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1917 Movie Poster1917 is the best film about the foot soldier since 1998’s Saving Private Ryan and the best film about the foot soldier in World War I since the triumvirate of All Quiet on the Western Front, Journey’s End, and Westfront 1918, all from 1930. What director Sam Mendes (Skyfall) couldn’t have known when he was making the film was that it would be a perfect metaphor for our time as well.

In an era when few people under 70 have been through a war, or even been in military service, we are all facing the possibility of sudden death from a very real enemy in the current pandemic. This tale of two lance corporals who risk their lives to deliver a message to a colonel deep in enemy territory in order to prevent the certain massacre of 1,600 men is fraught with danger at every turn. One will make it, one won’t.

Dean-Charles Chapman (Game of Thrones) is selected for the mission by his general (Colin Firth) because his brother, Richard Madden (Rocketman), a young lieutenant, is among those who would be killed if the mission fails. Chapman chooses his closest friend, George Mackay (Captain Fantastic) to accompany him. When Chapman is killed along the way, Mackay has two missions, one to deliver the general’s letter to commanding officer Benedict Cumberbatch (The Imitation Game) and the other to find his friend’s brother.

Roger Deakins, who had to wait until his fourteenth Oscar nomination for 2017’s Blade Runner 2049 to finally win one for his superb cinematography, wasted no time in collecting his second here. His amazing camerawork, which appears to be captured in a single take, was one of the film’s ten Oscar nominations and one of its three wins. The other two were for Visual Effects and Sound Mixing.

1917 is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Clint Eastwood’s latest film, Richard Jewell, is really two films in one. It’s both a biopic about the security guard who was falsely accused of being the Centennial Park bomber at the 1996 Olympics and an indictment of the press and law enforcement. In the first effort, it succeeds, in the second it does not.

Paul Walter Hauser first attained our attention as one of the Ku Klux Klansmen in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman. Here he does a complete turnaround as the earnest hero who just wants to help but can’t seem to keep quiet even when it’s against his interests to keep on talking. Sam Rockwell as his lawyer gives his most emotionally powerful performance as his lawyer. He’s even better here than he was in his Oscar-winning performance in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Kathy Bates, who received the film’s sole Oscar nod as Jewell’s emotionally wrought mother, delivers her finest performance since 1995’s Dolores Claiborne.

The problem with the film is that it depicts the film’s villains, a pushy reporter and a lazy FBI agent, so over-the-top that were they as incompetent in real life as they are portrayed in the film, wouldn’t have kept their jobs for very long. If you can ignore Olivia Wilde and Jon Hamm in those thankless roles, you’ll enjoy the film.

Richard Jewell is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Warner Archive has released a beautifully restored print from AMPAS and the Film Foundation of William Wyler’s 1936 film of Sinclair Lewis’ Dodsworth on Blu-ray.

Walter Huston won a New York Film Critics award for his performance and received the first of his four Oscar nominations for his portrayal of the retired industrialist whose life is turned upside down by his social-climbing wife (Ruth Chatterton) who leaves him for another man. Both Chatterton and Mary Astor as the widow with whom he eventually finds true happiness are superb in their roles but ironically Maria Ouspenskaya, in a brief role as the baroness who puts Chatterton in her place, was the only player aside from Huston to be nominated for an Oscar. Chatterton (Madame X, Sarah and Son) was a previous two-time nominee and Astor would have to wait another five years before she was nominated and won for The Great Lie.

Included as an extra is a 1937 radio broadcast featuring Huston and his wife Nan Sunderland in Chatterton’s role. Sunderland had played Astor’s role on Broadway with Fay Bainter (Jezebel) in Chatterton’s role.

Also newly released from Warner Archive is a DVD-only edition of Bryan Forbes’ 1978 film International Velvet starring Tatum O’Neal, Christopher Plummer, Anthony Hopkins, and Nanette Newman (Forbes’ wife) in a role turned down by Elizabeth Taylor and Julie Andrews among others.

O’Neal, just five years after her Oscar-winning performance in Paper Moon, plays the niece of the 14-year-old championship rider played by 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor in 1944’s National Velvet. O’Neal’s age is not revealed in the film, but the then-14-year-old actress ages from a schoolgirl to a young married woman during the film. Newman, who narrates, plays the grown-up version of Taylor’s character with Plummer as her live-in writer lover and Hopkins plays the coach who guides O’Neal to an Olympic gold medal riding one of Taylor/Newman’s horse Pie’s offspring.

The 1944 film was based on a novel by Enid Bagnold (The Chalk Garden) which took place in the 1920s. Forbes (The Whisperers) wrote the screenplay for the sequel as well as directed. Filmed thirty-four years after the original, the Taylor/Newman character has only aged 26 years by the end of the film set in the then present time which means that her character should have been in her sixties and not the forty she claims to be. For it to have made sense, the sequel should have been set in the late 1940s or early 1950s but that would probably have been a tougher sell.

Plummer, Hopkins, and Newman are all fine in their roles, but O’Neal is a disappointment in a tough role. Still, it’s a film that’s worth seeing, especially if you love horses.

Ingrid Thulin (Cries and Whispers) was infamously dubbed by Angela Lansbury in 1962’s The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse but uses her own voice effectively in J. Lee Thompson’s 1965 film, Return from the Ashes in which she plays the role that later won Nina Hoss numerous awards in 2014’s Phoenix.

Thulin impresses in a role originally intended for Gina Lollobrigida as the Jewish concentration camp survivor whose return to Paris disrupts the plans of her Polish gigolo husband (Maximilian Schell) and her devious stepdaughter (Samantha Eggar) to get their hands on her fortune.

Kino Lorber’s 2K restoration breathes new life into this generally forgotten thriller that still holds up admirably. Herbert Lom co-stars as Thulin’s loyal friend.

This week’s new releases include the Criterion Blu-ray editions of 1936’s Show Boat and 1991’s The Prince of Tides.

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