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Mitchum's the man, but this standard-def set hardly does him justice....
Fox / 1096 Minutes / 1954-1967 / Unrated / Street Date: October 9, 2012
Multi-disc compilations like this one can be hard nuts to crack for high-def geeks. I mean, let's first get out of the way the fact that Robert Mitchum is one of the great movie stars of both the classic Hollywood age and beyond - even his goofily effective cameo in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man had the bigger-than-life gravitas of a bona fide legend, and that performance came way after his prime (a period from which all ten of the films on this Robert Mitchum Film Collection are cultivated).
The issue here isn't Mitchum's power as a performer so much as the standard-def quality of these discs. The Night of the Hunter (1955) came out as a Criterion Blu-ray a while back, so there's absolutely zero reason to invest any money in its standard-def incarnation, and - as we'll cite again in the Video Quality section of this review - The Longest Day doesn't even get an anamorphic encode. Long story short: these are fine films (perhaps not all classics, but there are very few stinkers in the bunch), but if you can find some (or all) of them on Blu-ray editions or even high-def feeds of cable broadcasts, there's little reason to bother.
Films included: The Night of the Hunter (1955), River of No Return (1954), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), The Enemy Below (1957), Thunder Road (1958), The Hunters (1958), The Longest Day (1962), Man in the Middle (1963), What a Way to Go! (1964), The Way West (1967).