Masters of Cinema, Red River, and Me

Big News! I am pleased to announce that I'm joining the team at Masters of Cinema to be a occasional booklet editor. What is Masters of Cinema, you say? In short, they are the "Criterion Collection" of the United Kingdom, and have put out many of the same films with the highest quality transfers. They've also put out things you can't get in the United States, like Le Pont Du Nord, Van Gogh, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, and then they've done releases for major works like Lang's M, Ozu's Floating Weeds, The Blue Angel, and next year Computer Chess! (you can see a full list here). More than that, each booklet is more than just an essay, but a collection of canonical articles, interviews, and rare photos to go with it. The upcoming Mizoguchi box set, for example, has a booklet that runs 344 pages!

My first big project, as it turned out, happened to be a favorite: Howard Hawks's Red River. It's an excellent transfer of this amazing film, and the booklet I edited includes essays by Andrew Sarris and Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, plus interviews with editor (and The Thing credited director) Christian Nyby and writer Borden Chase. The Blu-Ray also features a video conversation with two of my favorite cinephiles: Dan Sallitt and Jaime Christley. Finally, I have a small essay in the booklet as well, talking about the differences between the now canonical Book Version and the rarer, hard to find Voice Version. 

Anyways, major thanks to Craig Keller for bringing me on the team—it's a total honor to work with and investigate these fantastic films and bring them all to you. As a treat to get you all excited, one of the things I pulled during my archival research was The Chisholm Trail, the original short story by Borden Chase that ran in the Saturday Evening Post starting on December 7, 1946. We didn't have room for it in the book, and since it is now out of copyright, I am presenting the first part here for your reading enjoyment—the second chapter should be especially interesting for fans of the film, as it paints Joanne Dru's Tess in a very different light. Enjoy!