The DVD Report #123: September 29, 2009

The quality of TV drama has never been better than it is right now, but the ways in which people watch their favorite series have changed dramatically over the years.

From the late 1940s through the 1970s, three major networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, dominated broadcast TV in the U.S. Although PBS and local channels existed, most people planned their TV viewing and much of their leisure lives around what those three networks were showing. Then in the late 1970s the VCR was introduced, taking hold in the early 1980s. People could record their favorite programs for viewing on their own time. In the ensuing years other avenues of recording shows for viewing at one’s leisure were introduced.

Today, with the proliferation of cable TV programming, on demand broadcasts by cable providers and the internet, TV viewing choices are seemingly endless. The big three networks’ hold on us no longer exists.

A growing number of TV viewers no longer bother to record their favorite shows. They don’t even bother to watch commercial-free showings of their favorite shows available on demand or the internet. They wait for box sets of their favorite shows to hit the video stores where they can catch an entire season of 22-24 episodes of 43 minutes each in a two-day marathon. How this will effect long-term programming is problematic. NBC is now filling its third hour of prime time Monday-Friday with a cheaply produced talk show. In the meantime, however, we can catch up with the newly released tenth season of one of NBC’s few enduring dramatic shows.

NBC’s venerable Law & Order is in its twentieth season. Old episodes continue to be shown in syndication on cable TV almost daily. DVD releases, however, have been stingy. Thus far, only the first six seasons and the fourteenth, the last with Jerry Orbach, have been released. Fans of the series’ now more popular spin-off, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, however, have been luckier. All ten seasons of that series are now available on DVD.

Unlike the original Law & Order, with its almost constant cast changes, the cast of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has remained relatively stable through the years, with only the Assistant District Attorney changing from time to time. The detectives who are the prime players in the Special Victims Unit, Chris Meloni, Mariska Hargitay, Ice T, Richard Belzer and their captain, Dann Florek, remain the key players. A newer detective, Adam Beach, who was brought in as a regular in season nine exited in that season’s finale. Tamara Tunie, the resident medical examiner since the second season, and B.D. Wong, the resident psychiatrist since the third, are also long time welcome faces.

Diane Neal, the Assistant District Attorney assigned to prosecute SVU’s cases since the third season, also exited at the end of season nine. Michaela McManus, who was brought in as the new ADA in season ten, was not very well liked by either the critics or the public and was fired halfway through the season. She is seen early in one episode but is then replaced by Stephanie March, the popular original ADA from the first two seasons, who explains that McManus was abruptly called to Washington, D.C. She is not seen again, although her name appears on the opening credits for the remainder of the season.

One thing the series has always provided is a strong showcase for guest stars. Whereas several of the leads of the original Law & Order have been nominated for Emmys over the years, only three actors, Julia Roberts, Jane Alexander and Tovah Feldhsuh, the last in 2003, have been nominated for their guest starring performances. None have ever won, although series lead Jerry Orbach did win a posthumous Emmy in 2004. Law & Order: SVU has been a far luckier venue for its guests.

Jane Alexander, Tracy Pollan, Martha Plimpton, Barbara Barrie, Marlee Matlin, Mare Winningham, Angela Lansbury, Marica Gay Harden and Robin Williams have all been nominated through season nine. Leslie Caron won in season eight and Cynthia Nixon in season nine. Series star Meloni was nominated in season seven, the year Hargitay became the first female star of a police procedural to win. It was her third nomination. She has continued to be nominated every year since.

This year, in addition to Hargitay’s by now perennial nod, three guest stars were also nominated and one of them won.

Brenda Blethyn was nominated for her portrayal of a kindly woman with a secret past. Carol Burnett was nominated for her portrayal of a black widow. Ellen Burstyn won for her portrayal of Meloni’s bi-polar mom, a wrenching performance that was the equal of any of her many film awards.

An interesting aside to season ten is that three of the actors who’ve played lawyers in past seasons, John Cullum, Lindsay Crouse and Swoosie Kurtz, have been promoted to judges. One of them, though, won’t be back on the bench any time soon as she was carted off in handcuffs at the end of a late season episode.

The feverish season finale ends with the death of one the series’ most beloved characters. I won’t tell you who, but it’s no one I’ve mentioned.

With the super modern techniques of crime solving employed in the Law & Order and C.S.I. franchises and their many imitators, it’s refreshing to find a hip, modern series that employs the little gray cells, as Hercule Poirot would say, in solving its murders.

Last year’s biggest breakout network show was CBS’ The Mentalist, the first season of which has just been released on DVD.

From the very first scene of this show we know we are in for a treat. The hero, Patrick Jane (Simon Baker), is a former phony psychic who is now employed as a consultant to the California Bureau of Investigation (C.B.I.). The pilot begins with a well-to-do middle-aged man (Steven Culp) holding a press conference about the murder of his teenage daughter. Baker walks into Culp’s kitchen, makes himself a sandwich while boiling water for tea. Culp’s wife walks in, Jane offers her a cup of tea and sits down to chat with her. He asks her if she thinks her husband is the murderer. She says she doesn’t know. He asks her if she asked her husband that question. She says no, asking what the point would be since he’d only deny it. He tells her most wives know when their husbands are lying. In walks Culp.

Baker asks Culp if he did it. The way he says “no” convinces the wife he did. She leaves the room in tears. As Culp is telling Baker to get the hell of his house, his wife comes back with a gun and shoots the bastard dead.

The characters and situations are as up-to-date as any of the competition, only the methods used to solve the crimes are old-fashioned, but old-fashioned in a good way. The writing is first-rate with lots of droll humor emanating from the banter between Baker and his associates led by his boss, Robin Tunney, who is Watson to his Holmes. There are dark undertones to Baker’s character, whose wife and daughter were murdered by a serial killer, but the darkness never overwhelms his innate goodness.

This is the fourth TV series for Baker who has been in films since the late 1980s and the one that seems to have finally made him a star. Previously nominated for a Golden Globe for the series The Guardian, The Mentalist earned him a well deserved Emmy nomination this year.

Classic film releases continue to be hard to find. Thankfully we now have the Warner Archive which continues to release fondly remembered gems. This month’s releases include Crossroads; Ice Palaceand Men Don’t Leave.

After the success of 1934’s The Thin Man, William Powell concentrated almost entirely on comedy roles. 1942’s Crossroads, directed by Jack Conway, gives him a rare dramatic role as a French diplomat who may or may not have been a thief and murderer in his earlier life.

Hedy Lamarr is his young wife; Claire Trever (in a role intended for Marlene Dietrich) is a nightclub singer who may or may not have once been his lover; Basil Rathone plays a conniving blackmailer and Margaret Wycherly appears as an old lady who may or may not be his mother. You may guess the ending but not how they get there. The acting, particularly by Powell and Rathbone, is first rate.

Edna Ferber’s novels, including Cimarron, Show Boat and Giant, had long been fodder for Hollywood. With Alaska’s entry into the union in 1959, Ferber’s Ice Palacecouldn’t have been more topical. Perhaps it was too topical. The 1960 film, directed by Vincent Sherman, was not a huge success but is affectionately remembered by those who have seen it as one of the better films derived from Ferber’s multi-generational soap operas.

Richard Burton and Robert Ryan are long time adversaries who share a granddaughter (Diane McBain) whose parents, Burton’s daughter (Shirley Knight) and Ryan’s son (Steve Harris), perished in the Alaskan wilderness when she was an infant. Carolyn Jones is the woman who secretly loves both men.

One of the most sought after films on DVD, 1990’s Men Don’t Leave, directed by Paul Brickman, is still popular enough to have gotten a major regular DVD release. It’s doubly surprising that it would be given such a low profile release considering that the film’s stars, Jessica Lange and Chris O’Donnell, are bigger names now than they were then, but let’s not quibble. It’s great to have this quirky film available on DVD at long last.

Lange plays a recent widow who moves with her teenage sons (O’Donnell and Charlie Korsmo) to Baltimore where sixteen-year-old O’Donnell has an affair with middle-aged Joan Cusack. If the concept sounds more Continental than American, that’s because it’s a remake of a French film. It’s deft and sensitively handled by Brickman whose only other film is the cult classic Risky Business.

-Peter J. Patrick (September 29, 2009)

The DVD Report #122: September 22, 2009

A cultural phenomenon in the 1980s, Fame, the Alan Parker directed film from 1980, and Fame, the subsequent TV series that ran from 1982 to 1987, have been given new DVD releases to coincide with the release of the new film version of Fame.

The original film was nominated for six Oscars and won two. It made stars of Debbie Allen as the dance teacher at the High School of the Performing Arts renamed School of the Arts for the film, and several of the actors playing students, notably Irene Cara, Barry Miller and Paul McCrane. Allen, along with actor-composer Albert Hague and newcomers Gene Anthony Ray and Lee Curreri, reprised their roles in the series.

The film was the latest in a genre that never grows old, the travails of high school students, combined with the “let’s put on a show” musical sub-genre that had been popular in spurts from the 1930s to the 1960s, but which had been out of favor for some time when the film renewed it.

DVDs of the original film and the first season of the TV series have been previously released. The current release version of the series combines Seasons 1 and 2.

Ms. Allen, who also served as the show’s choreographer, is once again the school’s dance teacher while Mr. Hague again plays the school’s music teacher with droll Old World charm. Carol Mayo Jenkins joins the cast as the school’s English teacher.

Erica Gimpell succeeds Cara as the school’s most gifted female dancer while Ray is once again the school’s most gifted male dancer. Curreri reprises his role as the school’s most gifted aspiring pianist-composer. New students include Lori Singer as a transplanted cellist from the Midwest and Valerie Landsburg as the resident comedienne, a role she won in audition over Madonna. Janet Jackson joined the cast in Season 3, which has not yet been released on DVD.

Allen who hosted a talent show of the same name in 2003 returns in the new film version as the school’s principal.

The current releases of Fame, particularly of the TV series featuring the previously unreleased Season 2, are welcome ones especially considering how the previous releases have fallen under the radar.

It’s business as usual, however, with two high profile reissues of the films of two major stars in that there is nothing new in either release.

It’s difficult to understand why anyone would opt to purchase the new John Wayne-John Ford Film Collection 2009 when the original John Wayne-John Ford Film Collection from 2006 is still available and selling for only two dollars more at Amazon and other sellers.

The original release featured eight films whereas as the new release features just six. The reason is that Warner Bros. no longer has the rights to either Stagecoach or The Long Voyage Home, the first two films Wayne made for Ford. It seems especially odd that Stagecoach is not included in such a collection. This is the film that took Wayne out of B westerns and made him a star. A 1939 Best Picture Oscar nominee, it is routinely named as one of the best films of Hollywood’s legendary best year.

Still included are They Were Expendable, Fort Apache, 3 Godfathers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers and The Wings of Eagles.

Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon were the first two films in Wayne and Ford’s legendary cavalry trilogy. The third film in the trilogy, the underrated Rio Grande is available from a different distributor.

3 Godfathers is the third film version of a classic western about three drifters who find a baby on Christmas morning. The Searchers, often cited as the greatest western ever made, is the only Wayne film directed by Ford that is as yet available on Blu-ray.

A tense World War II film about the American PT boats that defended the Philippine Islands, They Were Expendable had a screenplay by Frank Weed, the colorful writer played by Wayne in The Wings of Eagles. This film is generally considered sub-par Ford, mainly because of the interference of Wead’s family, which objected to Maureen O’Hara’s portrayal of his wife as an alcoholic. Her best scenes, reputedly the best scenes in the film, ended up on the cutting room floor.

Paul Newman: The Tribute Collectioin is comprised of the thirteen films controlled by Fox which Newman made between 1958 and 1982. All are currently available so the need to repackage them seems redundant, but any occasion that gives us the opportunity to talk about Newman can’t be all that bad.

The oldest film in the collection is 1958’s The Long, Hot Summer, directed by Martin Ritt, co-starring Newman’s wife Joanne Woodward, Lee Remick, Anthony Franciosa, Orson Welles and Angela Lansbury. Newman is an itinerant handyman falsely accused of being an arsonist. Newman and Woodward smolder in this enjoyable soap opera.

Newman and Woodward are together again on screen in 1958’s Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!, directed by Leo McCarey, in which Newman and Woodward are happily married suburbanitesuntil femme fatale Joan Collins comes between them. A pleasant time killer at best, the stars and the director have all done better work.

Together yet again, Newman and Woodward play a husband and wife who despise one another in 1960’s From the Terrace, directed by Mark Robson from John O’Hara’s novel. Ina Balin as Newman’s new love and Myrna Loy as his alcoholic mother steal the film out from under the stars.

Otto Preminger directed Newman and Eva Marie Saint in 1960’s Exodus, the film version of Leon Uris’ best seller about the founding of Israel. Sal Mineo steals this one as a young Auschwitz survivor.

Long considered Newman’s best early film, 1961’s The Hustler, directed by Robert Rossen, is the one in which he plays Fast Eddie Felson, the cocky young pool hustler who wants to take on the legendary Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason). Piper Laurie co-stars in a heart-wrenching performance as his crippled girlfriend.

Newman has a bit part as a punch-drunk boxer in 1962’s Adventures of a Young Man (aka Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man). Though excellent in it, his role is little more than a cameo in the film which starred Richard Beymer as the young man modeled after Hemingway and Arthur Kennedy and Jessica Tandy as his parents.

He again has little to do in 1964’s What a Way to Go! as one of Shirley MacLaine’s six husbands in this J. Lee Thompson-directed farce.

Newman is excellent as a young man raised by Indians in the 1967 western Hombre, directed by Martin Ritt. Fredric March, Richard Boone and Diane Cilento co-star.

Newman and Robert Redford co-starred for the first time in 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, directed by George Roy Hill. It’s one of two films in the collection that is also available on Blu-ray.

The other one is 1974’s The Towering Inferno, directed by John Guillermin and Irwin Allen, in which Newman heads an all-star cast that includes Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire and Jennifer Jones. See my report of July 14 for an extended review.

Newman essays the title role in 1976’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, directed by Robert Altman. Co-starring Joel Grey and Geraldine Chaplin, the film is surprisingly uninvolving.

The next Newman-Altman collaboration, 1979’s Quintet, co-starring Vittorio Gassman and Fernando Rey, is generally regarded as one of the worst films ever made. It’s about a game of survivor in the post-apocalyptic world following the next Ice Age.

The collection goes out on a high note, however, with 1982’s The Verdict, directed by Sidney Lumet, co-starring James Mason and Jack Warden. Newman plays a recovering alcoholic lawyer who takes on a high stakes case involving a suit against the Catholic Church.

-Peter J. Patrick (September 22, 2009)

The DVD Report #121: September 15, 2009

Noble, self-sacrificing schoolteachers have been a movie staple in films for decades. In the 1930s we had Goodbye, Mr. Chips; in the 1940s, Cheers for Miss Bishop; in the 1950s, Blackboard Jungle and Good Morning, Miss Dove! and in the 1960s, To Sir, With Love.

While two major films of the late 1960s, Rachel, Rachel and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, gave us imperfect teachers as protagonists, the saintly teachers were soon back in such films as Stand and Deliver; Dead Poets Society and Mr. Holland's Opus. Only recently, as with Half Nelson, have we seen an increase in films that take teachers off their pedestals and show them as often-flawed human beings. Such is the case with The Class, the 2008 Cannes Film Festival winner and Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film.

Teacher Francois Begaudeau often exacerbates problems in his French grammar class by engaging in arguments with his students that explode into near violence. Filmed over the course of a year at an actual high school, the cast is comprised mainly of non-actors in the roles of the students and teachers. Director Laurent Cantet co-wrote the screenplay with Begaudeau based on Begaudeau’s book about his experiences as a teacher.

Although the situations in the thought-provoking film relate to a specific classroom, the problems are universal in scope and apply to workplaces, as well as classrooms, everywhere.

The Class is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. Both contain the original French version with English subtitles and a poorly dubbed English version.

Rene Clement was one of the great French directors of the post-World War II era. Two of his most acclaimed works, 1952’s Forbidden Games and 1960’s Purple Noon, have long been available on DVD. 1956’s Gervaise, which won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Film of 1957, has finally been released by Criterion as part of their Essential Art House Collection.

The fifth film version of Emile Zola’s L’Assomoir, it has long been considered the closest to capturing the essence of Zola’s writing as any film taken from his works.

Maria Schell, named Best Actress at the 1956 Venice Film Festival, provides a performance of enormous warmth and depth as the independent young woman who realizes her dream of owning her own laundry shop at a terrible cost to herself and her loved ones. Schell, who had been in films since childhood and a major star in Europe since the 1940s, became an international star with this one leading to starring roles in such Hollywood classics as The Brothers Karamazov; The Hanging Tree and Cimarron.

Schell’s character’s daughter would grow up to be the title prostitute in Zola’s most celebrated novel, Nana. Clement gives an indication of what will become of her with the film’s famed closing shot in which the young child entices the neighborhood boys by skipping down the street with a ribbon in her hair.

Maria’s brother, Oscar winning actor Maximilian Schell, made a highly controversial documentary about Schell’s life shortly before her death from dementia in 2005 called My Sister Maria, which is also available on DVD.

Another newly-released film as part of Criterion’s Essential Art House Collection is Marcel Carne’s Le Jour Se Leve from 1939. Banned by the Vichy government for being too pessimistic, then almost destroyed by RKO when they remade it eight years later, this famous film was released in the U.S. in 1940 as Daybreak. It opens with a man who has been shot tumbling down the stairs dead. The focus then shifts to Jean Gabin as the man who has shot him. We see in flashbacks what has led to the killing.

The remake, long available on DVD, is called The Long Night and stars Henry Fonda, Barbara Bel Geddes and Vincent Price under Anatole Litvak’s direction. An interesting film in its own right, it lacks the poetry of Carne’s version.

Yet another overdue release from Criterion’s Essential Art House Collection is Litvak’s 1936 film Mayerling about the tragic romance of the heir to the Austrian throne and his young mistress, played by Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux eighteen years before their equally-famous starring roles in The Earrings of Madame de... It’s a sumptuous treat from beginning to end and much more memorable than the nicely photographed, but dully executed 1968 remake with Omar Sharif and Catherine Deneuve.

The last time Noel Coward’s play Easy Virtue was filmed was in 1928 when it was directed by Alfred Hitchcock as a heavy drama. This time around, Stephan Elliott, the director of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,has put the emphasis in his Easy Virtue clearly on comedy.

Jessica Biel, singing, dancing and tossing off bon mots with the best of them makes an engaging heroine, ably supported by Ben Barnes as her young husband, Kristin Scott Thomas as her snooty mother-in-law and Colin Firth as her full-of-surprise father-in-law. Barnes (the title character in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian) and Firth, who became fast friends on the set, are currently co-starring in the latest big screen version of Dorian Gray.

The Elliot version of Easy Virtue is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. The Hitchcock version is available on standard DVD only.

The last of John Ford’s classic westerns to make it to DVD, 1950’s Wagon Master was one of his personal favorites. A tribute to the pioneer spirit, the film was made without major stars but with Ford’s stock company of character actors including Ben Johnson, Ward Bond, Harry Carey Jr., Russell Simpson, Jane Darwell and Hank Worden. Carey, who is still going strong at 88, provides commentary along with director-historian Peter Bogdanovich. Excerpts from Bogdanovich’s 1966 audio interview with Ford are also included.

Veteran TV director Joseph Sargent’s 2002 miniseries Salem Witch Trials has also been released. Though not as well remembered as either 1937’s Maid of Salem or 1995’s The Crucible which cover the same ground, it is a frightening, sobering account of a dark page in the history of what would become America.

It’s 1691, 71 years after the Puritans came to Massachusetts and a group of young girls begin acting strangely, soon blaming their afflictions on “witches”. Conveniently those accused are the political enemies of the town leader and the new minister. Before the tyranny is put to a stop, twenty innocent victims will be killed - seventeen women and three men.

Kirstie Alley, Henry Czerny and Jay O. Sanders have the principal roles, but veteran players Rebecca De Mornay, Shirley MacLaine, Peter Ustinov and Alan Bates steal the show.

Salem Witch Trials is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

MacLaine also stars in another TV venture now available on DVD, 2001’s These Old Broads in which MacLaine, Debbie Reynolds and Joan Collins play reunited co-stars who can’t stand one another. Elizabeth Taylor plays their agent. Reynolds’ daughter, Carrie Fisher, wrote most of the dialogue.

There are some bright lines but most of it is pure hokum. Once you get past the shock of seeing Reynolds and Taylor together almost half a century after Liz stole Eddie (Fisher) from Debbie, there isn’t much left. Of course, it helps to remember that Taylor also stole Cleopatra from Collins, Reynolds stole The Unsinkable Molly Brown from MacLaine and MacLaine played a caricature of Reynolds in Postcards From the Edge, so seeing any combination of these players together is worthy of a raised eyebrow or two, but that’s about it.

The latest of Disney’s “classics” to be re-issued are Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Pete's Dragon. I highlighted “classics” because although the former may be one, the latter clearly is not.

Released in 1971, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, with a clever score by the Sherman Brothers (Mary Poppins; The Happiest Millionaire), is directed by Mary Poppins’ Robert Stevenson, and, like Mary Poppins, is a delightful mixture of live-action and animation.

Angela Lansbury is marvelous in a rare on-screen leading role as an apprentice witch and Mary Poppins’ David Tomlinsonis a great deal of fun as the Professor of Magic she corresponds with. The colorful supporting cast includes such reliable character actors as Roddy McDowall, Sam Jaffe, John Ericson, Tessie O’Shea, Reginald Owen, Cyril Delevanti and Hank Worden.

It’s hard to believe that only four years later the Disney Studios would have deteriorated to such an extent as to put out something as bad as Pete's Dragon. The film opens with credits over an ugly matte painting of what is supposed to be a depressed New England town. The narrative begins with the protagonist, a marginally talented child actor by the name of Sean Marshall, going through the woods with a big green dragon that only he can see while being pursued by his evil adopted hillbilly family. The family, led by a ghastly made up Shelley Winters, sings an awful song and is thrown one by one into the mud by a whip of the dragon’s tail. The boy then goes to another town where the invisible dragon destroys property and is seen by old drunk Mickey Rooney. Helen Reddy then enters the film as Rooney’s daughter. Though she possesses a nice voice and is quite charming, she is no Julie Andrews.

The farthest I’ve ever gotten into the film is the point where Jim Dale and Red Buttons show up looking like another couple of crazies. If it gets better after that, I don’t know, nor do I care.

-Peter J. Patrick (September 15, 2009)

The DVD Report #120: September 8, 2009

Criterion has made a lot of classic film lovers happy with the release of That Hamilton Woman, Alexander Korda’s sumptuous 1941 film about the scandalous adulterous love affair of Britain’s Napoleonic War hero, Lord Horatio Nelson and Emma, Lady Hamilton. A favorite of many, Winston Churchill claimed to have seen the film more than eighty times.

Vivien Leigh coming off the highs of Gone With the Wind and Waterloo Bridge and Laurence Olivier coming off the highs of Wuthering Heights and Rebecca play out the tragic love story that is in many ways like their own real life story.

Featuring meticulously crafted battle sequences and exquisitely staged confrontation scenes, the two stars are at their best. It’s certainly the best film they ever made together.

Heading the supporting cast are such stalwarts as Gladys Cooper, Sara Allgood, Alan Mowbray and Henry Wilcoxin. Cooper, who had played Olivier’s sister in Rebecca the year before, plays his wife here, the last time she would play a middle-aged character before beginning a 25 year career as the mother, grandmother and great-grandmother of every major star in Hollywood.

Allgood essays the role of Leigh’s chatty mother the same year she won an Oscar nomination for playing a very different mother, the beloved matriarch of the coal mining family in How Green Was My Valley. Mowbray, usually in supercilious roles, plays Leigh’s husband, a British ambassador. Wilcoxin, best known for his roles in practically every Cecil B. DeMille movie, plays Olivier’s loyal second in command.

Extras include commentary from noted film historian, Ian Christie, a reproduction of a 1941 radio promotional program and a booklet essay by film critic Molly Haskell.

That Hamilton Woman is available on standard DVD only.

Criterion has also just released a more contemporary American film, Wilt Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco.  The 1998 comedy-drama was the third in Stillman’s trilogy about contemporary upper-class WASPs, following 1990’s Metropolitan and 1994’s Barcelona.

Set in the early 1980s, the central characters in the film are recent college grads Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny who spend most of their evenings at a Studio 54-like disco club frequented by a gallery of interesting characters played by Chris Eigeman, Mackenzie Astin, Matt Keeslar, Robert Sean Leonard, Jennifer Beals and Michael Weatherly among others. The film’s dazzling ending on a train predates the climax of Slumdog Millionaire by 11 years.

Extras include commentary by Stillman and stars Sevigny and Eigeman and four deleted scenes, with commentary also provided by Sitllman, Sevigny and Eigeman.

The Last Days of Disco is available on standard DVD only.

Columbia has issued another batch of welcome titles in their inexpensive Martini Movies line, this time concentrating on four generally forgotten films from the early 1970s.. Included are three from 1971, The Pusuit of Happiness; Summertree and The Buttercup Chain and one from 1973, Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing.

Filmed amidst great fanfare in 1969, Robert Mulligan’s The Pusuit of Happiness was supposed to have been a major 1970 release starring Michael Sarrazin straight from They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Barbara Hershey straight form Last Summer and Ruth Gordon straight from her Oscar win in Rosemary's Baby. The supporting cast included an eclectic mix of veteran and up-and-coming performers such as E.G. Marshall, Arthur Hill, Sada Thompson, Barnard Hughes, Robert Klein, David Doyle, Charles Durning, Rue McClanahan and William Devane.

Sarrazin plays a bright but aimless college student, wary of the draft, who accidentally kills a pedestrian with his car on a rain swept night in Manhattan. A reactionary judge throws the book at him and he goes to jail where his natural integrity gets him into even more trouble. Hershey plays his live-in lover, an arrangement that does not sit well with his upper crust family.

Ruth Gordon should have had a field day with the role of Sarrazin’s grandmother, the bigoted family matriarch, but Mulligan wasn’t happy with her performance and after the film’s completion decided to re-shoot her scenes with Ruth White with whom he had worked on To Kill a Mockingbird. Ironically White would have played Sarrazin’s grandmother a year earlier in Midnight Cowboy had Sarrazin not turned down the role of Joe Buck. Sadly, White, who is terrific in the role, died of cancer shortly after completing her scenes in December, 1969.

The studio decided to hold the film back until the notoriety of Gordon’s firing and White’s death died down. By the time it was released in February, 1971, it was already forgotten, which is a shame because it’s every bit as good as Mulligan’s next film, the smash hit, Summer of '42.

Kirk Douglas’ production company produced Summertree, directed by Anthony Newley, as a star vehicle for Michael Douglas and his then girlfriend Brenda Vaccaro. The film has many similarities to The Pusuit of Happiness, a charismatic star turn by a gifted a young actor, whose character has a romance with a woman not approved of by his family, concerns about the draft and a planned escape to Canada to avoid it. Like The Pusuit of Happiness, it was also a failure at the box office which in no way diminishes its quality.

Jack Warden is very effective as Douglas’ uptight father and Barbara Bel Geddes, who has less to do, nevertheless makes a welcome appearance as his mother. A young Rob Reiner is featured as one of Douglas’ college buddies.

A less effective film, Robert Ellis Miller’s The Buttercup Chain is one of those films about aimless youth falling in and out of love to gorgeous backdrops, in this case England, Italy, Spain and Sweden. The cast is as attractive as the scenery with Hywell Bennett and Jane Asher playing British cousins raised as brother and sister who have the hots for one another and American Leigh Taylor-Young and Swedish Sven-Bertil Taube as their respective interim lovers.

Filmed on location in Spain, Alan J. Pakula’s Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing stars Timothy Bottoms as a shy, awkward young American and Maggie Smith as an equally shy, awkward middle-aged British spinster. The two meet and fall in love while spending their summer in Spain. The film’s climax, filmed in La Mancha, is visually impressive as are the performances of the two stars, but there’s not much more to the film than that. Still with Bottoms, fresh from his star making turn in The Last Picture Show, and Smith fresh from her Oscar nominated turn in Travels With My Aunt on the heels of her Oscar win for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie the star combination should have insured an audience. Alas, few came to see it.

The Martini Movies releases are available on standard DVD only.

Warner Archive continues their breakneck pace of releasing pre-1980s films. Now available are several film noir and crime thriller films ranging from the mid-1940s to 1960.

The oldest in the group is the little known Suspense from 1946, which was directed by Frank Tuttle, the director of This Gun for Hire and The Glass Key, not the makeup artist. The film stars Belita, the ice-skating champion of the 1936 Winter Olympics, supported by Barry Sullivan, Albert Dekker, Bonita Granville and Eugene Pallette in his last film. The bizarre tale of murder on ice was Monogram’s most expensive film to date financed by the unexpected box office success of the prior year’s Dillinger.

Both 1948’s Berlin Express and 1951’s The Tall Target are so good they rival the excitement of the two legendary thrillers set aboard trains by which all such films are measured, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes and Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich.

Robert Ryan, Merle Oberon and Paul Lukas star in Berlin Express directed by Jacques Tourneur on the heels of Out of the Past. Filmed on location in Frankfurt and Berlin, this was the first film
to be made inside occupied post-World War II Germany and vividly captures the ruin of a bombed out and devastated nation that just a few years earlier threatened to rule the world.

The plot is about an anti-fascist German statesman attempting to escape the country amidst threats from unrepentant diehard Nazis. Who can be trusted?

An undercover Brinks detective named John Kennedy is the only one who stands between Abraham Lincoln and his intended assassin in Anthony Mann’s The Tall Target in which both the newly elected President and his would-be killer may or may not be passengers on the Baltimore bound train to his inaugural, on which Kennedy is travelling.

Dick Powell provides one of his best tough-as-nails performances as Kennedy in this film based on an actual event. Paula Raymond, Adolphe Menjou, Marshall Thompson and a young Ruby Dee co-star.

Ruth Roman was never a major star so it’s curious why Warner Bros. is promoting her as the sole star of King Vidor’s 1951 thriller, Lightning Strikes Twice in which co-stars Richard Todd, Mercedes McCambridge and Zachary Scott were better known then and remain so even now.

Roman is the second Travelyen who comes to question whether or not her husband (Todd) was really guilty of the murder of his first wife for which he was exonerated by a hung jury. Though it’s not quite in the same league as Rebecca, it holds its own against other films that have employed this tried and true formula. All four stars are at the top of their game while Frank Conroy, Kathryn Givney, Rhys Williams and Daryl Hickman turn in memorable performances as well.

A Grade B thriller that was a Grade A hit, 1960’s Pay or Die gave Ernest Borgnine his best post-Marty role as the real life cop who battled the Black Hand, the precursor of the Mafia, in New York’s Little Italy of 1906-1909. Directed by Richard Wilson (It's All True), the film features a standout performance by Zohra Lampert in her first major role.

On the TV front, Rescue Me: Season 5, Vol. 1 is now available. The always interesting series about firefighters in New York City post-9/11 began as a comedy-drama but by the end of its fourth season had veered almost completely into dark dramatic territory with its constant fury and violence.

The fifth season injects more humor into the proceedings as star Denis Leary continues to struggle with his alcoholism while co-stars John Scurti, Daniel Sunjata, Steven Pasquale, Michael Lombard and Larenz Tate help put out the fires both literally and figuratively. Adam Ferrara comes into his own as the new chief and Michael J, Fox as Leary’s ex-wife’s new boyfriend adds dramatic, as well as comic heft to the show.

Rescue Me: Season 5, Vol. 1 is available on standard DVD only.

-Peter J. Patrick (September 8, 2009)

The DVD Report #119: September 1, 2009

Tony Gilroy has been a busy man this year. He not only wrote and directed Duplicity (reviewed here last week) but co-wrote this week’s top DVD release, State of Play, as well. Kevin Macdonald’s film version of the 2003 British TV miniseries of the same name crosses the Atlantic, moving the location of the original story from London to Washington, D.C.

The film is good, and makes good use of its locations, but suffers in comparison to the miniseries, which had nearly six hours to develop its characters and tell its story. The film begins the same, two people are gunned down on the streets and a legislative aide falls to her death in front of a train on her way to work. A veteran newsman and a young reporter team up to connect the dots and expose the plot behind the seemingly unconnected killings. That’s the crux of it, with the film version ending a bit more optimistically as it ties up the loose ends left hanging by the miniseries.

The acting is a mixed bag. Ben Affleck as an influential congressman and Jeff Daniels as his boss, the majority whip, are first rate. Jason Bateman is also quite good as a duplicitous creep, and several supporting performances stand out - Josh Mostel chief among them, but the rest of the primary cast has done much better work elsewhere. Robin Wright Penn as Affleck’s wife merely looks miserable throughout and the actors representing the fourth estate don’t look like they work for the same organization, let alone belong in the same movie.

Russell Crowe’s long, unkempt hair and slovenly appearance, which he has maintained through several films of the last few years, are a distraction. Rachel McAdams’ deer-caught-in-the-headlights character looks like she should be playing Crowe’s daughter, not his colleague. Worst of all, the usually sublime Helen Mirren, playing the tough-as-nails editor, threatens credulity with her elegant appearance and potty mouth, an incongruous combination.

It’s certainly worth spending a couple of hours with, but if you want to see a really absorbing crime thriller, I recommend the miniseries, which I previously reviewed here last May, instead.

State of Play, the movie, is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD. State of Play, the miniseries, is available on standard DVD only.

A really pleasant surprise, Greg Mottola’s coming-of-age comedy-drama Adventureland features nice performances by Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart as teenagers who meet while working the midway in an amusement park during the summer of 1987. The soundtrack features David Bowie, The Cure, INXS and Lou Reed, artists who were popular a few years earlier, but who’s counting?

A wistful, gentler version of Carny (reviewed here last week), the film features Ryan Reynolds in the role of Eisenberg’s mentor and Stewart’s seducer. Eisenberg, who was unforgettable in Roger Doger and The Squid and the Whale seems to be cornering the market on brainy teenagers these days, while Stewart who was equally memorable in Into the Wild and Twilight seems to be cornering the market on intelligent young girl roles.

Adventureland is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

A nice surprise from the Warner Archives is Robert Ellis Miller’s 1966 film of Muriel Resnick’s Any Wednesday. Eschewing the usual smarminess of mid-1960s sex comedies, this one features charming performances by Jane Fonda as a “nice girl” who nevertheless becomes the mistress of a petulant executive played by Jason Robards and almost ends up married to him with the approval of his first wife, played by Rosemary Murphy reprising her Tony-nominated Broadway role. Dean Jones is the hick from the sticks you know is going to end up with Janie in the end.

The film has some nice New York locations, including shots of the city during a blackout. The only downside is that although the film stars Jane Fonda, you keep thinking you’re watching Sandy Dennis. That’s because Fonda is constantly being directed to channel Dennis who created the role on Broadway. Her quirky mannerisms and facial expressions, her propensity to burst into tears at the slightest provocation, are all there. If you can get past that, you’ll enjoy it.

Less captivating is another Warner Archive release from the mid-sixties. Made just two years later, Jerry Paris’ film How Sweet It Is!, from a novel by the same Muriel Resnick,is the kind of film Any Wednesday worked so hard not to be. It’s a smarmy, only intermittently funny conceit centered on a middle-aged American couple who take a company-paid trip to the French Riviera and end up with their teenage son in a French bordello, or is it an Italian bordello? By the time they get there, you won’t care, you’ll just want to leave.

The screenplay, co-written by Garry Marshall at his worst, doesn’t know when to stop playing the same gag over and over again, like the opening of Debbie Reynolds’ overcoat to reveal the skimpy bikini underneath, which supposedly turns on all Frenchmen. James Garner plays her husband and Maurice Ronet her would-be French lover. Marcel Dalio is amusing as a perplexed butler, but Paul Lynde and Terry-Thomas who receive co-star billing have little to do.

On the TV front, the spate of releases of last season’s shows continues in anticipation of the new one.

A cult hit that people seem to either love or hate, Supernatural: The Complete Fourth Season has been released. If you’re unfamiliar with this one, it’s about a pair of brothers played by Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles who carry on the family business of “hunting” ghosts and other supernatural phenomena. Personally I came to this show late, having recently devoured the first three seasons and am now happily into the fourth.

People seem to love or hate this show. Apparently if you like Lost, 24 or Heroes you’re not supposed to like Supernatural . Maybe that’s why I like it. I gave up on Lost midway into the first season - too convoluted for me. I didn’t watch 24 until the fifth season but found the sixth a letdown and never went back to the first four. I was intrigued by the first season of Heroes but found the second ridiculous and haven’t watched since. Supernatural is easy to follow and stays true to its characters. It’s often violent but a little less on the gore scale than True Blood and doesn’t play tricks on its audience like Ghost Whisperer.

In the fourth season opener, an angel pulls older brother Dean Winchester (Ackles) from the bowels of Hell. He returns to the living to find Sam (Padalecki) slipping further and further to the dark side. In the meantime the individual episodes are filled with humor, mystery and an occasional touch of romance. The two lead actors continue to work well together. Why both, especially Ackles, haven’t become bigger stars remains the biggest mystery of all.

Supernatural: The Complete Fourth Season is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Another show that people seem to love or hate is Brothers & Sisters, the third season of which has also been released. Since Sunday night is the only night I regularly watch TV, I’ve been hooked since the very first episode. I cheered Sally Field when she won the Emmy the first year and was happy to see her nominated again the second and third years. Sadly, Rachel Griffiths, who is equally fine, has not been nominated this year, though she was nominated the first two. None of the other actors have been nominated in any of the seasons, though some of them, particularly Ron Rifkin, Matthew Rhys and Dave Annable provide consistently strong work.

Brothers & Sisters: The Complete Third Season is available on standard DVD only.

-Peter J. Patrick (September 1, 2009)