Terror in a Texas Town

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Ribs
Joined: Fri Jun 13, 2014 1:14 pm

Terror in a Texas Town

#1 Post by Ribs » Mon Apr 24, 2017 10:25 am

Image

For his 41st and final feature film, Joseph H. Lewis was able to combine the two genres in which he had excelled. The man in the director’s chair for My Name is Julia Ross, Gun Crazy and The Big Combo, Lewis was one of the all-time greats in film noir. But he was also a fine director of Westerns, having made A Lawless Street, 7th Cavalry and The Halliday Brand, all of which – especially the last – remain underrated. Terror in a Texas Town would bring his noir sensibilities to the American West, resulting in one of his finest works.

McNeil (Sebastian Cabot, The Time Machine) is a greedy hotel owner who wants to take control of Prairie City, the Texas town of the title. Keen to drive the local farmers of their land, McNeil hires a gunman, Johnny Crale (Nedrick Young, who would pen the Oscar-winning screenplay for The Defiant Ones the same year), resulting in the death of a former whaler. The dead man’s son, George Hansen (Sterling Hayden, The Killing), arrives in town to inherit the farm and set the stage for revenge – armed with only his father’s old harpoon…

Terror in a Texas Town was written by Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten blacklisted by the film industry and forced to write under pseudonyms or to use ‘fronts’. Two years before he helped break the blacklist with on-screen credits for Otto Preminger’s Exodus and Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, his work was credited to Ben Perry, but it demonstrates a psychological depth and political dimension that is undoubtedly that of Trumbo.

SPECIAL EDITION CONTENTS:

Brand-new 2K restoration from original film elements produced by Arrow Films exclusively for this release
High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentations
Uncompressed Mono 1.0 PCM Audio
Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
Introduction by Peter Stanfield, author of Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail and Horse Opera: The Strange History of the Singing Cowboy
Scene-select commentaries by Stanfield
Theatrical trailer
Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Vladimir Zimakov

FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by Glenn Kenny

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TMDaines
Joined: Wed Nov 11, 2009 1:01 pm
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Re: Terror in a Texas Town

#2 Post by TMDaines » Mon Apr 24, 2017 12:21 pm

Never heard of this one, but colour me interested.

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domino harvey
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Re: Terror in a Texas Town

#3 Post by domino harvey » Mon Apr 24, 2017 12:23 pm

It's wildly overrated due to one memorable image-- otherwise it's whatever. Lewis on the whole is a mediocre director vaunted to all-time status by some on the strength of Gun Crazy and the Big Combo, but stuff like this shows he's no Auteur

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DarkImbecile
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Re: Terror in a Texas Town

#4 Post by DarkImbecile » Mon Apr 24, 2017 12:26 pm

Still... Chekhov's harpoon!

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Alphonse Tram
Joined: Tue Nov 25, 2014 11:32 am

Re: Terror in a Texas Town

#5 Post by Alphonse Tram » Mon Apr 24, 2017 12:36 pm

Fantastic announcement! I love this film, Arrow are really delivering the goods.

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knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: Terror in a Texas Town

#6 Post by knives » Mon Apr 24, 2017 1:58 pm

domino harvey wrote:It's wildly overrated due to one memorable image-- otherwise it's whatever. Lewis on the whole is a mediocre director vaunted to all-time status by some on the strength of Gun Crazy and the Big Combo, but stuff like this shows he's no Auteur
I prefer My Name is Julia to those to be honest. Still, I agree he should be placed as a talented craftsman rather than a auteur.

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dda1996a
Joined: Tue Oct 27, 2015 6:14 am

Re: Terror in a Texas Town

#7 Post by dda1996a » Mon Apr 24, 2017 3:40 pm

Saw this a few years ago. Really disappointing and to be frank really silly. It might sound cool, western with a harpoon, but it turns out to be incredibly silly when the film takes everything so seriously.

isakorg2
Joined: Thu May 05, 2016 11:43 am

Re: Terror in a Texas Town

#8 Post by isakorg2 » Sat Jul 15, 2017 12:51 pm

Disagreements about Lewis aside, if anyone else has actually watched the Arrow disc, have they encountered any problems?

I find that quite often there are shifting light levels in the image, creating an unwelcome flickering effect. I also found this to be the case with the recent blu-ray Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia also. I've encountered this on no other Arrows or any BDs for that matter and believe me I've got a lot of them. I'm watching on a Samsung 60" plasma (got it last year - a relatively new set) and with an Oppo. I do notice that when I select Display - which creates black bars across the top and bottom of the screen, with information about the display - how many minutes to go, mps, etc - the flickering is NOT apparent - I would say it even disappears.

Has anybody encountered this?

Thanks

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cdnchris
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Re: Terror in a Texas Town

#9 Post by cdnchris » Tue Aug 01, 2017 8:26 pm

domino harvey wrote:It's wildly overrated due to one memorable image-- otherwise it's whatever. Lewis on the whole is a mediocre director vaunted to all-time status by some on the strength of Gun Crazy and the Big Combo, but stuff like this shows he's no Auteur
You ain't kidding. One decent shot (maybe two) and then an incredibly silly film to fill the rest of the time, helped less by Sterling Hayden's "accent." I love Hayden, and I'll watch anything with him, but 'yeesh' this was terrible.

Credit to Arrow for putting out a rather great disc for it. It looks great (and can't say I noticed isakorg2's issue) and I liked the supplements if just for the fact Stanfield obviously doesn't care for the film, nor Lewis for that matter (outside of Gun Crazy and The Big Combo);.

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