The Real West

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding Educational Video
Review: Gary Cooper, famous western star, does an outstanding joy of narrating this video. He died shortly after making this video and it stands as a testimonial to a man who wanted to do away with the cowboy myth and show the west as it really was.

I think any teacher of American History should have this movie in their library or personal collection.

Rating:
Summary: Better than Ken Burns, in some ways...
Review: I was fortunate enough to see this on TV when it was broadcast in 1960 and after all these years I can still recall phrases from it. It was, apparently, the last thing Cooper did, and he does a wonderful job. I believe his voice actually breaks in sincere sorrow when he is reciting the famous speech by Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, toward the end. His empathy and knowledge of the West (he was from Montana) are everywhere apparent.

Beyond that, this is one of the best-written documentaries I've ever seen. Every line, almost, is memorably quotable. Some are extremely funny, others extremely tragic, but they have a brilliant solidity and incisiveness that makes this a really extraordinary piece of work. Lines like "sleeping on prairie feathers with no mattress but your backbone" and "Sam Colt made everybody the same size," have a whipcracking honesty that rings very true.

The photo montages are excellent, many of them quite rare images, like gigantic piles of buffalo bones beside a railroad track. The cross-cutting at the end, depicting the struggle between whites and Indians, is handled magnificently.

Defects are trifling. The sound gets fuzzy from time to time, as if the track were being spliced, but Cooper's narration is quite clear throughout. This is a very bare-bones DVD, just the show and the usual scene-selection feature, no commentary, no extras to speak of.

But it is one of the clearest, most comprehensive and truthful pictures of the West I've ever seen. Cooper really ended his career on a high note.