The DVD Report #80

The holidays have arrived with DVD releases of films for Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

For Veteran’s Day, Warner Bros. has come up with Warner Bros. and the Homefront featuring pristine versions of This Is the Army, Thank Your Lucky Stars and Hollywood Canteen.

Officially titled Irvin Berlin’s This Is the Army, the 1942 musical revue was a rarity on Broadway in that it featured an all-servicemen cast. Transferring to the screen a year later, it kept most of its original cast but added a few name stars including George Murphy, Joan Leslie, Ronald Reagan, Joe Louis, Kate Smith and Berlin himself. The story is minimal, the show’s the thing, and it’s quite a show under the sure hand of Warner’s top director, Michael Curtiz. Commentary is by film historian Drew Casper assisted by co-star Leslie. Extras include a documentary on Warner Bros. at War narrated by Steven Spielberg. This release restores the overture and exit music not attached to the film in 65 years. It’s also vastly superior to the myriad public domain versions long available.

The emphasis is on stars putting on a show in 1943’s Thank Your Lucky Stars, Warner Bros. follow-up to the success of This Is the Army, the highlight of which is Bette Davis singing “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old”. Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, John Garfield, Dinah Shore, Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino and Olivia de Havilland are also featured under the direction of David Butler.

Featuring more of a storyline, 1944’s Hollywood Canteen stars Robert Hutton and Dane Clark as Purple Heart recipients on leave who discover the servicemen’s canteen founded by Bette Davis and John Garfield. Davis and Garfield co-star as themselves along with Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Jane Wyman, Roy Rogers, Jack Benny and the object of Hutton’s affection, Joan Leslie, among many others on their best behavior. It was directed by Delmer Daves.

Of more contemporary interest is the Thanksgiving entry Kit Kittredge – An American Girl, a period pieceset in the Great Depression and ending on a very thankful Thanksgiving Day in 1934. Abigail Breslin stars as the ten-year-old would-be feature writer for a big city Cincinnati newspaper. Chris O’Donnell is the father who must leave to look for work in Chicago and Julia Ormond appears as the mother who must hold it all together by taking in borders that include Jane Krakowski, Glenne Headly, Joan Cusack and Stanley Tucci. Charming Breslin and her young friends also get to solve a mystery in which a young hobo is falsely accused of stealing money and other valuables. It’s a rare G-rated treat that the whole family can watch while waiting for the turkey to cook.

For Christmas, Warner Bros. has come up with two collections of holiday films. Newly released is the Warner Bros. Classic Holiday Collection Vol. 2 featuring All Mine to Give, Holiday Affair, It Happened on 5th Avenue and, unavailable outside of the box set, Blossoms in the Dust. They have also re-issued the Warner Bros. Classic Holiday Collection Vol. 1 featuring the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol, Boys Town and its sequel Men of Boys Town, Christmas in Connecticut, and, unique to and available only with the re-issued box set, The Singing Nun.

Barely seen by anyone in its initial theatrical release, Allen Resiner’s 1957 film All Mine to Give is a film that the world has discovered in its TV showings in the years since. Often called the saddest movie ever made, it is also joyful and hopeful in its tale of a young boy who must find homes for his younger siblings after the death of his mother on Christmas Day. Glynis Johns is very affecting as the mother, as is Cameron Mitchell as the father who dies earlier, but Rex Thompson as the boy on the mission is the one who steals your heart.

Warm and fuzzy are not adjectives often used in describing a Robert Mitchum film, but they perfectly fit Don Hartman’s 1949 film Holiday Affair in which Mitchum stars as an unemployed sales clerk who brightens the lives of widow Janet Leigh and her young son. Wendell Corey co-stars.

A charming, if forgotten, Oscar-nominated gem, Roy Del Ruth’s It Happened on 5th Avenue is the improbable tale of a group of squatters led by Victor Moore and Don DeFore who occupy an abandoned mansion while the owners, played by Charlie Ruggles, Ann Harding and Gale Storm, join them incognito.

Oddly enough, however, the most requested film in the new box set is the one you can only get if you buy the box. Mervyn LeRoy’s 1941 film Blossoms in the Dust was nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture and Actress (Greer Garson), winning one for its gorgeous color art direction.

Garson plays the real life Edna Gladney who, after the death of her own child, establishes first a day care center, then a home for foundlings. Her impassioned plea before the Texas legislature near the end of the film to strike the word “illegitimate” from birth records is one of the great speeches in movie history. The film marked the first time Garson appeared opposite Walter Pidgeon. The two were so good together they co-starred in another seven films over the next nine years.

Edwin L. Marin’s 1938 version of A Christmas Carol is a delightful adaptation with Reginald Owen in probably his best screen performance as Scrooge. He is ably supported by Gene, Kathleen and June Lockhart, and Terry Kilburn as the Cratchits; and Leo G. Carroll as Marley’s Ghost.

Spencer Tracy, of course, won his second Oscar for portraying real life Father Flanagan in Norman Taurog’s 1938 film of Boys Townfor which Mickey Rooney won a Special Juvenile Oscar in conjunction with several other films that year. Taurog’s 1941 sequel, Men of Boys Town, also with Tracy and Rooney ,gives us more of the same “there is no such thing as a bad boy” stuff.

Breezy and endearing, Peter Godfrey’s 1945 film Christmas in Connecticut gives us Barbara Stanwyck at her most charming as a magazine writer who is not what she pretends to be. Dennis Morgan, Sydney Greenstreet, S.K. “Cuddles” Sakall and Una O’Connor all do what they do best, that is add charm and guffaws.

Unlike the newer box set, the bonus disc in this newly released set is a bit of a clinker. Henry Koster’s 1966 film The Singing Nun is a completely fictionalized story of the then-popular real-life singing nun who had a world-wide hit with the catchy “Dominique” among other songs. It also seeks to capitalize on the resounding success of the previous year’s box office champ and Oscar winner The Sound of Music but doesn’t even come close. You can’t blame the film’s star, Debbie Reynolds, who does her best to rise above the film’s cornball script. Chad Everett, Agnes Moorehead and Greer Garson co-star, with Garson’s big false eyelashes on her Mother Superior character causing quite a stir at the time.

Also newly released from Warner Bros. is the 1951 epic Quo Vadis. Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1905 based largely on his meticulously researched 1895 novel about early Christians in Nero’s Rome. It had been filmed in France in 1902 and would be filmed twice again by Italy in the silent era, to great success in 1912 and to a lesser extent with Emil Jannings as Nero in 1925.

Cecil B. DeMille famously filmed a non-credited version in 1932 called The Sign of the Cross with Fredric March, Elissa Landi, Claudette Colbert, and Charles Laughton as Nero, but the big MGM production first announced in the early 1940s would have to wait until 1950 when all the elements came together under Mervyn LeRoy’s direction at Cinecitta Studios in Rome. The wait was worth it. The wait for the DVD, which like the film itself has taken ten years to get off the ground, has also been worth it. The film never looked or sounded so good, with the overture and exit music attached to the film for the first time in 56 years. All the elements that earned it eight Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Editing, Scoring, Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume Design and two Supporting Actors, Leo Genn as Petronius and Peter Ustinov as Nero, hold up extremely well. Robert Taylor as the Roman soldier, Deborah Kerr as the Christian woman he loves and Finlay Currie as St. Peter also star. Taylor, originally slated for the same role ten years earlier, actually got it only after Gregory Peck became ill and had to drop out.

Speaking of Peck, Universal has released The Gregory Peck Collection featuring the previously available Cape Fear and To Kill a Mockingbird, as well as the new-to-DVD The World in His Arms, Captain Newman, M.D., Mirage, and Arabesque.

While J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 suspense thriller Cape Fear, co-starring Robert Mitchum and Polly Bergen, has been nicely re-mastered, Robert Mulligan’s film from the same year of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winning To Kill a Mockingbird, for which Peck won his Oscar, is a re-issue of the same two-disc set previously released as part of Universal’s Legacy Series.

Raoul Walsh’s 1952 swashbuckler The World in His Arms is a fairly routine action film albeit one with an unusual locale: 1850s Alaska and Russia. Ann Blyth and Anthony Quinn co-star.

Peck stars in, but more or less acts as ringmaster for his flamboyant supporting cast, David Miller’s quirky 1963 service comedy-drama Captain Newman, M.D. Second-billed Tony Curtis has at least as much screen time as Peck while Eddie Albert as a psychotic senior officer and Bobby Darin in an Oscar-nominated performance as a shell-shocked airman all but steal the film out from under both of them.

The two very stylish suspense films Edward Dmtyrk’s Mirage from 1965 and Stanley Donen’s Arabesque from 1966 that round out the set seem just as fresh as they did way back then. Diane Baker and Walter Matthau co-star in the former, while Sophia Loren co-stars in the latter.

Paramount, which now owns the rights to 1970’s The Boys in the Band, has released a Special Edition of the William Friedkin film based on Mart Crowley’s landmark play about a group of gay friends attending a birthday party in a fabulous two-story luxury apartment in NYC.

From a hot ticket workshop production attended by everyone from Jackie Kennedy to Marlene Dietrich to a smash hit off-Broadway production, The Boys in the Band was a cultural phenomenon that dated very quickly with the gay liberation movement of the 1970s. Nevertheless as a dramatic work it ranks with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Subject Was Roses as an example of an essentially one-set play opened up for the screen that remains at its core an actor’s showcase. The nine actors who starred in the off-Broadway production retained their roles for the screen and they are all brilliant, with Kenneth Nelson, Leonard Frey and Cliff Gorman perhaps the best known of the group.

Friedkin and Crowley provide a feature length commentary and appear in the three accompanying documentaries along with producer Dominick Dunne and two of only three surviving members of the cast, Laurence Luckinbill and Peter White.

Paramount, which spends more time re-issuing the same films than it does coming up new releases, is at it again with two-disc Centennial Editions of spruced-up versions of three of their 1950s classics Sunset Boulevard, Roman Holiday and Sabrina.

They have done an excellent job with Sunset Blvd., which in its previous release had picture and sound problems. Billy Wilder’s film noir classic about a faded movie star attempting a comeback that nobody wants looks and sounds absolutely stunning. Extras galore include reminiscences of the film’ stars Gloria Swanson and William Holden.

The two early Audrey Hepburn classics looked good to begin with, but it’s always nice to have extras so if you’re a Hepburn fan, you may want to indulge in the behind the scenes stuff available on the second discs of William Wyler’s Roman Holiday in which she plays a runaway princess who beguiles reporter Gregory Peck and Billy Wilder’s Sabrina in which she plays the chauffer’s daughter torn between rich brothers Humphrey Bogart and William Holden.

Finally, Columbia has issued The Budd Boetticher Box Set featuring five of the westerns Boetticher made with Randolph Scott at the studio: The Tall T, Decision at Sundown, Buchanan Rides Alone, Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station.

Like the Anthony Mann-James Stewart collaborations at Universal, director Boetticher and star Randolph Scott worked hand-in-glove to produce an impressive body of work in a relatively short period of time. Made at a time when TV westerns dominated the airwaves, these big screen westerns made between 1957 and 1960 were not given the respect due them at the time. Dumped onto the second half of double-bills, these sparse but riveting “B” pictures have become the stuff of legend as attested to by the introductions given them by Clint Eastwood, Taylor Hackford and Martin Scorsese and the feature length commentaries by Hackford and historian Jeanine Basinger.

Accompanying the set is the feature length documentary Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That about the bullfighter-turned-director featuring Clint Eastwood and Quentin Tarantino among many others.

-Peter J. Patrick (November 11, 2008)