The DVD Report #65

Peter Luketic’s 21 starts out well on the campus of Boston’s M.I.T. where poor boy Jim Sturgess falls under the influence of evil professor Kevin Spacey who teaches him to count cards, a trick he will need to win the money he needs for his tuition at Harvard Medical School. Once the film gets to Las Vegas, however, it is a repetitious game of cat and mouse as Sturgess and his co-conspirators, including Kate Bosworth, manage to beat the odds under the watchful eyes of Laurence Fishburne until he outsmarts them. Sometimes what happens in Vegas should stay in Vegas.

If this week’s most high profile new film to be released on DVD is somewhat underwhelming, there are several classic films being released that more than make up for it.

Criterion has reissued Akria Kurosawa’s 1963 masterpiece High and Low with four-track stereo replacing the mono sound from its initial release. Though most people think of Kurosawa as the director of epic films of feudal Japan like Rashomon and The Seven Samurai, he was also quite adept at directing modern dress dramas and this adaptation of Ed McBain’s crime novel King’s Ransom was one of his best. Toshiro Mifune stars as the shoe magnate who must pay kidnappers who mistakenly kidnap his chauffer’s son instead of his. The film was responsible for tougher kidnapping laws in Japan. Extras include several documentaries, including a rare interview with Mifune.

Criterion has also released a new DVD of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 film Vampyr, previously available only in a no-frills edition from Image. The Criterion Edition offers both the original theatrical version and a specially made version that removes the German inter-titles and replaces them with easier-on-the-eyes English subtitles. The film itself, which changes the spelling of vampire to the more fanciful Vampyr is not your typical horror film. Famed for its imagery, it is presented more as an ongoing nightmare than a straight forward narrative. The beautiful young vampire of the novel Carmilla, upon which it is based, is turned into a limping, fat old lady. The protagonist is played by producer Baron Nicholas de Gunzberg who uses the stage name Julian West in order to protect his family name. Special features include both the original novel and the script translated into English.

One of the best films ever about the lives of jazz musicians, Anatole Litvak’s Blues in the Night was a few years ahead of the film noir era but is very much in the style of that genre. Richard Whorf is the actual lead, but the better known Priscilla Lane and Betty Field were billed above him. Whorf, later a TV director, is outclassed not just by those two actresses, but by a stellar supporting cast that includes Lloyd Nolan, Wallace Ford, Jack Carson, Elia Kazan and Billy Halop. Kazan, excellent as a fast-talking law student turned musician, isn’t the only future big name director who contributed outstanding work on the film. Robert Rossen (The Hustler) wrote the fast-moving script and Don Siegel (Dirty Harry) was responsible for the film’s eye-popping montages.

After one of the most gorgeously shot opening sequences in movie history, Jack Webb’s Pete Kelly’s Blues settles down into a routine gangster melodrama, albeit one that is enlivened by some pretty mean jazz music and the thrilling singing of Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar-nominated Peggy Lee. Nothing, however, can top that opening in a New Orleans cemetery in 1915 in which a trumpet falls off a horse drawn hearse, not even the chandelier-crashing climax involving Webb (who also stars), leading lady Janet Leigh, and bad guy Edmond O’Brien. The real Pete Kelly and his band have featured roles.

Tyrone Power was Fox’s biggest box office star from the late 1930s to well into the 1950s, and has remained popular for fifty years after his death. Friends and fans still get together once a year at the cemetery where he is buried to attend a memorial service on the anniversary of his death. Although several of his films, most notably The Mark of Zorro, The Razor’s Edge, The Long Gray Line and Witness for the Prosecution, have consistently sold well on DVD, Fox was unprepared for the strong sales that accompanied the release of its Tyrone Power Collection featuring several of his swashbucklers last year. As a result they have released a mammoth new set called the Tyrone Power Matinee Idol Collection which includes four of his most sought after films as well as six more obscure titles and four documentaries on his career for a list price of less than $35, or less than $3.50 per title, making it the bargain of the month, if not the year. And they still have enough of his major films left over for another set. Lloyd’s of London, Suez, King of the Khyber Rifles and Untamed will have to wait for future release.

The four highly sought after films in the current release are Johnny Apollo, This Above All, The Luck of the Irish and I’ll Never Forget You. Of the four, only Johnny Apollo has been previously released on home video, in a long ago VHS Fox gangster film collection. The other three have only been available in grainy, hard-to-watch copies from private sellers.

The oldest film in the collection is Power’s first with Fox, Irving Cummings’ Girls’ Dormitory from 1936. Built around French import Simone Simon in her first Hollywood film as a student at a girls’ school infatuated with headmaster Herbert Marshall, it was ninth-billed Power who made audiences sit up and take notice as Simon’s handsome young cousin who arrives on in the final reel. Ruth Chatterton and Constance Collier co-star.

Three of the five films Power made with Loretta Young between 1936 and 1938 are included here, including his first starring role in Tay Garnett’s breezy Love Is News in which Young plays a madcap heiress who turns the tables on wise guy reporter Power. Don Ameche co-stars as his flummoxed editor.

In Edward H. Griffith’s smart, sophisticated Caf Metropole, Power is a bogus prince wooing Young’s delighted heiress with a Russian accent that comes and goes. Adolphe Menjou, Gregory Ratoff, Charles Winninger and Helen Wesley add to the merriment.

Power and Young play a recently-divorced couple who meet again by chance in Walter Lang’s charming Second Honeymoon. Stuart Erwin and Claire Trevor co-star.

Power and Young were a perfect team, but she tired of fighting studio chief Daryl Zanuck for better roles and left Fox when her contract expired. The studio then paired Power with Linda Darnell in several films beginning in 1939 with Gregory Ratoff’s screwball comedy Day-Time Wife in which he plays an executive who becomes bored with his young wife and finds excuses to spend more time with his secretary, Wendy Barrie. She gets even by going after his partner, Warren William. Binnie Barnes and Joan Davis co-star.

Power was at the zenith of his popularity when Fox cast him against type in Henry Hathaway’s gangster melodrama Johnny Apollo. Released in 1940 on the heels of his two biggest hits, Jesse James and The Mark of Zorro, this is the darkest film in the collection. It’s also one of the best, as Power goes from idealistic young romantic to hardened criminal in the course of the film. Dorothy Lamour is outstanding as his leading lady while Edward Arnold and Lloyd Nolan add dramatic heft to the supporting cast.

Power had another powerful role in Anatole Litvak’s 1942 melodrama The Above All, also included here,in which he plays a disillusioned soldier opposite recent Oscar winner Joan Fontaine as an upper-crust idealist. The stellar cast also includes Thomas Mitchell, Henry Stephenson, Nigel Bruce, Gladys Cooper, Philip Merivale, Sara Allgood and Alexander Knox.

The collection offers two versions of Henry Koster’s The Luck of the Irish. You can choose between the standard black-and-white version that has been shown on TV all these years and the original 1948 theatrical release version in which the scenes in Ireland at the beginning and end of the film have been tinted green.

Though based on a popular novel, the film seems to have been heavily influenced by two landmark Broadway musicals of the previous year: Finian’s Rainbow and Brigadoon. You get the leprechaun-in-America element of the first combined with the fortuitous-visit-and-eventual-return-to-an-enchanted-land of the latter.

Power’s charm blends well with his two leading ladies, Anne Baxter and Jayne Meadows, the latter reminiscing about the film in a special feature, but the film wouldn’t work without a perfectly cast leprechaun and it gets one in Oscar-nominated Cecil Kellaway.

The success of The Luck of the Irish prompted Fox to cast Power opposite Gene Tierney in a reworking of Love Is News, now called That Wonderful Urge, and included here as well. Directed by Robert B. Sinclair, the cast also includes Reginald Gardiner, Arleen Whelan, Lucile Watson and Gene Lockhart.

Arguably the best film in the collection is the last and newest, Roy Ward Baker’s I’ll Never Forget You from 1951. Originally titled The House in the Square in Great Britain, the film is a savvy update of the classic Berkeley Squarewith Power in Leslie Howard’s Oscar-nominated role as the contemporary man and his look-alike ancestor. Power’s character has been modernized as a nuclear scientist, making the romance, time-shifting across decades and ancestral generations, somehow seem more plausible. Ann Blyth has one of her best roles as the woman he falls in love with across time. Opening and closing scenes are in black-and-while while the middle section is in Technicolor.

Among the extras is a telling documentary narrated by his three children. Sadly his two daughters by Linda Christian barely remember him and his son Tyrone, Jr. was born after he died, but all have come to know him through his films and personal relationships with those he worked with.

If all that isn’t enough to keep you busy for a while, you can lose yourself in the newly released Law & Order – SVU – Season 7. This release covers the 2005-2006 season of the venerable police procedural now going into its tenth season. Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni star.

-Peter J. Patrick (July 29, 2008)