John Wayne hams it up as a one-eyed, broken-down marshal in this 1969 adaptation of Charles Portis's bestselling novel. Kim Darby plays the formal-speaking adolescent who goes to Wayne for help tracking down her father's killer, and singer Glen Campbell straps on his guns to join the quest. Directed by old lion Henry Hathaway (Rawhide), True Grit is largely a showcase for Wayne (who finally won an Oscar), but it is also a decent Western with a particularly stirring final act. --Tom Keogh
How does bitter convict Robert Stroud cope with a lifetime of solitary confinement? The answer in a sense comes from above in the form of a feeble sparrow he finds in the isolation yard. Stroud brings this newfound companion to his cell nurses it to health and from that point on there's no turning back. Despite having only a third grade education and no hope of parole Stroud becomes a renowned ornithologist and achieves a greater sense of freedom and purpose behind prison walls
MARLON BRANDO (The Godfather) gives the performance of his career as the tough prizefighter-turnedlongshoreman Terry Malloy in this masterpiece of urban poetry, a raggedly emotional tale of individual failure and institutional corruption. On the Waterfront charts Terry's deepening moral crisis as he must choose whether to remain loyal to the mob-connected union boss Johnny Friendly (12 Angry Men's LEE J. COBB) and Johnny's right-hand man, Terry's brother, Charley (In the Heat of the Night's ROD STEIGER), as the authorities close in on them. Driven by the vivid, naturalistic direction of ELIA KAZAN (Gentlemen's Agreement) and savory, streetwise dialogue by BUDD S CHULBERG (A Face in the Crowd), On the Waterfront was an instant sensation, winning eight Oscars, including for best picture, director, actor, supporting actress (North by Northwest's EVA MARIE SAINT), and screenplay. Special Edition Features: New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition Alternate presentations of the feature restoration in two additional aspect ratios: 1.85:1 (widescreen) and 1.33:1 (full-screen) Alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS -HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray edition Commentary featuring authors Richard Schickel and Jeff Young New conversation between filmmaker Martin Scorsese and critic Kent Jones Elia Kazan: Outsider (1982), an hour-long documentary New documentary on the making of the film, featuring interviews with scholar Leo Braudy, critic David Thomson, and others New interview with actress Eva Marie Saint Interview with director Elia Kazan from 2001 Contender, a 2001 documentary on the film's most famous scene New interview with longshoreman Thomas Hanley, an actor in the film New interview with author James T. Fisher (On the Irish Waterfront) about the real-life people and places behind the film Visual essay on Leonard Bernstein's score Trailer PLUS : A booklet featuring an essay by critic Michael Almereyda and reprints of Kazan's 1952 ad in the New York Times defending his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, one of the 1948 New York Sun articles by Malcolm Johnson on which the film was based, and a 1953 Commonweal piece by screenwriter Budd Schulberg
After starring in the now-legendary Dollars trilogy of spaghetti Westerns for Italian director Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood became a box-office star and imported the style of those classic shoot-em-ups for this 1967 Western directed by Ted Post, with whom Eastwood had worked during their days on the television series Rawhide. Eastwood plays an innocent rancher who is mistaken for a cattle rustler and sentenced to hang by an angry mob. When he is saved from the noose by a passing lawman, he embarks on a renegade campaign of vengeance against the men who attempted to lynch him. Hang 'Em High offers a number of memorable moments and stylistic flourishes, and features a superb supporting cast of Western veterans, including Ben Johnson, Ed Begley, Pat Hingle, Dennis Hopper, Bruce Dern, LQ Jones, and the "Skipper" himself, Alan Hale Jr Made just three years before Dirty Harry, the film marked a turning point for Eastwood, who would soon move into a prolific period of contemporary thrillers. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com
A bumbling professor accidently invents flying rubber or ""Flubber"" an incredible material that gains energy every time it strikes a hard surface. It allows for the invention of shoes that can allow jumps of amazing heights and enables a modified Model-T to fly. Unfortunately no one is interested in the material except for Alonzo Hawk a corrupt businessman who wants to steal the material for himself.
The first live action movie ever produced by Walt Disney. Fred MacMurray heads an all-star cast that includes Jean Hagen Tim Considine Kevin Corcoran and Annette Funicello in her big screen debut. After years of on-the-job clashes with cranky canines mail carrier Wilson Daniels (MacMurray) sees man's best friend as his worst enemy. This makes for one hairy situation when a magical ring accidentally transforms his teenage son Wilby (Kirk) into a lumbering sheepdog! Can Wilby break
Cowboy is both a sturdy Delmer Daves picture--his third with Glenn Ford, following Jubal and 3:10 to Yuma--and also one of the most offbeat Westerns ever. It must be the most true to form too, with Frank Harris's memoirs as the source and a picaresque screenplay by Edmund H. North and Dalton Trumbo (a blacklistee, credited only posthumously). There's a pileup of oddities and complications at the outset, with Chicago hotel clerk Harris (Jack Lemmon) already in mid-romance with a daughter of the Mexican aristocracy (Anna Kashfi--Mrs Marlon Brando at the time), and Texas cattleman Tom Reese (Ford) storming in to commandeer an entire floor of the hotel for him and his drovers so they can party 'till, well, the cows come home. Partying is curtailed when Reese loses big at cards; Harris bails him out with his savings, and Reese finds he's taken on not only an unwanted partner but a tenderfoot besides. Soon everyone is headed south. Cowboy merits its bedrock title. This is a rare Western in which the job of breaking horses, trail herding, and so on, figures as a dynamic aspect of the storytelling. The film also has a blunt and original way of looking at death, not as a genre convention but as something abrupt, ungainly, and often absurd, in both senses of the word. (This applies equally to men and cattle, by the way.) The camerawork is trim, angular, and somehow precarious, and the jagged editing hustles the very eventful proceedings to a close in barely an hour and a half. Saddle up. --Richard T. Jameson, Amazon.com
Marlon Brando's famous "I coulda been a contenda" speech in On the Water Front is such a war horse by now that a lot of people probably feel they've seen the film already, even if they haven't. And many of those who have seen it may have forgotten how flat-out thrilling it is. For all its great dramatic and cinematic qualities, and its fiery social criticism, Elia Kazan's has created one of the most gripping melodramas of political corruption and individual heroism ever made in the United States, a five-star gut-grabber. Shot on location around the docks of Hoboken, New Jersey, in the mid-1950s, it tells the fact-based story of a longshoreman (Brando's Terry Malloy) who is blackballed and savagely beaten for informing against the mobsters who have taken over his union and sold it out to the bosses. (Karl Malden has a more conventional stalwart-hero role, as an idealistic priest who nurtures Terry's pangs of conscience.) Lee J Cobb, who created the role of Willy Loman in Death of Salesman under Kazan's direction on Broadway, makes a formidable foe as a greedy union leader. --David Chute, Amazon.com
""You don't understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody instead of a bum which is what I am let's face it."" - Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) Marlon Brando is the longshoreman who finds himself increasingly isolated when he challenges the might and power of the tough New York City dockers' Union. Rod Steiger is his elder brother torn between loyalty to union and love of family. Lee J. Cobb is the powerful union boss while Eva Marie Saint
An outstanding but obscure film from classic director Elia Kazan detailing the difficulties in building a dam on the Tennessee river with opposition from locals across the colour divide...
In 1959 screenwriter Rod Serling first opened the door to the "dimension of imagination" that is The Twilight Zone, a show quite unlike anything that had gone before, and better than much that has followed in its wake. This original and daring television series ran for five seasons from 1959 to 1964 and still looks as fresh as ever, particularly on DVD. What distinguished the series was the quality of the scripts, many of which were penned by Serling, but with significant contributions from veteran sci-fi authors and screenwriters such as Richard Matheson. Actors of the calibre of Robert Redford, Burgess Meredith, Lee Marvin and William Shatner gave some of their best small-screen performances, while an unforgettable main title theme by Bernard Herrmann and musical contributions from young turks such as Jerry Goldsmith underlined the show's attraction for great creative talent both behind and in front of the cameras.Volume 4 cherry-picks four of the show's more diverse episodes. In "Mr Dingle the Strong" (episode 55) alien visitors experiment on a hapless human, but instead of sinister X Files horror, Serling plays it for laughs. Despite the sparkling presence of Burgess Meredith (the closest the series came to a regular star), this one-joke plot demonstrates why the Zone only rarely ventured into comedy. "Two" (episode 66) pits a characteristically taciturn Charles Bronson against an even more stoical Elizabeth Montgomery, two soldiers from opposing sides who must rediscover themselves as the last man and woman and play Adam and Eve in a post-holocaust world. "A Passage for Trumpet" (episode 32) casts Jack Klugman (The Odd Couple, Quincy) as a downtrodden trumpeter who, in a jazz rewrite of It's a Wonderful Life, learns to value life. Nice. Finally, "The Four of Us are Dying" (episode 13) employs four different actors to play the same character, a "cheap little con-man" whose ability to change his features at will doesn't prevent his deserved comeuppance (more jazz here, this time in a wonderfully jagged underscore from Jerry Goldsmith).On the DVD: A neat animated menu with a winking eye guides the viewer "Inside the Twilight Zone", which consists of digests of background information on the individual episodes, as well as a general history of the show, season-by-season breakdown and a potted biography of Serling. --Mark Walker
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