Judy Holliday won the Best Actress Oscar for 1950, besting Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson, who gave two of the most iconic performances in Hollywood history in “All About Eve” and “Sunset Blvd.,” respectively. Those films have become revival evergreens, but not so George Cukor’s “Born Yesterday” — and Holliday, who died of cancer in 1965, decades before Swanson and Davis, is nowhere near as well remembered as she should be.
Beautifully restored by Sony, “Born Yesterday” has arrived in a gorgeously mastered Blu-ray released by Twilight Time, a boutique label specializing in fantastic-looking limited editions of 3,000 (several of its previous titles titles have sold out and fetch hefty prices from online sellers). Photographed in glistening black-and-white by the masterful Joseph Walker largely on sets representing a huge hotel suite — as well as locations around Washington, D.C. — this is a textbook example of how to adapt a stage comedy (Garson Kanin’s) for the screen by the director of “The Women,” though he has a much smaller cast to work with here.
Holliday reprises her Broadway role as the longtime “dumb blonde” mistress of a vulgar scrap-iron magnate (Broderick Crawford), who is in D.C. to bribe a congressman for legislation that will benefit him financially. Crawford decides to hire a reporter (a bespectacled William Holden) to “educate” Holliday with entirely unexpected results. The only other major role is Crawford’s self-loathing alcoholic lawyer, played with great comic skill by Howard St. John (best known as the police chief in Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train”).
Native New Yorker Holliday — who had replaced Jean Arthur when the much-older actress left the play for supposed health reasons during out-of-town tryouts — was nobody’s choice to repeat in the film except for Cukor, who had directed her in a small role in “Winged Victory” during Holliday’s unremarkable three-picture stint at Twentieth-Century Fox in the mid-1940s. Columbia Pictures’ Harry Cohn bought the play as a vehicle for Rita Hayworth, of all people, but she departed the lot after marrying Aly Kahn. According to Kanin, Marilyn Monroe (then briefly under contract at Columbia) shot a test for “Born Yesterday” but Cohn didn’t bother looking at it. Other actresses, including Lucille Ball and former Columbia contractee Jean Arthur, were under consideration, but Cukor hatched a plan to turn Holliday into a bona-fide movie star.
Their vehicle was a showy supporting role in the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn classic “Adam’s Rib,” which was written by Kanin and his wife Ruth Gordon. Cohn finally relented and allowed Cukor to use the actress he referred to as “the fat Jewish broad,” provided she signed a seven-year contract and had a couple of bigger names as co-stars. Broderick Crawford, who had just won a Best Actor Oscar for “All The King’s Men,” took the stage role of Paul Douglas, who had signed with Fox while Cohn dithered over casting the female lead in the film (they finally worked together on screen in 1956’s “The Solid Gold Cadillac”’). The reporter role, which had been played on Broadway by Gary Merill (by then husband of Bette Davis, whom he supported in “All About Eve”) went to William Holden, who had already wrapped the second of his four 1950 releases, “Sunset Blvd.”
Holliday — who had an extraordinary gift for combining comedy and vulnerability — starred in five more movies for Columbia through 1956, two of them directed by Cukor. She then returned to the stage in the musical “Bells Are Ringing,” which she filmed in 1960 at MGM under Vincent Minnelli’s direction. All of her films are available on DVD and are well worth exploring.
Another worthy classic getting a handsome Blu-ray upgrade from Twilight Time is John Frankenheimer’s brilliant World War II thriller “The Train” (1964), previously available in a lackluster DVD from licensor MGM. “The Train” was mentioned in many recent reviews of George Clooney’s “Momuments Men,” which is sort of an unofficial sequel that goes out of its way to avoid comparisons to Frankenheimer’s film but ended up getting unfairly clobbered with them anyway.
Both films feature fictionalized versions of Rose Valland, a curator at Paris’ Jeu de Palme who kept track of artwork confiscated by the occupying Nazis and helped the allied forces recover it afterwards. In “Momuments Men,” she’s played by a glamorous Cate Blanchett, while “The Train” (which was loosely inspired by her memoirs), it’s a more accurately spinsterish Suzanne Flon who pleads with Burt Lancaster’s railway supervisor to stop a train full of French masterpieces headed for Germany just ahead of liberation (unlike “Moments Men,” the earlier film oddly doesn’t mention that most of them were taken from Jewish art collectors).
Lancaster, who has been working with the French underground, is reluctant to have his men risk their lives for paintings — at least until his old conductor mentor (the great character actor Michel Simon) cheerfully lays down his life to protect the national treasures. From there on in, it’s a duel of wits between Lancaster and German officer Paul Scofield (Oscar winner for “A Man For All Seasons”) who is equally determined that his cargo will escape France at any cost.
Shot in stunning black-and-white,”The Train” is one of the smartest thriller ever made, with incredible stunt work by former circus performer Lancaster and action involving mostly real trains. When allied bombers attack, you’re watching explosions in an actual train yard that was scheduled for demolition in real life. It’s one of my favorite movies.
(Twilight Time reports at its Facebook page that “The Train” is now sold out. These previous titles are listed as being close to sold out: “In Like Flint,” “Our Man Flint,” “Hard Times,” “The Driver,” “Leave Her to Heaven,” “Bye Bye Birdie,” and “Bell, Book, and Candle.”)
Twilight Time’s other new Blu-ray upgrades include a beautiful new transfer of Woody Allen’s “Radio Days” (1987), which at the time was his most expensive and elaborate film (though overshadowed in popularity by its immediate predecessor, “Hannah and Her Sisters”). It’s an uncharacteristically warm-hearted homage to family life in New York City of the 1940s (Seth Green plays a youthful surrogate) and the role that radio played in popular culture, with musical cameos by Diane Keaton and Kitty Carlisle Hart.
Also highly recommended is the gorgeous high-definition debut of Richard Fleischer’s crackling CinemaScope/DeLuxe Color noir “Violent Saturday” (1955), which Twilight Time released in a disappointing non-anamorphic DVD transfer not long after it begin operations in 2011, before switching over strictly to Blu-ray.
The Warner Archive Collection has included several films mentioned in my three recent not-on-DVD columns (here, here and here) among the six Glenn Ford titles premiering this week. They are Ted Tetzlaff’s Alpine adventure “The White Tower” (1950) with Alida Valli; Mitchell Leisen’s “Young Man With Ideas” (1952) co-starring Ruth Roman; Mark Robson’s “Trail” (1955) with Dorothy McGuire; Alex Segal’s excellent and much-requested thrilller “Ransom!” (1956) co-starring Donna Reed; George Marshall’s World War II comedy “Imitation General” (1958) with Red Buttons; and Joseph Pevney’s long-awaited “Torpedo Run” (1958) co-starring Ernest Borgnine.
Blake Edwards’ road-show comedy epic “The Great Race” (1965) with Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood, will be making its Blu-ray debut on Sept. 9 from the Warner Archive Collection. Over on the retail side, Warner Home Video will upgrade a couple of holiday evergreens to Blu-ray on Nov. 11: Edwin L. Marin’s underrated “A Christmas Carol” (1938) starring Reginald Owen and Gene Lockhart, and Peter Godfrey’s “Christmas in Connecticut” (1945) with Barbara Stanwyck, Dennis Morgan and Sydney Greenstreet.
Lesley Selander’s rarely-seen Korean War adventure “Dragonfly Squadron” (1954) will be available for the first time in its original 3-D version (as well as a flat transfer) in Olive Films’ Oct. 14 Blu-ray release. John Hodiak and Bruce Bennett star.
Kino Lober’s KL Studio Classics line has announced a trio of Burt Reynolds films for Nov. 11: Arnold Laven’s “Sam Whiskey” (1969) with Clint Walker; Joseph Sargent’s “White Lightning” (1973) with Ned Beatty; and Reynolds’ feature directing debut, “Gator” (1976) with Burt, Jack Weston and Lauren Hutton.