You REALLY gotta see this: Wagon Master (1950)

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.

You gotta see this: Hellfire (1949).

Republic's Hellfire (1949) — a family favorite I've seen a million times — is pitifully hard to find, though it used to show up on The Westerns Channel every once in a while.

It's a terrific movie — in wonderful, weird-looking Trucolor — with gambler Bill Elliott trying to fulfill a promise to build a church — without resorting to the violence he's accustomed to. He decides to do a little bounty hunting to raise the money, and runs into a number of unsavory characters along the way.

Paul Fix: For a Bible-toter, you're pretty handy with a six-shooter.

Bill Elliott: It kinda bothers me, too. Seems like the only kind of sermon I can make folks listen to.

It also stars my all-time favorite actress: Marie Windsor. You may know her from Kubrick's The Killing (1956), The Narrow Margin (1952), Abbott & Costello Meet The Mummy (1955), Bounty Hunter (1954) with Randolph Scott, a few John Wayne movies and other great stuff. She always said Hellfire was one of her personal favorites, which is good enough for me.

Interesting weird little note: H.B. Warner plays the old preacher, Brother Joseph, whose death sends Elliott on his quest to build the church. Back in 1927, Warner was Jesus in The King Of Kings. He's also one of the bridge-playing Hollywood fossils in Sunset Boulevard (1950).

Rio Bravo #4