Will Penny (1968)

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General		Extras
Category	Western	Featurette-Remembering Will Penny Featurette-The Cowboys of Will Penny
Rating
Year Of Production	1968
Running Time	105:13
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (55:53)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Programme
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Tom Gries
Studio Distributor	Paramount Home Entertainment	Starring	Charleton Heston Joan Hackett Donald Pleasence Lee Majors Bruce Dern Anthony Zerbe
Case	?
RPI	$24.95	Music	David Raskin

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) German Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.75:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English English for the Hearing Impaired French German Dutch Turkish Italian Spanish Italian Titling	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Will Penny is Charlton Heston’s perfect Western – and he gets to play the lead, which certainly helps. An aging cowboy goes to the hills for a winter job with a couple of friends. On the way, he has a chance encounter with a group of gun-toting religious psychopaths, headed by the wildly melodramatic Preacher Quint (Donald Pleasence). In the encounter, one of Preacher Quint’s sons is killed by the expert shot of Will Penny, only doing his part to defend what’s his. Penny then continues on and finally gets a job as a line rider, checking the perimeter of a ranch.

    It is at the line rider’s cottage that Penny meets for the second time the beautiful Catherine Allen (Joan Hackett), and her young son, left behind by an unscrupulous guardian who was meant to take them to California. Although the ranch doesn’t allow squatters, Penny agrees to let them stay. But all is not well, because Preacher Quint is out for revenge! Yet, for all their overacted madness, Quint and his clan are pretty stupid psychopaths. Not only unhinged, but also plain dumb. I mean, you can’t just half kill a man like Charlton Heston in the middle of a Western movie and expect him not to get back on his feet and kill you in the second half of the movie. Don’t they know the rules of Hollywood Westerns?

    I quite like this genre, although I must confess that I am more partial to the neo-Western movement embodied in films like Kevin Costner’s epic Dances With Wolves, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, and one of my personal favourites, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. However, I have my favourites amongst the classics; Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Western trilogy, featuring Clint Eastwood, is masterful, not only in its entertainment value, but also in its merging of Eastern Samurai philosophy and quirky humour in order to redefine the Western genre. Will Penny, on the other hand, is unlike any of these films. It is a traditional Hollywood Western, often politically incorrect, and unashamedly extolling the virtues of the frontier cowboy.

    Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t a bad film. With a debut performance by The Six-Million Dollar Man himself, Lee Majors, how could it be bad? But it is dated, a little hackneyed, and at times clichéd. Performances can also be a bit hammy. I found myself laughing at it rather than with it on several occasions, but then I’m a little jaded nowadays. If you like neo-Westerns, you probably won’t like this. And there is none of the grace and comic timing which worked so well in Leone’s Westerns. But it is watchable, apparently quite the classic in its own right, and does have a heart somewhere at its core, even if the all-important gunfight at the end is a little lame, even by 1968 standards. Heston himself believes it to be “...the truest film about what the West was really like that I have ever seen, let alone been in.” I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s not bad for a Hollywood interpretation.

Video

    Presented in 1.75:1, 16x9 enhanced, this is close to the original aspect ratio of 1.85:1.

    The quality of the picture is actually pretty good for a film made in 1968. It’s a little grainy, with some persistent low-level noise throughout, and also a little soft. Colours are not brilliant, sometimes seeming a little washed out. But it was hardly going to be a perfect telecine transfer given its age. Shadow detail is acceptable.

    MPEG artefacts are virtually non-existent, except for some mild posterization on extreme facial close ups, and aliasing on background features, but nothing really noteworthy.

    There is quite a bit of dust in the transfer, and the occasional tiny hair, however none of this is really distracting. And again, given the age of the film, this is hardly surprising. In fairness, the amount of dirt is probably well above average for a film this old.

    There are 8 subtitle options: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Turkish and English for the Hearing Impaired. They are white with a black border and easy to read.

    The dual-layer pause is at 55:53. It occurs during a quiet scene and is subtle enough that I missed it the first time.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The default track here is an English 2.0 Dolby Digital mono soundtrack, but there are also German, Spanish, French and Italian tracks in the same format.

    There’s not much to say, really. Dialogue is easy enough to understand. There were no apparent audio sync problems.

    The range was adequate, and the score came up fairly well, but limited, in the mono soundfield.

    There is no surround information, nor even any left-right directional cues.

    There was no subwoofer use.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menus

    All menus are 16x9 enhanced, static with no sound.

Featurette: “Remembering Will Penny” (13:17)

    Presented in 1.33:1, non 16x9 enhanced, 2.0 Dolby Digital Stereo. This is a series of clips from the film interspersed with interviews from the principal (surviving) cast and crew or their progenitors as well as an historian.

Featurette: “The Cowboys of Will Penny” (3:21)

    Presented in 1.33:1, non 16x9 enhanced, 2.0 Dolby Digital Stereo. This is more of the interviews from the people in the previous featurette discussing the actors who played the cowboys in the film.

    The R1 version is apparently presented in the correct aspect ratio of 1.85:1, but whether that information has just been inaccurately recorded or not I cannot determine. The features are the same.

    Will Penny is a classic style old Western. It’s not great, but apparently it is highly regarded.

    The video transfer is good for a film of this age.

    The sound is pretty lame, but all I would expect.

    Although there was not a glut of them, the extras are pretty good.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall