POSSE (Kino Lorber)

Posse
Kino Lorber / Kino Classics

The Stats
Video: 1080p High Definition
Audio: 2.0
Subtitles: English SDH

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by "Doc" Hunter Bush, Staff Writer and Podcast Director

Posse comes to Blu-ray from Kino Lorber. One of only two films directed by co-lead Kirk Douglas, the other being Peg Leg, Musket & Sabre (1973), Posse is an excellent example of revisionist western. The look and sound of the Kino Blu-ray do justice to a film with a chewy moral center, and the modest special features are still enough to make this worth a look.

The Movie: Good

I grew up watching westerns (and the 1960 Spartacus), so I like Kirk Douglas just fine, but man, do I love Bruce Dern and even though, intellectually I know that their careers overlapped a good amount, I just could not imagine them sharing screen space. Once that minor moment of cognitive dissonance was reconciled, Posse still had a lot of surprises for me. An ambitious, action packed, and morally complex film, Posse is an excellent example of the revisionist western.

After an opening nighttime shootout in a burning barn that ends with many train-robbing outlaws dead, and $40,000 turned to ash, we're introduced to U.S. Marshall Howard Nightingale (Douglas) riding a train with his titular posse, hot on the trail of outlaw leader Jack Strawhorn (Dern). Nightingale shows off the campaign posters for his upcoming senatorial bid, which he assures his men he'll be a shoe-in for after the capture of Strawhorn. Soon, they do just that, making short work of Strawhorn's remaining defenses, and taking him into custody, back on the train, headed to town to see him hanged.

This is where most westerns would be wrapping up: the lawman bringing a bandit to justice. But Posse has a lot more going on under the surface. Strawhorn, for instance, views the encroachment of trains on the small desert towns, and the people who live and work in them, as a negative; the modern equivalent being automation and megacorporations wiping out small businesses and workers in the name of modernity. Nightingale, for his part, is a born politician. He smiles, shakes hands and kisses babies--try to never get those two backwards, btw--while secretly all but champing at the bit to climb into the pocket of Big Train.

Amidst a steady stream of action sequences--a train explodes in this and keeps going!--Posse gives Douglas and Dern plenty of room to draw these men in all the shades of their equal but conflicting viewpoints. Neither of them, all told, is The Good Guy. "Honest men stay honest" Strawhorn says at one point, "only as long as it pays. That's why I'm a thief, and you're a liar."

This fascinating and thorny tone might be the doing of credited screenwriters William Roberts (The Magnificent Seven) and Christopher Knopf (Cimarron Strip), but I'm willing to bet it's more the product of an uncredited treatment from one of my favorite filmmakers, Larry Cohen. Cohen started in TV and westerns--he created Branded--before moving on to exploitation films like Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem (both released in 1973!) and horror films like The Stuff (1985), which I would end up finding him through. Most of his works have the same feelings of inevitability and doom, the healthy disapproval of capitalism, and are awash in a very similar moral ambiguity as Posse.

The Packaging: Average

This is, as The Simpsons would say, perfectly cromulent packaging. While most of the recent Kino releases I've covered have had a reversible cover, Posse unfortunately does not. The cover is quite striking however: an illustration of Nightingale above the titular posse on horseback with a train crossing being them; the whole thing on a weathered yellow background. The first pressing also comes with a cardboard slipcover of the same image.

The Video: Excellent

There's something I love about the look of Posse. The daylight scenes have a real, palpable sense of oppressive heat beating down on everything. The landscapes look beautiful, and occasionally lush, but that lushness feels in defiance of the atmosphere. Then there are the night scenes. Every nighttime scene in Posse looks like a velvet painting (complimentary). There is just something unusual to the depth of the shadows and the softness of the spotlights. The opening scene--the shootout at the burning barn--is completely arresting because of this intangible visual quality.

This is all obviously the product of the cinematography by Fred J. Koenekamp (The Towering Inferno), but the Kino release restores the film to how I imagine it must have looked the first time it was screened: sumptuous.

The Audio: Average

I noticed no issue at all with the audio on this release. I have a three-channel soundbar--purely to prevent my TV from vibrating apart over time--and Posse sounded full-bodied throughout. I was particularly impressed with the train scenes, of which there are quite a few, because usually big, rumbling engines like that tend to vibrate my soundbar something fierce. That DID happen, but not nearly as much as I was expecting it to.

Another audio high-point is that the dialogue was incredibly carefully mixed. There are a lot of wide open spaces in this, it being the west and all, and the dialogue in these locations, while most certainly recorded later, actually sounded appropriately distant. It's a small thing, but it helps maintain the verisimilitude of the film overall, which makes for a better, more immersive experience. I imagine this would sound even better with a more robust audio set-up.

The Special Features: Average

These are fairly bare-bones special features, but still enjoyable. The commentary track from filmmaker and historian Steve Mitchell was loaded with interesting tidbits, like Fred Koenekamp's tendency to light to the mood of the scene, and not to the picture--which makes those velvet painting sequences feel even more remarkable--or how director Kirk Douglas would forget to shoot coverage of himself. Charming. My one quibble is that there should be a Play All option for the trailers.

• Audio commentary by filmmaker / historian Steve Mitchell
• Trailers
• Posse (theatrical trailer)
• Man Without a Star (1955)
• Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957)
• The Last Sunset (1961)
• Lonely Are the Brave (1962)
• Will Penny (1967)
• Doc (1971)
• Chato's Land (1972)
• Joe Kidd (1972)
• Valdez is Coming (1971)

In Summary: Snag a used copy

Kirk Douglas--again, doing double duty in front of and behind the camera--and Bruce Dern are both excellent here, and the cinematography really took my breath away, but while I found a lot to enjoy about Posse, in both media and message, I don't think it's a bombastic enough film to be a universal recommend. 

Obviously if you are a westernhead, or specifically into revisionist westerns, then you will definitely want to snatch this up. But the average film-buyer may want to hold off just a bit. Posse is a different animal than most of its peers. As the tagline says "Posse begins like most westerns. It ends like none of them."