My Sister Eileen (1942)

My Sister Eileen is a 1942 Columbia screwball comedy, and arguably it’s one of the best of its breed.

Ruth Sherwood (Rosalind Russell) and her sister Eileen (Janet Blair) live in Columbus Ohio. Ruth is trying to make it as a journalist and Eileen as an actress but even in the comparatively small pond of Columbus Ohio they’re still very small fish. Ruth decides that if you’re going to be a very small fish you might as well be a small fish in a big pond. In fact the biggest pond of all - New York. So, despite the forebodings of their father, they head for the Big Apple.



They end up living in a dingy basement rathole of an apartment in Greenwich Village with a crazy artist as a landlord. An added attraction is that a new subway is being constructed right underneath the building and the entire building shakes every time the engineers decide to do some blasting, which happens every few minutes But the good news is that the blasting only goes on for eighteen hours a day.

Their apartment seems to be a magnet for every crazy in New York. Most days Grand Central Station is slightly less crowded than the girls’ living room. The problem is that Eileen is a man magnet. She’s the bubbly sexy blonde while Ruth is the bookish type who’s never been a success with men.



Their careers don’t exactly take off. Men are interested in Eileen but it’s not her career they’re interested in. Ruth does eventually get to meet the eccentric editor of the prestigious glossy magazine The Manhatter, Bob Baker (Brian Aherne). He thinks she has potential as a writer but her stories don’t have enough going on. She explains that it’s difficult to write when you’re surrounded by compete chaos and insanity. Then Bob has a brainwave. Why doesn’t Ruth trying writing about the craziness that surrounds her?

It’s an inspired idea and Ruth writes a story called My Sister Eileen, because Eileen is the centre of all the madness. Bob loves the story but of course there are still plenty of obstacles to overcome before Ruth can find success and there’s the added complication that both Ruth and Eileen think Bob is the sort of man they’ve been looking for.



In true screwball comedy style the action is frenetic and everybody is working at cross purposes and everything gets crazier and crazier, culminating with half the Portuguese merchant marine dancing the conga through the apartment and Eileen winding up getting arrested for starting a riot. She doesn’t mind being thrown in the cells though because she meets some very cute policemen and they’re ever so nice to her. Men just can’t help themselves where Eileen is concerned.

Most importantly though there are not just ludicrous situations, the ludicrous situations are genuinely funny. The screenplay by Jerome Chedorov and Joseph Fields gives the players plenty of good lines and they make the most of them. Director Alexander Hall keeps the pacing tight.



Rosalind Russell is at her sparkling best. Ruth is wry and witty and despite all the setbacks she never gives up. It’s the sort of feisty and strong but very likeable and sympathetic character that she played so well. She gets plenty of solid support from the rest of the cast. Janet Blair is suitably ditzy as Eileen and proves to be the perfect foil for Rosalind Russell.

This is classic screwball comedy with the right mix of laughs, madness and romance. A total delight and a definite treat for Rosalind Russell fans.



This is one of the movies in volume 1 of the Columbia Icons of Screwball Comedy series. Each volume contains four movies and both are well worth grabbing.

Armored Car Robbery (1950)

Armored Car Robbery is not a film noir. It’s a tough gritty crime B-movie, more a police procedural in many ways, and it’s a very good one.

Made by RKO in 1950 it does have the film noir look with lots of night scenes, lots of scenes in dockside areas, cheap motels and the like - the whole paranoid seedy big city underworld feel.

Dave Purvis (William Talman) is a criminal who has always managed to say one step ahead of the law. He has no record. Now he plans a really big job - an armored car robbery. He has it all worked out. It’s foolproof.



Dave Purvis is proof that the smarter a criminal is, the dumber he is. He thinks he’s so thorough that he leaves nothing to chance. No loose ends. But right from the start chance steps in. He’s made a series of hoax calls to the police so he can time how long it takes them to get to Wrigley Field where the robbery is to take place. He knows they have three minutes to carry out the robbery. Unfortunately when the robbery actually occurs Detective-Lieutenant Jim Cordell (Charles McGraw) and his partner are two minutes away from Wrigley Field. There’s a shootout that leaves a dead cop and one of the gang badly wounded.

They make their getaway but with the wounded gang member bleeding profusely and clearly about to become a major liability.



Dave Purvis knows how to get rid of liabilities but again he’s not as clever as he thinks he is. He seems to assume that cops spend all their time sitting in police headquarters waiting for calls. It doesn’t occur to him that they spend a lot of time driving about the city making a nuisance of themselves to the criminal classes. And while doing this they have an annoying habit of noticing odd things. Odd things like cars getting pushed into the bay. And bloodstains where there shouldn’t be bloodstains.

It’s all going badly wrong and Lieutenant Cordell and his partner have found some other loose ends Dave Purvis overlooked. Like burlesque dancer Yvonne LeDoux (Adele Jurgens). She’s the wife of Benny, one of the gang members, but she’s also Dave Purvis’s girlfriend. The police are closing in but Purvis still thinks he holds all the aces.



Director Richard Fleischer was no auteur but he made some good films during his long career, including another classic crime B-movie, The Narrow Margin. Armored Car Robbery is cut from the same cloth as The Narrow Margin - a taut fast-moving very tense crime thriller.

Armored Car Robbery is an object lesson in film-making - there’s not a single unnecessary minute in the film, and there’s not a single minute that needs to be added. It’s an absolute model of efficiency. The planning of the robbery, the robbery itself, the hunt for the gang, the personalities of the key characters - all are sketched in with extraordinary economy. Never spend five minutes on a sequence that could be done just as effectively in three - that seems to be Fleischer’s motto here and it’s one of the secrets of making great thrillers.



There’s nothing fancy in Fleischer’s and there’s nothing fancy about the acting either but all the performances are effective. Charles McGraw is a great laconic hardboiled cop. William Talman is excellent as the egotistical and vicious Purvis and Adele Jergens is wonderful as the opportunistic and equally vicious burlesque queen.

It’s a low-budget movie that succeeds perfectly in doing what it sets out to do with energy and style and with a minimum of fuss, and without getting distracted by anything that is not strictly necessary. A great example of the crime B-movie at its best.



It was released on DVD in Region 1 by Warner Home Video and in Region 2 by Odeon. My copy is the Odeon version and it can’t be faulted. Highly recommended.

The Man from Laramie (1955)

The Man from Laramie was the last of the five westerns starring James Stewart that Anthony Mann directed in the 1950s.

Stewart plays Will Lockhart, a man who seems at first to be a rather amiable trader who arrives in the small town of Coronado with three wagons full of provisions for the store there. Pretty soon we discover that he’s a haunted man, haunted by the death of his brother and determined on taking revenge. Lockhart had been a captain in the US Cavalry and his kid brother had been in the service as well, until his patrol was ambushed and wiped out by Apaches. The Apaches had been armed with US Army repeating rifles and Will Lockhart wants to find the man who sold them the guns. When he finds him he intends to kill him.



Coronado turns out to be a tense unfriendly place. The big man around these parts is Alec Waggoman (Donald Crisp). He claims to own the whole town and all the country around it for three days’ ride. This proves to a slight exaggeration, but only a slight one. He owns everything except the Half Moon Ranch. That’s owned by Kate Canady (Aline MacMahon). Kate and Alec have a history, but not a happy one. Alec plans eventually to own everything, including the Half Moon Ranch.

He also hopes to establish a cattle dynasty. Unfortunately his only son Dave is not exactly ideal material for such a project. Dave is spoilt, impulsive, jealous and spiteful. He is also lazy and incompetent. Alec’s ranch foreman Vic Hansbro (Arthur Kennedy) has the job of trying to keep Dave in line and out of trouble, a formidable challenge.



Will Lockhart’s arrival in town is the catalyst that will bring the simmering tensions in Coronado to boiling point. When Dave and his boys find Lockhart and his men harvesting salt from a salt pan on the Waggomans’ Barb Ranch they burn Lockhart’s wagons and shoot his mules. Lockhart is not a man to forget this kind of treatment. Lockhart finds himself drawn into the complex and dangerous dramas of the unhappy town, dramas that escalate into a series of murders as his own obsessive search for the man he holds responsible for his brother’s death becomes enmeshed in the struggle for control of the Waggoman empire.

Vic is a key figure. An orphan, he was raised by Alec Waggoman and considers himself as having a claim on the ranch, a claim bitterly resented by Dave Waggoman. Now Alec Waggoman is in failing health and going blind and the question of who will succeed him is becoming urgent.



The villains in this movie are not the conventional sort of western villains. They’re bad because they’re weak. And their weakness makes them dangerous. Will Lockhart is a strong man but also a man driven by a dangerous obsession.

Since Anthony Mann directed some notable examples of film noir earlier in his career it’s tempting to see his westerns as a species of western noir. There’s some justification for this. His westerns do have a slightly noirish sense of fate. Characters make mistakes because they do the things that are in their nature. They seem almost unable to do anything else.



This applies to the hero in this movie as well as to the villains. Will Lockhart is a man driven not just by his desire for revenge but by the extraordinarily stubborn streak in his character. When a sensible man would walk away he dives right in.

James Stewart gave some of his most admired performances for Anthony Mann and he does a fine job here. Vic is arguably an even more interesting character than Lockhart although Arthur Kennedy is rather less impressive than Stewart. That’s perhaps personal prejudice on my part - he’s an actor I’ve never really been convinced by.



This was one of the first westerns made in Cinemascope and Mann makes the most of the format.

A very good, intelligent and complex western.

The Region 4 DVD is a handsome widescreen print although sadly lacking in extras apart from trailers.

The Sea Hawk (1924)

The 1924 silent film The Sea Hawk is not to be confused with the much better known 1940 Errol Flynn movie of the same name with which it has nothing in common apart from the pirates and the Elizabeth setting. The 1924 movie is however a terrific piece of swashbuckling fun combined with romance.

It’s based on the 1915 novel The Sea Hawk by Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950), one of the greatest of all adventure tales by one of the grand masters of the genre. Despite his name and his Italian birth Sabatini spent most of his life in England and wrote all of his many books in English. They were all perfect material for movies and many were in fact filmed, the best known being Scaramouche and Captain Blood.



This is one of the most faithful film adaptations you’ll ever see. Sabatini’s story is so good that there was really no reason to change anything.

Sir Oliver Tressilian (Milton Sills) is a very successful Cornish privateer. Not a pirate, but in Elizabethan times the dividing line between licensed privateers and pirates was notoriously thin. He is a brave noble sort of chap but with a reputation for being hot-headed and rather inclined to dueling if he feels his honour has been impugned. He is in love with Lady Rosamund Godolphin (Enid Bennett) but the match is bitterly opposed by her guardian Sir John Killigrew and by her violent and impulsive brother Peter. There is a further complication - Sir Oliver’s brother Lionel and Peter Godolphin are rivals for the affections of a lady of rather flexible morals. A duel between Sir Oliver and Sir John leaves the latter with a minor wound but doesn’t help matters, and then a drunken and enraged Peter Godolphin is killed by Lionel Tressilian.



It was a fair fight but there were no witnesses so the law is likely to regard it as a case of murder. Sir Oliver protects Lionel but then, inevitably given the poisonous relations between the two men, Sir Oliver finds himself under suspicion. He has the means to clear himself but Lionel, a man of little courage, fears that if his brother is cleared he will be accused of the murder. So he pays a rascally and notoriously treacherous sea captain, Jasper Leigh (Wallace Beery) to kidnap Sir Oliver and sell him into Moorish slavery. Sir Oliver’s sudden disappearance will naturally suggest that he was guilty and has fled.

Jasper Leigh’s ship is captured by the Spanish and Sir Oliver is sentenced to the living hell of life as a galley slave. He befriends a young noble Moor and when the Spanish ship is in turn captured by Moorish pirates Sir Oliver is more than willing to convert to Islam. It proves to be a wise move. Within a year he has become the famous Sakr-el-Bahr, the Sea Hawk, the most feared and successful of all Moorish corsairs.



Of course his story does not end there. He still loves Rosamund and still yearns to return to England. And he will encounter Captain Jasper Leigh again, and the treacherous sea dog will become an unlikely ally. He will need allies, having made dangerous enemies at the court of the Basha of Algiers. There will be further adventures, further sea fights and some unexpected plot twists.

Milton Sills makes a fine swashbuckler but it’s Wallace Beery who steals the picture as the loveable rogue Captain Jasper Leigh. The acting on the whole is fairly naturalistic by silent movie standards. There’s so much action that there’s really no need for the actors to go overboard, apart from Wallace Beery but he’s so much fun nobody is likely to complain.



The action scenes are spectacular and the Spanish and Moorish galleys are real galleys. It’s one of the most authentic Hollywood seafaring adventure movies you’re ever likely to see. The costumes and the sets are lavish. This was clearly a big-budget movie and it’s a visual treat.

The Sea Hawk has duels, murder, sea battles, treachery, romance, beautiful maidens sold in slave auctions, palace plots, double-crosses, noble heroes and just about every ingredient you could possibly wish for in an adventure movie. It’s all tremendous fun and non-stop excitement. It’s quite a long movie, just over two hours, but it packs so much plot and so much action in those two hours that there is no chance whatever of an audience becoming bored.



The Warner Archive DVD-R is a very good print with only very minimal print damage and it preserves the original tinting, one of the features of silent movies that I really love. Highly recommended.

No Orchids For Miss Blandish (1948)

No Orchids For Miss Blandish is a real oddity, a British attempt to make an American gagster film. It’s both a failure and a success. The American setting is totally unconvincing but it still manages to be a highly entertaining and surprisingly brutal crime thriller with a definite film noir tinge.

It’s based on the 1939 novel of the same name by the British thriller writer James Hadley Chase. He decided to write an American gangster novel although his knowledge of American gangsters (and America in general) was derived entirely from his reading of American pulp crime fiction. It was an enormous success and launched his long and lucrative literary career.



The 1948 film adaptation suffers from the same fault - this is an America of the imagination, an America that is a reflection of Hollywood crime movies. Everything about the American setting is subtly wrong. Or sometimes not so subtly wrong! Sid James’ American accent has to be heard to be believed. The actors are English and the accents are embarrassingly phony. But this movie simply doesn’t care. It races along with so much energy and enthusiasm that you end up not caring about such details either. In fact it’s part of the movie’s strange fascination.

It all starts with three punks trying to pull off a daring jewel theft. Miss Blandish (Linden Travers) is a fabulously wealthy heiress who owns jewels worth $100,000 and these punks have found out she’s going to be travelling to the country with her boyfriend with the jewel on her. Ambushing them up in their car and stealing the jewels should be dead easy. In fact the robbery ends with three people dead. The surviving thief gets the jewels, and he gets Miss Blandish. So far so good, but then he runs foul of the notorious Grisson gang.



Now mobster and gambling joint operator Slim Grisson (Jack La Rue) has the girl and the rocks. The gang figures this is a lucky break - her father will pay a huge random to get her back. what they don’t know is that Slim Grisson has been madly in love with Miss Blandish for a long time. His unrequited love takes an unexpected turn when she falls in love with him as well. He’s a violent ruthless gangster and that’s just the sort of man she has been waiting for all her life.

Their newfound love isn’t going to please the rest of his gang and it isn’t going to please Ma Grisson, the real leader of the gang (James Hadley Chase was fascinated by the story of Ma Barker and her boys). And they have not just the police to deal with but also a tough two-fisted newspaper reporter, Dave Fenner (Hugh McDermott). We know he’s an American newspaper reporter because he always carries a gun and shoots first and asks questions later and he slugs people a lot. That’s what American newspaper reporters do.



As the plot progresses, so does the body count. I lost count of the number of corpses. By the standards of 1940s British movies No Orchids For Miss Blandish is astonishingly (and quite graphically) violent. I have no idea how this movie got past the strict British censors. The idea seems to have been to make a movie that would be more hardboiled, more violent and more sexy than contemporary Hollywood crime films. The level of violence outraged British critics at the time.

There’s some terrific hardboiled dialogue. It might not always be authentically American but it’s still vastly entertaining.



The acting is excellent if you discount the accents. Jack La Rue is the only American in the cast. He’s a poor man’s Humphrey Bogart but he’s still pretty good. Walter Crisham is wonderful as his sadistic henchman Eddie. MacDonald Parke is memorably creepy as Doc, a struck-off doctor turned smooth hoodlum. Lilli Molnar joins in the scenery-chewing as Ma Grisson and Hugh McDermott is great fun as the gun-toting reporter. The casting of Sid James as a hardbitten New York bartender lends the movie a rather surreal touch.

There are surprising hints of sleaze, very unusual in a British movie of this period. The night-club scenes are quite well-mounted although the songs are fairly forgettable. The budget must have been reasonably substantial and technically the movie is impressive enough. St John Legh Clowes wrote and directed the film and he was clearly a believer in keeping the action moving along as rapidly as possible. It’s an approach that works for me.



The Region 2 DVD from Simply Media is barebones but otherwise more than satisfactory. It’s also been released in Region 1 by VCI.

This movie is like no other British crime movie of its era, a strange but very entertaining concoction and definitely worth a look.

Rio Bravo (1959)

In Rio Bravo in 1959 Howard Hawks returned to the themes that informed all his great action adventure movies. Once more we have we have a group of men facing danger and death, and once more they are professionals and as such they willingly accept the risks involved.

Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) has a prisoner in his gaol in a small border town in Texas. Joe Burdette is accused of murder. A US Marshal is on the way to collect the prisoner but will not arrive for six days. The problem for the sheriff is that Joe Burdette’s brother Nathan is the most powerful man in the county. Nathan is a rancher but in truth he’s more of a gangster. For Nathan Burdette murder is a minor matter compared to saving his brother from the noose. He has dozens of well-armed men and he is determined that his brother will not stay in gaol. Sheriff Chance has only his two deputies, a cripple (Stumpy, played by Walter Brennan) and a drunk (Dude, played by Dean Martin).



The plot is essentially a siege. When Nathan pays a travelling Mexican band to play the same song that the Mexican army played during the Battle of The Alamo to try to convince them of their doom it makes perfect sense. Chance and his men are every bit as besieged as the defenders of The Alamo.

The plot isn’t really the point of the movie. This is a heavily character-driven movie. The heroes will be sorely tested and their weaknesses will be exposed. Their ability to overcome those weaknesses will decide their fate.



This applies particularly to Dude. He’s an alcoholic and when the events of the movie start to unfold he’s been sober for precisely one day. He doesn’t know if he will be able to get the job done, and nor does Chance. There’s a memorable scene where the two of them have to go into a saloon full of bad guys to arrest a killer. Chance lets Dude take the lead. He wants to give Dude the chance to prove that he’s up to the job but he’s ever watchful in case this proves not to be the case. The scene is beautifully played by both actors.

Wayne gives one of his strongest performances, nicely leavened with humour. When Hawksian heroes face danger and death they don’t get all maudlin about it. Dean Martin is the big surprise. He apparently was very keen to land the role. He clearly thought he could do it justice, and he was right. Ricky Nelson is also surprisingly good as the young gunslinger Colorado Ryan. He wasn’t the world’s greatest actor but he’s more than adequate and he plays the role with a certain sly humour which complements Wayne’s performance nicely.



And then there’s the girl. Feathers (Angie Dickinson) is a classic Hawks woman. She’s feisty, strong, intelligent, resourceful and level-headed. In a tight corner she’s not a burden to the hero; she’s an asset. At first the love story between Chance and Feathers might seem a bit unlikely but really it makes perfect sense. She’s been married to one loser and she’s not going to make that mistake again. Next time she’ll pick a man who is worthy of her. She’s an alpha female and she’s going to go for the alpha male. While Dude and Colorado are both nice guys and they’re both cute John T. Chance is clearly the alpha male here. Angie Dickinson makes a slendid Hawksian woman.

This is an extraordinarily claustrophobic western. There’s hardly a scene in the movie where you can see the horizon. While other Hollywood westerns of the 50s were taking advantage of the widescreen formats to show the wide open spaces of the frontier Hawks takes the opposite tack. He closes everything in. His characters are trapped in the town, surrounded by Nathan Burdette’s gunmen. They’re in a universe of their own, completely cut off from the outside world, just like the airmen in Hawks’ much earlier Only Angels Have Wings. It’s a very effective technique and it really ratchets up the tension.



Hawks was not tying to do anything radical in this film. He was not trying to re-invent the western. This is a much more conventional movie than the westerns John Ford was making at the same time. What I suspect Hawks was trying to do was to show that the traditional western themes were timeless and that if done with sufficient skill they would still work. What it does have in common with the contemporary westerns of Ford, and of people like Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher, is that it’s a very grown-up western.

While Hawks is dealing with well-worn themes he never descends to mere cliché. This is illustrated rather nicely by the character of Colorado. when we first meet him we expect he will fall into one of two cliché roles. We expect that most probably he will be the young hot-headed gunslinger - cocky, over-confident and dangerous - who will cause trouble for the sheriff. But it doesn’t happen. There is tension at first between Colorado and Chance, but that’s just the older man testing out the youngster. Chance soon decides that this kid is alright. The second alternative would have been for him to the typical rookie who needs the older man to teach him the ropes. But that doesn’t happen either. Colorado is young but he’s a cool-headed professional. We also suspect that when he is given his deputy’s badge he will clash with Dude, being a threat to the older man. In fact he and Dude get along very well.



While Hawks made some memorable westerns I don’t think he was a western director in the sense that John Ford was. John Ford movies like The Searchers or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance could only have been westerns. There’s an obsession with the psychology of the frontier and the mythology of the west. Rio Bravo could just as easily have been a war movie, or a movie set in a big city with the heroes as cops. For Hawks the western was a means to an end, a way of telling the stories he liked to tell. For Ford the western was an end in itself.

With a fine script by Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, a strong cast and with Hawks’ non-nonsense directing style Rio Bravo is magnificent entertainment.

Gunga Din (1939)

Gunga Din is one of those movies that demonstrates that a troubled production history doesn’t necessarily lead to a bad film. It can result in a very good film.

To say that this 1939 production was based on Rudyard Kipling’s poem of the same name would be misleading. It would be more accurate to say it was inspired by the poem and by his collection of short stories Soldiers Three but in fact the screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charles Macarthur is pretty much an entirely original story. Many writers worked on this project but the plot of the final film was largely the work of Hecht and Macarthur.

Several different directors were at various times slated to direct the film, including Howard Hawks. Eventually RKO settled on George Stevens because up to that time he’d had a reputation for bringing movies in on time and on budget. Ironically Stevens went way over budget on Gunga Din!



Many actors were also at various times considered, including Robert Donat and Ronald Colman, before the final lineup of Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks Jr was chosen for the three leads, with Sam Jaffe as Gunga Din and Joan Fontaine as Fairbanks’ love interest.

This was in fact a very very big production for RKO. There was a good deal of location shooting, mostly at Lone Pine in California (a perennially popular movie location), and some impressive sets. And some very large-scale action scenes.



Sergeants Cutter, MacChesney and Ballantine (Grant, McLaglen and Fairbanks) are three firm friends serving in the British Army in India. They’re good if somewhat rowdy soldiers who see themselves as being a bit like the Three Musketeers. Until a terrible disaster intervenes - Sergeant Ballantine announces he’s going to get married and leave the army! His bride-to-be Emmy (Joan Fontaine) thinks the army is much too dangerous. Of course now it’s up to Cutter and MacChesney to save their pal from this awful fate.

Cutter has other plans on his mind as well, like looking for a fabulous treasure rumoured to be found in an abandoned temple. He has two companions in the quest for the treasure. One is the regimental water-carrier, Gunga Din, who has dreams of being a real soldier. The other is one of the regiment’s elephants, Annie (the particular pet of Sergeant MacChesney).



What Cutter doesn’t know that the temple is in fact the headquarters of a revived Thuggee cult. The murderous Thugs were thought to have been eliminated but this is far from being the case. The Thugs have moved beyond their usual practices of ritual murder and are now planning large-scale revenge on the British who had suppressed their cult. This will put the whole regiment in danger. The three friends all become involved in a desperate attempt to foil the Thugs’ plans and Gunga Din will find a role to play as well.

It’s a wonderful rousing adventure tale. It starts in a light-hearted vein but gradually becomes more serious and ends with a spectacular battle scene.



The very strong cast is a major asset. While Joan Fontaine has little to do the film affords the other players plenty of opportunities and they make the most of them. Cary Grant’s performance is heavy on the comedy but that suits the tone of the movie well enough. The standout performance though comes from Douglas Fairbanks Jr, an actor I find myself liking more and more.

George Stevens may have had set an outrageous amount of RKO’s money on this picture but the results are worth it. The movie cost so much that it made a loss on its initial release despite doing good business at the box-office but it was regularly re-released and ended up being a very profitable property.



The Region 1 DVD looks great and includes some worthwhile extras.

One of the classic Hollywood adventure movies.