The DVD Report #101

One of last year’s best films, John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, based on his Pulitzer Prize and Tony award-winning play, has come home to Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Shanley’s film, like his play, is set in 1964. The Catholic Church is on the cusp of great change. Vatican II with its sweeping mandates has already occurred and soon nuns will emerge from their cloistered lives, shorten their habits and eventually lose them and drop their Saint’s names and go back to their Baptismal, or birth, names. But for now they remain set in their ways. When not teaching or administering to the sick and the poor they live an austere life of solitude and prayer. Not so priests who can do pretty much what they please.

Enter into this atmosphere Sister James, a new nun, who is caught in the middle of a chess game between charismatic Father Flynn and dragon lady school principal, Sister Aloysius. Sister Aloysius is certain that something happened between Father Flynn and a new boy in school. She makes it her business to get at the truth, but what is the truth? Then she meets Mrs. Miller, the boy’s mother, and the narrative takes us in a completely different direction.

Essentially a four-character piece, the success of the film depends on the performances of those four actors and in the Oscar nominated work of Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Viola Davis we have a perfect quartet.

Extras include documentaries on the making of the film and interviews with four nuns of the Sisters of Charity, the order on which the story is based including the real life Sister James who was Shanley’s first grade teacher.

On the older film front, MGM has released three lesser musicals previously available only as part of a massive box set.

Samuel Goldwyn produced it, Ben Hecht wrote it, George Gershwin scored it and George Marshall directed it, so why isn’t1938’s The Goldwyn Follies better than the sum of its parts? Perhaps it’s because those parts are so diametrically opposed as to make the whole thing a hodgepodge.

Adolphe Menjou plays the lecherous producer, Andrea Leeds the sweet young thing, Kenny Baker the baritone, Vera Zorina the ballerina turned actress, Edger Bergen the ventriloquist, Helen Jepson the soprano, and Ella Logan the best friend; all perform well enough, but then there is Bobby Clark, Phil Baker and The Ritz Brothers at their annoying worst.

To the good, Kenny Baker gets to sing the last songs Gershwin ever wrote including “Love Walked In” and “Love Is Here to Stay”. For added measure, tennis pro Frank Shields, Brooke’s grandfather, plays the assistant director on a film within the film.

Olympic champion ice skater Sonja Henie proved a delightful comedienne on screen and made a handful of charming films, none of which are on DVD in the U.S. It’s a little odd, then, that the first one made available is one of her lesser efforts, 1945’s It’s a Pleasure, directed by William A. Seiter. Co-starring Michael O’Shea, Bill Johnson and Marie McDonald, it’s at best a pleasant time killer.

Howard Hawks remade his own 1941 comedy classic, Ball of Fire, into the 1948 musical, A Song Is Born, a vehicle for Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo in the Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck roles. The original was itself a variation on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and was about Gary, and seven elderly professors sequestered in their efforts to write an encyclopedia, whose life is interrupted by Stanwyck, a stripper on the lam from her gangster boyfriend. In the remake the old guys are musicologists. It’s decent enough, but the original is the one to see.

Universal, which owns the Paramount catalogue of films made between 1929 and 1949, has been more than a little stingy in releasing them to home video. While some of the more prestigious titles languish, they have put together a collection of pre-Code films, no doubt inspired by Warner Bros. successful Forbidden Hollywood series. Called the Pre-Code Hollywood Collection, and subtitled 6 Shocking Tales from Before Rules!, all six films have been impressively restored.

The remake of a notorious 1915 silent, George Abbott’s 1931 film The Cheat was intended to make a star of Broadway actor Harvey Stephens as the husband who takes the fall for his wife when she shoots her would-be lover after he brands her left breast with a hot iron. Poor Harvey, with Tallulah Bankhead and Irving Pichel chewing the scenery as, respectively, the wife and the opium smoking sex fiend who scars her, he never had a chance. Despite a long career in films and TV, he never had another starring role.

Sessue Hayakawa played the Ivory hunter sex fiend who collects women of all persuasions in the original. Casting Anglo-Saxon Pichel in the remake avoids the racial stereotyping but not the unsavory atmosphere. Bankhead baring her scarred breast in court to leering on-lookers is the film’s highlight. It’s worth seeing for its curio value. At only 74 minutes, the film breezes by.

Fredric March could play a drunk both happy and nasty with the best of them. His portrayal of the reporter and struggling playwright married to heiress Sylvia Sidney in Dorothy Arzner’s 1932 film Merrily We Go to Hell is one of his best in that vein. The title stems from March’s toast at various points in the film.

Adrianne Allen plays the other woman, a reigning Broadway star, with verve. In real life, Allen was married to Raymond Massey and the mother of his children, Anna and Daniel. She divorced Raymond and married her divorce lawyer after ten years of marriage. Raymond then married the lawyer’s ex-wife and they all lived happily ever after.

Cary Grant, who would soon star opposite Sidney in Madame Butterfly and March in The Eagle and the Hawk, has a small part as Allen’s on stage lover with whom Sidney has a brief fling after declaring her marriage to March “open”.

Arzner, the only major female director in Hollywood from the 1920s-1940s, only made a handful of films but they were all interesting, as is this one. There is really nothing shocking about it, though neither its open marriage theme nor its title would be allowed once the Production Code went into effect.

Grant’s star went quickly on the rise as evidenced by his billing over Nancy Carroll in William A. Seiter’s 1933 film Hot Saturday, even though the film is built around Carroll’s character. A racy comedy about the sexual goings-on in small town Americana, Carroll is torn between Grant, fellow bank employee Eddie Woods and archeologist Randolph Scott. William Collier Sr. and Jane Darwell play her parents. The ending comes as a bit of a surprise.

Claudette Colbert pulls out all the stops in Alexander Hall and James Somnes’ 1933 film Torch Singer, in which she goes from unwed mother to nightclub singer to children’s radio show star to falling down drunk. The film itself is rather tame for a pre-Code soap opera, but Colbert makes it highly watchable. She receives good support from Ricardo Cortez as her benefactor, David Manners as the man who loved and left her, and Ethel Griffies as Manners’ mean old aunt.

The song “Sweet Marijuana”, sung by Gertrude Michael to a background of topless chorus girls sitting on giant cacti, is the eyebrow raiser in Mitchell Leisen’s 1934 film Murder at the Vanities (aka Earl Carroll’s Murder at the Vanities) released a mere six weeks before the Production Code went into effect.

Taken from Carroll’s stage play, the film is both a full-blown musical on stage and a backstage murder mystery. Carl Brisson and Kitty Carlisle are the stars of the show, Victor McLaglen the police lieutenant investigating a murder, Jack Oakie the stage manager, Jessie Ralph the wardrobe mistress, Dorothy Stickney a lovesick maid, Toby Wing an especially dumb blonde chorine, Gail Patrick a private investigator, and Donald Meek the coroner. Ann Sheridan and Lucille Ball are in the chorus.

Star Brisson later became Rosalind Russell’s father-in-law.

The last film in the collection is Erle C. Kenton’s Search for Beauty, released in February 1934. Unlike many of the pre-Code films which were re-cut and re-released in bowdlerized versions, this one was always considered too hot to handle either as a re-issue or as a re-make. Dealing with three con artists (Robert Armstrong, Gertrude Michael and James Gleason) who bamboozle Olympic champions Buster Crabbe and Ida Lupino into fronting for an exercise magazine which they turn into a lurid cheesecake rag, the film is loaded with bared flesh, actually more male than female, double entendres and questionable sight gags. It’s all very funny and very tame by today’s standards.

An extra included with the set is a reproduction of the Motion Picture Production Code with rules that were to last from July 1934 to October 1968 after which it was replaced by the Motion Picture of America rating system still in effect today. Here are a few highlights:

MURDER

The technique of murder must be presented in a way that will not inspire imitation.
Brutal killings are not to be presented in detail.
Revenge in modern times shall not be justified.

SEX

The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld. Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing.
Excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures, are not to be shown.
Rape is never the proper subject for comedy.
Sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden.
Miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races) is forbidden.
Sex hygiene and venereal disease are not subjects for motion pictures.
Scenes of child birth, in fact or in silhouette, are never to be presented.
Children’s sex organs are never to be exposed.

VULGARITY

The treatment of low, disgusting, unpleasant, though not necessarily evil, subjects should be subject always to the dictate of good taste and a regard for the sensibilities of the audience.

OBSCENITY

Obscenity in word, gesture, reference, song, joke, or by suggestion (even when likely to be understood only by part of the audience) is forbidden.

PROFANITY

Pointed profanity (this includes the words: God, Lord, Jesus, Christ – unless used reverently – Hell, S.O.B. damn, Gawd), or every other profane or vulgar expression, however used, is forbidden.

COSTUME

Complete nudity is never permitted. This includes nudity in fact or in silhouette, or any lecherous or licentious notice thereof by other characters in the picture.