The DVD Report #66

It’s time for another in my series of “Films By Year” and their availability on DVD.

While my articles on the years from 1957 through 1961 focused on films released in the U.S. in those years, I’m doing a bit of shift in focus starting with 1962 and going with the first year of theatrical release anywhere in the world. This actually affects far fewer films than you might think.

These are the films of 1962 I consider to be the year’s ten best. All but one of them is currently available on DVD in the U.S.

Prior to the advent of big screen TVs, it was fairly horrendous trying to absorb in home viewing a monumental achievement of the likes of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, the epic adventure of the life of Britain’s T.E. Lawrence that was nominated for ten Oscars and won seven including Best Picture and Director. Focusing on Lawrence’s World War I campaign of organizing Arab tribes in fighting against the Turks, the film really should be seen in a theatre with a large screen at least once. Peter O’Toole’s Oscar-nominated, star-making performance is backed by a memorable supporting cast including Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, fellow Oscar nominee Omar Sharif, Arthur Kennedy, Jose Ferrer, Claude Rains, Donald Wolfit, Anthony Quayle and Jack Hawkins. It’s a film that succeeds on all levels from its literate script to its majestic cinematography, with an unforgettable score by Maurice Jarre.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the intimate, but equally brilliant To Kill a Mockingbird directed by Robert Mulligan from Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Nominated for eight Oscars, it won three including one for Gregory Peck as Best Actor. Peck, eschewing his usual romantic lead, plays the widowed lawyer and father of a six-year-old girl and ten-year-old boy in the Deep South who takes on the case of a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. The film is filled with rich characters including Mary Badham and Phillip Alford as the children, John Megna as their friend, Brock Peters as the defendant in the case and Robert Duvall as the mysterious Boo Radley. It’s magnificently scored by Elmer Bernstein.

Taking us into yet another completely different world, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate gave us a glimpse into the ugly hearts and minds of those plotting a Presidential assassination a year before JFK was shot. Moody, atmospheric and presenting one shocking scene after another. Both Laurence Harvey as the titled weakling and Frank Sinatra as his Korean War buddy give career-high performances, but the film really belongs to Oscar-nominated Angela Lansbury as Harvey’s evil mother and James Gregory as Lansbury’s politician husband, a Vice Presidential contender. Sinatra, who owned the film, withdrew it from exhibition after the Kennedy assassination. It had been out of circulation until the late 1980s.

Without changing a single line of dialogue, Sidney Lumet shifts the focus from the father to the mother in his filming of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night simply by focusing the camera on Katharine Hepburn rather than Ralph Richardson. The emphasis both supports and enriches O’Neill’s autobiographical study of his miserly actor father, drug addicted mother, alcoholic brother and his young consumptive self. Hepburn, Richardson, Jason Robards as the brother and Dean Stockwell as the O’Neill substitute all give extraordinary performances. All four shared the Venice Film Award but only Hepburn got an Oscar nomination for it.

One of the exuberant joys of the theatre-going world for several seasons was Meredith Willson’s The Music Man which was brought to the screen by Morton Da Costa in a joyous celebration of life in the Midwest circa 1912. Robert Preston skillfully reprises his Tony Award-winning performance as charlatan Professor Harold Hill and Shirley Jones beguilingly takes over the role of charming Marian the Librarian from Broadway’s Barbara Cook. Ronny Howard is her charmingly stuttering younger brother and Pert Kelton repeats her Broadway triumph as their perplexed mother (Kelton, at the time, was a huge star in TV commercials). Buddy Hackett, Paul Ford and Hermione Gingold also have major roles.

The eternal conflict between good and evil is examined in Peter Ustinov’s film of Herman Melville’s seagoing classic Billy Budd with Oscar nominee Terence Stamp hitting all the right notes as the personification of good as the titled naïve merchant seaman. Robert Ryan is at his snarling best as the personification of evil as the master at arms who hates the young sailor for no apparent reason. The excellent supporting cast is led by director/screenwriter Ustinov as the ship’s captain and former matinee idol Melvyn Douglas in his first film in more than ten years as the weather-beaten old sailmaker who has seen it all.

Daryl Zanuck’s meticulous, painstaking recreation of D-Day, June 5, 1944, The Longest Day required the efforts of three directors, Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton and Bernhard Wicki, to bring the producer’s dream project to fruition, but the result is absolutely breathtaking. The all-star cast including John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, Robert Mitchum, Richard Beymer, Red Buttons, Robert Ryan and Sal Mineo acquits itself well, each member of the cast turning in a fine vignette of a performance. The film, one of the last great black-and-white epics, has stood the test of time despite advances in film techniques that might render a lesser undertaking obsolete.

Otto Preminger was in the midst of his career resurgence as the go-to director of bestsellers when he mounted Allen Drury’s Advise & Consent about a Senate investigation into the President’s newly nominated Secretary of State. With Henry Fonda as the candidate, Walter Pidgeon as the Majority leader, Charles Laughton as a wily Southern senator, Franchot Tone as the President, and Lew Ayres as the Vice President, you knew you were in for a treat. The film was also notable as the first Hollywood film to give a face to homosexuality in the form of Don Murray as a young Senator who is the victim of blackmail. Laughton, Murray, and Burgess Meredith as a congressional witness are the standouts.

Released in Great Britain in 1962, but not released in the U.S. until 1963, Bryan Forbes’ The L-Shaped Room provided Oscar nominee Leslie Caron with one of her best roles as an unwed pregnant French woman residing in a shabby English boarding house until the birth of her baby. Her relationship with the other borders makes up the bulk of the story. Tom Bell as a blocked writer, Brock Peters as a prudish musician and Cicely Courtneidge as a retired vaudevillian provide staunch support. Courtneidge’s character was the screen’s first sympathetic lesbian. Sadly, this film is not available in Region 1 and oddly enough has only been available in Region 2 for about a year.

A TV play memorably adapted for Broadway and then brought to the big screen intact, Arthur Penn’s film of William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker had its genesis in Helen Keller’s autobiography. Anne Bancroft as Keller’s nearly-blind teacher, Annie Sullivan, and Patty Duke as blind, deaf and, until Annie talk her how to speak, dumb Keller are magnificent in their Oscar-winning roles, having honed them to perfection on stage. Teresa Wright and Patty McCormack had played them in the original 1957 TV production.

That only scratches the surface. An alternate top ten might consist of these classics, seven of which are available on DVD in the U.S.:

The last film directed by master Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, An Autumn Afternoon is a typical late Ozu masterpiece that tells the simple, yet powerful story of an aging widower who arranges a marriage for his 24-year-old daughter so that she is not obligated to look after him for the rest of his life. Acclaimed Japanese actor Chishu Ryu gives one of his finest performances as the old man. Like most of Ozu’s films, this did not open in the U.S. until after Ozu’s death in December 1963.

Best known for his later violent westerns, Sam Peckinpah directed one of the gentlest as well in Ride the High Country featuring screen legends Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, each in their last great screen role as aging gunmen, now respectable citizens, ruminating on their past lives when one of them decides to go for broke with one last daring holdup. Highly literate and beautifully photographed, the film features Mariette Hartley in a striking debut performance as McCrea’s daughter and character actor Edgar Buchanan in one of his signature roles as a judge.

It took me a long time to truly appreciate John Ford’s masterful The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, his meditation on the end of an era. Having first seen this film as a teenager, I couldn’t get past the seeming miscasting of James Stewart as a naive young attorney and John Wayne as his not much older mentor. Now that I’m older than they were at the time, this no longer presents a problem for me and I can enjoy the film for what it is, the last great western from the movies’ greatest director of westerns. Vera Miles as the woman both men love, Lee Marvin as the notorious title character and Edmond O’Brien as the savvy reporter who sums it all up, provide strong support.

While Stewart and Wayne could still draw huge crowds playing virile young men, their female contemporaries Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were viewed as has-beens who could no longer carry a film. But put together as battling old bats, they set off fireworks. Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was not even given a proper opening, it was unceremoniously dumped into wide release in early November, but became an unexpected smash hit creating a brand new sub-genre of horror films in the process. Not great art, but great entertainment nonetheless.

Geraldine Page had the role of her career in Richard Brooks’ film of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth as the aging actress who accompanies gigolo Paul Newman to his home town where he faces the enmity of the town boss, played by Oscar winner Ed Begley. Brilliantly cast with Shirley Knight as Begley’s daughter and Newman’s former girlfriend Mildred Dunnock as her supportive aunt, and Rip Torn as Begley’s stooge, the film closely follows the stage version except for the watered-down ending. In addition to Begley, Page and Knight were nominated for Oscars.

William Holden had one of his best roles in the true story of an American expatriate living in Sweden forced to spy for the Allies during World War II in George Seaton’s The Counterfeit Traitor. Filmed in many of the actual locations in which the story took place, the film makes fictional spy thrillers look like child’s play. Lilli Palmer is transcendent as the undercover German agent who is his chief informant. Her last scene leaves an indelible impression. Hugh Griffith, Ernst Schroder and Werner Peters also offer memorable characterizations.

Dated now, but only because numerous TV dramas have long since stolen its premise, Frank Perry’s Oscar nominated examination of teenage mental illness David and Lisa provided rising stars Keir Dullea and Janet Margolin with the roles of their burgeoning careers. Dullea is especially memorable as the boy who literally can’t be touched. Howard Da Silva masterfully plays the psychiatrist who treats them both. Eleanor Perry made it a family affair, winning an Oscar nomination for her screenplay to go with her then-husband’s directorial nod.

Another look at mental illness was beautifully captured in Serge Bourguignon’s Sundays and Cybele with Hardy Kruger in his career-high performance as a French soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress after a tour in Vietnam, who develops a friendship with a hapless young girl. The two have an idyllic relationship until he is inevitably and wrongly assumed to be a pedophile. Inexplicably this film has not been released on DVD anywhere in the world though it has long been available on VHS.

John Schlesinger won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for his first film, A Kind of Loving, featuring a star-making performance by Alan Bates as one of Britain’s angry young men forced into marriage with pregnant girlfriend June Ritchie and life under the thumb of the mother-in-law-from-Hell played by Thora Hird. While long available in Region 2, this film has yet to be released in Region 1.

Focusing on his early struggles for acceptability from his Viennese medical colleagues, John Huston’s film Freud won an Oscar nomination for its absorbing screenplay. Montgomery Clift was “Siggy”, with Susan Kohner as his wife and Susannah York as one of his patients. Larry Parks was also prominently cast in his first film in a dozen years. For some reason this film has never been released on commercial home video anywhere in the world, not even on VHS.

Then there were these gems:

Francois Truffaut’s film about life and life changes as seen through the eyes of a woman in love with two men is examined in Jules and Jim with Oskar Werner as Jules, Henri Surre as Jim and Jeanne Moreau as Catherine, a film whose swirling camera movements have been compared to Citizen Kane. It was one of the landmark films of the French New Wave.

George Marshall, John Ford and Henry Hathaway each directed segments of How the West Was Won, the first and last western to be filmed in Cinerama. Oddly this quintessential American classic was released in Europe a year before it made it to U.S. theatres. Debbie Reynolds, James Stewart, Carroll Baker, Gregory Peck and George Peppard have the largest roles among the many stars in the film set for an upgraded DVD release at the end of the month.

Two years after his Oscar win for Elmer Gantry, Burt Lancaster grabbed another nomination for his moving portrayal of longtime Alcatraz inmate Robert Stroud in John Frankenheimer’s Birdman of Alcatraz cataloguing his years of imprisonment and eventual transformation into a useful citizen. Telly Savalas as a fellow prisoner and Thelma Ritter as Stroud’s mother were also Oscar nominated.

Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick won Oscar nominations for recreating the roles made unforgettable by Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie in the TV version of Days of Wine and Roses directed by Blake Edwards. Good as Lemmon and Remick are, they can’t erase the memory of the originals, especially Laurie in her descent into alcoholic hell. Charles Bickford repeats his TV role as the woman’s disapproving father.

The first and best version of John D. MacDonald’s suspense thriller Cape Fear, tautly directed by J. Lee Thompson, provided Robert Mitchum with one of his best roles as the killer who menaces attorney Gregory Peck and his family. Polly Bergen co-stars as Peck’s wife and Lori Martin is their daughter.

A faithful adaptation of the Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim musical, Mervyn LeRoy’s film of Gypsy won Rosalind Russell her fifth Golden Globe for her portrayal of Gypsy Rose Lee’s stage mother. Natalie Wood was Gypsy née Louise and Karl Malden was Herbie in the underrated film version of what has become Broadway’s most revived musical.

Martin Ritt directed Adventures of a Young Man also known as Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man with Richard Beymer in a semi-autobiographical role as the budding writer. Acting honors go to Paul Newman as a punch-drunk boxer, and Arthur Kennedy and Jessica Tandy as Beymer’s bickering parents.

James Stewart and Maureen O’Hara had their first roles as grandparents in Henry Koster’s hilarious domestic comedy Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation in which Stewart takes the family on a vacation in which anything that could go wrong does. Laurie Peters, John Saxon, Marie Wilson, Reginald Gardiner and Fabian all figure into the plot.

Before directing Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate, John Frankenheimer directed her in All Fall Down, in which she is equally fine as another mother-from-Hell, and for which she won the National Board of Review award in tandem with her more famous role. Warren Beatty and Brandon de Wilde are her sons, and Karl Malden is her husband in this domestic drama from James Leo Herlihy’s novel. It is not available in Region 1.

The best of the many films made about animal hunting in Africa, Howard Hawks’ Hatari! provided John Wayne with a great change-of-pace role, ably supported by Hardy Kruger, Elsa Martinelli and Red Buttons. One of Henry Mancini’s most infectious scores adds immeasurably to the fun.

There were others, but too many to mention. I will stop with a nod to two films from 1961 that I left off of my previous report because they hadn’t been released in the U.S. until 1962:

A multiple-award-winning film, Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey featured Rita Tushingham in a star-making performance as a young British girl impregnated by a black sailor who is cared for by a compassionate gay man played by Murray Melvin. Tushingham and Melvin took acting honors at Cannes. It is not available in Region 1.

Dirk Bogarde won a BAFTA nomination for his portrayal of the closeted gay lawyer who goes after a blackmailer in Basil Dearden’s groundbreaking Victim, a noirish thriller that is also educational. Sylvia Sims as Bogarde’s astounded wife and Dennis Price as a fellow blackmail victim are also excellent.

-Peter J. Patrick (August 5, 2008)