The DVD Report #70

With the pickings remaining slim in DVD releases of exciting new movies, one would think this would be the ideal time for DVD distributors to fill the gap with releases of from their extensive catalogues of classic films. Alas, that isn’t the case, but there are a few gems being released here and there.

This was supposed to be the week that Fox finally released Elia Kazan’s Boomerang! The superb 1947 film was supposed to be part of the DVD release of films in its film noir line more than two years ago, but rights issues forced the DVD to be stopped dead in its tracks after a few release copies were sent to sellers. Now the same thing has happened all over again. If you can find it, grab it before it goes on sale on e-Bay at some ridiculous price.

The film, a true life account of the murder of an Episcopal priest, was, and is, a prime example of the genre centering on the capture, interrogation and prosecution of an innocent man – a splendid precursor to today’s police procedurals done in enormous style. Dana Andrews had one of his best roles as the prosecutor torn between his ambitions, loyalties and morals and he was supported by a superb cast that included Jane Wyatt as his wife, Lee J. Cobb as the local police chief, and Arthur Kennedy as the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Cara Williams, Sam Levene, Robert Keith, Taylor Holmes, and future Oscar winners Karl Malden and Ed Begley also provide memorable turns.

The other two films in the planned release, 1942’s Moontide and 1948’s Road House, are actually being released today.

The casting is what makes Archie Mayo’s Moontide memorable. The moody, expressionistic film about beachcombers stars the great French actor Jean Gabin, in his only Hollywood film, opposite Ida Lupino. Cast as a longshoreman who falls in love with suicidal Lupino, the “French Spencer Tracy”, in his first film in five years, proved to be just as charismatic in English as he was in French. Thomas Mitchell, in a rare villain role, and Claude Rains co-star in the film started by legendary director Fritz Lang who was fired and replaced by Mayo. Extras include an excellent documentary on the making of the troubled film.

Lupino is back and both Cornel Wilde and Richard Widmark want her in Jean Nuglesco’s Road House in which Lupino is at her best as a lounge singer whose sultry interpretations of “One for My Baby”, “About a Quarter to Three” and “Again” bring down the house. Widmark, still in the vicious killer role of his career that began with his Oscar-nominated turn in the previous year’s Kiss of Death, also turns in a memorable performance. Cornel Wilde, in one of his trademark good guy roles, and Celeste Holm, in one of her nice other woman roles, are also memorable. Extras include a documentary on the careers of Lupino and Widmark at Fox.

One of the great surprise hits of 1979, Nicholas Meyer’s Time After Time takes two legendary figures, The Time Machine author H.G. Wells and serial killer Jack the Ripper, and combines them in this charmer about Wells chasing the Ripper through time to present day San Francisco. There the emphasis is not so much on fantasy as it is on the blossoming romance between the transplanted Wells and a female bank officer. Malcolm McDowell, in his first U.S. film, is the perplexed Wells, and the delightful Mary Steenburgen is the bank officer, with the superb David Warner properly menacing as the Ripper. The real life romance between McDowell and Steenburgen, which echoes their characters’ development, provides the film with an added poignancy that’s hard to resist.

This new Special Edition DVD features commentary by Meyer and McDowell and loads of other extras.

One of the best films about the Vietnam War, Sidney J. Furie’s The Boys in Company C was released in 1978, the same year as The Deer Hunter, Coming Home and Go Tell the Spartans, and tends not to be as well remembered as those more celebrated films. Its narrative, which begins with the soldiers’ training and then moves to their hellish tour in Vietnam, pre-dates the similarly themed and structured Full Metal Jacket by nine years. Stan Shaw and Andrew Stevens star. Stevens won a Golden Globe nomination for his film debut.

Releases of last season’s TV series are now in full swing. Among those being released this week are Desperate Housewives – Season 4, Ghost Whisperer – Season 3 and Eli Stone – Season 1.

Recovering nicely from a disastrous second season, Season 3 of Desperate Housewives put the series back on track, but the abbreviated Season 4 was something of a head scratcher. By the end of the season more characters had met their demise, and in the final episode, a teaser of things to come, the series moved ahead by several years. As always, though, it’s the housewives themselves, Teri Hatcher, Felicity Huffman, Marcia Cross, Eva Longoria and Nicolette Sheridan, who remain the show’s main selling point and they don’t disappoint.

Changing direction with the death of a major character at the end of its first season, Ghost Whsiperer maintained its audience’s support through a somewhat tamer second season but stepped up the gore for Season 3, which again ends with the death of a major character. More disturbing for fans, however, might be the sudden aging of another character midway through the season. Jennifer Love Hewitt plays the woman with the ability to see the recently departed, and David Conrad plays her fireman husband. Camryn Mannheim is Hewitt’s business partner and Jay Mohr is a likeable local professor.

One of the few compensations of the strike-aborted TV season was the late-season introduction of shows given a chance to fill in for the striking shows. One such show was Eli Stone . It only lasted 13 episodes, but they were 13 intriguing ones about a lawyer with a brain aneurism that allows him to see things that aren’t there, taking cases for their moral significance rather than the amount of money they might bring. The talented cast, whose faces are probably more familiar to the general public than are their names, included Johnny Lee Miller, Natasha Henstridge, Loretta Devine, Matt Letscher, Sam Jaeger and Victor Garber.

The Blu-ray revolution is still in its infancy. It continues to take baby steps with releases of some new movies going day and date with the release of the standard DVD version while others are being completely ignored. Here’s a sampling of classic films recently made available in the new format:

Warner Bros., which was a huge supporter of the discontinued HD-DVD format, is slowly re-issuing the titles they issued in that format on Blu-ray. Newly released is The Adventures of Robin Hood. One of the earliest examples of Technicolor added to a film, the 1938 multiple Oscar winner looks as glorious as it did 70 years ago when it was released with the tagline, “only the rainbow can equal its brilliance!”

Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains, Alan Hale, Patric Knowles and Eugene Pallette head the impeccable cast under the dual direction of Michael Curtiz and William Keighley. It’s not just the best Robin Hood movie, but it’s also one of the best films of all time.

The wealth of extras includes home movies shot by Rathbone and composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold during production.

Presently an Amazon exclusive, the Blu-ray disc, as well as the Standard DVD release, of Hector Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman will be made available to other retailers in October. William Hurt stars in his Oscar winning role as a gay Brazilian prisoner who makes movies in his mind and relates them to his political prisoner cellmate, played by Raul Julia. The movie within the movie stars Sonja Braga as the titled spider woman in a tale of love and betrayal paralleling what is going on in the prisoners’ real life situation. Extras include several documentaries on the making of the film.

Featuring two audio commentaries, deleted scenes and a new documentary on the real life president among its extras, Oliver Stone’s Nixon remains a fascinating look at the unraveling of the former president. Though Anthony Hopkins stills seems to me to be an odd choice for the title character, Joan Allen as Pat Nixon and Paul Sorvino as Henry Kissinger are perfectly cast. With this release most of Stone’s films have now been transferred to Blu-ray. Still to come: the highly anticipated release of JFK in November.

Looking sharper than ever, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, also being reissued in standard DVD format, is no doubt making yet another home video appearance to drum up publicity for Disney’s third annual theatrical release of the 3-D version next month. The stop-motion classic is accompanied by loads of extras, some of them new to this release, some not so new (like the inclusion of the short films Vincent and Frankenweenie). Like Stone’s films, most of Burton’s have now been released on Blu-ray. Still to come: the long awaited release of Beetlejuice in October.

Happy viewing.

-Peter J. Patrick (September 2, 2008)