Sunset (1988) Blu-ray

No matter how many times it’s been done, making the jump from TV actor to film star is rarely instant or easy. Even in oft-cited case studies like Tom Hanks and George Clooney, the transitions are not smooth or inevitable. Bruce Willis is one of those examples people point to of someone who leapt from the small screen to the big one quickly and irreversibly. But Willis, whose career began with years of background acting and a couple of TV guest spots, had only made it to television by the mid-1980s. ABC had cast Willis as David Addison, the leading man of “Moonlighting”, a mystery comedy romance series that debuted in 1985 and cracked the Nielsen Top Ten by its second season. The movies were a reasonable market for Willis to test. His leading lady, costar Cybill Shepherd, had already had success there dating back to the early ’70s. And “Moonlighting” was about as cinematic as network TV got in the 1980s.

Buy Sunset Retro VHS Blu-ray
at Amazon.com

We all know that Willis made it and would eventually become one of the world’s biggest movie stars in the 1990s. His big break, of course, was Die Hard, the summer blockbuster that continues to be revisited and celebrated as much as any ’80s movie, holiday season-ready or otherwise. Immediately before Die Hard, Willis starred in two less remembered films for director Blake Edwards: 1987’s Blind Date and 1988’s Sunset. The former was reviewed negatively but turned a profit. The latter drew even cooler reviews and outright flopped, grossing just $4 million and change on a $16 million budget. If Willis wasn’t already done filming Die Hard by the time Sunset opened, there’s a great chance the world would have been deprived of one of its coolest leading men.

Adapted from an unpublished novel by Rod Amateau, Sunset tells an Old Hollywood yarn with more truth to it than you might assume. In 1929, Tom Mix (Willis) is a big movie star of Western pictures. His latest film needed to fulfill his studio contract sees him playing the legendary lawman Wyatt Earp (James Garner). Though his work is probably unknown to you now, Mix really existed and was an early star of hundreds of movies, most of them silents. And though you probably know him from dramatizations like 1993’s Tombstone, Earp too was real. And, believe it or not, Mix and Earp were really friends, with Wikipedia claiming Mix was a pallbearer at Earp’s funeral and openly wept at the service.

That is where the fact ends in Sunset and the fiction that follows in Amateau’s story and Edwards’ screenplay fails to grip or stir. Mix and Earp draw suspicion in the rape and murder of a madam, getting mixed up with corrupt cops and a vicious gangster. The plot of Sunset is so generic and routine that I will spare you the bother of detailing it any further. Suffice it to say, our heroes are innocent and determined to clear their names. Also, Earp starts up a romance with a woman (Mariel Hemingway) who corrects him when he says he’s old enough to be her father, pointing out he’s old enough to be her grandfather. How sweet.

Malcolm McDowell, aged 44, already looks like the wild-eyed old man that he has been for most of his career and most of our lives. He plays apple-chomping studio head Alfie Alperin, who is producing Mix’s Earp film and might have something to do with the star’s legal predicament.

Edwards wasn’t a bad filmmaker for Willis to pin his movie star hopes on and Tom Mix seems like a fitting role for an actor soon to utter “Yippi-ki-yay” as the start of his most iconic line of dialogue. But Sunset wasn’t foisting Willis to Hollywood’s A-list nor was it to slow the creative and commercial decline with which Edwards career would end in just a few years. The filmmaker had forty years in the business by this point and his hits 10 and Victor/Victoria were just a few years behind him at this point, but retirement was soon to call him along with a hiatus for his wife Julie Andrews.

Sunset made the leap to Blu-ray this week in a lightweight but eye-catching release from Alliance Entertainment with retro VHS artwork slipcover.

BLU-RAY DISC SPECIFICATIONS:
2.35:1 Widescreen
DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (English)
Subtitles: English for Hearing Impaired
Release Date: June 23, 2026
Single-sided, single-layered disc (BD-25)
Blue Keepcase in Cardboard Slipcover
Suggested Retail Price: $24.99

VIDEO and AUDIO

Sunset has a bit of an ’80s television feel to it, despite its use of the wider of modern aspect ratios. And yet, Alliance’s highly satisfactory Blu-ray presentation makes clear that this is cinema, with its sharp, clean print possessing the right amount of fine film grain throughout. The 2.0 DTS-HD master audio mix is fairly basic, but also without concern.

BONUS FEATURES, MENUS, PACKAGING and DESIGN

To nobody’s surprise, Sunset is joined by absolutely nothing in the way of bonus features. The movie didn’t get extras on DVD besides “More Bruce Willis” trailers and nobody outside of Criterion is doing anything like that these days for catalog titles.

The most exciting thing about the release is the slipcover, which is creatively designed to resemble a video store cover with cassette sliding out. With that old format growing more collectible, this is a nice way to pay homage to that while still enjoying the far better quality of a 1080p Blu-ray.

The static menu is an unremarkable adaptation of the keepcase cover art, which also gets used as disc artwork. Gladly, the disc is authored to resume playback.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Despite the accomplished director at the helm and a good amount of star power at the time, Sunset failed to find an appreciative audience and, at this point, probably never will. If, however, you are one of the film’s fans, you should be intrigued and pleased by Alliance’s basic but nice-looking Region A Blu-ray release.

Buy Sunset Retro VHS Blu-ray
at Amazon.com