Cowboy Collection [3 Discs]

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

Includes: Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, The Good, The Bad & The Ugly and The Magnificent Seven.

DVD FEATURES:

• Region: 1
• Number of Discs: 3
• Screen: Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 (Cinemascope)
• Audio: Dolby Digital Stereo
• Features:
  • cc

AWARDS

• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

•     Won Best Cinematography - 1969 (Conrad L. Hall)
•     Won Best Original Score - 1969 (Burt Bacharach)
•     Won Best Original Screenplay - 1969 (William Goldman)
•     Won Best Song - 1969 (Burt Bacharach, Hal David)
•     Nominated Best Director - 1969 (George Roy Hill)
•     Nominated Best Picture - 1969 (John C. Foreman)
•     Nominated Best Sound - 1969 (William Edmundson, David Dockendorf)
•     Nominated Best Drama or Comedy Score - 1960 (Elmer Bernstein)

• American Film Institute

•     Won 100 Greatest American Movies - 1998

• British Academy of Film and Television Arts

•     Won Anthony Asquith Award - 1970 (Burt Bacharach)
•     Won Best Actor - 1970 (Robert Redford)
•     Won Best Actress - 1970 (Katharine Ross)
•     Won Best Cinematography - 1970 (Conrad L. Hall)
•     Won Best Director - 1970 (George Roy Hill)
•     Won Best Editing - 1970 (Richard Meyer, John C. Howard)
•     Won Best Picture - 1970 (George Roy Hill)
•     Won Best Screenplay - 1970 (William Goldman)
•     Won Best Soundtrack - 1970 (William Edmundson, Don Hall, David Dockendorf)

• Directors Guild of America

•     Nominated Best Director - 1969 (George Roy Hill)

• Hollywood Foreign Press Association

•     Won Best Original Score - 1969 (Burt Bacharach)
•     Nominated Best Original Song - 1969 (Burt Bacharach, Hal David)
•     Nominated Best Picture - Drama - 1969
•     Nominated Best Screenplay - 1969 (William Goldman)

• Telluride Film Festival

•     Film Presented - 1992
•     Film Presented - 1989

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Cast:

  
       Clint Eastwood - The Good
       Eli Wallach - Calvera
       Katharine Ross - Etta Place
       Aldo Giuffre
       Charles Bronson - O'Reilly
       Jeff Corey - Sheriff Bledsoe
       Brad Dexter - Harry Luck
       Cloris Leachman - Agnes
       Ted Cassidy - Harvey Logan
       Kenneth Mars - Marshal
       Donnelly Rhodes - Macon
       Jo Gilbert - Large Woman
       Timothy Scott - News Carver
       Bing Russell - Robert
       Charles Dierkop - Flat Nose Curry
       Francisco Cordova - Bank Manager
       Nelson Olmsted - Photographer
       Paul Bryar - Card Player #1
       Sam Elliott - Card Player #2
       Charles Akins - Bank Teller
       Eric Sinclair - Tiffany's Salesman
       Aldo Sambrell

• Director:

  George Roy Hill, Sergio Leone, John Sturges

• Producer:

  John C. Foreman, Alberto Grimaldi, Walter Mirisch, John Sturges

• Screenwriter:

  William Goldman

• Screen Story:

  Mickey Knox

• Screenwriter:

  Sergio Leone, Age, Furio Scarpelli, Luciano Vincenzoni, Walter Bernstein, Walter Newman, William Roberts

• Cinematographer:

  Conrad L. Hall, Tonino Delli Colli, Charles B. Lang

• Composer (Music Score):

  Burt Bacharach

• Songwriter:

  Hal David

• Composer (Music Score):

  Ennio Morricone

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Bruno Nicolai

• Composer (Music Score):

  Elmer Bernstein

• Editor:

  John C. Howard, Andrew Horvitch, Richard Meyer, Eugene Alabiso, Nino Baragli, Ferris Webster

• Art Director:

  Philip M. Jefferies, Jack Martin Smith, Carlo Simi, Edward FitzGerald

• Executive Producer:

  Paul Monash

• Set Designer:

  Chester L. Bayhi, Walter Scott

• Costume Designer:

  Edith Head, Carlo Simi

• Sound/Sound Designer:

  David Dockendorf, William Edmundson, Gonzalo Gavira

• Makeup:

  Dan Striepeke, Rino Carboni, Emile LaVigne

• Special Effects:

  L.B. Abbott, Art Cruickshank, Lawrence Schiller, Eros Bacciucchi, Milt Rice

• First Assistant Director:

  Steven Bernhardt, Giancarlo Santi

• Camera Operator:

  Franco di Giacomo

• Stunts:

  Jack Williams

• Casting:

  Michael McLean

• Conductor:

  Burt Bacharach

• Second Unit Director:

  Michael Moore

REVIEWS:

• One of the most popular Westerns of all time, John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven was based on Akira Kurosawa's 1954 epic The Seven Samurai (which was originally titled "The Magnificent Seven" and was itself a thematic descendant of the Westerns of John Ford). Director/producer Sturges packed a huge amount of plot and detail into what could have been a routine Western -- the opening threat to the Mexican village; the first meeting between Yul Brynner's Chris and Steve McQueen's Vin in a tense confrontation with a group of racist thugs trying to block a funeral procession; the decision to help the villagers and the gathering of the unlikely band of heroes; the heroes' journey to the village and their confrontation with who and what they, as gunmen, really represent to the people they're trying to help. Some of this kind of material had figured in other, earlier movies, including George Stevens' Shane, Anthony Mann's underrated The Tin Star, and Sturges' own Last Train From Gun Hill, but no one had ever put quite that much plot or character development into a single Western before. Apart from Yul Brynner, who was already an established star thanks to The King and I, the cast featured a half-dozen actors who were either on the edge of stardom, such as Eli Wallach and Steve McQueen, or who would become major stars in coming years, including James Coburn, Charles Bronson, and Robert Vaughn; indeed, Sturges would re-team with McQueen, Coburn, and Bronson for 1963's The Great Escape, a film that provided a huge boost to each man's career. The Magnificent Seven was a massive hit when it was first released and by 1966 had spawned the first of three sequels; but the cast, which grew in prominence as most of them became massive box-office attractions in their own right, only made the movie seem bigger and more important as time went on, so much so that, had it not gone to television in the early '60s, The Magnificent Seven would have been ripe for an even bigger theatrical run in, say, 1965 or 1966. As it was, a television series based on the film was finally spawned at the end of the 1990s. There were also enough parodies, as well as references to the movie in media touchstones like the 1980s sitcom Cheers -- The Magnificent Seven being the favorite movie of the bar's regular patrons -- to confirm its place in the cultural lexicon. None of the sequels or the television series, however, ever matched Sturges' original, either at the box office or in their impact on popular culture. The secret behind the original's vast success, apart from the once-in-a-lifetime cast and the dazzlingly memorable score by Elmer Bernstein, was its timing and underlying zeitgeist. The Magnificent Seven was one of the very last feel-good films about American adventurism abroad to come out of Hollywood. Appearing in the period immediately before Vietnam became a political worry and then a full-blown war, it was the last major movie to depict Americans (albeit gunmen and mercenaries) going to another country to help a people struggling for independence, without any of the complications that Vietnam added to that notion. The film was, thus, a two-tiered nostalgia experience -- initially, about the closing of the West and, in the next few years, in a much more powerful and potent way, as a fond look back at Americans' image of themselves as "good guys" in the modern world. The only flaw in the film that is apparent when looking at it today is the absence of a black member of the seven -- Sturges himself was an old-fashioned, two-fisted liberal, but it's debatable whether, even if the script had contained such a character, United Artists or any other studio, would have okayed that casting in 1959. Even three years later United tried to get Ralph Nelson to make Lillies of the Field with Steve McQueen in place of Sidney Poitier); not to mention the question of who would have played the part -- among the most visible black leading men of the period, Poitier was too young and James Edwards was the wrong type. In any case, the film is a perfect document of its time as it stands and has become identified as such an intensely American cultural document that many viewers are unaware of its origins as a samurai story. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi
• Released the same year as The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid covered similar territory about the end of Western myths, but it expressed its revisionism with tongue firmly in cheek rather than with the brutal violence of Sam Peckinpah's offering. Butch and Sundance never lose their gift for one-liners, even when they have to jump off that gorge; George Roy Hill and screenwriter William Goldman send up the image of outlaws heading south of the border with bank robberies conducted in broken Spanish from crib notes. Still, violence impinges on Butch's and Sundance's world, intimating the fate that modernity held for charming bandits who cannot master a horse-replacing bicycle. The jocularly clear-eyed approach to the pair's exploits, combined with the chemistry between Paul Newman and relative newcomer Robert Redford, vastly appealed to audiences; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid became the most popular film of 1969 and won several Oscars, including one for Goldman's script. Like Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, glamorous outlaws Butch and Sundance were in tune with the late-'60s counterculture, but the movie's humor -- and its Oscar-winning Burt Bacharach/Hal David song "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" -- softened the revisionist blows amid impending tragedy. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi
• The last and grandest film in the "Dollars" trilogy, Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966) is actually a prequel, featuring Clint Eastwood's serape-less Blondie in a search for stolen gold during the Civil War. While the titular trio's quest seems simple, Leone renders the proceedings epic through the constant intrusions of a chaotic, war-torn universe. Rather than an ideal space, Leone's widescreen desiccated western landscape is a harsh environment ruled by brutality, but, as Eastwood's ironically labeled "Good" affirms upon witnessing a fruitless military battle, state-sanctioned bloodshed is even more destructive than individual venality. Still, Blondie's dry wit and Eli Wallach's buffoonish "Ugly" inject the violence with dark humor, while Ennio Morricone's famed score alternates between stately and tongue-in-cheek. In a final shootout set in an enormous circular cemetery and composed of extreme close-ups of the three leads, Leone sends Eastwood's Man With No Name out on a properly operatic yet wry note. The "good" triumphs, but, in Leone's West, it's all relative. Greeted with critical disdain for its stylistic flourishes and sadism, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly became a hit, and Leone's artistic influence can be seen from Eastwood's directorial work to John Woo's action theatrics. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi