Manufacturer: 4 Front Video
Starring: James Stewart, John Cleese, Amy Irving, Phillip Glasser, Erica Yohn
Directed By: Phil Nibbelink, Simon Wells

A box-office hit when released in 1994, this sprawling, frequently overwrought familial melodrama may get sillier as its plot progresses, but it's the kind of lusty, character-based epic that Hollywood should attempt more often. It's also an unabashedly flattering star vehicle for Brad Pitt as Tristan--the rebellious middle son of a fiercely independent Montana rancher and military veteran ...

Manufacturer: 4 Front Video
Starring: Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins, Aidan Quinn, Julia Ormond, Henry Thomas
Directed By: Edward Zwick

A lusty and rousing adventure, this calls to mind those glorious costume dramas produced so capably by the old Hollywood studio system--hardly surprising, in that its title character, a de facto Robin Hood in Old California, provided starring vehicles for Douglas Fairbanks and Tyrone Power, the 50s TV hit, and dozens of serials and features. Zorro, a pop-fiction creation invented by Johnston ...

Manufacturer: 4 Front Video
Starring: Antonio Banderas, Anthony Hopkins, Catherine Zeta-Jones, José María de Tavira, Diego Sieres
Directed By: Martin Campbell

Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
Starring: John Wayne, George Kennedy, Gary Grimes, Neville Brand, Clay O'Brien
Directed By: Andrew V. McLaglen

The last and least memorable of John Ford's famous cavalry trilogy, Rio Grande nonetheless has an interesting continuity about the gentlemanly rules of military conduct. Here the focus is on the family. While creating a heated controversy over his handling of the Apache war, John Wayne must also contend with disgruntled wife Maureen O'Hara and estranged son Claude Jarman Jr, a new recruit ...

Manufacturer: 4 Front Video
Starring: John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, Ben Johnson, Claude Jarman Jr., Harry Carey Jr.
Directed By: John Ford

Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
Starring: John Wayne, Roscoe Lee Browne, Bruce Dern, Colleen Dewhurst, Alfred Barker Jr.
Directed By: Mark Rydell

Manufacturer: MGM Entertainment
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Gian Maria Volontè, Mara Krupp, Luigi Pistilli
Directed By: Sergio Leone

Akira Kurosawa's rousing Seven Samurai was a natural for an American remake--after all, the codes and conventions of ancient Japan and the Wild West (at least the mythical movie West) are not so very far apart. Thus The Magnificent Seven effortlessly turns samurai into cowboys (the same trick worked more than once: Kurosawa's Yojimbo became Sergio Leone's A Fistful of ...

Manufacturer: MGM Entertainment
Starring: Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Eli Wallach, Robert Vaughn
Directed By: John Sturges

The so-called spaghetti Western achieved its apotheosis in Sergio Leone's magnificently mythic (and utterly outlandish) Once upon a Time in the West. After a series of international hits starring Clint Eastwood (from A Fistful of Dollars to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly), Leone outdid himself with this spectacular, larger-than-life, horse-operatic epic about how the West was ...

Manufacturer: Paramount Home Entertainment
Starring: Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards, Gabriele Ferzetti
Directed By: Sergio Leone

This is the movie that launched the spaghetti Western and catapulted Clint Eastwood to stardom. Before director Sergio Leone picked him out, Clint had played only a few bit parts in features plus his role as Rowdy Yates in the TV Western series Rawhide. Leone cast him for his stillness and physical presence, famously remarking that when Michelangelo was asked what he had seen in a ...

Manufacturer: MGM Entertainment
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Gian Maria Volontè, Marianne Koch, Wolfgang Lukschy, Sieghardt Rupp
Directed By: Monte Hellman, Sergio Leone