The DVD Report #10

Bridge to Terabithia, the current number one best-selling DVD according to Rentrak, is the second filmed version of the 1978 Peabody Award winning novel. The first was a 1985 made-for-TV movie that played on PBS.

Disney’s marketing of the film made it seem as though it were another Narnia. Though it has elements of Disney’s enormously successful The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, it is closer in concept and execution to the 1991 film, My Girl.

The less said about the plot, the easier it is to enjoy it, so no spoilers here. Suffice it to say that this is the best children’s movie to come down the pike in a long time, as well as one of the year’s best films so far.

The leads are played by child actors Josh Hutcherson (The Polar Express, RV) and Anna Sophia Robb (Because of Winn-Dixie, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and the principal adult characters are played by Robert Patrick (The Silence of the Lambs, Terminator 2: Judgment Day) and Zooey Deschanel (Elf, TV’s Weeds). The screenplay is by John Stockwell (The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys) and David Paterson (Love, Ludlow) whose mother Katherine Paterson wrote the novel. First time feature director Gabor Csupo is better known as a writer, producer and animator (TV’s The Simpsons).

Completely shifting gears, Fox is marketing its new Joan Collins collection as The Joan Collins Superstar Collection. While Collins never quite achieved superstar status, fewer stars have been in the limelight for as long as she has – 55 years to be exact. From 1952’s Judgment Deferred to last year’s British TV series, Footballers’ Wives, she has seldom gone for long without a starring vehicle, achieving her greatest fame in TV’s Dynasty when she was in her 50s.

The Fox collection spotlights five of her films, all of them first time DVD releases.

Collins’ first lead in a Fox film was as Gibson girl Evelyn Nesbitt in 1955’s taut The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing opposite Ray Milland (The Lost Weekend, Dial M For Murder) and Farley Granger (They Live by Night, Strangers on a Train) in a re-telling of the notorious 1906 murder trial of Nesbitt’s husband Harry K. Thaw (Farley) who shot and killed her lover, famed architect Stanford White (Milland) in Madison Square Garden. Stage legend Cornelia Otis Skinner (The Uninvited, The Swimmer) appears as Thaw’s mother and the always welcome Glenda Farrell (I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, The Talk of the Town) is Nesbitt’s mother. Collins never looked lovelier than under the direction here of Richard Fleischer (Compulsion, The Boston Strangler).

The story was re-told as one of the plot lines in 1981’s Ragtime, but this is a more complete version. The end shot is still a stunner.

Though one is tempted to dismiss 1957’s The Sea Wife as a poor man’s amalgam of Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison and Lifeboat, the film has a few small pleasures of its own, chiefly the location filming. The story in which Collins’ stranded nun hides her true identity from the equally adrift Richard Burton (Becket, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold) is hard to swallow from the get-go, but both Collins and Burton play it straight enough to give it some plausibility, though a stronger actress might have carried off the film’s famous last line a bit more convincingly.

Roberto Rossellini (Open City, Journey to Italy) was slated to direct, but when Fox refused to approve his script playing up the love story, he walked out and production manager Bob McNaught took over.

Lush location filming is the highlight of 1957’s Stopover Tokyo, in which Collins plays leading lady to Robert Wagner (White Feather, The True Story of Jesse James) who is an American agent out to stop an assassination in this re-working of the last of John P. Marquand’s Mr. Moto novels. Mr. Moto had so gone out of fashion by the time the film was made that the character is completely written out of the script.

This was the only film directed by writer Richard L. Breen (The Mating Season, O. Henry’s Full House).

Joanne Woodward had just won an Oscar for The Three Faces of Eve, her husband Paul Newman had just made Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and two-time Oscar winning director Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth, Going My Way) had just scored a triumphant comeback with An Affair to Remember, so one had every reason to expect that their next film, 1958’s Rally ‘Round the Flag Boys! would be a stupendous hit. It wasn’t.

Fox had wanted Jayne Mansfield for the role of the vixen next door, but Newman and Woodward campaigned hard to get Joan Collins cast in the part instead. That proved to be the smartest thing about the project as Collins steals every scene she’s in and saves the film from total mediocrity.

The last film in the collection is 1960’s Seven Thieves, which came mid-way in a long line of heist films from 1950’s The Asphalt Jungle to the mid-fifties’ Rififi and The Killing to 1964’s Topkapi.

The film was nominated for an Oscar for black-and-white costume design, presumably for Collins’ skimpy dresses, which she wears quite well. Directed by Henry Hathaway (Call Northside 777, True Grit), the film co-stars Edward G. Robinson (Double Indemnity, Key Largo), Rod Steiger (The Pawnbroker, In the Heat of the Night) and Eli Wallach (The Godfather, Part III, The Holiday). Once you get past Steiger’s over-acting the film holds up quite well.

Robinson is also the star of three of the four MGM-owned films noir also being released by Fox this week.

The most famous of the lot is 1945’s The Woman in the Window, directed by Fritz Lang (Metropolis, Fury). It was the first of two films Lang made back to back with the same three stars, Robinson, Joan Bennett (Father of the Bride, Dark Shadows)and Dan Duryea (Black Angel, Criss Cross). While both are excellent thrillers, the later Scarlet Street, available in a pristine print from Kino after years of being consigned to public domain hell, is the more satisfying of the two if only because of The Woman in the Window‘s infuriating ending. Raymond Massey (Abe Lincoln in Illinois, East of Eden) also has a prominent role in The Woman in the Window, while Rosalind Ivan (The Corn Is Green, The Suspect) is a stand-out in Scarlet Street.

The other films comprising this release are The Stranger, Kansas City Confidential and A Bullet for Joey.

The release of both 1946’s The Stranger and 1952’s Kansas City Confidential is notable as it is rare for a major studio to release films that have long been available in public domain. My Man Godfrey, His Girl Friday, Till the Clouds Roll By and the forthcoming Royal Wedding are a few examples where this rarity has occurred.

The Stranger was directed by Orson Welles (Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil) who co-stars as an ex-Nazi in hiding, with Loretta Young (Farmer’s Daughter, The Bishop’s Wife) his unsuspecting paramour. Robinson is the Nazi hunter who comes to town to unmask the now-small-American-town-assimilated college professor. The film was nominated for an Oscar for its tense screenplay and Welles was nominated for the Golden Lion at the 1947 Venice Film Festival for his direction.

It’s a nail-biter from start to finish.

Even darker forces are at work in Kansas City Confidential, directed by Phil Karlson (Tight Spot, Hell to Eternity). The British title for the film, The Secret Four, is the more apt one as the film is about a group of bank robbers who don’t know one another’s identities. Economically directed by Karlson with strong performances from John Payne (The Razor’s Edge, Miracle on 34th Street), Coleen Gray (Nightmare Alley, Kiss of Death) and Preston Foster (The Last Days of Pompeii, My Friend Flicka), this is one of the screen’s better revenge dramas.

The drawing card for 1955’s A Bullet for Joey was that it pitted Robinson against George Raft (Scarface, Each Dawn I Die). Both were icons of Hollywood’s golden age of gangster movies in the 1930s starring together for the first time. The film itself, though, is pretty much a potboiler, with Robinson playing the good guy out to stop Raft and his gang from gaining international secrets from a kidnapped scientist. Audrey Totter (Lady in the Lake, The Carpetbaggers) has the female lead.

The film was directed by Lewis Allen (At Sword’s Point, Suddenly) who spent most of his later career directing for television, most notably episodes of Perry Mason and Bonanza.

Also out this week are Billy Bob Thornton in The Polish Brothers’ The Astronaut Farmer, the family friendly The Last Mimzy, the Oscar-nominated documentary Iraq in Fragments, and the acclaimed Danish film After the Wedding. The latter was an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film earlier this year.

Next week Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole gets the Criterion treatment and MGM releases a collection of Esther Williams films including Dangerous When Wet and Neptune’s Daughter. In two weeks, several MGM musicals including The Pirate and Words and Music appear and in three weeks, more film noir gets released including They Live by Night and Decoy.

Peter J. Patrick (July 10, 2007)