westerns
Adam Sweeting
Henry Hathaway's 1969 version of True Grit famously won John Wayne his solitary Oscar for Best Actor. Jeff Bridges, remaking the role of battered, boozing, one-eyed lawman Rooster Cogburn in the Coen brothers' new incarnation, is nominated for the second year running after last year's triumph with Crazy Heart. Look out Colin Firth, because Bridges is in such barnstorming form that we could conceivably see him roaring off into the Hollywood night clutching another statuette, swigging moonshine and firing his six-gun in the air.But despite its services to the Duke, Hathaway's film also raised Read more ...
Graham Fuller
For the second time in four years, John Ford’s Stagecoach - the epochal black-and-white 1939 B-western that made a star of John Wayne and an icon of Monument Valley, and anticipated Ford’s unequalled run of westerns over the next quarter-century and the psychological westerns of the Fifties - has been remastered and reissued in a substantial two-disc DVD package. The eyes of Ford and Wayne completists should thus light up like those of the alcoholic Doc Boone (Oscar-winner Thomas Mitchell) relishing a couple of days’ proximity with the milquetoast whisky drummer Samuel Peacock (Donald Meek) Read more ...