The DVD Report #20

You know it’s Fall when Hollywood begins to release its big gun Oscar hopefuls and the year’s earlier contenders start to make it to DVD.

So far this year there’s been only one film consistently generating Oscar buzz and it’s just been released on DVD. Actress Sarah Polley’s directorial debut, Away From Her, is a quietly-effecting slice-of-life drama about a husband going through the agony of watching his wife slowly slip into the haze of Alzheimer’s disease. In temperament and mood, it is a good companion piece to The Secret Life of Words in which Polley and Tim Robbins play two lost souls who find one another. Julie Christie who had a cameo as a psychologist in that one is the Alzheimer’s patient here. She and Gordon Pinsent as her husband might well be the Polley/Robbins characters in old age.

Pinsent, who is heartbreaking as the husband, has the lion’s share of the film’s scenes, but it is Christie at her most luminous who you will remember. She can still knock your socks off with a smile even when there is nothing behind the smile.

A million-watt smile from another era, and one with deviousness masking loneliness, was the one put on by Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. Looking timeworn in previous DVD editions, the 40th anniversary edition has been spiffed up to look like it was shot yesterday. The DVD features commentary by co-stars Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross on one track and director Mike Nichols on another. A second disc contains the original soundtrack and if you purchase it at Best Buy you get yet a third disc, the DVD of 1982’s Simon and Garfunkel: The Concert in Central Park.

Finally being released on DVD is Gorilla at Large, the 1954 circus thriller in which Bancroft had her first starring role. I saw this in a theatre as a kid and for years couldn’t understand why Bancroft hadn’t become a big star. Then The Miracle Worker came along and the rest, as they say, is history. Here she is, though, at an early peak, as a trapeze artist flying low over a scary gorilla’s open air habitat, while Cameron Mitchell, Raymond Burr, Lee J. Cobb, Lee Marvin and others stand helplessly by. Second lead Charlotte Austin has the most piercing scream since Fay Wray in the original King Kong.

Gorilla at Large is paired with the cheesy 1981 film, Mystery on Monster Island, one of several twofers being released by Fox for under $10 a pop. Other combos available under the Midnite Movies banner include the silly The House on Skull Mountain paired with cult favorite The Mephisto Waltz and the taut A Blueprint for Murder paired with Man in the Attic, a nifty remake of The Lodger.

You also know it’s Fall when DVD companies start releasing horror movies in anticipation of Halloween. In addition to the new entries in its Midnite Madness line, Fox has just released two sets of Vincent Price horror films, both of them reissues with one new film and a supplementary disc each.

Included in the Vincent Price Scream Legends Collection are Tales of Terror, Twice Told Tales, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Dr. Phibes Rises Again, Theater of Blood, the previously unavailable Madhouse, and the newly-released Witchfinder General which had no been available under its U.S.-release title of The Conqueror Worm.

While Madhouse may be the new-to-DVD film, it’s Witchfinder General that gets the deluxe treatment, including commentary by producer Philip Waddilove and actor Ian Ogilvy. There’s also a featurette on the making of the film and its young director, Michael Reeves, who died of an accidental barbiturate overdose at the age of 25 a few months after the film’s release.

More a historical drama than a horror film, though there’s plenty of the latter, Witchfinder General developed quite a cult following that was outraged when the film showed up on TV with its original score replaced by one improvised on a Moog synthesizer. This is the restored version in which Price has one of his best roles as the real life Matthew Hopkins who died peacefully in old age, but not here, definitely not here! In the film the hunter and killer of innocents, as alleged witches, gets his just desserts in a most unusual way.

The Fly Collection is not exactly a collection of Vincent Price films as Price stars in only two of the three films, but the supplements include the excellent A&E biography of the actor previously available as a supplement to Laura, Price’s own favorite film.

The original 1958 film, The Fly, was a huge box office success at the time and has remained a cult classic through the years. Price has a supporting role as the brother of scientist David Hedison who experiments with teleportation to his detriment. He gets top billing in the immediate sequel, Return of the Fly, in which nephew Brett Halsey picks up where his father left off. The film, though a good one, suffers a bit from being in black and white. As Price himself says in a 1987 interview, two films made in black and white can be great but one in color and the other in black and white makes no sense.

When it came time to make the third film in the trilogy, the previously-unavailable The Curse of the Fly, Price’s contract with American-International allowed him to make other films outside the studio, but not horror films. As a consequence Fox was forced to hire another actor in his stead and selected Brian Donlevy to play the part in a film in which there were ironically no flies, merely mutants who got that way from utilizing the family’s teleportation facilities. A decent horror film in its own right, it bears little resemblance to its predecessors.

Long before Jurassic Parkthere was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, the original 1925 version of which has been restored from various prints, some of the footage looking better than others. If you can get past that, the highlight of the film is the special effects by Willis O’Brien, who later did King Kong, which are still amazing.

The A-list cast brings more to the film than one might expect. Bessie Love is a thoughtful, intelligent heroine, Lloyd Hughes a stalwart leading man, Lewis Stone an authoritative father figure, and a fierce, bearded Wallace Beery has one of his best early lead roles as the head of the expedition. The one sour note is the use of a white actor in black face with atrocious diction as preserved on the newly struck title cards. One might think they could at least replace words like dat and mo’ with proper phrasing.

King Kong, Godzilla and hundreds of later creature flicks owe much to the ending of The Lost World. Alas, the 1925 version is being released without much fanfare as a companion disc to the well made but less compelling 1960 remake.

Historical dramas have always been in fashion. To coincide with the release of Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Universal is releasing a twofer of two earlier historical dramas.

Personally, I’ve never understood how Anne of the Thousand Days could win ten Oscar nominations as well as various other awards in 1969. Granted, its Oscar-winning costumes were well made, but the stodgy script from a 1940s play was laughable coming just three years after the sublime A Man for All Seasons in which Robert Shaw played a robust young Henry VIII. How anyone could accept middle-aged, sleepy-eyed Richard Burton in the role so soon after that is beyond me. Genevieve Bujold as Anne Boleyn does manage to give a good performance despite having to spout awful dialogue like “I know my Elizabeth will make a better queen than Henry ever made a king” or other such nonsense.

Easier to take is Mary, Queen of Scots, if only because Vanessa Redgrave as Mary and Glenda Jackson as Elizabeth are so ferocious in their performances. Jackson had just played Elizabeth in the acclaimed TV mini-series, Elizabeth R and she was fascinating to watch reprising that role here. Like all films about Mary Stuart, the best scene is the one where Elizabeth comes to visit her in prison even though we know that in real life the two never met.

Precious is the word that comes to mind when looking for an adjective to describe Mike White’s Year of the Dog. While White can still write extremely sharp dialogue as he did in Chuck & Buck, The Good Girl and The School of Rock, his quirky, offbeat characters are less compelling in his directorial debut here than those he wrote for other directors in his earlier films.

Molly Shannon stars as an aging single woman who becomes obsessed with saving animals to the detriment of all else after the poisoning death of her beloved pet dog. John C. Reilly as a nutty neighbor, Thomas McCarthy and Laura Dern as her self-absorbed brother- and sister-in-law, Regina King as her best friend, and Peter Sarsgaard as an animal activist all have their moments, but the whole thing is rather lame.

One of the most controversial films of all time has been spiffed up for a Special Edition DVD. In 1980 director William Friedkin was still riding high on the success of The French Connection and The Exorcist almost a decade earlier. In filming the thriller Cruising about a an undercover cop’s investigation of a string of murders of gay men in Greenwich Village, Friedkin became obsessed with the gay leather scene and used a notorious after hours bar to film background material. Fueled by articles in the Village Voice, the gay community protested. The more they protested the more he filmed at the bar, causing star Al Pacino to say the film he made was not the film he signed on for. To this day, Pacino disavows the film which is never shown in any of his retrospectives. A pity because he delivers one of his best performances, though the film itself is a muddle. Having different killers at the beginning and end and even suggesting that Pacino himself might be a killer is meant to be ambiguous, but comes across as just confusing.

Also being released is a new 35th anniversary edition of Deliverance with commentary from all four stars (Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox) and director John Boorman, and a 30th anniversary edition of Saturday Night Fever with various extras.

Peter J. Patrick (September 18, 2007)