The DVD Report #249
Remakes and sequels have been a part of moviemaking from the very beginning. Rarely do they come off better than their first screen versions. Two adaptations of previously filmed works that do are Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, easily two of the ten best films of 2011.
Previously done as an award-winning TV mini-series in 1979, John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a thinking man’s thriller, a suspense filled tale of the search for a spy at the highest levels of the British government. Alec Guinness so embodied Le Carré’s George Smiley that is difficult to think of any other actor in the part, but Gary Oldman is every bit as memorable in Tomas Alfredson’s new film.
The mini-series took more than six hours to spin its tale whereas the film does so in less than two hours running time. Extraneous characters and red herrings are swept aside to concentrate on the main story line. The result is a leaner, cleaner tale that still demands its audience pay close attention to detail.
The 1970s milieu is perfectly realized with stunning cinematography, crisp editing and a haunting score by the prolific Alberto Iglesias. It is perfectly played by Oldman and a marvelous supporting cast that includes Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, John Hurt and Kathy Burke.
Oscar Profile #78: Otto Preminger
Born December 5, 1905 in Wiznitz, Bukovina, Austria-Hungary, now Wyschnyzja, Ukraine, Otto Preminger was born into a wealthy Jewish family. His father was a prosecutor who became Attorney General of Austria-Hungary.
Although he originally intended to follow in his father’s footsteps, he fell in love with the theatre and made his first film as a director in Austria in 1931 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1936 to accept an offer from Fox studio chief Joseph Schenk.
A dispute with production chief Darly F. Zanuck led to Preminger’s acrimonious dismissal from Fox after which Preminger made a name for himself on the Broadway stage. Having received rave reviews for playing a Nazi in Margin of Error as well as directing it, Fox, in Zanuck’s absence during World War II, offered him the part of another Nazi in 1942’s The Pied Piper. He accepted and when filming was completed was asked to reprise his stage role in the film version of Margin of Error to be directed by the legendary Ernst Lubitsch. He accepted, but Lubitsch left the project before filming began and with the production in shambles, Preminger was asked to direct. His salvage of the film led to his being allowed to produce, but not direct, Laura. Zanuck, now back from the war, had forgiven him but was still wary of him. Rouben Mamoulian was to direct the film, but clashes between Mamoulian and Preminger were resolved when Zanuck sided with Preminger’s choice of Clifton Webb over Mamoulian’s choice of Laird Cregar to play the pivotal role of Waldo Lydecker. Mamoulian was fired and Preminger got to direct what would become the lynchpin of his legendary career.
It was during this period that Preminger had a well-known affair with Gypsy Rose Lee, resulting in the birth of a child, Erik, whom Lee gave the last name of Kirkland after the husband she divorced shortly before his birth. It wasn’t until 1966 when Erik was 22 and Otto was 60 that he learned who his real father was.
The DVD Report #248
Alexander Payne’s Oscar nominated The Descendants provides Best Actor nominee George Clooney with his most assured performance to date as the middle-aged Hawaiian lawyer and land baron who becomes the primary caregiver for his two daughters when their mother is injured in a boating accident.
The film is gorgeously photographed and scored, but despite its Oscar winning screenplay, all the characters, including Clooney’s, don’t seem to be any more than figments of the writers’ combined imaginations.
Clooney’s kids (Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller) are both foul-mouthed brats, which seems to come as a surprise to their oblivious father. The older daughter’s boyfriend (Nick Krause) is irrelevant to the story and appears to have been added to the narrative merely as a sounding board for Clooney’s character. Clooney’s father-in-law, played by the usually forthright Robert Forster, is a mean-spirited jerk no one but the boyfriend has the gumption to call out. Clooney’s cousins, including the once great Beau Bridges, are nothing but a bunch of money grubbing losers. Only Judy Greer as the wife of the man (Matthew Lillard) Clooney’s wife was having an affair with comes off as a believable character. Her last scene with Clooney is a real heartbreaker unlike most of the contrived manipulations of the rest of the film which seem as phony as the glycerin induced tear Clooney sheds in the scene anyone who has seen the film’s incessant TV spots knows all too well.
Oscar Profile #77: Delbert Mann
Born January 30, 1920 in Lawrence, Kansas, Delbert Mann was the son of educators. After service as a bomber pilot during World War II, he attended Yale Drama School. His friend Fred Coe, a producer at NBC,offered him the chance to direct live drama on TV beginning in 1949.
His television credits beginning in 1950 included such productions as Othello with Torin Thatcher; Middle of the Night with Eva Marie Saint and E.G. Marshall; The Day Lincoln Was Shot narrated by Charles Laughton with Raymond Massey as Abraham Lincoln, Lillian Gish as Mary Todd Lincoln and Jack Lemmon as John Wilkes Booth; The Petrified Forest with Henry Fonda, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart reprising Duke Mantee, the role that made him famous; Our Town with Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint and Frank Sinatra and Marty with Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand.
Burt Lancaster and his producing partner optioned Marty as a tax write-off on the big screen, not having any expectation that audiences would pay to see something they had seen on TV for free the year before. The 1955 film was a huge success, eventually scoring eight Academy Award nominations and for Oscars including Best Picture and Actor Ernest Borgnine as well as one for Mann for his first film.
Mann’s follow-up film, 1957’s The Bachelor Party was not a box office success but did secure a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Carolyn Jones. His next film, 1958’s Desire Under the Elms was nominated for Best Black and White Cinematography and that year’s Separate Tables received seven nominations including Best Picture and two wins for Best Actor David Niven and Best Supporting Actress Wendy Hiller.
The DVD Report #247
Its title taken from the first of George R.R. Martin’s thus far five A Song of Ice and Fire novels, HBO’s Game of Thrones proved to be both a critical and ratings hit. The ten hour-long episodes that comprise the series’ first season have been released on Blu-ray and standard DVD.
If you’re unfamiliar with either the literary work or TV series, suffice it to say that it is a fantasy series for grown-ups.
Set in the mythical land of Westeros, there are three main plot lines: control of the kingdom being fought over by seven families; defense of the northern wall from otherworldly creatures and the rise of a dragon princess on a neighboring continent.
Nominated for thirteen Emmys, it won two for Main Title Design and Best Supporting Actor – Drama, Peter Dinklage, who also won a Golden Globe for his wry performance. Others in the Season One cast include Sean Bean, Mark Addy, Nicolaj Coster-Waldau, Michelle Fairley, Lena Headey, Iain Glen, Aidan Gillen, Kit Harrington, Richard Madden, Harry Lloyd and Emilia Clarke. The ten hours move swiftly along.
Oscar Profile #76: Alec Guinness
Born April 2, 1914 in London, England, Alec Guinness worked in advertising before achieving success as an actor. While studying acting at actress Fay Compton’s school he had a part as extra in 1934’s Evensong but spent the remainder of the decade on stage.
A commissioned officer in the Royal Navy during World War II, his screen career did not begin in earnest until after the war when David Lean cast him as Herbert Pocket in his 1946 version of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. He then starred as Fagin for Lean in his controversial 1948 film of Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Charges of anti-Semitism in Guinness’ portrayal kept the film out of the U.S. until 1951 by which time Guinness had become an international star.
The film that brought him such acclaim was his third, Robert Hamer’s 1949 comedy, Kind Hearts and Coronets in which he played eight roles. He was equally memorable as the lonely farm equipment salesman given two weeks to live in Henry Cass’ bittersweet 1950 film, Last Holiday.
His first Hollywood film was Jean Negulesco’s filmed in England The Mudlark in which he played Disraeli to Irene Dunne’s Queen Victoria.
His comic genius was again tapped for such films as 1951’s The Lavender Hill Mob and The Man in the White Suit. He received his first Oscar nomination for the former.
He was Father Brown in 1954’s The Detective and the Cardinal in 1955’s The Prisoner. He returned to comedy in the same year’s The Ladykillers.
The DVD Report #246
Two days after winning five Oscars, Paramount released Martin Scorsese’s Hugo on home video in three iterations: DVD, Blu-ray and 3-D Blu-ray.
Scorsese’s film excels on two levels, first as a children’s adventure, then as a lesson in film history. The problem is that the two tend to exist on separate levels.
Asa Butterfield, the impressive child star of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and Nanny McPhee Returns stars as Hugo Cabret, the young orphan who lives in a train station in 1931 Paris where he keeps the clocks running after the death of his father (Jude Law). He has also inherited his father’s love of movies and gadgets. Unable to rescue his father from a burning building, he was able to carry out an automaton, a complex mechanical device invented by the Greeks in the Middle Ages but at their zenith of popularity from 1860 to 1910. This particular automaton is in the shape of a small man and resembles what we would now call an android. It is, however, in a state of disrepair and requires small mechanical parts to restore its functionality. Hugo discovers that a toy vendor in the train station uses parts for his toys that are identical to the parts he needs for the automaton and begins to steal them. The vendor (Ben Kingsley) discovers what he has been doing and gives him a job cleaning his shop to pay for his crime. He also confiscates Hugo’s book of drawings made by his late father. Hugo refuses to tell the old man what he needs the parts for. He does, however, let the old man’s grand-daughter (Chloe Grace Moretz) in on the secret. Eventually it is discovered that the old man is pioneer film-maker Georges Melies, who made over five hundred short films between 1896 and 1913, but who has become a recluse. The focus of the film then switches to Melies, who is restored to prominence.
Oscar Profile #75: Henry Travers
Born March 5, 1874 in Northumberland, England, Travers Haggerty who would take the stage name of stage name Henry Travers had a long career on the British stage before coming to America at the turn of the last century.
On Broadway form 1901 to 1938, his stage roles included those of Alfred Dolittle in the 1926 production of Pygmalion; Wang Lung’s father in 1932’s The Good Earth and Grandpa in 1936’s You Can’t Take It With You.
He was third billed behind Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in 1931’s Reunion in Vienna and made his screen debut in the John Barrymore-Diana Wynyard 1933 film version in which he was given the fourth lead which had been played on stage by Minor Watson. Frank Morgan was given Travers’ role.
Travers’ fourth and fifth films were the classics, The Invisible Man and Death Takes a Holiday.
The DVD Report #245
Chances are there will never be a film that will give us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about J. Edgar Hoover, the sole director of the FBI from its creation in March, 1935 until his death in May, 1972. Two theatrical films and several TV movies have tried and failed both artistically and commercially, as well as truthfully.
Clint Eastwood’s high profile 2011 film, J. Edgar, was preceded thirty-four years earlier by Larry Cohen’s less hyped The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover with the TV movies sandwiched in-between. When critics say the film failed because no one today knows who J. Edgar Hoover was, I don’t think that’s true. It may be true that no one today cares about J. Edgar Hoover.
Both films expose Hoover as someone who took credit for other people’s work in law enforcement and a tyrant who held six presidents at bay through the powers he held. An outright hostile relationship with Robert Kennedy, John Kennedy’s Attorney General and Hoover’s immediate boss, takes up much of the screen time in Cohen’s film but is all but glossed over in Eastwood’s. Hints of a sexual relationship between Hoover and his assistant, Clyde Tolson are hinted at in Cohen’s film but are a bit less subtle in Eastwood’s. Still, it’s all handled as speculation. His often irrational, rabid anti-communism is portrayed in both films as is his hated of Martin Luther King and his keeping of wiretapped telephone conversations between celebrities and his dying instructions to his secretary to destroy the tapes.
Oscar Profile #74: Joshua Logan
Born October 5, 1908 in Texarkana, Texas, Joshua Logan’s father committed suicide when the younger Logan was just three years old. He then moved with his mother and sister to his maternal grandparents’ home in Mansfield, Louisiana. After his mother’s remarriage he was sent to a military boarding school. He became interested in acting while at Princeton where he became a member of the University Players acting with and directing such fellow members as James Stewart and Henry Fonda.
He made his Broadway debut as an actor in 1932’s Carry Nation. He may his film debut as director of 1938’s I Met My Love Again but did not get another call from Hollywood until 1955.
Among his early successes as a Broadway director were On Borrowed Time; I Married an Angel; Knickerbocker Holiday and Irving Berlin’s This Is the Army. After service in World War II, he directed Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun, wrote and directed Mister Roberts and South Pacific and directed Picnic and Fanny among others before going to Hollywood.
He served un-credited as the interim director between John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy on the 1955 film version of Mister Roberts and then directed that same year’s Picnic for which he received his first Oscar nomination. Both Mister Roberts and Picnic were nominated for Best Picture, losing to Marty.
The DVD Report #244
Universal’s 100th Anniversary Collector’s Series continues with the February release of All Quiet on the Western Front, the anti-war masterpiece that is as riveting today as it was 82 years ago.
Called Laemmle’s folly during production because no one thought 22-year-old producer Carl Laemmle, Jr.’s pet project would make a dime, the film became his father’s studio’s first prestige film since the mid-1920s. Hailed by critics and audiences alike, the film was a box-office hit of major proportions and handily won the Oscar as Best Picture of 1929/30.
The film, based on Erich Maria Remarque’s brilliant novel, follows a group of German schoolboys who enlist in the Kaiser’s Army during World War I and quickly become disillusioned by the harsh realities of war. The film made a major star of Lew Ayres, who had his first starring role the year before in The Kiss opposite Greta Garbo.
As the young soldier whose friends are one by one either incapacitated or killed, Ayres was the emotional center of the film. Unfortunately Hollywood really didn’t know what to do with him until George Cukor cast him as Katharine Hepburn’s sensitive alcoholic brother in 1938’s Holiday, after which he became immensely popular in MGM’s Dr. Kildare series. The actor was so affected by his portrayal of the young soldier in All Quiet that he became a conscientious objector during World War II which eroded his fan base. It was only after Olivia de Havilland insisted on him as her co-star in 1946’s The Dark Mirror that word of his heroism as a medic during the war became public knowledge and his career was restored, earning him an Oscar nomination for 1948’s Johnny Belinda and sustaining him at the top of his profession until his death fifty years later.
Oscar Profile #73: Nina Foch
Born April 20, 1924 in Leiden, Holland to Dutch classical music conductor Dirk Fock and his wife, American actress-singer Consuelo Flowerton, her parents divorced when she was a toddler and she moved with her mother to New York where she grew up.
Although she studied music and art, she turned to acting as a teenager and by the age of sixteen was already appearing in films. Her breakthrough came as the second female lead in 1945’s A Song to Remember which led to her being cast as the heroine in distress in the 1945 classic film noir, My Name Is Julia Ross. A sleeper hit, its success should have led to starring roles in major films, but, alas, she would remain in supporting roles at her home studio, Columbia. Among the more successful ones were Johnny O’Clock; The Guilt of Janet Ames; The Dark Past and Johnny Allegro.
An early entrant into TV, she still received an occasional important screen role such as that of Gene Kelly’s patron and would-be paramour in the 1951 Oscar winner, An American in Paris. She was the ill-fated Marie Antoinette in the 1952 version of Scramouche and a rich horsewoman in 1953’s Fast Company.
Her portrayal of the loyal company secretary in 1954’s Executive Suite earned her the first Best Supporting Actress award given by the National Board of Review, which led to her only Oscar nomination.
That same year she married her first husband, future TV host James Lipton.
The DVD Report #243
Universal has been busy upgrading many of its classics for Blu-ray release in this, its 100th Anniversary year.
First up is Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Released in December, 1962, this isn’t quite yet its 50th anniversary, but it comes close enough for the new release to be labeled a 50th Anniversary Edition. The Blu-ray, as well as the improved DVD, additions include all the extras from the 2007 Special Edition. Also included on the Blu-ray is an informative nine minute documentary on the restoration process.
One of the extras is the running commentary by Mulligan and producer Alan J. Pakula, recorded just months before his sudden death in 1993 for the Laser Disc release of the film which should need no introduction to film lovers. Other extras include several documentaries on star Gregory Peck from his Oscar acceptance speech to his AFI award acceptance speech to a lengthy documentary on his life and times.
At the heart of the film are the performances of child actors Mary Badham, Phillip Alford and John Megna, Badham and Alford as Peck’s children and Megna as a visiting cousin. Since the film’s story is told from the perspective of the children, it is not surprising that that these young actors give three of the best child performances of all time.
Oscar Profile #72: Fred Zinnemann
Born April 29, 1907 in Vienna, Austria, Fred Zinnemann grew up wanting to be a musician but ended up studying law instead. While studying at the University of Vienna he became interested in films and got his start as a cameraman working alongside such future greats as Billy Wilder and Robert Siodmak.
Moving to the U.S. to study film, he was cast as an extra in 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front but was fired for talking back to director Lewis Milestone. He later directed numerous shorts before being assigned his first feature films, two excellent early noirs, Kid Glove Killer with Van Heflin and Eyes in the Night with Edward Arnold. He followed them with his first major success, 1944’s anti-Nazi drama, The Seventh Cross with Spencer Tracy.
Employing the documentary style he had trained in, he received his first Oscar nomination for his direction of 1948’s The Search the film about World War II refugees that catapulted Montgomery Clift to stardom. Again working with Van Heflin, he directed the 1949 cult favorite Act of Violence and provided Marlon Brando with the launching pad of his film career as a paraplegic war veteran in 1950’s The Men. The following year he won his first Oscar for the documentary short subject, Benjy about a disabled boy played by Lee Aaker.
The DVD Report #242
With the Oscars less than three weeks away, many of this year’s nominees are available on DVD with others either announced for release or soon to be announced.
In decades past, the public, critics and Oscar more or less agreed on each year’s best films. That pretty much changed with the success of blockbusters such Jaws and Star Wars in the mid-1970s. Both films were nominated for Best Picture and won handily in the technical categories, but neither really had a shot at winning the big one. Jaws lost to the popular hospital drama, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Star Wars to Woody Allen’s comedy, Annie Hall.
In the years since when well-regarded smaller films were up against blockbusters, the smaller film almost always won, a clear indication that the Academy was more likely to side with critics than general audiences. There were exceptions, of course, such as Titanic which won over the critically acclaimed L.A. Confidential and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King which won over a field of lackluster nominees. With both the backstory was as important to the film’s win as what was on the screen.
Titanic was a behemoth, a blockbuster of unprecedented proportions that even before its Oscar victory had become the biggest moneymaking film in history. It was seen at the time as a film that was good for the industry. Return of the King was about to set at least three Oscar records, become the first third film in a trilogy to win; the first sequel to win without its original having also won a la The Godfather and the first fantasy film to win. Oscar voters always like to do something that sets a new record. It makes them feel special, part of history in a way.
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