Criterion has made a lot of classic film lovers happy with the release of That Hamilton Woman, Alexander Korda’s sumptuous 1941 film about the scandalous adulterous love affair of Britain’s Napoleonic War hero, Lord Horatio Nelson and Emma, Lady Hamilton. A favorite of many, Winston Churchill claimed to have seen the film more than eighty times.
Vivien Leigh coming off the highs of Gone With the Wind and Waterloo Bridge and Laurence Olivier coming off the highs of Wuthering Heights and Rebecca play out the tragic love story that is in many ways like their own real life story.
Featuring meticulously crafted battle sequences and exquisitely staged confrontation scenes, the two stars are at their best. It’s certainly the best film they ever made together.
Heading the supporting cast are such stalwarts as Gladys Cooper, Sara Allgood, Alan Mowbray and Henry Wilcoxin. Cooper, who had played Olivier’s sister in Rebecca the year before, plays his wife here, the last time she would play a middle-aged character before beginning a 25 year career as the mother, grandmother and great-grandmother of every major star in Hollywood.
Allgood essays the role of Leigh’s chatty mother the same year she won an Oscar nomination for playing a very different mother, the beloved matriarch of the coal mining family in How Green Was My Valley. Mowbray, usually in supercilious roles, plays Leigh’s husband, a British ambassador. Wilcoxin, best known for his roles in practically every Cecil B. DeMille movie, plays Olivier’s loyal second in command.
Extras include commentary from noted film historian, Ian Christie, a reproduction of a 1941 radio promotional program and a booklet essay by film critic Molly Haskell.
That Hamilton Woman is available on standard DVD only.
Criterion has also just released a more contemporary American film, Wilt Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco. The 1998 comedy-drama was the third in Stillman’s trilogy about contemporary upper-class WASPs, following 1990’s Metropolitan and 1994’s Barcelona.
Set in the early 1980s, the central characters in the film are recent college grads Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny who spend most of their evenings at a Studio 54-like disco club frequented by a gallery of interesting characters played by Chris Eigeman, Mackenzie Astin, Matt Keeslar, Robert Sean Leonard, Jennifer Beals and Michael Weatherly among others. The film’s dazzling ending on a train predates the climax of Slumdog Millionaire by 11 years.
Extras include commentary by Stillman and stars Sevigny and Eigeman and four deleted scenes, with commentary also provided by Sitllman, Sevigny and Eigeman.
The Last Days of Disco is available on standard DVD only.
Columbia has issued another batch of welcome titles in their inexpensive Martini Movies line, this time concentrating on four generally forgotten films from the early 1970s.. Included are three from 1971, The Pusuit of Happiness; Summertree and The Buttercup Chain and one from 1973, Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing.
Filmed amidst great fanfare in 1969, Robert Mulligan’s The Pusuit of Happiness was supposed to have been a major 1970 release starring Michael Sarrazin straight from They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Barbara Hershey straight form Last Summer and Ruth Gordon straight from her Oscar win in Rosemary’s Baby. The supporting cast included an eclectic mix of veteran and up-and-coming performers such as E.G. Marshall, Arthur Hill, Sada Thompson, Barnard Hughes, Robert Klein, David Doyle, Charles Durning, Rue McClanahan and William Devane.
Sarrazin plays a bright but aimless college student, wary of the draft, who accidentally kills a pedestrian with his car on a rain swept night in Manhattan. A reactionary judge throws the book at him and he goes to jail where his natural integrity gets him into even more trouble. Hershey plays his live-in lover, an arrangement that does not sit well with his upper crust family.
Ruth Gordon should have had a field day with the role of Sarrazin’s grandmother, the bigoted family matriarch, but Mulligan wasn’t happy with her performance and after the film’s completion decided to re-shoot her scenes with Ruth White with whom he had worked on To Kill a Mockingbird. Ironically White would have played Sarrazin’s grandmother a year earlier in Midnight Cowboy had Sarrazin not turned down the role of Joe Buck. Sadly, White, who is terrific in the role, died of cancer shortly after completing her scenes in December, 1969.
The studio decided to hold the film back until the notoriety of Gordon’s firing and White’s death died down. By the time it was released in February, 1971, it was already forgotten, which is a shame because it’s every bit as good as Mulligan’s next film, the smash hit, Summer of ’42.
Kirk Douglas’ production company produced Summertree, directed by Anthony Newley, as a star vehicle for Michael Douglas and his then girlfriend Brenda Vaccaro. The film has many similarities to The Pusuit of Happiness, a charismatic star turn by a gifted a young actor, whose character has a romance with a woman not approved of by his family, concerns about the draft and a planned escape to Canada to avoid it. Like The Pusuit of Happiness, it was also a failure at the box office which in no way diminishes its quality.
Jack Warden is very effective as Douglas’ uptight father and Barbara Bel Geddes, who has less to do, nevertheless makes a welcome appearance as his mother. A young Rob Reiner is featured as one of Douglas’ college buddies.
A less effective film, Robert Ellis Miller’s The Buttercup Chain is one of those films about aimless youth falling in and out of love to gorgeous backdrops, in this case England, Italy, Spain and Sweden. The cast is as attractive as the scenery with Hywell Bennett and Jane Asher playing British cousins raised as brother and sister who have the hots for one another and American Leigh Taylor-Young and Swedish Sven-Bertil Taube as their respective interim lovers.
Filmed on location in Spain, Alan J. Pakula’s Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing stars Timothy Bottoms as a shy, awkward young American and Maggie Smith as an equally shy, awkward middle-aged British spinster. The two meet and fall in love while spending their summer in Spain. The film’s climax, filmed in La Mancha, is visually impressive as are the performances of the two stars, but there’s not much more to the film than that. Still with Bottoms, fresh from his star making turn in The Last Picture Show, and Smith fresh from her Oscar nominated turn in Travels With My Aunt on the heels of her Oscar win for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie the star combination should have insured an audience. Alas, few came to see it.
The Martini Movies releases are available on standard DVD only.
Warner Archive continues their breakneck pace of releasing pre-1980s films. Now available are several film noir and crime thriller films ranging from the mid-1940s to 1960.
The oldest in the group is the little known Suspense from 1946, which was directed by Frank Tuttle, the director of This Gun for Hire and The Glass Key, not the makeup artist. The film stars Belita, the ice-skating champion of the 1936 Winter Olympics, supported by Barry Sullivan, Albert Dekker, Bonita Granville and Eugene Pallette in his last film. The bizarre tale of murder on ice was Monogram’s most expensive film to date financed by the unexpected box office success of the prior year’s Dillinger.
Both 1948’s Berlin Express and 1951’s The Tall Target are so good they rival the excitement of the two legendary thrillers set aboard trains by which all such films are measured, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes and Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich.
Robert Ryan, Merle Oberon and Paul Lukas star in Berlin Express directed by Jacques Tourneur on the heels of Out of the Past. Filmed on location in Frankfurt and Berlin, this was the first film
to be made inside occupied post-World War II Germany and vividly captures the ruin of a bombed out and devastated nation that just a few years earlier threatened to rule the world.
The plot is about an anti-fascist German statesman attempting to escape the country amidst threats from unrepentant diehard Nazis. Who can be trusted?
An undercover Brinks detective named John Kennedy is the only one who stands between Abraham Lincoln and his intended assassin in Anthony Mann’s The Tall Target in which both the newly elected President and his would-be killer may or may not be passengers on the Baltimore bound train to his inaugural, on which Kennedy is travelling.
Dick Powell provides one of his best tough-as-nails performances as Kennedy in this film based on an actual event. Paula Raymond, Adolphe Menjou, Marshall Thompson and a young Ruby Dee co-star.
Ruth Roman was never a major star so it’s curious why Warner Bros. is promoting her as the sole star of King Vidor’s 1951 thriller, Lightning Strikes Twice in which co-stars Richard Todd, Mercedes McCambridge and Zachary Scott were better known then and remain so even now.
Roman is the second Travelyen who comes to question whether or not her husband (Todd) was really guilty of the murder of his first wife for which he was exonerated by a hung jury. Though it’s not quite in the same league as Rebecca, it holds its own against other films that have employed this tried and true formula. All four stars are at the top of their game while Frank Conroy, Kathryn Givney, Rhys Williams and Daryl Hickman turn in memorable performances as well.
A Grade B thriller that was a Grade A hit, 1960’s Pay or Die gave Ernest Borgnine his best post-Marty role as the real life cop who battled the Black Hand, the precursor of the Mafia, in New York’s Little Italy of 1906-1909. Directed by Richard Wilson (It’s All True), the film features a standout performance by Zohra Lampert in her first major role.
On the TV front, Rescue Me: Season 5, Vol. 1 is now available. The always interesting series about firefighters in New York City post-9/11 began as a comedy-drama but by the end of its fourth season had veered almost completely into dark dramatic territory with its constant fury and violence.
The fifth season injects more humor into the proceedings as star Denis Leary continues to struggle with his alcoholism while co-stars John Scurti, Daniel Sunjata, Steven Pasquale, Michael Lombard and Larenz Tate help put out the fires both literally and figuratively. Adam Ferrara comes into his own as the new chief and Michael J, Fox as Leary’s ex-wife’s new boyfriend adds dramatic, as well as comic heft to the show.
Rescue Me: Season 5, Vol. 1 is available on standard DVD only.
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