[Note: When this feature premiered here some weeks back, it was under the title "Not on DVD". As several readers were thoughtful enough to point out, this was not technically accurate, because there isn't anything that you can't find in some version on DVD provided you have access to an all-region player, live at one of the far corners of the earth, and know a guy what knows a guy. Since then, researchers in the Screengrab test labs have labored to come up with a title for this feature that will be both honestly descriptive and pithy. As you can see, they failed. But you get the idea, right?]
The release of Wolverine has inspired a number of reviews and even studies of the Marvel Comics character written by people who could not resist the temptation to make light of the seemingly incongruous fact that this superheroic berserker figure is supposed to be Canadian, and therefore a product of what is widely, if unfairly, stereotyped as the dullest, most mild-mannered, phlegmatic society on Earth. It's true that Wolverine himself found life in the Great White North so unexciting that he ran off and got involved in the American Civil War. But at least one glamorous American antihero found the Canadian climate perfectly to his liking when he set about disproving F. Scott Fitzgerald's notorious line about there being no second acts in American lives. This was Bill Miner, the famously charming "gentleman bandit" who, in the course of making a name for himself as a stagecoach robber, is credited with having invented the pithy and hard-to-misconstrue phrase, "Hands up!" Miner is played by the 61-year-old Richard Farnsworth in The Grey Fox, which opens with our hero's release from prison. At first it appears that changing times have rendered him an honest man whether he likes it or not: the jail doors swing open to usher him into a post-stagecoach universe. For a time, he attempts to adjust to the practice of honest labor, with dispiriting results. Then he finds out about these neat things called trains.
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