DVD Find the Perfect Gift    Send a Gift Certificate
Search 
Home › Classics › War and Westerns
Review 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment / Twelve O'Clock High [1949]
Actors & Directors
  • Millard Mitchell
  • Gregory Peck
  • Dean Jagger
  • Henry King
  • Hugh Marlowe
  • Gary Merrill
Release date: 2005-08-01
Run time: 126 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £4.98

Review Twelve O'Clock High [1949] / 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment:


Review Optimum Home Entertainment / The Wooden Horse [1950]
Actors & Directors
  • Jack Lee
  • David Tomlinson
  • Leo Green
Release date: 2007-01-29
Run time: 98 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £4.83

Review The Wooden Horse [1950] / Optimum Home Entertainment:


Review Universal Pictures Video / She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Wayne) [1949]
Actors & Directors
  • John Ford
  • Joanne Dru
  • John Agar
  • Harry Carey Jr.
  • Ben Johnson
  • John Wayne
Release date: 2006-06-05
Run time: 99 min.
RRP: £9.99
Price: £0.95

Review She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Wayne) [1949] / Universal Pictures Video:

The second installment of John Ford's famous cavalry trilogy (which also includes Fort Apache and Rio Grande), this meditative Western continues the director's fascination with history's obliteration of the past. It features one of John Wayne's more sensitive performances as Capt. Nathan Brittles, a stern yet sentimental war horse who has difficulty preparing for his impending military retirement. All things considered, he refuses to leave before fulfilling his obligation to the local Indian tribe. It's a film about honor and duty as well as loneliness and mortality. And Oscar-winner Winton C. Hoch beautifully photographs it in Remington-like Technicolor tones (you've never seen such stunning cloud-covered skies). The combination of melancholy and farce (Victor McLaglen makes a perfect court jester) evokes comparisons to Shakespeare. Best of all, the scene in which Wayne fights back tears when receiving a gold watch from his troops is unforgettably bittersweet. If you view the whole trilogy, it actually makes sense to save this for last. [+]
-Bill Desowitz.

Review Sony Pictures Home Entertainment / 3:10 To Yuma [1957]
Actors & Directors
  • Van Heflin
  • Henry Jones
  • Delmer Daves
  • Leora Dana
  • Felicia Farr
  • Glenn Ford
Release date: 2002-04-22
Run time: 88 min.
RRP: £19.99
Price: £3.48

Review 3:10 To Yuma [1957] / Sony Pictures Home Entertainment:

3:10 to Yuma is a tight, taut Western in the High Noon tradition. Struggling rancher and family man Van Heflin sneaks captured outlaw Glenn Ford out from under the eyes of his gang and nervously awaits the prison train. Adapted from an Elmore Leonard story, this tense thriller is boiled down to its essential elements: a charming and cunning criminal, an initially reluctant hero whose courage and resolution hardens along the way and a waiting game that pits them in a battle of wills and wits. Glenn Ford practically steals the film in one of his best performances ever: calm, cool and confident, he's a ruthless killer with polite manners and an honourable streak. Director Delmer Daves (Broken Arrow) sets it all in a harsh, parched frontier of empty landscapes, deserted towns and dust, creating a brittle quiet that threatens to snap into violence at any moment. -Sean Axmaker, Amazon. com.

Review Paramount Home Entertainment / Gunfight At The Ok Corral [1957]
Actors & Directors
  • Burt Lancaster
  • Kenneth Tobey
  • Whit Bissell
  • Rhonda Fleming
  • Kirk Douglas
  • John Sturges
Release date: 2006-09-25
Run time: 122 min.
RRP: £15.99
Price: £3.57

Review Gunfight At The Ok Corral [1957] / Paramount Home Entertainment:


Review Odyssey Video / An Ungentlemanly Act [1992]
Actors & Directors
  • Bob Peck
  • Rosemary Leach
  • Ian Richardson
  • Stuart Urban
Release date: 2003-06-30
Run time: 118 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £4.16

Review An Ungentlemanly Act [1992] / Odyssey Video:


Review Warner Home Video / The Wild Bunch [1970]
Actors & Directors
  • William Holden
  • Robert Ryan
  • Ernest Borgnine
  • Sam Peckinpah
  • Edmond O'Brien
  • Warren Oates
Release date: 2005-06-01
Run time: 138 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £1.90

Review The Wild Bunch [1970] / Warner Home Video:

Here's how director Sam Peckinpah described his motivation behind The Wild Bunch at the time of the film's 1969 release: "I was trying to tell a simple story about bad men in changing times. The Wild Bunch is simply what happens when killers go to Mexico. The strange thing is you feel a great sense of loss when these killers reach the end of the line. " All of these statements are true, but they don't begin to cover the impact that Peckinpah's film had on the evolution of American movies. Now the film is most widely recognized as a milestone event in the escalation of screen violence, but that's a label of limited perspective. Of course, Peckinpah's bloody climactic gunfight became a masterfully directed, photographed, and edited ballet of graphic violence that transcended the conventional Western and moved into a slow-motion realm of pure cinematic intensity. But the film-surely one of the greatest Westerns ever made-is also a richly thematic tale of, as Peckinpah said, "bad men in changing times. " The year is 1913 and the fading band of thieves known as the Wild Bunch (led by William Holden as Pike) decide to pull one last job before retirement. But an ambush foils their plans, and Peckinpah's film becomes an epic yet intimate tale of betrayed loyalties, tenacious rivalry, and the bunch's dogged determination to maintain their fading code of honor among thieves. The 144-minute director's cut enhances the theme of male bonding that recurs in many of Peckinpah's films, restoring deleted scenes to deepen the viewer's understanding of the friendship turned rivalry between Pike and his former friend Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who now leads a posse in pursuit of the bunch, a dimension that adds resonance to an already classic American film. [+]
The Wild Bunch is a masterpiece that should not be defined strictly in terms of its violence, but as a story of mythic proportion, brimming with rich characters and dialogue and the bittersweet irony of outlaw traditions on the wane. -Jeff Shannon.

Review Starz Home Entertainment / The Message
Release date: 2006-02-06
Run time: 177 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £2.69

Review The Message / Starz Home Entertainment:


Review 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment / Sink the Bismarck / The Enemy Below (Double Pack) [1960]
Actors & Directors
  • Curd Jürgens
  • Dick Powell
  • Robert Mitchum
  • David Hedison
  • Theodore Bikel
  • Lewis Gilbert (II)
  • Russell Collins
Release date: 2003-06-02
Run time: 190 min.
RRP: £14.99
Price: £6.97

Review Sink the Bismarck / The Enemy Below (Double Pack) [1960] / 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment:

The Enemy Below and Sink the Bismarck! form a double feature of semi-classic CinemaScope-era WWII naval dramas sailing from the Fox vault onto DVD for the first time. In The Enemy Below Robert Mitchum and Curt Jurgens are respectively captains of a US destroyer and a German U-boat whose vessels come into conflict in the South Atlantic. Both are good men with a job to do, the script noting Jurgens' distaste for Hitler and the Nazis and engaging our sympathy with the German sailors almost as much as the Americans. Made at the height of the Cold War of the 1950s, the film delivers a liberal message of cooperation wrapped inside some spectacular action scenes and a story that builds to a tense and exciting, moving finale. Sink the Bismarck! is a British film dating from three years later and adopts a more documentary style in recounting the race against time to track and destroy what was in 1941 the most powerful battleship then built, the Bismarck. Shot in gleaming black and white so as to make use of genuine WWII archive footage, the film is held together by the introduction of a fictional naval officer in overall command of the operation, played excellently by Kenneth More. To add some human warmth he is given a tentative romantic subplot with a WREN played by the luminous Dana Wynter. Though initially slow to gather steam, Sink the Bismarck! finally delivers an epic, thoroughly horrifying conclusion. On the DVD: The Enemy Below and Sink the Bismarck! come as a two-disc set with multiple language and subtitle options, including English for Hard of Hearing, but no extras other than the original trailers. These are presented at 16:9 and 2. [+]
35:1. Both are rather faded, but are fine examples of an era when watching the previews didn't guarantee a migraine. Both films are anamorphically enhanced in their original 2. 35:1 CinemaScope, and, bar a little grain in some shots and the inevitably inferior archive footage, the picture quality is excellent. The Enemy Below boasts sturdy three-channel sound (left, front, right) while Sink the Bismarck! is in very well mixed stereo. -Gary S Dalkin.

Review Warner Home Video / Errol Flynn Western Collection [1945]
Actors & Directors
  • Errol Flynn
Release date: 2008-09-29
Run time: 257 min.
RRP: £15.99
Price: £9.98

Review Errol Flynn Western Collection [1945] / Warner Home Video:


Review Warner Home Video / Flags Of Our Fathers [HD DVD] [2006]
Actors & Directors
  • Robert Patrick
  • Adam Beach
  • Barry Pepper
  • Ryan Phillippe
  • Clint Eastwood
  • Paul Walker
Release date: 2007-07-09
Run time: 127 min.
RRP: £25.99
Price: £15.99

Review Flags Of Our Fathers [HD DVD] [2006] / Warner Home Video:


Review 20th Century Fox / Platoon - Definitive Edition [1986]
Actors & Directors
  • Charlie Sheen
  • Johnny Depp
  • Forest Whitaker
  • Willem Dafoe
  • Oliver Stone
  • Tom Berenger
Release date: 2007-03-05
Run time: 115 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £3.28

Review Platoon - Definitive Edition [1986] / 20th Century Fox:


Review Sony Pictures Home Entertainment / Joyeux Noel
Actors & Directors
  • Daniel Bruhl
  • Diane Kruger
  • Benno Furmann
  • Christian Carion
  • Guillaume Canet
  • Gary Lewis
Release date: 2006-11-06
Run time: 116 min.
RRP: £15.99
Price: £2.85

Review Joyeux Noel / Sony Pictures Home Entertainment:

Joyeux Noel captures a rare moment of grace from one of the worst wars in the history of mankind, World War I. On Christmas Eve, 1914, as German, French, and Scottish regiments face each other from their respective trenches, a musical call-and-response turns into an impromptu cease-fire, trading chocolates and champagne, playing soccer, and comparing pictures of their wives. But when Christmas ends, the war returns. Joyeux Noel has been justly accused of sentimentality, but if any subject warrants such an earnest and hopeful treatment, it's the horrors of trench warfare. The largely unknown cast-the more familiar faces include Diane Kruger (Troy), Daniel Bruhl (Good Bye Lenin!), Benno Furmann (The Princess and the Warrior), and Gary Lewis (Billy Elliot)-deliver low-key but effective performances as the movie dwells on the everyday elements of life in the face of war. Based on a true incident (though considerably fictionalized). -Bret Fetzer.

Review MGM Entertainment / Red River [1949]
Actors & Directors
  • Arthur Rosson
  • Coleen Gray
  • Joanne Dru
  • Walter Brennan
  • Howard Hawks
  • John Wayne
  • Montgomery Clift
Release date: 2000-06-12
Run time: 133 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £2.80

Review Red River [1949] / MGM Entertainment:

Any short list of the all-time greatest Westerns is bound to include this 1948 Howard Hawks classic about an epic cattle drive. Red River features one of John Wayne's greatest performances. Like his Ethan Edwards in John Ford's 1956 masterpiece The Searchers, the Duke plays an isolated and unsympathetic man who is possessed by bitterness. Wayne is Texas rancher Tom Dunson, who adopts a young boy orphaned in an Indian massacre. That boy, Matthew Garth (played as an adult by Montgomery Clift in his screen debut), becomes Dunson's assistant and heir apparent-until Dunson's temper gets out of control during a long cattle drive and Matt intervenes to stop him. From that moment on, Dunson swears he will kill Matt. Red River has everything a great Western ought to have: a sweeping sense of history, spectacular landscapes, stampedes, gunfights, Indian attacks, and, of course, Walter Brennan as Dunson's crusty old cook and comic sidekick, Nadine Groot. As a special bonus, the film also features the legendary Harry Carey (upon whom Wayne would base some of his gestures in The Searchers) and his son Harry Carey Jr, who became a fixture in Ford and Hawks' Westerns. Red River is essential for anyone who loves Westerns, or movies in general. This one's a real beaut. [+]
-Jim Emerson, Amazon. com.

Review Warner Bros / Escape to Victory
Release date: 2006-10-23
RRP: £13.99
Price: £5.00

Review Escape to Victory / Warner Bros:

A group of P. O. W. s at a German prison camp agree to compete against Nazi soccer players in this World War II drama set in 1943 Occupied Europe. German Major Karl von Steiner, who played soccer professionally before the war, comes up with the idea. When his superior officers find out about the competition, they pit the Allies against Germany's best team-but they don't realize that the P. O. W. s plan to use the upcoming big game as a means of escaping. The Allied team includes John Colby, a British officer who also played soccer before the war, and Robert Hatch, an American soldier who cares far more about gaining his freedom than the game itself. [+]
When the P. O. W. s realize they have a good shot at beating the Nazi team in front of a huge crowd, they must decide what's more important: finishing the match or getting out alive.

Review Universal Pictures Video / Fort Apache (John Wayne) [1948]
Actors & Directors
  • Irene Rich
  • Henry Fonda
  • John Wayne
  • Guy Kibbee
  • Pedro Armendariz Jr.
  • John Ford
Release date: 2006-06-05
Run time: 122 min.
RRP: £9.99
Price: £4.30

Review Fort Apache (John Wayne) [1948] / Universal Pictures Video:

John Ford's 1948 classic stars John Wayne as a Cavalry officer used to doing things a certain way out West at Fort Apache. Along comes a rigid, new commanding officer (Henry Fonda) who insists that everything on his watch be done by the book, including dealings with local Indians. The results are mixed: greater discipline at the fort, but increased hostilities with the natives. Ford deliberately leaves judgments about the wisdom of these changes ambiguous, but he also allows plenty of room in this wonderful film for the fullness of life among the soldiers and their families-community rituals, new romances-to blossom. Fonda, in an unusual role for him, is stern and formal as the new man in charge; Wayne is heroic as the rebellious second; Victor McLaglen provides comic relief; and Ward Bond is a paragon of sturdy and sentimental masculinity. All of this is set against the magnificent, poetic topography of Monument Valley. This is easily one of the greatest of American films. -Tom Keogh.

Review 20th Century Fox / The Great Escape - Definitive Edition [1963]
Actors & Directors
  • Charles Bronson
  • Steve McQueen
  • James Coburn
  • John Sturges
  • Richard Attenborough
Release date: 2007-03-05
Run time: 166 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £2.98

Review The Great Escape - Definitive Edition [1963] / 20th Century Fox:


Review Paramount Home Entertainment / Man Who Shot Liberty Valance [1962]
Actors & Directors
  • John Ford
  • Edmond O'Brien
  • Vera Miles
  • John Wayne
  • Lee Marvin
  • James Stewart
Release date: 2005-06-06
Run time: 118 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £3.29

Review Man Who Shot Liberty Valance [1962] / Paramount Home Entertainment:

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. " That's more than the code of a newspaperman in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; it's practically the operating credo of director John Ford, the most honoured of American filmmakers. In this late film from a long career, Ford looks at the civilising of an Old West town, Shinbone, through the sad memories of settlers looking back. In the town's wide-open youth, two-fisted Westerner John Wayne and tenderfoot newcomer James Stewart clash over a woman (Vera Miles) but ultimately unite against the notorious outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). Ford's nostalgia for the past is tempered by his stark approach, unusual for the visual poet of Stagecoach and The Searchers. The two heavyweights, Wayne and Stewart, are good together, with Wayne the embodiment of rugged individualism and Stewart the idealistic prophet of the civilisation that will eventually tame the Wild West. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance may be the saddest Western ever made, closer to an elegy than an action movie, and as cleanly beautiful as its central symbol, the cactus rose. -Robert Horton The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a late film from the long career of director John Ford that tells of the civilising of an Old West town, Shinbone, through the sad memories of settlers looking back. Ford's nostalgia for the past is tempered by his stark approach, unusual for the visual poet of Stagecoach and The Searchers. The two heavyweights, John Wayne and James Stewart, are good together, with Wayne the embodiment of rugged individualism and Stewart the idealistic prophet of the civilisation that will eventually tame the Wild West. [+]
This may be the saddest Western ever made, closer to an elegy than an action movie, and as cleanly beautiful as its central symbol, the cactus rose. -Robert Horton.

Review 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment / Von Ryan's Express [1965]
Actors & Directors
  • Trevor Howard
  • Frank Sinatra
  • Mark Robson
Release date: 2005-04-18
Run time: 112 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £3.03

Review Von Ryan's Express [1965] / 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment:


Review Sony Pictures Home Entertainment / The Guns Of Navarone (Special Edition) [1961]
Actors & Directors
  • J. Lee Thompson
  • Stanley Baker
  • David Niven
  • Anthony Quayle
  • Gregory Peck
  • Anthony Quinn
Release date: 2007-02-12
Run time: 150 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £4.75

Review The Guns Of Navarone (Special Edition) [1961] / Sony Pictures Home Entertainment:


Models & Brands:
Twelve O'Clock High [1949], The Wooden Horse [1950], She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Wayne) [1949], 3:10 To Yuma [1957], Gunfight At The Ok Corral [1957], An Ungentlemanly Act [1992], The Wild Bunch [1970], The Message, Sink the Bismarck / The Enemy Below (Double Pack) [1960], Errol Flynn Western Collection [1945], Flags Of Our Fathers [HD DVD] [2006], Platoon - Definitive Edition [1986], Joyeux Noel, Red River [1949], Escape to Victory, Fort Apache (John Wayne) [1948], The Great Escape - Definitive Edition [1963], Man Who Shot Liberty Valance [1962], Von Ryan's Express [1965], The Guns Of Navarone (Special Edition) [1961]

Top headlines:
Search 
DVD Rental: try it for free