WARNERS & PARAMOUNT TEAM TO CELEBRATE THE DUKE'S 100TH BIRTHDAY
Warner Brothers Home Video and Paramount Home Entertainment have combined forces to provide John Wayne fans with the ultimate video collection - a celebration of the Duke's 100th birthday. Movie lovers will need true grit to get through all of the video offerings from both studios. The most exciting news is that Warners is debuting six Wayne features never before available on DVD: Allegheny Uprising, Reunion in France, Tycoon, Without Reservations, Trouble Along the Way and Big Jim McLain. While these may not be among Wayne's most acclaimed achievements, their unavailability on DVD has been annoyance to fans, especially completionist collectors who have long sought to replace their aging VHS versions with DVD editions.
Warners is releasing the six Wayne films new to DVD as individual titles and as a set titled
The John Wayne Film Collection.
WB is also releasing "must-have" collector's editions of two of Duke's
most popular titles: his 1959 classic for director Howard Hawks,
Rio Bravo and his 1972 box-office hit
The Cowboys.
Rio Bravo
is being released as a two-disc set loaded with extras including a
commentary by director John Carpenter and critic Richard Schickel and a
Wayne trailer gallery.However, if you
really dig the Duke as much as we do, you'll pass this up for the even grander
Rio Bravo Ultimate Collector's Edition that includes everything on the 2-disc set plus reproductions of the original pressbook, Dell comic book tie-in and studio lobby cards. (Note: as of this time, Cinema Retro has not received the final packaged set of this title. We will review as soon as it becomes available).
The Cowboys special edition is also a real treat. It restores the film's original overture with magnificent score by John Williams (why has there never been an official soundtrack released for this film???). The DVD also includes commentary by director Mark Rydell, a great new featurette that reunites Rydell with some of the child stars, an original production featurette and the trailer. Wayne seemed to get better as he got older and his performance in
The Cowboys is superb, even heart-breaking. He's more than matched by the late, great Roscoe Lee Brown and Bruce Dern, as one of the screen's most notorious villains. The cast of young actors is also remarkable, considering many had never been before a camera previously.
If your head isn't reeling already, consider the Paramount is releasing several compliation boxed sets highlighted by
The John Wayne Century Collection - a ten-gallon-sized shelf breaker that includes fourteen Wayne films. Among them are the recently-released special editions of
The High and the Mighty, Island in the Sky, Hondo and
McLintock! as well as reissues of
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Shootist, Big Jake, Donovan's Reef, In Harm's Way, Hatari!, Rio Lobo, The Sons of Katie Elder and
El Dorado. You'd have to be in an iron lung to have enough time to get through all of these, but making Wayne's world even more exciting is Paramount's new two-disc DVD special edition of
True Grit, the great 1969 film for which Duke won his only Best Actor Oscar.
Grit remains a real classic, highlighted by what is arguably Wayne's greatest scene on film: his one-man shootout on horseback with Robert Duvall's band of slimy outlaws. (We will review upon getting the final DVD version of this title.)
Given the time and effort studios put into promoting John Wayne titles, it should come as no surprise that the Duke is the only deceased actor to consistently rank among American's top ten favorite film stars in recent Harris polls. We at Cinema Retro salute one of the screen's most enduring legends- and tip our Stetson to WB and Paramount for giving fans a Texas-size amount of great DVDs to celebrate the Duke's 100th birthday. - Lee Pfeiffer
(NOTE: See Cinema Retro issue #4 for a tribute to the Duke as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. See Cinema Retro issue #5 for a tribute to Howard Hawks' El Dorado)
GET THE BOOK JOHN WAYNE: THE MAN BEHIND THE MYTH AT AMAZON!
GET THE BOOK DUKE: THE LIFE AND IMAGE OF JOHN WAYNE AT AMAZON!
CINEMA RETRO'S JOHN WAYNE MOVIE POSTER GALLERY
Enjoy these international movie posters from some of the films included in the Warner Brothers and Paramount DVD releases.