Western

• True Grit | DVD | (13/06/2011) from £4.99  |  Saving you £15.00 (75.00%)  |  RRP £19.99

  True Grit is a powerful story of vengeance and valour set in an unforgiving and unpredictable frontier where justice is simple and mercy is rare. Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) is determined to avenge her father's blood by capturing Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin) the man who shot and killed him for two pieces of gold. Just fourteen she enlists the help of Rooster Cogburn Academy Award Winner Jeff Bridges) a one-eyed trigger-happy U.S. Marshall with an affinity for drinking and hardened Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Academy Award Winner Matt Damon) to track the fleeing Chaney. Despite their differences their ruthless determination leads them on a perilous adventure that can only have one outcome: retribution.

• Dances With Wolves | DVD | (12/10/2009) from £3.70  |  Saving you £6.27 (62.80%)  |  RRP £9.99

• Clint Eastwood Collection - For A Few Dollars More/The Good, The Bad And The Ugly/A Fistful Of Dollars/Hang 'Em High | DVD | (13/08/2007) from £9.24  |  Saving you £20.75 (69.20%)  |  RRP £29.99

  Title Comprise: For A Few Dollars More: the tale of a ruthless quest to track down the notorious bandit El Indio played by Gian Maria Volonte. The film is also noted for its array of weaponry a veritable arsenal of rifles that became so operatic and Ennio Morricone's atmospheric score keeps the tension taut as the action moves from Jail breaks and hold-ups to spectacular gun battles. The Good The Bad And The Ugly:written by Age Scarpelli Luciano Vincenzoni and Sergio Leone is the third and last western in Clint Eastwood's spaghetti trilogy. Director Sergio Leone substitutes for the upright puritan Protestant ethos so familiar in Hollywood westerns a seedy cynical standpoint towards death and mortality as a team of brutal bandits battle to unearth a fortune buried beneath an unmarked grave. Joining Clint clearly ""The Good"" is the irredeemably ""Bad"" Lee and the resolutely ""Ugly"" Eli Wallach. The complete plot of bloodshed and betrayal winds its way through the American Civil War filmed to resemble the French battlefields of World War One to end in the climatic Dance Of Death. Arguably the quintessential Italian Western this 1966 film boasts a fine Ennio Morricone score featuring a main theme that reached No. 1 in the world's pop charts. A Fistful Of Dollars:The first of the ""spaghetti westerns"" A Fistful Of Dollars became an instant cult hit. It also launched the film careers of Italian Writer-Director Sergio Leone and a little known American television actor named Clint Eastwood. As the lean cold-eye cobra-quick gunfighter - Clint became the first of the ""anti-heroes"". The cynical enigmatic loner with a clouded past is the same character Eastwood fans have been savouring ever since. A Fistful Of Dollars is the western taken to the extreme - with unremitting violence gritty realism and tongue-in-cheek humour. Leone's direction is taut and stylish and the visuals are striking - from the breathtaking panoramas (in Spain) to the extreme close-ups of quivering lips and darting eyes before the shoot-out begins. And all are accented by renowned film composer Ennio Morricone's quirky haunting score. Hang 'Em High:Oklahoma 1873. Jed Cooper mistaken for a rustler and killer is lynched on the spot by crooked lawman Captain Wilson and a rampaging band of vigilantes. But as Wilson and his gang flee the scene there's one very important detail they've overlooked: Cooper is still alive! Saved in the nick of time by a sheriff Cooper takes on the job of deputy marshal in order to bring hard-handed justice to the Oklahoma territory and to the nine men who ""done him wrong""...

• High Noon | DVD | (13/10/2008) from £3.99  |  Saving you £6.00 (60.10%)  |  RRP £9.99

  The story of a man who was too proud to run. On the day Lawman Will Kane trades in his tin star for his beautiful bride news arrives that a killer he helped send to jail is returning on the noon train to seek revenge. At the behest of his friends and concerned for his new bride's safety they quickly leave town to avoid a confrontation. But Cooper realises they'll never run far enough away and heads back to town to face the killer. But when Kane tries to drum up support one by one the townspeople he had protected turn their backs on him... until Kane stands alone to face four killers on the deserted streets of town in one of the most famous showdowns ever!

• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid | DVD | (27/08/2001) from £3.99  |  Saving you £16.00 (80.00%)  |  RRP £19.99

  Dating from 1969, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has never lost its popularity or its unusual appeal as a star-driven Western that tinkers with the genre's conventions and comes up with something both terrifically entertaining and--typical of its period--a tad paranoid. Paul Newman plays the legendary outlaw Butch Cassidy as an eternal optimist and self-styled visionary, conjuring dreams of banks just ripe for the picking all over the world. Robert Redford is his more level-headed partner, the sharp-shooting Sundance Kid. The film, written by William Goldman (The Princess Bride) and directed by George Roy Hill (The Sting), basically begins as a freewheeling story about robbing trains but soon becomes a chase as a relentless posse--always seen at a great distance like some remote authority--forces Butch and Sundance into the hills and, finally, Bolivia. Weakened a little by feel-good inclinations (a scene involving bicycle tricks and the song "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" is sort of Hollywood flower power), the film maintains an interesting tautness, and the chemistry between Redford and Newman is rare. (A factoid: Newman first offered the Sundance part to Jack Lemmon.) --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com On the DVD: This anamorphic widescreen print of the 2.35:1 Panavision original looks marvellously crisp, highlighting the sepia tinting and washed-out, over-exposed look of the film nicely and making the best of the deep focus cinematography. The mono soundtrack sounds clean and clear in Dolby 2.0. The commentary track is hosted by documentary-maker Robert Crawford with contributions from George Roy Hill, cinematographer Conrad Hall, and lyricist Hal David (who chips in during the "Raindrops" sequence). The 40-minute documentary dates from 1968 and is narrated by director Hill, who talks in detail about the making-of process, comments on his relationship with the three principals (Katharine Ross was the difficult one apparently), and adds little nuggets such as how they sprayed the bull's testicles to make him charge at the end of the bicycle scene. Also included are a series of absorbing 1994 interviews with all the main players: Newman, Redford, Ross, writer William Goldman, and composer Burt Bacharach. Trailers, Production Notes and an Alternate Credit Roll complete an attractive package. --Mark Walker

• Apache Rifles | DVD | (20/09/2010) from £5.99  |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)  |  RRP £N/A

  Audie Murphy stars as Captain Jeff Stanton a man of honour caught between his duty and his conscience at a time when not all men were equal. When Indian Chief Victorio and his people leave the confines of their reservation Captain Stanton is sent to bring them back by whatever means necessary. Whilst he prefers a diplomatic solution many local miners would like nothing more than to be rid of the Indians once and for all leaving the gold-rich reservation land free to mine. As the injustice of the situation begins to have its effect on Stanton he must choose to fulfil his military obligation or disobey orders to prevent more bloodshed and the possible annihilation of an entire Indian tribe.

• Once A Upon A Time In The West | Blu Ray | (05/09/2011) from £7.95  |  Saving you £12.04 (60.20%)  |  RRP £19.99

  The so-called spaghetti Western achieved its apotheosis in Sergio Leone's magnificently mythic (and utterly outlandish) Once upon a Time in the West. After a series of international hits starring Clint Eastwood (from A Fistful of Dollars to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly), Leone outdid himself with this spectacular, larger-than-life, horse-operatic epic about how the West was won. (And make no mistake: this is the wide, wide West, folks--so the widescreen/letter-boxed version is strongly recommended.) The unholy trinity of Italian cinema--Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Dario Argento--concocted the story about a woman (Claudia Cardinale) hanging onto her land in hopes that the transcontinental railroad would reach her before a steely-eyed, black-hearted killer (Fonda) does. (The film's advertising slogan was: "There were three men in her life. One to take her ... one to love her ... and one to kill her.") Meanwhile, Leone shoots his stars' faces as if they were expansive Western landscapes, and their towering bodies as if they were looming rock formations in John Ford's Monument Valley. --Jim Emerson, Amazon.com

• Young Guns 2 - Blaze Of Glory | DVD | (25/08/2003) from £3.49  |  Saving you £15.50 (81.60%)  |  RRP £18.99

  Billy Doc and Chavez find themselves jailed in the same place and plan an escape. Together with new recruits they head for the Mexican border not knowing that Billy The Kid's one-time friend now wears a badge and is leading the posse to get them...

• 3:10 To Yuma | DVD | (28/01/2008) from £4.95  |  Saving you £15.04 (75.20%)  |  RRP £19.99

  In Arizona in the late 1800's infamous outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) and his vicious gang of thieves and murderers plagued the Southern Railroad. When Wade is captured Civil War veteran Dan Evans (Christian Bale) struggling to survive on his drought-plagued ranch volunteers to deliver him alive to the 3:10 to Yuma a train that will take the killer to trial. On the trail Evans and Wade each from very different worlds begin to earn each other's respect. But with Wade's outfit on their trail - and dangers at every turn - the mission soon becomes a violent impossible journey toward each man's destiny.

• Once Upon a Time in the West -- Special Collector's Edition (2 discs) | DVD | (06/10/2003) from £4.49  |  Saving you £15.50 (77.50%)  |  RRP £19.99

  Sergio Leone had to be persuaded to return to the Western for Once Upon a Time in the West after the success of his "Dollars" trilogy. The result is a masterpiece that expands the vision of the earlier movies in every way. It could as easily have been called The Good, the Bad, the Ugly and the Blonde as Charles Bronson steps into the No-Name role as the harmonica-playing vengeance seeker, Henry Fonda trashes his Wyatt Earp image as a dead-faced, blue-eyed killer who has sold out to the rapacious railroad; Jason Robards provides humanitarian footnotes as a life-loving but doomed bandit and the astonishingly beautiful Claudia Cardinale shows that all these grown-up little boys are less fit to make a country than one determined widow-mother-whore-angel-everywoman. The opening sequence--Woody Strode, Al Mulock and Jack Elam waiting for a train and bothered by a fly and dripping water--is masterful bravura, homing in on tiny details for a fascinating but eventless length of time before Bronson arrives for the lightning-fast shoot-out. With striking widescreen compositions and epic running time, this picture truly wins points for length and width. On the DVD: Once Upon a Time in the West on disc is the transfer fans have been waiting for: the longest available version of the film in shimmering widescreen (enhanced for 16:9 TVs) which lends full impact to Leone's long shots of Monument Valley scenery or bustling crowds of activity, but also highlights his ultra-close images as Bronson's beady eyes or Cardinale's luscious pout fill the entire screen. A commentary track is mostly by expert Sir Christopher Frayling, with input from other academics, participants and enthusiasts--it's good on the detail, and Alex Cox winningly points out that one scene bizarrely can't be reconciled with what happens before or after it. Disc 2 has four featurettes which, taken together, add up to a feature-length documentary on the film, and though overlapping the commentary slightly offer a wealth of further good stuff, plus the elegant Cardinale's undiminished smile. Also included is the trailer, notes on the cast, menu screens with generous selections from Ennio Morricone's score, stills gallery, comparison shots from the film and contemporary snapshots of the locations. --Kim Newman

• The Outlaw Josey Wales | DVD | (21/01/2002) from £4.08  |  Saving you £9.91 (70.80%)  |  RRP £13.99

  The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Clint Eastwood's 31st film as an actor, 20th as international star and fifth as director, was the first to win him widespread respect. Critics had grumbled when the producer-star replaced Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff) in the director's chair a week into shooting. They ended up cheering when Eastwood delivered both his most sympathetic performance to date and--with the heroic collaboration of cinematographer Bruce Surtees--an impressive Panavision epic that stresses the scruffiness, rather than the scenic splendours, of frontier life. During the Civil War, Union "Redlegs" attack Southerner Josey Wales's dirt farm and wipe out his family. Seeking vengeance, Wales throws in with a company of Reb guerrillas. Tagged as a renegade after the surrender, he flees west into the vastness of the Indian Territories, where, quite unintentionally, he finds himself cast as the straight-shooting paterfamilias of an ever-growing, spectacularly motley community of misfits and castaways. This is to say, Josey's personal quest for survival and something like peace of mind evolves into a funky, multicultural allegory of the healing of America. Josey Wales is good, not great, Eastwood. The big-gun fetishism can get tiresome, and too many characters exist only to serve as six-gun (and at one point Gatling gun) fodder. But mostly the film is agreeably eccentric, and almost furtively sweet in spirit--a key transitional title in the Eastwood filmography, and one of his most entertaining. --Richard T Jameson

• Deadwood - Season 1 | DVD | (04/07/2005) from £12.39  |  Saving you £37.60 (75.20%)  |  RRP £49.99

  The remarkable first season of Deadwood represents one of those periodic, wholesale reinventions of the Western that is as different from, say, Lonesome Dove as that miniseries is from Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo or the latter is from Anthony Mann's The Naked Spur. In many ways, Deadwood embraces the Western's unambiguous morality during the cinema's silent era through the 1930s while also blazing trails through a post-NYPD Blue, post-The West Wing television age exalting dense and customized dialogue. On top of that, Deadwood has managed an original look and texture for a familiar genre: gritty, chaotic, and surging with both dark and hopeful energy. Yet the show's creator, erstwhile NYPD Blue head writer David Milch, never ridicules or condescends to his more grasping, futile characters or overstates the virtues of his heroic ones. Set in an ungoverned stretch of South Dakota soon after the 1876 Custer massacre, Deadwood concerns a lawless, evolving town attracting fortune-seekers, drifters, tyrants, and burned-out adventurers searching for a card game and a place to die. Others, particularly women trapped in prostitution, sundry do-gooders, and hangers-on have nowhere else to go. Into this pool of aspiration and nightmare arrive former Montana lawman Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and his friend Sol Starr (John Hawkes), determined to open a lucrative hardware business. Over time, their paths cross with a weary but still formidable Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine) and his doting companion, the coarse angel Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert); an aristocratic, drug-addicted widow (Molly Parker) trying to salvage a gold mining claim; and a despondent hooker (Paula Malcomson) who cares, briefly, for an orphaned girl. Casting a giant shadow over all is a blood-soaked king, Gem Saloon owner Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), possibly the best, most complex, and mesmerizing villain seen on TV in years. Over 12 episodes, each of these characters, and many others, will forge alliances and feuds, cope with disasters (such as smallpox), and move--almost invisibly but inexorably--toward some semblance of order and common cause. Making it all worthwhile is Milch's masterful dialogue--often profane, sometimes courtly and civilized, never perfunctory--and the brilliant acting of the aforementioned performers plus Brad Dourif, Leon Rippy, Powers Boothe, and Kim Dickens. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com

• The Magnificent Seven | DVD | (11/06/2001) from £2.99  |  Saving you £12.99 (72.20%)  |  RRP £17.99

  Akira Kurosawa's rousing Seven Samurai was a natural for an American remake--after all, the codes and conventions of ancient Japan and the Wild West (at least the mythical movie West) are not so very far apart. Thus The Magnificent Seven effortlessly turns samurai into cowboys (the same trick worked more than once: Kurosawa's Yojimbo became Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars). The beleaguered denizens of a Mexican village, weary of attacks by banditos, hire seven gunslingers to repel the invaders once and for all. The gunmen are cool and capable, with most of the actors playing them just on the cusp of '60s stardom: Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn. The man who brings these warriors together is Yul Brynner, the baddest bald man in the West. There's nothing especially stylish about the approach of veteran director John Sturges (The Great Escape), but the storytelling is clear and strong, and the charisma of the young guns fairly flies off the screen. If that isn't enough to awaken the 12-year-old kid inside anyone, the unforgettable Elmer Bernstein music will do it: bum-bum-ba-bum, bum-ba-bum-ba-bum... Followed by three inferior sequels, Return of the Seven, Guns of the Magnificent Seven, and The Magnificent Seven Ride! --Robert Horton

• The Magnificent Seven Collection | DVD | (15/10/2001) from £8.98  |  Saving you £25.64 (64.10%)  |  RRP £39.99

  The Magnificent Seven effortlessly turn samurai into cowboys (the same trick worked more than once: Kurosawa'sYojimbo became Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars) and Akira Kurosawa's rousing Seven Samuri was a natural for an American remake through this movie--after all, the codes and conventions of ancient Japan and the Wild West (at least the mythical movie West) are not so very far apart. The beleaguered denizens of a Mexican village, weary of attacks by banditos, hire seven gunslingers to repel the invaders once and for all. The gunmen are cool and capable, with most of the actors playing them just on the cusp of 60s stardom: Steve McQueen, JamesCoburn, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn. The man who brings these warriors together is Yul Brynner, the baddest bald man in the West. There's nothing especially stylish about the approach of veteran director John Sturges (The Great Escape), but the storytelling is clear and strong, and the charisma of the young guns fairly flies off the screen. If that isn't enough to awaken the 12-year-old kid inside anyone, the unforgettable Elmer Bernstein music will do it: bum-bum-ba-bum, bum-ba-bum-ba-bum... followed by three inferior sequels, Return of the Seven, Guns of the Magnificent Seven, and The Magnificent Seven Ride!--Robert Horton, Amazon.com

• Clint Eastwood Collection - A Fistful Of Dollars/The Good, The Bad And The Ugly/For A Few Dollars More/Hang 'Em High | Blu Ray | (30/08/2010) from £10.00  |  Saving you £29.99 (75.00%)  |  RRP £39.99

  A Fistful Of Dollars: The first of the 'spaghetti westerns' A Fistful Of Dollars became an instant cult hit and launched the film careers of Italian Writer-Director Sergio Leone and a little known American television actor named Clint Eastwood. As the lean cold eyed cobra-quick gunfighter - Clint became the first of the 'anti heroes'. A Fistful Of Dollars is the western taken to the extreme - with unremitting violence gritty realism tongue-in-cheek humour and striking visuals. For A Few Dollars More: A Fistful of Dollars had proven so successful that a sequel was inevitable. The superbly scripted For A Few Dollars More tells the tale of a ruthless quest to track down the notorious bandit El Indio played by Gian Maria Volonte by an unforgettable alliance between ruthless gun-slingers Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef. Sergio Leone's direction is both violent and operatic and Ennio Morricone's atmospheric score keeps the tension taut as the action moves from jail breaks and hold ups to spectacular gun battles. The Good The Bad And The Ugly: In the third of Eastwood's spaghetti trilogy Director Sergio Leone substitutes the upright puritan Protestant ethos so familiar in Hollywood westerns for a seedy cynical standpoint towards death and morality. The complex plot of bloodshed and betrayal winds its way through the American Civil War following a team of brutal bandits battling to unearth a fortune buried beneath an unmarked grave and boasts a fine Ennio Morricone score featuring a main theme that reached No.1 in the world's pop charts. Hang 'Em High: They riddled him with bullets. They strung him up. They left him to die. But they made two fatal mistakes: they hanged the wrong man... and they didn't finish the job. In his first American-made western Clint Eastwood indelibly carves his niche as the quintessential tough guy - cool-headed iron-willed and unrelenting in the pursuit of revenge.

• The Big Country | DVD | (11/06/2001) from £2.09  |  Saving you £9.50 (73.10%)  |  RRP £12.99

  William Wyler directed this epic Western, about the clash of East and West, intellect and action. Gregory Peck stars as a sea captain who moves way out West to marry Carroll Baker and become part of the ranch owned by her father (Charles Bickford). But he discovers that daddy's top hand (Charlton Heston) carries a torch for Baker and doesn't particularly like Peck stepping into his place. Peck also finds himself caught in the midst of a power struggle between Bickford and his surly neighbour, Burl Ives (and his reprehensibly bullying son, Chuck Connors). The Big Country is a long, sprawling tale that works because its characters are played by movie stars who know how to command the big screen in a big story. --Marshall Fine

• Open Range | DVD | (06/06/2011) from £3.84  |  Saving you £6.04 (60.50%)  |  RRP £9.99

  Released almost exactly 11 years after Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, Kevin Costner's Open Range proved yet again that the Western is the classic American genre. Costner's first film since 1997's ill-fated The Postman returns the actor/director of Dances With Wolves to the open prairies of America--in this case the free-range frontier of 1882--where legal "free-grazing" cattle drives were falling prey to empire-building land-owners. In the wake of territorial murder, free-grazing cowboys Boss (Robert Duvall) and Charley (Costner) seek vengeful justice against the ruthless rancher (Michael Gambon) who threatens their law-abiding survival. A feisty ally (the late Michael Jeter, in his next-to-final film role) and a doctor's sister (Annette Bening) offer support during climactic shootouts, masterfully staged with the shock and suddenness of real-life gunfire. While it lacks the thematic impact of Eastwood's masterpiece, this handsome production!--rich in character development and thick-hided humour--redeemed Costner's directorial career with a well-told story (by Craig Storper, based on Lauran Paine's novel The Open Range Men), flawless performances, and stunning Canadian locations. --Jeff Shannon

• Tombstone | DVD | (13/04/2009) from £8.00  |  Saving you £9.99 (55.50%)  |  RRP £17.99

  This Western has become a modest cult favorite since its release in 1993, when the film was met with mixed reviews but the performances of Kurt Russell (as Wyatt Earp) and especially Val Kilmer, for his memorably eccentric performance as the dying gunslinger Doc Holliday, garnered high praise. The movie opens with Wyatt Earp trying to put his violent past behind him, living happily in Tombstone with his brothers and the woman (Dana Delany) who puts his soul at ease. But a murderous gang called the Cowboys has burst on the scene, and Earp can't keep his gun belt off any longer. The plot sounds routine, and in many ways it is, but Western buffs won't mind a bit thanks to a fine cast and some well-handled action on the part of Rambo director George P. Cosmatos, who has yet to make a better film than this. --Jeff Shannon

• Wyatt Earp | DVD | (19/07/2004) from £3.20  |  Saving you £10.50 (75.10%)  |  RRP £13.99

  Lawrence Kasdan's sprawling Western epic chronicling the life of legendary lawman Wyatt Earp. From Wichita and Dodge City to the OK Corral and Dodge City this is a thrilling journey of romance adventure and desperate heroic action.

• Jeremiah Johnson | DVD | (25/09/1998) from £3.99  |  Saving you £8.63 (61.70%)  |  RRP £13.99

  After they first worked together on the 1966 film This Property Is Condemned, director Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford continued their long-lasting collaboration with this 1972 drama set during the mid-1800s, about one man's rugged effort to shed the burden of civilisation and learn to survive in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains. Will Geer is perfectly cast as the seasoned trapper who teaches Jeremiah Johnson (Redford) how to survive against harsh winters, close encounters with grizzly bears, and hostile Crow Indians. In the course of his adventure, Johnson marries the daughter of a Flathead Indian chief, forms a makeshift family, and ultimately assumes a mythic place in Rocky Mountain folklore. Shot entirely on location in Utah, Jeremiah Johnson boasts an abundance of breathtaking widescreen scenery, and the story (despite a PG rating) doesn't flinch from the brutality of the wilderness. --Jeff Shannon