Fun City Editions is a relatively new blu-ray company and partner label with Vinegar Syndrome that has been busy impressing collectors with both the curation of their catalogue and the quality of their releases. My reaction to all of the Fun City releases so far has been - What on earth is that movie and when can I see it? or Oh man that's a movie I absolutely loved and I'm so thrilled to see it getting a blu-ray release. Rancho Deluxe falls into the latter category and I absolutely couldn't wait to get my hands on a copy.
Released in 1975 and directed by one of the great, still somewhat unsung directors of the era - Frank Perry (The Swimmer, David and Lisa, Play It as It Lays) and written by novelist turned screenwriter/director Tom McGuane (92 in the Shade, The Missouri Breaks) Rancho Deluxe is an oddball, low stakes, quasi-crime hangout in the new American West. Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston play Jack and Cecil - two cattle rustlers who land on the bad side of a wealthy ranch owner on account of their small time schemes. The ranch owner hires not only his two hands Curt and Burt - Harry Dean Stanton and Richard Bright - but also a detective played by Slim Pickens to apprehend the cattle thieves. It's a weird little universe unto itself populated with Pong playing cowboys and hotel room destroying bulls where you can pay your rent with beef and the West isn't really the answer to anyone's problems. Rancho is a clever satire of American myth-making but it isn't a particularly savage one - the stacked cast is incredibly likeable and the idiosyncratic downbeat humor feels like a precursor to what the Coen Brothers would do in the following decades.
Fun City's disc is comprised of a new 2K restoration - my understanding is that all of FCE's releases are predicated on new scans - that looks excellent while retaining the warm grain of the original film. Special features include a commentary by film critic Nick Pinkerton who is largely familiar to me through his work with Kino Lorber. Pinkerton provides the kind of commentary that I like best - one that is dense with information about the production and the historical context as well as tying in other films in interesting ways. If you prefer something more conversational the zoom-style interview with Jeff Bridges is charming due to Bridges' affable nature and of the significance this film and Montana has to his personal biography. Tom McGuane gets an interesting, more traditional interview and then there's a terrific essay provided by film historian Gavin Smith.
https://vinegarsyndrome.com/collections/fun-city-editions/products/rancho-deluxe-fun-city-editions
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