I don't mean to go spending your money, but if you haven't ordered your copy of Wagon Master, you need to get to it. Here, I'll save you all the looking — get it here.It's a beautiful DVD. First class. And, of course, it's one of John Ford's best.
All the DVD reviews out there cover how simple, light and unpretentious it is, playing almost like a Western fairy tale and looking very much like the silent Westerns Ford had made (he'd return to this stripped-down "silent" look for The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance).
What's weird to me is that the badguys, the Cleggs, rarely get a mention. I saw this thing a thousand times growing up (like yesterday's Hellfire), and I always thought the Cleggs were evil incarnate — an Old West version of the freak family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
They scared me. Bad. And as a result, I don't usually agree with a lot of the analysis of this great film. Masterpiece? Without doubt. Unpretentious? Sure. Beautiful? Absolutely. But those Cleggs, they throw bright and cheery right out the window — and dump in a big bucket of Menace.
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