The DVD Report #54

It’s a bountiful week for classic film releases. Warner Bros., Fox/MGM and Universal have all released films that have been in demand since the dawn of DVD eleven years ago.

Ten years after his death, Warner Bros. pays tribute to Frank Sinatra with the release of four collections celebrating his lengthy career.

Sinatra’s popularity as a singer in the 1940s was unprecedented and has been matched only by the popularity of Elvis Presley and The Beatles since. His concert appearances stopped traffic, and women swooned and fainted the minute he appeared on stage. It was inevitable that he would become a movie star.

Sinatra’s persona as an actor in the 1940s was as an amiable, good-natured yokel, a persona far from the real streetwise Sinatra, and one he rebelled against. Considering him ungrateful, MGM dropped his movie contract at about the same time Columbia Records dropped his recording contract. Washed up he offered to play the part of Maggio in 1953’s From Here to Eternity for scale. He was given the part, won an Oscar and resuscitated his career. His films, as well as his records for Capitol in the 50s were the artistic highpoint of his career.

While he continued to grow as a singer in the 1960s, his movies of the period in which he now generally played a wiseass clown, The Manchurian Candidate and a few others excepted, were mostly crap.

Rather than re-master Anchors Aweigh, Take Me Out to the Ballgame and On the Town for its Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly Collection, Warner Bros. merely repackaged them in keepsake cases. There is no need to buy this set if you have the original releases unless you really, really need to get rid of those horrible old snap cases.

The new releases start with the Frank Sinatra Early Years Collection featuring 1943’s Higher and Higher, 1944’s Step Lively and 1951’s Double Dynamite from RKO; and 1947’s It Happened in Brooklyn and 1948’s The Kissing Bandit from MGM.

Featuring Sinatra as himself, Tim Whelan’s Higher and Higher is a bit of fluff about a group of servants including Jack Haley and Michele Morgan who put on a show to help their master, Leon Errol, keep his 5th avenue mansion from going into foreclosure. Victor Borge, Mel Torme, Barbara Hale and Mary Wickes are featured. The song “I Couldn’t Sleep a Wink Last Night”, as well as the score, won Oscar nominations.

He received top billing in Whelan’s Step Lively, a remake of the Marx Brothers’ Room Service with George Murphy in Groucho’s role. Sinatra has the role of the songwriter played by Frank Albertson in the earlier film, considerably beefed up to suit his personality. Adolphe Menjou, Walter Slezak and Eugene Pallette co-star and in place of Lucille Ball and Ann Miller in the original, we get Gloria de Haven and Anne Jeffreys. The film won an Oscar nomination for Art Direction.

Sinatra had the best role of his early career as the homecoming G.I. in Richard Whorf’s It Happened in Brooklyn, managing to hold his own against scene-stealing Jimmy Durante as his old friend. Kathryn Grayson, Peter Lawford and Gloria Grahame co-star. Sinatra sings one of his signature tunes, “Time After Time”, not to Grayson as might be expected, but to Durante!

Having lost Kathryn Grayson to Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh and Peter Lawford in It Happened in Brooklyn, Sinatra finally gets her for himself in Laszlo Benedek’s, The Kissing Bandit. J. Carrol Naish and Mildred Natwick add their customary class, but the best that can be said for this excruciating parody of The Mark of Zorro isthat it looks good in Technicolor.

Sinatra and Groucho Marx more or less play themselves while Jane Russell channels Judy Holliday’s character from Born Yesterday in Irving Cummings’ Double Dynamite, Sinatra’s disastrous penultimate film before From Here to Eternity revived his career.

Better films and bigger box office greeted Sinatra after his triumph in Eternity. Featured in the Frank Sinatra Golden Years Collectiion are 1955’s The Tender Trap
The Man With the Golden Arm and The Man with the Golden Arm; 1958’s Some Came Running; and 1965’s None But the Brave and Marriage on the Rocks.

Although back in comic mode, the Sinatra of Charles Walters’ The Tender Trap is a much more serious actor than he was before Eternity. Featuring a lovely performances by Debbie Reynolds as the kook who loves him, David Wayne and Celeste Holm, the film won an Oscar nomination for its catchy title tune.

Two years after winning his supporting Oscar for Eternity, Sinatra won his only Best Actor nomination for Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm, for what is generally regarded as his greatest performance. He plays a strung out junkie with a needy crippled wife, played by Eleanor Parker and a younger woman who truly loves him, played by Kim Novak. The film also won Oscar nominations for Art Direction and its evocative score by Elmer Bernstein. Previously available in public domain prints of varying quality, this is the only film in the set to have been previously available on DVD.

Long regarded as one of Vincente Minnelli’s finest dramatic films, Some Came Running was released the same year as Gigi which won Minnelli his only Best Director Oscar.

Personally, I have always had a problem with this film. The characters, Sinatra as a homecoming G.I. patterned after author James Jones, Dean Martin as his boozy buddy, Shirley MacLaine as a floozie with a heart of gold, Arthur Kennedy as Sinatra’s straight-laced brother, and Martha Hyer as a prim, uptight schoolteacher all seem to me to be out of place in the conservative small town Indiana of the Eisenhower fifties. As a dramatic work, this film was bookended in Minnelli’s canon by Tea and Sympathy and Home From the Hill, two films in which the characters fit perfectly within the framework of their environment. Clearly, though, I am in the minority on this one, as MacLaine, Kennedy and Hyer all received Oscar nominations for their work, as did the film’s Art Direction and song “To Love and Be Loved”.

Sinatra’s only directorial effort, None But the Brave, is a solid anti-war film in the tradition of All Quiet on the Western Front about a World War II truce between Americans and Japanese combatants on a Pacific island. Pre-dating Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima by more than forty years, it is from a story by Japanese writer Kikumaru Okuda and features Sinatra along with Clint Walker, Tommy Sands, Brad Dexter, Tony Bill and Sammy Jackson.

Sinatra and Dean Martin were paired for the last time in the contrived Marriage on the Rocks, directed by Jack Donohue. Deborah Kerr, in a failed effort to change her ladylike image, plays Sinatra’s wife who leaves him for Martin. She, Cesar Romero, Hermione Baddeley, Tony Bill and Nancy Sinatra are completely wasted.

Three of the four films that comprise the Frank Sinatra Rat Pack Collection, 1960’s Ocean’s 11, 1964’s Robin and the 7 Hoods and 1963’s 4 for Texas, have previously been released complete with commentary by Frank Sinatra Jr. Added to the collection is 1962’s Sergeants 3 sans commentary, a remake of Gunga Din set in the old west with rat packers Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop. Davis plays the character patterned after Gunga Din. This film is available for separate purchase.

Everything this week is not Sinatra. Also being released are two major British war films and a Hollywood farce about different aspects of World War II as well as a number of classic westerns and sci-fi films and a film that challenged obscenity laws in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Released almost back to back in 1957 and 1958 respectively, The One That Got Away and Carve Her Name With Pride are about two very different real life World War II protagonists.

In the former, directed by Roy Ward Baker, Hardy Kruger engagingly plays Luftwaffe pilot Franz von Werra, the only World War II British P.O.W. who got away. This highly suspenseful film chronicles his various escapes including the one that eventually led him to the U.S. on his way back to Germany.

In the latter, directed by Lewis Gilbert, Virginia McKenna plays British war widow Violette Szabo who joins British Intelligence and becomes a liaison to the French underground. Paul Scofield, Jack Warner and Maurice Ronet are memorable in support, but it’s basically English rose McKenna’s show and she shines throughout.

Anthony Quinn plays the buffoon in Stanley Kramer’s 1969 film The Secret of Santa Vittoria in which Quinn, as the mayor of a small Italian town, must hide a supply of wine from the Nazis toward the end of the war. Despite the best efforts of Anna Magnani, Hardy Kruger and Giancarlo Giannini to bring some class to the project, nothing really works, though the DVD transfer does full justice to the film’s gorgeous art direction and set design. The film is not without its supporters, having won Oscar nominations for Editing and Score. It also won the Golden Globe for Best Picture – Musical or Comedy and nominations for Actor, Actress, Director, Score and Song (“Stay”).

The films that comprise the Fox Classic Westerns Collection are 1950’s The Gunfighter, 1951’s Rawhide and 1954’s Garden of Evil.

Oscar nominated for its story, The Gunfighter marked the second teaming of director Henry King and star Gregory Peck. As they had done the previous year with the war drama Twelve O’Clock High, they brought a new sense of realism to an old genre. Peck is the retired gunslinger who young hot shots won’t leave in peace. Co-starring Helen Westcott, Millard Mitchell, Jean Parker, Karl Malden, Skip Homeier, Verna Felton, Ellen Corby and Richard Jaeckel, the film is packed with small moments that add up to a memorable whole.

Taut and suspenseful, Henry Hathaway’s Rawhide was the first pairing of Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward as a stagecoach driver and his passenger who are held siege by outlaws. Hugh Marlowe, Dean Jagger and Edgar Buchanan co-star in Hayward’s first box office smash under her Fox contract.

Hayward is back under Hathaway’s direction and this time Gary Cooper’s gets her in Garden of Evil in which Hayward hires Cooper, Richard Widmark and Cameron Mitchell to help free her husband, Hugh Marlowe, trapped in a collapsed gold mine. The tension between Cooper and Widmark is palatable in one of the best westerns of the mid-1950s.

Fox is also releasing a number of westerns under its distribution deal with MGM including 1955’s Man With the Gun, 1958’s Man of the West, 1959’s Day of the Outlaw and 1967’s The Way West, as well as re-releasing 1940’s The Westerner.

An early DVD release, William Wyler’s The Westerner has long been out of print, fetching big bucks for scarce copies on eBay. Although Gary Cooper gets star billing, the focus of the film is on Walter Brennan as rascally Judge Roy Bean. Brennan’s performance, which is arguably his greatest, won him his third Oscar in five years, a record he holds to this day. The film was also nominated for its Art Direction and Original Story.

One of the more obscure westerns of the mid-1950s, Richard Wilson’s Man With the Gun is redeemed by the casting of Robert Mitchum as the man who goes searching for missing wife Jan Sterling. Karen Sharpe, Henry Hull, Emile Meyer and a young Angie Dickinson co-star.

The last of the great Anthony Mann-directed westerns of the 1950s, and the only one not to star James Stewart, Man of the West provided Gary Cooper with one of his finest late-career roles as an aging, reformed outlaw. Not only does Mann get powerful work from Cooper, but also from Julie London, Lee J. Cobb, Jack Lord and Royal Dano as well. Cooper’s character’s name is Link, highly appropriate for the film that was the link between the optimistic westerns that preceded it and the violent, pessimistic ones that followed.

Starkly filmed amidst the snows of a bleak Montana winter, Day of the Outlaw provides Robert Ryan with one of his best leading roles as cowman in a town of farmers he’s at odds with but who risks his life to save them when gunmen take over the town. Burl Ives, Tina Louise, Alan Marshall, David Nelson, Venetia Stevenson, Nehemiah Persoff, Dabs Greer and Elisha Cook Jr. have prominent supporting roles.

Based on the true story of a former Missouri Senator’s wagon train trek across the U.S., Andrew V. McLaglen’s The Way West provided strong characterizations for Kirk Douglas as the taskmaster ex-Senator, Robert Mitchum as his scout and Richard Widmark as the settler who eventually takes over the march. The huge supporting cast includes Lola Albright who nearly drowned during filming, and Sally Field.

Originally available only at Best Buy, Universal’s The Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection – Vol. 1 & 2 is now available everywhere.

The class act of Volume One is Jack Arnold’s 1957 classic The Incredible Shrinking Man with Grant Williams as the businessman on holiday who begins to shrink due to exposure
to radioactive mist. Thanks to a literate script by Richard Matheson (Stir of Echoes, I Am Legend), the film has an immediacy that belies its title – it is extremely credible right down to its last shocking line.

The other films in the set are strictly grade-B programmers that offer some amusement: Tarantula!, The Mole People, The Monolith Monsters and Monster on the Campus.

The cream of the crop of Volume Two is Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1940 film, Dr. Cyclops, which, highly unusual for its day, was filmed in Technicolor with Albert Dekker as the mad doctor who shrinks his enemies. Unlike The Incredible Shrinking Man, however, this has a less unsettling, more traditional movie ending.

The other films in the set are the less interesting Cult of the Cobra, The Land Unknown, The Deadly Mantis and The Leech Woman.

Shocking in its day, Louis Malle’s 1958 film The Lovers stars Jeanne Moreau as a woman who leaves her husband and children after one night of passion. Moderately successful at the time, the film became a cause-célèbre when a city in the Midwest declared it obscene. The Supreme Court eventually became involved, causing Justice Potter Stewart to make his famous pronouncement about pornography: “I know it when I see it”. This wasn’t it.

-Peter J. Patrick (May 13, 2008)