Audie Murphy Collection IV (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Jun 23, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Kurt Neumann/Budd Boetticher/Nathan JuranRelease Date(s)
1950/1952/1954 (May 27, 2025)Studio(s)
Universal-International Pictures (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)- Film/Program Grade: See Below
- Video Grade: See Below
- Audio Grade: See Below
- Extras Grade: B-
- Overall Grade: B
Review
I hope those reading this review aren’t limited to Audie Murphy Western fans because this release speaks to a larger, potentially ominous trend with the label releasing it: Kino Lorber.
Early this year I reviewed Les Femmes, a Kino release of an innocuous French sex comedy starring Brigitte Bardot. The film wasn’t any good, but the larger problem was its inexplicable video transfer. What was presented was in color: green. The color timing was so completely out-of-whack that everything white (telephones, tablecloths, plastic chairs, pages of books) was a profoundly ugly pea-soup green. How did the folks at Kino not notice this? How could they not realize how completely unacceptable this video transfer was?
And this leads us to their Audie Murphy Collection IV, specifically with The Kid from Texas, a 1950 Universal-International production shot in three-strip Technicolor. Like the other major film companies, Universal has been pretty good about remastering such films, going back to the original black-and-white separation negatives whenever possible, resulting in splendiferous, perfectly-aligned video transfers that “pop” with primary color. A week earlier, in fact, I marveled at the tremendously impressive work of Warner Archive on Annie Get Your Gun, another Technicolor title released that same year.
The Kid from Texas, however, is a bewildering, inexcusable disaster. It resembles something similar to (though perhaps isn’t) a raw video scan: no color-timing appears to have been done on it at all, the desaturated palette in no way resembles what a three-strip Technicolor film from 1950 should look like. At all. The color levels change from shot-to-shot; the image throughout is overwhelmingly bright to the point of distraction, while blacks and contrast are nonexistent. Much film damage is in evidence: green and blue blotches, speckling, and even reel change cues, much of which could easily have been minimized digitally. Oddly, the image is otherwise perfectly aligned. (And the trailer, included as an extra feature, offers a more accurate representation of what the color, at least, should look like.)
So, what happened? Did Universal send Kino “the wrong video file,” an unfinished version and that no one at Kino noticed (or cared)? Did someone there decide that it was “good enough” to release, as-is? Regardless, it’s so obvious the film transfer is so-not-right and unfinished, that Kino would nevertheless sign off on releasing it anyway suggests an alarming lack of quality control, or maybe ignorance, or cost-cutting—who knows? It’s one thing to make do with an older transfer that’s “good enough” to release in 2025, even where improvements are possible, but another to release a video transfer so emphatically wrong. If few complain about the transfer, which really is close to completely unwatchable, what will pass their QC department next?
As for the movie, it’s a routine “true story” of Henry McCarty, alias William Bonney but remembered as outlaw Billy the Kid (Murphy), gunned down when he was just 21. As Billy, Murphy was himself baby-faced and 24 and looked the part. Narrated by an uncredited Parley Baer, the film is a fictionalized account of the Lincoln County War, with supporting characters Jameson (Shepperd Strudwick) based on John Tunstall and Alexander Kain (Albert Dekker) based on Alexander McSween. Overall, the movie is reasonably accurate compared with most Western outlaw films from the period.
In 1879 New Mexico Territory, General Lew Wallace (Robert H. Barrat, well cast), later the author of Ben-Hur, mediates a war between ranchers Major Harper (Dennis Hoey, Inspector Lestrade of the Sherlock Holmes movies) on one side and Alexander Kain (Dekker) on the other. Jameson (Strudwick), employed by Kain, tries to tame Billy, already a violent gunslinger wanted throughout the west, and might have succeeded, had Harper’s men (including William Tallman, luckless Hamilton Burger on Perry Mason) not gunned down Billy’s emerging father figure. He vows to kill those who murdered Jameson.
Billy turns to Kain for guidance, but he’s a manipulative capitalist, putting his property ahead of the safety of his men—as noted by his much-younger wife, Irene (Gale Storm)—and uses Billy and others to commit violence and murder while disavowing any connection to the violence he himself ordered. General Wallace, exasperated by all the bloodshed, calls on Pat Garrett (Frank Wilcox) to bring Billy to justice, dead or alive.
This was the first of Murphy’s many Universal Westerns, widely popular and profitable films for the company throughout the 1950s, culminating somewhat with Night Passage (1957), which teamed Murphy with U-I’s other big Western film star of the period, James Stewart. (Improbably they play brothers.) Murphy alternated between good guys and good-bad guys (as in the Stewart picture), though early films like this one portray him as something like a proto-juvenile delinquent at the crossroads. Routine but not bad.
Audie Murphy plays yet another historical outlaw in The Cimarron Kid (1952) but both the movie and the video transfer are significantly better. Louis Stevens was a journeyman screenwriter whose credits date back to at least 1920, but the film was directed by Budd Boetticher, who’d go on to direct a famed series of modestly budgeted, character-driven Westerns written by Burt Kennedy and starring Randolph Scott in the second-half of the ‘50s. The Cimarron Kid is significantly better-directed than the other two films in this set, and one suspects many of its little highlights were devised by Boetticher on location.
Released from jail, Bill Doolin (Murphy) is riding a train back home that’s held up by the Dalton Gang, boyhood friends who foolishly acknowledge him. Passengers assume he’s in on the robbery, forcing Bill to flee with the others to their remote hideout, where he’s reunited with pals including Bitter Creek Dalton (James Best), Dynamite Dick Dalton (John Hudson), Bob Dalton (Noah “Pidge” Beery, Jr.), Stacey Marshall (Frank Silvera), Will Dalton (William Reynolds), Grat Dalton (Gregg Palmer), and hothead Red Buck (Hugh O’Brian, nearly unrecognizable, with dyed hair, thick beard and scar).
True to historical fact, the Daltons, joined by Doolin, plan a daring, unprecedented robbery of two banks simultaneously in Coffeyville. It’s a disaster, leaving most of the Dalton Gang dead or wounded, and forcing them to hide out at a ranch owned by Pat Roberts (Roy Roberts), who has lived both sides of the law. Bill replaces the dead Bob Dalton as the gang’s leader, eventually agreeing to a plan to rob a gold shipment worth $100,000. But the law has the jump and them and a bloodbath seems inevitable...
The general plot and structure of The Cimarron Kid isn’t much different from The Kid from Texas, and Murphy’s quasi-romance with Beverly Tyler in this (as Roberts’s daughter, Carrie) is just as dull and uninteresting as Murphy’s was with Gale Storm in the earlier picture. However, Boetticher’s imaginative staging and little character touches he, presumably, added, greatly enhance the film, turning it from a routine Technicolor Western into a minor classic of its type.
First, there’s an interesting relationship between Best’s Bitter Creek Dalton and his hanger-on Hispanic girlfriend, Cimarron Rose, played by Yvette Dugay, typecast in such parts. (She was, reportedly, French, but was born Audrey Lee Pearlman, in Paterson, New Jersey.) Eschewing the usual man-hungry senorita found in such films, Cimarron Rose is one tough, smart cookie, using her sexuality to gather intelligence on behalf of the gang. In a very imaginative use of location, one shootout takes place in a roundhouse, she bravely manipulating the switch controlling the big wheel at its center to position a locomotive engine’s steam, allowing the gang to escape.
She gives Bitter Creek a Mexican choker necklace to wear, binding them together, but when he’s ambushed and killed, she watches as one of his assassins retrieves the necklace, thinking it would make a nifty souvenir for his kids, a bitterly tragic flourish probably added by Boetticher. The film also makes excellent use of Jamaica-born actor Frank Silvera, whose dignified, understated performance as a peripheral member of the gang is anything but racially stereotyped.
When a marshal (Leif Erickson) confronts Roberts in his barn, suspecting the latter is hiding the Dalton Gang there, there’s a marvelously tense dialogue between the two, the marshal spotting the barrels of many guns pointing at him, forcing him to talk his way out of a potentially deadly situation, staging cleverly repeated during the climax. Late in the film, Boetticher imaginative stages a conversation between Roberts and Carrie out-of-focus and in silhouette as they discuss Bill’s fate, he sleeping on a sofa in the background. Roberts steps out of frame and the camera dollies in toward Carrie, blackening the screen as it dissolves to the next scene. In deference to Murphy’s surging popularity, the ending was changed to something painfully unbelievable, but much of what comes before it distinguishes The Cimarron Kid from the usual programmer.
This time, the video transfer is much improved. Most of the picture looks great, but maybe separation negatives no longer exist on the last two reels or so, which are a half-step lower in quality and have minor matrix alignment issues.
Unfortunately, Drums Across the River (1954) is saddled with a B-Western plot top-heavy with bad guys and situations that only make Murphy’s character appear foolish and naïve. Gary Brannon (Murphy) runs a freight company with his father, Sam (Walter Brennan), in a gold-mining town whose mines are played out. Frank Walker (Lyle Bettger) proposes venturing across the river into off-limits Ute Indian territory whose mountains are rich with the stuff. Sam tries warning Walker’s men against trespassing on government-decreed Indian land, but Gary, concerned for the town’s future, agrees to tag along.
In the curiously bifurcated screenplay, Walker and his gang seem determined to start an Indian war, hoping the U.S. Cavalry will step in, move the tribe to a reservation, allowing them to mine Ute territory; in the second-half, Walker, aided by hired gun Morgan (Hugh O’Brian again, again sporting a nasty scar), elaborately frames Gary and the Ute for a stolen gold shipment.
In most of his Universal Westerns, Audie Murphy played polite, clean-cut but unruly characters with chips on their shoulders, tightly holding onto a grudge over some past injustice and/or deceived/manipulated by bad guys. It’s not far removed from the later ‘50s types of rebellious youths exemplified by James Dean, but when it’s as clumsy and crudely-done as it is in Drums Across the River, it tends to make Murphy’s characters stubbornly self-defeating when not outright foolish. (Even the tonier Night Passage uses Murphy this way.) Here, the bad guys have the upper-hand for most of the film’s running time, Gary consistently making poor choices that result in nearly the entire town ready to lynch him by the end. It’s therefore a little surprising Murphy became such an enduring (if second-tier) box-office star.
One look at hammy, wild-eyed smiling cobra Lyle Bettger should have tipped Gary off immediately, or that the miners are played by such sneering dog-heavy types as James K. Anderson and Lane Bradford, who rarely played anything else. (B-Western star Bob Steele and serial star George Wallace are also part of the gang, however.) In the film Taos (Jay Silverheels) becomes the Ute chief upon the death of his father (Morris Ankrum). Taos, dignified and cool-headed if firm, is frankly a more interesting character than Gary ever is; the film would have been more interesting had the story been told from Taos’s perspective instead. Lisa Gaye, lookalike sister of Debra Paget, is the shoehorned-in love interest, but the late Mara Corday, as Walker’s saloon girl lover, is the more interesting of the two female leads.
Filmed in Technicolor and released in 1.85:1 widescreen, Drums Across the River is presented via a good transfer with accurate color and with reasonable sharpness. It and the other two titles all have DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono, all acceptable, with optional English subtitles and are Region “A” encoded.
THE KID FROM TEXAS (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO): B-/F/A-
THE CIMARRON KID (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO): A-/A-/A-
DRUMS ACROSS THE RIVER (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO): C/B+/A-
Extras are limited to trailers (the one for The Cimarron Kid is in black-and-white) and new audio commentaries: historian Gary Gerani for The Kid from Texas, author C. Courtney Joyner for The Cimarron Kid and Drums Across the River.
Overall, a real mixed bag, with two lesser, routine oaters and one superior film, the set greatly undermined by the bizarrely unacceptable video transfer offered on The Kid from Texas. One hopes this kind of issue doesn’t crop up again.
- Stuart Galbraith IV