Product Details

• Actors: Henry Armetta, Warner Baxter, James Bradbury Jr., Joe Brown (III), Dorothy Burgess
• Directors: Raoul Walsh
• Format: Black & White, Color, DVD, Silent, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 1.0)
• Subtitles: English, Spanish
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: 20th Century Fox
• DVD Release Date: May 24, 2005
• Run Time: 95 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0007PALPW
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #62,970 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "In Old Arizona" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

No Description Available.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: NR
Release Date: 17-APR-2007
Media Type: DVD

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In Old Arizona, May 26, 2005

By 

J. Whiteway - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In Old Arizona (DVD)

Several years ago I found a source for In Old Arizona on VHS. It was a copy of a copy of a......... well , you get the idea.
It was in pretty poor shape. But, it was also the only resource
I could find for this movie.
This movie is not one of Warner Baxter's best movies. But, it is
historically interesting as being the very first talking western and the first appearance of the Cisco Kid. And he's a bad guy in this one too. And overall, I have to give it five stars for the fact that it was new technology and also interesting to see actors that came from the silent era learning to adapt to speaking a part as well as acting it. I am greatful to Fox for taking this movie out of mothballs and restoring it. It is not perfect but, considering the version I had previously, it is pretty near it. Well worth adding to a movie collector's collection.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Caballero's Way, September 13, 2005

By 

Steven Hellerstedt "SH" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In Old Arizona (DVD)

Set in the late 1890s and featuring Warner Baxter in his Oscar winning role as the Cisco Kid, IN OLD ARIZONA is oddly entertaining. One of the first all-talking movies, its primitive sound recording techniques make it a pretty static `action' western. Although some scenes were shot outdoors - impressively catching the actors' voices without boom mikes showing at the top of the screen - most of the action takes place indoors, if action we can call it, while the actors sit real close to each other and talk loud and slow in interminable dialogues. Missing is the normal musical scoring and under-scoring, although many scenes open and close with picturesque cowboys, pianists, and caballeros singing or strumming an old-timey standard. This odd entertainment will appeal to you if you want to see how films went about figuring out what to do now that they finally had a sound track.

IN OLD ARIZONA is taken from O. Henry's short story "The Caballero's Way." It's a story that's easy to find with a simple internet search and is worth the hunt. The movie is more or less faithful to the source: the Cisco Kid loves Tonia (Dorothy Burgess) who, O. Henry tells us, was `half Carmen, half Madonna, and the rest...let us say, was humming-bird.' The movie Tonia is quite a bit more Carmen than Madonna, though, and it's not long before her roving eyes fall upon calvary Sgt. Mickey Dunn (Edmund Lowe), a bowery boy, transplanted to the old west, who is mesmerized equally by the humming-bird charms of Tonia and the sizable bounty offered for the Cisco Kid, dead or alive. Not quite the antagonist or motivation envisioned by O. Henry, but close enough for the purposes of this movie. With its simple but strong plot in place, IN OLD ARIZONA shows us how this deadly love triangle plays out.

For fans of old movies IN OLD ARIZONA is fascinating. As one of the first big pictures released after the introduction of sound, I was engrossed more by the way the movie's makers used their new toy than with the story. What sound effects do they use for stagecoaches and galloping horses? How do they handle background, or ambient, noise? Not too well, as it turns out. There's a scene in a bar where the directors (Irving Cummings & Raoul Walsh share directing credits) have a piano player sing in the background while a conversation is going on in the foreground. The music more or less drowns out the conversation. Baxter's Mexican accent sounds like it was filtered through Chico Marx. Surprisingly, this was Dorothy Burgess's first movie. Twenty-one years old at the time, her acting, with its languidly paced exaggeration, belongs in a silent film. Usually I like or dislike a movie solely on the content of the story. My reaction to IN OLD ARIZONA is a little different. The story was okay, but there was way too much gibble-gabble, too little action, and a good chunk of the dialogue is hard to follow. I added another star because this is a transitional film, in good condition, and a study of not only what Hollywood was going to do with sound, but also what it would try and discard in the future.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars the bowery boys meet the cisco kid, September 5, 2006

By 

Jonathan Lapin "fletcher rabbit" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In Old Arizona (DVD)

this is probably the highest ranking anyone will ever give this film, but i genuinely enjoyed it. warner baxter creates the role of the cisco kid, adapted from an o. henry short story, and it owes more to o. henry than to zane grey; the dialog is punctuated with tough "noo yawk" street lingo of a century ago, and the denouement is pure irony. and incidentally, there is a hilarious exchange between the two lead cowboys where they compare the size of their respective guns. is this for everyone? by no means. but if you are a westerns buff, and are willing to take a look into a different time and a different mindset, give this a try.