The DVD Report #95

Guy Ritchie has had a checkered career. The audacious British director burst onto the international scene with the manic crime caper comedies, 1998’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and 2000’s Snatch, and then squandered his talent with 2002’s Swept Away, a dreadful remake of the classic Italian film as a star vehicle/vanity production for his then-wife Madonna.

Ritchie is back in stride with his latest, Rocknrolla, another manic crime caper in which old school London gangster Tom Wilkinson has to compete with Russian thugs for control of prime waterfront real estate. Meanwhile small time criminals Gerard Butler and Tom Hardy play both ends against the middle while Wilkinson searches for his estranged stepson, Toby Kebbell, a rock ‘n roll star pretending to be dead in order to boost record sales. The “rocknrolla” has stolen a valuable painting from the nasty crime boss’s home. Mark Strong, Thandie Newton, Jeremy Piven and Jimi Mistry figure in the mix as well. It doesn’t add up to much, but you won’t be bored. Wilkinson gives another bravura performance and the ending, both his and the film’s, is quite satisfying.

Jiri Menzel is a prolific Czech actor-writer-director whose masterful Closely Watched Trains won a slew of awards including the Best Foreign Film Oscar forty-one years ago. He’s back on the international front with his latest work, I Served the King of England. The new film is just as wry, funny, dramatic and brilliantly observed as his earlier work.

It opens with the aptly named actor Oldrich Kaiser observing upon his release from a Communist prison that he was sentenced to fifteen years in 1948 for being a millionaire, but because of the armistice only had to serve fourteen and three quarters. From there we flashback to the young Jan Dite played by Ivan Barnev who rises from humble servant to millionaire during World War II. Juia Jentsch, best known for playing the victim of the Nazis in Sophie Scholl does an about-face to play an unrepentant Nazi here. The film’s title comes from a line proudly uttered by Jan’s maitre d’ and mentor.

One of the year’s best thrillers, actor-writer-director Guillaume Canet’s Tell No One is already available in Region 2 and will be available in Region 1 next month. Francois Cluzet stars as a pediatrician whose wife was brutally murdered eight years earlier. Still grieving, he receives an e-mail with a recent picture of his wife, Marie-Josee Croze, looking very much alive but frightened. So begins his search for his wife and the truth behind what really happened. In true Hitchcockian style, the innocent man is pursued by both the police and various bad guys and no one is what they seem. Among the familiar faces involved in the action are Kristin Scott Thomas, Nathalie Baye, Jean Rochefort and Canet himself as a famed equestrian.

Several other films long available in Region 2, including Hobson’s Choice, Ironweed, Yentl and Our Man in Havana, have finally made their debut in Region 1.

One of the most English of films, David Lean’s delightful 1954 comedy Hobson’s Choice was the director’s last black-and-white film. Charles Laughton, whose career had been in decline for some years, once again emerged as one of the world’s great actors with his portrayal of the tyrannical 1890s bookmaker brought to heel by his plain-speaking daughter and her timid husband, brilliantly played by Brenda De Banze and John Mills. The film won the BAFTA as Best British Film of its year while Mills, De Banzie and Lean’s screenplay were also nominated.

The Criterion release includes an insightful 1978 BBC-produced biography on Laughton with appearances by his widow, Elsa Lanchester, his brother and long time friends Paul Gregory and Christopher Isherwood.

Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep each received one of their multiple Oscar nominations for their performances in the 1987 film version of William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed about a couple of depression era drunks down in their depths in Albany, New York. It was directed by Hector Babenco, his first American film, two years after his Oscar nomination for Kiss of the Spider Woman. Bleak, harrowing and often depressing, the film is saved by the two star performances with nice bits by Carroll Baker, Michael O’Keefe, Fred Gwynne and Frank Whaley among others.

Barbra Streisand’s directorial debut,1983’s Yentl, was supposed to have been released in two versions – both a feature-only disc and a Special Edition two-disc set. The single disc was cancelled at the last minute leaving retailers short as they had ordered massive copies of the cancelled version and few, if any, of the Special Edition. That problem has now been rectified and Streisand lovers can now get their hands on Streisand’s self-love fest in which she gives herself twelve (count ‘em!) solos in this overproduced version of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s simple story of a young girl (Streisand was over 40 at the time!) who disguises herself as a boy in order to get an education in Czarist Russia. Mandy Patinkin and Amy Irving (in an Oscar nominated performance) co-star. The production values are great, but unless you really, really like Streisand, you’ll keep looking at your watch or checking the time remaining on your player, waiting for the interminable thing to end.

The men behind The Third Man, writer Graham Green and director Carol Reed, made 1960’s Our Man in Havana, a spy spoof set in pre-Castro Cuba with a once-in-a-lifetime cast led by Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, Maureen O’Hara, Ernie Kovacs, Noel Coward and Ralph Richardson. It’s picaresque, amusing and ultimately satisfying, but with that pedigree it should have been much more but as long as you don’t expect too much, you won’t be disappointed. Columbia has released it as part of wave two of its “Martini Movies”, as silly a promotional title as there ever was, but a welcome one if it gets more classics out on DVD.

Time has been extremely kind to another “martini movie”, Richard Rush’s 1970 film Getting Straight, which today’s generations tend to see through rose-colored glasses as a reflection of the era in which it is set. In actuality, this film, about a grad student torn between getting his masters and joining his friends in protesting his school’s rigid rules, totally misses the point of the times. Real concerns of the day such as the Vietnam War, civil rights and free speech are glossed over, reducing the student’s reason for protesting to something that students do. Elliot Gould does deliver a strong performance in the lead and Candice Bergen has never looked lovelier than she does here, but their constant bickering grows tiresome. The best thing about the film is spotting young talent such as Robert F. Lyons, Jeannie Berlin, John Rubinstein, Harrison Ford and others and for providing marvelous Cecil Kellaway with his last role as Gould’s mentor.

Released as part of the Warner Bros. Paul Newman Film Series, Irwin Allen’s 1980 film When Time Ran Out. came late in the game for disaster films. Producer Allen had reached his peak with 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure and 1974’s The Towering Inferno. His low was 1978’s The Swarm. While this film is a step up from that tedious film, it hardly achieves the level of his early ‘70s successes.

Newman, William Holden, Jacqueline Bisset, James Franciscus, Barbara Carrera, Edward Albert, Burgess Meredith, Valentina Cortese, Red Buttons, Ernest Borgnine and Pat Morita have the principal roles in the tale of a dormant volcano that erupts on a South Pacific resort island. Who will live? who will die? With poorly drawn characters uttering uninspired dialogue in trite situations, who cares? Even the special effects aren’t all that “special”. The film did receive an Oscar nomination for Costume Design, though it’s difficult to understand why.

Making its way to Blu-ray this week is Dario Argento’s first, and some say best, film, 1970’s The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, a horror film that is also a compelling murder mystery with Hitchcockian overtones. Tony Musante and Suzy Kendall star.

Also out on Blu-ray this week are William Friedkin’s Oscar winning 1971 film The French Connection and John Frankenheimer’s 1975 follow-up French Connection II, both starring Gene Hackman. The former is a classic, the latter is not but does have its moments.

-Peter J. Patrick (February 24, 2009)