According to a Movies Unlimited — I received a notice this morning — a few key 50s Westerns are going out of print on DVD.
Copper Canyon (1950)
Gunfight At The O.K. Corral (1957)
Last Train From Gun Hill (1959)
All three are Paramount pictures. All three are excellent films. And all three feature gorgeous transfers, with Gunfight and Gun Hill having been in VistaVision.
In this age of Special Editions, Blu-ray upgrades and streaming stuff, I’m not exactly sure what a title being discontinued really means. Let’s just say you’ve been warned, and my conscience is clear. (There are some great non-Western films on that list, too — such as Don Siegel’s Hell Is For Heroes.)
Great picture, the Copper Canyon comic. Of course I saved it.
Wonder what these discontinuations mean–maybe the Warner Archive model has been successful enough that these operations can scale down and reintroduce their films on a need-to basis. If so, I wonder if the extras will follow them into newer incarnations. I also wonder when they’ll start adding Blu-rays to these catalogs.
On the other hand, if the Netflix example is strong, these can all be digitally downloaded or streamed. Either way, we might be seeing the slow demise of the extras, that laserdiscs initiated (if memory serves).
As an aside, I’ve recently run across a series of James Bond soundtracks on the internet (and presumably zillions of other fannish OSTs) that pull hitherto unreleased music cues from DVDs. I guess if you have the right equipment you can digitally extract foley noises and dialogue and background from the actual scores. This means that people who have been waiting since the early sixties for an expanded OST for From Russia With Love or whatever, can finally get their needs sated, albeit illegally.
You can add these efforts to the new fan-edited versions of popular films and film series that are creeping around the internet. Someday they’ll trace all these pirate activities to the fan hatred of Jar Jar Binks.
I didn’t think Jar Jar Binks would ever make its way into a discussion of 50s Westerns..
The earliest (and still maybe the best) example of film fan-tinkering I know of is a guy who matted full-frame films to their proper aspect ratio.
T
While the other majors have at least in the past issued
Western DVDs with major stars Paramount have been
rather reluctant to re-issue big budget A westerns.
On the missing list are:
RUN FOR COVER James Cagney,John Derek,Ernest Borgnine
THE HANGMAN Robert Taylor, Fess Parker,Jack Lord
THE JAYHAWKERS Jeff Chandler,Fess Parker
THUNDER IN THE SUN Susan Hayward,Jeff Chandler
THE SAVAGE Charlton Heston
PONY EXPRESS Charlton Heston,Rhonda Fleming
RED MOUNTAIN Alan Ladd, Lizabeth Scott,Arthur Kennedy
THE GREAT MISSOURI RAID Macdonald Carey,Wendell Corey
DENVER & THE RIO GRANDE Edmond O Brien,Sterling Hayden
Paramount have resisted the MOD/DVDr route but have
leased a great part of their back catalog to Olive Films who
are slowly making available on DVD many “lost” Paramount
titles. Hopefully some of the above will turn up at some
point with a few of the missing Pine-Thomas things as well