Looking at Film from Every Angle

The DVD Report #91

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Peter J Patrick

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Lots to cover this week with the release of one major film from 2008 and fourteen older films, all but one of which are new to DVD.

If you’re a Woody Allen fanatic you’ll love his latest film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. If not you’ll find little to like in it.

The title doesn’t refer to someone’s name as might be expected, but is in fact the name of two friends, Vicky and Cristina, and the city they spend a summer in, Barcelona, Spain. The scenes of Barcelona and other Spanish locales are picture postcard perfect, but pretty pictures do not a movie make. The two women are vapid and annoyingly played by Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johanssen who both seem to be channeling Diane Keaton in Annie Hall with their hair tugging, facial grimaces and halting speech. Chris Messina as Hall’s fiancé does the Woody Allen/Tony Roberts bit as the opinionated New York guy. Only Javier Bardem as a bohemian artist and Penelope Cruz as his crazy wife offer something new in an Allen film. Cruz is good but one note in her Oscar-nominated role.

Warner Bros. has made several long requested classic titles available on DVD in Region 1 for the first time.

One of the best remembered love stories all time, Mervyn LeRoy’s 1940 version of Waterloo Bridge, has long been one of the most requested DVD titles. Vivien Leigh, fresh from her Oscar win in Gone With the Wind, gave an even more poignant performance as the ex-ballerina who turns to prostitution when she believes her lover, Robert Taylor, has been killed in World War I. Lucile Watson as Taylor’s aristocratic mother, Virginia Field as Leigh’s friend and confidante and Maria Ouspenskaya as the head of the ballet company of which they are members offer strong support. The film deservedly won Oscar nominations for Joseph Ruttenberg’s cinematography and Herbert Stothart’s score.

A huge hit in its day, Anthony Asquith’s 1964 film The Yellow Rolls-Royce is an all-star production in which the titled vehicle provides the thread that binds together three disparate stories. Rex Harrison, very much in Henry Higgins mode, plays the initial owner who buys the vehicle for his feckless wife, Jeanne Moreau; gangster George C. Scott is the second owner whose moll, Shirley MacLaine, has an affair with Alain Delon while buddy Art Carney covers for her; finally Ingrid Bergman and Omar Sharif use the car to drive resistance fighters across rugged Yugoslavian terrain. Joyce Grenfell, Edmund Purdom and Roland Culver co-star. The song “Forget Domani” won a Golden Globe and Ritz Ortolani’s score was also nominated. Its cinematography and costume design were nominated for BAFTAs.

The most famous of several versions of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd was the 1967 film directed by John Schlesinger with Julie Christie as the Victorian heiress pursed by three men: farmer Alan Bates, wealthy Peter Finch, and soldier/scoundrel Terence Stamp whom she marries. With a running time of nearly three hours, the film is a bit of a chore to sit through, but ultimately rewarding as it comes to a most satisfying conclusion. Nicolas Roeg’s breathtaking cinematography was nominated for a BAFTA and Richard Rodney Bennett’s score was nominated for an Oscar. The film won National Board of Review awards for Best Film and Actor (Finch). Bates and Prunella Ransome, as Stamp’s tragic mistress, were nominated for Golden Globes.

Almost as long as Far From the Madding Crowd, Herbert Ross’ 1969 musical version of Goodbye, Mr. Chips is less of a chore to sit through thanks to a commanding performance by Peter O’Toole as the beloved schoolteacher. Though the film itself is not the masterpiece the 1939 version was, O’Toole’s performance is nearly as splendid as Oscar winner Robert Donat’s in the original. Unfortunately, Petula Clark, lovely though she is, is not as adept an actress as Greer Garson, making their love story somewhat less compelling. If there are no hits emanating from Leslie Bricusse’s serviceable score, neither are there any embarrassments. Sian Phillips, Mrs. O’Toole at the time, steals several scenes as Clark’s zany actress friend. O’Toole won several awards including the Best Actor trophy of the National Board of Review and the fourth of his eight Oscar nominations. Phillips won the National Society of Film Critics award as the year’s Best Supporting Actress.

It’s probably called Warner Bros. Romance Classics Collection because anything called the Troy Donahue Collection wouldn’t sell today, but that is exactly what this set is, a four-film collection of Donahue’s box office hits from 1961-1963.

The teen heartthrob became an overnight sensation in Delmer Daves’ 1959 film A Summer Place opposite Sandra Dee, but received his first star billing in Daves’ follow-up film 1961’s Parrish. Playing an impressionable teen who moves to Connecticut with his mother, the still-formidable Claudette Colbert, who has married tobacco farmer Karl Malden. Donahue grows to manhood through his love of three women: Diane McBain, Connie Stevens and Sharon Hugueney. Dean Jagger has one of his best roles as the film’s sage. Colbert, whose career had been relegated to TV work throughout most of the 1950s, came out of retirement to play the mother role and then retired again.

That same year, Daves and Donahue reteamed for Susan Slade, an old-fashioned tearjerker about a young girl left pregnant by her dead fiancé whose parents pose as the baby’s parents. Donahue has top billing, but his Parrish co-star Connie Stevens has the actual lead as the title character, while Dorothy McGuire, who played Donahue’s mother in A Summer Place, plays Stevens’ mother here. Donahue is the horse trainer and aspiring writer who loves Stevens from afar, while Bert Convy is the rich boy who pursues her until he finds out she is no longer a virgin. Lloyd Nolan and Brian Aherne co-star.

Donahue again has top billing in his fourth Daves collaboration, 1962’s Rome Adventure, but the focus here is on Suzanne Pleshette as the young tourist looking for love in Italy with Donahue as the expatriate architect with whom she has an affair. Daves’ witty dialogue provides them, as well as Angie Dickinson as Donahue’s mistress, Rossano Brazzi as an old roué with designs on Pleshette, and Hampton Fancher as her young protector, with equal opportunities to shine, though the brightest star here may well be “Italy as you’ve never seen it.” A bit of trivia: Donahue and Pleshette were married two years later; future writer-producer-director Fancher later wrote the screenplay for Blade Runner.

Without Daves’ strong guidance, Donahue is at a loss in Norman Taurog’s turgid 1963 attempt at light comedy, Palm Springs Weekend, in which he, Connie Stevens, Ty Hardin, Stefanie Powers, Robert Conrad and Jerry Van Dyke appear as over-aged teenagers on spring break in Warners’ blatant rip-off of MGM’s superior Where the Boys Are from three years earlier.

Warner Bros. has also released a new Sidney Poitier Collection featuring the previously released A Patch of Blue as well as three new-to-DVD titles.

The reissue of Guy Green’s landmark 1965 film A Patch of Blue is the same transfer with the same minimal extras as the previous release except for the packaging. Poitier gives one of his most indelible performances as the kindly man who helps blind girl Elizabeth Hartman find independence. Shelley Winters as Hartman’s harridan of a mother won her second Oscar for her totally unsympathetic portrayal while character actor Wallace Ford had his best role in decades as Hartman’s powerless grandfather. Hartman, making her screen debut, won an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Poitier, Hartman and Winters were nominated for Golden Globes with Hartman winning as Best Newcomer. All four stars were nominated for the now-defunct Laurel awards.

Rock Hudson as a pacifist white settler and Dana Wynter as his patrician wife have top billing in Richard Brooks’ searing 1957 Kenya-based film Something of Value, but the focus is on Poitier as Hudson’s childhood friend turned rebel. Poitier superbly plays the restless native who joins the Mau Maus after the imprisonment of his father in 1945 and becomes a key figure in their 1952 uprisings in which innocent men, women and children are slaughtered in the name of independence. Wendy Hiller gives a devastating performance as Hudson’s sister caught in the maelstrom. Robert Beatty, Walter Fitzgerald and Michael Pate are excellent as other settlers and Juano Hernandez and William Marshall are memorable as Mau Mau leaders. The original prologue to the film intoned by Winston Churchill does not appear on the DVD.

A compelling waterfront drama, Martin Ritt’s Edge of the City co-stars John Cassavetes and Poitier as a couple of longshoremen who battle racial prejudice on the job. Ruby Dee is Poitier’s charming wife and Kathleen Maguire is the friend she matches up with Cassavetes. Jack Warden, in one of his signature roles, plays a nasty, Simon Legree-style villain. The film which was made three years after the celebrated On the Waterfront compares favorably to that landmark Oscar-winning film.

Poitier directs as well as stars in 1973’s A Warm December, a rather pedestrian tearjerker in which he plays a widowed Washington D.C. physician on vacation with his daughter in London. He is attracted to a mysterious woman who turns out to be the dying niece of an African diplomat. Esther Anderson, in her only major role, plays the dying woman. George Baker and Johnny Sekka co-star.

As if all of that weren’t enough, Warner Bros. has also released MGM: When the Lion Roars, an ambitious four part, warts-and-all 1992 documentary chronicling the rise and fall of the studio whose catalogue of classic films Warner Bros. now owns. Patrick Stewart hosts with live interviews from Lew Ayres, Freddie Bartholomew, Ernest Borgnine, Helen Hayes, Van Johnson, Roddy McDowall, Luise Rainer, Mickey Rooney, Esther Williams and others, most of whom are gone now.

Producer-director John Frankenheimer won his 6th DGA nomination and 12th and 13th Emmy nominations (and fourth directorial win) for his brilliant 1997 miniseries George Wallace featuring Emmy award-winning performances by Gary Sinise as the controversial Alabama governor and Mare Winningham as his first wife. The two were also nominated for Golden Globes and Angelina Jolie won one as his second wife. Clarence Williams III, as a fictional servant, and Joe Don Baker, as Wallace’s predecessor in the State house, also turn in memorable performances. It’s riveting from the first moment to the last as it follows the life of the once-liberal politician who became the poster boy for racial prejudice in the 1960s and a voice for the downtrodden following a 1972 attempted assassination that left him unable to walk and in great pain for the remainder of his life.

-Peter J. Patrick (January 27, 2009)

Buy on DVD!
Use Each Title’s Link


Top 10 Rentals of the Week

(January 18, 2009)

  1. Pineapple Express
  2. My Best Friend’s Girl
  3. Righteous Kill
  4. Mirrors
  5. Bangkok Dangerous
  6. Babylon A.D.
  7. The Family That Preys
  8. Eagle Eye
  9. Appaloosa
  10. Burn After Reading

Top 10 Sales of the Week

(January 11, 2009)

  1. Pineapple Express
  2. Righteous Kill
  3. Eagle Eye
  4. Babylon A.D.
  5. Bangkok Dangerous
  6. The Dark Knight
  7. Mamma Mia!
  8. Battlestar Galactica: Season 4.0
  9. WALL-E
  10. The Tudors: The Complete Second Season

New Releases

(January 27, 2009)

Coming Soon

(February 3, 2009)

(February 10, 2009)

(February 17, 2009)

(February 24, 2009)

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