In this sweeping pioneer adventure, a courageous young scout (WAYNE) leads hundreds of settlers across treacherous cliffs, though brutal snowstorms, Indian attacks and buffalo stampedes to their destiny out West. Along the way, he loses his heart to a beautiful pioneer woman (MARGUERITE CHURCHILL) and never stops trying to win her love. TYRONE POWER co-stars in this visually spectacular epic.

No Description Available.
Genre: Westerns
Rating: NR
Release Date: 8-NOV-2005
Media Type: DVD

Here's something you don't see every day. Then again, would you want to? Several years before the 1950s' Davy Crockett craze, John Wayne donned a coonskin cap to play a militiaman in early-19th-century Alabama. He and his fellow Kentuckians are just passing through--"marching 600 miles," as they merrily sing (and sing, and sing), because riverboat magnate John Howard has refused to haul them. Howard and all-purpose scoundrel Grant Withers are scheming to dispossess a community of French émigrés--veterans of Napoleon's Grand Army who've come seeking life, liberty, etc. in the New World. Howard's also out to marry Vera Ralston, the French general's daughter. Naturally, Wayne's just the lad to gum up both plans.

Wayne himself produced The Fighting Kentuckian, but far from repeating the success of his maiden effort, Angel and the Badman, this is one of the feeblest films in his long career. Writer-director George Waggner never gets a handle on what a pre-Western should look and move like. Consequently, the cast does a lot of standing around looking silly in period costume, waiting--mostly in vain--for the script to establish their connection to one another and something resembling a plot. There is a glossier look to the proceedings than most Republic pictures achieved, thanks to Lee Garmes's pearly cinematography, but this is scant consolation. So is the almost creepy presence of Oliver Hardy, sans Laurel, doing Ollie-shtick as Wayne's jolly sidekick. No, he doesn't say, "This is another fine mess you've got me into!" But he should. --Richard T. Jameson

No Description Available.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: NR
Release Date: 17-APR-2007
Media Type: DVD

John Wayne Collection: Dakota Rio Grande Dark Command

John Wes Hardin, nacido en 1835 en una pequeña localidad de Texas vive los días azarosos de la guerra civil, que le marcarán para siempre. Un asesinato en legítima defensa, y su afición a los naipes, le lanzan a una carrera criminal, con varias muertes a sus espaldas, que le obligan a huir de un estado a otro para eludir así la acción de la justicia. Cuando se dicta una ley federal que alcanza a toda la Union, Hardin va a presidio. Allí escribirá la historia de su vida, que titulará: Historia de un condenado..

One of very few widescreen productions filmed at the dawn of the talkies, The Big Trail was dismissed by reviewers of the day, little seen, and soon shelved and forgotten--for more than half a century, as it turned out. For movie buffs, it became a sort of Holy Grail. After all, the esteemed Raoul Walsh had directed, the early 70mm angle was tantalizing, and wasn't this the movie that was intended to make a star of Duke Morrison, a 22-year-old former prop man whom Walsh had rechristened John Wayne for the occasion? For curiosity value alone, surely it rated a look.

Restored in the late 1980s and warmly embraced by film festival audiences, The Big Trail proved to be more than just a historical footnote. What were those 1930 reviewers thinking?! Wayne is fresh, exuberant, matinee-idol handsome, and irresistibly charming (only a little purple prose trips him up, and no one should have been asked to speak such early-talkie flapdoodle anyway). The scenario winds through epic settings from the banks of the Mississippi by way of the Grand Canyon to the snows of Oregon and the mountain vistas of Washington, marking both a wagon train's journey and the settling of a personal score between trail guide Wayne and Tyrone Power Sr. as a veritable ogre of a villain. (A villain off-camera, too: Legend holds that Walsh had the actor beaten nearly to death for attempting to force himself on leading lady Marguerite Churchill.) The Big Trail is now an authentic classic, and a swell movie. Probably always was. --Richard T. Jameson