Warner Bros. releases sparkling new versions of a classic western – and a classic "eastern" – on 4K disc

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One of the great westerns of all time, Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo, has made the transition to 4K disc, and it was worth the wait.

Ditto for "East of Eden," Elia Kazan's take on John Steinbeck, a movie I didn't like very much but which many others seem to think is equally classic to Rio Bravo. Those people are wrong, of course, but at least fans of the film now have a much more state-of-the-art version to be bored by.

Rio Bravo tells the story of Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne), his burned out drunk of a friend and deputy, Dude (Dean Martin) and deputy-sidekick Stumpy (Walter Brennan), along with hotshot new kid/fast draw in town Colorado (Ricky Nelson). The story follows the four of them (Four for Texas?) as they await the consequences of Chance arresting a lowlife, but connected, hood for gunning down an unarmed man.

Joe Burdette (Claude Akins) is that small-time low life, but since he's the no-good brother of a no-good Bigwig – and blood is blood - brother Nathan (John Russell) wants to save his sibling's neck from being stretched by the gallows. And he has plenty of time and resources to do it: Chance is holding Joe in a cell at his sheriff's office, waiting for the federal Marshall to show up a few days down the road. So, Nathan basically lays siege to the town, while sending in hired killers to, if not exactly spring Joe, at least to intimidate Chance and make life as difficult as possible.

Kind of like the Biden DOJ…

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