You know you're destined for the pantheon of westerns when John Wayne shows up to introduce you, as he did for the first episode of television's Gunsmoke in 1955. He had just made a film with star James Arness and told viewers to get used to Arness because, like Wayne, he would be around for a while, which was true. The series ran for 19 seasons, and Wayne's intro is included in this week's box sets Gunsmoke: Volume One (selected episodes from 1955 to 1964) and Gunsmoke: Volume Two (from 1964 to 1974). In his recently recorded episode commentaries, Arness even sounds like Wayne.
The show began as a half-hour, expanded to an hour in 1961 and switched from black and white to colour in 1966. Marshal Matt Dillon (Arness) faces down gunslingers, talks sense into reprobates (including Burt Reynolds as Quint Asper, who joined the cast in 1962 for three seasons) and generally rides herd on the rabble in Dodge City, Kansas, in the 1880s. He is the voice of reason and ethics, though, in what was billed from the start as an adult western, he isn't above being dressed down by Doc Adams (Milburn Stone). "It's all pride with you, isn't it? Just pride. Somebody came into town who's faster than you are, and you just gotta try to prove he isn't."
Dillon enjoys an uncertain relationship with Miss Kitty (Amanda Blake) of the Long Branch Saloon, who in an earlier radio series had clearly run a brothel but in the TV series grew steadily more respectable. And his deputy Chester (Dennis Weaver, later of McCloud) is more eager than smart and has a pronounced limp, which was added during rehearsal because director Bill Warren wanted Chester to have an excuse not to help the marshal when fights broke out.
Paladin (Richard Boone) of Have Gun Will Travel is another western icon. A gunslinger for hire, he dresses in black, has a chess knight as an emblem emblazoned on his holster, operates out of a swank San Francisco hotel with a Chinese servant unfortunately named Hey Boy, and can read Chinese as easily as shoot someone to death, which he frequently does. Boone is perfect in the role, silky as an educated, ethical "knight without armour in a savage land" (to quote the theme song) and stone cold as an avenger. The show's strong writing ensures that the plots -- and his reactions -- are seldom predictable, and it's fun to see actors such as James Coburn in their early days. Have Gun Will Travel: The Complete Third Season includes 39 black-and-white episodes from 1959 to 1960.
Want more TV icons? Alec Guinness shines as weary master spy George Smiley in the BBC miniseries Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) and Smiley's People (1982). Author John le Carré pops up in a long, absorbing 2002 interview (spread across the two DVD sets) to call Tinker Tailor the ideal realization of his work and to suggest that Smiley's People wasn't quite as smooth, since he and Guinness had to pitch in as writers when early arrangements fell through. Once Guinness agreed to star, finding cast members was no problem: Ian Richardson, Joss Ackland, Patrick Stewart, Beryl Reid, the best of British talent. Producer Jonathan Powell recalls that in Tinker Tailor, which hinges on learning which of four British Secret Intelligence Service agents is a traitor, he hired four actors of equivalent fame so as not to "tell the audience who it is by having a very famous actor playing the bad guy."
Who's Got the Black Box? (France, 1967, a.k.a. La Route de Corinthe) is a decidedly more obscure and more frivolous spy thriller, in which a continually underestimated woman (Jean Seberg), whose spy-husband is killed by the bad guys, continues his crusade to find out who is importing black boxes into Greece that can disable the radar protecting U.S. missiles. The 90-minute colour movie is no lost masterpiece, but it's entertaining to see French director Claude Chabrol, better known for his psychological thrillers, trying to channel Alfred Hitchcock (one of Chabrol's heroes) while retaining the anti-slickness of the French New Wave. The Greek scenery is nice too.
The chirpy 1930s cartoon character Betty Boop began as a dog, was redrawn as a sexy cutie (the dog ears became hoop earrings) and, after the censors cracked down in 1933, turned into a spunky homebody. Betty Boop: Queen of Cartoons, a 45-minute 1995 documentary from A&E's Biography series, captures her career arc, her retirement in 1939 and her rebirth as a late-20th-century icon (there's that word again). It's narrated by Peter ( Mission Impossible) Graves, brother of Gunsmoke's Arness. And there's a new outing for the terrific computer-animated sequel Toy Story 2 (1999), the one in which cowboy Woody (Tom Hanks) is nabbed by a toy collector. The two-disc set adds new extras, repeats some old ones from the Toy Box set of a few years ago, and sharpens the already sharp picture and sound.
Also out: SeaQuest DSV Season One, with 23 episodes from the 1993-95 series set a decade from now and produced by Steven Spielberg (at $2-million an episode), in which Captain Nathan Bridger (Roy Scheider) uses his research submarine to keep order under the sea; and the "uncorked" edition of the vulgar buddy comedy The Wedding Crashers, with one commentary by director David Dobkin, another by stars Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn and a version of the film with 8½ minutes added.
EXTRA! EXTRA!
In Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, Bill Murray's hapless character takes a trip to find out which of his old girlfriends sent him a note saying he had fathered a child. Jarmusch talks in a brief bonus feature of his love of randomness in film, and an accompanying making-of segment proves the point. It consists mainly of clapperboards clacking, interspersed with idle chat between actors waiting for their scenes to start. Sharon Stone, in bed with Murray: "Stop it, or I'm going to go Tyson. I'm going to bite your ear right off." Murray: "See, it was a shock when Tyson did it, but if you'd done it, no big deal. Page seven." But the highlight is a flurry of outtakes from a scene in which two giggling teens (played by Jennifer Rapp and Nicole Abisinio) improvise mindless chatter on the bus that Murray boards to begin his odyssey. It's odd that something so annoying in real life can be so much fun in small, staged doses.
CLASSICS FOR KIDS
GERALD McBOING BOING
Author-illustrator Dr. Seuss may have turned out a gazillion children's books, but he couldn't be contained within hard covers. He devised the 1953 live-action fantasy The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T and, three years earlier, wrote the rhyming verse for the seven-minute cartoon Gerald Mcboing boing. It's one of four Gerald cartoons that were inventively animated by UPA (which made the Mr. Magoo series) and are compiled in Cartoon Adventures Starring Gerald McBoing Boing. (The cartoons themselves can't agree on whether Boing has a capital B.) Gerald can't speak, but he utters sounds -- a spring being sprung, a cuckoo clock, a train whistle, a huge explosion. The boy is trotted off to schools and doctors and is inevitably teased by his schoolmates. " 'Nyaah, nyaah,' they all shouted. 'Your name's not McCloy. You're Gerald Mcboing boing, the noisemaking boy.' " All ends ingeniously. The film won a 1950 Oscar for best short subject (cartoon division), and the three sequels maintain the light, charming tone.