The DVD Report #82: November 25, 2008
The animation in Pixar's WALL-E is flawless. Even so, the film has the look and feel of a "real" movie rather than a cartoon. Very much in the mode of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterwork 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film is about Earth's last inhabitant, a garbage collecting robot, who comes to save the world. It has as its theme songs excerpted portions of "Put on Your Sunday Clothes" and "It Only Takes a Moment" from the 1969 film version of Jerry Herman's Hello, Dolly! This is hilarious for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that the legions of hip 2001 fans and the not so hip Dolly fans of the late 1960s were diametrically opposed to one another. It's almost like watching a modern version of Abie's Irish Rose to see the descendants of both groups united in love, even if they are robots. The film succeeds on many levels from its early non-dialogue scenes invoking the best of Keaton, Chaplin and Tati to its later scenes wittily conveying what will happen to man as he no longer has to do anything except eat, sleep and watch TV as machines do everything for him. At the heart of it, though, is the sweet old-fashioned love story involving scruffy but adorable WALL-E and the sleek and beautiful EVE, their courtship played out against those Jerry Herman tunes, which began and end the film. WALL-E is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. Surprisingly easy to take, Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder is both a spoof of modern Hollywood in general and war movies in particular. Stiller stars as a Sylvester Stallone type whose own Rambo-esque filmmaking becomes a bit too real. The usually annoying Jack Black is annoying as usual as a Chris Farley type, but the film is redeemed by three superlative performances. Best of all is Robert Downey Jr. who is garnering serious Oscar talk for his tongue-in-cheek portrayal of "the world's greatest actor", a five-time Oscar winner who has undergone skin pigmentation to play a black Army officer. Standing out in smaller roles are Tom Cruise in full Magnolia mode as a bald, foul-mouthed studio head and Nick Nolte hilariously sending up his tough guy image as a fake military expert. The film has many inside jokes, which most filmgoers should easily get. Tropic Thunder is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. One of the films heavily spoofed in Tropic Thunder is Oliver Stone's Platoon, which has yet to be released on Blu-ray. Another Stone classic, JFK, however, has just been released in that format and re-issued in a three-disc standard DVD set. Conspiracy theories have surrounded the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy since the day of the act itself. The investigation by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was the closest anyone ever got to proving it. JFK, Stone's film of that investigation, which raises more questions than it answers, may be questionable history, but it is brilliant filmmaking. It justly won 1991 Oscars for its superb cinematography and remarkable editing and was nominated for six more including Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor (Tommy Lee Jones), Score, Writing and Sound. In addition to Jones as Clay Shaw, there are unforgettable turns by Kevin Costner as Garrison, Sissy Spacek as his wife, Gary Oldman as Lee Harvey Oswald, Joe Pesci as David Ferrie, Kevin Bacon as a composite of several other real-life characters, and Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Donald Sutherland, John Candy, Sally Kellerman and many others in small but important roles. A year after Peter Glenville's Becket was finally released on standard DVD, the classic film which won twelve 1964 Oscar nominations has been given a Blu-ray release. Best Actor nominees Richard Burton as the Bishop of Canterbury and Peter O'Toole as his King (Henry II), each giving one of their greatest performances, look and sound even more commanding in high definition. Burton also stars in Martin Ritt's 1965 film of John Le Carre's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which has just been released by Crtierion in a two-disc special edition with loads of extras including an August 2008 interview with Le Carre in which he explains the genesis of the novel and his opinion of the film. He reluctantly admits Burton, again Oscar nominated as the tired spy, gave a great performance though he is more complementary to the work in the film of Claire Bloom, Oskar Werner, Cyril Cusack and director Martin Ritt. Other extras include a fascinating documentary on the life of Le Carre and a telling BBC interview of a full-of-himself Burton in 1967. Missing from its first set of Griffith Masterworks, Kino has now released D.W. Griffith's 1920 masterpiece Way Down East from the Museum of Modern Art's 35mm restoration. Grffith's film of Lottie Blair Parker's 1898 play incorporated elements of other famous plays in its telling, including the famed ice floe scene from Uncle Tom's Cabin. The stunning cinematography and fast-paced editing breathed new life into the old melodrama of a virtuous young woman betrayed by an evil man and redeemed by the love of a good one. Grffith's muse, Lillian Gish, was reunited with Richard Barthelmess, her Broken Blossoms co-star of the year before, and once again the two made beautiful music together. Lowell Sherman played the villain. If I have one complaint about the meticulous restoration, it's that it uses the film's original tints - green and sepia along with standard black-and-white, changing from scene to scene, making the film appear as though it were restored from different elements. I would have preferred a straight black-and-white version, but the distraction is worth it just to have this great film back in pristine condition. Also stunningly restored is Brian Desmond Hurst's 1951 version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol from VCI. Released late in the holiday season last year but difficult to find, copies are much more widely available now. Be sure to seek out the two-disc Ultimate Collector's Edition from VCI and not one of their earlier editions or copies from other distributers of this public domain title. It is vastly superior to all of them. Included are: two versions of the original, one for 4x3 screens and one for 16x9 wide screen TVs; the lamentable colorized version; and the 1935 Scrooge with Sir Seymour Hicks for comparison. Commentary for both black-and-white versions of the 1951 film is provided by historian Marcus Hearn and actor George Cole, Alistair Sim's protégé, who played young Scrooge. Alas, Cole, now in his 80s, doesn't recall much about the making of the film or the other actors, even though he worked extensively with many of them including Kathleen Harrison who plays Scrooge's landlady and Hermione Baddeley who plays Mrs. Cratchitt. Forget the commentary, it's the film that matters. Marvelously detailed with characters and scenes taken from Dickens' novel's original illustrations, it's Sim's performance as the old miser that renders it one of the all time greats. Although many actors have played the part over the years no one has ever lent it as much gravitas or sheer joy in the scenes of redemption at the end. From the sublime to the ridiculous. I had to read a synopsis of Bruce McDonald's virtually unwatchable The Tracey Fragments from Maureen Medved's novel on the IMDb (Internet Movie Database) to figure out what I had just sat through. It's a schizophrenic film about a 15-year-old girl played by twentyish Ellen Page on a bus supposedly looking for her missing 7-year-old brother. According to the IMDB, however, it's really about the girl cutting the umbilical cord with the brother representing her younger self. You're supposed to be able to figure that out by the way her nutcase mother holds the phone cord when she calls home. The scenes of the girl's home life are truly pathetic with the girl yelling at the mother and the father yelling at the girl. Watch it at your peril. A little known film that is worth seeking out is The Fall from Tarsem Singh, the East Indian director whose only previous film, 2000's The Cell, was one I didn't care for. He has completely redeemed himself in my estimation with this one, a charmer on many levels. The main thrust of the film takes place in a Los Angeles hospital in the 1920s where a young girl, who helps her family pick oranges for a living, is recovering from a nasty fall which has broken her arm. She forms an unusual friendship with suicidal stuntman Lee Pace who has been paralyzed in a stunt gone wrong. He passes the time by telling her a story of ancient times in which the Blue Bandit, also played by Pace, must avenge the death of his twin brother at the hands of Governor Odious and rescue the fair Sister Evelyn. He saves the little girl from boredom and she saves him from suicide. The film wraps with another film within the film, the western on which Pace was injured, and a tribute to classic movie stunts of the 20s. On the TV front, the controversial Bones - Season 3 has been released. While the police/medical procedural remains both thought provoking in its dramatic presentations and witty in its banter, it came close to losing its audience this season with two story lines, both of which went on too long and produced questionable results. In one story arc, two secondary characters plan to marry once the woman receives a divorce from the man she married while under the spell of the tropics two years earlier. She eventually obtains the divorce but the two then quickly break up, a rather unsatisfactory ending to a romance that series' fans had invested so much in. Far more disturbing, however, was the serial cannibal killer arc, which lasted most of the season. It ends with the killer's accomplice turning out to be one of the series' best loved characters who is then whisked away to the funny farm, his hands having been badly damaged in an explosion. At its heart though is the chemistry of its stars, David Boreanaz as stalwart FBI Agent Seeley Booth and Emily Deschanel as forensic anthropologist and author Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan, who remain charming as ever. Giving the show a shot in the arm this season is the addition of Freaks and Geeks alum John Francis Daley to the cast as a baby-faced FBI shrink and profiler. His casting almost redeems the shows' wrong moves, emphasis on almost. -Peter J. Patrick (November 25, 2008) |
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The DVD Report #81: November 18, 2008
Who would have thought two guys drunkenly singing an old Barry Manilow song would provide the emotional high of a state-of-the-art superhero movie in 2008? Probably no one other than Guillermo del Toro who does just that with Hellboy II: The Golden Army, the sequel to his 2004 Hellboy . Sequels rarely live up to the original and seldom surpass it, but del Toro, whose Pan's Lbyrinth topped many ten-best lists just two years ago, does exactly that with this one. The film opens with a sequence set in 1955 when the precocious Hellboy was 11, reminding us of the close relationship the alien had with his adoptive father John Hurt. It also provides a framing device for the main thrust of the film as Hurt reads the boy a bedtime story in which a fairytale king separates three parts of his crown and locks up the treacherous "golden army" of otherworld creatures who would destroy mankind. They can only be unleashed again if all three parts of the crown are put back together. Flash forward to the present and the king's evil son is about to resurrect the golden army against the human race. Only Hellboy, his cohorts Abe Sapien and Liz Sherman, and their team can stop him. The film is filled with thrilling action sequences, eye-popping special effects and nice tongue-in-cheek acting by a cast headed by Ron Perlman, Doug Jones and Selma Blair as the misunderstood saviors of the world and Luke Goss as the evil prince. It's available in both Blu-ray and standard DVD. Blu-ray releases continue at a fast pace. Newly released is Planet of the Apes - The Legacy Collection featuring improved picture and sound releases of all five films in the original series, 1968's Planet of the Apes, 1970's Beneath the Planet of the Apes, 1971's Escape from Planet of the Apes, 1972's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and 1973's Battle for the Planet of the Apes. The films, about a future where apes rule the world and men are reduced to dumb beasts, remain ever fascinating, though audience interest flagged as the series continued. All of them are, however, afar superior to the dreadful 2001 remake of the original. Amazingly, this big budget series was able to produce a film a year for four straight years after skipping 1969, whereas today's big budget series are filmed two to three years apart. If you see no other Planet of the Apes film, you owe it to yourself to see Franklin J. Schaffner's original in which Charlton Heston stars as the astronaut stranded amongst a civilization of apes that includes Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter and Maurice Evans in marvelously detailed Oscar-winning make-up. The re-mastered set is also available in standard DVD. Also available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD is the 2002 TV movie A Christmas Visitor directed by Christopher Leitch with a cast headed by William Devane, Meredith Baxter, Dean McDermott and Aaron Ashmore. Why this is the first Hallmark Hall of Fame film to be released on Blu-ray is beyond me. It is not all that special. It's about a family that has been mourning the loss of their son in Operation Desert Storm for 11 years who come to see meaning in celebrating Christmas through the eyes of a mysterious stranger. I won't spoil the ending by telling you who the stranger turns out to be, but if you haven't guessed it within the film's first twenty minutes you haven't been paying attention. Ashmore, who was Jimmy Olson in TV's Smallville from 2003 to 2006, and plays the dead son in flashbacks in A Christmas Visitor, also has a major supporting role in another Christmas movie new to DVD, albeit not Blu-ray. The direct-to-DVD The Christmas Cottage was filmed as Thomas Kinkade's Home for Christmas and is the story of his painting of the Placerville town mural that made him famous. As a personal remembrance, it's fine, but as a movie, it's a bit of a mess. On one hand you have Jared Padalecki as future artist Kinkaid; Ashmore as his brother, a future best-selling author; Marica Gay Harden as their beloved mother hiding her precarious financial situation; Peter O'Toole as Kinkaid's dying mentor; and Ed Asner in a brief appearance as O'Toole's agent. On the other hand you have a supporting cast of ham actors who mug before the camera every chance they get under the amateurish direction of Ken LaZebnick whose major claim to fame is the direction of 21 episodes of TV's Touched by an Angel. Chris Elliott, Richard Moll, Richard Burgi and Charlotte Rae are the most outrageous of the muggers. Changing gears completely, When Did You Last See Your Father?, directed by Anand Tucker, is a mature exploration of a middle-aged man's last days spent with his dying father and his reflection on their love-hate relationship through the years. Colin Firth is the son, Jim Broadbent the father and Juliet Stevenson the mother. All of them are superb. Director Tucker's output is slow but measured. This is only his third film in ten years, but like his previous two efforts, Hilary and Jackie and Shopgirl, it is well worth your time. You may recall that Emily Watson and Rachel Griffiths won much deserved Oscar nominations for the former while Steve Martin and Claire Danes garnered serious Oscar talk for the latter. The stars of his new film might well have been given serious Oscar consideration for Father had the British-Irish co-production been more widely seen. The Canadian film Autumn Hearts, directed by Paulo Barzman, filmed under the title Emotional Arithmetic /em> is another unexpected gem. Shown briefly at film festivals around the world, it comes to DVD without a U.S. theatrical release which is something of a puzzle since it stars four of our best actors: Susan Sarandon, Christopher Plummer, Gabriel Byrne and Max von Sydow, all in meaty roles. The characters Sarandon and Byrne play in middle age and von Sydow in old age met when they were interred in a Nazi concentration camp outside of Paris in 1943. Sarandon's character was a young American Jewish girl, Byrne's a young Irish Catholic boy stranded in Paris during the war while von Sydow's character was the wise Russian Jewish philosopher who saved their lives while placing his own in jeopardy. As the story begins, Sarandon has invited von Sydow, newly freed from a Russian Gulag, to visit the farm she shares outside of Quebec with her cynical retired college professor husband, Plummer. Von Sydow brings along Byrne, who was Sarandon's first love, which brings out the worst in Plummer. Roy Dupuis as Sarandon and Plummer's son and Dakota Goyo as their grandson complete the group of characters who get together in 1985. Actor Justin Theroux makes his directorial debut with Dedication, a quirky romantic comedy about a blocked writer of children's books who has to find new inspiration after the death of his illustrator partner of fifteen years. It's mainly an actor's showcase, and fortunately for Thoroux, he has a superb cast to work with. Billy Crudup, in probably his best big screen performance to date, plays the acerbic writer while Mandy Moore plays his new collaborator, trying to get her first big break. Tom Wilkinson is the dead partner who returns in Crudup's imagination and Bob Balaban is his frustrated editor. Dianne Wiest has a featured role as Mandy's real estate agent mom. The City of Paris gets billing over the title, along with co-stars Charles Laughton, Franchot Tone, Burgess Meredith and Robert Hutton in what started out to be Irving Allen's The Man on the Eiffel Tower. The troubled 1949 Franco-American co-production was taken over by Meredith (his directorial debut) at Laughton's insistence. Given Laughton's brilliant direction of his only film, 1955's The Night of the Hunter, the film might have been a masterpiece, but in Meredith's less assured hands, it is merely good. Laughton did direct Meredith's scenes, which are actually the best in the film. Laughton plays fabled French detective Inspector Maigret out to solve the murder of a rich old lady and her maid. Bungling burglar Meredith is the obvious suspect, but Maigret suspects there is more to the crime, as the audience is aware from the beginning. Tone, who produced the film, is the manic-depressive failed medical student who committed the crime in a plot involving heir Hutton, his wife Patricia Roc and mistress Jean Wallace. His taunting of Laughton leads to the film's climactic chase scene on the Eiffel Tower. The film was shot in the experimental Ansco Color, which has deteriorated over time. Although the film has been restored by the UCLA film labs, the color restoration is not good. It still looks faded, though not quite as bad as one of those old black and white movies tinted to make it look as though it were shot in color. It remains, however, the best example of what the City of Light looked like in the post-war years. Alas, you'll have to wait to see for yourself in the U.S. unless you come across the restored version on TV as the region 1 release has mysteriously been cancelled. It is, however, available in Region 2 (U.K.). Lousy public domain prints also exist. -Peter J. Patrick (November 18, 2008) |
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The DVD Report #80: November 11, 2008
The holidays have arrived with DVD releases of films for Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. For Veteran's Day, Warner Bros. has come up with Warner Bros. and the Homefront featuring pristine versions of This Is the Army, Thank Your Lucky Stars and Hollywood Canteen. Officially titled Irvin Berlin's This Is the Army, the 1942 musical revue was a rarity on Broadway in that it featured an all-servicemen cast. Transferring to the screen a year later, it kept most of its original cast but added a few name stars including George Murphy, Joan Leslie, Ronald Reagan, Joe Louis, Kate Smith and Berlin himself. The story is minimal, the show's the thing, and it's quite a show under the sure hand of Warner's top director, Michael Curtiz. Commentary is by film historian Drew Casper assisted by co-star Leslie. Extras include a documentary on Warner Bros. at War narrated by Steven Spielberg. This release restores the overture and exit music not attached to the film in 65 years. It's also vastly superior to the myriad public domain versions long available. The emphasis is on stars putting on a show in 1943's Thank Your Lucky Stars, Warner Bros. follow-up to the success of This Is the Army, the highlight of which is Bette Davis singing "They're Either Too Young or Too Old". Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, John Garfield, Dinah Shore, Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino and Olivia de Havilland are also featured under the direction of David Butler. Featuring more of a storyline, 1944's Hollywood Canteen stars Robert Hutton and Dane Clark as Purple Heart recipients on leave who discover the servicemen's canteen founded by Bette Davis and John Garfield. Davis and Garfield co-star as themselves along with Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Jane Wyman, Roy Rogers, Jack Benny and the object of Hutton's affection, Joan Leslie, among many others on their best behavior. It was directed by Delmer Daves. Of more contemporary interest is the Thanksgiving entry Kit Kittredge - An American Girl, a period pieceset in the Great Depression and ending on a very thankful Thanksgiving Day in 1934. Abigail Breslin stars as the ten-year-old would-be feature writer for a big city Cincinnati newspaper. Chris O'Donnell is the father who must leave to look for work in Chicago and Julia Ormond appears as the mother who must hold it all together by taking in borders that include Jane Krakowski, Glenne Headly, Joan Cusack and Stanley Tucci. Charming Breslin and her young friends also get to solve a mystery in which a young hobo is falsely accused of stealing money and other valuables. It's a rare G-rated treat that the whole family can watch while waiting for the turkey to cook. For Christmas, Warner Bros. has come up with two collections of holiday films. Newly released is the Warner Bros. Classic Holiday Collection Vol. 2 featuring All Mine to Give, Holiday Affair, It Happened on 5th Avenue and, unavailable outside of the box set, Blossoms in the Dust. They have also re-issued the Warner Bros. Classic Holiday Collection Vol. 1 featuring the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol, Boys Town and its sequel Men of Boys Town, Christmas in Connecticut, and, unique to and available only with the re-issued box set, The Singing Nun. Barely seen by anyone in its initial theatrical release, Allen Resiner's 1957 film All Mine to Give is a film that the world has discovered in its TV showings in the years since. Often called the saddest movie ever made, it is also joyful and hopeful in its tale of a young boy who must find homes for his younger siblings after the death of his mother on Christmas Day. Glynis Johns is very affecting as the mother, as is Cameron Mitchell as the father who dies earlier, but Rex Thompson as the boy on the mission is the one who steals your heart. Warm and fuzzy are not adjectives often used in describing a Robert Mitchum film, but they perfectly fit Don Hartman's 1949 film Holiday Affair in which Mitchum stars as an unemployed sales clerk who brightens the lives of widow Janet Leigh and her young son. Wendell Corey co-stars. A charming, if forgotten, Oscar-nominated gem, Roy Del Ruth's It Happened on 5th Avenue is the improbable tale of a group of squatters led by Victor Moore and Don DeFore who occupy an abandoned mansion while the owners, played by Charlie Ruggles, Ann Harding and Gale Storm, join them incognito. Oddly enough, however, the most requested film in the new box set is the one you can only get if you buy the box. Mervyn LeRoy's 1941 film Blossoms in the Dust was nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture and Actress (Greer Garson), winning one for its gorgeous color art direction. Garson plays the real life Edna Gladney who, after the death of her own child, establishes first a day care center, then a home for foundlings. Her impassioned plea before the Texas legislature near the end of the film to strike the word "illegitimate" from birth records is one of the great speeches in movie history. The film marked the first time Garson appeared opposite Walter Pidgeon. The two were so good together they co-starred in another seven films over the next nine years. Edwin L. Marin's 1938 version of A Christmas Carol is a delightful adaptation with Reginald Owen in probably his best screen performance as Scrooge. He is ably supported by Gene, Kathleen and June Lockhart, and Terry Kilburn as the Cratchits; and Leo G. Carroll as Marley's Ghost. Spencer Tracy, of course, won his second Oscar for portraying real life Father Flanagan in Norman Taurog's 1938 film of Boys Townfor which Mickey Rooney won a Special Juvenile Oscar in conjunction with several other films that year. Taurog's 1941 sequel, Men of Boys Town, also with Tracy and Rooney ,gives us more of the same "there is no such thing as a bad boy" stuff. Breezy and endearing, Peter Godfrey's 1945 film Christmas in Connecticut gives us Barbara Stanwyck at her most charming as a magazine writer who is not what she pretends to be. Dennis Morgan, Sydney Greenstreet, S.K. "Cuddles" Sakall and Una O'Connor all do what they do best, that is add charm and guffaws. Unlike the newer box set, the bonus disc in this newly released set is a bit of a clinker. Henry Koster's 1966 film The Singing Nun is a completely fictionalized story of the then-popular real-life singing nun who had a world-wide hit with the catchy "Dominique" among other songs. It also seeks to capitalize on the resounding success of the previous year's box office champ and Oscar winner The Sound of Music but doesn't even come close. You can't blame the film's star, Debbie Reynolds, who does her best to rise above the film's cornball script. Chad Everett, Agnes Moorehead and Greer Garson co-star, with Garson's big false eyelashes on her Mother Superior character causing quite a stir at the time. Also newly released from Warner Bros. is the 1951 epic Quo Vadis. Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1905 based largely on his meticulously researched 1895 novel about early Christians in Nero's Rome. It had been filmed in France in 1902 and would be filmed twice again by Italy in the silent era, to great success in 1912 and to a lesser extent with Emil Jannings as Nero in 1925. Cecil B. DeMille famously filmed a non-credited version in 1932 called The Sign of the Cross with Fredric March, Elissa Landi, Claudette Colbert, and Charles Laughton as Nero, but the big MGM production first announced in the early 1940s would have to wait until 1950 when all the elements came together under Mervyn LeRoy's direction at Cinecitta Studios in Rome. The wait was worth it. The wait for the DVD, which like the film itself has taken ten years to get off the ground, has also been worth it. The film never looked or sounded so good, with the overture and exit music attached to the film for the first time in 56 years. All the elements that earned it eight Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Editing, Scoring, Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume Design and two Supporting Actors, Leo Genn as Petronius and Peter Ustinov as Nero, hold up extremely well. Robert Taylor as the Roman soldier, Deborah Kerr as the Christian woman he loves and Finlay Currie as St. Peter also star. Taylor, originally slated for the same role ten years earlier, actually got it only after Gregory Peck became ill and had to drop out. Speaking of Peck, Universal has released The Gregory Peck Collection featuring the previously available Cape Fear and To Kill a Mockingbird, as well as the new-to-DVD The World in His Arms, Captain Newman, M.D., Mirage, and Arabesque. While J. Lee Thompson's 1962 suspense thriller Cape Fear, co-starring Robert Mitchum and Polly Bergen, has been nicely re-mastered, Robert Mulligan's film from the same year of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning To Kill a Mockingbird, for which Peck won his Oscar, is a re-issue of the same two-disc set previously released as part of Universal's Legacy Series. Raoul Walsh's 1952 swashbuckler The World in His Arms is a fairly routine action film albeit one with an unusual locale: 1850s Alaska and Russia. Ann Blyth and Anthony Quinn co-star. Peck stars in, but more or less acts as ringmaster for his flamboyant supporting cast, David Miller's quirky 1963 service comedy-drama Captain Newman, M.D. Second-billed Tony Curtis has at least as much screen time as Peck while Eddie Albert as a psychotic senior officer and Bobby Darin in an Oscar-nominated performance as a shell-shocked airman all but steal the film out from under both of them. The two very stylish suspense films Edward Dmtyrk's Mirage from 1965 and Stanley Donen's Arabesque from 1966 that round out the set seem just as fresh as they did way back then. Diane Baker and Walter Matthau co-star in the former, while Sophia Loren co-stars in the latter. Paramount, which now owns the rights to 1970's The Boys in the Band, has released a Special Edition of the William Friedkin film based on Mart Crowley's landmark play about a group of gay friends attending a birthday party in a fabulous two-story luxury apartment in NYC. From a hot ticket workshop production attended by everyone from Jackie Kennedy to Marlene Dietrich to a smash hit off-Broadway production, The Boys in the Band was a cultural phenomenon that dated very quickly with the gay liberation movement of the 1970s. Nevertheless as a dramatic work it ranks with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Subject Was Roses as an example of an essentially one-set play opened up for the screen that remains at its core an actor's showcase. The nine actors who starred in the off-Broadway production retained their roles for the screen and they are all brilliant, with Kenneth Nelson, Leonard Frey and Cliff Gorman perhaps the best known of the group. Friedkin and Crowley provide a feature length commentary and appear in the three accompanying documentaries along with producer Dominick Dunne and two of only three surviving members of the cast, Laurence Luckinbill and Peter White. Paramount, which spends more time re-issuing the same films than it does coming up new releases, is at it again with two-disc Centennial Editions of spruced-up versions of three of their 1950s classics Sunset Boulevard, Roman Holiday and Sabrina. They have done an excellent job with Sunset Blvd., which in its previous release had picture and sound problems. Billy Wilder's film noir classic about a faded movie star attempting a comeback that nobody wants looks and sounds absolutely stunning. Extras galore include reminiscences of the film' stars Gloria Swanson and William Holden. The two early Audrey Hepburn classics looked good to begin with, but it's always nice to have extras so if you're a Hepburn fan, you may want to indulge in the behind the scenes stuff available on the second discs of William Wyler's Roman Holiday in which she plays a runaway princess who beguiles reporter Gregory Peck and Billy Wilder's Sabrina in which she plays the chauffer's daughter torn between rich brothers Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. Finally, Columbia has issued The Budd Boetticher Box Set featuring five of the westerns Boetticher made with Randolph Scott at the studio: The Tall T, Decision at Sundown, Buchanan Rides Alone, Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station. Like the Anthony Mann-James Stewart collaborations at Universal, director Boetticher and star Randolph Scott worked hand-in-glove to produce an impressive body of work in a relatively short period of time. Made at a time when TV westerns dominated the airwaves, these big screen westerns made between 1957 and 1960 were not given the respect due them at the time. Dumped onto the second half of double-bills, these sparse but riveting "B" pictures have become the stuff of legend as attested to by the introductions given them by Clint Eastwood, Taylor Hackford and Martin Scorsese and the feature length commentaries by Hackford and historian Jeanine Basinger. Accompanying the set is the feature length documentary Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That about the bullfighter-turned-director featuring Clint Eastwood and Quentin Tarantino among many others. -Peter J. Patrick (November 11, 2008) |
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The DVD Report #79: November 4, 2008
Happy Election Day! Today is, of course, a historic one in which practically everyone will be glued to their TV sets, radios and/or internet sources for the results of many key races including the Presidency. There have been years, however, when Election Day news has either been slow in coming or downright dull and boring and to get my political fix I needed to watch an old politically themed movie or miniseries to fill the void. Here are a few of the films I turned to: It's been surpassed by newer, better films about the 16th President, but D.W. Griffith's 1930 film, Abraham Lincoln, remains an interesting artifact of the early days of talkies. It is an episodic account of the great man's life, focusing on events of the Civil War and his assassination. Walter Huston's classy impersonation was one of his best lead performances on film and the supporting cast is quite good, especially Una Merkel as Ann Rutledge and Kay Hammond as Mary Todd Lincoln. As an alternative there's John Cromwell's 1940 film Abe Lincoln in Illinois with Raymond Massey Oscar nominated in the title role and an equally impressive Ruth Gordon as Mary Todd Lincoln. Thirty-two years before Lincoln had to fight the Civil War, Andrew Jackson had to stave off Secessionists in his administration, a subject that is explored in Clarence Brown's 1936 film The Gorgeous Hussy. The film focuses on the exploits of Peggy O'Neile Timberlake Eaton, the innkeeper's daughter who rose to prominence and notoriety as Jackson's de facto First Lady after the death of his beloved wife, Rachel. Joan Crawford plays Peggy in her first costume drama, surrounded by a strong cast that includes Robert Taylor, Melvyn Douglas, James Stewart and Franchot Tone as various lovers and husbands, Lionel Barrymore as Jackson, and Beulah Bondi in an Oscar-nominated performance as Rachel Jackson. Sidney Toler has his best pre-Charlie Chan role as Daniel Webster. For another take on the Andrew and Rachel Jackson story, see Henry Levin's 1953 film The President's Lady with Charlton Heston as the 8th President and Susan Hayward as his pipe-smoking backwoods wife. In the midst of World War II, Darryl F. Zanuck produced what he considered the most important film of his life, Henry King's 1944 epic Wilson about the life and times of the man who was President during the previous World War. Focusing equally on the great events of the day, the backstabbing politics of the time and Wilson's family life, Zanuck spared no expense in the production that included 12,000 players in 200 scenes. The film was nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture, Director and Actor, Alexander Knox. Equally impressionable are Ruth Nelson as Wilson's socially conscious first wife and Geraldine Fitzgerald as his politically astute second wife who may or may not have made decisions of State in his name while he recovered from a stroke. The early life of Dolly Madison is explored in Frank Borzage's 1946 film Magnificent Doll in which the future First Lady is forced into an arranged marriage by her late-life-Quaker-convert father; loses her father, husband and son in the Plague; has a long standing affair with Aaron Burr; and then marries James Madison and serves as hostess in the White House to widowed Thomas Jefferson while her husband serves as his Secretary of State. It's all presented rather matter-of-factly so if you don't know your history, you may not follow all of the events covered by the film, but it is an interesting look at a slice of Americana not often covered by Hollywood. Ginger Rogers as Dolly, David Niven as Burr, Burgess Meredith as Madison, Peggy Wood as Dolly's mother, and Stephen McNally as her first husband have the principal roles. A fictitious bid for the 1948 Republican Presidential candidacy is the subject of Frank Capra's 1948 film State of the Union starring Spencer Tracy as the idealistic businessman being corrupted by the crooked politicos including his mistress, newspaper magnate Angela Lansbury in a role eerily reminiscent of her later performance in The Manchurian Candidate. Claudette Colbert was originally cast as Tracy's wife but had to leave the production for health reasons and was replaced by Katharine Hepburn who, having helped Tracy rehearse his role, knew all the character's lines. The two are terrific together as usual, with Hepburn's drunk scene near the end the comic highlight of a more serious than usual Capra film. Adolphe Menjou as a party power broker, Van Johnson as a newspaperman-turned-speech writer-turned-campaign manager and Margaret Hamilton as Menjou's charming housekeeper head a fine supporting cast. The life and death of demagogueWillie Stark, a thinly disguised version of Louisiana's notorious governor Huey Long, is the subject of Robert Rossen's 1949 film, All the King's Men. Based on Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the film was nominated for seven Oscars and won three for Best Picture, Actor (Broderick Crawford in a career high performance as Stark) and Supporting Actress (Mercedes McCambridge as his acid-tongued secretary and sometimes mistress). The cast includes John Ireland in an Oscar nominated performance as the newspaperman-turned-investigator through whose eyes the story is told, Joanne Dru as Ireland's one-time fiancée and Crawford's latest mistress, Shepperd Strudwick as her brother, John Derek as Crawford's irresponsible son, and Anne Seymour as his noble wife. A thinly veiled biography of James Curley, the four-time mayor of Boston and one-time governor of Massachusetts, John Ford's 1958 film The Last Hurrah from Edwin O'Connor's bestseller stars Spencer Tracy in one of his best performances as the loveable old rogue. The politics are more about working class Irish Catholics vs. Protestant bluebloods than Democrats vs. Republicans, but no matter, the dirty dealing and bickering is palpable just the same. Jeffrey Hunter is Tracy's newspaperman nephew given a rare inside look at the workings of big city elections. Dianne Foster is Hunter's Protestant wife; Pat O'Brien, James Gleason and Edward Brophy are Tracy's cronies; Donald Crisp is a Cardinal; Jane Darwell plays an elderly charmer who lives to go to funerals; Basil Rathbone and John Carradine are the chief villains; Wallace Ford and Frank McHugh appear as a couple of dumb politicos; and Basil Ruysdael is Foster's clergyman father whose "I'll bet if he had to live his life over he'd do things differently" gets to set up Tracy's famous last line: "the hell I would!" The film is both cynical and sentimental like all the great Ford films. Congressional shenanigans behind the scenes as the Senate gets ready to vote on the President's choice for Secretary of State is the juicy plot device that drives Otto Preminger's 1962 film of Allen Drury's long-time bestseller, Advise & Consent. Henry Fonda is the candidate under scrutiny, Walter Pidgeon the Majority Leader, Charles Laughton the wily Southern Senator who bucks his own party, Franchot Tone the President, and Lew Ayres the Vice President. Don Murray, Geroge Grizzard and Burgess Meredith figure heavily in a sub-plot that leads to the screen's first scene in a NYC gay bar and Gene Tierney shows up as the Washington hostess with the mostest. One of the most unsettling political thrillers of all time, John Frankenheimer's 1962 film ofRichard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate has lost none of its fascination. Numerous imitators, including a star-studded remake, have come and gone, but nothing comes close to the impact of the original when you discover who the voice on the phone is that is egging unwitting assassin Laurence Harvey on. Frank Sinatra as his Korean War buddy and numerous supporting players are fine, but the film belongs to Angela Lansbury in one of the most withering portrayals of lopsided mother love ever committed to film. Burt Lancaster is a self-righteous U.S. Army General plotting to take over the country in John Frankenheimer's 1964 film of Fletcher Knebel and Charles F. Bailey's bestseller Seven Days in May. Kirk Douglas is an underling who uncovers the plot and informs the President, a stalwart Fredric March in one of his last great roles. An equally fine Edmund O'Brien was Oscar nominated as a congressman who is loyal to the President. March, O'Brien and Frankenheimer were all nominated for Golden Globes along with composer Jerry Goldsmith for this, one of the best of the cold war dramas. Sidney Lumet's 1964 film, Fail-Safe has had an odd history. The film, based on a novel about nuclear annihilation, was completed in 1963, but Stanley Kubrick and Columbia Pictures brought a nuisance suit against it claiming it plagiarized their Dr. Strangelove, which was based on another novel. It didn't. The two college professors who had written the bestselling Fail-Safe had never heard of the more obscure novel upon which the Kubrick film was based, but similarities were enough to allow Columbia to forebear in a settlement whereby they obtained rights to the film intending not to release it. They finally did release it ten months after Strangelove had become a box office sensation. Fail-Safe was not a huge success. Audiences theorized that there was no sense in spending good money to see a straight drama they had already seen satirized. Strangelove may be the superior film artistically, but Fail-Safe is the one that will send chills up and down your spine. Henry Fonda as the President, Dan O'Herlihy as the conflicted General and Walter Matthau as the "we can survive a nuclear war" theorist head the impeccable cast. Scenes of people going through the motions of their everyday lives as the bomb drops on New York is as eerily unsettling post-9/11 as it was watching the film in a darkened theater in New York City in 1964, not being quite sure what you would find when you exited into the daylight. Franklin J. Schaffner's 1964 film of Gore Vidal's play The Best Man is a provocative study of the in-fighting at a nearly-deadlocked Presidential convention. Henry Fonda (again!) is the upright candidate patterned after Adlai Stevenson, Cliff Robertson is the sleazy politician patterned after Richard Nixon, and Lee Tracy is the crafty former president patterned after Harry Truman. Ann Sothern is a professional party giver who steals the little of the film that is left to steal after Tracy gets through with it. The indomitable Tracy was justly nominated for an Oscar for his return to films after a thirty years absence. It's back to the beginning with Peter H. Hunt's jubilant film of Sherman Edwards' musical 1776 in which the Nation's founding fathers attempt to agree on the Declaration of Independence. William Daniels as John Adams, Ken Howard as Thomas Jefferson, Howard Da Silva as Benjamin Franklin and Virginia Vestoff as Abigail Adams delightfully reprise their Broadway roles while a young Blythe Danner takes over for Betty Buckley as Martha Jefferson. Despite the musicalization, it's a fairly accurate and deft reproduction of the actual events. Unfolding pretty much as the actual events did, Alan J. Pakula's 1976 film of Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men is remarkable in that it keeps the suspense at full throttle even though audiences, then as now, knew the outcome. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman are uncanny as the intrepid reporters and Jason Robards is a wonder in his Oscar-winning portrayal of Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. Stand-outs among the rest of the cast include Jack Warden and Martin Balsam as other editors, John Randolph as John Mitchell, Stephen Collins as Hugh Sloan, Oscar nominee Jane Alexander as a whistle blowing bookkeeper, and of course Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat. One of the most acclaimed miniseries from the Golden Age of the miniseries, the 1970s, 1979's Backstairs at the White House is based on the memoirs of Lillian Rogers Parks (1897-1997) who, along with her mother Maggie Rogers, served a total of eight first families from the Tafts to the Eisenhowers. Nominated for 11 Emmys and winner of one (for Best Make-up), its acting nominees included Olivia Cole as Maggie, Louis Gossett Jr. as the White House's head butler, Ed Flanders as Calvin Coolidge, Robert Vaughn as Woodrow Wilson, Eileen Heckart as Eleanor Roosevelt and Celeste Holm as Florence Harding. Awards watchers will observe that there are eight Oscar winners and seven other Hollywood veterans who were nominated for Oscars at least once in the outstanding cast. Among the winners are Gosset, Heckart, Holm, Kim Hunter (Ellen Wilson), George Kennedy (Warren Harding), Lee Grant (Grace Coolidge), Estelle Parsons (Bess Truman) and Cloris Leachman (housekeeper Mrs. Jaffray). The nominees include Vaughn, Paul Winfield (Maggie's husband), Victor Buono (William Howard Taft), Julie Harris (Helen "Nellie" Taft), Jan Sterling (Lou Hoover), Barbara Barrie (Mamie Eisenhower) and Jack Kruschen (Alexander Woolcott). Tony and Emmy winner (for other roles) Leslie Uggmas has the lead as Lillian. A relic of the Clinton Administration, Rob Reiner's 1995 film The American President is an absolute charmer with Michael Douglas playing the widowed Clintonesque President who woos and wins lobbyist Annette Bening. Martin Sheen and Michael J. Fox are his loyal supporters and Richard Dreyfuss is his hiss-able opposing candidate. There are others, of course, but these are the ones I find myself thinking about and returning to most often. -Peter J. Patrick (November 4, 2008) |
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