The Houston Story - Gene Barry

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S E A R C H D V D B e a v e r

directed by William Castle
USA 1956

Wildcatter Gene Barry has ambitions that go beyond collecting his paycheck for working on the oil rigs. He dreams up a scheme for siphoning off oil from the big pipelines and selling it to fly-by-night distributors or foreign interests. He approaches Edward Arnold, local boss of a sinister "combine" based in St. Louis, who goes for the plan (meanwhile planning to dispose of Barry once the oil and the money start flowing). It turns out Barry is a bit smarter and more ruthless than he seemed; forty years later, he would have been a vice-president (at least) of Enron.

Along with his slithering around to evade the various minions of the complicated syndicate, he finds romantic complications as well. On the right shoulder sits good-gal Jeanne Cooper, waitress in an eatery called The Derrick. But on the left side is Temptation, in the person of Barbara Hale.

Excerpt of review from Bill McVicar at imdb.com located HERE

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Theatrical Release: February 1956 (USA)

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DVD Review: Sony Pictures (Choice Collection) - Region 0 - NTSC

Big thanks to Gregory Meshman for the Review!

DVD Box Cover		CLICK to order from:
Distribution	Sony Pictures Region 0 - NTSC
Runtime	1:20:42
Video	1:85:1 Original Aspect Ratio 16X9 enhanced Average Bitrate: 5.6 mb/s NTSC 720x480 29.97 f/s
	NOTE: The Vertical axis represents the bits transferred per second. The Horizontal is the time in minutes.
Bitrate
Audio	Dolby Digital Mono (English)
Subtitles	None
Features	Release Information: Studio: Sony Pictures Aspect Ratio: Widescreen anamorphic - 1:85:1 Edition Details: • None DVD Release Date: November 6th, 2012 Keep case Chapters 8

Comments

Here is another B crime drama from Sony Pictures available for the first time on DVD in this made-on-demand release and once again, this is a very good quality disc.

The anamorphic progressive transfer has nearly no damage and is presented in proper aspect ratio of 1.85:1 - there is black bars on all sides of the image. Mono audio is fine with no distortion. There are no subtitles per usual standard, no extras and no menus when you pop in the disc. Yet, we still can easily recommend this release just for its great presentation.

- Gregory Meshman

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