On DVD, a collection of unreleased westerns restored by Warner

Continuing the business started with the “pre-code” collection of films made before the Hays censorship code came into effect, Warner has restored some of its forgotten westerns and is releasing them on DVD.this new collection is now on sale on the major's website.

Extremely disparate, spread over a period that runs from 1931 to 1971, the set brings together more curiosities than masterpieces.Of the fifteen feature films it includes, the oldest, Billy the Kid by King Vidor, is the most fascinating.The third film about its author, this western which marks its first foray into the genre is striking with its freedom of tone and the liveliness of a staging that makes fire from any wood.Its (great) charm holds.as much to its aesthetic, still very marked by that of the silent (carbon halos inscribed in the frame, use of text boxes ...), as to the principle of eccentric heterogeneity which constitutes it, and which makes it original.Deploying a bunch of totally baroque secondary characters, multiplying whimsical little scriptwriting inventions (Pat Garrett lures Billy the Kid out of his lair by grilling fried bacon), King Vidor combines the western style with a deliciously burlesque spirit for the best.

Among the successes of the series, we will also remember Two Men in the West, the unique western of Blake Edwards.The splendor of its color palette, from gray blue to yellow brown, all in depressive sparkles, echoes a story.strange fact of dead times, breaks in rhythm, non-events.Closer to the twilight tone of Du Jour du vin et des roses than to the hysterical euphoria of La Party, the film follows the drift of two cowboys by little major who decide to rob a bank to tear themselves away from the mediocrity of their condition, and magnifies it.This totally bizarre, extremely personal film comes long after the end of the golden age of the genre, when it seems to have exhausted all its possibilities.By tinting with intense melancholy the landscapes of the great west, by filming with poignant lyricism the faces of his two anti-heroes, Blake Edwards offers a sort of swan song, in minor mode.

Posted Date: 2020-12-05