With DVD sales showing no sign of recovery three years into The Great Recession, the major studios have largely abandoned releasing deep-catalogue titles on regular pressed DVDs in favor of burn-on-demand programs and Blu-ray upgrades of titles that proved their profitability on the DVD format. The major exception is Warner, which released a pair of new-to-DVD Spencer Tracy-Katharine titles as singles in April, as well as including them in a comprehensive set. Next month, Warner will put out the long-unseen “Night Flight” (1933) in a major test of format’s viability at retail.
Sony, which was slow to market but released more deep-catalogue DVD titles than Warner in the last couple of years, has so far in 2011 focused on its Screen Classics by Demand MOD line and released only a couple of new-to-DVD war-themed titles at retail, with no further ones announced. Since 2009, Fox has released only three new-to-DVD catalogue titles, and then made them available only as part of pricey box sets.
(Paramount Pictures/Photofest)
Had the economy not tanked, Richard Fleischer’s terrific “Violent Saturday” (1955) would logically have eventually turned up in Fox’s long-suspended “Fox Noir” series of beautifully restored and packaged thrillers. Instead, it’s part of a new licensing deal for limited editions through Screen Archives, a longtime distributor of soundtracks which recently put it out under the Twilight Time label.
Though it had a week-long run at Film Forum three years ago, I’d never seen this rare example of a CinemaScope noir, which I don’t believe was included in the Fox packages that played on NBC’s “Saturday Night at the Movies” and “Monday Night at the Movies” in the ’60s. My dog-eared Broadcast Information Bureau book from 1978 claims it had one network play, most likely on ABC which seemed to play the Fox titles that were too racy for NBC.
Vividly filmed on location at a couple of towns in Arizona, “Violent” has intriguing dual focus with soap opera trimmings. It opens with the Friday-afternoon arrival of a trio of criminals — Stephen (nee Horace) McNally, J. Carroll Naish, and inhaler-addicted Lee Marvin — planning to rob the local bank the next morning.
Their activities are compared/contrasted with the guilty secrets of the townspeople: Richard Egan is a closet alcoholic, married to what was then referred to as a nymphomaniac; the bank’s manager, Tom Noonan, is a married Peeping Tom obsessed with a nurse; and librarian Sylvia Sidney is a kleptomaniac who steals a purse to meet the mortgage payments (the scene where they discover each others’ secrets in an alley is some kind of classic).
The film’s nominal hero is top-billed Victor Mature, in one of his best performances as a copper-mine manager who gets to prove to his young son (Billy Gray, just before “Night of the Hunter”) that he has courage even if he didn’t serve in World War II.
Besides Marvin, the film’s real scene-stealer is Ernest Borgnine, who plays a mild-mannered Amish farmer whose family is held hostage by a confederate while the bank robberies finally meet up with most of the townspeople during the heist. Let’s just say that Borgnine — midway between “Bad Day at Black Rock” (also with Marvin) and his Oscar-winning Bronx butcher in “Marty” — speaks softly but carries a big pitchfork.
This is a wonderfully nasty piece of work. It was also quite profitable, so it’s no surprise that Fox’s Darryl Zanuck installed Fleischer (who had established his noir reputation with “The Narrow Margin” and was coming off “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”) as his house director for years to come. Twilight Time has apologized for releasing a less than ideal non-anamorphic transfer (see a technical explanation at DVD Beaver) that Fox prepared years ago for Laserdisc. As the label explains, the alternative was not to put this wonderful title out at all. The release does offer a full stereo mix that shows off Hugo Friedhofer’s atmospheric score, also available as an isolated track.
Twilight Time’s first release was a proper anamorphic transfer of John Huston’s “The Kremlin Letter” (1970), a long and convoluted spy thriller with an excellent cast that includes Max Von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Orson Welles, Dean Jagger, Barbara Parkins — and, memorably, George Sanders in drag playing “Love is a Many Splendored Thing” on the piano at a San Francisco bar. Next up (no date has been announced) is Michael Curtiz’s “The Egyptian.”
After mining the deep catalogue for a series of “Blacklot Series” sets, Universal seems to have thrown in the towel on DVD releases of new deep-catalogue titles for standard DVD retail sale. They have continued to license rare titles to the TCM Vault Collection, which began as a manufacture-on-demand program offering six RKO titles purchased from the estate of Merian C. Cooper but has morphed into offering pressed discs sold through the TCM/Movies Unlimited website.
The latest, drawn from Universal’s huge pre-1948 Paramount holdings, is a “Pre-Code Double Feature.” One disc contains Frank Lubitsch’s “This is the Night” (1932), a racy Lubitschean semi-musical that represents Cary Grant’s feature debut. He’s fifth-billed as a javelin thrower who returns from the Los Angeles Olympics to his wife (Thelma Todd) who has been carrying on with Roland Young in his absence. To allay suspicion, Young’s pal Charlie Ruggles signs up top-billed Lila Damita (Errol Flynn’s forgotten first wife in real life) to pose as Young’s wife and they all go on vacation together.
You’d be hard pressed to predict that Grant would go on to be one of Hollywood’s great light comedians from this, but it’s still a lot of fun.
Marlene Dietrich toplines the feature on the other disc, Rouben Mamoulian’s seldom-seen “The Song of Songs” (1933). Mamoulian was the personal choice of Dietrich’s mentor Josef von Sternberg, who agreed with Paramount that they needed a break after five consecutive films together (they made their last two right after this one).
While Mamoulian was one of the great directors of the era — he made this between the Frederic March “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “Queen Christina,” which some rate as the best film of Dietrich’s rival Garbo — “The Song of Songs” looks a lot like a Sternberg. Reportedly the director deferred to his distraught star, who bemoaned Sternberg’s absence and assisted cinematographer Victor Milner in replicatating her mentor’s elaborate lighting setups.
The storyline, a “Pygmalion’ ‘variation derived from an old German novel and play, is an over-the-top melodrama that’s much of a piece with the Sternbergs. Dietrich is an innocent, bible-loving farm girl who goes to live in Berlin with her crusty aunt (Alison Skipworth) after the death of her father.
She poses nude for a handsome but peniless sculptor (Brian Aherne) she falls for, but he’s paid off by a retired army officer (Lionel Atwill) who wants to make Marlene his bride. She inevitably cheats on Atwill with his staff “agriculturist” Hardie Albright until the marriage literally goes up in flames. Marlene moves back to Berlin where she sings in nightclubs and does God knows what else until Aherne shows up to save her in the final reel.
One common misconception is that the Production Code Authority (aka The Hays Office) did not censor films at all until mid-1934. In fact, 15 minutes of material they considered questionable was snipped from “The Song of Songs,” which may not be a major Dietrich but is still quite interesting as an interval in the middle of her Sternberg period.
The TCM series comes with copious text and photos extras, including in the case of “Song of Songs” the film’s original, elaborate souvenir program, which can be printed out from the PDF format. The extensive notes claim that Paramount distributed “thousands” of replicas of the nude statue to promote the film. Wonder what happened to them?
Paramount, which owns most of its post-1948 titles, hasn’t debuted any new vintage movies for years on its own label except for the Viacom-owned “The African Queen,” which was delayed by a lengthy restoration effort. The studio has thankfully continued to license titles to the Criterion Collection (as have Fox, Universal, and, rumor has it, a couple of long-sought Jan Troell titles are being licensed to CC by longtime holdout Warner). Paramount is also distributing a large number of B and C-list titles on DVD through an ongoing deal with a smaller distributor, Olive Films.
Olive’s latest pair of Paramount titles includes Otto Preminger’s notorious “Hurry, Sundown” (1966), which was received with such critical vitriol that it ended his career as a high-profile purveyor of epic-scale literary adaptations.
“To say that ‘Hurry Sundown’ is the worst film of the still-young year is to belittle it,” wrote Judith Crist of the soon-to-fold World Journal Tribune, who was soon to become the best-known film critic in the U.S., writing for New York magazine and TV Guide as well as tele-reviewing on “The Today Show” (and, uh, appearing in an ad for a feminine hygiene spray). “It stands with the worst films of any number of years. Otto Preminger has provided us not only with soap-opera plotting that gives ‘Peyton Place’ Dostoievskian stature but also with cartoon characters and patronage of Negroes that are incredible in 1967. The whole melange would be offensive were it not simply ludicrous.”
Crist’s review — which began “Gather roun’, chillum, while dem banjos is strummin’ out ‘Hurry Sundown’ an’ ole Marse Preminger gwine tell us all about de South…” — made a huge impression on me as a teenager, and I even made a couple of attempts to write some of my early reviews in the ’80s in dialect. But from a distance of nearly a half-century, “Hurry, Sundown,” while problematic in some aspects, seems far more watchable than many other films from that era, certainly more so than the downsized Preminger movies that followed.
Star fans will savor the only teaming of Jane Fonda and Michael Caine (hot off “Alfie” and “Funeral in Berlin”) both near the peak of their physical perfection. He’s a sleazy opportunist who wants to turn Fonda’s ancestral Georgia spread into a housing development in 1946. But Caine runs into a major roadblock in the form of Fonda’s sharecroppers: his redneck cousin (fellow Brit John Phillip Law, soon to show off his impressive physique opposite Fonda in “Barbarella”) with a headstrong wife (a pre-“Bonnie and Clyde” Faye Dunaway) and towheaded brood; and a proud black veteran of World War II (Robert Hooks) who wants to keep the spread inherited by his mother (Beah Richards), who happen to be Fonda’s old mammy.
“Hurry Sundown” has enough plot, and sexual complications, for half a dozen movies. In the most notorious scene, Fonda performs fellatio on Caine’s saxophone (he’s a failed musician) in an attempt to repair their frayed marriage, damaged by his highly questionable treatment of their autistic son.
Speaking in a Southern drawl, Caine is wonderfully rotten in one of only two movies where he attempts an American accent — he didn’t do so again until “The Cider House Rules” in 1999. He has volatile chemistry with Fonda, whose neurotic character is torn between her sympathy for blacks and the racist attitudes of her husband and his rather menacing friends.
The excellent cast includes singer Diahann Carroll (just before her TV series “Julia”) as a schoolteacher who has returned from a stint in New York to sort-of pursue Hooks; the great black actor Rex Ingram (“The Green Pastures”) in his final big-screen appearance as her wise grandfather; and George Kennedy as the pragmatic sheriff with a black mistress or two. Rex Reed, who like Crist is one of my predecessors as a film reviewer at The post, supposedly has an unbilled bit as a farmer, but I couldn’t spot him.
Preminger was particularly fond of character actors, and he provides a particularly juicy role to one of his favorites, Burgess Meredith, as a racist judge who Caine prevails upon to evict the sharecroppers. But even Preminger is upstaged in the courtroom climax by Jim Backus, who in the midst of “Gillian’s Island” briefly grabs the spotlight as Hooks’ lawyer, boasting about his “half-negro brother.”
A great liberal who fought the blacklist, censors and studio suits to cast African-Americans in prominent roles, Preminger clearly failed to keep up with the racial attitudes of the the times (even if the great Pulitzer winning playwright Horton Foote co-wrote the screenplay). Still, “Hurry Sundown” held my attention for two and a half hours, right up to the literally explosive finale.
Shooting on location in Louisiana (gorgeously photographed by Loyal Griggs, who Preminger fired, and another old pro, Milton Krasner), this movie ran way over budget and broke even at best. But Preminger, who had been one of the most successful independent director-producers of the ’50s and early ’60s, had signed an iron-clad contract with Paramount after the enormous success of the military potboiler “In Harm’s Way” (1965). As long as he kept to a relatively low budget, Preminger could make
pretty much anything he wanted.
Olive today is releasing one of these late Premingers, “Such Good Friends” with Dyan Cannon in a script partly written by Elaine May (under a pseudonym). Coming in July is the DVD debut of Preminger’s most infamous movie, the counter-culture spoof “Skidoo” with Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing and an all-star supporting cast including Groucho Marx. I can’t wait to review that one.
Today the Warner Archive Collection MOD program is debuting Mark Robson’s long-awaited spy thriller “The Prize” (1965) with Paul Newman, Elke Sommer and Edward G. Robinson as well as introducing a couple of war-themed early Newmans to the DVD format: Arnold Laven’s “The Rack” (1956) with Wendell Corey, Walter Pidgeon and Edmond O’Brien, and Robert Wise’s “Until They Sail” (1957) with Jean Simmons, Joan Fontaine, Piper Laurie and Sandra Dee.
For fans of the lovely Lane Sisters — Priscilla, Rosemary, Lola and ringer Gale Page — like me, WAC is offering “The Four Daughters Collection” with a remastered version of Curtiz’ previously released “Four Daughters” (1938) as well as its never-available-on-video sequels “Four Wives” (1939) and “Four Mothers” (1940) — plus “Daughters Courageous” (1939) a pseudo sequel with the sisters, John Garfield and Claude Rains playing similar roles to the ones they had in “Four Daughters.” The titles will also be available individually.
The Criterion Collection, meanwhile, has announced that under its licensing deal with MGM, it will be offering Stanley Kubrick’s noir classic “The Killing” (1956) with Sterling Hayden in a Blu-ray edition that also includes its predecessor “Killer’s Kiss” (1955). A corresponding edition in the DVD format will also be available on August 16.