Warner Home Video Western Classics Collection (Escape from Fort Bravo / Many Rivers to Cross / Cimarron 1960 / The Law and Jake Wade / Saddle the Wind / The Stalking Moon)

Amazon.com There's plenty in this set for Western fans to enjoy, but let's note that none of these movies rises to the classic status the box title claims. If the term "Western classic" is to mean anything--and it should--it has to be reserved for the likes of Stagecoach, The Naked Spur, Seven Men from Now, and Unforgiven. What we have here are half a dozen pictures that came out in mid?20th century, have recognizable professionals going about their business, and agreeably remind us of how they made 'em before they stopped makin' 'em the way they used to. And for a pleasant weekend's viewing, that'll do nicely. The Civil War?era Escape from Fort Bravo (1953), the first of director John Sturges's many Westerns, has flint-hard U.S. Cavalry officer William Holden riding herd on Confederate POWs in Arizona. Once Holden has fallen for his colonel's daughter's best friend Eleanor Parker, who's also secretly the fiancée of Rebel officer John Forsythe, the film itself is allowed to escape Fort Bravo and echo off the walls of some picturesque canyons well-supplied with hostile Indians. Sturges had a good eye for staging action, and the big climax involves a kind of Apache Agincourt, a patiently lethal military tactic on the part of the Mescaleros. Cameraman Robert L. Surtees was forced to abandon Technicolor for Ansco color, which has a pleasing palette for standard scenes but tends to go greenish and speckly in desert longshots. This was MGM's first production in modest widescreen (1.77:1), which your flat-screen TV may shave a mite. The other five films in the set, all full CinemaScope (2.35:1), look fine. The Law and Jake Wade (1958) is another Sturges-Surtees picture, one of three vehicles for fading MGM star Robert Taylor. He's a reformed outlaw turned town marshal who springs former partner Richard Widmark from jail, thereby paying off an old debt. But as Widmark sees it, they still have unfinished business, best settled by dragging Taylor and fiancée Patricia Owens off to a ghost town haunted by old guilt and savage Indians. As a journey Western, the movie pales alongside the great Budd Boetticher films of the same era, but the felonious traveling companions include Henry Silva, Robert Middleton, and DeForest Kelley, and the derelict town and its Boot Hill make a memorable killing ground. The credits of Saddle the Wind (1958) feature two unlikely names to be connected with a Western: the script is by Rod Serling (pre?Twilight Zone), and the wind in need of