Savant has a barrage of reviews - two Westerns, two War films, and a famous nonfiction poetic documentary:
Home Vision Entertainment's Man of Aran is quite an experience, one of those pictures that teaches the meaning of backbreaking work. Robert Flaherty took his camera to the windswept island and shot for two years - developing his own film in a makeshift lab in a shack. The disc comes with a thorough docu that returns to Aran in 1976 to find out how things have changed, and how the islanders feel about their depiction in the earlier success.
MGM's The Unforgiven is a superior Western with a terrific widescreen look. John Huston directs an all-star cast in a gripping story of racial hatred on the frontier. With Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn, Audie Murphy, John Saxon, Lillian Gish, Charles Bickford, and Albert Salmi.
John Farrow does his share of fancy directing in Columbia's wartime propaganda film Commandos Strike at Dawn. Fisherman Paul Muni witnesses his town ravaged by occupying Nazis, and heads for England to guide Commandos back to raid, and rescue his daughter. An interesting and fairly obscure War picture.
MGM gives single-disc status to a picture that surely never saw the top half of a double bill, Roger Corman's Five Guns West. You won't believe how minimal a Western can get until you see this, but it does have a good performance from Dorothy Malone. Written by one of its actors. In glorious Pathécolor.
And finally, producer Charles H. Schneer comes up with the only picture where Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis acted together, the gloppy and intelligence-challenged Hellcats of the Navy. No, Nancy doesn't play a hellcat, just a nurse in love with a sub captain, but Ronnie is a lone beacon of acting ability in a script engineered to make room for stock footage.
The reviews roll out, favoring the weighty War epics soon to come, along with some rare foreign gems from Criterion - Thanks for reading, and for all the positive email about 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Glenn Erickson
Posted by DVD Savant at May 15, 2003 05:38 PM