Stars: John Wayne

Summary: In the Academy Award-winning TRUE GRIT, crotchety U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn would rather stay at home than chase criminals. He heeds the call, though, when 14-year-old Mattie Ross calls on him to avenge her father's death at the hands of a man who has escaped into Indian territory. The pair are accompanied on their journey by a Texas ranger who has his own motives to serve... In the action-packed Western THE SONS OF KATIE ELDER, three wandering sons return home to attend the funeral of their mother who has been murdered. The brothers then set their sights on the man responsible for her death, as well as for the death of their father six months prior. However, getting revenge won't be easy because the culprit--who has also gained possession of the family's ranch--will stop at nothing to deter them... THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE recounts the story of Ransom Stoddard, a politician with an axe to grind. Years earlier, the newly-minted lawyer received a vicious beating from the notorious thug Liberty Valance and was left for dead. Tom Doniphan, a rancher and feared gunman, found Stoddard unconscious and nursed him back to health. As a result, the two men became great friends, despite their differing attitudes towards law and justice. In his capacity as senator, Stoddard vows to rid the small town of Shinbone of undesirables like Valance.

WIN DVDs by rating this DVD

Average User Rating:

WIN DVDS by being amongst the first to review this DVD. Reviewing DVDs earns you bonus entries and lets you WIN DVDs!Please login before reviewing this DVD. If you're a new user, register for free and enter to WIN FREE DVDs!

True Grit

A wonderful/rueful running gag in El Dorado involves the Edgar Allan Poe line "Ride, boldly ride" being mangled by toupee-wearer John Wayne into "Ride, baldy, ride." Two years later, in True Grit, Wayne put the joke in italics by donning an eyepatch and several inches of girth to play cantankerous territorial marshal Rooster Cogburn. Critics belatedly noticed that he could be a marvelously entertaining actor, and Hollywood finally gave him the Oscar they'd failed to nominate him for in Red River, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, et al. But make no mistake: True Grit is a splendid movie, with lovingly textured storytelling and sturdy characters, Henry Hathaway's finest high-country action set-pieces, intoxicatingly ornate frontier language, and a couple of formidable bad guys (Jeff Corey's Tom Cheney and Robert Duvall's "Lucky" Ned Pepper). It's a compliment to say that, from a technical standpoint, the movie could have been made any time in Hathaway's 40-year career, yet its feeling for the reality of violence ceded no ground to The Wild Bunch, released around the same time. Still, the film's most sublime passage falls between bursts of gunplay: Rooster sitting on a hilltop at night recounting his life story, as John Wayne metamorphoses ineluctably into W.C. Fields. --Richard T. Jameson

The Sons of Katie Elder

John Wayne recovered from his first bout with cancer to appear in this 1965 film as the brother of Dean Martin, Earl Holliman, and Michael Anderson Jr. All four characters are wandering souls prone to trouble, but after the funeral of their frontier mother, they set out to avenge her death. Directed by Henry Hathaway (Wayne's director on True Grit), the film moves like a conventional, latter-day Western, with good performances from Wayne and Martin, who'd already costarred with the Duke in Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo. Nice support from Dennis Hopper (who had a legendary conflict with Hathaway on this film), Strother Martin, and George Kennedy. --Tom Keogh

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

"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. 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

Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Release Date:	October 6, 2008
Runtime:	354 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	P H E 9640
Keywords:	Man, Wayne, English, Shot, Who, True, John, Liberty, Sons, Grit, Katie, Drama, Elder, Valance, Westerns
Genre:	Westerns