Will Penny (1968)
Review by HTQ4
Film:
DVD:

Written and Directed by Tom Gries
Starring Charlton Heston, Joan Hackett, Donald Pleasance, Lee Majors, Bruce Dern, Ben Johnson, Slim Pickens, Clifton James, Anthony Zerbe, Jon Gries

Features:

• Remembering Will Penny Featurette
  
• The Cowboys of Will Penny Featurette
  

Released by: Paramount
Rating: NR
Region: 1
Anamorphic: Yes

My Advice: Own it

Will Penny (Heston) is a cowhand who is getting on up there in years and is looking for his next job. He heads off with a couple of other hands named Blue (Majors) and Dutchy (Zerbe) to find work at a ranch called Flatiron. Along the way, they cross paths in a bad way with an insane preacher named Quint (Pleasance) who is hell-bent on Penny, who apparently killed one of his sons. Penny makes his way to Flatiron where he takes up a place as the line rider, but he finds out that his cabin is already occupied by a couple of squatters, Catherine (Hackett) and Horace (Jon Gries). They are a mother and son who were on their way to Oregon to meet their husband/father and become farmers, but their guide left them stranded with winter moving in. Penny is faced with the decision of turning them out to face the winter alone, or to help them through the winter and see them on their way--and then there's that crazed preacher that needs to be dealt with.

Ranking right up there with John Ford's The Searchers, this is probably one of the finest westerns ever made. The writing is exceptional and it paid off that the producers decided to let the writer (who at that point had only done of a couple of jobs for television) direct the picture. Heston turns in one of the finest performances of his career. He simply is Will Penny. When you see him in this film, it will make your blood boil that he will forever be remembered as the man who uttered, "Get your hands off me, you damn dirty ape!" The rest of the cast is equally good. Pleasance is downright scary as the man who can seem to turn any Bible verse into a reason to kill a man. Majors' character actually has three dimensions, which is nice to see from him. The characters are all fully lived and their relationships are every bit as important as they need to be.

However, there is one aspect of this film that makes it stand out more than any of these that I've listed here: its accuracy. This has to be the film that comes the closest to capturing what real life must have been like in the Old West. It shows what life was like for a woman on the frontier, it shows how men were able to create their own sort of crude justice, it shows how hard it was for cowhands to find a job after their current payroll was through. In short, it covers almost every aspect of life in the west in the mid-1800s and does so without apologizing or "Hollywoodizing" it. If they had gotten any more accurate, it would have been a documentary, not a movie.

The DVD is a fitting tribute to this piece of movie history. They present the film in an anamorphic widescreen format and the transfer is well done. But most of all, the bonus material gives the movie the respect it deserves. There are two featurettes on this DVD. The first, "Remembering Will Penny" is a collection of interviews with Heston, Jon Gries (who also happened to be the son of the writer/director) and Western Historian Miles Swarthout. I can only assume that the interviews with Heston were shot before the announcement of his battle with Alzheimer's. However, it is wonderful that they captured his thoughts about the film and put it on this DVD. The other featurette is a different, yet shorter, collection of interviews with the same people, but this time they talk about the actors who played some of the roles in the film. There's not much to this one but, again, it's great that they've captured these interviews on film for posterity.

Even if you are not a fan of the American western, you will want to add this one to your collection. How any lover of film could not get wrapped up in watching this flick is beyond me.