Lou Lumenick

Lou Lumenick

Movies

Midcentury Manhattan on Blu-ray with Woody Allen, Tyrone Power

Views of Manhattan in three different eras are offered in a trio of recent releases from the boutique label Twilight Time, which has now added titles licensed from MGM to its ever-increasing lineup of deep catalog films from the Sony/Columbia and Fox catalogs that it’s released on high-quality, limited-edition Blu-rays.

George Sidney’s “The Eddy Duchin Story” (1956), a musical biopic of the society pianist/bandleader, is far more interesting than I remembered from a viewing nearly a half-century ago on WCBS’ “Schaefer Award Theater.”

Yes, a weary-looking, 41-year-old Tyrone Power is too old to play the title character in his 20s, just as he was a year earlier in John Ford’s “The Long Grey Line.” But he’s particularly poignant as the older Duchin, who died of leukemia at 42. (Power himself died of a heart attack at 44.)

A hugely popular film in its time, with Carmen Cavallero performing the classics on the soundtrack, this one is a real weepie: Duchin’s wife (an ethereal Kim Novak) dies shortly after giving birth halfway through the movie, and the rest is about Duchin’s difficult relationship with their son, Peter (Rex Thompson).

Peter Duchin, who became an even more famous pianist-bandleader than his father (I sat next to him at an ’80s charity event where Nancy Reagan was being honored), wrote disparagingly about the movie’s inaccuracies in his memoirs.

But the film’s depiction of the time span covered — 1927 to 1951 — has more accurate period detail (especially costumes) than most biopic films of the 1950s, such as the more or less contemporaneous “Too Much, Too Soon” (1958). Eddy Duchin’s heiress wife, Marjorie Oelrichs, was a niece of Blanche Oelrichs, a poet wife of John Barrymore who called herself Michael Strange and is portrayed in the biopic of their doomed daughter Diana by Neva Patterson (Dorothy Malone was Diana and Errol Flynn was J.B.).

The aunt and uncle who have raised Marjorie in “The Eddie Duchin Story” (Sheppard Strudwick and Frieda Inescourt) are in fact thinly disguised versions of New York Gov. Averell Harriman and his then-wife, who raised Peter Duchin after his father’s death.

Tyrone Power and Kim Novak in “The Eddy Duchin Story.’’Columbia Pictures

“The Eddy Duchin Story” features extensive location shooting in Manhattan, with the Tavern on the Green standing in for the Central Park Casino, which had been demolished in the 1930s. The playground that replaced the Casino is the unusual setting for a key dramatic scene, and another one takes place in a park alongside the East River with a great CinemaScope view of what was then known as Welfare Island (before the apartments on Roosevelt Island went up).

Martin Ritt’s “The Front” (1976) takes place almost immediately after the end of “The Eddy Duchin Story.” This largely forgotten comedy-drama about the blacklist features what may well be Woody Allen’s best performance.

He plays a wisecracking deli cashier and small-time bookie who agrees to put his name on scripts for a high-school classmate (Michael Murphy, who would later work with Allen on “Manhattan”), a TV writer who’s been blacklisted.

Things get complicated when the show’s producer (Herschel Bernardi, one of several blacklistees in the cast) insists that Allen’s character be present on the set, and Allen becomes involved with Bernardi’s assistant (singer Andrea Marcovicci, who participates in what is apparently the first commentary track on a Woody Allen movie), who has no idea about the deception.

The most tragic figure in the film, set largely in Radio City, is a vaudeville comedian-turned-TV personality (Zero Mostel, another real-life blacklistee) whose long-ago connections to politically suspect organizations have been dug up by a dogged investigator.

Mostel, star of Mel Brooks’ “The Producers,” is the center of a remarkable sequence where, accompanied by Allen, he endures humiliation at a Catskills resort after his blacklisting. The character’s subsequent suicide is modeled on that of Philip Loeb, who was fired from TV’s “The Goldbergs” because of his political past.

Written by another blacklistee, Oscar nominee Walter Bernstein, “The Front” puts Allen’s character in the position of whether to stand up to the House Un-American Activities Committee. The film is bookended by black-and-white sequences accompanied by Frank Sinatra’s “Young at Heart” on the soundtrack — yes, the same Frank Sinatra who “may” have fathered Ronan Farrow.

Woody Allen and Andrea Marcovicci in “The Front.”Everett Collection

“The Front” actually holds up better than one of Woody’s own inquiries into morality — “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” which got much better reviews than “The Front” when it opened in 1989.

Martin Landau is superb as a wealthy optometrist who disposes of a troublesome mistress (Anjelica Huston) with the help of a brother (Jerry Orbach) who has underworld connections, but the whole thing seems overly calculated, removed from reality, and not a little bit pretentious.

Allen himself provides comic relief as a struggling comic filmmaker who’s unable to disguise his contempt for his brother-in-law (Alan Alda), a hugely successful producer of TV sitcoms. Mia Farrow is cast as a PBS producer caught in the middle — and Joanna Gleason is Allen’s wife, the target of some of his most misogynistic barbs ever.

Locations include the Tavern on the Green, Central Park and the old Bleeker Street Cinema, where Allen and his young niece watch “This Gun for Hire” with Laird Cregar and “Happy Go Lucky” with Betty Hutton.

Another recent Twilight Time release is the underrated “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” (1974), the impressive directing debut of Michael Cimino, who also wrote the script.

When I interviewed Clint Eastwood in Cannes a few years after Cimino’s disastrous “Heaven’s Gate,” he told me he helped Cimino bring in “Thunderbolt” (which he produced) under budget and ahead of schedule (often, I read later, by refusing to let him shoot extra takes).

Filmed on gorgeous locations in Montana, “Thunderbolt” is an unusual buddy movie centering on Eastwood’s ex-con and a younger man (Jeff Bridges, who was Oscar-nominated) who join up with Eastwood’s former criminal confederates (George Kennedy and Juliette Lewis’ dad, Geoffrey) to rob a rob a bank — after the loot Eastwood hid from an earlier robbery disappears.

Clint Eastwood stars in “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.”United Artists

Besides the two stars’ chemistry and scenes that have sparked homoerotic speculation for decades, “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” has a couple of other distinctions. Bridges spends most of the last half-hour in rather attractive drag, and the film has one of the best twist endings of a crime film since the original “Ocean’s Eleven.”

This is an extremely handsome Blu-ray transfer, as is Twilight Time’s recent release of John Guillerman’s “The Blue Max,” a World World I adventure starring George Peppard with spectacular flying scenes.

This month’s Twilight Time releases include Robert Rossen’s Oscar-winning “All the King’s Men” (1949), starring Broderick Crawford; Sam Peckinpah’s “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia” (1974), and Sidney Lumet’s “Equus” (1977), starring Richard Burton. May offerings include Allen’s “Broadway Danny Rose” with Farrow and “Mr. Hobbs Takes A Vacation,” starring James Stewart and Maureen O’Hara.

The Warner Archive Collection’s latest Blu-ray release is Arthur Hiller’s superb “The Americanization of Emily,” with James Garner and Julie Andrews. Also out this week is a new remaster of George Hill’s seminal “The Big House” (1930), with Chester Morris, Wallace Beery and Robert Montgomery, which includes Spanish- and French-language versions that were filmed simultaneously by MGM — the latter directed by Paul Fejos (“Lonesome”) and starring Charles Boyer in the Morris role.

Another MOD program, Sony Pictures Choice Collection, has released Elliot Nugent’s “And So They Were Married” (1936), starring Melvyn Douglas and Mary Astor, as well as a World War II rarity, Sidney Salkow’s “The Boy From Stalingrad” (1943), whose young cast includes the ill-fated Scotty Beckett.

Olive Films has made its first announcement this year for its line of simultaneous DVD and Blu-ray releases. May 6 will see William K. Howard’s never-on-DVD “Johnny Come Lately” (1942), starring James Cagney, and David Miller’s “Love Happy” (1949), the final Marx Brothers movie, featuring an early appearance by Marilyn Monroe. These will be followed a week later by Miller’s “Flying Tigers” (1942), starring John Wayne, and Mark Robson’s “Home of the Brave” (1949), with James Edwards.