For a Few Dollars More - French Pressbook

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Blu-ray Review: God's Gun

Kino Lorber's God's Gun Blu-ray has finally arrived, representing the first time the film has been available in widescreen in North America. Previously the film has been available from MGM on DVD in a fairly decent transfer in the UK for the past 15 years or so.

Kino itself has an excellent track record for releasing Lee Van Cleef titles on blu-ray; including For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly, Death Rides a Horse, Sabata, Barquero, Captain Apache, Bad Man's River, Return of Sabata, and even the complete series of The Master.   

main menu

 

The film itself is a well know LVC disaster.  You would have thought with the talent involved (LVC, Jack Palance, and Sabata director "Frank Kramer") this movie would be a slam dunk.  Unfortunately a film plagued with problems both behind the scenes and on the page was made. What we end up with is a film which LVC didn't even dub his own voice on!

Most copies you will find of God's Gun are of a scratchy full screen public domain print that has been floating around since the 1980's.  It wasn't until 2007 that a quality studio released version of the film was put on DVD.  Unfortunately, this DVD has only been available in Europe, and as such is region 2/PAL encoded (making it unplayable on most US DVD players).  This Blu-ray marks the North America disc debut.

VIDEO:

The transfer is an improvement over the DVD edition.  Much of the improvement comes from the extra resolution that blu-ray provides, while the actual source material does not show any revolutionary improvement.  Color timing is slightly different from the DVD.  This is probably as good as this film will ever look.

Blu-ray

DVD

Screencaps below (click to enlarge!) -

AUDIO:

The audio is available in English only.  English subtitles.  Nothing remarkable here.  

EXTRAS:

Decent for a film of this caliber.  Alex Cox gives a nice commentary on the film, and remains positive throughout.

• Audio Commentary by Alex Cox
• LVC and western trailers selection (all also available from Kino)
• Reversible cover art



IN CONCLUSION:

Recommended for the LVC completest only.  Owning a better copy of this film, doesn't necessarily make it a better movie!

THE GOOD:

• Good picture quality
• Nice commentary track
• Nice selection of trailers

THE BAD:

• God's Gun

Full stats and ordering info- 

• Region: A
• Language: English
• Subtitles: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Studio: Kino Lorber
• Run Time: 97 minutes (1:36:45)

Order at amazon.com

reversible cover art

Captain Apache - Black and White Press Photos (part 2)

A continuation from a previous post

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Max Allan Collins "Nolan" Book Covers

Author Max Allan Collins based his character book series character Nolan on LVC

The Van Cleef resemblance (which was part of the Pinnacle covers, to a degree, and very much an element of the Perfect Crime reprints) is mentioned prominently in the novels. I met him once, interviewed him, and he treated me with amusement and at one point got briefly irritated with me. It was unsettling but memorable, being Jon to his Nolan. No guns were involved.

http://maxallancollins.com/blog/2019/12/03/one-more-time-for-nolan/

Here is a look at those book covers below!