Unconquered (Blu-ray) by Justin Remer The Movie: Unconquered (1947) is one of Cecil B. DeMille's epic takes on America's frontier past, much like the recently reissued Union Pacific. It's a romantic look at the colonial settlers' push west into Indian territory, with dashing and square-jawed Gary Cooper as the half-idealistic/half-sensible hero, Captain Holden. His nemesis is Garth, a shifty-eyed arms dealer played with villainous aplomb by Howard Da Silva. Garth is making moves and selling rifles to the Seneca -- not for the benefit of the indigenous people, but so he can be position himself as the white man with first dibs to steal land.Garth's duplicitousness extends to romantic matters as well. Early in the film, Gart...Read the entire review »

The Emperor Waltz (Blu-ray) by Stuart Galbraith IV The Emperor Waltz (1948) is one of director and co-writer Billy Wilder's least Wilder-esque films. Prior to its production, Wilder had spent many months in Europe, visiting Berlin, bombed back to the Stone Age, the concentration camps and looking at footage shot immediately after their liberation, all the while searching in vain for his mother and other Jewish relatives that doubtlessly perished in the Holocaust. Initially, Wilder considered making a documentary about what he had seen there, but instead began developing with co-writer Charles Brackett a film about the American Occupation forces in Berlin, a project that eventually became A Foreign Affair (1949). A commonly held theory is that Wilder was so traumatized by the atrocities he had seen, that combined with survivor's guilt from having successfully fled Nazism in the 1930s, he made The Emperor Waltz, a confectio...Read the entire review »