The DVD Report #110: June 30, 2009

Mae West asked if he was carrying a gun in his pocket or if he was just glad to see her, and a star was born. Audiences have been glad to see him ever since. I’m speaking of course of Cary Grant, whose entire screen career can be traced through the magic of DVD.

The iconic star had been noticed on screen before in throwaway parts in Merrily We Go to Hell and Blonde Venus, and all but stole Hot Saturday from Nancy Carroll, but didn’t have a starring role until the not-on-DVD Madame Butterfly opposite Sylvia Sidney. It was however his two starring roles opposite Mae West that launched him as a major star.

The bawdy She Done Him Wrong was the film version of Mae’s Broadway smash Diamond Lili. Together with the other 1933 Mae-Grant hit I'm No Angel, it literally saved Paramount from bankruptcy. It was such a sensation that theatres had to add midnight showings to accommodate the crowds. Authentically set in the Gay Nineties, its laugh-a-minute scenario was interrupted only by Mae’s warbling of such great songs as “Frankie and Johnny” and the notorious “Easy Rider”. It went on to win an Oscar nomination for Best Picture and entered the National Film Registry in 1996. The equally funny I'm No Angel was advertised with the tag line, “come up and see me sometime - any time” but the line itself is from She Done Him Wrong. At 66 and 87 minutes, respectively, the two should be seen back-to-back, especially if you’ve never experienced either one.

From Mae on, it was nothing but starring roles for Grant, though it was another pair of comedies that made him a superstar four years later.

Grant and Constance Bennett are ghosts haunting banker Roland Young in the uproarious Topper. While Young and Billie Burke as his befuddled wife have all the best lines, the film works because of the delightful interplaying of all four stars. Young’s performance earned him a much-deserved Oscar nomination and the film spawned several sequels, though none of them with Grant. It later became a highly successful TV series in the 1950s.

An even bigger hit was The Awful Truth, which was nominated for six Oscars including Best Picture and won one for director Leo McCarey. The film, which entered the National Film Registry in 1996, was also nominated for the wonderful acting of Irene Dunne and Ralph Bellamy, but alas, not for Grant’s performance, his finest to date, and arguably the finest of his entire career.

The film, which is about a couple who meet, marry and divorce after a brief time together only to find they really love one another, had been previously made as a silent film and would be officially remade several years later as well as unofficially too many times to count, but this is the definitive version with the added bonus of being steeped in screwball comedy. Its most memorable scene is probably the one in which Grant and Asta, the dog from The Thin Man, play footsy with a hat. Not too many actors could steal a scene from a dog, especially one as cute as Asta, but Grant could, and did.

The following year Grant appeared in two comedies opposite Katharine Hepburn that were box office flops in their day but have long since been revered as masterpieces.

Critics of the day were split and audiences were indifferent to Hepburn’s first and only venture into screwball comedy. Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby starred Grant as a bespectacled professor and Kate as a loopy heiress. The “baby” of the title was a leopard. May Robson, Charlie Ruggles and Barry Fitzgerald were in it, too. It’s marvelous from start to finish and features Grant’s immortal line, “I’m turning gay” when asked by Robson what he was doing dressed in women’s clothes. The film was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1990 in only its second year of existence.

The other 1938 film was George Cukor’s Holiday, a remake of Philip Barry’s sentimental comedy-drama about a man, played by Grant, who espouses to live a leisurely life while he’s young and work when he’s old. Hepburn and Lew Ayres as the sister and brother of his fiancé are perfectly cast, as is Grant, of course. Jean Dixon and Edward Everett Horton as Grant’s friends who bond with Hepburn and Ayres are equally fine. The film’s splendid art direction accounted for its only Oscar nomination.

The box office failure of those two films caused Hepburn to be labeled “box-office poison” and sent her scurrying back to Broadway where her triumph in The Philadelphia Story would lead to one of the quickest and greatest comebacks in show business history. Grant, in the meantime, was unaffected, though he did step away from comedies for a while.

Grant’s two best remembered films of 1939, often cited as Hollywood’s greatest year, were George Stevens’ adventure epic Gunga Din and Hawks’ aviation epic Only Angels Have Wings.

Though Gunga Din was only nominated for one Oscar (Best Cinematography), the 1999 entrant into the National Film Registry was the first of the Best Films of Films’ Best Year films to be shown in the current New York screenings of the Academy. Taken from Rudyard Kiplings’s then already 47-year-old poem, Grant, Douglas Fairbannks Jr. and Victor McLaglen are the British soldier-adventurers and Sam Jaffe is the Indian water boy who proves to be a better man than any of them.

Nominated for two Oscars, Only Angels Have Wings remains one of the best films about the men who risk their lives flying airplanes, in this case commercial planes in a South American Banaa Republic. In addition to Grant, Jean Arthur, Thomas Mitchell, Richard Barthelmess and Rita Hayworth all turn in memorable performances. Mitchell, had he not won his Oscar that year for Stagecoach, would almost have certainly won for this. His death scene is one of the most heart-rending in screen history.

1940 saw a return to comedy for Grant. He was the editor in Hawks’ remake of The Front Page, a 1993 entrant into the National Film Registry, now called His Girl Friday. Grant more than meets his match in Rosalind Russell as the star reporter in this rare remake that is even better than the original.

He was Irene Dunne’s husband once again in My Favorite Wife in which he remarries just as Dunne returns from the dead, or actually a desert island where she had been holed up with Randolph Scott for seven years. The film was nominated for three Oscars including Best Original Story.

Best of all, he was Katharine Hepburn’s ex-husband vying for her affections with Jimmy Stewart and John Howard in the screen version of The Philadelphia Story. The film was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture, Director (George Cukor), Actress (Hepburn) and Supporting Actress (Ruth Hussey), winning two for Best Actor (Jimmy, not Grant) and Best Screenplay. Hepburn, cementing her glorious comeback, won the New York Film Critics award for Best Actress and the film itself entered the National Film Registry in 1995.

Finally it was Grant’s turn at being nominated for an Oscar, albeit not for his best performance in 1941. That would have been as Joan Fontaine’s childlike, menacing husband in Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion, not as Irene Dunne’s newspaperman husband in Penny Serenade, though that performance, too, is good. Suspicion was nominated for three Oscars including Best Picture and won one for Best Actress (Fontaine). Grant’s nomination was the only one accorded Penny Serenade even though Dunne’s performance is superior.

Nominated for seven Oscars including Best Picture, 1942’s The Talk of the Town did not yield any for its director George Stevens or any of its players including the film’s three dynamic stars, Grant, Jean Arthur and Ronald Colman. Colman was nominated for Random Harvest that year instead.

Grant’s second and last flirtation with Oscar came for 1944’s None But the Lonely Heart in which he was nominated for playing against type as a drifter in the poverty-stricken Cockney area of London. Though he’s good, he is easily outclassed by the great Ethel Barrymore who deservedly won the Best Supporting Actress award as his dying, cancer-stricken mother.

He was actually better in the same year’s Arsenic and Old Lace. Filmed in 1941, the Frank Capra film could not be released until the stage version ended its highly successful run on Broadway. In it, he plays the nephew of two delightful old ladies who just happen to have murdered a few elderly men whose bodies keep popping up at the most inopportune time.

Grant’s second film for Hitchcock, 1946’s Notorious is a near-perfect movie, arguably Hitch’s best output of the 1940s. Ingrid Bergman is absolutely luminous as the daughter of an executed German spy who is recruited by American agent Grant to pose as a Nazi sympathizer to her father’s friends in Argentina, even going so far as to marry one of them. Hitch’s killing suspense would have made this good no matter who played in it, but Bergman, Grant and Claude Rains as Ingrid’s pathetic husband send it into the stratosphere. Leopoldine Konstantin, billed as Madame Konstantin, is also terrific as Claude’s bitter, unyielding mother. Rains and Ben Hecht’s screenplay were nominated for Oscars and the film itself entered the National Film Registry in 2006.

Grant thereafter alternated between comedies and serious dramas, but it was the comedies that most often proved more popular at the box-office.

Shirley Temple was after Grant in 1947’s The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, an Oscar winner for Sidney Sheldon’ screenplay, but Grant was more interested in Temple’s older sister, played by Myrna Loy.

Grant and Loy were together again in 1948’s Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, the archetypical comedy of its type. Melvyn Douglas was the other man, ready to rescue Loy every time something went wrong with the remodeling of their home.

Wonderful Ann Sheridan was a WAC whose French-born husband, Grant, she petitions to bring to the States in Howard Hawks’ 1949 film, I Was a Male War Bride. As usual the combination of Hawks, Grant and a strong female lead proved potent and the film was a huge success.

A brave film to be made at the height of the McCarthy era, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1951 romantic comedy-drama People Will Talk cast Grant as an English professor who falls in love with Jeanne Crain, a student left pregnant by her killed-in-combat soldier boyfriend. Walter Slezak and Finlay Currie are fine as Grant’s supporters and Hume Cronyn is at his most hissable as the film’s holier-than-thou finger pointer.

Grant reunited with Howard Hawks for their first screwball comedy together since Bringing Up Baby. Extremely popular, but requiring more than a little suspension of disbelief, 1952’s Monkey Business is about a research chemist who invents a fountain of youth pill that turns back the years of those who take it a bit too far. Ginger Rogers, as Grant’s wife, won a Golden Globe nomination. Charles Coburn and an up-and-coming Marilyn Monroe co-star.

Grant’s former co-star Irene Dunne had one of her greatest successes opposite Charles Boyer in Leo McCarey’s 1939 shipboard romance, Love Affair. When McCarey decided to remake it in 1957 he cast Deborah Kerr in Dunne’s role and Grant in Boyer’s. Re-named An Affair to Remember, the remake proved even more successful than the original, winning four Oscar nominations as opposed to the original’s six. Although none of the actors were nominated, Kerr might have been had she not been nominated for Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison instead. McCarey won a DGA nomination for Best Director.

Reuniting with Alfred Hitchcock one more time for 1959’s North by Northwest, the directing and acting icons had their biggest hit together. Playing the typical Hitchcock hero of the innocent man mistaken for someone else, he’s a New York advertising executive chased across the country by spies who think he’s a government agent. The film’s unforgettable set pieces include the U.N., a Kansas corn field, Mount Rushmore and a train that enters a tunnel at precisely the right moment. The seemingly effortless performances of Grant and Eva Marie Saint keep it light even as they face dastardly villain James Mason and his henchmen including Martin Landau. Leo G. Carroll and Jessie Royce Landis also have prominent roles, the latter playing Grant’s mother though she was only five years his senior.

North by Northwest was nominated for three Oscars including one for Ernest Lehman’s screenplay. Hitchcock was DGA nominated for Best Director and the film itself entered the National Film Registry in 1995.

After North by Northwest, Grant could do no wrong at the box office although his films were not always of the quality of his past work. Only Stanley Donen’s 1963 comedy-mystery Charade is worthy of a mention along with that of his earlier work.

Charade won an Oscar nomination for the lovely Henry Mancini-Johnny Mercer title tune. Both Grant and Audrey Hepburn won Golden Globe nominations for their performances.Reviews of the film had been ecstatic with one influential critic famously opining that when Audrey is playing little old lady supporting roles the ageless Grant will still be playing romantic leads.

Alas, that wasn’t to be. Grant only made two more movies, the pleasant, if forgettable World War II comedy FFather Goose opposite Leslie Caron and the ill-advised remake of The More the Merrier re-named Walk, Don’t Run.

With the locale changed from wartime Washington, D.C. to the Tokyo of the 1964 Olympics, the 1966 film had the potential of being something fresh and exciting, but seems as tired as Grant in his one and only geezer role, playing the merry old matchmaker role that won Charles Coburn an Oscar in the earlier film. Samantha Eggar and Jim Hutton co-star.

Grant, long snubbed by Oscar, finally won an honorary one at the 1969 ceremonies for “his unique mastery of the art of screen acting with the respect and affection of his colleagues.” One of Oscar’s greatest moments, we won’t see its likes again now that the Academy has decided to remove special awards from the Oscar telecast.

-Peter J. Patrick (June 30, 2009)

The DVD Report #109: June 23, 2009

It won the National Board of Review award for Best Film of 2008 and numerous international film awards and was an early Oscar favorite for the triple crown of Best Animated Feature, Best Documentary and Best Foreign Film. Alas, Ari Folman’s Israeli film Waltz With Bashir ended up being nominated only in the latter category, losing to the Japanese film Departures which has thus far had only limited release in the U.S.

A unique film that defies easy description, Waltz With Bashir is well worth your time. Using the animated likeness of the filmmaker as its protagonist, it is about the suppressed memory of not only Folman, but an entire generation of Israelis who fought in the first Lebanon War twenty years earlier.

A mixture of the real and the surreal, the animation turns to documentary footage as Folman’s memory returns in the film’s last few shocking moments.

Waltz With Bashir is available in both English and the original Hebrew on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Another award winning Israeli film, Eran Riklis’ Lemon Tree features a heart rending performance by Hiam Abbass as a poor Palestinian widow whose lemon grove in the West Bank is located across the street from the Israeli Defense Minister’s new home. As such it is declared a security risk and the woman is served with a notice that her beloved lemon trees will be cut down. Frightened, but unbowed, she fights the Defense Minister in court, even taking her case to the Israeli Supreme Court, finding an unexpected ally in the Defense Minister’s wife.

Lemon Tree is not yet available on DVD in Region 1, but is available in Region 2.

Another film awaiting a Region 1 DVD release is the controversial UK/Irish co-production, Hunger which marked the directorial debut of Steve McQueen, the brilliant Irish filmmaker who is no relation to the late actor of the same name.

McQueen’s film has won numerous international awards including the Irish Film and Television Awards for Best Film, Actor (Michael Fassbender) and Supporting Actor (Liam Cunningham).

An absorbing, if difficult, film to watch, it chronicles the intolerable living conditions and brutal beatings of the Irish prisoners administered by the British guards at Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison in the 1980s. Protests against the treatment of the inmates and their struggle for basic human rights led to the IRA prison hunger strike which claimed the lives of ten inmates.

Fassbender plays Bobby Sands, who led the strike, during which he was elected to Parliament while he lay dying. His ordeal is shown in excruciating detail. This is not a film for the faint of heart.

Cunningham plays the prison chaplain.

When it will be released in Region 1 is anybody’s guess.

Vying with Waltz With Bashir and Departures for last year’s Best Foreign Oscar, Uli Edel’s epic German film The Baader Meinhof Complex is a riveting, no-holds-barred tale of the rise and fall of Germany’s RAF (Red Army Faction) that grew out of dissatisfaction with world events the group perceived to be a new fascism in the early 1970s, little by little creating their own terror attacks culminating in the failed international hijacking of an airliner.

It was produced by Bernd Eichinger, the man responsible for the highly acclaimed 2004 film about Hitler’s last days Downfall.

Released on DVD in Region 2 months ago, its Region 1 release has not been set. In fact, the film only had a limited showing in the U.S. last Fall.

A more accessible film from a German director is Tom Tykwer’s The International. Tykwer has struggled to retain the success of his breakout hit, Run Lola Run, for more than a decade now. His latest film, it’s sad to say, does little to restore his reputation as one of the current cinema’s most audacious artists.

Stylishly filmed in locations around the world including Berlin, Milan, New York and Istanbul, only the extended set piece action sequence in New York’s famed Guggenheim Museum achieves the sense of wonder Tykwer’s early work hinted at.

Clive Owen stays true to form as yet another of his self-sacrificing lone wolf heroes as the investigator out to bring down a Swiss bank which seeks to control the world through monetary control and illegal arms sales to third world countries. Co-star Naomi Watts plays yet another of her overworked career women, this time a New York Assistant D.A. Only Armin Mueller-Stahl as a heavy hearted senior advisor within the bank offers something new in the way of character interpretation among the main cast members. It’s a decent time killer, but not a film you’re likely to recall much of once it’s over.

The International is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

The latest comedy by P.J. Hogan, the once promising director of Muriel's Wedding and My Best Friend's Wedding, is Confessions of a Shopaholic, a film that is just as frenetic as his earlier efforts but hardly as good. A sort of anti-Sex and the City, the film’s heart is in the right place, it’s just that the forced comedy is not very funny. The film is at its best when it stops trying to be funny and lets the romance between Isla Fisher as the titled character and her boss, Hugh Dancy, take over.

The supporting cast of Kristin Scott Thomas, Joan Cusack, John Goodman, John Lithgow, Julie Hagerty, Christine Ebersole and others is largely wasted. Lynn Redgrave is completely unrecognizable as an elderly drunken society matron in one brief scene.

Confessions of a Shopaholic is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

One of the most unusual films ever made, Louis Malle’s My Dinner With Andre took critics and audiences by storm in 1981. Filmed in documentary style, it is about two old friends, theatre director Andre Gregory and playwright Wallace Shawn who have dinner together in an Upper East Side Manhattan restaurant. That’s it - two hours of two guys talking, but the talk which covers everything from love to death to superstition to money, is endlessly fascinating.

The two-disc Criterion Special Edition includes two hour-long supplements, a 1982 retrospective of Malle’s work narrated by Shawn and newly conducted separate interviews of Gregory and Shawn by writer-director Noah Baumbach.

It used to be that the major studios released their classic films in groups on DVD. Lately those releases have dwindled to the point of extinction. While we await the long delayed releases of Columbia’s classic comedies, Theodora Goes Wild and My Sister Eileen, promised for August 4, the studio has reached deep into its vaults to come up with an unusual release. Barely released in 1957, and then in a truncated version, Jack Garfein’s film of The Strange One is an almost literal transposition of the Actors’ Studio production of Calder Willingham’s End As a Man, the play on which it is based.

Ben Gazzara, George Peppard, Pat Hingle, Geoffrey Horne, Paul E. Richards, James Olson and Larry Storch all made their screen debuts here, as did Julie Wilson as a character interpolated into the film.

Originally a novel by Willingham, who later co-wrote the screenplays for Paths of Glory and The Graduate, the film is largely confined to cramped spaces perhaps psychologically revealing the mindset of director Garfein, an Auschwitz survivor at 15. Gazzara is the sadomasochist who lords it over his fellow Southern military cadets. Peppard is the good guy. The DVD restores the once heavily censored “homosexual undertones” mostly involving Richards’ character.

Gazzara provides a ten minute on-screen reminiscence, largely about the genesis of the play into film and nothing about the controversy over the censorship.

-Peter J. Patrick (June 23, 2009)

The DVD Report #108: June 16, 2009

No less than three of 1959’s Best Picture Oscar nominees were about the indomitability of the human spirit. Two of them, William Wyler’s Ben-Hur and Fred Zinnemann’s The Nun's Story, won the lion’s share of the year’s awards, yet it is the third, George Stevens’ The Diary of Anne Frank, that has increased in reputation over the last fifty years.

Shown in public schools, film schools and acting classes, Stevens’ at once personal and universal tale of prevailing optimism and hope despite the constant threat of death endures and becomes even more remarkable with the passage of time.

The book on which the film is based is a diary kept by a young girl who hoped to one day have it published, become a famous writer and go to Hollywood. Her wishes were ironically fulfilled after her death in a concentration camp at 15.

Discarded by the Nazis who arrested the girl’s family and friends who were in hiding together, the diary was found by the woman who hid them and given to Anne’s father, Otto, the only survivor, after the war. Though he had it in his possession from 1945, it took him a long time to bring himself to read it. Finally in 1952, he acceded to his daughter’s wishes and had it published. It wasn’t until the Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway play of 1955, however, that the work became widely known.

Fox’s 50th anniversary edition on Blu-ray comes with tons of extras, the most intriguing being interviews with the film’s two young stars, Millie Perkins who played Anne, and Diane Baker who played her sister Margot. Though interviewed separately, the two old friends’ reminiscences are remarkably similar. Both adored director Stevens and co-stars Richard Beymer and Ed Wynn. Perkins, in particular, was not enamored of either Joseph Schildkraut and his constant attempts at scene stealing - ordered by Stevens to throw the handkerchief he uses to wipe his brow to Perkins during one of her big dramatic scenes, he pulls another one out of his pocket and starts to wipe his brow all over again – or Shelley Winters’ constant need for reassurance and her constant grilling of Perkins, demanding to know how such an untrained actress could be capable of such deep emotion.

One interesting tidbit is that Perkins, generally assumed to have turned twenty during the 1958 filming, was actually two years older. She lets slip that she is now 73.

Also included are interviews with composers David and Thomas Newman on their father Alfred Newman’s score which accounted for one his 45 Oscar nominations, though not one of his nine wins. They seem most proud of their father’s composing of the Fox fanfare.

Perhaps the most poignant extra is George Stevens Jr. quietly reading letters from Otto Frank and his father written during the filming. The elder Frank, though a great supporter of both the play and the film, could never bring himself to see either.

The Diary of Anne Frank is also being reissued on standard DVD.

Also released in celebration of milestone anniversaries are the 45th anniversary edition of Dr. Strangelove and the 25th edition of Ghostbusters.

Released at the height of the cold war, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove Or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a satirical masterpiece that knocked the era’s paranoia on its ear. At heart it’s the saga of two psychotic generals, Joint Chief of Staff Buck Turgidson, played by George C. Scott, and Air Force Strategic Commander Jack Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden, who orders a bomber squadron to attack the U.S.S.R. triggering a secret Soviet weapon, the “Doomsday Machine”.

Enter Peter Sellers who plays three different men who try to avert the catastrophe: British Captain Lionel Mandrake, the only person with access to General Ripper; U.S. President Muffley; and Dr. Strangelove, a demented former Nazi scientist. Slim Pickens is the bombardier who memorably rides the bomb to oblivion to the strains of Vera Lynn singing her World War II signature song “We’ll Meet Again”. All this craziness led to a box office phenomenon and four Oscar nominations as well as the failure of the movie-going public to take seriously any other film about nuclear annihilation for a long time.

The Blu-ray disc comes with an exclusive picture-in-picture trivia track. Both the Blu-ray and standard DVD release of the 45th Anniversary Edition include a slew of extras including archival interviews with Peter Sellers and George C. Scott and an interview with Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

One of the most successful films of the1980s, Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters featured Bill Murray and the film’s co-writers Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis as three former college professors who go into the ghost-busting business. Gorgeous Sigorney Weaver and nerdy Rick Moranis are their first clients.

Blu-ray exclusives include a picture-in-picture trivia track and featurettes on resurrecting the classic Ecte-1 car and a video game. Both the Blu-ray and standard DVD release include numerous other extras.

One of the landmarks of international cinema, Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal has been given an expansive new Criterion release on Blu-ray.

Bergman’s dark, quizzical masterpiece is a manifesto on existentialism that has been parodied more than any film in history. Even those who have never seen it are aware of the knight’s chess game with Death. Max von Sydow, in his first great screen role, plays the 14th Century knight who bargains with Death, trying to hold onto life as long as he can. Bergman regular Bib Andersson co-stars.

The new digital transfer features an introduction by Bergman filmed in 2003; audio commentary by Bergman expert Peter Cowie with a new afterward; Bergman Island, a 2006 documentary on Bergman; an archival audio interview with Von Sydow; a 1989 Bergman tribute by Woody Allen; Bergman 101, a selective Bergman filmography; the theatrical trailer; new English subtitles; and an optional dubbed English soundtrack.

New from Criterion on standard DVD, Henry Cass’ 1950 film Last Holiday is a joy to watch whether you’ve never seen it or are experiencing it for the umpteenth time.

Made on the heels of Alec Guinness’ international sensation in Robert Hamer’s 1949 film Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which he portrayed nine outrageous characters, the masterful Guinness does an about face and plays a low key timid man given weeks to live by his doctor. Co-starring Kay Walsh, this droll, social commentary and unpredictably dark comedy about life, death and luck is a timeless masterpiece that more people should get to know. Avoid the dumbed-down remake with Queen Latifah, and see this instead. You’ll be glad you did.

-Peter J. Patrick (June 16, 2009)

The DVD Report #107: June 9, 2009

One hundred and twenty hours of film were recorded and eight hours of it were put on screen in the final product through its multiple screen images in the “you-are-there” documentary, Woodstock.

Woodstockthe film was as remarkable an achievement as the three day celebration of music, love and mud it documents. Michael Wadleigh’s box office phenomenon was largely credited with saving Warner Bros. at a critical time in its history.

This was no standard compilation of greatest hits performed by the artists. The performances of Jimi Hendrix, Richie Havens, The Who, Joan Baez, Crosby, Still and Nash, Arlo Guthrie, Credence Clearwater Revival, Joe Cocker, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & the Fish and more were selected for inclusion for their lyrical relevance as well as their musical value.

The documentary, whose assistant directors and editors included Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker, put as much emphasis on the attendees as they did the performers, uncannily capturing the three day event in August 1969 like nothing before or since.

Warner Bros., which has previously released the film on VHS and DVD in a 25th Anniversary Director’s cut that added thirty minutes to the original three and one-half-hour running time, has outdone themselves with the 40th Anniversary Edition out now on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. Included in the 40th Aniversary Collector's Edition, which comes in a buckskin-covered box complete with evenly-cut fringe, are a circular iron-on patch, replicas of a $24 three-day ticket and handwritten notes, a Lucite display with images from the festival, a Woodstock fact sheet and a 60-page Life Magazine commemorative reprint of the event itself.

There is also a new retrospective, The Museum at Bethel Woods: The Story of the Sixties & Woodstock, which is basically a promotional video for the museum with its constant reminders that the concert actually took place at Bethel, New York, not Woodstock. There is also an additional three hours in bonus content including performances recorded for, but not included in either the film or the extended director’s cut of the 1970 Oscar-winning documentary, which had also been nominated for Editing and Sound.

If they gave Oscars for savvy marketing, Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino would win hands down. Sold as a Dirty Harry style revenge flick, the film is anything but. It’s a meditation on tolerance and understanding, the value of hard work and the peace that comes with forgiveness. Would something that sells itself as that kind of movie bring in the audiences that might learn something from it? Of course not, which is why the marketing was so brilliant, appealing as it did to the head-bangers and hate mongers whose moral it was aimed at like a fully loaded shotgun.

Eastwood gives the performance of his career as a retired autoworker with lots of pent up rage. Recently widowed, he’s a bitter old man who can’t relate to his family, his priest or his changing neighborhood. The Hmong family next door brings back painful memories of his Korean War service. When he chases gang members who are trying to indoctrinate the kid next door off his property, the act is met with great gratitude by the family and serves to forge the beginning of a new relationship between the old man and the young son and daughter of the family.

The best scenes, the film’s marketing to the contrary, are not the ones filled with violence but the dialogue scenes between the old man and his neighbors and old man and the young priest who refuses to be bullied into leaving him alone.

Newcomers Bee Vang and Ahney Her are appropriately low key as the Hmong kids as is Christopher Carley as the priest.

Gran Torino is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. Both are loaded with extras.

An actor’s actor who is as well known for his comedic roles as his dramatic ones, Jack Lemmon left a large body of work which has generally been well represented on video, save for some of the comedies he made for Columbia in the eleven year period from 1954 to 1964 while doing his best work elsewhere (Warner Bros.’ Mister Roberts and Days of Wine and Roses, United Artists’ Some Likt It Hot and The Apartment). Sony has remedied that with the release of The Jack Lemmon Film Collection.

They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and the fact that these films have been out of circulation for so long probably makes people remember them as being better than they were.

Mildly amusing, rather than laugh-out-loud funny, Mark Robson’s 1954 film Phffft! - “don’t say it, see it” proclaimed the newspaper adds - reunited Lemmon with his It Should Happen to You co-star Judy Holliday. A fifties variation on The Awful Truth, one of the great screwball comedies of the thirties, it had its work cut out for it trying to live up to that comparison. Only Kim Novak, surprisingly adept at light comedy, rises to the occasion as the ditzy broad Lemmon has a fling with between his break-up and eventual reconciliation with Holliday.

Typical of the service comedies of the fifties, Richard Quine’s 1957 film Operation Mad Ball at least moves at a fast pace with Lemmon, Ernie Kovacs, Arthur O’Connell and Mickey Rooney more or less playing characters they’ve played a thousand times. Dick York, James Darren and Roger Smith brought some fresh blood to the project and the leading lady was perky Kathryn Grant before she became Kathryn Crosby.

Easily the best of the lot, Quine’s 1962 film The Notorious Landlady, co-written by Blake Edwards and Larry Gelbart, is a pleasant comedy-mystery in which U.S. diplomat Lemmon helps landlady Novak solve her husband’s murder. Fred Astaire as Lemmon’s boss, Lionel Jeffries an inept Scotland Yard inspector and the wonderful Estelle Winwood as an old lady in a wheelchair add to the fun. Lemmon racing down hill to save Winwood’s runaway wheelchair from going over a cliff is the film’s comic highlight.

Betraying its stage origins, David Swift’s 1963 film Under the Yum Yum Tree is largely a one-note film revolving around an apartment complex run by a libidinous landlord, played by Lemmon at his leering worst. Carol Lynley, Dean Jones, Edie Adams and Imogene Coca are among those suffering through his sneer.

To be fair to Lemmon, he detested making both Under the Yum Yum Tree and its 1964 follow-up Good Neighbor Sam, also directed by Swift, both of which he made under duress to complete his Columbia contract.

To be fair to Swift and Columbia, as well as Lemmon, Good Neighbor Sam is not a bad film. It’s the old “let me borrow your husband to claim an estate” plot with Romy Shneider as the neighbor pretending to be married to Lemmon, while wife Dorothy Provine sits on the sidelines until Mike Connors comes along. Edward G. Robinson co-stars.

Old and new TV series released on DVD continue this week with the release of Perry Mason - Season 4, Vol. 1. Other recent releases include the 9th season of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, the fourth season of Weeds, and the first season of True Blood, the latter two on Blu-ray as well as standard DVD. Whatever your taste in TV series, there’s something for everyone in this batch. Enjoy!

-Peter J. Patrick (June 9, 2009)

The DVD Report #106: June 2, 2009

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet reunite eleven years after Titanic. No crowd pleaser this time out, Revolutionary Road is a bleak melodrama about discontented suburbanites in the 1950s.

Richard Yates’ novel met with critical acclaim when it was published in 1961, but was not a commercial success. Indeed, none of the writer’s seven published novels and three collections of short stories were. Raised by a ne’er-do-well sculptress mother, he was a psychotic alcoholic who died in 1992 at the age of 66 after two failed marriages, three children and twenty five years of suffering from emphysema. I mention this because it is crucial to understanding the place this unique work comes from.

On the surface the Wheelers appear to be your typical suburban couple with a couple of nice kids. The husband Frank, played by DiCaprio, has settled into a job he hates while wife April, played by Winslet, yearns for a life she never had. The two are bored out of their skulls. One day, the usually depressed April euphorically suggests that they sell their house and car and move to Paris. After some trepidation, Frank agrees. The remainder of the film revolves around others’ reaction to this decision and the two main obstacles that that stand in its way.

Yates wrote this, his first novel, in the wake of the break-up of his first marriage. His sympathies clearly lie with the husband, while the wife is portrayed as cold and bitter, near schizophrenic in her actions. On screen, though, the wife grabs more of your sympathy thanks to the sheer force of Winslet’s performance. DiCaprio, on the other hand, never seems to me to be at his best. His character is often petulant and child-like and it’s never clear whether it’s the character or the actor that is coming through.

The supporting performances are difficult to gauge. The characters are mostly caricatures, though the unsung David Harbour as the neighbor who has a thing for April and Richard Easton as the realtor’s husband who turns his hearing aid off when his wife goes into one of her tirades, seem more real than Kathryn Hahn as Harbour’s silly wife or Kathy Bates as the jabbering realtor.

Michael Shannon, who won an Oscar nod as the realtor’s son just released from a mental institution, seems to be a stand-in for Yates, the outside observer who sums everyone up with a barrage of words no one in their right mind would get away with.

The office workers pale in comparison to the similar characters in TV’s superb Mad Men series.

Revolutionary Road is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD. Extras include commentary by director Sam Mendes and screenwriter Justin Haythe and a documentary on Yates.

Poor Ed Zwick, the long time director gets almost no respect in critical circles. His only Oscar was for producing Shakespeare in Love and his only other nomination was for producing Traffic. The films which he himself directed, including Glory, Legends of the Fall, Courage Under Fire, The Last Samurai and Blood Diamond won lots of awards recognition for their stars and technicians, but none for Zwick. The same is true for his latest, Defiance, about a group of Jewish partisans who fought the Nazis and survived World War II.

The film’s only Oscar nomination was for James Newton Howard’s score, yet the film is easily Zwick’s best since the similarly themed Glory.

Whereas Glory dealt with the unheralded story of the volunteer black brigade which fought in the Civil War, Defiancedeals with the wartime participation of another group generally viewed as victims of their time. Three of the four Jewish Bielski brothers, played by Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell take matters into their own hands when their parents are massacred by the Nazis on their farm in Belarus. The fourth, played by George MacKay, is too young to fight.

During the course of the war they will not only hide in the nearby forest, but rescue thousands of others. At war’s end, 1,20 people will walk out of the forest.

Craig as the charismatic oldest brother and natural leader is the only one billed over the title, but this is a true ensemble piece in which many of the players stand out, chief among them Schreiber as the hot-headed and hot-blooded second brother, Bell as the sensitive third brother, Alexa Davalos as Craig’s “forest wife” who becomes his long time real wife, Allan Corduner and Mark Feuerstein as the camp’s intellectuals and Jodhi May as a pregnant rape victim.

Defianceis available on Blu-ray and standard DVD. Extras include commentary by Zwick, a making-of documentary, interviews with the children and grandchildren of the Bielski brothers and recent photographs taken of survivors of the forest camp.

There have been so many new-to-Blu-ray discs released in the past few months it’s impossible to keep up with them all. One worth mentioning is Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, whose popularity has endured for more than forty years. What is unusual about this release is that it not only includes the superior Blu-ray transfer but the 40th Anniversary standard DVD of two years ago, as well. Alas, the Original Soundtrack and Simon and Garfunkel in Central Park CD’s that accompanied the release of the standard DVD are not included.

On the classic front, Warner Bros. continues to go all out with its Archive Collection. As we wait to see what they have in store for us in June, we have learned that they have pulled the Lex Barker Tarzan films from showing on TCM any time soon. Apparently they want the Warner store to be the only place we can find the films in the Archive for now.

Concurrently, however, Warner Bros. has released ten titles (so far) that would seem like natural fits for the Archive program to Amazon for sale as exclusives. Included in this group are such interesting titles as:

1940’s Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, directed by William Dieterle, with Edward G. Robinson in his own personal favorite screen role as the tenacious 19th Century bacteriologist who discovered a cure for syphilis. This was the third great biographical drama Dieterle directed for Warner Bros. following The Story of Louis Pasteur and The Life of Emile Zola and another example in a long line of fine films for which Robinson might have been nominated for an Oscar, but incredibly never was.

1941’s The Strawberry Blonde, directed by Raoul Walsh, with James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland and Rita Hayworth at their charming best in this turn-of-the-century comedy-drama in which dentist Cagney muses over his life, wondering if he married the right girl. De Havilland provides just the right touch as his wife and Hayworth is unforgettable as the sex bomb who becomes a shrew. Highlights include the rendering of many early 20th Century hit tunes and ends with a sing-along to “And the Band Played On”.

1946’s The Verdict, Don Siegel’s directorial debut, a nifty, locked-room murder mystery set in fog-enshrouded Victorian London, in which long time co-stars Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre pull out all the stops as a disgraced Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard and his loquacious neighbor. Joan Lorring as a money grubbing chanteuse, George Couloris as Greenstreet’s replacement at the Yard and Rosalind Ivan as an impressionable housekeeper co-star, but it’s Greenstreet and Lorre you can’t take your eyes off of.

1947’s The Unsuspected, directed by Michael Curtiz, a dandy film noir murder mystery featuring Claude Rains in a role similar to the one played by Clifton Webb in Laura, with Joan Caulfield in the role patterned after Gene Tierney in that better known classic and a whopper of a supporting cast including Audrey Totter, Constance Bennett, Hurd Hatfield and Ted North all in top form as the “lesser” people in radio star Rains’ orbit. Woody Bredell’s cinematography and Franz Waxman’s score are standouts.

1949’s Look for the Silver Lining, directed by David Butler, the highlight of June Haver’s career in which she played Broadway star Marilyn Miller whose rise to fame was similar to Haver’s own. Unlike the fabled Miller who died at the early age of 37, Haver would soon turn her back on show business and join a convent only to emerge several months later to marry Fred MacMurray and live a long life as one of the richest and happiest women in Hollywood. Her story would make a more interesting biopic than Miller’s, but this one’s decent enough.

Also available as Amazon exclusives are 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, Bordertown, Crime School, The Male Animal and Colorado Territory.

-Peter J. Patrick (June 2, 2009)