Looking at Film from Every Angle

The DVD Report #90

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Peter J Patrick

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The big release of the week is the Criterion Collection’s long awaited release of Douglas Sirk’s 1954 film Magnificent Obsession. John M. Stahl’s original 1935 version is included on a bonus disc.

The original novel was written by Lloyd C. Douglas, whose religious-themed The Robe was a huge box office hit in 1953, prompting new interest in his earlier work. Magnificent Obsession would not be the last John M. Stahl film remade by Sirk. Five years later he would remake Imitation of Life as well.

More spiritual than religious, the title of Douglas’ novel refers to the former Methodist minister’s deep belief in the philosophy of doing good deeds quietly. The 1935 version with Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor, scripted by Douglas, is closer to the novel in tone. Sirk’s sudsier remake with Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson is, however, the more famous version. Both are extremely well made and deserve to be seen.

Taylor, who became rather wooden in his later films, is breezily charming in the early devil-may-care scenes of the earlier version. He is also quite believable as the down-to-earth man his character becomes in later life. Rock Hudson is equally impressive in the later version. Both actors became major stars due to their characterizations in these films.

Irene Dunne, at the time of the making of the earlier version, was the queen of the weepie, having made so many in the first few years of her arrival in Hollywood that she probably could have played the part of the widow accidentally blinded by Taylor in her sleep. It is a tribute to her skills that she brings as much freshness and warmth to the role as she does. Wyman, who had become a latter day queen of the weepies by the time she filmed the later version, does equally well and in fact earned her fourth Oscar nomination for her efforts.

Wyman and Hudson were later re-teamed for Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows in which they were even more effective.

Extras include a 1980 interview with Sirk and a new interview with filmmakers Allison Anders and Kathryn Bigelow.

Newly released by Criterion on both standard DVD and Blu-ray, Gregory Nava’s 1983 film El Norte is one of the first and best films made about the experiences of Latin American emigrants to the U.S. It features Zaide Silvia Guiterrez and David Villalpando as Guatemalan teenagers who miraculously survive the massacre of their hometown. The film chronicles their adventures, both harrowing and funny, as they travel through Guatemala and Mexico to Los Angeles where they take low-paying jobs as illegal immigrants until trouble looms anew. Nominated for an Oscar for its screenplay, the film, co-produced by the U.S. and the U.K., was admitted into the National Film Registry in 1995.

As close to a traditional western as we’re likely to see these days, Ed Harris’ Appaloosa, from a Robert B. Parker novel, is a leisurely paced, straight-forward account of a couple of professional lawmen, Harris and partner Viggo Mortensen, who come to the title town to clean it up after the murder of the town’s marshal and his two deputies.

Harris, better known as an actor, has directed only one previous film, 2000’s Pollock about the famed artist for which he won his only Oscar nomination as a lead actor in the title role and for which Marcia Gay Harden won the supporting actress Oscar for her portrayal of his partner Lee Krasner. Harris, one of our most versatile actors, also has three supporting actor nominations to his credit for Apollo 13, The Truman Show and The Hours.

The one characteristic Harris displays in each of his Oscar nominated performances, as well as in many other films, is his ability to shout louder than his co-stars. Here, he provides the audience with a completely different, quietly controlled soft-spoken performance. Mortensen, Harris’ co-star in A History of Violence is equally low-key and controlled. The histrionics are left to Oscar winners Jeremy Irons as the principal bad guy and Renee Zellweger as an unconventional leading lady, a widow who, as Mortensen puts it, “has to be with a man.”

Technical aspects of the film including its clean, lean cinematography are first rate. The film looks especially good on Blu-ray.

Speaking of Blu-ray, studios continue to spruce up their major films for release in the new format.

One of the newest to get the Blu-ray treatment is Election, an uproariously funny high school comedy from 1999 that in many ways foreshadows the disastrous 2000 U.S. Presidential elections. The film stars Reese Witherspoon as an obnoxious, self-absorbed candidate for class president. Matthew Broderick is the social studies teacher who can’t stand her and puts up his own candidate, football star Chris Klein, to oppose her. The film’s screenplay, which was written by director Alexander Payne and his writing partner Jim Taylor, was nominated for an Oscar. The writing duo went on to win the Oscar for their next screenplay, Sideways, five years later.

One of the most popular films of recent years, Nick Cassavetes’ 2004 film The Notebook has been re-released on standard DVD and issued for the first time on Blu-ray in a ridiculously over- packaged set that includes an actual notebook, note paper and envelopes.

The film itself is both a charming love story and a gothic mystery. James Garner, in a Screen Actors Guild-nominated performance plays an elderly man visting his Alzheimer’s-afflicted wife, director Cassavetes’ real life mom Gena Rowlands in a Satellite Award-winning performance. There, he attempts to make inroads into her memory by reading her a story about a young woman who must choose between two loves. The young woman is obviously Rowlands fifty years earlier and one of the young men is Garner, but which one?

Rachel McAdams is the young woman, and Ryan Gosling and James Marsden are the two men. All three are fine.

Diane Lane won her first, and to date only, Oscar nomination for her smoldering performance in Adrain Lyne’s 2002 film Unfaithful, a deft Hollywood remake of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 film La Femme Infidele.

Lyne, who specializes in this type of material, made it his most suspenseful since the mega-hit Fatal Attraction. Lane, often a diffident actress in unchallenging roles, here lives up to the task given her as the straying wife. Olivier Martinez as her young lover and Richard Gere as her cuckolded husband are both excellent, but it’s Lane’s film all the way. The sharpness of the Blu-ray format enhances viewing enjoyment.

I’ll be back next week with reviews of a slew of classic films being released on DVD for the first time.

-Peter J. Patrick (January 20, 2009)

Buy on DVD!
Use Each Title’s Link


Top 10 Rentals of the Week

(January 11, 2009)

  1. Pineapple Express
  2. Righteous Kill
  3. Bangkok Dangerous
  4. Babylon A.D.
  5. Eagle Eye
  6. Burn After Reading
  7. The Dark Knight
  8. Mamma Mia!
  9. Death Race
  10. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Top 10 Sales of the Week

(January 4, 2009)

  1. Eagle Eye
  2. The Dark Knight
  3. Mamma Mia!
  4. WALL-E
  5. Horton Hears a Who
  6. Wanted
  7. Death Race
  8. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
  9. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
  10. Burn After Reading

New Releases

(January 20, 2009)

Coming Soon

(January 27, 2009)

(February 3, 2009)

(February 10, 2009)

(February 17, 2009)

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