The Top 10 Western DVD Collections
Featuring John Wayne, Sam Peckinpah, James Stewart and that f*#!@& Deadwood.
By: Henry Cabot Beck 07/01/2008
Western lovers who think of themselves as the last of a dying breed have to be feeling a little less lonely these days, as there are so many Westerns dropping into the DVD market.
You’ll find B-Westerns, singing cowboy Westerns, silent Westerns, TV Westerns, Spaghetti Westerns and classic adult Westerns, and some of them are getting the full-out treatment with scholarly or insider commentaries, in-depth documentaries, restored visuals and digitally dolled-up audio tracks. A recent release of Henry Hathaway’s less than stellar Garden of Evil (1954), for example, starring Gary Cooper and Susan Hayward, actually has a stand-alone musical track so that fans of composer Bernard Herrmann can listen to his score without being bothered by the inane dialogue.
Most recently, Fox Home Entertainment made their 21-disc, $300 Ford at Fox box set the most prestigious and handsomely mounted package in the current DVD world, and while it contained only a handful of actual Westerns, John Ford’s status as the most important Western film director in film history put Fox squarely on the side of the angels.
Companies like the Oklahoma-based VCI, which manages, with Kit Parker, the catalogue of legendary B-picture producer Robert Lippert, continues to issue fine single, double and triple editions of some of the better low budget post-war adult Westerns. And more than one company is devoted to restoring and releasing Spaghetti Westerns, the good, the bad, the ugly and, occasionally, the great.
It’s a good time to be a Westerns film fan.
Of course, producers do sometimes miss the boat. Many unexhumed classics and unrealized collections beg for the total bells & whistles treatment; we’re still waiting for the Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott box set, finally due this fall, and we could use a Sam Peckinpah TV package that bundles his brilliant series The Westerner together with The Losers starring Lee Marvin and Katherine Anne Porter’s Noon Wine. Every step backward, though, does seem to be met by one or two steps forward.
Here’s a handful of the best, the brightest and shiniest DVD collections and packages, mixed in with a few funky cinema favorites.
1. There’s no way around it—the Duke comes first. I would have liked to start this list by suggesting one single comprehensive John Wayne DVD box set, but the fact that I have to name two only goes to prove how big Wayne was.
The John Wayne Western Collection (Paramount) is the smaller, Western-only brother of an even larger collection. It includes John Ford’s masterful The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Shootist, Wayne’s final picture, and fully loaded special editions of True Grit, Hondo and McLintock!
2. As good or better is the John Wayne/ John Ford Film Collection (Warner), which contains a two-disc edition of Stagecoach, two of the three cavalry movies Wayne made for Ford, Fort Apache and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, and the movie many, including Wayne, regarded as his best work and one of the greatest Westerns of all time, The Searchers, which is presented in a spectacular two-disc edition with all kinds of goodies.
Comments (1)
Some great box sets!
But what about Scott and Boetticher? Their collaboration should be up there with Wayne and Ford and Stewart and Mann.
Dr John True West Maniac
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