Criterion Collection Blu-ray Review: Red River (1948)

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Related Essay:
Rio Bravo

Although he embraced nearly every genre from adventure to Film Noir to screwball comedy throughout his enviable career (and didn’t shy away from blending several together in the span of a single film’s running time), technically speaking, 1948’s Red River was Howard Hawks’ first western.

Admittedly that’s an amazing feat when you consider the film’s overall complexity. Yet as a character driven storyteller less concerned with traditional structure and formula than he was in spinning a memorable yarn, Red River had all the hallmarks of a Hawks classic.

Coming right off the heels of To Have and To Have Not and The Big Sleep — both of which starred Humphrey Bogart — Hawks dared to cast the white-Stetson clad, All-American cowboy hero John Wayne in a role that was decidedly better suited to guy like Bogart whose screen fedoras and Stetsons typically ranged in color from black to gray.

A subversive casting decision, Hawks also aimed to rip that black hat/white hat surface level philosophy to shreds.

While we get the impression The Duke begins the film like the heroic cowboy we’d all come to know and love from movies like Stagecoach, within River's first act Hawks gives audiences their first glimpse of Duke as a Noir tinged antihero after he makes a fatal mistake by not bringing his lady love with him to settle land and build a cattle empire.

Losing her to frontier violence in a (thankfully) offscreen Native American attack, Wayne’s hardened Tom may have lost his beloved but he unexpectedly gains an adoptive son.

Taking a young boy named Matt under his wing who’d likewise lost everyone he’d had to old western violence as well, Tom becomes the veritable father to the child who grows to become Montgomery Clift.

Jumping ahead in time until the end of the war which found land overtaken by carpetbaggers and all of the money depleted from the south, Tom and Matt decide to go where they can make a living by organizing a late nineteenth century cattle drive from Texas all the way to Missouri along the Chisholm Trail.

A post WWII cinematic study of evolving masculinity across two generations as contrasted by Wayne’s hard-hearted tyrannical patriarch and Clift's sensitive, contemplative, level-headed veteran who’s experienced violence as a survivor and a soldier embodied by the actor in his first screen role, Red River is also another in a long line of father/son, mentor/protégée male “love stories” that would populate Hawks’ career.

Essentially a new variation of an old storyline and/or an unofficial thematic sequel to Only Angels Have Wings which he made a decade earlier and would follow up with again each decade with new screen interpretations such as Rio Bravo in the ‘50s and El Dorado in the ‘60s, Red River was a character-driven western first and foremost.

Distinctly Hawksian with its screwball “three cushion dialogue” that talked around points like characters were shooting pool and aiming for rebounds and style points, in the oeuvre of Hawks, the women served as dialogue-heavy aggressors — articulating things that the men in their lives would never bring themselves to admit like Jean Arthur in Wings, Bacall in Have and Sleep or Angie Dickinson in Bravo.

Thus, following suit, it's a role that the filmmaker’s contracted second choice of Joanne Dru was given in River that she managed to play pretty damn well despite lacking the presence of the other stars (and a rushed ending that even the director concedes just never worked completely right in any way, shape or form when contrasted with the rest of the picture).

And although Hawks was inspired by master western filmmaker John Ford, Red River was the first film that convinced Ford that “the son of a bitch” Wayne could actually act, thereby facilitating the next phase in Duke's evolving role in subversive ‘50s and ‘60s masterpieces like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Yet more than just awe-inspiring for what it did for Wayne’s career, it’s also a fascinating historical document to illustrate the change in screen acting.

For not only did River launch newcomer Clift’s career but as such it also inspired a new generation of actors from Marlon Brando to James Dean and Paul Newman to embrace the natural, Stanislavski method as opposed to the demonstrative expressive “show me” technique popularized in the '20s and ‘30s.

While Hawks was the first to discount his skills as a filmmaker by giving credit elsewhere (such as second unit director Arthur Rosson or cinematographer Russell Harlan), or acknowledging the role that luck played in helping him execute an occasional poetic “John Ford shot,” the film is still influential.

Cinematically, this is particularly evident given the way that — much like the friendships that occur throughout his filmography between an older man and a younger one based on their professional camaraderie and ability as fliers, fighters etc. — he liked to rely on his actors’ talents to play things out when it came to his edits.

Cutting on movement rather than action shots to keep edits hidden in order to spotlight the actors so you know that it’s really Walter Brennan driving that wagon across the river, Wayne catching a shotgun and handily firing three times or Clift hopping into the stirrup to get on his saddle, Hawks ensures a sense of realism and masculine cool simultaneously.

Likewise, from a narrative perspective, he preferred to open sequences (and frequently his films) with a fast-paced action-packed moment that gets us right into the story before slowing things down to bring us up to speed with explanations or expositions.

By way of this effect, Hawks once again achieves with his camera the same billiard like rebounds and style points that take a backward way into traditional storytelling, which he frequently utilized with his famous “three cushion dialogue” as he discussed with Peter Bogdanovich in his book Who the Devil Made It.

And knowing him better than most, Bogdanovich makes a welcome appearance as a film scholar on the Criterion set, offering key insights and behind-the-scenes information that makes a great companion to the Hawks chapter of Devil.

Gorgeously restored to a sharp, high definition sheen, The Criterion Collection serves up both definitive versions of Hawks’s adaptation of the Boren Chase novel that the author had shortened into a Saturday Evening Post story which he translated into screenplay form alongside Charles Schnee.

Also including the out-of-print original novel with the impressive dual format edition box set that boasts the film in DVD and Blu-ray for a total of four discs, the collection serves up Hawks’ preferred theatrical edition along with the longer “book version.”

Despite being unauthorized by the filmmaker, the book version that is lacking Walter Brennan’s audible narration boasts an ending that’s closest to the one that the helmer had intended.

Threatened with legal action by the litigious Howard Hughes, who felt like Hawks had repurposed the ending he’d written for Hughes’s The Outlaw before he’d been fired, while there honestly isn’t that much of a difference between the two cuts which due to Dru’s rushed, ineffective delivery Hawks has never actually liked all that much, it’s still interesting to see the two back-to-back.

And while I agree that the tone moves from too deathly serious to too jovial ultimately — as Hawks had always emphasized — the film is less fixated on the girl than it is on the relationship between the two generations of men.

Elevated by the compelling interplay between the leads whose dynamic is analyzed in a fascinating new light in the gender and sexuality focused nonfiction study Masked Men which I read during a film school project that dissected Hawks’ Rio Bravo, Red River is not only of the director’s very favorite films he’s ever made (along with Scarface) but it’s one of my very favorite westerns.

The first genre work that actually opened my eyes to what can be achieved in a western, perhaps Red River is so unique because of its novelty as not only the director’s first western but also Clift’s first film and Wayne’s first challenging role.

And while I'm sure the film was liberating to the actors, it's a distinctly Hawksian achievement all-around.

Without the weight of previous genre efforts impacting his thought process, Hawks was uninhibited and free to let the lessons he’d learned on everything from Bringing Up Baby to Only Angels Have Wings and The Big Sleep inspire him to make his own kind of western.

And that’s precisely what Howard Hawks did in Red River, which finds the filmmaker producing the work on his own — less focused on rules or formula than he was determined to capture a stampede of character, conflict, cattle and celluloid to see exactly what type of cinematic endeavor he could achieve.   

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DVD Review: El Dorado (1966) -- The Paramount Centennial Collection

New From Paramount Centennial Collection

In the oft-cited famous story of Hawksian lore, when Howard Hawks contacted Robert Mitchum about the possibility of making a movie together and an interested Mitchum took the bait and fished for the plot-- Hawks reeled him in telling the actor that, “There’s no story. You and Duke play two old cowboys.”

However, their perception of the film differed upon its completion with Robert Mitchum confessing that—truth be told-- El Dorado “was all character development,” whereas the traditionally anti-analytical Hawks had second thoughts, revealing in the notes of this Paramount Centennial Collection 2-Disc DVD that in all actuality there ended up being a pretty good plot (courtesy of Leigh Brackett’s crackerjack script) “even though it wanders around.”

For, in the familiar terrain of Hawksian male bonding pictures of “professional courtesy” even for one’s rivals-- along with a strong female character who’s one of the boys and the mentor/protégé relationship of pairing a cynical and wise man (usually Duke Wayne) with a naïve but earnest youngster--you can most definitely-- as he shares, “let a thing wander around.”

And despite the fact that Howard Hawks seemed to master every genre from the gangster picture with Scarface to the screwball comedy with Bringing Up Baby to the film noir with The Big Sleep-- making in fact very few westerns in comparison to the era’s most famous genre director John Ford (with whom he shared John Wayne countless times) -- it's his westerns that have become especially beloved over the years.

While my favorite Howard Hawks western is undoubtedly Red River starring John Wayne in the role he frequently stated made Ford finally realize that he could actually act alongside the irreplaceable Montgomery Clift-- Hawks' biggest hits seem to be the ones that blended together all of the elements from his previous genre pictures like the slapstick of Baby to the professionalism of Only Angels Have Wings to the sultry dames played by Lauren Bacall in movies such as The Big Sleep.

And to this end in 1959, Hawks made his most rousingly entertaining western with Rio Bravo (again starring The Duke and penned by Brackett) which was originally envisioned as a right-wing response picture to their distaste for the Gary Cooper classic High Noon which Hawks and Wayne found downright un-American (for more on this subject, read my essay on the films here).

Containing what can arguably be considered Dean Martin's best on-screen performance as an alcoholic law man driven to drink due to trouble with a woman (a frequent plot device), Rio Bravo found Martin teaming with veteran tough Wayne, the kid “Colorado” (Ricky Nelson), and a disabled Stumpy (Walter Brennan) to take down a ruthless villain.

After a couple of flops and although Hawks vehemently denied the claim, he remade the film for a second of what would eventually be three times (resulting in their final western together, Rio Lobo) via 1966’s El Dorado which began filming in ’65 but was ultimately released in ‘67.

In doing so, he returned to the same Old Tucson location set where he’d filmed Bravo years earlier complete with those smaller buildings that made the tall actors look even larger than life. Additionally he reworked the earlier premise with the help of Brackett who (along with Wayne) had actually wanted to be more faithful to novelist Harry Brown’s darker, Greek-tragedy inspired western book The Stars in their Courses but they ultimately abandoned most of the literary source material in favor of something Hawks considered far more entertaining.

A classically structured western and one that—as the antithesis to the increasingly dark but brilliant works of Ford (like my personal Wayne/Ford favorite The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) that didn’t give Wayne a whole lot to do—Hawks' film used a far more comedic, fast-paced structure that true to form, Hawks would add to on-shoot sitting in his chair and rewriting lines on yellow legal pads during filming.

As cinema scholar, filmmaker, and indeed commentary track contributor Peter Bogdanovich revealed--in one of two commentary tracks included on El Dorado’s most recent Paramount release—Hawks, who didn’t direct actors too much other than telling them to just pick up the pace, never wanted to linger over action and preferred to instead making his violence fast and economical without lingering over it, for example in the way that era’s up-and-comer Sam Peckinpah did in The Wild Bunch.

This is evidenced throughout the rather simple tale of Wayne’s hired gun who—upon realizing that El Dorado’s town sheriff is his old friend J.P. Harrah (Mitchum, basically taking on Dean Martin’s Bravo role)—turns down the offer to work for Ed Asner’s greedy land owner who’s violently strong-arming the local MacDonald family.

After gunplay erupts and time passes, Wayne’s Cole Thornton and his new knife-throwing vengeance-filled sidekick Mississippi (a dynamite James Caan in a better role than Nelson’s in Bravo)-- who can’t shoot a gun to save his or anyone’s life-- ultimately end up joining Harrah. With Mississippi in tow whom he’s fixed with a sawed-off shotgun to try and help even out his new friend’s weakness, Thornton returns out of friendship and loyalty when he discovers that his colleague has not only become a heartbroken “tin star with a…drunk pinned on it” but that Asner’s Bart Jason has recruited one of the best gunman in the area in the form of Christopher George’s Nelse McLeod.

While they weren’t exactly attempting to reinvent the wheel and upon its delayed release the very traditional studio picture became a surprise box office hit in the wake of a studio and Hollywood filmmaking atmosphere that had definitely begun to change to the era of ‘70s auteurs like Bogdanovich, Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma and others—it still holds up as an enormously entertaining work to this day.

Intriguingly, although he’d be crucified for it now, Hawks’ defiance of logic and geography was bold as brass throughout. In El Dorado, for the sake of a better shot, Mitchum switched which side he uses a crutch on throughout which resulted in hilarious problems in continuity that prompted a great line by former continuity expert Wayne in the final cut and likewise, he abandoned reason in having the men double back around town in a chase sequence that doesn’t really make a whole lot of geographical sense. However, in this case it's all completely forgiven.

This is owed as much to the overall excitement of the film and our reverence of all involved spouting spirited quips and undergoing some pretty great pratfalls (especially via a few humdingers by Mitchum that display his little-known comic side) as it is to the fact that Hawks was definitely right in his assertion that it’s always okay to let characters wander around. And this is especially easy to "fake" when a majority of the picture occurs at night to hide the gaffes and ratchet up the tension.

Filled with impressively lit night shots that resulted into a critical disagreement when Roger Ebert playfully suggested that Ms. Pauline Kael needed to have “her glasses scrubbed” when she penned an exaggerated complaint to the contrary, there’s a tremendous standout in the picture that finds the men slowly meandering through the streets, guns out and ready to take down a killer. However, as Bogdanovich noted it is filled with reaction shots that are more about Wayne and Mitchum’s relationship and less about getting the bad guy in the end.

In a terrific sequence that—like Dean’s in Bravo—finds Mitchum having to prove his mettle by no longer further embarrassing himself in a bar shootout—Hawks simply lets the men wander for what must have been more than a dozen minutes. In doing so, they stalk all around town, church bells are used to curious effect and despite the large absence of fast-paced jokes, they still manage to work in a great line and gag when Caan’s Mississippi “hits” a bad guy not with the gun but by shooting a sign that hits him instead.

The result is pure Hawksian western poetry (that also includes its Edgar Allan Poe namesake in the poem quoted by Caan) with its depiction of a group of male outsiders coming together to try and set things right. Additionally, much to Brackett’s credit in improving upon the role that Angie Dickinson played in Bravo, she offers not one but two superbly written characters for actresses Charlene Holt and Michele Carey, ensuring that although you’ll never mistake the look and feel of a Hawks western for the mid to late 1960s filmmaking going on elsewhere, at least on some levels (despite one horrible Asian caricature scene) the film tried to change with the time.

And in fact, the lovely Michele Carey (one in a long line of Hawks’ favored memorably voiced brunettes) actually gets the chance to legitimately become a part of the gang by the end in a great shootout that likewise includes a nice twist on Hawks’ and Duke’s thematic and conversational emphasis of “professional courtesy” in a final showdown.

El Dorado was released as part of Paramount’s ongoing 2-Disc Centennial Collection titles in tandem with their other Duke offering—John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And while the widescreen print looks gorgeous and sounds dynamic (watching as I did in its original Mono as opposed to an enhanced Dolby Digital), in addition to the commentaries and a beautiful full-color booklet of facts and photos, the second disc features a seven-part documentary on the film along with galleries, the vintage trailer and featurette on the American west artwork included as well as a remembrance of John “Duke” Wayne.

DVD Review: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) -- The Paramount Centennial Collection

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As the saying goes, “John Ford Made Westerns,” and it’s his four decades of doing so with The Duke that provide one of the most fascinating selections of titles for film students or ardent fans of the genre to peruse.



To a casual viewer, Duke’s persona was always that of the same uncomplicated and genuine cowboy who said “pilgrim” an awful lot (when in reality the first time this occurred was in this picture), sat tall in the saddle, and never let a wicked gunslinger get away.



However, it’s in his pictures with Ford that you can most specifically see the way that Duke’s characterization — as an extension of Ford’s attitudes regarding politics and what was happening in American society at the time — evolved over the course of their work.

Following the do-gooder subtext in Ford’s earliest work with Wayne, it wasn’t until Ford saw the man in Howard Hawks’ excellent Red River that he realized the potential his star had as an actor and he adjusted their collaborations accordingly.

And beginning in the post World War II era, the films started to become much darker as the years passed which was witnessed in the revered, violent classic The Searchers until their final feature together, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was released in 1962 and managed to present Ford’s entire thesis in one perfect 123 minute unforgettable collection of unspooled reels of celluloid.

To quote a critic included in the excellent documentary contained within Paramount Centennial Collection’s recent 2-disc release, the irony of the film can be found directly in the title of this “anti-mythic western.” However, irony is used throughout the entire work.

Shot in black and white for what can be attributed to dozens of reasons including the aging stars playing characters far younger than they were, the cost of the film could only been green-lit by Wayne locked into an ultra-successful 10 picture deal with Paramount, etc. An intriguing aesthetic decision nonetheless, the entire point of the film goes against the visual representation in its stance that absolutely nothing is black and white.



A movie without clear-cut heroes, Ford does present us with one incredibly vicious villain in Lee Marvin’s most sadistic turn as the whip carrying Liberty Valance, but it goes even further in its opposition to the typical western paradigm — even the names are ironic as Jimmy Stewart’s character whom we initially assume is our naïve hero is named Ransom whereas the villain is Liberty.

Based on Dorothy Johnson’s short story but given a decidedly different spin, as opposed to Johnson’s presentation of what would become the Wayne character as a near “fairy godmother” who nudged Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard along and showed him the way, Wayne sees him as a romantic rival for the heart of the sweet, illiterate Hallie (Vera Miles).



Opening the film as Ransom and Hallie step off the train back in the old town of Shinbone for the funeral of Duke’s forgotten rancher Tom Doniphon, Ford and screenwriters James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck already ruin the surprise of who gets the girl right from the start by introducing us to the now extremely successful couple as we discover that Ransom has gone onto become a beloved senator.



A legend back in Shinbone for having killed the notorious Liberty Valance, the structure of the film bravely works against the overused device of the flashback in an extended one as Senator Stoddard finally decides that it’s time to tell the story of his arrival in Shinbone and what really happened regarding Marvin’s crazed outlaw and his death.

Obviously, the revelation is one that’s fairly easy to predict and moreover it's one that intriguingly Variety in their 1962 review of the film notes may have worked more successfully if the narrative hadn’t given away these “current day” surprises from the start.

However I still feel it’s Ford and Wayne’s best feature. The most clear-cut and perfectly executed example of the themes that had been woven throughout the filmmaker’s career, in the end Valance still stands as a work that begs to be discussed once the final frame flickers and it cuts to black.



Above all, it concerns itself with the difference between “legend” and “fact” and Ford’s assertion that relying squarely on books, law school, and intellect is fine in theory but in the end you have to be willing to understand that sometimes force is required to fight for what’s right.

And in the film, we’re introduced to Stoddard’s arrival as a law school graduate who decided to literally “go west young man” only to find himself nearly killed upon his arrival by Marvin’s grinning psychopath.



While Stoddard refuses to let others fight his battles for him and tries to get law and then the newspaper on his side before he helps educate the townsfolk and rally them in the quest for statehood, the tough minded Doniphon isn’t content to let Valance walk all over Stoddard as well as the rest of the town.



Realizing he’s losing his unspoken but — on his end — understood “claim” that Hallie is his girl when she finds Stoddard's willingness to have stood up to Valance on behalf of an old woman brave, we watch as Duke’s heart slowly breaks and understand when he makes a decision to act to ensure her happiness even if it will cost him his own.

However, it’s still Wayne, therefore Ford refuses to turn him or anyone into a teddy bear as despite himself, some of Doniphon's actions as well as Stoddard’s go against the two men’s “types” brilliantly in the eyes of filmgoers who felt they knew everything about Stewart and Wayne based on the roles they’d played in the past.

While Miles admittedly doesn’t have all that much to work with since after all she’s a woman in a western, it’s especially surprising to watch again this time around. For although it’s the legend of Doniphon’s actions and Wayne’s picture that is used in the foreground of the box and most of the film’s advertising, in reality he has the least to do in the movie. Marvin easily dominates the picture and Stewart undergoes a complex and staggering evolution all in the course of one movie as opposed to the Duke’s career with Ford over four decades.



Also elevating the work are Woody Strode as Doniphon’s devoted sidekick Pompey and especially Edmond O’Brien’s dignified turn as a never-say-die newspaper man Dutton Peabody, who gets the chance to shine in the film’s most exquisite cinematographic shot as he turns off his lamp and crosses the street before returning, illuminating it once more to find Valance and his goons are there.

An American classic, Valance is one of the most surprising westerns ever offered by the genre and one that I guarantee will interest even those who wouldn’t necessarily categorize themselves as “western fans.” Ford’s influence in using filmmaking cleverly to remind viewers that life is far more complicated than a cowboy in a white hat and one in a black hat (despite its tongue-in-cheek usage of this same imagery with Wayne vs. Marvin) makes The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance an ideal choice for Paramount’s Centennial Collection.

The edition features dual commentary tracks, including a feature length one with Peter Bogdanovich that contains archived interview recordings with Ford and Stewart as well as a selected scene audio track introduced by Dan Ford also containing archival recordings of Ford, Stewart, and Marvin. The set's second disc also contains the original trailer, galleries as well as a seven part featurette entitled “The Size of Legends." Hands down, a terrific buy for Father's Day, this collection is sure to be of interest to those who cherish the picture and/or the talented individuals involved.

DVD Review: Rona Barrett's Hollywood: Nothing But the Truth (2008)

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2/10/09

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Working in the entertainment news industry for more than thirty years, veteran daily broadcaster and celebrity interviewer Rona Barrett is indeed as Infinity Entertainment Group notes, "a true pioneer and innovator." Leaving behind the overly formal television studio styled interviews we see on most broadcast and cable network shows that puts celebrity guests in the hot seat, Barrett's approach was simple, genuine, empathetic and direct.

With, as she admits, a true interest in "what makes people tick" and a commitment to "never ask a question I couldn't answer myself," (should she ever be in the interviewees' shoes), she was the first to "conceive the 'coffee klatch' style now embraced by other top journalists," as celebrities opened their doors and lives up to Rona and chatted with her as though "they were with an old friend."

There's an old quote that unfortunately after an hour of digging I cannot locate to reference directly so forgive my paraphrasing and it states that if one is fortunate enough for whatever reason to live an extraordinary life, one has no business keeping that to themselve. And so it is to our great pleasure that Ms. Barrett, who introduces the first in her series of interview DVDs serves up snippets of eleven of her most memorable interviews from stars ranging from John Wayne to Carol Burnett.

Having been acquainted with Cher since she was just a kid-- roughly around the time she was to marry Sonny Bono at age 16-- Rona visits the successful singer at home with the two relaxing on her large bed as though they were sisters as Cher candidly opens up about her recent divorce from Bono and new relationship with Greg Allman (who would become her second husband).

Confessing that she knew from an early age that she didn't want to continue life as a poor young woman who felt ugly as the only non-blonde in a family of blondes, Cher reveals the way she practiced signing autographs at age twelve and the frank discussions she had with both her mother and Bono that although she may not be the prettiest or the most talented, there was something unique about her. Admitting that her whole life revolved around Bono who waited months to even hold her hand, Cher is refreshingly able to speak lovingly about her ex whom she felt had become like family in sharing that she would always love him.

Just one of the singers and famous women Barrett includes on the disc as there's another interview of a similar vein with Priscilla Presley-- whose marriage to Elvis, Barrett had been the first one to break. Catching up with Presley now a little over a year following his death as a poised Presley recalls both the great times and the hard times of living with the King whose happiness was of the utmost importance to her. She shares that Elvis Presley's ease and genuine love for people will be the one thing that their daughter Lisa Marie would inherit, following his shocking passing.

Perhaps the most articulate singer Barrett interviews on the disc is the remarkably intelligent Donna Summer-- always underrated in my opinion-- who discusses the impact that such a frankly sexual hit like "Love to Love You Baby," had on the otherwise shy, comedy prone, and devoutly religious young woman so that she wasn't sure she wanted to leave the house for awhile. Ultimately looking back and noting that, "I'm a coat of many colors, you're just seeing one stripe," as the quintessentially graceful response to those who pigeonhole her as simply a sexy diva-- Summer shares her dedication to her craft and the way that in the end, she feels that to work in show business requires a sense of masochism, especially in the music industry where love and hate flow side by side as it beats you one week and you beat it the next.

Another woman who always fell prey to that double-edged sword-- Ms. Raquel Welch shares the similar way that her looks were used to define her range as a performer and while she freely admits that even at age seven she realized she received attention just walking around in ballet toe shoes due to her beauty and later used that to her advantage, she was relishing with Barrett in the opportunity to show the real side of herself that few people know.

Perhaps the most gripping portion of the disc contains a segment with Carol Burnett that quickly had me in tears in this 1976 interview in which Barrett asks her about her horrific tragedy prone life growing up as the child of two alcoholics. With the utmost of clarity and bravery, she recalls the bold decision she made as a young woman barely scraping by in New York to return home and take over as guardian of her twelve year old sister. Absolutely devastating yet extraordinarily courageous-- Burnett proves to be yet another one of those comedians who turned to laughter out of misery in order to mask a pain so deep that no one would be able to decipher it on the surface.

While Burnett safely reveals her history with Barrett, it's interesting to take a look at two interviews with Robin Williams just a few months apart before and after the start of the astronomical success of Mork and Mindy as he is unable to sit still, taking on voices and jumping topics throughout as Mork in the first one and then becoming a bit more composed in the second, speaking to her as Robin.

Noting another performer who changed in a short period-- Barrett offers a significant interview with John Travolta, just following the burial of his mother which finds him matured incredibly over the year following the success of Saturday Night Fever where he reveals that he felt his greatest ambition and goal was to continue to inspire others such as helping breaking gender stereotypical boundaries to encourage men to dance (via Fever, Grease and many others). Moreover, Travolta states that the ultimate legacy to which he aspires to leave would be to add positive inspiration to a life that is filled with so much negativity, in a way that makes contemporary viewers feel especially heartbroken realizing the tragic loss of his son Jett.

In two other interviews that break free of traditional gender stereotypes, fans who may have shortchanged Burt Reynolds as simply a car driving sex symbol and former stuntman get an intimate look at the man. Within moments, he shares his insecurities about his appearance (including one politically incorrect ethnic description), hints at the wound left by the press over his relationship with his best friend and former lover, the older "America's sweetheart" Dinah Shore, and mentions his desire to remain a bachelor but adopt a child so that he can become a father.

Much like Richard Dreyfuss, who is also interviewed, Reynolds rejects the notion that there's something wrong for men to remain bachelors although in Dreyfuss' case, it seems to have been a decision made at a young age as he shared in 1981 that he'd been openly opposed to marriage his entire life. While he doesn't like loneliness, he also confesses that although he doesn't believe he could be involved with just one person, he refutes any immature playboy labels by candidly revealing that sex is just extremely unimportant to him and that he's almost always embarrassingly been less interested in the act itself rather than foreplay (which he considers himself far more into as a "foreplay junkie").

Although Barrett's summation following each interview which she introduces and segues from into the next piece revealed that Dreyfuss has not only been married three times since that interview but also had three children, she also commends his willingness to open up about his history with drugs and bipolar disorder as promoting honesty and awareness about those extremely important issues.

However, it's the second interview included on the disc-- Barrett's final interview with John Wayne-- which is a bittersweet treat for fans as we see him just out of the hospital in one of his last public appearances before his death from cancer. Understandably sure that he would cancel and want his rest and privacy, Barrett fondly recalls the way that she heard The Duke in the background yell, "Tell Rona to come on down."

Sharing an easy rapport with a man she considers one of her favorite people of all time, courageously Barrett gives Wayne the opportunity to impart any wishes or second thoughts, asking him about regrets or if he'd do anything differently if he had the chance and while he said there were times he admits he lost his temper or said some things he probably shouldn't have, in the end, he would do it the same way all over again.

Clocking in at only a nice ninety minute running time with a bonus feature entitled Rona's Story-- it's fascinating material and while some interviews (including Carol Burnett's) seem much more compelling than others (Raquel Welch's) and we longed for more, despite the loads of tissues I was grabbing for during the Burnett segment, luckily it's been stated that this is the first in a series of DVDs Ms. Barrett is releasing.

An important piece of twentieth century American history containing some great insights into the way our society and gender roles evolved over the years, these are much more than the type of Access Hollywood tabloid style interviews we see today or low-class gossip pieces about Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, or Britney Spears.

A reminder that television interviewing is an art form and that one must be empathetic, nonjudgmental and willing to ask the tough questions in the right way-- it's an important documentary for those in what has sadly become our paparazzi styled celebrity news industry and a wonderful addition for pop culture fans wanting to know the humans behind the personas. However, perhaps the best surprise is that one dollar of each DVD Sold goes to help elderly citizens without the economic resources the chance to go into assisted living through The Rona Barrett Foundation.