Not bad - some issues - DVD?

I finally saw Gunslinger and it's not a bad movie at all. Cheap, certainly, but it moves, it's exciting, it has some neat twists, it's even in color, and let's face it, the plot -- a murdered sheriff's widow taking the job and gunning for the people behind hubby's killing -- is pretty unique.

Just seeing Beverly Garland's quick-thinking actions at her husband's funeral is by itself reason to really like this picture. Not to mention her first encounter in the saloon with Allison Hayes. Her falling in love with the titular gunslinger (John Ireland) sent to kill her, just a few days after her husband (remember him, Bev?) was shot dead, is a timeless example of love at first sight.

Obviously they should have taken some extra care about certain things in the film. The movie makes a big (if completely irrelevant) point of specifying the dates it takes place, starting with "Friday, May 21, 1878"...except that May 21, 1878 was a Tuesday. I know Roger Corman made his movies in a hurry, but this would have taken about 30 seconds to look up in an almanac; why put stuff like this in if you can't spare a few moments to get it right? I also liked the Pony Express rider who keeps galloping into town -- 17 years after the Pony Express stopped. (Must've had a lame horse.) Crab monsters are believable; it's the little things like these that stretch one's credulity.

My main bone to pick is the way portions of the script glorify the Confederacy. Particularly knowing it was directed by Roger Corman, who is anything but a right-wing zealot, hearing a lot of nonsense praising that insurrection of racists and traitors is not only historically inaccurate, it's reprehensible. There was no reason the film had to contain the plot elements involving the Confederacy, certainly not to the point of making it sound like the noble lost cause so many books and movies (like The Birth of a Nation or Gone With the Wind) have falsified it to be.

Fortunately, there are only a couple of scenes where this comes up, so it doesn't really detract from the overall enjoyment of the film. For a low-budget movie with a plot that's more than a little bizarre (to say the least), this isn't a bad little western at all, and it's certainly a one-of-a-kind entry in the Corman catalogue.

But -- why isn't this on DVD? Apparently it was on VHS with a couple of other B westerns, but it seems to have disappeared. This film was released by American Releasing Corporation, the original name of what would shortly become American International Pictures, and some of the studio's films (such as another Beverly Garland opus, It Conquered the World) are owned and have been tied up by Sam Arkoff's widow. (Or maybe it's James H. Nicholson's.) I don't know if this is the case with Gunslinger, but whatever's going on, this film definitely needs to join all the other Corman films available on DVD.

Update: The DVD is out! Shout! Factory has released Gunslinger as part of a group of four films in their set "Movies 4 You: Western Collection". The "Movies 4 You" concept is a new one from Shout! -- there are several such sets in different genres: sci-fi, horror, war, westerns. There are at present at least two western sets (the other is called "Western Classics"), so make sure which one you order. The other films in the set with Gunslinger are all low-budgeters from the 1970s, so this opus really stands out in the pack.