The DVD Report #63

An indifferent public kept one of this year’s few good films so far from becoming the success it deserved. Kimberly Peirce’s meticulously researched Stop-Loss instead became the latest in a series of films about the Iraq War to suffer defeat at the box office.

The policy of stop-loss was created by the United States Congress after the Vietnam War. It was founded on Title 10, United States Code, which states in part: “… the President may suspend any provision of law relating to promotion, retirement, or separation applicable to any member of the armed forces who the President determines is essential to the national security of the United States” and Paragraph 9(c) of DD Form 4/1 (The Armed Forces Enlistment Contract) which states: “In the event of war, my enlistment in the Armed Forces continues until six (6) months after the war ends, unless the enlistment is ended sooner by the President of the United States.”

Every person who enlists in a branch of the U.S. Armed Forces signs an initial contract with an eight (8) year service obligation. The enlistment contract for a person going on active duty generally stipulates an initial period of active duty from 2 to 4 years, followed by service in a reserve component of the Armed Forces of the United States for the remainder of the eight year obligation. Service members whose ETS, retirement, or end of service obligation date falls during a deployment are generally involuntarily extended until the end of their unit’s deployment.

However, since 2004, the year after the Iraq War began, the U.S. Army, under the direction of the President, has routinely employed stop-loss to send returning, separating soldiers back to Iraq at the last possible moment. It has become, in essence, a back door draft.

The film focuses on decorated war hero Ryan Phillippe’s return to his small town Texas home and his bitter reaction to his sudden stop-loss situation. The film doesn’t shy away from brutal war scenes in its opening segment nor does it shy away from depicting the returning G.I.s as rowdy, confused and unable to cope with the return to civilian life. As one of them puts it, he’s going to miss blowing things up.

Phillippe had been a squadron leader whose last deadly mission resulted in the loss of several of his men and the severe wounding of another. The film features a powerful segment involving Phillippe’s visit to a V.A. hospital to visit that man, now blind and missing his right arm and right leg from the knee down and talking about going back and dying in the War so that his large immigrant family can become automatic U.S. citizens. It also features a scene in which Phillippe’s friend, Abbie Cornish, plays pool with a wounded soldier with one real arm, a prosthetic arm and two prosthetic legs.

Mostly though, it’s about Phillippe’s powerless struggle to reason with the powers that be to let him be. Phillippe delivers a tough, no-nonsense performance and he is matched with great support work from real life squeeze Cornish, Channing Tatum as a fellow squadron leader, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a dishonorably discharged soldier, Victor Rasuk as the blinded amputee and Timothy Olyphant as a belligerent commanding officer.

Poor marketing, rather than audience indifference, is to blame for the failure of Alison Eastwood’s Rails & Ties, which is such an obscure title that I’d never even heard of it until it hit the DVD shelves.

Clint’s daughter has been acting in films since the 1980s and singing in them since the late 1990s but this film marks her directorial debut. She proves to be as gifted a director as her celebrated father with the film’s sensitive material.

What might have been just another maudlin made-for-TV movie becomes, in her hands, and those of her actors, a deeply moving work of art.

Kevin Bacon, in one of his best performances, stars as a railroad man, a train engineer who follows the book in slowing down but not stopping a train as it approaches a car on the tracks. The car, driven by a crazed alcoholic young woman, has been driven there by the woman who plans on committing suicide and taking her 11-year-old son with her. The boy escapes in the nick of time and the story then focuses on his unhappy placement in foster care and his escape and tracking down of the engineer he blames for killing his mother.

There is a parallel story with a heart-breaking performance by Marcia Gay Harden as Bacon’s cancer-ridden wife railing against her impending death. At the crux of the film is her contentious relationship with Bacon saved by the entrance of the boy into their lives. As the boy, Miles Heizer delivers an exceptional child performance. It’s a film definitely worth seeking out.

Life and death in a small Quebec mining town in the 1940s is the subject of Claude Jutra’s 1971 film, Mon Oncle Antoine. Long regarded as the greatest Canadian film, this quietly observed slice of life drama focuses on a young adolescent working for his uncle, the local general store manager who doubles as the town’s undertaker. On a larger scale the harshness of life depicted in mid-20th Century French Canada opened the eyes of the rest of the country to problems of that province. They were appalled that people were living and dying in their own country of conditions that seemed more like something out of the 1840s.

The new Criterion Special Edition features two excellent documentaries, one on the history of the film and one on director Jutra who committed suicide in 1986 at the age of 56 rather than continue to suffer the ravages of early onset Alzheimer’s disease. He jumped into the St. Lawrence River like the character at the end of one of his films, his body not found until it washed up on shore five months later with a note in his pocket reading “I am Claude Jutra”.

From 1973 to 1975, producer Ely Landau brought to the screen fourteen filmed plays that were given limited runs in a handful of theatres across the countryunder the aegis of the American Film Theatre. While all fourteen films have been available singly for some time Kino has repackaged them as one set.

The fourteen films are The Iceman Cometh, A Delicate Balance, The Homecoming and Luther (1973); Three Sisters, Butley, Rhinoceros and Lost in the Stars (1974); and The Maids, Philadelphia, Here I Come, Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, Galileo, In Celebration and The Man in the Glass Booth (1975).

The most acclaimed play of the series and the most anticipated film of the group was Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh directed by John Frankenheimer from Thomas Quinn Curtiss’ screenplay.

Though not entirely successful due to the miscasting of Lee Marvin in the lead, the film is nevertheless made memorable by second and third leads Fredric March and Robert Ryan.

Ryan, who died shortly after completing his role in the film, looks gaunt and emaciated, his brave performance giving extra meaning to his long speeches about death and dying.

Jeff Bridges co-stars in the role made famous by Robert Redford in the 1960 TV version. That production featured Jason Robards in the most acclaimed performance of his career as “Hickey”, the character played in this version by Lee Marvin. The 1960 TV version of The Iceman Cometh is also available on DVD.

Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, directed by Tony Richardson from Albee’s text with a dream cast headed by Katharine Hepburn, Paul Scofield, Lee Remick, Kate Reid, Joseph Cotton and Betsy Blair, seemed like it couldn’t miss. Alas, the play, which is mired in theatrical artificiality only, comes alive when the magnificent Kate Reid is throwing one of her barbs at the rest of the cast. Reid was a last-minute replacement for Kim Stanley whom rumor has it was forced to leave because Hepburn felt she was stealing the film. Ironically, her replacement did exactly that.

A Tony Award winner as Best Play in 1967 and a Tony nominee once again for Best Revival of a Play in 2008, Peter Hall directed the screen version of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming from a screenplay by the author. It’s the story of a family reunion in which two brothers lust after the wife of a third while their father and uncle watch. All the performances are noteworthy but Pinter’s wife, Vivien Merchant, is the standout. Also featured are Cyril Cusack, Ian Holm, Michael Jayston and Paul Rogers.

John Osborne’s play Luther won the Tony as Best Play in 1964. Slow moving, but rewarding, the film version adapted by Edward Anhalt, provided Stacy Keach with one of his best screen roles as the medieval monk who spurred the Protestant Reformation.

Featured in the all-star cast are Patrick Magee, Hugh Griffith, Robert Stephens, Alan Badel, Julian Glover and Judi Dench. It was directed by Guy Green.

Filmed in 1970 and released in the U.K. then, Landau’s film of Laurence Olivier’s version of Anton Chekhov’s much-filmed Three Sisters was released in the U.S. as part of the American Film Theatre in early 1974. Olivier, Alan Bates and Joan Plowright are superb.

Simon Gray wrote the screenplay for his own play, Butley, directed by Harold Pinter and starring Alan Bates as the college professor who loses both his wife and boyfriend on the same day. The sharp dialogue and Bates’ performance are compelling, but the one-set play is very talky and not for all tastes. Jessica Tandy is a fellow professor.

Belonging very much to the theatre of the absurd, Tom O’Horgan’s film of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros with a screenplay by Julian Barry, re-unites Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder who had been successfully paired in The Producers. Here they are caught up in a world where people become afflicted by a rare flu in which they turn into rhinoceroses as they go slowly mad. Karen Black co-stars.

Daniel Mann directed the film version of the Maxwell Anderson-Kurt Weill musical Lost in the Stars based on Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country itself filmed twice (in 1952 with Canada Lee and again in 1995 with James Earl Jones). The musical version is just as memorable with Brock Peters as the South African minister whose son, played by Clifton Davis, is, to put it mildly, a disappointment. Songs include “Our Little Grey House”, “Stay Well” and the haunting title song. Melba Moore, Raymond St. Jacques, Paul Rogers and Paula Kelly co-star.

Slight but affecting, Christopher Miles’ film of Jean Genet’s The Maids features Glenda Jackson and Susannah York as the titled ladies’ maids who dress up as Madame (Vivien Merchant) in her absence and make fun of her. Mark Burns is Monsieur. Miles co-wrote the screenplay with Robert Enders.

Irish actor Donal McCann had the role of his life as the young man preparing to leave Ireland for America in Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come, directed by John Quested. Des Cave, Siobhan McKenna, Liam Redmond, Niall Toibin, David Kelly and O.Z. Whitehead co-star.

The long running off-Broadway revue Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris was filmed pretty mostly intact, though several odd editing techniques were used to “open up” the play by director Denis Heroux. Denis Blau is credited with the screenplay from his original French musical, but the English adaptation is by Mort Suhman who co-stars in the film with Elly Stone, Joe Masiell and lyricist-composer Brel himself. The songs, including “If We Only Have Love” and “Carousel”, were standards long before they were used in the play.

Bertolt Brecht worked on his play Galileo for more than thirty years, never quite being able to make the great scientist into the cowardly villain Brecht perceived him to be. Topol, as did all the actors who played the part on stage beginning with Charles Laughton, brought a humanity, infused with innate likeability, to the role that countermanded Brecht’s intent. The script was co-written by director Joseph Losey who first directed the play on Broadway in 1947 and features a most distinguished supporting cast including John Gielgud, Edward Fox, Clive Revill, Margaret Leighton, Georgia Brown, Tom Conti, Judy Parfitt, Michael Gough and Patrick Magee.

Three sons gather to celebrate their parents’ anniversary in David Story’s In Celebration directed by Lindsay Anderson with a screenplay by the author. Alan Bates stars as the older brother, but Brian Cox all but steals the film as the younger one.

Although several productions in the series were nominated for various critics’ award, it wasn’t until the end of the series that one scored an Oscar nomination. Finally, Robert Shaw’s The Man in the Glass Booth directed by Arthur Hiller from Edward Anhalt’s screenplay earned a Best Actor nomination for Maximilian Schell as the Nazi concentration camp survivor who is mistaken for a Nazi war criminal. Lois Nettleton, Lawrence Pressman and Lloyd Bochner are featured. Both Schell and Anhalt were nominated for Golden Globes.

-Peter J. Patrick (July 15, 2008)