Saturday night - Savant is recovering from a cold and looking foward to Father's Day (which means breakfast out). I've got 3 FORQ's tonight (Films of Reasonable Quality) and one fall-down major discovery.
All Day's David Kalat has had this disc up his sleeve for a long time, and has given it the proper gestation. Edward Dmytryk's Christ in Concrete (aka Give Us This Day) is a very complex movie to explain, and All Day's special edition does it justice with commentaries and other extras. The film itself is a real head-scratcher, a lost English effort made by expatriate American blacklistees, that not only fell through the cracks, as Kalat's company motto goes, but had cement poured in on top of it. The amazing thing is that it's a really good movie, an expressive and lusty portrait of life and love that should be up there with the Wyler, Stevens and Capra classics.
Roman Polanski gives us the tense terror play Death and the Maiden, starring Sigourney Weaver, Ben Kingsley and Stuart Wilson. It's three people in a single room for 90 minutes, but the suspense builds and the dramatic quotient is high.
Robert Redford and George Segal are klutzy criminals who can't seem to pull off the perfect crime, even thought they get four or five chances to do it, in the cleverly plotted The Hot Rock. Zero Mostel is only one of numerous obstacles for the larcenous pair.
And the genuine sparks between Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward ignite Martin Ritt's The Long Hot Summer, a steamy soap opera with Anthony Franciosa, Lee Remick, Angela Lansbury and Orson Welles, who wears the most ridiculous makeup of his career. It's William Faulkner, by way of Peyton Place.
More goodies on the horizon, including a passel 'o art pix courtesy of Criterion and Home Vision, that Savant is eager to bite into. Thanks for hanging round, and hope summer is shaping up for all of us. Glenn Erickson
Posted by DVD Savant at June 14, 2003 05:44 PM