6 Winning Western DVDS

By RICHARD CORLISS

Brokeback Mountain is the kind of film you don't see nowadays: a western. Yet a half-century ago, the genre dominated the big and small screens. Every movie star from Monroe to Brando had to ride a horse, and in the 1958-59 TV season, six of the top seven shows were oaters. Here is a passel of DVDs worth packing in your saddlebag.

SAM PECKINPAH'S LEGENDARY WESTERNS COLLECTION

The first scene in The Wild Bunch--a swarm of red ants devouring a scorpion as children giggle at the sport--could summarize Peckinpah's view of humanity. Something in this legendary auteur, who drank and crazied himself out of a brilliant career, said, "Life is awful. Ain't it fun to watch?" This DVD package spotlights two wild westerns (The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) and two mild ones (Ride the High Country and The Ballad of Cable Hogue), all paying tribute to colorful, mournful rogues whose time had passed. For Peckinpah, elegy was autobiography.

WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE

Steve McQueen, fresh from the Actors Studio, got his first starring role in this 1958 TV series, and at times he must have thought Lee Strasberg would disown him. McQueen's method here was a weathered glint and a sawed-off Winchester rifle in his holster. As a bounty hunter with a stern personal code of ethics, McQueen did have something Hollywood could appreciate: star quality. The fun in this first-season DVD is watching him mix it up with other tyros--James Coburn, Warren Oates, Michael Landon--who would also soon learn how to commandeer the screen.

HAVE GUN--WILL TRAVEL

"A knight with-out armor in a savage land," the theme song said. Paladin was a good guy who dressed in black, dispensing bullets, beatings and quotes from Shakespeare with equal facility. As incarnated by Richard Boone, whose dandyish mustache and amused baritone voice lent ironic counterpoint to a face that looked as if it had just lost six barroom brawls, Paladin was the hired gun as moral arbiter. He needed no supporting cast to cheer on or question his decisions; he already had the writers and directors to make this series the best in the West.

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

First the western went east--to Japan, where Akira Kurosawa transformed it into The Seven Samurai (1954)--then it came home, in this 1960 version of the Kurosawa classic. For a time, it upended the genre's concentration on noble or twisted loners; this was the first all-star western romp. It's in no way a terrific film; director John Sturges was a pedestrian showman. But to watch McQueen, Coburn, Yul Brynner, Charles Bronson and Eli Wallach fight for screen time is to see a fabulous showdown of egos--like Meet the Fockers, with six-guns instead of sex puns.

SEVEN MEN FROM NOW

Among the great directors of westerns, Budd Boetticher is the forgotten man. Between 1956 and '60 he teamed with Randolph Scott for seven films, tight-lipped, sunbaked fables of one man's honor on the outlands of civilization. Until now, none of these B-movie masterpieces have been on DVD. Seven Men from Now is the first and a fine introduction to the canon. But we need the rest, to teach the young'uns how stark and eloquent a western can be.

GUNSMOKE

John Wayne comes on at the start of the series' first episode (of an epochal 635) to say that this will be a different kind of western. And James Arness's Marshal Dillon was a different kind of lawman--like the Duke after anger management. Gunsmoke led the TV stampede of "adult westerns." Dillon might be the sage of the sagebrush, musing on man's weakness for violence, but since every show begins with his gunning down a bad guy, we know that this is the same old (Testament) stuff, with a little sweet pacifist palaver mixed in.