The DVD Report #48

With respectful, if rather lukewarm reviews, The Kite Runner got lost in the avalanche of year-end releases despite all its advance publicity.

Telling the tale of an Americanized Afghanistan-born writer who returns to his homeland in search of the missing son of a friend, Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland) has made his most assured film to date. Devoid of the histrionics of the former and the overly cute telling of the latter, if there is a flaw in the film it is that the class system in Afghanistan is not explained as well as it might be for Western audiences. A simple voice-over at the beginning of the film would have helped enormously. Without it, you may not fully understand the relationship between the main character and his childhood friend until the end of the film when it is made quite clear.

The film received some unwanted publicity when the father of the boy playing the protagonist’s friend objected post-filming to his son having been portrayed as a victim of rape. The rape scene is not only crucial, it’s the whole reason for the story, which is a metaphor for the rape of the country itself, first by the Russians, then the Taliban, while the world stood by and did nothing. The irony of the West’s involvement after 9/11 is not relevant as the story takes place in 1978 Kabul, 1988 San Francisco and the Pakistan and Afghanistan of 2000. The novel from which it is adapted was written before 9/11.

Without anticipating them, I was amazed to find references to so many other films: The Red Balloon of course but not surprisingly, also The Green Years (central child character is mean to his only friend), Home From the Hill (a major plot point), Midnight Express (the violence at the end), Brokeback Mountain (the dinner table rebuke of the main character’s father-in-law) and The Namesake (narrative style).

The film is rated PG-13 and is a good film for older children as well as adults interested in learning about other cultures.

No film in recent memory seems to have polarized critics and audiences alike as much as Tim Burton’s film of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. Place me on the side of those who liked it, albeit with reservations.

I knew going in that some of Sondheim’s music had been cut, but I did expect to hear all the best known songs and I wasn’t disappointed in that. “The Worst Pies in London”, “A Little Priest”, truncated though it may be, “Johanna”, “Pretty Women” and “Not While I’m Around” are all there.

Johnny Depp acquits himself quite well in the title role and his singing is fairly decent. Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett is a bit too thin-voiced, but plays her part with conviction. Jamie Campbell Bower as Anthony and Ed Sanders as Toby are full-voiced wonders, but Jayne Wisener is hopelessly shrill as Johanna, and Laura Michelle Kennedy is a totally unsympathetic beggar woman.

I didn’t care for the washed out, almost sepia tone of the film but if I could change just one thing it would be the ending. It just hangs there. An epic big screen musical needs to go out soaring. It doesn’t.

Still, it is a well made film even if it isn’t for Sondheim purists. Anyone looking for a replica of the stage production would be better off renting or buying one of the two DVDs made from stage productions, the 1982 Great Performances version of Sweeney Todd with Angela Lansbury and George Hearn, or the 2000 production of Sweeney Todd in Concert with Hearn and Patti LuPone.

In honor of her centenary, Warner Bros. has released The Bette Davis Collection Vol. 3. while Fox will be releasing its Bette Davis Centenary Celebration Collection next week on what would have been her 100th birthday.

The Warner Bros. collection includes The Old Maid (1939), All This, and Heaven Too (1940), The Great Lie (1941), In This Our Life (1942), Watch on the Rhine (1943)and Deception (1946).

The powerhouse pairing of Davis and Miriam Hopkins in Edmund Goulding’s The Old Maid meant big box office in the autumn of 1939. It was also one of the best films of that year, generally considered to be the strongest in movie history.

Davis is at her best playing the unwed mother whose daughter (Jane Bryan) is raised by her cousin (Hopkins) with Davis pretending to be her aunt. The pairing of Davis and Hopkins was so successful that the two were re-teamed four years later for Old Acquaintance in which the fur flew once again.

A subdued Davis plays a perfect nanny to Charles Boyer’s children in Anatole Litvak’s All This, and Heaven Too, nominated for three 1940 Oscars – Best Picture, Art Direction and Supporting Actress: Barbara O’Neil. O’Neil plays Boyer’s hypochondriac wife whose death results in his being accused of murder. The film is told in flashback by Davis, now a teacher in a girls’ school.

Davis and Mary Astor set off sparks in Edmund Goulding’s The Great Lie for which Astor won a 1941 Oscar as the pregnant mistress of Davis’ downed-flyer husband (George Brent). Hattie McDaniel co-stars.

One of the strangest films ever made, John Huston’s In This Our Life is neither a typical women’s film, nor a typical testosterone-driven Huston film, nor is it really a hybrid of the two. It’s just strange.

Davis and Olivia de Havilland play sisters named Stanley and Roy, respectively. Davis is the “bad” one who gets into trouble for all sorts of things, including framing her black maid’s son for a hit and run accident. Neither Davis nor de Havilland are at their best, but the supporting cast, including Charles Coburn, Billie Burke, Hattie McDaniel and Ernest Anderson is exemplary. Even Lee Patrick, in a small role, stands out. Huston’s father Walter has a cameo.

Paul Lukas and Lucile Watson are the standouts in Herman Shumlin’s film of Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine for which the former won an Oscar and the latter a nomination. Dashiell Hammet’s screenplay was also nominated, and the film was amongst the ten nominees for Best Picture, the last year in which they would nominate so many.

Davis plays the secondary role of the wife of anti-Fascist Lukas. Watson is her celebrated Washington hostess mother, the widow of an influential politician. Geraldine Fitzgerald, George Coulouris and Beulah Bondi co-star.

It seems odd that they would pass over Irving Rapper’s 1945 version of The Corn Is Green, containing Davis’ last great Warner Bros. Performance, in favor of Rapper’s Deception, but that’s what they did. Maybe they’re saving Corn for a fourth collection of Davis’ Warner Bros. films.

In any event, Deception is one of those gothic dramas involving a woman torn between two men, one of whom is insane. Paul Henreid and Claude Rains, her co-stars in Rapper’s sublime 1942 film, Now, Voyager, are once again the men in her life.

The Fox collection includes a special two-disc edition of All About Eve (1950), Phone Call From a Stranger (1952), The Virgin Queen (1955), Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) and The Nanny (1965).

Both the best film of Davis’ career, and the one containing her best performance, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’ masterpiece All About Eve is a delicious Broadway valentine laced with poison. Davis as the aging star, Anne Baxter as the sycophantic actress who mimics her, George Sanders as a vitriolic newspaper columnist, Celeste Holm as Davis’ best friend and Thelma Ritter as her wisecracking maid accounted for five of the film’s record-setting 14 Oscar nominations (a record still standing today, although shared now with Titanic). It won six, including Best Picture, Supporting Actor (Sanders), Sound Recording, Costume Design and two for Mankiewicz for his screenplay and direction, the same double whammy he won the year before for A Letter to Three Wives.

Fox has released the film on DVD twice before and has repackaged it in various sets of DVDs for much of the last ten years, but the new two-disc Special Edition isolates the film, its two commentary tracks and its separate music track on disc one and moves the supplements, including the AMC back story on the film to disc two where it is joined by several new features. Among them are two documentaries on Mankiewicz, Joseph L. Mankiewicz: A Personal Journey and Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

Davis takes a back seat to fourth husband Gary Merrill, the star of Jean Negulesco’s Phone Call From a Stranger in which Merrill is the only survivor of a plane crash who takes it upon himself to visit members of the families of the victims he met on the plane. Davis, Shelley Winters and Beatrice Straight are among those he visits.

A fairly hokey but highly watchable rehash of The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, this time covering Elizabeth I’s relationship with Sir Walter Raleigh, Henry Koster’s The Virgin Queen is the film in which Davis recreates the role she played 16 years earlier opposite Errol Flynn. This time she’s paired with Richard Todd, who more than holds his own. Joan Collins, Herbert Marshall and Dan O’Herlihy co-star.

Intended as a reunion of his What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? co-stars, Davis and Joan Crawford, Robert Aldrich’s Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte began filming with both stars, but when Crawford dropped out due to illness, Davis’s friend and frequent co-star, Olivia de Havilland, was brought in. The film was in hiatus for so long that co-star Barbara Stanwyck had to drop out due to other commitments. Another Davis friend and former co-star, Mary Astor, was brought in to replace her. Agnes Moorehead, who all but steals the film as Davis’ unkempt housekeeper, was on the verge of quitting and being replaced by Thelma Ritter when the project resumed filming. The film received seven Oscar nominations, a rarity for a gothic horror film. Its nods were for Best Supporting Actress (Moorehead), Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume Design, Editing, Score and Song for its haunting title tune.

Davis had her last great horror role as the beloved family nursemaid in Seth Holt’s The Nanny. Little William Dix is accused of drowning his baby sister and is sent away to an institution. On his return, he tries to convince his mother, Wendy Craig, that it was actually Nanny who drowned the baby, but she will have none of it. It’s up to her sister, Jill Bennettb to determine the truth. Davis, all sweetness and light, but pure evil on the inside, is chilling throughout.

Another actress with a hearty DVD release schedule is Angela Lansbury. In addition to the 1982 version of Sweeney Todd (which is being re-released on April 15th), Lansbury has already seen the DVD release of the first seven seasons of Murder, She Wrote, as well as many of her feature films.

Lansbury was nominated for Emmys for all twelve seasons of Murder, She Wrote and Golden Globes for ten of them. She never won an Emmy but she won the Golden Globe four of the ten times she was nominated, her last for The Eighth Season now out on DVD. This is the season in which she takes a teaching job at a Manhattan university and shuttles back and forth between New York and Cabot Cove. The writing in this season was considerably sharper than it had been for the last two, in which Lansbury’s was often seen narrating other people’s stories.

Another Emmy nomination came to Lansbury guest starring role in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit – The Sixth Year. Series star Mariska Hargitay was also nominated for an Emmy for this season, another new DVD release, and won a Golden Globe as well. The Lansbury episode crossed over to the short-lived Law and Order: Trial by Jury. Christopher Meloni is Hargity’s co-star in the popular police procedural.

Coming: There Will Be Blood and Classic Musicals From the Dream Factory Vol. 3.

-Peter J. Patrick (April 1, 2008)