The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 4K UHD Is the Pick of the Week

For large portions of my life, I have watched horror movies in the month of October. It is the spooky season after all. For close to a decade, I’ve watched film noirs in November (it is Noirvember, after all). Non-English language films get their treatment in February. It is Foreign Film February after…well, you get the picture. I like creating movie themes for each month. This allows me to dive deeper into a genre or a particular category than I might otherwise do. I’ve found lots of lesser-known films this way. For the second year in a row, I’ve turned March into Westerns in March (yeah, I know, that’s not as snappy as the others, but it’s hard being clever all the time).

I’ve only recently become a fan of Westerns. I was never against them; I just didn’t watch them all that much. But I’ve become a big fan over the last several years and so it is fun to designate March to them. As luck would have it there are several terrific westerns coming out this week. The best is probably The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

John Ford directed it. James Stewart and John Wayne star. It is a film about myths and legends and how they are sometimes different from what they seem. It’s about the myth of the Old West that Ford, Wayne, and Stewart helped create. Stewart plays a man who rose to political power based on the legend of how he shot Lee Marvin’s outlaw character many years ago. But when he comes back home, we learn what really happened. It is a terrific film and Kino Lorber is re-releasing it on 4K UHD. They previously released it a year or so ago, but that was a limited edition with only 10,000 copies printed. From what I’ve read, this new release is the same disk but in different packaging. That’s a sneaky way to get around that whole limited edition thing, but if you didn’t get it before, now’s your chance.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

A Fistful of Dynamite (AKA Duck, You Sucker!): Sergio Leone never intended this film to be a part of his Man With No Name Trilogy (his title was always the parenthetical one, but studios preferred the tie-in to his earlier film A Fistful of Dollars) but it does feel like a lighter, funnier, spiritual successor to those films. There is no Clint Eastwood in this one, but James Coburn and Rod Steiger do their best.

Death Rides a Horse: Another Spaghetti Western. This one stars Lee Van Cleef as a man set on revenge against the men who raped and murdered his mother and sister when he was but a child.

The Lion in Winter (50th Anniversary): Peter O’Toole, Katharine Hepburn, Anthony Hopkins, and Timothy Dalton star in this medieval adventure about King Henry II and various scheming for power. Kino Lorber presents this anniversary edition with a new 4K transfer and lots of extras.

Saw 10-Film Collection: Just in time for the twentieth anniversary of the release of the first film in this gruesome horror franchise comes this boxed set with all ten films. It appears the disks themselves are all the same as previous releases, so it’s just the packaging that’s different. But it is pretty cool packaging.

Shivers: Walmart has been teaming up with various studios to release exclusive Steelbooks of various movies. This early Cronenberg horror film seems like a strange choice for a company that used to say they were all about family values, but whatever. There isn’t anything new to this release except for the cool-looking cover art.