Allan Dwan had a long and illustrious career in Hollywood going back to the beginning of silent days, and making his last film in 1961. He worked in just about every genre, he had a hand in inventing some of the first movie lights, and was responsible for discovering many actors and actresses (Rita Hayworth, Carole Lombard, Ida Lupino, Natalie Wood and Lon Chaney, Sr.) A string of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.'s best pictures were directed by Dwan, and he was the favorite director of Gloria Swanson and Shirley Temple. In addition he helped people like Marshall Neilan, Victor Fleming, Harold, Arthur and Richard Rosson get their starts in film. He was one of the first people hired by D.W. Griffith, John Ford served as his prop man, and Erich Von Stroheim was at one point his assistant.

Reading about Allan Dwan, I get the feeling that there was little in early film history that was not touched by Dwan in one way or another. And yet, hardly any of the hundreds of films that he was involved in are available on DVD.

Then I came across a handful of his '50s westerns: Silver Lode, Cattle Queen of Montana, Passion and Tennessee's Partner. These are more or less standard program westerns, although they are supposed to be quite above average in their technicolor photography, and they do star such actors as Barbara Stanwyck, Dan Duryea, Cornel Wilde, Raymond Burr, and Ronald Reagan. They are released by VCI, so they are cheap, and the quality could be horrible, but it could also be passable.

Has anyone seen any of these films (on DVD or otherwise)? Any comments?

Of course, for those interested in Dwan, but not willing to gamble on VCI, his River's Edge is just out in the Fox Studio Classics line.

Good post. Dwan is probably the most neglected major pioneers in American Cinema; he very rarely gets mentioned by critics or scholars. I haven't seen many of his films, as only a few of them are on DVD. I have Silver Lode and the transfer is pretty good. Scorsese praises him in A Personal Journey Through American Movies for his adventurous camera moves in the film. Pretty good film.

The last interview with Dwan, from 1980:
www.brightlightsfilm.com/17/07_dwan.html

His 1922 Robin Hood with Fairbanks is on DVD from Kino.

In addition to the titles mentioned above, here's some of the ones that I have (+ their source):
Manhandled (1924, grey market VHS)
Wages of Virtue (1924, same)
Stage Struck (1925, same, w/color Salome sequence)
West Point (1927, from TCM)
Tide of Empire (1929, TCM)
The Iron Mask (1929, Kino)
Hollywood Party (1934, LD)
Heidi (1937, DVD)
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938, DVD)
Suez (1938, from the Fox Movie Channel - rumored for 07 DVD release!) The Gorilla (1939, TCM)
Up in Mabel's Room (1944, TCM)
Getting Gertie's Garter (1945, TCM)
Sands of Iwo Jima (1949, DVD).
And I'm sure there's many more...what would we do without TCM?

And don't forget Slightly Scarlet from VCI! A guilty pleasure...

So, Silver Lodeand Slightly Scarlet are safe buys from VCI...

Ashirg -- would you happen to know about any of the other VCI Dwan westerns mentioned at the top of the thread?

Sorry, can't tell you much about those westerns although I'll be interested to know. I did do a review for Slightly Scarlet at DVD Beaver.

Nice review Ashirg, and a nice find... I am not sure that I own any VCI releases, but this looks very passable for the profile of the film and the reputation of this label. Although I love my Criterion, MoC, etc just as much as the next guy, it makes me particularly happy to hear about these little and forgotten films that exist in good releases out there on less celebrated labels.

The trick with VCI is not to have undue expectations when purchasing their DVDs. They deal primarily with public-domain stuff, but generally do acceptable jobs with it. (They have a couple of outstanding titles -- like City of the Dead for A/V quality and Bunuel's Robinson Crusoe and Losey's King & Country for importance.) Thankfully, their typically low prices make blind buys possible.

So King & Country is a good release?! I had forgotten about this one. For some reason I passed it up a couple of years ago, when I was going through Losey's other releases on DVD... remember thinking the aspect ratio was off. But, Losey and Bogarde... can't believe myself.

VCI's prices have always been appealing. The "blind buy" approach is viable for me now, but was not a couple of years back (everything being after all somewhat more expensive when importing into the country I live in).

Ah, yes, Slightly Scarlet. Listed on the IMDb as a Film Noir, though it is colour and 2:1 SuperScope. Is it good? John Alton was the cinematographer.

It's a good (if not great) Dwan, and the print is adequate. Certainly worth buying, although all the major Dwan is still misiing from DVD.

From what I can gather, the UK edition has a better transfer:

Amazon UK listing ($25)
Benson's listing ($18)

One of the greatest British films of the 60s; very powerful; exquisite performances (don't forget the late, great McKern, folks) starkly photographed by one of my heroes - Denys Coop. Larry Adler's lonesome harmonica adds the perfect colour in one of Losey's finest achievements.

Yeah, VCI are a mercurial bunch. Some of their transfers are gorgeous, but others are downright negligant - their 'remastered' Blood And Black Lace was a hamfisted effort: DVD Beaver comparison. The Baron deserves better.

Aside from the westerns and Slightly Scarlet, they also have a release of a Dwan picture called Pearl of the South Pacific starring Virginia Mayo and David Farrar. And, a double RKO bill of Dwan's Escape to Burma with Robert Ryan, Barbara Stanwyck and David Farrar (once more) with Tourneur's Appointment in Honduras with Glenn Ford and Ann Sheridan. At apx. $8 a title (incl. freight), I would get the former based on the premise alone, and the latter on the strength of the talent. In any event, I ordered all of them, and will post comments at a later date.

Also got King & Country -- didn't see your post until just now, Gordon. However, if this film is half as amazing as I remember thinking when I read about it some years ago, it will certainly be worth a double-dip if necessary.

Just made a quick thrawl through the VCI site. I could not find Robinson Crusoe or the Mann noirs. However, I stumbled across a number of other titles that look interesting: Hanibal (Edgar Ulmer, 1960); Sundown (Henry Hathaway, 1941); Quakser Fortune Has a Cousin In the Bronx (Waris Hussein, 1970); Angel On My Shoulder (Archie Mayo, 1946); The Brave One (Irving Rapper, 1956); I'll Be Seeing You (Cukor & Dieterle, 1944); Miracle at Marcelino (Ladislao Vajda, 1955 -- very nice caps and review at Beaver); The Moon and the Sixpence (Albert Lewin, 1943); And Then There Were None (Rene Clair, 1945) + a collection of one of my childhood favorite cartoons -- Popeye (75th anniversary Set of 35 cartoons).

Any comments on these?

I thought the UK edition had gone OOP. As I recall, the VCI is just a PAL->NTSC port of the UK edition. (Shades of our Kino thread!) But it's one of those more satisfactory jobs. The print is certainly beautiful.



My bad! I believe the full title is The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Or just search under Bunuel's name.

I thought it was a pretty solid noir (the only Dwan film I've seen), it's by no means a bad film anyways, and worth checking out for alton's cinematography alone which is a peculiar contrast of brazen saturated hues and his typical deep shadows. The compositions weren't particularly interesting though (as far as I can remember...) when compared with the Mann/Lewis noirs but perhaps that's attributable to Dwan who Alton felt was too stuck in his ways and fell off.

Just a quick post, as I received the DVDs that I ordered from VCI today.

Mind you, I only did a quick skip through a few chapters on each disc to ensure that they are in good condition, and to get an idea of the quality, but here is my initial impression for the benefit of anyone who may be interested in picking up any of these titles:

City of the Dead (John Moxey, 1960) -- This title has been lauded by several people in the forum, and on top of the clips that I watched looking extremely moody and scary/exciting, the transfer is as close to pristine as one can get without going to heaven. Not the slightest hint of a defect in the print, and a very strong transfer + copious extras.

Slightly Scarlet (Dwan, 1956) and Silver Lode (Dwan, 1954) have both been mentioned above as good discs, and I must say that I was impressed. Again, the source prints appear to be almost completely spotless, and the colors (both films were photographed by John Alton -- as were most, if not all of the Dwan pictures mentioned hereafter) definitely looked quite above average for color films of this age.

Passion (Dwan, 1954), Cattle Queen of Montana (Dwan, 1954) and Tennessee's Partner (Dwan, 1955) -- All of these westerns by Dwan looked to be very close in quality to Silver Lode. The source prints again appear to have been in almost pristine condition, and the colors (which do vary a little from scene to scene) fall in the spectrum from quite acceptable to good.

Pearl of the South Pacific (Dwan, 1955) and Escape to Burma (Dwan, 1955) also looked very strong, although in the scenes I watched, there seemed to be slightly greater variance in the colors between individual scenes. That said, Pearl will probably be the first that I watch... a real late night summer flick. In the few minutes that I watched, I saw gorgeous Polynesian locales, one sea monster, and one Virginia Mayo in risque "swimsuit."

The flip side of Escape to Burma features Appointment in Honduras -- an adventure yarn by Jacques Tourneur, featuring Glenn Ford sweating bullets and brandishing a machete, as he leads a group of people through the jungle... unfortunately, this side of the disc appears to have some pressing related issues, so I could only watch little bits of the film, before it would break up into "digital blocks" and freeze. The colors in this film do appear to be below the level of all the other titles mentioned, but the film as such looked really exciting.

King & Country (Losey, 1964) has also been mentioned above, and it looks absolutely great.

Sundown (Hathaway, 1941) is by far the oldest film of the batch, and here the print is not in excellent shape. The transfer as such also looks a little weaker than the other films, but then what are the chances of a better release of this film coming along anytime soon...

All in all, I am very pleased with these DVDs. And, extremely pleased to be in a position to view such a relatively large group of Allan Dwan's later films. Up until now my impression (from various reviews and posts) has been that VCI's releases were very poor. Of course this may still be so, but these titles certainly look fine, and to think that I got them all for just over $80. It is certainly not the last time I have traded with VCI, and I would be happy to hear about other titles of theirs that are of good quality.[/b]

I can't believe it has already been close to nine months since posting the above. In any event, I viewed the trio of Dwan westerns from 1954 (Silver Lode, Cattle Queen of Montana and Passion) in the past week. My initial comments on the condition of the prints and transfers still stand; the colors do fluctuate during the films, something which I find to often be the case with technicolor films, irrespective of the responsible label. Cattle Queen looked consistently the best, and it is a film that takes place almost completely on location, so there are a number of scenes that impress with their scenic beauty. John Alton was a master in color as in B/W, and it is interesting to see how he handled the extended "day for night" sequence early in the film, which looks very lovely and natural (something not always the case with this process). The presentation of Passion seemed slightly weaker than the other two films.

The three films were produced by RKO, and as pointed out above, these must have been considered standard western fare in their day. And, to be fair, they do in most respects hark back to an earlier day, when seen in context wtih some of the more modern westerns being made in the '50s by such directors as Anthony Mann and John Ford, with their emphasis on complexity of character and psychology. However, it is interesting to see the prominence of female characters in these Dwan westerns. Both Passion with Yvonne De Carlo playing a double role as twins vying for the attention of Cornel Wilde as a cowboy out to seek revenge against the crooks, who butchered his family, and Cattle Queen in which Barbara Stanwyck is the center of attention as a cowgirl out to avenge - and uphold the rights of - her father, who has been murdered and robbed of his cattle and land rights.

Silver Lode impresses with the way it blatantly critiques the House Un-American procedurals of Senator McCarthy that were on-going at the time of the film's production. Dan Duryea rides into town with his gang, flashing a US Marshall badge, and demanding that citizen John Payne be put under arrest, and taken to California to stand trial for murder and theft. McCarthy manages to stir up the sentiments of the town to the point, where almost all of Payne's friends and co-citizens believe the charges against Payne, and join in the manhunt. It is a relentless and bleak little western, in fact.

As someone, who really enjoys the old Hollywood cinema, I liked these films a lot. There is clearly an uncomplicated, straigthforward, craftsy guiding sensibility behind these films. They make no qualms about being "simply" westerns; they rather make the most of being exactly that. There are a lot of impressive moments that are almost thrown away in these films. The closing sequence in Passion of Wilde chasing his enemy up an almost vertical, snowclad mountainside, himself being chased by the law and the woman who loves him, is great cinema. The mounting paranoia throughout Silver Lode, which finally has the Payne character desperately running from building to building in his town, ending up all but completely isolated and cornered in a bell tower, that too is great cinema.

My ongoing bout with cinephilia has taken me to Allan Dwan. I already own the VCI DVD of Silver Lode, a film I cherish. However, having just ordered a hogs-head full of other VCI product directed by Dwan, I find myself concerned with the issue of OAR. IMDb's Tennessee's Partner entry states that the OAR is 2:1. Is it presented as such? Amazon says it's full-frame. The stills I've found look open-matte... I can't seem to find much info about him outside of this forum. Thanks in advance!

Tennessee's Partner is presented full frame, and I see no indication that it would or should ever have been presented otherwise (ie, the compositions look correct, title credits are centered in the frame, and there is no mention of any special photographic process in the credits). The technicolor photography by John Alton even looks very good on the disc. The film is probably not the best of the 4 or 5 Dwan westerns from VCI, but I saw them as something like a cycle. If you like Silver Lode, you will most likely enjoy all of them.

According to Maltin (usually reliable on aspect ratios), Tennessee's Partner was shot in SuperScope.

In which case the VCI DVD is, alas, fucked. Good catch.

Well, if Maltin and Cobb say so, then probably it was in superscope...

I have only my eyes.

No mention here of AR problems here.

I just checked and Maltin rated Scharphedin2's eyes **1/2

I think the confusion may be that some films were masked in superscope, although they were shot full frame -- for example Invasion of the Bodysnatchers -- in order to capitalize on the "scope" craze of the time.

Looking at the film, the image was clearly not cropped, and few of the compositions (in the stills above) make sense, if the image was designed to be masked to a ratio of 2.00:1. As the blog post points out, the film achieves a lot with very little. It is not a major film, but a good example of effective storytelling and studio professionalism. Alton's camera work is as always excellent, and lifts the film considerably. I am sure it would be very noticeable, if the format/ratio of the film had been tampered with.

If there is any doubt left from simply looking at the film, I think it highly unlikely that RKO would have released the film in superscope without trumpeting the process in the credits.