DVDFile

Shout! Factory / 189 Minutes / 1976 / Rated PG/R / Street Date: January 17, 2012

Typically I’m not a big fan of double-disc titles. They’re usually fairly low quality, don’t have many special features, and one of the titles is usually something that barely made it to the screen. Be that as it may, when both films feature James Our Man Flint Coburn, one of the original Magnificent Seven, I become an impulse-buying 5 year-old. Coburn is an actor that, no matter whether he was co-starring in a low-budget B-reel or playing a supporting role in an Oscar contender - it happened once or twice - he always brought a suave bit of panache to the screen. Though the titles here are by no means anyone’s idea of “classic”, they are classic Coburn.

The first movie on the disc is entitled The Last Hard Men and stars Coburn, Charlton Heston and Barbara Hershey, and is directed by western flick stalwart Andrew V. McLagen (Chisum, Shenandoah). Adapted from the Brian Garfield novel Gun Down, Hard Men tells the story of Zach Provo and his search for justice against the lawman Sam Burgade (Heston) that killed his wife. Breaking free from a chain gang that he is serving time on, Provo sets off after Burgade with a few fellow convicts with plans to kidnap Burgade’s daughter and force him in to a showdown. 

Filled to the brim with the kind of poorly-written melodrama that Coburn was better than most at, Hard Men is neither original nor is it very good. What it is, though, is a perfect translation of a western pulp novel into film form, making a film of simple motivations, plot points and camera angles. No film school in the lower 48 is going to be offering up a syllabus featuring this film anytime soon unless it’s for a class on “making a movie that looks exactly like an episode of Gunsmoke". Now that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just a fact: this is a film born of simplicity. It is simply simple plot, simple action, simple fun.  Sometimes a person just wants vanilla ice cream, and what better way to enjoy vanilla than with Heston & Coburn, and a nice bit of Barbara Hershey on top.

The next film in this double-feature is Sky Riders, directed by Douglas Hicox (Brannigan, Theater of Blood) and features Robert Culp mailing it in alongside James Coburn. Coburn plays Jim McCabe, a smuggler who spends his days working with aged Nazi naval captains and high-stepping around the Mediterranean in a yellow and red sea-plane while wearing an ascot. Filmed on location in Greece… somewhere… Sky Riders is full of 1970’s low-budget action and some pretty terrible dialog.  Be that as it may, it is 100% good fun and reminiscent of something I would have watched on local television jammed between Bonanza reruns and the annual Jaws telethon.

Here’s a snippet of what you can expect from Sky Riders:

“I’m afraid he’s all we’ve got.”

“No he’s not.”

[Enter Coburn wearing a leather jacket]

God damn, that’s some fine dialogin’. Sometimes the simplest option is the best, and this is one of those times.  Sky Riders is paint-by-numbers good times punctuated by some Bruce Lee-taught fists of fury thrown by Coburn himself. Having trained with Lee himself, Coburn is more than able to throw down in some happy action fun-time fight scenes in his trademark Derick Flint sort of way.

Sky Riders is filled with old-timey fun, like Robert Culp developing a roll of film in his basement because he just so happens to have a room set aside just for that purpose in his mansion, or one of McCabe’s sidekicks doing old-timey book research instead of using the Wikipedias. While SkyRiders may not be the greatest example of 70’s action cinema available it is an entertaining bit of fun from an era in which film didn’t need a budget to fill out 90 minutes of screen-time.