The DVD Report #89

There are lots of new and recent DVDs to catch up with this week.

Sony/Columbia is one of the stingier companies when it comes to releasing classic films so it’s a cause for celebration when they come up with something for us like The Films of Michael Powell even if the collection contains only two films he directed alone.

Released in the U.K. as A Matter of Life and Death and in the U.S. as the more lyrical sounding Stairway to Heaven (Powell’s preferred title), the 1946 film co-directed by Powell and Emeric Pressburger was one of their best.

David Niven plays a downed British airman who falls in love with American radio controller Kim Hunter before learning that he was supposed to have died when his parachute failed to open but his emissary (Marius Goring) got lost in the fog over the English Channel. The brunt of the film is Niven’s appearance before the Heavenly Court he must convince to give him another chance. Beautifully filmed in black and white and color in the reverse of The Wizard of Oz with the black-and-white scenes the fantasy scenes and the color sequences the real life ones, the film was a critical and commercial hit in its day that found appreciative audiences in TV showings for many years thereafter but has become almost forgotten today. Hopefully the DVD release will allow new audiences to discover this little charmer.

The second film in the collection is Powell’s Age of Consent, his last film and Helen Mirren’s first.

Originally released in the U.S. in a badly truncated version in 1969, the film has been restored to the director’s original vision complete with Mirren’s plentiful nude swimming and posing for artist James Mason. Though the story of Australian artist Norman Lindsey’s earlier life was better represented in John Duigan’s 1994 film Sirens with Sam Neill in the role, this autumnal version filmed in and around Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has its compensations. For one thing, it is as gorgeous to look at as any of Powell’s films. Mason, fit, trim and spry at 60, co-produced the film with Powell who hadn’t been able to find financing since the critical and commercial flop of Peeping Tom, now considered a masterpiece, nine years earlier.

Another legendary director who had difficulty getting his films financed in his later years was Samuel Fuller. His last Hollywood film, made in 1981, was the controversial White Dog, an unproduced property that had sat on Paramount’s shelf for a number of years before Fuller was brought onto the project. The completed film had a troubled history that so upset Fuller that he literally left the country and moved to France.

Except for a one-week showing in Detroit in November 1982, distributor indifference kept the film out of U.S. theatres until 1991 when it was enthusiastically hailed by the New York film critics as a lost masterpiece.

The story of a dog that is raised to attack and kill black people until it is cured by a black trainer, the film based on a novel by Romain Gary, is not exploitative at all, but rather a meaningful examination of race relations in America. Kristy McNichol in her first adult role plays an up-and-coming actress who finds the dog but is unaware of its background. Paul Winfield plays the movie animal trainer who reprograms the dog and Burl Ives is his business partner. Although there are some horrific murders, most of the violence is off screen.

The film was co-written by Fuller and Curtis Hanson. Hanson and Fuller’s widow chronicle the production’s troubles in an excellent accompanying documentary on the Criterion Edition of the film.

One of last year’s most acclaimed foreign films, Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven, interweaves the lives of six characters from Bremen and Hamburg, Germany to Istanbul and the northern Turkish coast. The story follows the interconnected lives a young Turkish professor of German ancestry in Germany, his nasty hotheaded father, the father’s prostitute girlfriend, the prostitute’s daughter, the daughter’s female lover and the lover’s mother. The latter is wonderfully played by the great German actress Hanna Schygulla in an achingly powerful performance. Schygulla shines, but so do the lesser known players in this suspense-filled multi-cultural and multi-generational slice of life drama. Akin won the Best Director award at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and Schygulla recently won the National Society of Film Critics award as best supporting actress of 2008.

Generally thought of as the last great English novel, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited was first published in 1945. It is even more fondly remembered for the acclaimed 1981 TV mini-series it spawned starring Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews and Diana Quick and featuring Laurence Olivier and Claire Bloom. The abridged film version, directed by Juian Jarrold, stars up-and-comers Matthew Goode, Ben Whishaw and Hayley Atwell in the leads with Michael Gambon and Emma Thompson in the major featured roles of Lord and Lady Marchmain. Though all the actors are fine in the film version, it is nevertheless stolen by Emma Thompson in gray wig and aging makeup playing the grand dame as if to the manor and manner born. Thompson, as well as the film’s art direction, costume design and cinematography are all Oscar worthy.

Of lesser interest, but in the same vein as Brideshead Revisited, Saul Dibb’s The Duchess also offers noteworthy art direction, costume design and cinematography in the service of the story about a lovely, beguiling and influential female aristocrat, Keira Knightley as the Duchess of Devonshire, an ancestor of Lady Diana Spencer, whose marital woes compared quite strikingly to those of the future princess. Ralph Fiennes is the indifferent Duke, Dominic Cooper the Duchess’s young lover and Charlotte Rampling her mother. Brideshead ‘s Hayley Atwell has a major supporting role as the Duke’s mistress.

Last year’s best director Oscar winners, Joel and Ethan Coen, gave us as their follow-up to No Country for Old Men, a return to their comedic roots with Burn After Reading. As one has come to expect from the Coens, this is no feathery light romp, but a very dark comedy indeed. John Malkovich plays a retired low level CIA agent whose memoirs are found by an airhead exercise gym employees, Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand, who attempt to blackmail Malkovich. Meanwhile, Malkovich’s wife, Tilda Swinton, is having an affair with FBI agent George Clooney whose wife has a secret lover of her own. Richard Jenkins also figures into the ensuing mayhem as Pitt and McDormand’s boss. Enjoyable, but forgettable, it’s been nominated for Broadcast Film Critics and Golden Globe awards largely due to the lack of serious competition in the comedy categories.

Judd Apatow’s production team’s latest comedy is Pineapple Express directed by David Gordon Green, best known for such heavy dramatic works as Undertow and Snow Angels. Apatow’s buddy Seth Rogen stars as a pothead process server who witnesses a murder and Apatow’s other buddy James Franco appears as Rogen’s drug supplier. The two are forced to go on the lam from the killers, drug lord Gary Cole and crooked cop Rosie Perez. The beginning of the film is nicely set up, and Rogen and Franco’s bromance has more resonance than Rogen’s wanly played out affair with an underage high school girl, but the bloody mid section and climax are too broadly played and go on so long that they wear out their welcome long before the film ends. Franco unexpectedly won a Golden Globe nomination for his performance.

Classified as a comedy, but really more a coming-of-age drama, Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness provides TV actor Josh Peck with a breakout screen role as a melancholy high school drug pusher whose shrink is one of his clients. As the shrink, Ben Kinsgley at first seems to be channeling Harvey Keitel at his looniest, but proves to be a more complex and eventually lovable character as he becomes Peck’s best friend as well as advisor. Olivia Thirlby is a total charmer as Kinglsey’s stepdaughter with whom Peck has his first romance. Famke Janssen as Kingsley’s wife and Jane Adams as one of Peck’s clients also offer strong portrayals in support.

TV miniseries were something new in 1976 when Captains and the Kings premiered. There had been only Rich Man, Poor Man, still missing on DVD in the U.S., when this beloved new-to-DVD series was first shown. Telling one man’s life story against the backdrop of the industrial revolution, the fictional Armagh family had obvious parallels to the Kennedy dynasty as it explored its themes of a shadow government, presidential politics and assassination as well as infidelity, alcoholism and insanity. There were strong performances by the entire cast including Golden Globe winner Richard Jordan, Emmy winner Patty Duke, Emmy nominees Jane Seymour and Charles Durning, as well as Blair Brown, Perry King, Burl Ives, John Houseman, Henry Fonda, Barbara Parkins, Celeste Holm, Ray Bolger, Ann Sothern and many others.

On the TV series front, Nip/Tuck Season 5, Part 1, containing 14 of the planned 22 episodes filmed prior to last year’s writers’ strike, has been released. The narcissistic plastic surgeons played by Dylan Walsh and Julian McMahon have moved their superficial practice to Los Angeles in order to get into even more outrageous relationships than they could even dream of in Miami.

-Peter J. Patrick (January 13, 2009)