Fritz Lang’s “You and Me” (1938), a strange and imperfect movie that I love more on each viewing, has finally arrived on DVD via the TCM Vault Collection, as part of its second “Dark Crimes” collection.
Not a noir like the other three in the set — though it certainly has more of a trademark German expressionist look than a couple of them — it’s part romantic comedy, part Depression-era drama, part Kurt Weill musical and part illustrated lecture that “Crime Does Not Pay.”
George Raft, a big star of the era who is often unfairly maligned by contemporary critics, gives one of his most vulnerable performances as Joe Dennis, an ex-convict who works at a Manhattan store whose owner Jerome Morris (western legend Harry Carey, cast wildly against type) believes in giving them a second break.
What Joe doesn’t suspect is that Helen, the fellow employee who he briefly holds hands with as their escalators move in opposite directions — a swooningly romantic touch more like Frank Borzage than Lang — is also out of stir (and, as the script would have it, is forbidden by her parole to date, much less marry Joe).
She is extremely well played by Sylvia Sidney — whose remarkably resume runs from Von Sternberg (“An American Tragedy”) to Tim Burton (“Mars Attacks!”) — in her third consecutive film for Lang (“Fury” and “You Only Live Twice”). Unlike those two, Lang didn’t originate “You and Me,” which was supposed to be the directorial debut of screenwriter Norman Krasna.
But Raft and his originally assigned co-star, Carole Lombard, balked at an inexperienced director, and Lang agreed to step in and take on material unlike anything else in his career.
Lang brought in Sidney to replace Lombard, who had already moved onto another film, and Virginia Van Upp (whose writer-producer career is worthy of further research) was assigned to darken Krasna’s script.
It was apparently Lang’s suggestion that that fellow German emigre Kurt Weill be assigned to write the songs with lyrics by Ira Gershwin.
Two or three of them were jettisoned at some point — it boggles the mind to imagine Raft and Sidney singing a planned love duet, even by Weill — but what’s left is unlike any other musical of that era.
The film opens with “The Cash Register Song,” sung by an accented operatic voice who sounds to me like Fortunio Bonanova (who delivered another Well-Gershwin composition as Christopher Columbus in “Where Do We Go From Here”?) over a montage of stolen goods, including a movie projector.
More conventional, but still somewhat odd, is “The Right Guy For Me,” performed by torch singer Carol Page at a nightclub where Raft and Sidney spend a romantic evening as the camera cuts away to shots of a waterfront dive out of von Sternberg.
And then there’s “The Knocking Song,” which is more like a recitation by Joe’s ex-jailmates (with an impressionistic prison flashback) at Morris’ department store, who Joe agrees to join in Barton MacLaine’s plot to knock over the place after discovering Helen’s secret and walking out on her. The colleagues are a Runyonesque lot that include Roscoe Karns and George E. Stone (as well as a severely out-of-place Robert Cummings).
Not all of what follows totally works — especially when Helen spells out for the boys on a chalk board in the children’s department why their robbery is a bad deal for them financially.
But overall “You and Me” is still an engrossing and highly atmospheric experience, utterly unlike any other Hollywood film you’re likely to see from any era. It shares a disc with Lang’s more typical “Ministry of Fear” (1944), which I reviewed when it was released last year in a DVD/Blu-ray combo by the Criterion Collection.
The TCM Vault set whimsically pairs the budget-be-damned Lang with quickie king William Castle, who directed a couple of noirs included here before moving over to his more famous, gimmick-laden horror movies.
The more interesting one is “Hollywood Story” (1951), starring Richard Conte as an ambitious film producer researching the 1920s murder of a famous silent director who bears more than a slight resemblance to William Desmond Taylor (much as King Vidor would do, in real life, beginning in the mid-1960s, as chronicled in the book “A Company of Killers”).
Though the names are changed, the script co-written by “Gidget” creator Frederic Kohner) sticks fairly closely to the particulars of the Taylor case, and there are cameos by silent stars like Francis X. Bushman, Betty Blythe and William Farnum.
TCM’s new resident noir expert Eddie Muller, who provides detailed intros for the films, says this was Universal’s attempt to cash in on the success of “Sunset Boulevard,” with Fred Clark essentially playing the same role in both movies (in “Hollywood Story,” his character is also a former assistant to the murder victim).
It’s also narrated by Jim Backus, a ubiquitous on-screen presence two years into his run as the voice of Mr. Magoo. The disc includes a brief interview with leading lady Julia Addams.
Rounding out the two-disc set is Castle’s “Undertow” (1949), an above-average Universal programmer starring Scott Brady (brother of Lawrence Tierney) as a veteran trying to escape his criminal past who gets framed for the murder of his girlfriend’s underworld uncle.
This one is most interesting for its location shooting in Chicago and heavy John Russell, before he settled into a long career in westerns, from TV’s “The Lawman” to Clint Eastwood’s “Pale Rider.”
The enterprising boutique distributor Flicker Alley has just released (as a DVD-Blu combo) an essential set for cinephiles and preservation fans under the somewhat awkward title “We’re in the Movies: Palace of Silents & Itinerant Filmmaking.”
There are a pair of fascinating documentaries making their video debuts here. Stephen Schaller’s ultra-rare “When You Wore a Tulip and I Wore a Big Red Rose” is identified as a 1983 film, but much of it seems to have been filmed earlier, as he interviews then-elderly adult participants in a short film that was shot in Wausau, Wisc. in 1914 (that’s right, one hundred years ago).
Schaller not only pinpoints changes in that city, but does impressive detective work to illuminate the forgotten early 20th century phenomenon of traveling filmmakers who made films with, and for, audiences far from Hollywood. The interviews are terrific, the subjects (including the lively old lady who provides piano accompaniment for the film) highly engaging, and you’ll also learn a lot about film preservation — Schaller was responsible for finding and saving “The Lumberjack,” the opus the interviewees appeared in but hadn’t seen since a mysterious screening in the late 1920s.
The similarly little-known (and very clannish) world of film collectors (and revival houses) is documented in absorbing detail in “Palace of Silents,” which follows the ups and downs of Los Angeles’ celebrated (and still extant) Silent Movie Theatre.
Founded in 1942 by collector John Hampton and his wife, who ran it until 1979, the theater was closed for a decade and was reopened in 1991 by another, highly mysterious collector named Lawrence Austin who was murdered during a showing of “Sunrise” six year later.
Eventually, the current owners of the Silent Movie Theater found the key to survival was to include some talkies in its programming mix.The interviews are again, great.
The set also includes a handful of interesting short films by itinerant filmmakers — among them a child-kidnap yarn from Texas that’s said to have been made 200 times with different local casts all over the country.
I recently published a pair [https://nypost.com/2014/06/18/64-clips-of-movies-you-cant-find-on-dvd/] of lists [https://nypost.com/2014/06/26/even-more-clips-70-in-fact-of-flicks-you-cant-find-on-dvd/] of interesting films that are not available on DVD. It’s probably a coincidence, but I’m still pleased to learn that one of them, “Call Me Savage” (1932) with Clara Bow, will be released soon by the Fox Cinema Archives.
I should have an exact date next week for this release and other titles in FCA’s next wave, including Gregory LaCava’s “The Affairs of Cellini” (1934) with Frederic March, “Gateway” and “Five of a Kind” (1938, both with Don Ameche) and “Everything Happens at Night” (1939) starring Sonja Henie, Ray Milland and Robert Cummings.
Tuesday’s Warner Archive Collection releases include four films with June Allyson: “The Secret Heart” (1946), toplined by Claudette Colbert and Walter Pidgeon; “High Barbaree” (1947) with Van Johnson; “Too Young to Kiss” (1951), also with Johnson; and “The Girl in White” (1951), a biopic of New York City’s first female hospital intern, directed by John Sturges.
The usual suspects return for the umpeenth time on DVD with the release of “Universal Classic Monsters: The Complete 30 Film Collection” on Sept. 2.
This set basically collects the eight monster classics that were released on Blu-ray in “Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection” two years ago, plus “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” — while adding the sequels and spin-offs (like “The Invisible Woman”) that were included on the out-of-print “Legacy Collection” DVD sets.
Those sets are also being reissued in new configurations that provide complete (and overlapping) series runs for each and every monster, now including their encounters with Abbott and Costello for Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man, the Mummy and the Invisible Man.
On the Blu-ray front, Kino Lorber has announced a bunch of MGM-licensed titles for its new Studio Classics Line.
Sept. 9: Richard Lester’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1966) starring Zero Mostel and Phil Silvers; Lester’s “Juggernaut” (1974) with Richard Harris and Omar Sharif; Ossie Davis’ “Cotton Comes to Harlem” (1970) starring Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St. Jacques; and “Across 110th Street” (1972) with Anthony Quinn and Yaphet Kotto.
Sept. 16: Sean Connery in both “The Great Train Robbery” and “Meteor.”
Sept. 23: and Burt Lancaster in Richard Brooks’ “Elmer Gantry,” “The Young Savages” and with Clark Gable in “Run Silent, Run Deep.”
Oct. 7: Ken Russell’s “Billion Dollar Brain” (1967) starring Michael Caine, Jules Dassin’s “Topkapi” (1968), Ulu Grossbard’s “True Confessions” (1981) with Robert DeNiro and Robert Duvall and “Mulholland Falls” (1996).
Universal has announced the Blu-ray debuts of “Duel,” “The Sugarland Express,” the severely underrated “1941” and “Duel” as part of “Steven Spielberg Director’s Collection” on Oct. 14.
“Schinder’s List” (already on Blu) and “Munich” (not on Blu) are not included, apparently at the director’s insistence, nor is any of Spielberg’s interesting TV work at Universal (like the “Columbo” pilot) save “Duel,” an ABC movie-of-the-week that was released in an expanded version as a theatrical feature in Europe. There does not seem to be any collection-specific extra features, though there is a book.