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Saturday May 18, 2013
Savant's new reviews today are:
Loophole
Wow! This modest crime thriller with some smart ideas is a great film noir rediscovery. Bank teller Barry Sullivan is accused of Grand Theft, hounded from his job and persecuted by a bonding company detective (Charles McGraw) who doesn't know the meaning of Innocent Until Proven Guilty. An interesting take on "loser noir" sees Sullivan harrassed beyond the breaking point, unable to convince anybody that he's not a crook. But who took the $50,000 in cash from his bank cubicle? Co-starring Dorothy Malone, this 1954 show was thought lost, but is now found and handsomely restored. From The Warner Archive Collection.
5/18/13
If I Were You
Writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin's conventional but intelligent script gives the underused Marcia Gay Harden a chance to flex her acting muscles in comedy mode. She aces her starring role as a cheated-on wife who surreptitiously forms a fast friendship with her husband's mistress. What sounds old fashioned is a pleasure to watch -- Harden is really likeable, and the movie respects its characters. With Leonor Watling and Aidan Quinn. From Kino Lorber.
5/18/13
and
Mister 880
Edmund Gwenn's best "cute little old codger" vehicle is this amusing tale from producer Julian Blaustein, about the concerted effort to catch the oddest counterfeiter on the Treasury Department's books -- someone who passes $1 bills so poorly forged that the word "Washington" is misspelled. Top agent Burt Lancaster must be patient to nab his quarry, while phony bill passer Dorothy McGuire takes a personal interest in the crafty old fool. Instead of dimwit whimsey, we're treated to a semi-docu realism that befits what is actually a true story. From 20th Fox Cinema Archives.
5/18/13
Hello!
Everything seems to be running okay here today, and I'm back in review harness. Upcoming Blu-ray notices will include Scream Factory / MGM's Lifeforce (pictured), Twilight Time / Fox's Leave Her to Heaven, Olive / Paramount / Republic's Miracle of the Bells, Champion and Hoodlum Empire and Anchor Bay's A Common Man. DVD selections include Fox Cinema Archives' Sons and Lovers and Icarus Films' docu Last Summer Won't Happen.
My latest Warner Archives to-do list is impressive in itself. I'm ready to write up their Forbidden Hollywood 6 collection, while the Cold War epics Never Let Me Go and I Was a Communist for the FBI wait in the wings. I'm also hoping for Mask of Dimitrios to walk in the door -- it has been one of the top request titles in reader mail here at Savant. George Feltenstein said that the Collection would be nailing some much-desired titles this year...
Link of the day: over at the recommended site Trailers from Hell, Joe Dante comments on a reissue trailer for Peter Bogdanovich's Boris Karloff horror pic Targets. Be sure to read the accompanying text -- and follow its link to a second, original Targets trailer. It plays like a gun control PSA from today!
Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson
Wednesday May 15, 2013 The Ides of May
Savant's new reviews today are:
Ultimate Gangsters Collection:
Classics
Blu-ray
Warners boosts its top classic gangster titles to HD, with terrific remastered presentations of Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, The Petrified Forest and White Heat. I'll see your Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson and raise you two James Cagneys! These still-breathtaking crime thrillers come complete with trailers, featurettes, "Night at the Movies" bundles of short subjects, commentaries and an extra DVD disc with a feature length docu and a stack of gangster-themed WB cartoons. In Blu-ray from Warner Home Video.
5/14/13
Gate of Hell
Blu-ray
Prepare to have your retinas dazzled by Teinosuke Kinugasa's vintage tale of fierce love in the Emperor's court, as a great warrior demands the wife of another loyal retainer, breaking all the rules. Thanks to a recent restoration, the breathtaking original colors of this amazingly designed movie look better than ever. An Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, the movie's designs drew rave U.S. reviews back in 1954. In Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
5/14/13
and
Kid Millions
Savant's favorite among producer Sam Goldwyn's Eddie Cantor musicals, this tale of a shipboard cruise to Egypt to claim a $77 million dollar reward sees Eddie assailed by a number of fortune hunters, including impossibly youthful and impressively talented singer Ethel Merman, the attractive Ann Sothern & George Murphy, and the famed Nicholas Brothers when they both looked like 6th graders. Lucille Ball can be spotted in the huge musical numbers as a Goldwyn Girl. The finale is a full-on experimental 3-strip Technicolor romp in a fantastic ice cream factory. Good songs and great entertainment, from The Warner Archive Collection.
5/14/13
Hello!
The fact that you can read this means that my DVDtalk uploading problem got resolved, thanks to some great help from Homer & Luis at the home hosting company. I've been writing furiously trying not to think about the uploading issue, and will have to go back through my reviews to see if they're loaded with nervous errors.
I've been seeing some terrific pictures, including some new Warner Archive Pre-Codes. They show how the Code censorship banned not only nudity and sex innuendo, but relevant subject matter and honest expressions of sexuality as experienced by real people. I've also seen a fun new film noir (see photo) that concludes on a Malibu beach, at the same lonely beach house seen in Kiss Me Deadly. That was quite a shock of recognition. As I'm writing this ahead of time, right now I need to go back and work on getting DVD Savant up and running again ... thanks for reading and for the corrections. I've also fixed about 50 typos and other mistakes in my Monster (El monstruo resucitado) review -- now if I could only upload them!
--- Glenn Erickson
Screening review: Portrait of Jason
Theatrical screenings are underway for a new restoration of Shirley Clarke's game-changing experimental documentary from New York of the 1960s. Flamboyant gay hustler Jason Holiday addresses the camera non-stop, revealing his unusual lifestyle, his pragmatic-hipster approach to life and his ambitions to do a one-man stage show. In one twelve-hour marathon session, Clarke's camera makes this man reveal his inner self -- or does the clever fellow pace his performance to optimal dramatic effect? The film's L.A. run begins next week at the New Beverly theater. From Milestone Films.
5/11/13
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Cloak and Dagger
(1946)
Gary Cooper makes an unlikely physicist-secret agent, flying into wartime Switzerland and Italy to contact atom scientists working for the Nazis and engaging in one of Hollywood's most brutal fight scenes of the 1940s. But the real mystery in Fritz's Lang's espionage thriller is the "why" of how its anti-nuke, anti-Fascist message was suppressed -- pressure was brought to bear to eliminate the film's entire last reel of expensive location work. Savant has the whole story. In Blu-ray from Olive Films.
5/11/13
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Monster (El monstruo resucitado)
They say the modern Mexican horror film began with this totally bizarre 1953 concoction about a mad surgeon with a horribly disfigured face, who vows to punish the world but would also like a little love from the adventurous reporter who answers his newspaper ad. Director Chano Urueta's impressive production conjures the look of the Universal horror classics -- a mansion in a graveyard! wax statues! an ape-man caged in the dungeon! a remote-controlled killer zombie! -- while mixing in motifs and situations from everything from Frankenstein to Phantom of the Opera. From One 7 Movies.
5/11/13
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The Enforcer (1951)
Wow! A top-flight Humphrey Bogart gangster film, finally viewable again and in Blu-ray as well. Bogie is the tough DA who takes on Murder Incorporated, and the whole picture is devoted to hardboiled crime action. With second-billed Zero Mostel in a great dramatic role, just before he was blacklisted; also Ted de Corsia, Roy Roberts, Everett Sloane and a gallery of Warners tough guys to keep things hopping. We won't be seeing many more 'new' Bogart performances like this, as they aren't making 'em any more. In Blu-ray from Olive Films.
5/07/13
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The Great Escape
It's about time -- John Sturges' all-star POW tunnel-and-run adventure turns Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, James Coburn, Charles Bronson and twenty more interesting actors into desperate escapees. And you won't believe how young David McCallum of NCIS looks -- even greener than his Illya Kuryakin days. A superior old-time favorite, with plenty of extras and reissued in Blu-ray from Fox / MGM.
5/07/13
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This Land Is Mine
Charles Laughton delivers a genuine acting tour-de-force as a milquetoast teacher who finds his courage while standing up to Nazi occupiers, in Jean Renoir's RKO war propaganda picture with Maureen O'Hara, Walter Slezak, George Sanders and Kent Smith. A perfect little movie built around Laughton's bravura theatrical oratory against Fascist tyranny... very moving stuff. From The Warner Archive Collection.
5/07/13
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Masaki Kobayashi Against the System
Each title in Eclipse's terrific Series 38 four-disc set is a hard-hitting winner. The Thick-Walled Room tells the truth about scapegoated Japanese war criminals, I Will Buy You is a searing exposé of the bribery and corruption in big league baseball recruting, Black River is a seamy gangster story set just outside an American Naval Base, and The Inheritance is a suspenseful mini-classic about the schemes cooked up to circumvent the will of a dying industrialist. Filmmaker Masaki Kobayashi was easily the best of Japan's rebel filmmakers. From Eclipse.
5/04/13
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Silver Linings Playbook
Last year's popular hit begins as a nervously fascinating story of a Bipolar patient trying to rebuild his life in all the wrong ways. The personalities and romance angles in David O. Russell's movie click and stay clicked, what with Bradley Cooper and especially Jennifer Lawrence making an incredibly attractive couple. So why does it turn into a sitcom and resolve like a lame, feel good movie? We don't knock the feeling, but the first half of the film was going in such an interesting, dangerous direction. In Blu-ray + DVD + Digital + Ultraviolet from Anchor Bay / Starz / Weinstein.
5/04/13
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