The DVD Report #60: June 24, 2008
One of the most beloved films of all time, Joshua Logan's Fanny, has finally been released on DVD. To commemorate the occasion, I'll take a look at Fanny and other major films released in the U.S. in 1961 starting with the year's top ten. It took two directors, Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, to bring the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim musical West Side Story to the screen. Filmed on the mean streets of New York's upper west side just before the buildings were torn down to make way for Lincoln Center, the film is essentially a modern Romeo and Juliet tale set against the backdrop of interracial gang warfare. Natalie Wood is the innocent Puerto Rican girl and Richard Beymer the Anglo boy she falls in love with to the consternation of both sets of family and friends, but it's second leads George Chakiris as Natalie's gang leader brother and Rita Moreno as his street wise girlfriend who walked home with the acting honors as well as two of the film's 11 Oscars in supporting categories. The film also won for Best Picture, Direction and numerous technical awards. Based on the 1948 Nuremberg trial of the judges who rubberstamped Hitler's atrocities, Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg was expanded from a successful TV docudrama and given an all-star cast to add dramatic heft. Spencer Tracy, in one of his last great roles, is fairness personified as the American judge who oversees the trial, while Maximilian Schell brilliantly plays the defense counsel opposite Richard Widmark's U.S. Army prosecutor. Marlene Dietrich is heartbreaking as the proud widow of an executed German officer as are Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift as victims of the atrocities. Only Burt Lancaster, in a role planned for Laurence Olivier, seems out of place as the most stoic of the judges on trial, though he does have one riveting scene near the end. Schell won an Oscar as did Abby Mann for adapting his own teleplay for the screen. Tracy, Garland, Clift, Kramer, cinematographer Ernest Laszlo and the film itself were among the film's 11 nominations. A worldwide sensation, Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita opened the floodgates to foreign film releases in the U.S. like nothing before or since. Marcello Mastroianni stars as a disillusioned paparazzo through whose eyes we see the world pass by. Less ambiguous than most Fellini works, the title translates ironically as "the sweet life" when what it's really about is "the empty life". Among its fascinating juxtapositions are the suffocation of monogamy vs. the meaninglessness of promiscuity and sincere religious beliefs vs. manipulative hypocrisy. Above all it is a visually stunning masterwork with unforgettable images from the statue of Christ flying over Rome to Anita Ekberg bathing in the Fountain of Trevi. The film won an Oscar for Black-and-White Costume Design and was nominated for its art direction, screenplay and Fellini's direction. Perhaps no romantic comedy in film history has grown in stature over the years like Blake Edwards' Breakfast at Tiffany's. It was taken from Truman Capote's novella about the romance between a call girl and a gigolo forever immortalized by Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard to the strains of Henry Mancini's magnificent score which includes Audrey's plaintive singing of the great Oscar-winning "Moon River". Exquisitely filmed on location in New York, Hepburn always maintained that she was badly cast in a role Capote envisioned for Marilyn Monroe, but legions of fans beg to differ for her Holly Golightly is easily the best loved of all of Audrey's performances. The only sour note is the embarrassing performance of Mickey Rooney as Holly's Japanese neighbor. The film was nominated for five Oscars including Best Actress and won two for Mancini's score and for the song "Moon River". Edwards' direction was not nominated for an Oscar, but he was singled out as one of the finalists for a DGA (Directors' Guild of America) award. Marcel Pagnol's Marseilles trilogy of the 1930s (Marius, Fanny and Cesar) became the Broadway musical Fanny in 1954, which was filmed with its glorious score mostly intact, but without the lyrics being sung in what was originally advertised as Joshua Logan's Fanny (until someone pointed out the double meaning). Whether it's writer Pagnol, composer Harold Rome or director Logan whose name precedes the title, the 1961 version owes as much to master cinematographer Jack Cardiff as it does those gifted artists as it is one of the most visually splendid works of art ever committed to film. It is also one of the best acted with Leslie Caron and Horst Buchholz as Fanny and Marius, the young lovers separated by his love for the sea; and especially by those two old rascals Charles Boyer, as Marius' father Cesar, and Maurice Chevalier, as Fanny's benefactor Panisse. The film was nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture, Direction and Actor (Boyer), and four Golden Globes including Best Picture, Actor (Chevalier) and Actress (Caron). Paul Newman had one of the most acclaimed roles of his career as "Fast Eddie" Felson in Robert Rossen's The Hustler, a role he repeated to an Oscar win 25 years later in Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money. Filmed in stark black and white against the backdrop of seedy, smoke-filled pool halls, the film is one of the bleakest, grimmest dramas ever to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Its unrelenting melancholy and sadness is unbearable at times, especially in its portrayal of the doomed romance between Fast Eddie and the crippled Sarah, beautifully played by Piper Laurie. Jackie Gleason had what was far and away his best dramatic role as Minnesota Fats, the legendary real-life pool player. Haunting and unforgettable, the film was nominated for nine Oscars including Best Picture, Direction, Actor, Actress and two Supporting Actors (Gleason and George C. Scott). It won two for its art direction and cinematography. If Breakfast at Tiffany's and Fanny were the year's most memorable romantic comedies, and they were, Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three was the fastest and the funniest. James Cagney, in his last role before his retirement, has one of his best roles as Coca Cola's man in Berlin charged with chaperoning his boss' daughter while vacationing there. Unfortunately for Cagney, the girl (Pamela Tiffan) falls head over heels in love with Communist Horst Buchholz resulting in rapid-fire cold war gags and trips in and out of East Berlin in the last days before the wall went up. Buchholz matches Cagney in his fast comic delivery as does Arlene Francis as Cagney's seen-it-all wife. Lilo Pulver is a knockout as Cagney's voluptuous secretary. The film won a much-deserved Oscar nomination for its black and white cinematography. Wilder and his writing partner I.A.L. Diamond were nominated for a WGA award and Cagney for a Laurel Award. William Wyler's 1936 film of Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour, re-titled These Three, skirted the lesbian issues inherent in the play by concentrating on the heterosexual romance of Merle Oberon and Joel McCrea and having Miriam Hopkins jealous of Oberon instead of McCrea, a fact seized upon by brat Bonita Granville who tells a vicious lie that causes multiple tragedies. The remake with Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine and James Garner pulls no punches as MacLaine is clearly shown to be jealous of Garner, not Hepburn. Hopkins is on board as the aunt of the character she played a quarter century earlier, but acting honors go to Fay Bainter as the grandmother of the brat, a role which earned her a richly deserved Oscar nomination, her first in 23 years. The film won four other nominations for its black and white cinematography, art direction and costume design as well as sound. An Italian film that evokes Greek tragedy, Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers is about a poor widow, played by Katina Paxinou, who moves with her five sons to Milan to find a better life for her family. The episodic film tells of the small triumphs and little tragedies that the family encounters in its struggles. Paxinou, whose larger than life persona was sometimes an overbearing presence on screen, is magnificent in this role as are Alain Delon as saintly fourth son Rocco and Renato Salvatoni as the volatile brother he fights with over prostitute Annie Girardot in another standout performance. Beautifully photographed by Giuseppe Rotunno and scored by Nino Rota, this was one of the seminal films of Italian cinema that wedded Italian postwar neo-realism to a story almost operatic in tone. Just as popular in its day as the later version of Patricia Highsmith's TThe Talented Mr. Ripley was nearly forty years later, Rene Clement's Purple Noon featured the enigmatic Alain Delon as the ne'er-do-well who murders and then impersonates his friend, Maurice Ronet. Both the English-dubbed version that was shown in the U.S. and the original French version with subtitles are featured on the DVD introduced by Martin Scorsese. Once again, a Nino Rota score adds immeasurably to the enjoyment. This version tells the same story as Anthony Minghella's version, but, unlike that later version, it is non-judgmental in its view of the amorality of the characters making it all the more terrifying. It was a highly influential film at the time. There were so many other fine films released in 1961 that I have to have two runners-up lists, one for Hollywood product and one for imports. One of the grandest of the sub-genre known as high adventure, J. Lee Thompson's The Guns of Navarone from Alistair McLean's novel about a British expedition sent to blow up a Nazi fortress on a Greek island, won an Oscar for Special Effects and was nominated for a total of six including Best Picture and Director. Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn star. Spectacular in every sense of the word, Anthony Mann's El Cid stars Charlton Heston as Spanish hero Rodrigo Diaz, who drove the Moors from Spain. Nominated for three Oscars, the film co-stars Sophia Loren, Raf Vallone, Genevieve Page, John Fraser and Gary Raymond. The most intelligent of the plethora of films about the life of Jesus was Nicholas Ray's King of Kings, whichbenefits greatly from the central performance of the quietly commanding Jeffrey Hunter. Miklos Rozsa's Golden Globe-nominated score helps immensely as well. Highlights of the film are, as they should be, scenes of the Sermon on the Mount, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. One of the best of John Ford's late westerns, Two Rode Together features James Stewart at his cynical best as an Army negotiator who secures the release of two long-held white prisoners of the Comanches to disastrous effects. Richard Widmark, Shirley Jones, Linda Cristal, John McIntire, Anna Lee, Olive Carey, Jeanette Nolan and John Qualen figure prominently in the cast. The struggles of a black family in Chicago was the focus of Daniel Petrie's A Raisin in the Sun from Lorraine Hansberry's landmark play with an impeccable cast led by Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil, Ruby Dee and Diana Sands, each turning in a fine performance. Poitier and McNeil were nominated for Golden Globes while Dee won the National Board of Review award. William Inge won an Oscar for his original screenplay and Natalie Wood a Best Actress nomination for Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass in which Natalie literally goes crazy for the love of sensational newcomer Warren Beatty in 1920s Kansas. Barbara Loden, the future Mrs. Kazan, Pat Hingle and Audrey Christie provide outstanding supporting performances. The film was as famous for the Wood-Beatty off-screen romance as it was for the one on screen. Ten years after the off-Broadway play made her a star, Geraldine Page reprised her role in Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke to great acclaim and an Oscar nomination as the frustrated Southern spinster. The film was also nominated for its gorgeous art direction, Elmer Bernstein's pulsating score and Una Merkel's portrayal of Page's kleptomaniac mother. Page won the Golden Globe and National Board of Review awards as the year's best actress. Williams' novella The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone was the source of the Jose Quintero film of the same name with Vivien Leigh in a great late-career performance as a disillusioned American widow seeking fulfillment in Rome's seedier venues. Warren Beatty, out of his depth as an Italian gigolo, co-starred. Lotte Lenya won an Oscar nomination for her unforgettable turn as a female panderer. Hayley Mills doubled her fun and her persona as twins separated in infancy by their divorced parents in the Disney comedy The Parent Trap directed by David Swift with Maureen O'Hara and Brian Keith as the parents the girls hope to re-unite. Charlie Ruggles, Cathleen Nesbitt and Una Merkel co-star. The film won Oscar nominations for editing and sound. Rodgers & Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song was memorably brought to the screen by Among the best of the imports are three more each from France and Italy as well as three from Great Britain and one from Japan. A seminal film of the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless features virtuoso performances by Jean Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg as a young car thief and the woman who loves him. It's style over substance, but what style! The film introduced techniques that have become familiar, even routine, in modern filmmaking, notably fast pacing, intricate hand held camera movements and jump shots. The classic French novel of deceit and betrayal was first modernized and presented under its original title in Roger Vadim's film of Les Liaisons Dangereuses and was made as a showcase for his second wife Annette in the role of the virtuous victim of evil Jeanne Moreau and Gerard Phillippe. A young Jean-Louis Trintignant co-stars. It would later be even more successfully filmed as both Dangerous Liaisons and Valmont and then modernized for American audiences as Cruel Intentions. Moreau is unforgettable in Louis Malle's terrific Elevator to the Gallows in which she plays a scheming wife who seduces Maurice Ronet into killing her husband in a well-made French Double Indemnity. Filmed in Hitchcockian style with the cynicism of a young Billy Wilder, the film is so good it's hard to believe it was the director's first feature. Miles Davis' jazz score is an added treat. Sophia Loren returned to her Italian roots to play her greatest role, that of the young mother who, along with her daughter, is raped by Moroccan soldiers during World War II in Vittorio De Sica's heart-rending Two Women. Loren won many international awards for her performance including the Best Actress Oscar. She was, until this year, the only actress to have won for a foreign language performance though the film that most American audiences saw was the English dubbed version. The first two films of Michelangelo Antonioni's trilogy of ennui, L'Avventura and La Notte,were both released in the U.S. in 1961. Both are very demanding and require the right frame of mind to sit through but reward the patient viewer in the end. In L'Avventura, Monica Vitti and Gabrielle Ferzetti go looking for Ferzetti's missing girlfriend, Lea Massari. In La Notte the ubiquitous Jeanne Moreau becomes bored with husband Marcello Mastroianni. The trick is for you not to become bored while eavesdropping on their lives. Susannah York became an overnight sensation as the teenage girl abandoned in a hotel in French wine country with her three younger siblings when her mother suddenly becomes ill. Lewis Gilbert's coming-of-age drama Loss of Innocence (The Greengage Summer) features Kenneth More and Danielle Darrieux are the nominal stars. Jane Asher is also memorable as her younger sister. Dark and foreboding, Jack Clayton's film of Henry James' classic The Turn of the Screw,re-titled The Innocents,is an eerie masterpiece. Deborah Kerr has one of her best roles as the governess slowly going out of her mind. Freddie Francis' stark black-and-white cinematography aids the film significantly. One of the signature films of the British school of kitchen sink dramas, Karel Reisz's film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning provided Albert Finney with an early acting showcase as the angry young man who brings grief to girlfriends Shirley Anne Field and Rachel Roberts. A tongue-in-cheek samurai film made in the style of a Hollywood western, Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo gave Toshiro Mifune a much-needed comedy role as the samurai up for hire between two warring town factions. It was the inspiration for the spaghetti western Fistful of Dollars. Other films worth seeking out include Irvin Kershner's The Hoodlum Priest for the stunning performances of Don Murray as real life Father Charles Dismas Clark who ministers to street toughs and Keir Dullea as a death row inmate; Michael Curtiz's Francis of Assissi for the heartfelt performances of Bradford Dillman as St. Francis and Dolores Hart as Saint Clare, the role that convinced her to give up acting and become a nun; Frank Capra's remake of his own Lady for a Day renamed Pocketful of Miracles for a rare treat of a comic performance by Bette Davis as Apple Annie; Mervyn LeRoy's A Majority of One for the lovely performances of Rosalind Russell as a Jewish matron who falls in love with a Japanese gentleman, played by Alec Guinness, who more than makes up for Mickey Rooney's sins in Breakfast at Tiffany's; and George Seaton's delightful The Pleasure of His Company for Fred Astaire's charming lead in a non-musical ably abetted by Debbie Reynolds, Lilli Palmer and Tab Hunter. No mention of the films of 1961 would be complete without at least acknowledging the presence of Return to Peyton Place, one of the most jaw droppingly awful sequels in movie history, but one that is redeemed at least in part by the indomitable Mary Astor playing a domineering mother as only she could. Her comeuppance at the end is more than worth your time for having sat through the rest of the nonsense. -Peter J. Patrick (June 24, 2008) |
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The DVD Report #59: June 17, 2008
England's Henry VIII and his immediate successors, Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey, Mary I and Elizabeth I have been the subjects of many films over the years. With the releases of TV's The Tudors - The Complete First Season and the recent theatrical film, The Other Boleyn Girl, there are now more than twenty films and TV miniseries available on DVD in which to get caught up in the intrigues that informed their lives. Henry (1491-1547) was thrust into the limelight when his older brother died and he became successor to the throne at the age of 10. He became engaged to his brother's widow, Katherine of Aragon (1485-1536), and married her in 1509 when he was 17 and she was 23. They had a daughter, Mary (1516-1558), who survived infancy but all three of their sons were either miscarried or died shortly after birth. Henry had several mistresses, most notably Elisabeth Blount (1502-1539) and Mary Boleyn (1499-1543), both of whom bore him children. He later became infatuated with Mary's sister Anne (1501-1536), but she refused to bed him unless he married her leading to the annulment of his marriage to Katherine and his break with Rome, appointing himself Head of the Church in England. Anne, who became his second wife, bore him a daughter, Elizabeth (1533-1603), but failed to give him a son. Shortly after she miscarried, ironically on the day of Katherine's funeral, Henry had his second marriage annulled and Anne beheaded on trumped up charges of incest, adultery and treason. He then married his latest mistress, Jane Seymour (1508-1537), who finally bore him a son that would outlive him: Edward (1537-1553). But she died in childbirth. He then agreed to an arranged marriage with German Anne of Cleves (1515-1557) in order to strengthen his Protestant support, but found her repulsive and had the marriage swiftly annulled. Henry's fifth marriage was to Anne Boleyn's Catholic cousin, Catherine Howard (1520-1542), but court intrigue intervened and the marriage was annulled followed by her beheading on trumped up charges of adultery. Finally, Henry married the wealthy Catherine Parr (1512-1548) who outlived him. Henry, who was responsible for more than 72,000 executions in his lifetime, was succeeded by Edward VI. He never actually ruled as he died before reaching adulthood. He was succeeded by Lady Jane Grey, who lived for nine days before being replaced by Mary without ever having been crowned. Mary I, called Bloody Mary because of her nearly 3,000 executions in less than five years, restored Catholicism to England, but upon her death, Elizabeth I restored Protestantism in the form of Henry's Church of England and ruled until old age claimed her at 70. For many, Charles Laughton was the definitive Henry VIII. He was made up and costumed in 1933's The Private Life of Henry VIII to look as if he had stepped out of a painting of the king. The film itself makes light of history and follows Henry's life from the beheading of Anne Boleyn to his death. Binnie Barnes, as fourth wife Catherine Howard Robert Donat, as Thomas Culpepper, the member of Henry's court with whom she was alleged to have committed adultery; and Elsa Lanchester, as the grotesque Anne of Cleves, stand out in the supporting cast. Merle Oberon looks lovely but has little more than a cameo as Anne Boleyn. Laughton later reprised the role in 1953's Young Bess about the early days of the life of Elizabeth, played by a stunning Jean Simmons, and featuring the estimable Deborah Kerr, as Catherine Parr, and Rex Thompson (later Kerr's son in The King and I), as her stepson Edward. A young and virile Henry in the presence of Robert Shaw in 1966's A Man for All Seasons, was a shock to generations raised on Laughton's portrayal, and his battle of wills with (Saint) Sir Thomas More hit many a raw nerve. The film was perceived at the time as a metaphor for the protests against the Vietnam War. Its literate script, high production values, meticulous direction by Fred Zinnemann, and the great performances of Paul Scofield as More, Wendy Hiller as his uncomprehending wife, and Shaw make it a film not just of its time, but to paraphrase its title, "a film for all seasons." Coming just three years after A Man for All Seasons, 1969's Anne of the Thousand Days, based on Maxwell Anderson's 1946 play, seemed old-fashioned and stodgy. It wasn't helped by a tired-looking Richard Burton in place of the young and virile Shaw. But its art direction and costume designs were eye-popping, and Genevieve Bujold as Anne Boleyn, Anthony Quayle as the wily Cardinal Wolsey and Irene Papas as Katherine of Aragon at least made the first hour and a half tolerable. After that, it lumbers along to its inevitable conclusion. Almost forty years later, however, it is a lot easier to take in small doses on DVD. A year after Anne of the Thousand Days, TV gave us the ideal Henry in Keith Michell, who played the monarch in a six part miniseries called The Six Wives of Henry VIII. In it, the leisurely pace of the format allowed for more in-depth coverage of his life and times and those of his wives. It was later released theatrically in truncated form as Henry VIII and His Six Wives. The current film about the intrigues surrounding the affair of Henry and Anne, The Other Boleyn Girl, concentrates on the machinations of the Boleyn family and the tragic events that followed. In this version, the ambitious Sir Thomas Boleyn and his wife's husband, the Duke of Norfolk, plot to have Anne seduce Henry in order to secure more favorable court appointments for the family, but he falls in love with her married sister Mary instead. After Mary's difficult pregnancy cools their relationship, Anne is brought back into the picture by her conniving uncle, but by this time she has learned a thing or two and refuses to become involved with him outside of the marriage bed. Both Natalie Portman as Anne and Scarlett Johanssen as Mary acquit themselves well but Eric Bana's Henry VIII is seen pretty much as a wimp and unless you are aware of the historical background you won't understand much of the goings-on. The critically lambasted miniseries The Tudors has been described as soft-core pornography and dismissed by literary scholars as highly inaccurate, but it has a huge fan base nonetheless. No attempts have been made to make Jonathan Rhys-Meyers look anything like the real Henry. This is revisionist history at its worst. As Edward did not live to maturity, there have been very few films in which he is anything but a peripheral presence. The exceptions, of course, are the various film versions of Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, the best of which is the 1937 version with Billy and Bobby Mauch as the young prince and the poor boy who exchange places as Henry lies dying, ably supported by Errol Flynn, Claude Rains, Alan Hale, Henry Stephenson and Montagu Love as Henry. There have been countless remakes since, the best perhaps being the 1977 version re-titled Crossed Swords with Mark Lester (Oliver!) in a dual role as the prince and the pauper supported by Oliver Reed, Raquel Welch, Rex Harrison, Ernest Borgnine, George C. Scott and Charlton Heston as Henry. It's interesting mainly thanks to its eclectic cast, but the 1937 version remains the most endearing. The short reign of Lady Jane Grey is chronicled in 1986's Lady Jane. Edward's fifteen-year-old cousin is manipulated into the succession by court intrigue in order to keep Catholic Mary from gaining the throne and causing the execution of Henry's Protestant reformers. Helena Bonham Carter is excellent as usual as Jane, as is Cary Elwes as her young husband. There are no films about the reign of Mary I, but there are many films about her half-sister and successor, Elizabeth I. After Elizabeth's ascension and the restoration of Protestantism as the prevailing faith in England, Roman Catholic partisans propagated the ascension of Elizabeth's cousin, Mary Stuart, also known as Mary, Queen of Scots. Attempts on Mary's behalf ended in her imprisonment and eventual beheading as chronicled in John Ford's 1936 film Mary of Scotland from Maxwell Anderson's play, with Katharine Hepburn as Mary and Florence Eldredge as Elizabeth. Though events are seen from Mary's perspective, both queens are treated with intelligence and respect with Eldredge's Elizabeth agonizing over the prospect of having to execute her cousin. Though the two women never met in real life, Elizabeth's clandestine visit to Mary in her confinement is so powerful that all subsequent plays and films about the two have demanded the inclusion of such a scene. Elizabeth gets her own story in 1937's Fire Over England with a stalwart Flora Robson as the queen chronicling her battles with Spain's Philip II, played by Raymond Massey. Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh co-star in their first pairing. Robson reprised the role in the 1940 Errol Flynn swashbuckler, The Sea Hawk, delivering a rousing curtain speech. The aging Elizabeth's infatuation with the Earl of Essex is chronicled in 1939's The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex based on the play Elizabeth the Queen by Maxwell Anderson who, in addition to writing the aforementioned Mary of Scotland also went on to write Anne of the Thousand Days. Better known for its sumptuous sets and costumes and for the fireworks set off by the differing acting styles of Bette Davis and Errol Flynn than for its historical accuracy, the film was a huge success at the box office. Olivia de Havilland is Flynn's true love and Vincent Price is Sir Walter Raleigh. Davis reprised Elizabeth in 1955's The Virgin Queen, which more fully explores her relationship with Raleigh, played by Richard Todd. Joan Collins makes a major impression as Raleigh's true love, but Davis dominates the film as only she could. A more expansive look at the life and times of Elizabeth was chronicled in the 1971 miniseries Elizabeth R in which Glenda Jackson became an Elizabeth for the ages. She successfully reprised the role in the 1971 theatrical film Mary, Queen of Scots opposite Vanessa Redgrave as Mary. Jackson's definitive stamp on the role was challenged by two actresses in 1998, by Cate Blanchett in the title role of the lamentable Elizabeth and Judi Dench in a cameo in Shakespeare in Love. While Shakespeare in Love was clearly presented as a work of fiction, Elizabeth proved to be even more fictional with its juxtaposing of some historical events and outright distortion of others. The fault, however, was not Blanchett's. She and Dench were both quite good and in fact, both were nominated for Oscars with Dench winning in support in that year's Best Picture winner. Blanchett reprised the role to another Oscar nomination in 2007's Elizabeth: The Golden Age. For modern audiences, though, the indisputable best Elizabeth since Jackson has to be Helen Mirren's take on the aging queen in the 2006 miniseries Elizabeth I. Whether romancing the equally aging Jeremy Irons or his impetuous son Hugh Dancy or commanding great legions and obsequious counselors, she was highly believable in everything she did, including almost dying while standing. -Peter J. Patrick (June 17, 2008) |
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The DVD Report #58: June 10, 2008
Continuing my look at the films of previous years available or not on DVD, it's time to look at 1960. The film year of 1960 holds special significance for me as it was the year in which I first worked in a movie theatre after school and, for the first time, saw almost all of the films released in the U.S. that year - and most of them for free! As usual, I'll start with the films I consider the ten best of the year, four of which are, incredibly, still missing on DVD. Billy Wilder reached the pinnacle of his considerable career with what was then called a seriocomedy and might now be called a dramedy. Whatever you call it, The Apartment was a brilliantly written, photographed, acted, scored and directed film about a lowly office worker who schemes his way to the top by renting out his apartment for the extracurricular affairs of his bosses. Jack Lemmon as the lovable schnook, Shirley MacLaine as the elevator operator he's sweet on and Fred MacMurray as the head of personnel who breaks MacLaine's heart all give career high performances. The expert supporting cast includes Ray Walston, Edie Adams and Jack Kruschen as Lemmon's neighbor, a doctor who comes in handy when MacLaine overdoses on pills after being abandoned by MacMurray on Christmas Eve. Wilder's direction and the film tied with Jack Cardiff and his film of D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers at the New York Film Critics Award, but triumphed on its own at the Oscars, winning awards for Best Picture, Direction, Writing (Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond), Black-and-White Art Direction and Editing. It was also nominated for Best Actor (Lemmon), Actress (MacLaine), Supporting Actor (Kruschen), Black-and-White Cinematography and Sound. The film it tied with for its New York Film Critics win, Cardiff's Sons and Lovers was also named Best Picture by the National Board of Review. Ace cinematographer Cardiff (Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes) directed only a handful of films, of which this was easily his best. Another ace cinematographer, Freddie Francis, won the Oscar for his work here, no doubt aided by Cardiff's keen eye. The film is about the coming of age of the artist son of a coal miner and his possessive wife, splendidly acted by Dean Stockwell, Trevor Howard and Wendy Hiller, with Mary Ure as the older woman Stockwell is attracted to and Heather Sears as the young innocent who is attracted to him. Both Howard and Hiller have said that they directed themselves in the film. If so, they did so brilliantly. Howard as the rough, gruff coal miner and Hiller as the mother with obvious incestuous feelings for her son, have never been better. In addition to its Oscar for Francis, the film was nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture, Director, Actor (Howard), Supporting Actress (Ure), Screenplay and Editing. For some reason, which I've never been able to fathom, this film is not available on home video in the U.S. but is on DVD in Europe and Australia. An audience pleaser from the outset, and a perennial favorite ever since, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho was not met with universal acclaim by the critics of the day. They objected to the pace, the manipulation, the fact that it was filmed in black and white on the Universal back lot where Hitchcock's highly successful TV series had filmed for years making it seem somehow inferior to Hitchcock's meticulously-crafted color films of the 1950s. The film won no awards from critics' groups and received a measly four Oscar nominations for Best Director, Supporting Actress (Janet Leigh), Black-and-White Art Direction and Cinematography. Yet today you'd be hard pressed to find a critic who doesn't consider it one of the greatest films ever made with its place in history forever secure as the first modern psychological horror film. Anthony Perkins' performance as the mother-fixated motel owner is justifiably the stuff of legend, as is Leigh's performance as a remorseful thief hiding out at the motel. Critics were kinder to Vincente Minnelli's Home from the Hill than the Academy was. It got no Oscar nominations, but Robert Mitchum and George Peppard were named Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor respectively by the National Board of Review, Mitchum having won for his work in The Sundowners as well. No director of the day was more adept at filming in Cinemascope than Minnelli who fills his screen with one beautiful-to-look-at scene after another. The film is melodrama at its best. Mitchum is the local Texas patriarch whose upbringing of son George Hamilton is left to his repressed wife, played by Eleanor Parker, until Mitchum decides to make a man of him under the tutelage of his foreman, George Peppard. Peppard just happens to be Mitchum's illegitimate son and when Hamilton runs off after impregnating local girl Luanna Patten, it's Peppard who steps in to make things right. You'll need to keep a box of tissues handy for the final scene between Parker and Peppard. Minnelli won a Directors Guild nomination for his work. Even more heated than Sons and Lovers and Home from the Hill, and certainly more controversial, was Richard Brooks' film of Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry about a phony evangelist brilliantly played by Burt Lancaster in his Oscar-winning role. Lancaster had previously won the New York Film Critics award and a Golden Globe. Jean Simmons as a true believer evangelist and Shirley Jones as a preacher's daughter-turned-prostitute were nominated for Globes as was the film and Brooks for his direction. Jones won an Oscar for her performance as did Brooks, albeit for his screenplay. The film was also nominated for Best Picture and Best Score. Another controversial drama, Stanley Kramer's Inherit the Wind was the fictionalized dramatization of the 1920s Scopes Monkey Trial in which a high school teacher was prosecuted for teaching evolution. Famed lawyer Clarence Darrow became the teacher's defense attorney while three-time U.S. Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan prosecuted. The fictionalized Darrow and Bryan were played by two-time Best Actor Oscar winners Spencer Tracy and Fredric March and it's a treat to watch the two legends square off against each other. Florence Eldredge, March's real life wife, is quite touching as his wife here. The film was nominated for four Oscars including Best Actor (Tracy), Cinematography, Editing and Screenplay. Tracy was also nominated for a Golden Globe, while March won the Best Actor award at the Berlin Film Festival. Both actors were nominated for BAFTAs, the British Academy Award. Exploring the world of migrant Australian sheep drivers, Fred Zinnemann's The Sundowners provided Robert Mitchum with one of his best screen roles, for which he won the National Board of Review award in conjunction with his performance in Home from the Hill. Deborah Kerr, as his long-suffering wife, took home her third New York Film Critics award for Best Actress while Zinnemann won a Golden Globe nomination for his direction. Five Oscar nominations went to the film for Best Picture, Director, Actress (Kerr), Supporting Actress (Glynis Johns) and Screenplay. Set in small-town-Oklahoma of the 1920s, Delbert Mann's The Dark at the Top of the Stairs from William Inge's play offered a great exploration of the Americana of a by-gone era. Robert Preston starred as a travelling salesman whose wife, Dorothy McGuire, holds the family together. Shirley Knight is their teenage daughter being romanced by troubled Lee Kinsolving, and Richard Eyre is their impressionable son. Good as they all are, veterans Eve Arden as McGuire's bigoted sister and Angela Lansbury as Preston's sometimes-mistress steal the film. Kinsolving and Knight were nominated for Golden Globes, while Knight was the film's sole Oscar nominee. Arden and Max Steiner's great score were nominated for Laurel awards and Mann won a DGA nomination. This woefully neglected film sadly has never been available on commercial home video in any region. Reprising the role he was born to play, Ralph Bellamy once again portrays Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Vincent J. Donehue's Sunrise at Campobello, for which he won a Tony on Broadway. On screen, however, it was the normally garrulous Greer Garson, as shy Eleanor Roosevelt, who won the lion's share of awards including the Best Actress award of both the National Board of Review and the Golden Globes. Donehue was nominated at the DGA and the film earned four Oscar nominations including Best Actress, Color Art Direction and Costume Design, and Sound. Eclipsed by later versions of the story of FDR's fight to overcome polio, it remains a treat thanks to its impeccable star performances, but it's not available on DVD. The eviction of life-long residents from their homes and the subsequent flooding necessary to build the dams on the Tennesee River in the 1930s is the background of Elia Kazan's Wild Riverfeaturing strong performances by Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick and a great one by Jo Van Fleet in meticulous old age makeup down to the last liver spot. Clift is the government's man, Remick the poor widow he falls in love with and Van Fleet her grandmother who refuses to budge from the property she's lived in all her life. Kazan was nominated for a Best Director award at the Berlin Film Festival but the film failed to win any major critics' awards or Oscar nominations. This quintessentially American film is oddly only available on DVD in Europe. 1960 was such a banner year for film that an alternative ten best list could easily be created from amongst the many other great films released in the U.S. within the year. Two groundbreaking Soviet films, Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying and Grigori Chukharai's Ballad of a Soldier, were the first Russian-made films since prior to World War II in which war was not seen as the idealistic triumph of the Soviet leadership but as the cause of much suffering for ordinary people. Cranes won the Palme d'Or for Best Film at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival and winning a Special Mention was its enigmatic star, Tatiana Samoilova, who plays the girl who waits for a lover who will never return from the war. Ballad was nominated for the same honor at the 1960 Festival and its star, Vladimir Ivashov as the idealistic doomed soldier of the title, won many international awards. A classic of the emerging French new wave, Alain Resnasis' Hiroshima, Mon Amour is a complex romantic drama about a married French woman, played by Emamuelle Riva, involved in an affair with a married Japanese man, played by Eiji Okada, recalling an earlier affair with a German soldier. He has memories of his own, including the loss of his family when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Alec Guinness played against type as a blowhard Scottish Army colonel at war with his replacement, martinet John Mills, in Ronald Neame's provocative Tunes of Glory. Jack Hawkins leads a group of ex-Army men in a bank heist in Basil Dearden's droll comedy The League of Gentlemen. They were the year's two best British imports. Lilli Palmer is splendid as usual as the Italian Mother Superior responsible for hiding Jewish children from the Nazis in Ralph Thomas' deeply moving Conspiracy of Hearts. Sylvia Sims has one of her best early roles as an impressionable novice and Yvonne Mitchell is equally fine as the doubting nun whose reluctance to shelter the children thaws as unimaginable atrocities make the official neutrality of the Church impossible to live with. The third in his trilogy about life amongst Calcutta's poor, Satyajit Ray's The World of Apu is perhaps the greatest of the three films with the now-grown Apu struggling between worldly responsibilities and his own ambitions. Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece of blind vengeance, The Virgin Spring, helped propel the career of Max von Sydow who plays the father of the murdered girl. It won numerous international awards including the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. An atypical non-action film in master Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's canon, Ikiru features a commanding performance by Takashi Shimura as a bureaucrat who searches for meaning in his life when he is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Nominated for six Oscars, and winner of four, Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus is a thinking man's epic about the slave revolts in ancient Rome featuring an all-star cast led by Kirk Douglas, Jean Simmons, Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, John Gavin, Tony Curtis, Woody Strode and Oscar winner Peter Ustinov. Other films of note included Jules Dassin's raucous Never on Sunday featuring Melina Mercouri's joyful Oscar-nominated performance as a carefree Greek prostitute and the unforgettable Oscar winning title song; Otto Preminger's film about the founding of Israel, Exodus features Sal Mineo's soulful Oscar-nominated performance and Ernest Gold's magnificent Oscar-winning score; Vincente Minnelli's Bells Are Ringing, the year's best musical, with Judy Holliday reprising her delightful Tony Award-winning role; John Ford's revisionist western, Sergeant Rutledge, with a great performance by Woody Strode as a black soldier falsely accused of rape; John Sturges' reworking of Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai becomes The Magnificent Seven with Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen; Anthony Mann's epic widescreen color remake of Edna Ferber's Cimarron with Glenn Ford and Maria Schell; John Wayne's evocation of the tragic last days of The Alamo featuring Wayne, Richard Widmark and Laurence Harvey; Wolf Rilla's minimalist, eerie and influential Village of the Damned; those dueling Oscar Wilde biographies: Ken Hughes' The Trials of Oscar Wilde (aka The Man With the Green Carnation) with Peter Finch, and Gregory Ratoff's Oscar Wilde with Robert Morley; and the Disney remakes of the classics Swiss Family Robinson and Pollyanna, the former with John Mills and Dorothy McGuire, the latter with Hayley Mills and Jane Wyman. -Peter J. Patrick (June 10, 2008) |
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The DVD Report #57: June 3, 2008
With all the major movies from last year having been released on DVD, it's time to catch up on the "little" films you may have missed, or lose yourself in the thrall of a beloved classic. The most ambitious film to be made from a Stephen King work in some years, Frank Darabont's Stephen King's The Mist is an exciting sci-fi horror film in which a small Maine town is beset by monsters coming out of the mist after a storm. The major set piece is a grocery store where surviving town residents are holed up, with the tragic events bringing out the best in some, the worst in others. While the emphasis here is on character development rather than horror, it does not shy away from the latter when it comes, but neither does it dwell on it like most modern horror movies. Thomas Jane, as the central character, a movie poster artist; Nathan Gamble as his young son; Toby Jones as the grocery store's chief clerk; Laurie Holden as the new teacher in town; Frances Sternhagen as the wise old teacher; and Jeffrey DeMunn as a local businessman are all fine as the principal good guys. Andre Braugher has fun chewing the scenery as an arrogant lawyer, but William Sadler as a dimwitted big mouth and Marcia Gay Harden as a loony bible-spouting harridan are a bit much. I'm told the ending of King's novella was ambiguous whereas Darabont's ending to the film is conclusive and unforgettable. It's also wrongheaded in my opinion, but to say more would be to give it away. Woody Allen's films are generally hit or miss, but I'm happy to say Cassandra's Dream, is more the former than the latter. Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell are perfectly cast as brothers with big dreams who agree to commit a murder for profit for their rich uncle, played by the always good Tom Wilkinson. Farrell is morally sickened by the idea but agrees to go along with it anyway in order to get out from under a gambling debt, while McGregor deals with it more pragmatically. Tension mounts. Will they do it? Will they be able to put it behind them or will it gnaw at them until one murder isn't enough? It ultimately plays more like a Hitchcock suspense film than an Allen exploration of angst. Vilmos Zsigmond's breathtaking cinematography adds immeasurably to the enjoyment, as does Philip Glass' score. One of the lesser efforts in the plethora of Iraq war stories released in the last year, writer-director James C. Strouse's maudlin Grace Is Gone is a rather strange little film in which John Cusack plays a former soldier whose wife is still serving in the Army. He stays at home in Minnesota with his young daughters, shielding them as much as he can from news of the war. When his wife is killed, instead of telling them the truth, he takes them on a road trip to an amusement park in Florida. Along the way he stops at his mother's house and has a run-in with his anti-war brother played by Alessandro Nivola, has the 12- and 8-year-olds' ears pierced, and spends a couple of nights with them at a hotel. On the way home he tells them the truth while Clint Eastwood's score drowns out the words. A more engrossing film about a father-daughter relationship, Renny Harlin's Cleaner debuted at last year's Toronto Film Festival and played theatrically in Europe before going direct to DVD in the U.S. Keke Palmer, who played the title role in Akeelah and the Bee, plays as beautifully opposite Samuel L. Jackson as her father in this film as she did Laurence Fishburne as her mentor in the previous one. Jackson, too, has one of his best roles as a retired policeman, now working as a crime scene cleaner embroiled in a high profile murder investigation. Ed Harris as Jackson's former partner, Eva Mendes as the wife of a missing informant and Luis Guzman as the detective on the case are all excellent, but it's the performances of Jackson and Palmer and the relationship between the two that make the film worth your time. Hardly worth anybody's time isPaul Schrader's The Walker, a convoluted murder mystery set in Washington, D.C., but filmed in England. Woody Harrelson has the title role, that of an escort or "walker" of wealthy women, some of whom are played by Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily Tomlin, Lauren Bacall and a blink-and-you-miss-her Mary Beth Hurt. Willem Dafoe is Scott Thomas' husband, a powerful U.S. Senator, and Ned Beatty is Tomlin's husband, an even more powerful D.C. power broker. The murderer is a professional killer, but who hired him remains a mystery even after the film ends. Trust me, you won't care. Much better is Anton Corbijn's Control, based on Deborah Curtis' memoir, Touching From a Distance, about the life and death of her husband, Joy Divison lead singer Ian Curtis. Newcomer Sam Riley is perfectly cast as the gifted singer who suffered from epilepsy as well as deep emotional problems. Samantha Morton once again proves why she is one of today's best actresses as Deborah. The film gives equal weight to Curtis' music as well as his short life. On the reissue front, Criterion has produced a spectacular looking disc of the 1940 masterpiece, The Thief of Bagdad, co-directed by Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell and Tim Whelan. One of the most exciting fantasy films ever made, this Arabian Nights tale has it all, from eye-popping colors to how-did-they-do-that images of men on flying carpets and boys turned into dogs. Wonderfully cast with Conrad Veidt, Sabu, June Duprez, John Justin and Rex Ingram, the Special Edition has two commentaries: one by directors Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and one by film and music historian Bruce Eder. A second disc offers a wealth of special features as well. With big screen versions of Broadway musicals a rarity these days, TV's PBS occasionally fills the gap with a live theatre or concert version of a Broadway musical that will likely never see the light of day as a Hollywood film. Such is the case with Stephen Sondheim's Company, last year's pared down revival which has now been released on DVD. Not to be confused with 1971's Original Cast Album: Company, also available on DVD, this version is the complete show whereas the former was a documentary about the highly charged recording sessions for the original Broadway version of nearly forty years ago. The minimalist staging of the show, in which each performer must also play a musical instrument, as well as the occasional laughter from the audience, never lets us forget that we are watching a staging, rather than a filmed work in which we can lose ourselves. As a result, it is a less-than-compelling performance. Although all the performers are good, none, including star Raul Esparza, set off sparks the way Elaine Stritch did with her thrilling performance of "The Ladies Who Lunch" during the recording session. One of the most requested miniseries has finally arrived on a commercial three-disc DVD collection after years of being available in a less-than-stellar bootleg collection. Paramount's Holocaust won 8 Emmy Awards for the 1978-1979 TV Season out of 15 nominations including Best Limited Series, Actor (Michael Moriarty), Actress (Meryl Streep), Supporting Actress (Blanche Baker) and Director (Martin J. Chomsky). The performances of Fritz Weaver, Rosemary Harris, David Warner, Sam Wanamaker and Tovah Feldshuh were also nominated. Moriarty and Harris won Golden Globes and Chomsky the DGA. The groundbreaking mini-series, which also stars James Woods and Joseph Bottoms, follows the tragedy and triumph of the fictional Jewish Weiss and German Dorf families from the 1930s to 1945. Filmed on location in Germany and Austria, the performance of the entire cast is at or near each of their considerable career highs. -Peter J. Patrick (June 3, 2008) |
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