Blu-ray Release: From Noon Till Three

Blu-ray Release Date: Sept. 13, 2016
Price: Blu-ray $29.95
Studio: Twilight Time


Perhaps the shaggiest, quirkiest, most meditative study of Old West mythmaking in Charles Bronson’s (The Mechanic) career is  writer/director Frank D. Gilroy’s funny and unexpectedly moving 1976 film From Noon Till Three.

One of the least-known “revisionist” Westerns from its year of release (its home studio United Artists also rolled out Arthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks, Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson that year.), From Noon Till Three is without doubt the most fun, with a lean, mean newly-minted Death Wish action superstar Bronson gets to kick back, crack a smile and enjoy the charms of his frequent leading lady and real-life wife Jill Ireland (Breakheart Pass).

From-Noon-Till-Three_jpg_optBronson plays a small-time bandit who elects to sit out a planned robbery he’s sure will end in a bloody ambush, and she plays the proper lady with whom he spends that strategic downtime. Sure as shooting, the bank job proves a disastrous reckoning for his fellow gang members, and he craftily escapes; in the process, he swaps clothes with an easily duped dentist, who is apprehended and killed in his place. Afterward, the respectable ladylove becomes a notorious woman of the world, transforming the “legend” of her assignation with the outlaw into a thriving business with a best-selling penny-dreadful memoir along with what would be termed today as “merchandising by-products,” and the resourceful, scruffy fugitive returns to get a piece of the action.

Also on-hand for the production of this Western comedy-romance are the fine cameraman Lucien Ballard (The Hawaiians), resourceful production designer Robert Clatworthy (Psycho), and the great composer Elmer Bernstein (To Kill a Mockingbird), whose score is available on this Twilight Time release as an isolated track.

As supplier Twilight Time prints up only 3,000 copies of each title, be sure to keep on the Twilight Time site or that of distributor Screen Archives for the August 30 prebook date!

About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.