It's no secret that I love the Ranown films that Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher made in the late fifties. After watching and reviewing them here, I lamented that aside from Seven Men from Now, the films owned by Columbia Pictures were now out of print and the boxset containing the films was commanding high prices on the secondary market. There were dvd-rs available on Amazon, but they were ridiculously expensive* and then there's the issue of dvd-rs being a unreliable format.
So imagine my surprise while browsing the movie section of Target, only to see a Randolph Scott collection on their shelves. I was intrigued, at first thinking that it would contain some of his public domain work like the similar John Wayne collections do. Then I noticed the bottom of the package, listing the films, and that 5 of them were Ranown films. And since it was a Mill Creek release it was only $7. It isn't the blu-ray released that I had hoped for, but it's cheap and as of late, Mill Creek has been putting out a good product when they have decent materials.
Opening up the set reveals that it's 2 discs, with the films split three to a disc. This should be fine, as only one of the films in the set breaks the 80 minute mark. I did a quick check through of the set and each film is presented in anamorphic widescreen, and the picture quality is alright. I mean it isn't blu-ray quality, but in terms of it being a cheap budget release then it's good. No special features from the original set are ported over, and menus are just a static image with the name of each picture, but the important thing is that these great films are available again.
I'll update this post when I've gone through the films, but as of right now it's worth the $7 that Target and Amazon are charging for it, and there is a second Scott collection that Mill Creek has released that has a few earlier films that were also originally released by Columbia. A review of A Lawless Street, the one non-Boetticher film will be coming in February, since January is always reserved for Django films here.
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