Thanks to a whirlwind month devoted to appreciations (Robin Williams, Lauren Bacall), anniversary-themed features (“Rear Window” and “The Wizard of Oz”), a flood of new theatrical releases and a much-needed vacation, this is my first DVD Extra column since July. But before I leave town again for the Toronto International Film Festival, I wanted to offer quick reviews of two very worthwhile recent DVD releases from the Fox Cinema Archives.
Fox’s manufacture-on-demand program has been criticized for its use of off-the-shelf TV transfers, some prepared for the Fox Movie Channel decades ago. Certainly I would have preferred that Fox spent a little extra and remastered John Francis Dillon’s jaw-dropping pre-code melodrama “Call Her Savage” (1932) from MoMA’s recent restoration, which was shown at the 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival.
The old transfer used is slightly battered, but it’s still more than watchable — and, to give Fox some credit, this IS the first of Bow’s 10 or so talkies to be legitimately available on DVD in North America. And the comeback of Hollywood’s original wild child (after being dropped by longtime employer Paramount and 1931 and a subsequent nervous breakdown) is a doozy, even if she reportedly did her last two films for Fox primarily for financial reasons.
Bow’s penultimate screen role (she made Frank Lloyd’s nearly as racy “Hoop-La” the following year) casts her as as Nasa, hard-drinking, hot-tempered western heiress. Neither she nor her long-suffering dad (Williard Robertson) is aware this temperament “results” from her being the product of her mother’s affair with a native American, suggested in the first of two moralistic prologues.
Nasa is first seen playfully whipping her fellow “half-breed” (though she doesn’t yet know she’s one) pal from the reservation Moonglow (Gilbert Roland), then smashing a guitar over an Indian head’s. When Dad ships Nasa off to Chicago for schooling, she marries a wealthy cad (Monroe Owsley) with a mistress (Thelma Todd) and a drug habit. After he tries to rape her in a New Orleans sanitarium, poor Nasa ends up working the streets while her child dies in a fire — minutes before Moonglow shows up with news of an inheritance.
In other words, “Call Her Savage” is a catalog of naughty stuff that would be banned when the Production Code began being enforced in mid-1934 — including a visit to a Greenwich Village bar with mincing waiters and an anarchist played by Mischa Auer. It’s a lot of fun, if more than slightly racist if you take its theory about Nasa’s multi-racial background causing her “temperament” seriously (which the docile Moonglow — who incidentally may or may not be her brother — does not share).
A couple of months before Lauren Bacall’s death, FCA released a comedy-drama that contains one of her best performances, “Woman’s World” (1954). Bacall is fourth-billed (after Clifton Webb, June Allyson and Van Heflin) in this reunion with her “How to Marry a Millionaire” director, the underrated Gene Negulesco, who had helmed the fantastically popular “Three Coins in the Fountain” in the interim. Webb plays a bitchy and womanizing (!) auto magnate who summons his top three regional managers (ulcer-prone Fred MacMurray, Heflin and Cornel Wilde — the latter coasting through his last contractual obligation to Fox) to corporate headquarters in Manhattan to audition for the spot as his number two, the incumbent having recently worked himself to death.
As the title intimates, Webb and the film are more interested in their wives — Allyson hams it up as Wilde’s gaffe-prone midwest hausfrau, who at one point gets stuck in a porthole of Clifton’s Webb as it cruises up the back-projected Hudson River. (New York was presumably chosen as more photogenic than Detroit for this semi-travelogue, which offers some great mid-century views though none of the stars appear to have to have gotten closer to the Big Apple than Century City). Meanwhile, Texas belle Arlene Dahl is trying to secure the job for outspoken hubby Heflin by seducing Webb (whose den hilariously includes photos of his romantic “conquests,” including Gene Tierney’s portrait from “Laura”).
Allyson and Dahl may have flashier roles, but Bacall steals the film in one of her warmest performances as a mother of two (as Bacall was in real-life). She and spouse MacMurray are estranged, but she reluctantly agrees to accompany him to Manhattan even though she believes getting the big job may end up killing him. One standout sequence is conciliatory dinner with MacMurray at an Italian restaurant at Manhattan restaurant they frequented during their “college days” (given their age differences, he would have to been a faculty member). And, even more interestingly, the sophisticated Bacall takes the clueless Allyson shopping for a discount gown (that she will inevitably end up spilling something on). The latter sequence takes places in a strictly functional store with sharp-elbowed customers (but without dressing rooms) than is unmistakably meant to be the legendary Loehmann’s — which Bacall, a former fashion model from the Bronx, later mentioned several times in her autobiography. I’d like to think she suggested it.
Fox offers another ancient transfer for “Woman’s World” — a non-anamorphic letterbox master (not enhanced for widescreen TVs), but at least it isn’t a cropped pan-and-scan or full frame like some FCA ‘Scope titles. The reality is that this fascinating ’50s time capsule (which offers a less realistic view of the business world than “Executive Suite”) is unlikely to appear on disc in any other way, unless the limited-edition boutique label Twilight Time decides to step in, as they did with a superb Blu-ray of “The Rains of Ranchipur,” another star-packed CinemaScope production with MacMurray.
Coming attractions: The big news is that two Frank Capra classics celebrating anniversaries are debuting in new 4K restorations on Blu-ray in the fourth quarter. The Oscar-winning “It Happened One Night” (1934) with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert is getting the full Criterion Collection treatment on Nov. 11 (there is also a corresponding DVD release). Extras include the two-hour 1997 documentary “Frank Capra’s American Dream”; Capra’s 1922 directorial debut, the short “The Ballad of Fisher’s Boarding House”; the 1981 AFI tribute to Capra; a conversion between Molly Haskell and Philip Lopate, and a written essay by The Post’s very own Farran Smith Nehme.
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, which has largely been farming out its big titles to other distributors, will bring out a 75th-anniversary restoration of Capra’s beloved “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939) starring James Stewart, Jean Arthur and Claude Rains on (Blu-ray only) Dec. 2. The extras (including “Frank Capra’s American Dream” and a commentary track by Frank Capra Jr., who died in 2007) are ported over from the Sony’s 2006 Frank Capra Collection on DVD. No word yet when Sony will release the gorgeous restoration of “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” that premiered at this year’s TCM Classic Film Festival — hopefully they won’t wait until the 80th anniversary in 2006.
In the meantime, Kino Lorber will high-def upgrade Capra’s final film –“Pocketful of Miracles” (1961) with Glenn Ford and Bette Davis in a remake of Capra’s “Lady for a Day” (1933) — on Blu-ray Nov. 18, with a new DVD edition also available for this out-of-print title. Also on that date, the KL Classics line will reissue on DVD/debut on Blu Hal Ashby’s “Coming Home” (1978) with Jane Fonda and Bruce Dern. The following week, it’s the same treatment for Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” (1973) and “Thieves Like Us” (1974), followed by his “Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson” (1976) starring Paul Newman and Burt Lancaster.
Also available either on Blu-ray or DVD (both for the first time) from Flicker Alley on Nov. 11 are a couple more Cinerama travelogues with Lowell Thomas: “Seven Wonders of the World” (1956) and “Search for Paradise” (1957), both with copious special features. And Cohen Media will offer a Blu-ray upgrade and restoration for Fritz Lang’s “Hangmen Also Die” (1943) on Sept. 9
Staying on the Blu-ray front, Warner Home Video offers up an Audrey Hepburn Blu-ray collection with three previously available Paramount evergreens, “Sabrina,” “Funny Face” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” on 9/30. And the Warner Archive Collection, which has been putting out some outstanding Blu-ray transfers, offers up the high-def debut of Blake Edwards’ “The Great Race” (1965) with Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood in the full roadshow version.
WAC keeps up its torrid recent pace of releases — everything from Joe E. Brown to Glenn Ford and never-on-DVD rarities like “They Shall Have Music!” and a double feature of both 1930s “Raffles” films (starring Ronald Colman and David Niven) — with the Sept. 9 debut of two of the three versions of the Sigmund Romberg operetta “The Desert Song.” The long-unseen 1943 version starring Dennis Morgan and Irene Manning features mouth-watering three-strip Technicolor, a campy script that turns the villains into Nazis and some sets that were recycled (in black-and-white) for “Casablanca.” The more traditional 1953 remake, which is being offered separately on Sept. 9 stars Morgan’s successor Gordon MacRae opposite Kathryn Grayson.
WAC is also taking 9/23 preorders for John G. Adolfi’s “The Man Who Played God” (1932) with George Arliss and his protege Bette Davis, making her WB debut; and Sam Wood’s “Five and Ten” (1931) starring Marion Davies and Leslie Howard. For 9/16, it’s westerns including Richard Bare’s “Shootout at Medicine Bend” (1957) with Randolph Scott and Angie Dickinson; Paul Landres’ “Son of a Gunfighter” (1965) with Russ Tamblyn in the title role; and the hard-to-image pairing of a non-singing Dennis Morgan and Patricia Neal in Edwin L. Marin’s “Raton Pass” (1951).
The Sony Pictures Choice Collection continues to dig up ultra-rarities that have received minimal, if any, TV exposure, let alone previous video release for this low-profile MOD program. Their Sept. 9 docket includes John Sturges’ “Best Man Wins” (1948), an unusual starring vehicle for character actor Edgar Buchanan loosely adapted from Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavares County”; and William Berke’s “Girl in the Case” (1943), yet another forgotten Columbia B picture starring Edmund Lowe, this time opposite Janis Carter.
John Wayne fans will be glad to hear that The Duke’s long-out-of-print “The Sands of Iwo Jima” (1949) will be making its Blu-ray debut, and returning to DVD as well, on Nov. 11 via Olive Films’ licensing deal with owner Paramount Pictures. Apparently this is the final Olive release starring Wayne, who was Oscar nominated under Allan Dwan’s direction in this World War II classic.
Speaking of cinema icons, Paramount has chosen not to outsource its “Diamond Anniversary Edition” of “White Christmas” (1954), out Nov. 11. Apparently this is the same excellent Blu-ray transfer from five years ago of the Bing Crosby/Danny Kaye/Michael Curtiz musical schmaltzfest, with mostly the same special features. The major addition seems to be a 19-minute UNICEF short with Kaye from 1955 (“Assignment Children”) that was theatrically distributed by Paramount back in the day.
Universal, which previously announced it was bringing “Holiday Inn” to Blu ray in October, will issue a massive 24-title, 13-disc “Bing Crosby: Silver Screen Collection” on DVD, also on Nov. 11. Two hundred dollars list (even discounted to $139 at Amazon) seems a bit steep for a set comprised entirely of ’30s and ’40s titles that, with one exception, have long been available on DVD, either individually and/or as part of previous sets. (The 1947 “Variety Girl” featuring Crosby and Bob Hope most prominently among a raft of Paramount star cameos, bowed via the Universal Vault Series MOD program back in May and will be making its pressed-disc debut as part of the set). It’s not as if there aren’t unreleased Crosby titles in the Universal vaults — “The Big Broadcast,” “Dr. Rhythm,” “The Star Maker” and a controversial one that Universal announced and pulled several years ago, “Dixie,” not to mention his cameo in the long-unseen “Duffy’s Tavern.” There’s apparently not even a booklet in the set, but that 13th disc is a brand-new 90-minute “American Masters” documentary on Crosby, available three weeks before it premieres on PBS — which will be selling it a standalone DVD.