Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

Dodge City Blu-ray Movie Review

Westward (Tally) Ho!

Reviewed by Michael Reuben June 7, 2015

The year 1939 saw Westerns become A-list fare with major releases that included Stagecoach from United Artists, Jesse James from Fox, and The Oklahoma Kid and Dodge City from Warner Brothers. The last was notable for starring, as its cowboy hero, a leading man who hailed from Australia and was best known for playing English swashbucklers like Captain Blood and Robin Hood. Errol Flynn never thought he was convincing in a ten-gallon hat, but the public disagreed, and after Dodge City, where his character was scripted as an Irishman with a history of British military service, screenwriters didn't even bother explaining his foreign diction. In films like Virginia City and San Antonio, Flynn was just another cowboy.

Screenwriter Robert Buckner (Yankee Doodle Dandy) loosely based Flynn's character on Wyatt Earp, but the figure of the free-roving cattleman who reluctantly pins on a badge, because someone has to do it, is as much a Western archetype as the open plain. Indeed, Dodge City is a virtual compendium of Western tropes, and director Michael Curtiz stages the action so fluidly and sustains the pace so breathlessly that he packs more action into a trim 104 minutes than many contemporary directors manage in over two hours. As one film historian notes in the extras, these devices had not yet become clichés, which no doubt explains their enormous appeal to the audience of 1939. Decades of repetition would make them ripe for parody by the time Mel Brooks used Dodge City as a model for Blazing Saddles in 1974, but even Brooks's mockery couldn't kill them off. Twenty-one years later, Lawrence Kasdan reinvented them in Silverado, which, no doubt as a nod to Dodge City, included a sheriff with an English accent played by Monty Python's John Cleese.

Dodge City opens efficiently with entrepreneur Colonel Dodge (Henry O'Neill) en route by train in 1866 to the town he founded that will shortly be christened with his name. As he explains to the railroad executives who are his traveling companions how the city will supply their newly completed line with an endless supply of cargo, the Colonel spots a stagecoach from the window, which the train overtakes and outpaces. The Colonel also recognizes and greets three cowboys on horseback. They are Wade Hatton (Flynn), Rusty Hart (Alan Hale) and Tex Baird (Guinn "Big Boy" Williams). They have been working as buffalo hunters, which puts them in competition with Jeff Surrett (Bruce Cabot) and his right-hand man, Yancey (Victory Jory). When Surrett is revealed not to have the proper license, he is arrested—and the film's battle lines are drawn.

Six years later, Dodge City has become "the Babylon of the American frontier", or so a pair of title cards informs us. Now the "Longhorn cattle center of the world", the town "knows no ethics but cash and killing". None other than Jeff Surrett has risen to the top of the heap, ruling Dodge from his headquarters at the Gay Lady Saloon, where cattlemen gamble away their earnings while being entertained by Surrett's girlfriend and main attraction, singer Ruby Gilman (Ann Sheridan). But just taking their earnings isn't enough for Surrett. He also takes their cattle in deals on which he has no intention of paying. It's cheaper to have Yancey murder the seller. Any lawman who tries to interfere is killed or run out of town. The sheriff's office has been abandoned and boarded up.

Hatton and his two sidekicks return to the new Dodge City driving a herd from Texas and leading a wagon train of settlers. It's been an eventful trip. Among the travelers are Abby Irving (Olivia de Havilland), and her brother Lee (William Lundigan), the orphaned niece and nephew of Dodge City's Dr. Irving (Henry Travers). Lee has met with calamity during the trip, in circumstances for which Abby blames Hatton. They arrive in Dodge with an icy chill between them that Hatton would very much like to thaw.

But Hatton has more immediate problems upon discovering that his old enemy, Surrett, won't allow anyone else to buy his cattle in Dodge. Hatton refuses to sell, and when the townspeople see how he stands up to Surrett, they ask him to become sheriff. Initially reluctant, Hatton is finally persuaded after witnessing a tragedy in the streets, and the war between arch-enemies begins in earnest. Soon the jails are filled to overflowing. It's only a matter of time before either Hatton or Surrett goes down.

Dodge City has everything you could want in a Western: runaway horses, a cattle stampede, shootouts in the street (and elsewhere), a chase and battle on a steam locomotive, a lynch mob confronting a steely sheriff, one of the biggest barroom brawls ever filmed, even the classic confrontation in a barbershop between one man in the chair and an assassin who hopes to surprise him. Of course, there's also romance, as Abby Irving, now a columnist for the local newspaper, gradually recognizes in Hatton the man of integrity beneath the dusty plainsman. De Havilland and Flynn were paired in a total of eight films, most famously as Maid Marian and the thief of Sherwood Forest in The Adventures of Robin Hood, but they are just as well-matched on horseback in Dodge City. Near the film's end, when Colonel Dodge returns to the town that now bears his name, he finds his old acquaintance Hatton much changed and in better circumstances.

Dodge City Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

As a mark of how seriously Warner took Dodge City, the film was shot in three-strip Technicolor, which was far more expensive than filming in black-and-white. The cinematographer was Sal Polito (who had shot The Adventures of Robin Hood the previous year for director Curtiz), with additional photography by Ray Rennahan (Duel in the Sun).

For this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray release, Warner has created a new master from an interpositive, using digital technology to realign and "re- register" the three layers of the original photography of this 1939 classic. The result stands in stark contrast to its treatment of two other recently released Technicolor productions from a few years later, Anchors Aweigh (1945) and On the Town (1949). Dodge City's Blu-ray image is much sharper and better defined, while still retaining a film-like texture and a natural grain pattern. The presentation may not be quite as impressive as an Ultra Resolution restoration such as that given The Band Wagon, but it is still good enough to render complex scenes like the huge barroom brawl, the cattle stampede or the train ambush with depth and detail. The vivid and varied hues, from the prairie earth tones to the glitz of the saloon hall stage where Ann Sheridan sings and dances, are a reminder of why the early Technicolor process made such a dazzling impression on audiences of the time.

Warner has mastered Dodge City on a BD-25 with an average bitrate of 23.21 Mbps, which doesn't seem to be enough space or bandwidth for a film with this much action and complexity. Still, after looking closely at several of the most demanding scenes, it appears to me that an effort was made to fine-tune the bit-budget, so that bandwidth was conserved where it could be and reallocated where it was needed. Minor artifacting appears from time to time, typically in solid backgrounds where the eye is likely to overlook it (or, on smaller screens, to mistake it for grain).

Dodge City Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Dodge City's original mono mix has been encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA 1.0, and it's lively and involving. Gunshots, hoofbeats, wagon wheels, train engines, poker chips on saloon tables, honky-tonk pianos and all of the usual sounds associated with a Western are part of the mix, and they have as much presence and dynamic range as the recording technology of the era will allow. The dialogue is clear and properly mixed, and the score by the legendary Max Steiner (Casablanca) supplies both grandeur and intimacy.

Dodge City Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The extras have been ported over from Warner's 2005 DVD of Dodge City.

• Warner Night at the Movies: This series of short subjects is available under both "Special Features" (where a "play all" option is provided) and, optionally, under "Play" as an introduction to the main feature.


• Introduction by Leonard Maltin (480i; 1.33:1; 3:33): The film critic describes what audiences in 1939 typically saw in advance of the main feature.
• The Oklahoma Kid Trailer (480i; 1.37:1; 2:47): Warner's other big 1939 Western, starring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart.
• Newsreel (480i; 1.37:1; 1:56): Accounts of the Nazi siege of Warsaw and its attack on the French Maginot line.
• Sons of Liberty (480i; 1.37:1; 20:37): In a short film directed by Curtiz, Claude Rains stars as Haym Salomon, an unsung hero of the American Revolution.
• Dangerous Dan McFoo (480i; 1.37:1; 7:54): A Merrie Melody directed by Tex Avery and loosely based on the poem "The Shooting of Dan McGrew".



• Dodge City: Go West, Errol Flynn (480i; 1.33:1; 8:36): An array of film scholars and historians discuss the history and significance of Dodge City in both Flynn's career and the development of the Western.



• Theatrical Trailer (480i; 1.37:1; 3:17): Not so much a theatrical trailer as a newreel report of the elaborate premiere in Dodge City, Kansas, with a special train chartered by Warner, a parade, a rodeo, appearances by numerous Warner stars and simultaneous presentation in three theaters to accommodate the entire town's population.

Dodge City Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Maybe the reason why Errol Flynn slipped so comfortably into the saddle had something to do with the essence of the frontier myth. Like the English settlers who originally crossed the Atlantic, the pioneers in their covered wagons and the cowboys who rode with them were adventurous independents, much like the outlaws and swashbuckling heroes for which Flynn was already beloved. With a few minor adjustments, Flynn's archetypal rebel transplanted to the American frontier as effectively as all the other immigrants who came to the New World seeking a better life, his courtly style now converted into a kind of calm professionalism, whether as a trail boss accompanying a wagon train or a sheriff subduing an unruly town. Highly recommended.