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TAKING HER HOME
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Category Archives: John Ford
IN SERVICE
HOLDING THE REINS
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THE TOP TWELVE WESTERNS OF ALL TIME
According to the man pictured above:
The Naked Spur
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Unforgiven
Lonesome Dove (television mini-series)
IT’S HERE
The Quiet Man Blu-ray.
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THE QUIET MAN
Coming to Blu-ray next week — impetuous, Homeric . . .
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SO LONG, ‘DOBE
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BLU-RAY
Blu-ray is to DVD what vinyl is to CD — that is, it offers an incremental increase in quality that somehow takes the viewing or listening experience into a new realm. Vinyl sounds more like live music than a CD can, Blu-ray looks more like a projected 35mm print than a DVD can.
The Blu-ray quality is more important for some films than for others — beautifully lit films with shots composed in depth, like The Searchers, take your breath away on Blu-Ray.
It makes a great difference with a film like Rear Window, much of which takes place in a single room. Hitchcock works hard, through lighting and composition, to make that room seem like an interesting place to be confined. It feels bigger and more inviting when seen in a Blu-Ray presentation, offering the compensations Hitchcock counted on for limiting his male star’s presence to one relatively small space.
A WESTERN MOVIE POSTER FOR TODAY
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GATHERED AT THE RIVER
Frame from John Ford’s Rio Grande, shot on the Colorado River near Moab, Utah.
Myself in more or less the same location a couple of years ago, photographed by Paul Zahl..
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I’LL TAKE YOU HOME AGAIN, KATHLEEN
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YO!
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KIRBY AND KATHLEEN
I won’t say that every shot in John Ford’s Rio Grande is brilliantly lit, composed and choreographed, an example of cinematic craft at its highest pitch of elegance and beauty. Perhaps five percent of the shots in the film don’t fit that description. On the other hand, neither Citizen Kane nor Vertigo achieves that level of perfection from shot to shot, and very few films exceed it, Seven Samurai, Chimes At Midnight and The Conformist being among the few that come readily to mind.
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ESSENTIAL
John Ford’s Rio Grande is one of the greatest of all Westerns, one of the greatest of all American movies. The new Blu-ray edition of it from Olive Films belongs in every home.
For some thoughts on the film, so simple on its surface, so complex underneath its surface, click here.
ESSENTIAL
No civilized home should be without this stunning Blu-ray edition of The Seachers and the means to play it on a large-screen television. It’s as close as you will probably ever get, these days, to seeing a pristine Technicolor print projected in a theater — which is to say as close as you will probably ever get to one of the greatest works of art created in America and one of the greatest performances (by Wayne) ever committed to film.