The DVD Report #91: January 27, 2009
Lots to cover this week with the release of one major film from 2008 and fourteen older films, all but one of which are new to DVD. If you're a Woody Allen fanatic you'll love his latest film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. If not you'll find little to like in it. The title doesn't refer to someone's name as might be expected, but is in fact the name of two friends, Vicky and Cristina, and the city they spend a summer in, Barcelona, Spain. The scenes of Barcelona and other Spanish locales are picture postcard perfect, but pretty pictures do not a movie make. The two women are vapid and annoyingly played by Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johanssen who both seem to be channeling Diane Keaton in Annie Hall with their hair tugging, facial grimaces and halting speech. Chris Messina as Hall's fiancé does the Woody Allen/Tony Roberts bit as the opinionated New York guy. Only Javier Bardem as a bohemian artist and Penelope Cruz as his crazy wife offer something new in an Allen film. Cruz is good but one note in her Oscar-nominated role. Warner Bros. has made several long requested classic titles available on DVD in Region 1 for the first time. One of the best remembered love stories all time, Mervyn LeRoy's 1940 version of Waterloo Bridge, has long been one of the most requested DVD titles. Vivien Leigh, fresh from her Oscar win in Gone With the Wind, gave an even more poignant performance as the ex-ballerina who turns to prostitution when she believes her lover, Robert Taylor, has been killed in World War I. Lucile Watson as Taylor's aristocratic mother, Virginia Field as Leigh's friend and confidante and Maria Ouspenskaya as the head of the ballet company of which they are members offer strong support. The film deservedly won Oscar nominations for Joseph Ruttenberg's cinematography and Herbert Stothart's score. A huge hit in its day, Anthony Asquith's 1964 film The Yellow Rolls-Royce is an all-star production in which the titled vehicle provides the thread that binds together three disparate stories. Rex Harrison, very much in Henry Higgins mode, plays the initial owner who buys the vehicle for his feckless wife, Jeanne Moreau; gangster George C. Scott is the second owner whose moll, Shirley MacLaine, has an affair with Alain Delon while buddy Art Carney covers for her; finally Ingrid Bergman and Omar Sharif use the car to drive resistance fighters across rugged Yugoslavian terrain. Joyce Grenfell, Edmund Purdom and Roland Culver co-star. The song "Forget Domani" won a Golden Globe and Ritz Ortolani's score was also nominated. Its cinematography and costume design were nominated for BAFTAs. The most famous of several versions of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd was the 1967 film directed by John Schlesinger with Julie Christie as the Victorian heiress pursed by three men: farmer Alan Bates, wealthy Peter Finch, and soldier/scoundrel Terence Stamp whom she marries. With a running time of nearly three hours, the film is a bit of a chore to sit through, but ultimately rewarding as it comes to a most satisfying conclusion. Nicolas Roeg's breathtaking cinematography was nominated for a BAFTA and Richard Rodney Bennett's score was nominated for an Oscar. The film won National Board of Review awards for Best Film and Actor (Finch). Bates and Prunella Ransome, as Stamp's tragic mistress, were nominated for Golden Globes. Almost as long as Far From the Madding Crowd, Herbert Ross' 1969 musical version of Goodbye, Mr. Chips is less of a chore to sit through thanks to a commanding performance by Peter O'Toole as the beloved schoolteacher. Though the film itself is not the masterpiece the 1939 version was, O'Toole's performance is nearly as splendid as Oscar winner Robert Donat's in the original. Unfortunately, Petula Clark, lovely though she is, is not as adept an actress as Greer Garson, making their love story somewhat less compelling. If there are no hits emanating from Leslie Bricusse's serviceable score, neither are there any embarrassments. Sian Phillips, Mrs. O'Toole at the time, steals several scenes as Clark's zany actress friend. O'Toole won several awards including the Best Actor trophy of the National Board of Review and the fourth of his eight Oscar nominations. Phillips won the National Society of Film Critics award as the year's Best Supporting Actress. It's probably called Warner Bros. Romance Classics Collection because anything called the Troy Donahue Collection wouldn't sell today, but that is exactly what this set is, a four-film collection of Donahue's box office hits from 1961-1963. The teen heartthrob became an overnight sensation in Delmer Daves' 1959 film A Summer Place opposite Sandra Dee, but received his first star billing in Daves' follow-up film 1961's Parrish. Playing an impressionable teen who moves to Connecticut with his mother, the still-formidable Claudette Colbert, who has married tobacco farmer Karl Malden. Donahue grows to manhood through his love of three women: Diane McBain, Connie Stevens and Sharon Hugueney. Dean Jagger has one of his best roles as the film's sage. Colbert, whose career had been relegated to TV work throughout most of the 1950s, came out of retirement to play the mother role and then retired again. That same year, Daves and Donahue reteamed for Susan Slade, an old-fashioned tearjerker about a young girl left pregnant by her dead fiancé whose parents pose as the baby's parents. Donahue has top billing, but his Parrish co-star Connie Stevens has the actual lead as the title character, while Dorothy McGuire, who played Donahue's mother in A Summer Place, plays Stevens' mother here. Donahue is the horse trainer and aspiring writer who loves Stevens from afar, while Bert Convy is the rich boy who pursues her until he finds out she is no longer a virgin. Lloyd Nolan and Brian Aherne co-star. Donahue again has top billing in his fourth Daves collaboration, 1962's Rome Adventure, but the focus here is on Suzanne Pleshette as the young tourist looking for love in Italy with Donahue as the expatriate architect with whom she has an affair. Daves' witty dialogue provides them, as well as Angie Dickinson as Donahue's mistress, Rossano Brazzi as an old roué with designs on Pleshette, and Hampton Fancher as her young protector, with equal opportunities to shine, though the brightest star here may well be "Italy as you've never seen it." A bit of trivia: Donahue and Pleshette were married two years later; future writer-producer-director Fancher later wrote the screenplay for Blade Runner. Without Daves' strong guidance, Donahue is at a loss in Norman Taurog's turgid 1963 attempt at light comedy, Palm Springs Weekend, in which he, Connie Stevens, Ty Hardin, Stefanie Powers, Robert Conrad and Jerry Van Dyke appear as over-aged teenagers on spring break in Warners' blatant rip-off of MGM's superior Where the Boys Are from three years earlier. Warner Bros. has also released a new Sidney Poitier Collection featuring the previously released A Patch of Blue as well as three new-to-DVD titles. The reissue of Guy Green's landmark 1965 film A Patch of Blue is the same transfer with the same minimal extras as the previous release except for the packaging. Poitier gives one of his most indelible performances as the kindly man who helps blind girl Elizabeth Hartman find independence. Shelley Winters as Hartman's harridan of a mother won her second Oscar for her totally unsympathetic portrayal while character actor Wallace Ford had his best role in decades as Hartman's powerless grandfather. Hartman, making her screen debut, won an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Poitier, Hartman and Winters were nominated for Golden Globes with Hartman winning as Best Newcomer. All four stars were nominated for the now-defunct Laurel awards. Rock Hudson as a pacifist white settler and Dana Wynter as his patrician wife have top billing in Richard Brooks' searing 1957 Kenya-based film Something of Value, but the focus is on Poitier as Hudson's childhood friend turned rebel. Poitier superbly plays the restless native who joins the Mau Maus after the imprisonment of his father in 1945 and becomes a key figure in their 1952 uprisings in which innocent men, women and children are slaughtered in the name of independence. Wendy Hiller gives a devastating performance as Hudson's sister caught in the maelstrom. Robert Beatty, Walter Fitzgerald and Michael Pate are excellent as other settlers and Juano Hernandez and William Marshall are memorable as Mau Mau leaders. The original prologue to the film intoned by Winston Churchill does not appear on the DVD. A compelling waterfront drama, Martin Ritt's Edge of the City co-stars John Cassavetes and Poitier as a couple of longshoremen who battle racial prejudice on the job. Ruby Dee is Poitier's charming wife and Kathleen Maguire is the friend she matches up with Cassavetes. Jack Warden, in one of his signature roles, plays a nasty, Simon Legree-style villain. The film which was made three years after the celebrated On the Waterfront compares favorably to that landmark Oscar-winning film. Poitier directs as well as stars in 1973's A Warm December, a rather pedestrian tearjerker in which he plays a widowed Washington D.C. physician on vacation with his daughter in London. He is attracted to a mysterious woman who turns out to be the dying niece of an African diplomat. Esther Anderson, in her only major role, plays the dying woman. George Baker and Johnny Sekka co-star. As if all of that weren't enough, Warner Bros. has also released MGM: When the Lion Roars, an ambitious four part, warts-and-all 1992 documentary chronicling the rise and fall of the studio whose catalogue of classic films Warner Bros. now owns. Patrick Stewart hosts with live interviews from Lew Ayres, Freddie Bartholomew, Ernest Borgnine, Helen Hayes, Van Johnson, Roddy McDowall, Luise Rainer, Mickey Rooney, Esther Williams and others, most of whom are gone now. Producer-director John Frankenheimer won his 6th DGA nomination and 12th and 13th Emmy nominations (and fourth directorial win) for his brilliant 1997 miniseries George Wallace featuring Emmy award-winning performances by Gary Sinise as the controversial Alabama governor and Mare Winningham as his first wife. The two were also nominated for Golden Globes and Angelina Jolie won one as his second wife. Clarence Williams III, as a fictional servant, and Joe Don Baker, as Wallace's predecessor in the State house, also turn in memorable performances. It's riveting from the first moment to the last as it follows the life of the once-liberal politician who became the poster boy for racial prejudice in the 1960s and a voice for the downtrodden following a 1972 attempted assassination that left him unable to walk and in great pain for the remainder of his life. -Peter J. Patrick (January 27, 2009) |
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The DVD Report #90: January 20, 2009
The big release of the week is the Criterion Collection's long awaited release of Douglas Sirk's 1954 film Magnificent Obsession. John M. Stahl's original 1935 version is included on a bonus disc. The original novel was written by Lloyd C. Douglas, whose religious-themed The Robe was a huge box office hit in 1953, prompting new interest in his earlier work. Magnificent Obsession would not be the last John M. Stahl film remade by Sirk. Five years later he would remake Imitation of Life as well. More spiritual than religious, the title of Douglas' novel refers to the former Methodist minister's deep belief in the philosophy of doing good deeds quietly. The 1935 version with Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor, scripted by Douglas, is closer to the novel in tone. Sirk's sudsier remake with Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson is, however, the more famous version. Both are extremely well made and deserve to be seen. Taylor, who became rather wooden in his later films, is breezily charming in the early devil-may-care scenes of the earlier version. He is also quite believable as the down-to-earth man his character becomes in later life. Rock Hudson is equally impressive in the later version. Both actors became major stars due to their characterizations in these films. Irene Dunne, at the time of the making of the earlier version, was the queen of the weepie, having made so many in the first few years of her arrival in Hollywood that she probably could have played the part of the widow accidentally blinded by Taylor in her sleep. It is a tribute to her skills that she brings as much freshness and warmth to the role as she does. Wyman, who had become a latter day queen of the weepies by the time she filmed the later version, does equally well and in fact earned her fourth Oscar nomination for her efforts. Wyman and Hudson were later re-teamed for Sirk's All That Heaven Allows in which they were even more effective. Extras include a 1980 interview with Sirk and a new interview with filmmakers Allison Anders and Kathryn Bigelow. Newly released by Criterion on both standard DVD and Blu-ray, Gregory Nava's 1983 film El Norte is one of the first and best films made about the experiences of Latin American emigrants to the U.S. It features Zaide Silvia Guiterrez and David Villalpando as Guatemalan teenagers who miraculously survive the massacre of their hometown. The film chronicles their adventures, both harrowing and funny, as they travel through Guatemala and Mexico to Los Angeles where they take low-paying jobs as illegal immigrants until trouble looms anew. Nominated for an Oscar for its screenplay, the film, co-produced by the U.S. and the U.K., was admitted into the National Film Registry in 1995. As close to a traditional western as we're likely to see these days, Ed Harris' Appaloosa, from a Robert B. Parker novel, is a leisurely paced, straight-forward account of a couple of professional lawmen, Harris and partner Viggo Mortensen, who come to the title town to clean it up after the murder of the town's marshal and his two deputies. Harris, better known as an actor, has directed only one previous film, 2000's Pollock about the famed artist for which he won his only Oscar nomination as a lead actor in the title role and for which Marcia Gay Harden won the supporting actress Oscar for her portrayal of his partner Lee Krasner. Harris, one of our most versatile actors, also has three supporting actor nominations to his credit for Apollo 13, The Truman Show and The Hours. The one characteristic Harris displays in each of his Oscar nominated performances, as well as in many other films, is his ability to shout louder than his co-stars. Here, he provides the audience with a completely different, quietly controlled soft-spoken performance. Mortensen, Harris' co-star in A History of Violence is equally low-key and controlled. The histrionics are left to Oscar winners Jeremy Irons as the principal bad guy and Renee Zellweger as an unconventional leading lady, a widow who, as Mortensen puts it, "has to be with a man." Technical aspects of the film including its clean, lean cinematography are first rate. The film looks especially good on Blu-ray. Speaking of Blu-ray, studios continue to spruce up their major films for release in the new format. One of the newest to get the Blu-ray treatment is Election, an uproariously funny high school comedy from 1999 that in many ways foreshadows the disastrous 2000 U.S. Presidential elections. The film stars Reese Witherspoon as an obnoxious, self-absorbed candidate for class president. Matthew Broderick is the social studies teacher who can't stand her and puts up his own candidate, football star Chris Klein, to oppose her. The film's screenplay, which was written by director Alexander Payne and his writing partner Jim Taylor, was nominated for an Oscar. The writing duo went on to win the Oscar for their next screenplay, Sideways, five years later. One of the most popular films of recent years, Nick Cassavetes' 2004 film The Notebook has been re-released on standard DVD and issued for the first time on Blu-ray in a ridiculously over- packaged set that includes an actual notebook, note paper and envelopes. The film itself is both a charming love story and a gothic mystery. James Garner, in a Screen Actors Guild-nominated performance plays an elderly man visting his Alzheimer's-afflicted wife, director Cassavetes' real life mom Gena Rowlands in a Satellite Award-winning performance. There, he attempts to make inroads into her memory by reading her a story about a young woman who must choose between two loves. The young woman is obviously Rowlands fifty years earlier and one of the young men is Garner, but which one? Rachel McAdams is the young woman, and Ryan Gosling and James Marsden are the two men. All three are fine. Diane Lane won her first, and to date only, Oscar nomination for her smoldering performance in Adrain Lyne's 2002 film Unfaithful, a deft Hollywood remake of Claude Chabrol's 1969 film La Femme Infidele. Lyne, who specializes in this type of material, made it his most suspenseful since the mega-hit Fatal Attraction. Lane, often a diffident actress in unchallenging roles, here lives up to the task given her as the straying wife. Olivier Martinez as her young lover and Richard Gere as her cuckolded husband are both excellent, but it's Lane's film all the way. The sharpness of the Blu-ray format enhances viewing enjoyment. I'll be back next week with reviews of a slew of classic films being released on DVD for the first time. -Peter J. Patrick (January 20, 2009) |
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The DVD Report #89: January 13, 2009
There are lots of new and recent DVDs to catch up with this week. Sony/Columbia is one of the stingier companies when it comes to releasing classic films so it's a cause for celebration when they come up with something for us like The Films of Michael Powell even if the collection contains only two films he directed alone. Released in the U.K. as A Matter of Life and Death and in the U.S. as the more lyrical sounding Stairway to Heaven (Powell's preferred title), the 1946 film co-directed by Powell and Emeric Pressburger was one of their best. David Niven plays a downed British airman who falls in love with American radio controller Kim Hunter before learning that he was supposed to have died when his parachute failed to open but his emissary (Marius Goring) got lost in the fog over the English Channel. The brunt of the film is Niven's appearance before the Heavenly Court he must convince to give him another chance. Beautifully filmed in black and white and color in the reverse of The Wizard of Oz with the black-and-white scenes the fantasy scenes and the color sequences the real life ones, the film was a critical and commercial hit in its day that found appreciative audiences in TV showings for many years thereafter but has become almost forgotten today. Hopefully the DVD release will allow new audiences to discover this little charmer. The second film in the collection is Powell's Age of Consent, his last film and Helen Mirren's first. Originally released in the U.S. in a badly truncated version in 1969, the film has been restored to the director's original vision complete with Mirren's plentiful nude swimming and posing for artist James Mason. Though the story of Australian artist Norman Lindsey's earlier life was better represented in John Duigan's 1994 film Sirens with Sam Neill in the role, this autumnal version filmed in and around Australia's Great Barrier Reef has its compensations. For one thing, it is as gorgeous to look at as any of Powell's films. Mason, fit, trim and spry at 60, co-produced the film with Powell who hadn't been able to find financing since the critical and commercial flop of Peeping Tom, now considered a masterpiece, nine years earlier. Another legendary director who had difficulty getting his films financed in his later years was Samuel Fuller. His last Hollywood film, made in 1981, was the controversial White Dog, an unproduced property that had sat on Paramount's shelf for a number of years before Fuller was brought onto the project. The completed film had a troubled history that so upset Fuller that he literally left the country and moved to France. Except for a one-week showing in Detroit in November 1982, distributor indifference kept the film out of U.S. theatres until 1991 when it was enthusiastically hailed by the New York film critics as a lost masterpiece. The story of a dog that is raised to attack and kill black people until it is cured by a black trainer, the film based on a novel by Romain Gary, is not exploitative at all, but rather a meaningful examination of race relations in America. Kristy McNichol in her first adult role plays an up-and-coming actress who finds the dog but is unaware of its background. Paul Winfield plays the movie animal trainer who reprograms the dog and Burl Ives is his business partner. Although there are some horrific murders, most of the violence is off screen. The film was co-written by Fuller and Curtis Hanson. Hanson and Fuller's widow chronicle the production's troubles in an excellent accompanying documentary on the Criterion Edition of the film. One of last year's most acclaimed foreign films, Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven, interweaves the lives of six characters from Bremen and Hamburg, Germany to Istanbul and the northern Turkish coast. The story follows the interconnected lives a young Turkish professor of German ancestry in Germany, his nasty hotheaded father, the father's prostitute girlfriend, the prostitute's daughter, the daughter's female lover and the lover's mother. The latter is wonderfully played by the great German actress Hanna Schygulla in an achingly powerful performance. Schygulla shines, but so do the lesser known players in this suspense-filled multi-cultural and multi-generational slice of life drama. Akin won the Best Director award at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and Schygulla recently won the National Society of Film Critics award as best supporting actress of 2008. Generally thought of as the last great English novel, Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited was first published in 1945. It is even more fondly remembered for the acclaimed 1981 TV mini-series it spawned starring Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews and Diana Quick and featuring Laurence Olivier and Claire Bloom. The abridged film version, directed by Juian Jarrold, stars up-and-comers Matthew Goode, Ben Whishaw and Hayley Atwell in the leads with Michael Gambon and Emma Thompson in the major featured roles of Lord and Lady Marchmain. Though all the actors are fine in the film version, it is nevertheless stolen by Emma Thompson in gray wig and aging makeup playing the grand dame as if to the manor and manner born. Thompson, as well as the film's art direction, costume design and cinematography are all Oscar worthy. Of lesser interest, but in the same vein as Brideshead Revisited, Saul Dibb's The Duchess also offers noteworthy art direction, costume design and cinematography in the service of the story about a lovely, beguiling and influential female aristocrat, Keira Knightley as the Duchess of Devonshire, an ancestor of Lady Diana Spencer, whose marital woes compared quite strikingly to those of the future princess. Ralph Fiennes is the indifferent Duke, Dominic Cooper the Duchess's young lover and Charlotte Rampling her mother. Brideshead 's Hayley Atwell has a major supporting role as the Duke's mistress. Last year's best director Oscar winners, Joel and Ethan Coen, gave us as their follow-up to No Country for Old Men, a return to their comedic roots with Burn After Reading. As one has come to expect from the Coens, this is no feathery light romp, but a very dark comedy indeed. John Malkovich plays a retired low level CIA agent whose memoirs are found by an airhead exercise gym employees, Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand, who attempt to blackmail Malkovich. Meanwhile, Malkovich's wife, Tilda Swinton, is having an affair with FBI agent George Clooney whose wife has a secret lover of her own. Richard Jenkins also figures into the ensuing mayhem as Pitt and McDormand's boss. Enjoyable, but forgettable, it's been nominated for Broadcast Film Critics and Golden Globe awards largely due to the lack of serious competition in the comedy categories. Judd Apatow's production team's latest comedy is Pineapple Express directed by David Gordon Green, best known for such heavy dramatic works as Undertow and Snow Angels. Apatow's buddy Seth Rogen stars as a pothead process server who witnesses a murder and Apatow's other buddy James Franco appears as Rogen's drug supplier. The two are forced to go on the lam from the killers, drug lord Gary Cole and crooked cop Rosie Perez. The beginning of the film is nicely set up, and Rogen and Franco's bromance has more resonance than Rogen's wanly played out affair with an underage high school girl, but the bloody mid section and climax are too broadly played and go on so long that they wear out their welcome long before the film ends. Franco unexpectedly won a Golden Globe nomination for his performance. Classified as a comedy, but really more a coming-of-age drama, Jonathan Levine's The Wackness provides TV actor Josh Peck with a breakout screen role as a melancholy high school drug pusher whose shrink is one of his clients. As the shrink, Ben Kinsgley at first seems to be channeling Harvey Keitel at his looniest, but proves to be a more complex and eventually lovable character as he becomes Peck's best friend as well as advisor. Olivia Thirlby is a total charmer as Kinglsey's stepdaughter with whom Peck has his first romance. Famke Janssen as Kingsley's wife and Jane Adams as one of Peck's clients also offer strong portrayals in support. TV miniseries were something new in 1976 when Captains and the Kings premiered. There had been only Rich Man, Poor Man, still missing on DVD in the U.S., when this beloved new-to-DVD series was first shown. Telling one man's life story against the backdrop of the industrial revolution, the fictional Armagh family had obvious parallels to the Kennedy dynasty as it explored its themes of a shadow government, presidential politics and assassination as well as infidelity, alcoholism and insanity. There were strong performances by the entire cast including Golden Globe winner Richard Jordan, Emmy winner Patty Duke, Emmy nominees Jane Seymour and Charles Durning, as well as Blair Brown, Perry King, Burl Ives, John Houseman, Henry Fonda, Barbara Parkins, Celeste Holm, Ray Bolger, Ann Sothern and many others. On the TV series front, Nip/Tuck Season 5, Part 1, containing 14 of the planned 22 episodes filmed prior to last year's writers' strike, has been released. The narcissistic plastic surgeons played by Dylan Walsh and Julian McMahon have moved their superficial practice to Los Angeles in order to get into even more outrageous relationships than they could even dream of in Miami. -Peter J. Patrick (January 13, 2009) |
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The DVD Report #88: January 6, 2009
It's time to look back at the best DVD releases of 2008, which I cite as follows:
The big news of the year was the settling of the high definition format wars in which Sony's Blu-ray won out over Samsung's HD-DVD, and DVD distributors began to not only release all new high definition DVDs on Blu-ray but to reissue those titles previously released in HD on Blu-ray as well. The best release of the year, however, is the standard DVD release of Murnau, Borzage and Fox which I reviewed in depth just a couple of weeks ago. The humongous collection features the extant Fox films of F.W. Murnau, Sunrise and City Girl , as well as most of the early Fox films of Frank Borzage including 7th Heaven and Street Angel as well as a recreation through story boards and stills of Murnau's lost film 4 Devils and a recreation of Borzage's lost feature The River . In many ways this set is even more valuable than Fox's mammoth Ford at Fox a year ago. Many of the Ford films had had previous DVD releases and almost all of them were released separately at the same time as the box set. Of the films in the Murnau, Borzage collection, only Sunrise has been previously released and there are no plans to release the other films separately at this time. Long available in various hard-on-the-eyes home video versions, Warner Bros. knocked themselves out with an eye-popping How the West Was Won presented seamlessly in two versions, including a "smilebox" version which recreates the original Cinerama presentation as closely as possible. Presented with the left and right sides of the image in full screen with the center image compressed this version forces you to focus on the action at the center while using your peripheral vision to take in the action on the sides. The second version is the standard widescreen version we've seen before but with the telltale lines between the three sections removed. This second version is available in standard DVD but only the Blu-ray version contains the "smilebox" presentation. Fox's Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection is the definitive collection of films he made in the period from 1927-1947. Included are re-issues of such long out-of-print tiles as Rebecca , Spellbound and Notorious as well as such earlier films as The Lodger , Sabotage and Young and Innocent , which have been rescued from public domain hell. Also included in the nicely packaged set are extensive notes on each film. It doesn't get much better than once again seeing Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier in Rebecca , Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck in Spellbound and Bergman and Cary Grant in Notorious , films thatnot only represent the best of Hitchcock but the best of filmmaking in general. Also noteworthy are Universal's newly released special editions of three of its Hitchcock titles, Rear Window , Vertigo and Psycho . The title of The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration is a bit of a misnomer. Director Francis Ford Coppola acted as an advisor to the actual restoration of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II , the first two films in the trilogy, as did cinematographer Gordon Willis, though neither of them did the actual work. The third film, The Godfather Part III , also included here,did not require restoration. But I quibble. The films restored to their original vibrancy look spectacular, especially on Blu-ray. We can follow once again the life story of Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino, across the span of the character's life and the decades of the filmmaking process which lasted from 1971 to 1990. Marlon Brando, James Caan, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, John Cazale and Talia Shire also star. Long sought on DVD by lovers of classic films, rights issues were finally resolved and Joshua Logan's Fanny was at long last released in a two-disc special edition. Based on Pagnol's 1930s trilogy of Marius , Fanny and Cesar and Harold Rome's 1950s musical, the 1961 film version keeps Rome's glorious score but jettisons his equally splendid lyrics. No matter, though, as the actors make up for it in spoken dialogue that remains as fresh and charming as it was then. Leslie Caron is at her loveliest as the waterfront girl left pregnant by her young lover and forced through circumstance to marry his father's friend. Horst Buchholz as the boy, Charles Boyer as his father, and Maurice Chevalier as his accommodating friend are all splendid as is the magnificent cinematography and Rome's score, the soundtrack of which makes up the second disc. Criterion, long the crème de la crème of standard DVD, has entered the Blu-ray market in a big way with its release of Carol Reed's The Third Man , which continually tops the polls of best British films and consistently shows in the top ranks of American films as it was an American-British co-production. It stands the test of time as the best cold war thriller of them all and the performances of Joseph Cotton, Orson Welles and Alida Valli still sizzle. The film's breathtaking cinematography and zither-influenced score looked and sounded great on Criterion's standard DVD release but look and sound even sharper on Blu-ray. Also among Criterion's initial Blu-ray releases are The Man Who Fell to Earth , Chungking Express , Bottle Rocket and The Last Emperor . Taking ten years for MGM to get around to filming it, Quo Vadis has taken Warner Bros., who now owns the rights, just as long to restore it and release it on standard DVD. The film that started the long run of biblical films that lasted throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s looks and sounds great on standard DVD with Robert Taylor as the Centurion, Deborah Kerr as the Christian, and Peter Ustinov as Nero who fiddles while Rome burns. My one quibble is that the film was simultaneously prepared for Blu-ray but the Blu-ray disc will not be released until later this year, a serious case of Warner Bros. double dipping (i.e. hoping consumers will buy both). They are pulling the same stunt with Gigi , already out on Blu-ray in Japan. A religious epic of another kind, the thinking man's Becket with Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole directed by Peter Glenville at the height of their careers, also took a long time to come to DVD but a short while to come to Blu-ray where it looks and sounds even more stunning than on the long-awaited standard disc. Unlike Quo Vadis , however, this one-two punch was not calculated, it just happened that way. The film beautifully chronicles the relationship of England's Henry II and his carousing friend, Thomas Becket, whom he makes Bishop of Canterbury in the expectation that Becket will cater to his whims. Unexpectedly, Becket develops a conscience that forms the crux of the drama, one of the best of the 1960s. John Gielgud, Donald Moffit, Pamela Brown and Martita Hunt co-star. Criterion's Eclipse Series 8 - Lubitsch Musicals packaged together the missing-on-DVD early Lubitsch musicalsthat once again reminded us of the sophistication of the director most people know for his later comedies Trouble in Paradise , Ninotchka , The Shop Around the Corner , To Be or Not to Be , and Heaven Can Wait . The same effervescent spirit that pervaded those films is there in abundance in the early screen musicals included here: Love Me Tonight , Monte Carlo , The Smiling Lieutenant , and One Hour With You , all but one starring Maurice Chevalier. Other compilations of note included Columbia's marvelous The Budd Boetticher Collection and Fox's last two installments of its Charlie Chan collections, Charlie Chan Collection, Volume 4 and Charlie Chan Collection, Volume 5 . Animation took a big step forward with the Blu-ray release of the French film Persepolis about the true-life story of an Iranian girl who lived through the hell of the Shah's rule and the even more oppressive regime of the Ayatollahs. It was a one-of-a-kind masterpiece beautifully rendered in high definition black-and-white and color. It is presented in both the original French version with subtitles and the dubbed U.S. version. Chiarra Mastroianni and her mother Catherine Deneuve voice both versions with Sean Penn and Gena Rowlands joining them on the dubbed version. The only other animated release of particular note this year was the Pixar film WALL-E , which humorously portrays the humans of 700 years in the future as childlike, lazy, fat slobs. Honorable mentions for the year go to The Dark Knight , Iron Man , Helboy II: The Golden Army, Forgetting Sarah Marshall , and Across the Universe for looking and sounding so great on Blu-ray; and There Will Be Blood d , No Country for Old Men, Into the Wild, Gone Baby Gone , and Atonement for being the best of 2007's films released on DVD in 2008. -Peter J. Patrick (January 6, 2009) |
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