Blu-ray Release: Rio Grande

Blu-ray Release Date: Available now
Price: Blu-ray $19.99
Studio: Olive Signature


Rio Grande, the third and final installment in John Ford’s loosely-conceived Cavalry Trilogy (preceded by Fort Apache and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon) stars John Wayne as Lt. Col. John Kirby Yorke (the role he inhabited in Fort Apache) alongside Maureen O’Hara (in the first of five films she’d co-star in alongside Wayne) as his estranged wife, Kathleen, a woman set on keeping their son, Jefferson (Claude Jarman Jr., The Yearling), now under Yorke’s command, out of harm’s way.

Filmed throughout Moab, Utah and the majestic Professor Valley – photographed in exquisite gradations of black and white by Stagecoach cinematographer Bert Glennon – the 1950 classic Western offers nuanced observations on love, family, and honor, while firmly adhering to the western genre, showing Ford at his most measured and mature as a storyteller. Written by James Kevin McGuinness (Men of Boys Town) based on the Saturday Evening Post story by James Warner Bellah, Rio Grande features J. Carrol Naish and a supporting cast of familiar faces, many of them from the Ford stock company of actors including Harry Carey, Jr., Ben Johnson, Victor McLaglen, Chill Wills, and Grant Withers.

This latest addition to Olive Film’s popular Olive Signature Blu-ray line of titles contains the following features:

  • New High-Definition digital restoration
  • Audio commentary by Nancy Schoenberger
  • “Telling Real Histories” – Raoul Trujillo on representations of Indigenous Americans in film
  • “Songs of the Rio Grande” – Marc Wanamaker on the Sons of the Pioneers
  • “Strength and Courage” – Patrick Wayne on his father
  • “Bigger Than Life” – with Claude Jarman, Jr.
  • Visual essay by Tag Gallagher
  • “The Making of Rio Grande” – with Leonard Maltin
  • Essay by Paul Andrew Hutton
  • Theatrical trailer
Buy or Rent Rio Grande

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.