Gary Cooper: The Signature Collection
Studio: Warner Home Video
WorkNameSort: Gary Cooper: The Signature Collection
Casual Gary Cooper fans may be surprised to hear about the caliber of the films in this six-disc collection. Dallas? Springfield Rifle? The Wreck of the Mary Deare? Minor titles indeed, and I doubt there’s a significant legion of Coop enthusiasts salivating at the thought of seeing these perfunctory genre pictures when far better vehicles for the star ‘ like Man of the West and Ball of Fire ‘ are still awaiting DVD release. As in the immortal High Noon, Cooper does a lot of waiting in Dallas as a vengeful Western outlaw, but this film is a few clock cutaways short of great. Likewise, Springfield Rifle, which finds the actor playing a Union spy in the South, is pure filler. Made by directorial lightweights Stuart Heisler and André de Toth, neither film has a compelling cinematic language nor transcendent thematic depth.
The selling points for this box are clearly Howard Hawks’ moving World War I biopic Sergeant York and Ayn Rand’s paean to libertarianism The Fountainhead. In the latter, it’s admirable to see a classic Hollywood studio take a risk on Rand’s weighty novel, but King Vidor’s stylized direction is more effective than Rand’s own pedantic script. York, though, holds up better than ever and would make a nice companion piece to the latest World War I masterpiece currently in theaters. Similar to Flags of Our Fathers, York is directed with the perfect balance of touching sensitivity and matter-of-fact battlefield immediacy. Two terrific featurettes on the bonus disc make this entire collection almost worth buying.
This article appears in Nov 8-14, 2006.