John Ford on DVD

[whaleallright]

//

[denti alligator]

I just ordered a bootleg version of Sun Shines Bright on DVD that was supposedly made from an "original negative." Doubtful. Probably a transfer from that VHS. I'll report back.

[otis]

Screen caps from the UK Wagon Master here.

[ellipsis7]

Universal release that WAGON MASTER as a single disc in R2 UK on May 5th...

[Titus]

I picked up the Universal R2 of Wagon Master and it's almost unwatchable. There's a ghosting problem, but the main flaw is a jerkiness in the image, like the frame rate is fluctuating or something. I've never seen anything like it before. Is anybody else with the disc experiencing the same problem?

[Perkins Cobb]

Sounds like a poor NTSC->PAL conversion.

[domino harvey]

From a shitty 1.66 letterboxed MGM DVD to hi-def: the Horse Soldiers is unbelievably coming out on Blu-ray on June 8 in France

[knives]

Is it good Ford?

[zedz]

I watched this on the weekend, and it's good, though not great, Ford. Constance Towers is nice and feisty and Wayne and Holden have decent chemistry with her and one another.

My DVD was anamorphic, but, indeed, rather shitty transfer-wise. There are plenty of handsome compositions and no little spectacle that should translate well to HD.

[domino harvey]

Yeah, some early non-anamorphic MGM discs got 16X9 transfers in the UK, guess this was one of them. I tried watching it last year, got about five minutes in and put it back in the unwatched "pile" (the audio was shit too and no subtitles meant I was getting doubly frustrated at the disc)-- I was gonna get to it eventually, but now I'll just wait it out

[zedz]

I wouldn't be at all surprised if this were just the old shitty non-anamorphic transfer blown up and reauthored to be just as shitty, only anamorphically so. Even the silk-purse processor on my upscaling Oppo was at a loss.

[John Hodson]

I wouldn't be at all surprised if this were just the old shitty non-anamorphic transfer blown up and reauthored to be just as shitty, only anamorphically so.

Possibly not; I enjoyed a very decent HD broadcast of this recently and was quite surprised at the quality. As for if it's good Ford, it's okay, not great; the death of Fred Kennedy hangs over the whole thing like a shroud.

[zedz]

I wouldn't be at all surprised if this were just the old shitty non-anamorphic transfer blown up and reauthored to be just as shitty, only anamorphically so.

Possibly not; I enjoyed a very decent HD broadcast of this recently and was quite surprised at the quality. As for if it's good Ford, it's okay, not great; the death of Fred Kennedy hangs over the whole thing like a shroud.

To clarify - I was referring to my few-years-old anamorphic DVD, not speculating about the new BluRay, which I'm sure will be a vast improvement.

[rockysds]

Carlotta is offering a free dvd of "Rookie of the Year", Ford's Screen Director's Playhouse Episode, when you order something else from their site.

[Rsdio]

Does anyone have any info about the quality of the transfers in this UK Ford box set? Seems a great deal if it's up to par.

[henry001]

Finally 7 Women is available on DVD from Spain.

I appreciate if whoever purchased the DVD could review the quality of the DVD.

Thanks

Henry

[zedz]

Looking at that listing, they only have one copy, and it's not Amazon that's selling it but a third party, so I'd suspect a bootleg unless other listings for the film start appearing.

[Gregory]

Yeah, it's from some outfit called Nacadih Video, who make the amusing claim on the back that the film was directed by Robert Z. Leonard (who wasn't even a working filmmaker at the time). Guess what, Warner—this is the kind of product that people purchase when the legal rights-holder sits on the film for ages, doing nothing with it.

[BillWatkins]

THE RISING OF THE MOON is being released via Warner Archive in 2 weeks.

[henry001]

I do not believe it is bootleg, because Daa Vee Dee is selling it. But the quality may be bad. That is why I asked if anybody tried it. Here is another link.

[kingofthejungle]

The MGM BD of Horse Soldiers is a barely adequate transfer. Both it and the current DVD of Sergeant Rutlegde have simply terrible color - they look like they were sourced from worn Eastman distribution prints. They deservemuch better, considering they used to look gorgeous in IB Tech. Rutledge is a far greater Ford . First time I saw Rutledge in 35mm (and IB) in the sixties it was programmed with Muriel!! Stroke of genius, one of many many great doubles from those days. Horse Soldiers is a weak Ford IMO - the biggest problem is Holden who is simply for me so irritating and unctious a personality this all comes out in his performance as though via osmosis and he just doesn't sit comfortably with any of the other players, especially Wayne. Fonda in the sublime Fort Apache he aint.

You're absolutely right about the deficiencies of the Blu-Ray of Horse Soldiers. It could easily look better with proper treatment from the studio.

I have to disagree about the film itself, though. The more I watch it, the more it seems a work that was very personal to Ford, despite it being one that perhaps wasn't as fully realized as his other work. I don't want to seem like I'm trying to be cute in suggesting it (and I generally hate 'they meant it to be that way' responses to film criticism), but I do think that Holden's ill-fit with the military men (and Wayne in particular) is fairly important to what Ford is attempting to establish between the characters. To me, Holden's Maj. Kendall and Wayne's Col. Marlowe present a dichotomy that's sort of a rough draft of what he does with Ransom Stoddard and Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. You have man on intellect vs. man of instinct, civilized man vs. virile man. In this instance, one who heals as a profession vs one who kills as a profession. So Holden's almost nagging discomfort with all of the characters (importantly excepting Constance Towers' Hannah Hunter) is all of a piece, he belongs to the feminine graces of civilized society and is, in Ford's estimation, a lesser man than Wayne for it.

In some respects, Ford extends this dialectic to the war itself, but does so in a manner that can play as mere southern sympathies if one doesn't look at it too deeply. Perhaps my favorite visualization of the culture clash is Wayne & Co.'s arrival at the Hunter plantation. Wayne and another grubby looking soldier step into the polished refinement of the Hunter home, and Ford carries on a running visual gag about the soldier being unable to get rid of a plug of tobacco he's chewing. This a graceful, feminine world, with no place for spitoons, and Wayne and the other soldier are interlopers - perhaps made even more uncomfortable by the sudden intrusion of refinement into their lives than Ms. Hunter is about having occupying military forces on the grounds.

As in Liberty Valance, the ending finds the woman left unhappily with the man of intellect. The man of instinct has no place within the civilization he fights to establish, but this time he's allowed to ride out into an heroic blaze of suicidal glory. We don't get to witness his unmaking, nor any of the vulnerability associated with it, so it's neither as provocative nor unsettling as the later film. Valance also benefits from the insertion of this dichotomy into a debate about the role of law, making it both more universal and richer in implication -- but the basic structure that Ford builds on is developed in The Horse Soldiers.

I do think that what Ford achieves in Horse Soldiers is somewhat undermined by all of the nonsense in the script about Wayne's hating the medical profession due to the loss of his wife - Ford probably should have torn those pages of the script out, it's clear that he viewed each man's character as a more elemental force than the script's facile explanations allow.

[BillWatkins]

George Feltenstein said in the most recent Warner Archive Podcast that the reason they haven't released Ford's 7 Women yet is because they're currently searching for the longer Director's cut of the film. Apparently the studio interfered and forced some cuts, something I hadn't been aware of before.

[hearthesilence]

George Feltenstein said in the most recent Warner Archive Podcast that the reason they haven't released Ford's 7 Women yet is because they're currently searching for the longer Director's cut of the film. Apparently the studio interfered and forced some cuts, something I hadn't been aware of before.

I don't have it anymore, but I could've sworn that the director's cut was actually used on the old home video versions of this film. I think Jim McBride mentions it in his Ford biography too. That was a long time ago so maybe they're looking for the original film elements and all they have on the shelf is an old, obsolete video transfer?

[whaleallright]

I thought it was Sun Shines Bright that was "accidentally" released on VHS in its longer, prior-to-release version.

[hearthesilence]

I thought it was Sun Shines Bright that was "accidentally" released on VHS in its longer, prior-to-release version.

You're absolutely right! Mixed the two up, m'bad.

Regardless, the fact that 7 Women is on the radar is very welcome news. I only saw it once at BAM, just 4 years ago, and the late Elliott Stein gave a great talk about it afterwards.