9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
AT LAST- Rancho Notorious on DVD, December 29, 2009
At Last! Fritz Lang's final Western, "Rancho Notorious".
My main concern in buying a DVD is the quality of the transfer. And I only buy things of which I'm familiar and WANT to own.
With this disc I was more than pleasantly surprised. For the first time since it appeared on tape here is a copy to delight in. Not perfect, as at times it is a little muzzy, but the odd colouring and confined sets with painted back-drops have a beauty that suits the subject matter and Lang's interpretation of what the old West looked like. In fact, if memory serves me correctly it looks even better than it did on its initial release in the cinema. But that was a long, long time ago.
As a film it, like most of Lang's work, is an acquired taste. His characters are larger than life, they are highly emotional but well drawn, and he pushes on with his narrative. No longuers here - story, character development, action and romance -all completed in a fraction under one hundred minutes.
But what fascinates about Lang's work, expecially his Rancho Notorious, is his visual composition; his sparse use of objects in rooms so that there is nothing to distract the viewer from his sole purpose to tell a story; his almost obsessive way of framing his characters in doorways so that they receive our full attention.
This work, perhaps more so than many of his other American films, is a throw-back to the silent cinema of the Twenties. The emphasis is on the visual - camera movements, camera angles, composition (as stated above),and dialogue that is just slightly more informative than the captions that were once in use. And the jumps from one scene to the next often come as a surprise - give pause to grasp what has been happening and make us sit in awe at the confidence he had in his usage and understanding of the medium.
And the acting? Arthur Kennedy, as he was in the Westerns of Anthony Mann, intense, believable and gripping. Marlene, as ever, is in perfect control, regardless of the fact that she and Lang fought like cats and dogs during the filming. She was the consummate performer and had certainly learnt her lessons well from Joe
Verdict: Money well spent. A worthy addition to my DVD library.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Strange On The Range, Indeed, July 30, 2009
With the exceptions of the truly delirious "Johnny Guitar" (only Western to my knowledge where the women shoot it out at the end, not the men) and the completely gonzo, '60's style lunacy of "Greaser's Palace," this is one of the oddest Westerns I've ever seen. That doesn't mean it isn't an entertaining, excellent film, however. Fritz Lang was one of the great film directors and Arthur Kennedy, the lead, excelled at portraying anguish and stress, two emotions very much on display throughout the film. Lang was a master of suspense and generates terrific tension and drama from the film's revenge motif, a theme that must have been getting pretty tired with Western movies even by the early '50's. First-time viewers will be on the edge of their seats.
The real show-stealer in the movie is Marlene Dietrich, however. She sings, hams it up outrageously (hilariously spoofed by Madeline Kahn later on in "Blazing Saddles"), loves the attention of being the only woman on an isolated ranch, and generally cows, browbeats, and defies every man in the movie. Get a load of her having the time of her life in the human horse race scene in the film's first flashback. Fans of old actors will have fun spotting people like George Reeves (the '50's TV "Superman")and William Frawley (Ethel's husband in "I Love Lucy").
Two other points: One: "Chuck-A-Luck" has to be one of the most tuneless, odd melodies ever selected for a movie theme song. Two: Lang really skirted the Hays Code in this film, the rigid set of rules as to what could and couldn't be portrayed by Hollywood. There's quite a bit of blood (pretty much a big no-no in those days); the fact that the protagonist's fiance is raped before being murdered is made fairly plain (again by the standards of that day); and the protagonist and a known outlaw are shown riding away at the end of the film even though the Hays Code required that any criminal in a film should be punished or die for his crimes (Lang got around this by having the theme song refer to both men dying that day, but, like a good bit of the movie, this really doesn't make much sense).
I recommend this film to fans of offbeat Westerns in particular and to fans of a well-made films in general.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Hate, Murder and Revenge", May 6, 2008
Fritz Lang's last Western and, in many ways, his finest. One of the director's bleakest works, "Rancho Notorious" (1952) also serves as a vehicle for Marlene Dietrich, whose Germanic flavor almost lapses into self-parody. Lang's perverse, stylized "B" movie distorts reality in its use of artificial backdrops and shadowy interiors. The rugged individualism of "Rancho Notorious" is markedly different from the epic grandeur of John Ford, thus paving the way for the "psychological" Westerns of Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher.
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