The DVD Report #72

“A classic movie adventure – breathtakingly reborn via pioneering technology – in 2 stunning new versions never before possible” is the blurb on the Blu-ray packaging of How the West Was Won and for once the hyperbole is accurate. The two-disc set features both the widescreen version transfer tailored to home screens which is also available in standard DVD while the exclusive-to-Blue-ray second disc offers the “special smilebox process transfer replicating the Cinerama wraparound theatrical experience”. This is the version to see. The center of the screen in this version is the same somewhat truncated size as the center of the widescreen transfer but the left and right sides of the screen expand to full screen size revealing details you never knew were there. The wraparound aspect of the Cinerama process relied on audience members’ peripheral vision emulating the you-are-there aspect of the viewing experience. While no home viewing system yet devised can duplicate the process, this comes as close as anything you’re likely to see.

The film itself is an eye-popping spectacle taking us from the days of danger-filled commerce on the Erie Canal to the building of the railroads and beyond. Essentially following the travails of one family, it begins with Karl Malden and Agnes Moorehead and their daughters Debbie Reynolds and Carroll Baker who pair up with Gregory Peck and James Stewart, respectively. Reynolds and George Peppard as Baker and Stewart’s son are featured more prominently than any other players, who include an early 1960s Who’s Who of movie stars. Among them are John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Preston, Richard Widmark and narrator Spencer Tracy. The film is the work of three directors, Henry Hathaway, who handled most the filming; John Ford, who shot the Civil War sequences; and George Marshall, who shot the railroad sequences. Hathaway later revealed that he had re-shot most of Marshall’s work.

Extras include Cinerama Adventure, a full-length documentary on the three-screen process used fittingly enough to showcase you-are-there style documentaries in the 1950s and early 1960s. How the West Was Won was the first, and only, narrative film made in the three camera-three screen process. Later films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey were filmed in a widescreen process that bore the Cinerama name but were not filmed with three cameras for three screen projection.

Warner Bros. is also releasing another 1960s classic in Blu-ray and improved standard DVD editions today.

One of Paul Newman’s biggest hits, as well as one of his most acclaimed films, 1967’s Cool Hand Luke was previously available in a rather weak early DVD transfer. It has now been restored to its original splendor befitting the only one of Newman’s three Oscar-nominated anti-establishment titled heroes of the 1960s whose story was shot in color. Set in the Deep South, the film about life on a chain gang was actually shot in Stockton, California which, on a hot summer’s day, can be as stifling as any Southern locale. While Newman delivers one of his best performances, the film is also noteworthy for at least two of its supporting performances, those of George Kennedy, who won an Oscar as a fellow prisoner; and Strother Martin, as the head jailer who gets to utter the film’s famous catch phrase, “what we have here is a failure to communicate.” Extras include commentary from Newman biographer Eric Lax and a making-of documentary featuring new interviews with, among others, director Stuart Rosenberg and original author Donn Pearce.

Warner Bros. is also releasing a number of classic musicals in standard DVD.

Originally released by MGM in the early days of DVD, Warner Bros.’ subsequent reissues of An American in Paris and Gigi were the same original transfers in new packaging. Both films have long been in need of upgrading.

There are still those who are shocked to learn that An American in Paris beat both A Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun to win the 1951 Oscar for Best Picture. While those other films remain high on many people’s lists of the best films ever made, An American in Paris, now as then, is a matter of taste.

Featuring the glorious music of George Gershwin, the phenomenal dancing of Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron, and the most gorgeous recreation of Paris any soundstage has ever given us, the story about a painter is a slight one and the film really has no ending. There’s that long ballet to the title number and a fadeout without dialogue. See it for the music, the dancing and the scenery, not the story.

Extras include a making-of documentary featuring interviews with Caron and co-star Nina Foch.

More satisfying as a story, Gigi was nominated for, and won, 9 Oscars including Best Picture of 1958. The last of MGM’s major musicals, a musical version of Colette’s novella about a young Parisian girl raised to be a courtesan had been a dream project of producer Arthur Freed ever since he saw the original French film version in 1951. Censorship issues and a Broadway play from the original source material starring Audrey Hepburn further delayed the project. Finally, after securing the services of Lerner and Loewe and convincing the MGM brass that the film would be the My Fair Lady of the screen, he was given a green light. With an impeccable cast led by Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan and Hermione Gingold, directed by Freed favorite Vincente Minnelli, decked out in period costumes by Cecil Beaton, and filmed in actual Parisian locations, the result was the crowning achievement of both Freed’s unit and Minnelli’s career.

Extras include a making-of documentary in which Caron gives her opinion of her director, her co-stars and her own performance. It also includes the original 1948 French film version of Gigi.

Of lesser interest, is Warner Bros.’ The Busby Berkeley Collection – Volume 2. While the Berkeley musicals are always fun, this collection doesn’t feature anything close to the heights achieved by the films in the first collection, which included 42nd Streetand Gold Diggers of 1933, but it does have its compensations.

Featured in the new collection are Gold Diggers of 1937, Gold Diggers in Paris, Hollywood Hotel and Vasity Show.

Co-directed by Lloyd Bacon and Berkeley, Gold Diggers of 1937 is at its comedic best poking fun at the insurance business, and goes out with a bang musically with its final production number, “All’s Fair in Love and War” led by the great Joan Blondell. There’s terrific singing, too, by Dick Powell and superb clowning by Glenda Farrell, Victor Moore and Lee Dixon, but by the time the film was released in December 1936, gold diggers stories were passé and there was really nothing in it to cause a revival of the sub-genre.

Moving the chorines to Paris and advertising its musical numbers as “songs your mother never taught you” couldn’t save 1938’s Gold Diggers in Paris, directed by Roy Enright, musical direction by Berkeley, and the sub-genre gasped its last breath. Rudy Vallee and Rosemary Lane headed a rather undistinguished cast.

Of more lasting repute is 1937’s Hollywood Hotel directed by Berkeley and featuring one truly great song, Johnny Mercer and Richard Whiting’s immortal “Hooray for Hollywood”. Unfortunately that’s about all there is to recommend in the film which more or less wastes the talents of Dick Powell, Rosemary Lane, Lola Lane, Glenda Farrell and even Ronald Reagan in a bit part.

Dick Powell and Rosemary Lane return, this time accompanied by Rosemary’s other sister Priscilla, in the “college kids putting on a show” musical Vasity Show, directed by William Keighley and with dance direction by Berkeley. If nothing else, it shows why Warner Bros., with only sporadic returns to the genre, threw in the towel on movie musicals until the 1950s.

A genre that endures to this day is the murder mystery series. The grand-daddy of them all, Charlie Chan, is back in Fox’s Charlie Chan – Volume 5, featuring the last seven titles in the Fox series that began in 1929 and, after shifting to Monogram in 1942, stayed around until 1949. With the release of Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise, Charlie Chan in Panama, Murder Over New York, Charlie Chan in the Wax Museum, Dead Men Tell, Charlie Chan in Rio and Castle in the Desert, twenty-one of the thirty-two extant Chan titles are now available on studio re-mastered DVDs. Included in that count are six Monogram titles previously released by MGM. All forty-two titles are available on sub-par public domain copies.

A remake of the lost 1931 Warner Oland film, Charlie Chan Carries On, 1940’s Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise is one of the most delightful in the series featuring Sidney Toler as Chan, Victor Sen Young as his number two son Jimmy, and a cast of suspects that includes Lionel Atwill, Leo G. Carroll, Charles Middleton, Marjorie Weaver, Robert Lowery and Cora Witherspoon. The pacing here is tighter than in the original, in which Chan is not brought into the action until halfway through the film. Here he is brought into the case from the beginning. As with other Toler films in the series, the tone is lighter than those of the Oland era. It was directed by Eugene Forde.

Another remake, albeit one of a non-Chan film: 1934’s Marie Galante, 1940’s Charlie Chan in Panama was originally planned as a Mr. Moto film but with American sympathies turning against Japan in the wake of its attack on China, it was quickly reassigned as a Chan film which explains why Charlie is undercover as someone other than himself for much of the film. It was also one of the first films in which Nazi spies are the villains. Sidney Toler and Victor Sen Young again star with Jean Rogers, Kane Richmond, Lionel Atwill (as a different character than the one he played in Murder Cruise) and Mary Nash in the same year she played Katharine Hepburn’s mother in The Philadelphia Story. It was directed by Norman Foster.

In yet another pre-war sabotage film, 1940’s Murder Over New York, Charlie investigates a murder committed to cover up a Nazi plot to steal aircraft plans. Sidney Toler and Victor Sen Young are back as Chan and Jimmy, and the cast of suspects includes such familiar-to-Chan faces as Marjorie Weaver, Robert Lowery and Kane Richmond, each as different characters than they played in the year’s previous two Chan films. Directed by Harry Lachman, this was the first Chan film in many years in which the detective’s name was not part of the title.

In the fourth Chan film released in 1940, a life-size wax dummy of Toler’s Charlie gets considerable screen time. Charlie Chan in the Wax Museum revolves around murders in a museum dedicated to crime. In addition to Charlie, there are wax dummies of Jack the Ripper, Bluebeard the Pirate and other nefarious characters. Victor Sen Young is back as Jimmy, and Margeurite Chapman and Marc Lawrence are among the suspects. It was directed by Lynn Shores in the same year he directed the action sequences (uncredited) in The Mark of Zorro.

Set aboard an old sailing ship, 1941’s Dead Men Tell revolves around the murder of a nice old lady played by Ethel Griffies who is scared to death by a ghost. Charlie and Jimmy investigate others aboard the ship including her family members. Sidney Toler and Victor Sen Young continue as Charlie and Jimmy and the suspects include Sheila Ryan, Robert Weldon, Jay Aldredge and George Reeves. In real life, Griffies, who was in her sixties, lived to be over 100, acting until very nearly the end, and delighting TV audiences as a frequent guest on The Merv Griffin Show. Harry Lachman directed.

A remake of another Oland Chan, 1931’s The Black Camel, 1941’s Charlie Chan in Rio revolves around the murder of a woman with a secret past. Sidney Toler’s Chan dominates as always, but Victor Sen Young’s Jimmy is less prominent in this one in which supporting players Cobina Wright Jr., Mary Beth Hughes, Kay Linaker, Ted North, Victor Jory and Harold Huber carry most of the plot. New York socialite Wright was the Paris Hilton of her day, a model who made only a handful of films. Her more famous mother, Cobina Wright Sr. was a society columnist. Harry Lachman directed.

By the time of 1942’s Castle in the Desert, Fox was tiring of the Chan series and it would prove to be their last. Toler would be back when the series continued at Monogram two years later with Benson Fong as his number three son, but no longer would the Chan films be given the high production values they were at Fox.

The delightful Ethel Griffies is back as a different character, of course, than the one who was murdered in Dead Men Tell, and Arleen Whelan, Richard Derr, Douglass Dumbrille, Henry Daniell and Steven Geray are also in the cast along with Toler and Sen Young. The plot revolves around mystery poisonings at a castle in the middle of the Mojave Desert. It was directed by Harry Lachman.

I’ll be back next week with reviews of the Criterion editions of The Small Back Room, La Ronde, The Earrigng of Madame de. and other DVDs.

-Peter J. Patrick (September 16, 2008)