Gary Cooper MGM Movie Legends Collection
August 2007 Reviewed by: Charlotte Meyer Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Even though High Noon, his best-known western film, is not included, this four-film collection of Gary Cooper movies illustrates the importance of his career. Between 1925 and 1961, he made over 100 films and reigned as a Hollywood superstar as movie technology moved from adolescence to maturity. The earliest of these films, The Winning of Barbara Worth, 1926, is a black-and-white silent movie, and the last, the 1954 film Vera Cruz, set a high-water mark for Technicolor cinematography. This collection shows Cooper’s version of a legendary character type, the strong, silent, stoic hero. We see the development of the western as a genre with the immense contribution he made toward defining the role of the American cowboy.

Cooper was in his early 20s in The Winning of Barbara Worth. It tells a story of diverting the Colorado River into the desert "to fill the emptiness with flowers, and fruits, and golden grain." It isn’t the lanky young cowboy Cooper who wins the girl in this early film but the suave urban engineer Ronald Coleman, who’s really the star, taking not only the girl but the hero’s responsibility to right the human and ecological damage. The print is quite good; some of the tinting at key moments in gold or pink or blue is surprisingly effective. Director Henry King gives us some impressive wide shots.

Another black-and-white is The Cowboy and the Lady, 1938, a corny but charming romance. Cooper plays a shy, countrified rodeo rider on tour in glamorous Miami Beach. He wins the elegant city girl (Merle Oberon). They elope, after one evening, easily overcome many silly obstacles, and move to his Montana ranch. It’s a good enough print too.

Another black-and-white and a much better movie is the 1939 Real Glory. It’s set in the early 1900s on a Philippine island during a Moro uprising. Cooper is a take-command medical doctor in the Marines, who always knows just what to do in each of the action-packed crises. Somehow in the midst of the whizzing bullets and a cholera epidemic he manages a romance with the commander’s daughter. From one film to the next, these black-and-whites improve in clarity of image, in sound and in production values.

Most memorable of the four is the classic western Vera Cruz, set during the Mexican Revolution and shot entirely in Mexico in Technicolor’s three-strip luscious saturated color. Cooper is a mercenary, a former colonel in the Confederate Army, looking to raise the money to recover his plantation and support those living on it. His unlikely sidekick is Burt Lancaster, ruthless, violent, and crude. Lancaster’s toothy grin is memorably psychopathic. They get offers for their services from both Emperor Maximilian and the revolutionaries and accept the highest bid whenever it comes. Add a few beautiful women, lots of gun play, buckets of gold, some spectacular battles, a complicated plot, great shots of Mexico, and you have mixed up a great movie. They say that the best color quality control for video transfer is achieved by printing from Technicolor negatives, and this transfer shows it. Don’t look for any extras, though, on any of the films.

Although there is something haphazard about the mix of films for this collection, they somehow come together to make an effective composite of the long, stellar career of Gary Cooper.

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