The DVD Report #77

A box office hit, though not quite the success its producers had hoped, Paramount has released Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on Blu-Ray and standard DVD.

The fourth installment in the Indiana Jones franchise comes nineteen years after the last one, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,and finds star Harrison Ford spry as ever. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the film’s hoary plot, which is at least as old as 1932’s The Mummy wherein greedy men and women uncover buried ancient treasures and come to a no-good end. The difference is the detail, which here, under Steven Speilberg’s assured direction, benefits from the best that modern special effects wizardly can produce.

On the plus side, Karen Allen, Ford’s co-star in the original Raiders of the Lost Ark , is back and has a considerable role. John Hurt, Ray Winstone and briefly Jim Broadbent offer characteristically good support and Shia LaBeouf is a welcome addition as Ford’s newest sidekick.

On the other hand, Cate Blanchett, who only seems to be in every other movie made in the last ten years, is a bust as the film’s chief villain, a Russian Army officer who looks and sounds like Cyd Charisse in the musical comedy Silk Stockings when one imagines she is supposed to look and sound like remorseless killer Lotte Lenya in the James Bond spy classic From Russia With Love.

The film looks great on Blu-ray which offers a ton of supplements but your tolerance level will depend on how many times you’ve seen the plot played out before.

A more adult-friendly bit of entertainment, Marcel Lagenegger’s Deception is intriguing but no less disappointing in its predictability.

Ewan McGregor is a young auditor who falls victim to the machinations of charming scoundrel Hugh Jackman while dallying with delectable dames Michelle Williams, Charlotte Rampling, Lisa Gay Hamilton and Natasha Henstridge among others. The actors are all first rate and make it seem better than it is, but in the end you realize you’ve seen it all before and often done better as episodes of your favorite TV shows.

Remember when Paramount announced it would be releasing films from its catalogue of old Republic films and actually set release dates for Johnny Guitar, Letter From an Unknown Woman and The Dark Mirror in April 2006, and then just as abruptly cancelled those releases without explanation? Well, in the intervening two and a half years, the rights to the Republic library shifted to Lionsgate, which has been just as curmudgeonly about releasing those films. They have stepped gingerly into the marketplace with the DVD release of two 1948 films, Arch of Triumph and One Touch of Venus, but have just cancelled the scheduled imminent release of 1954’s Ulysses without fanfare. It seems as though nobody loves Republic.

Ingrid Bergman is reunited with her Gaslight co-star Charles Boyer in Lewis Milestone’s Arch of Triumph but this time he’s not trying to drive her mad. They are now star-crossed lovers caught up in pre-World War II nastiness. Boyer is a German doctor masquerading as a Czech tourist in 1938 Paris while Bergman plays a seen-it-all chanteuse. He is arrested and deported over and over until the Nazis close the border. She waits and waits. Charles Laughton, as a fellow refuge, and Louis Calhern, as a sympathetic restaurant and nightclub owner, co-star.

What works on stage doesn’t necessarily work on screen. For proof of this old adage look no further than William A. Seiter’s film version of the Kurt Weill-Ogden Nash musical One Touch of Venus about a statue of the Greek goddess of love coming to life in the form of Ava Gardner. While Gardner is certainly lovely, she wasn’t yet a strong enough actress to carry the film. Robert Walker was a bit out of his element as the clerk who brings her to life and Dick Haymes and Olga San Juan don’t offer much either. Only the great Eve Arden at her acerbic best manages to breathe some life into the thing. Still it’s nice to hear what remains of the lovely score, which includes “Speak Low”, even if we don’t have Mary Martin to sing it.

Lionsgate is also periodically re-releasing a number of Studio Canal films from the 1980s and 1990s. Among them is Richard Attenborough’s labor of love, 1992’s Chaplin, which was previously released in a bare bones edition in the early days of the DVD format. The film, which won an Oscar nomination for Robert Downey Jr. for his uncanny impersonation of the beloved star, features a strong supporting cast that includes Kevin Kline, Dan Aykroyd, Milla Jovovich, Diane Lane and Geraldine Chaplin playing her own grandmother.

Loads of extras include the Chaplin home movie All at Sea.

The Warner Gangster Collection Vol. 4 is upon us. Having pretty much exhausted its supply of famed gangster films, with its previous volumes, volume 4 provides some fairly entertaining lesser known releases as well as a feature length documentary called Public Enemies: The Golden Age of the Gangster Film.

The documentary, which covers the entire history of the world for the last 100 years, contains clips of just about every gangster movie made from 1906’s The Black Hand to 2006’s The Departed. Homage is paid to the stalwarts of the genre, notably Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, Scarface, Angels With Dirty Faces, The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra and White Heat, with archival footage of some of the best directors of the genre including Raoul Walsh, Howards Hawks and William A. Wellman. While it pretty much preaches to the converted, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. So if you’re a fan of the genre you’ll be in machine gun heaven.

After his great success in Little Caesar, Edward G. Robinsonhad a long and distinguished career in all kinds of films, but he kept returning to the gangster genre, sometimes as another hard boiled gangster, sometimes in a comic vein to kid his image. One of his first and best stabs at comedy was 1933’s The Little Giant directed by Roy Del Ruth in which he plays a hood who made a fortune in Chicago during Prohibition and now that “beer is back” cleans up his act and enters into high society in Santa Barbara. The always good to see Mary Astor co-stars as a once wealthy woman who has lost her fortune and must now rent out her house to Robinson.

Long regarded as the best of the 1930s boxing films, 1937’s Kid Galahad, directed by Michael Curtiz, features Wayne Morris in the role that Elvis Presley would later reprise. He is the battling bellhop groomed by promoter Edward G. Robinson to be the next best thing in the ring. Bette Davis is the moll with the heart of gold, Humphrey Bogart is the snarling rival promoter and Jane Bryan, who would play Davis’ daughter in The Old Maid two years later, is Morris’ true love.

Robinson stars once again in the 1938 comedy-drama, The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, directed by Anatole Litvak, an off-beat tale of a psychologist investigating the criminal mind. In order to gain a better understanding of his subjects, he decides to become a criminal himself. Claire Trevor, who would win an Oscar playing Robinson’s moll ten years later in Key Largo, is his leading lady and Humphrey Bogart, Allen Jenkins, Donald Crisp and Gale Page add immeasurably to the fun.

A more conventional crime drama, 1939’s Invisible Stripes, directed by Lloyd Bacon, stars George Raft, then being groomed by Warner Bros. to be its next big gangster star, as an ex-con who tries to reform but is pulled back into the life by fellow ex-con Humphrey Bogart. Both actors generate considerable star power as do William Holden as Raft’s younger brother and Jane Bryan as Holden’s sweetheart. The supporting cast includes Henry O’Neill, Paul Kelly and Lee Patrick.

Robinson is back in top form in the fifth and final film in the set Bacon’s 1942 comedy, Larceny, Inc. in which he plays an ex-con who wants to open a dog racing track but in order to raise the money first opens a luggage shop. There, he is assisted by cronies Broderick Crawford, Edward Brophy and the charming Jane Wyman. Jack Carson enters the fray as a luggage salesman and Anthony Quinn is a gangster who wants in on the loot generated by the business.

It was released on DVD way back in January, but I didn’t pay much attention to TV’s Damages until Glenn Close and Zeljko Ivanek won Emmys for it last month. I found it totally riveting and watched the first season’s thirteen episodes in just two days.

The acting of Close and Ivanek is first rate, as is the performance of Ted Danson who was also nominated, but lost to Ivanek. But so are those of all the actors here including Rose Byrne, Noah Bean, Tate Donovan, Philip Bosco, Peter Riegert, Anastasia Griffith, Michael Nouri, Peter Facinelli and Zachary Booth.

The series opens with a bloodied Byrne aimlessly wandering Manhattan streets and being taken into police custody. From there we flash back to the young lawyer’s first days in the Big Apple, her engagement to a young doctor and the class action suit being brought by powerhouse attorney Close against billionaire Danson who cashed in his stock and left his 500 employees out to dry. And that, as they say, is just the beginning. Evil lurks around every corner and everyone has something to hide. So many corpses pile up by the end of the Season it’s difficult to imagine who will be around for Season 2.

-Peter J. Patrick (October 21, 2008)