More Digging

Just a quick addendum to the previous post, regarding how some works by great directors can get buried on packaged DVD sets.

I was delving into the filmography of Andre de Toth and watching all his titles that were available on DVD (on Netflix specifically). When I had finished, I went through his filmography on the IMDB and clicked on each title I hadn’t heard of to learn about some of his other films. Lo and behold I stumbled upon two Andre de Toth-directed westerns on a Randolph Scott triple feature DVD set from no less than Warner Brothers: Man Behind the Gun/Thunder Over the Plains/Riding Shotgun. The first film is by Felix Feist, and the second two are by Andre de Toth. Since I had recently watched some excellent Andre de Toth-directed Randolph Scott westerns, this was quite an exciting find. (It’s not on Netflix, though, so I haven’t been able to watch them yet.) Warner Brothers also has one other Randolph Scott triple feature set: Colt .45/Tall Man Riding/Forth Worth; and two John Wayne triple feature sets: The Telegraph Trail/Somewhere in Sonora/The Man from Monterey and The Big Stampede/Ride Him Cowboy/Haunted Gold. There were no tremendously exciting surprises for me amongst the directing lineups of these sets.

In all the sets, browsing on Amazon did not yield the directors’ names. The only options were to check each title in IMDB individually or go to www.DVDEmpire.com, which allows you to view the back of a DVD case clearly enough to see directors’ names (although many sets won’t have that information there). Individual titles on IMDB do indicate if they are on DVD, although I’m not sure how reliably (perhaps a distributor may operate below IMDB’s radar or do a bad job of listing the contents of their package). In the case of these two Andre de Toth westerns, the IMDB link to the DVD was how I stumbled upon this set.

Just another revelation that there are some potential buried treasures out there on these packaged DVD sets. (Perhaps I’ll build up to a more meaningful post sometime soon!)