase of Red River and Winchester '73) that is by turns witty and smart and also on target with dialog that is wonderfully good at getting around Hollywood's childish/hypocritical production-code "ethics" of the time.

Stewart (above, left) and his elderly partner (played by the great Walter Brennan, above, right) bring a hard of cattle into the 1800s town of Seattle, where they then board (along with the cattle) a ship headed north toward gold prospecting areas. Stewart finds himself in trouble with the law almost immediately after boarding, and things only grow worse, once he and Brennan land in gold country.

The local town is controlled by a particularly nasty fellow named Gannon (a fine, alternately sleazy/smart performance from John McIntire), whose retinue of bad guys kill off anyone Bannon can't control or buy. On the distaff side are Ruth Roman (above), long-time expert at playing good bad-girls (or is she a bad good-girl?), and Corinne Calvet, below left, trading her usual glamour-girl image to play a sweet but sassy local with an eye and heart for Stewart's grumpy good guy.

This being an adult western, as many important good guys die as do bad ones, and characters are left with life-changing choices that sometimes end those lives. Sure, coincidence flourishes (this is 1950s Hollywood, after all) and morality finally triumphs. But at a cost. (That's wonderful character actor J.C. Flippen, below, left.)

As usual with Arrow, Bonus Materials abound, including the film shown complete in two different aspect ratios -- 2.00:1 and the original 1.85:1 (yet both look equally poorly transferred) -- and an excellent new appraisal by critic Kim Newman of both this film and the career and westerns of Anthony Mann, and there is even a feature-length documentary on Mr. Mann to entertain us further in this huge array.

Distributed here in the USA via MVD Visual and running 97 minutes, The Far Country hit the street in its two-disc set last week -- for purchase and (I hope somewhere) rental.

A TIME FOR DYING: Budd Boetticher/Audie Murphy's final narrative film gets the remastered treatment on DVD

TrustMovies had never heard of  A TIME FOR DYING prior to receiving the announcement of its imminent appearance in remastered form on DVD from Corinth Films, a distribution company the output of which I've been particularly fond of over the years.

Turns out that this very odd little (it lasts only 76 minutes) western from 1969 -- the last narrative film directed by Budd Boetticher and featuring the final performance of Audie Murphy -- is very much one-of-a-kind.

It's no secret to film fans -- particularly those of westerns -- that Mr. Boetticher (pictured left) was one of the better directors in this once-popular genre. Boetticher was drawn to and had a knack for making the most of stories that highlighted moral questions, together with those oft-times gray areas between right and wrong, evil and good.

This interest gets full play in A Time for Dying, as we note early on a scene in which a sweet bunny rabbit is about to be attacked by a rattlesnake. After the movie's hero (Richard Lapp, shown two photos below) prevents this, he is interrupted by a young man who looks rather villainous (actor Bob Random, shown below and currently making news via the popular documentary, The Other Side of the Wind), who suggests to our hero that the rattler had a right to live, too. Hmmm...

A Time for Dying turns out to have been both directed and written by Boetticher -- his first and only try at screenwriting, although he did provide stories for a few films. His script may not have won any awards, but it still stands as a simply-constructed, nicely-written and very surprising piece of work. Its simplicity, in fact, is one of the reasons the film so easily draws us in and keeps us both amused and interested in just where this oddball story might be heading.

The movie possesses genuine charm, thanks to the work of actors Lapp (above, who looks amazingly like a young and fresh-faced Audie Murphy) and its heroine, a spunky and intelligent young woman played by Anne Randall, shown below. These two "youngins" combine sweetness and naivete in such perfect measure that it's difficult not to be charmed by the pair and the situation in which they find themselves.

Though the two have only just met -- they're both "new in town" -- only a day elapses before they've gotten themselves "hitched." At the point of a gun. The gunslinger is none other than a certain famous Judge Roy Bean (played with great relish and fun by Victor Jory, below), who takes a liking to these kids, even as he sentences another sweet-looking youngster to be hung by the neck until dead for possibly stealing a horse. ("Don't worry," my spouse noted, "he won't really be dead.") Hmmm again...

By the time you have reached the finale and denouement of what one of our more famous critics, Roger Ebert, called "the damndest and confoundingest western you can imagine" -- I suspect you'll have arrived at a notion that would have pleased the late Mr. Boetticher immensely: It really does not matter how charming or sweet or "good" you might be, people: 
Life is mostly shit.

Along the way, not only do we meet that hanging judge, but also Jesse James (played by Murphy, shown above, in his final screen role), Jesse's brother Frank, and their relative, also known (by a pompous-but-not-so-hot filmmaker) as "the coward Robert Ford." Boetticher's take on these famous folk, just as on Judge Bean, is every bit as unusual and enjoyable as is all else in this oddly sweet and darkly satisfying film.

From Corinth Films, A Time for Dying makes its DVD debut this coming Tuesday, February 5. Simultaneously -- already, actually -- the movie is available via Amazon Prime Video and free, for members of that popular streaming service.

The Coen Brothers' best? Netflix's THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS soars, even as it knocks you for a long, dark, funny loop

The brothers Ethan and Joel Coen (shown below, with Ethan on the left) may be better known for their directing efforts, but in actuality the pair possesses more credits in writing than it does in directing. And while TrustMovies has long thought the brothers to be among our finest current film writers, it took their latest movie, THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS, available now via Netflix streaming, to make me realize just how goddamned good they really are.

The level of dialog here -- the intelligence, wit and in particular the "period" authenticity -- from all the characters in each of the six tales told seems so incredibly perfect (often utterly juicy) that one can only listen in rapt attention and marvel throughout.

The tales themselves are terrific -- one as different from the next as you could want -- yet possessing the consistent Coen theme of a dark universe, full of irony and humor, in which almost no one comes to a good end. (And really now, no one ever does, right? There are good and vastly varied middles maybe, but the end is always the same.) Yet most (well, some) of the folk we meet here are fine people deserving of as much good as they can muster.

The movie begins with its most light-hearted and even silly story, starring that wonderful actor Tim Blake Nelson (above) as a singing gunfighter who is just a tad too besotted with his own aura and reputation. The episode is as hilarious and goofy as anything the Coens have given us.

We then move to the tale of a doofus would-be bank-robber (played by a wonderful James Franco, above) in, again, a tale as dark and funny as you'll find. Mr. Franco gets the movie's most hilarious line, "This your first time?", and trust me, context is all here.

The third episode is one of the darkest I've yet seen, in which actual original dialog goes all but missing and we are treated to perhaps the oddest recitations of great writing -- from Shakespeare to Shelley and back -- you'll have ever seen/heard. Liam Neeson, Harry Melling (above) and a gifted chicken weave a story as bleak as any recorded, and the Coens tell it in a manner that proves almost as beautiful as it is deadly.

Tom Waits stars as a lone gold panner/prospector in the fourth segment, which takes place in the movie's most lushly beautiful scenery and comes closest to a happy conclusion as we're likely to get -- even if the getting there is pretty dry and dark.

The penultimate tale is the longest, richest and most moving, as Zoe Kazan and Jefferson Mays play brother and sister who head west as part of a wagon train led by a couple of very interesting men (Bill Heck and Grainger Hines). Luck, more often of the bad sort, plagues the people here. Each tale leads off and ends with an illustration, as from an old western-themed tome. The one used in this particular segment, along with its accompanying snippet of words, seems somewhat ordinary when we first hear it at the episode's beginning. As heard and seen again at the conclusion, it packs an extraordinary punch.

The final segment involves a stagecoach ride with a quintet of thrown-together passengers -- Jonjo O'Neill, (above, left), Brendan Gleason (above, right), Tyne Daly, Saul Rubinek and Chelcie Ross -- who communicate smugly, angrily and humorously as they head for a rather unusual destination. The dialog here grows as philosophical as it is funny and smart.

So right and so original in so many ways, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs may seem to you as it does to me, one of, perhaps the Coens' best work to date. It's mordant as hell and a lot funnier, too. In an earlier post this week, I referred to Billy Wilder and The Apartment as an example of compassionate cynicism. The Coens bring that odd juxtaposition to equally amazing life with this splendid film.

From Netflix, after one of that behemoth's typically highly limited theatrical runs and now streaming at your pleasure, the movie is certainly one of 2018's very best.

WOMEN OF THE WEST: new Anthology Film Archives series features 18 westerns with female protagonists

The usual suspects are all gathered here: Joan Crawford in Nick Ray's Johnny Guitar, Jean Arthur in Wesley Ruggles' Arizona, and especially Barbara Stanwyck (above), who stars in in three films in this series: Anthony Mann's The Furies, Sam Fuller's Forty Guns and Allan Dwan's Cattle Queen of Montana. These are all from the glory days of the American western, the 1940s and 50s. But among the surprise delights of this new series -- WOMEN OF THE WEST, presented by Anthology Film Archives in New York City and beginning this Friday, August 31, through Sunday, September 16 -- are some unexpected near-gems.

Look for Gordon Parks, Jr.'s Thomasine & Bushrod (above: a sort-of Blacksploitation western from 1974), Maggie Greenwald's The Ballad of Little Joe (a cross-dressing surprise from 1993) and a must for any Lina Wertmuller "completists" out there, The Belle Starr Story, a Spaghetti western from 1968 that Wertmuller co-wrote, co-directed (under the pseudonym of Nathan Wich) and then took over, once her co-writer/director Piero Cristofani left the film.

All these and more are part of the series which TrustMovies imagines will be catnip for feminists, western fans and just about anybody who appreciates oddball movies -- some of them very good indeed.

Having already seen most of the films included here, I'll concentrate on the Wertmuller, which was spanking new to me and is not very good at all. Nor is the print I viewed via DVD screener, said to be provided by The Swedish Film Institute, which is utterly bleached of color and looks like it was transferred from a much-copied VHS tape back in the day.

From the outset almost everything about this silly movie seems rudimentary, as though everyone involved -- from those in front to the camera to those behind it -- were  thinking, "God, let's just get this over with!"

Consequently, it is difficult to determine or even imagine what drew Ms Wertmuller (shown at right) to the project, other than the opportunity to simply be able to direct a movie. Any movie. And, as this occurred very early in her career, it must have provided some important on-the-job training.

What the movie does have is a couple of Italian
"stars" of some note from the 1960s, especially the beautiful, slightly-freckle-faced Elsa Martinelli (shown below) in the leading role as that American woman outlaw icon known as Belle Starr.

Also onboard is the darkly handsome hunk, George Eastman (below), as another outlaw named Larry Blackie, who proves especially good at undressing, rolling his eyes and laughing a lot. The two of them prove to be one of those on again/off again romances in which the lovers keep vying for control over each other, with neither willing to give in (this would become a kind of hallmark of much of Wertmuller's work).

With a screenplay that's as obvious, silly, clunky and pseudo-poetic as it gets, the movie gives us Belle's back story and history -- which includes a lecherous and evil uncle, an Indian maiden rescued from lynching, and a friend-and-maybe-eventual lover (played by Robert Woods, below),

all finally leading up to the major diamond heist that provides the movie's most compelling section -- it's final half hour in which things heat up and get a little interesting for a change.

We get a bit of safe-cracking, the robbery itself, and then -- via a Pinkerton agent (Bruno Corazzari, below) who proves both the movie's major villain, as well as a bizarre bit of actual conscience at film's end -- a nasty, sexy torture scene complete with homoerotic overtones between said agent and our semi-hero Blackie (above).

The Belle Starr Story will take you back to a time when men were men, women women, and those Italian spaghetti westerns were already getting way too long in the tooth. And it'll make you eager to view again some of Ms Wertmuller's later films, while offering the chance to see an example of how this talented director, movie-wise at least, first cut her own teeth.

Her film will play during AFA's Women of the West series on Monday, September 10, at 6:45pm; on Wednesday, September 12, at 9pm and on Friday, September 14 at 9pm.  To view the entire AFA series schedule, simply click here.          

Short take: Scott Cooper's endlessly annoying HOSTILES proves this year's favored "fart" film

Or maybe last year's, as HOSTILES, the new movie from Scott Cooper, was released in limited fashion on December 22, in the rather ridiculous hopes of becoming an Oscar contender. "Fart" film, for those new to this site, is TrustMovies' special name for a failed art film, and few I've sat through in the past 12, maybe 24, months, have failed on the level that this one does. Oh, its themes and intentions are all good -- pointing up unfairness of the treatment of our Native Americans, while allowing that, yes, some of them, did some pretty nasty things to those white settlers.

Unfortunately, filmmaker Cooper (shown at right), who both wrote and directed the film (after giving us, also in the writer-director category, Crazy Heart and Out of the Furnace), is a fellow who insists on making certain we get the point. Every single last lick of it. Over and over. And as slowly as possible so that it has to SINK IN. Lasting two hours fourteen minutes, Hostiles may seem to you, as it did to me (and others in our audience) about as slow-paced a movie as you'll have so far seen. At one point in the theater, a patron near me asked, and very loudly, "When it something gonna happen here?!" This was followed by several voices adding, "Yeah!" and "Right!" I tend to keep quiet most of the time in movie theaters, but I must say I could not blame them. Though in all fairness, the movie does begin with an action scene, as a family of white settlers is summarily massacred by a group of wild Indians, with only the wife (the always excellent Rosamund Pike, shown below) barely surviving.

From there we go to a military fort, where an officer (the also always excellent Christian Bale, below, center, surrounded by his men) who has a multitude of reasons for hating the "red man" is given the assignment of bringing an Indian chief and his family (the Chief is played by Wes Studi, at left, two photos down), who had formerly slaughtered a number this officer's friends and has now been imprisoned for years, to an out-of-state Indian burial ground, where the Chief, who has been graced with terminal cancer, will surely die.

If you maybe feel that this rather oddball situation smacks of heavy-handed manipulation -- does it ever! -- just wait. Along the journey, Bale and his crew discover Pike, in mourning for her own family, and of course they must bring her with them. Their journey is fraught with a couple more Indian attacks, but mostly it is burdened with a whole bunch of angst on Bale's part. And while this actor is often particularly good with angst, here the stuff is piled on so hot and heavy that it drags the film consistently downwards. The screenplay, dialog and the visuals are as heavy-handed as the themes, and this tends to make even those few scenes that resonate emotionally hit you over the head so hard you'll want to run for cover.

At least half the film's "moments" last far too long, as well, so that you're muttering throughout, "We get it, we get it." Robert Aldrich and Alan Sharp, in their excellent Ulzana's Raid from 1972, managed much of these same ideas so much better and stronger. Plus, their movie is a half-hour shorter. If you know that film, it will make sitting through this one all the more difficult. Finally, it is Hostiles' undue length, resulting in a kind of constant, overweening pomposity, that most thoroughly does it in.

Yes, indeed, as the poster at top declares, We are all... HOSTILES, in yet another example of "we-insist-that-you-fully-understand-this-idea" mode. And the movie does finally bring whites and redskins together at last (while killing most of them in the process). But if, considering all that has now been done to the Native American population, you can actually buy the sweet/sad finale without wincing, you're a better man I am, Gunga Din.

From Entertainment Studios Motions Pictures, the movie has now opened in a number of cities around the country. Click here to find the theater(s) nearest you.

Little-known Joseph H. Lewis diamond-in-the-rough, TERROR IN A TEXAS TOWN, gets the Blu-ray treatment via Arrow Academy

A director with some 54 credits on his resume, whose films, a few of which -- Gun Crazy, The Big Combo, The Undercover Man -- are oddball gems that are much better known than he is, Joseph H. Lewis (shown below) was one of those filmmakers whose served his material, rather than the other way around. TrustMovies grew up greatly enjoying some of this fellow's films without being aware of who he was or how he fit into the world of movie-making.

All that is beginning to change these days, as Lewis'
better films continue to be more fully recognized and appreciated. One of these is TERROR IN A TEXAS TOWN (from 1958) which has just arrived on Blu-ray in a smackingly good edition from Arrow Academy -- with some first-class Special Features in tow. Starring that always-capable actor Sterling Hayden (below), playing the son of a recently murdered father who arrives in the titular town to take over his dad's home, the movie proves an unusually low-key and philosophical western about the meanings of freedom and justice.

The movie's excellent screenplay was written, under a pseudonym, by Dalton Trumbo, and it bears a number of this blacklisted writer's hallmarks, starting with its low-key approach and interest in ideas, as much as in action -- all of which director Lewis serves up to a tee.

Once in town and having learned of his father's death, Hayden's character encounters the suave-if-tubby lead villain, essayed with classy smarm by Sebastian Cabot (above, right), along with his hired-gun henchman, played by a crackerjack performer new to me named Nedrick Young, a blacklisted actor/writer who would give us the following year (using yet another pseudonym) the Oscar-winning screenplay for The Defiant Ones.

Mr. Young (shown above and further above) makes a simply terrific villain: intelligent but frightening and as impressive in his own way as is Hayden in his. The pair makes a fine set of adversaries, and the change that occurs in Young's character (I hesitate to call it growth, but yet I think it is) once he encounters a man who is unafraid to die (the fine Victor Millan, below, right), provides a death scene of such simplicity, intelligence and strength that it instantly becomes one of the more memorable that movies have given us.

The women in the film are quite interesting, as well, particularly the our villain's "kept woman" who does not seem to quite have to strength to stand on her own. As played by an actress also new to me, Carol Kelly (below, left, and at bottom center), this character proves to be another of the movie's memorable people with some interesting things to tell us.

Terror in a Texas Town, while adhering to practically every last one of the cliches of the movie western, still manages to often be quiet, thoughtful, and sometimes surprising -- never more so than in the scene (below) in which three bad guys work over our hero, and instead of the expected all-out, razza-ma-tazz fight scene, we get something quite other.

Conversations between characters are equally low-key and telling; they make us listen and consider. And director Lewis serves the intelligent screenplay exceedingly well, drawing expert performances from all, and keeping the relatively taut story-line moving along at a decent pace.

At most, I suppose, this is simply a very good example of the B movie that used to show up on double bills and sometimes proved better than the main attraction. But it is yet another feather in the late-arriving cap of this unusual and far-too-unheralded film director.

From Arrow Academy (distributed here in the USA by MVD Visual and running a lean 80 minutes. Terror in a Texas Town arrived on Blu-ray disc on July 11 in a new 2K hi-def restoration from the original film elements, with an uncompressed mono soundtrack. Also worth watching and included on the Blu-ray is the excellent introduction to the film (and its director) by Peter Stanfield.