Uncle Ethan (John Wayne) returns home to his brother’s house after the Civil War to find his niece’s and nephews all grown up.

However the happy Texan outback is about to become a little unstable as a group of rebel Comanche tear through the district. They begin by stealing and killing a neighbours heard of cattle. Ethan heads out with the Texas rangers to find the Indians, instead they find a dead heard of cattle. They immediately head home in fear of what is happening while they are away. Sure enough the Indians have been through Ethans brothers house set it in fire, killed his brother and wife and taken his 2 nieces.

The Texas rangers with Ethan at their side head off to find the two girls. Soon enough there are differences and Ethan ends up splitting from the group with his nephew Martin Pawley (Jeffery Hunter) and another man to find the girls. Lucy is found dead shortly after but Debbie the eldest girl is still missing. They spend 5 years searching for them finding Debbie eventually.

While all of this is going on Laurie (Vera Miles) is waiting at home for Martin to return to marry her. She decides after 5 years and only one letter that he isn’t coming back to her so she decides to marry another. Martin does return just in time though.

This is really a glorified Cowboy and Indians story that dragged on a little too long and had so many cliches it became monotonous.

So How Does This Transfer Hold Up?

VIDEO
While this is far superior to Cowboys there is still some room for improvement. I won’t be too critical though considering the film is 45 years old. The disc is dual sided with a full frame version on one side and a 1.75:1 Anamorphic widescreen transfer on the other. I admit I only watched parts of the full frame version but watched the widescreen transfer entirely.

The main fault with the transfer was a prevalence of film artefacts, which really became annoying after a while. There were no MPEG artefacts

Shadow detail was average and many of the darker scenes lacked a lot of detail.

Generally the image was quite sharp; given its age I was expecting it to be a lot worse. There were some minor instances of grain but nothing too bad.

The colour palette was characteristic of most technicolour films in that it was washed out and very dull. I wouldn’t expect too much more though once again taking the age of the film into consideration the technicolour images aren’t too bad.

There are some very minor instances of shimmering.

As a 45-year-old film I can’t really place too much criticism on the transfer quality.

AUDIO
Ok as a Dolby Digital Mono soundtrack this was certainly less than spectacular. The centre channel took the entire load as far as speaker coverage (surprise!). Dialogue was generally clear but sometimes got a little mumbly and needed a volume boost.

As a mono soundtrack you can’t really pick too much here, as there isn’t much to expect.

The best way to describe the musical score from max Steiner is "Typically Western". Lots of dramatic strings and cowboys songs are the basis for the soundtrack.

EXTRAS
Theatrical Trailer

Featurette: WB Presents:
A very nice and informative making of featurette which is well worth a look. Director John Ford takes us behind the scenes and reveals some film making secrets that would have been quite original in its time. The transfer quality here is plagued with film artefacts, and doesn’t seem to have had anywhere near as much attention as the film.