Stanley Donen’s “Charade” makes its Blu-ray debut today from the Criterion Collection in a stunningly beautiful transfer that captures the film’s European locations, including a chase in a Parisian subway.
Cary Grant’s last romantic lead (he made just two more films) in 1963 is a masterpiece of a comic romantic thriller, rivaled only by Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest,” which he made with Grant four years earlier.
“Charade,” which has a superb script by Peter Stone, is more of a mystery, with Audrey Hepburn as a woman being pursued by menacing associates of her newly-deceased husband (James Coburn, Arthur Kennedy and Ned Glass) as well as a couple of more mysterious characters (Cary Grant, Walter Matthau) with possibly suspect motives.
This still-captivativing film — it was remade by Jonathan Demme as the charmless “The Trouble With Charlie,” starring the hapless Mark Wahlberg and Thandie Newton — carries a very witty commentary track recorded for the 1999 DVD release by Donen and the late Stone.
Earlier this month, Criterion issued an immaculate Blu-ray transfer of the French New Wave classic, “Breathless,” recently restored for its 60th anniversary. Directed by Jean Luc-Godard in 1960, long before he became contemptous of his audience, “Breathless” stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Serberg as a hood and an American girl who go on the lam, in a story written by Francois Truffaut. Highly recommended.
Criterion issued another black-and-white classic, Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” (1950) on Blu-ray in December 2008, but it went out of print several months later after rights reverted to StudioCanal. Now this memorable, Vienna-set thriller with Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard and an unforgettable Orson Welles as a blackmarketeer is available in a new edition from Lionsgate.
The supplements — among them a commentary track by assistant director Guy Hamilton and film historian Simon Callow, a number of archival interviews and a zither performance — are different than in the Criterion edition, but the new Blu-ray looks very good indeed.
Five films from the ’50s through the ’70s with show business backgrounds are making their DVD debuts next week as part of Olive Films’ ongoing licensing deal with Paramount Pictures for deep-catalogue titles.
“Knock On Wood” (1953) was Danny Kaye’s first at Paramount after several years under contract to Samuel Goldwyn (including loan outs to Warner for “The Inspector General” and Fox for “On the Riviera”). It was a co-production between Paramount, Kaye’s Dena Productions and writer-directors Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, with whom Kaye would re-unite two years later for their comic masterpiece, “The Court Jester.”
This one gives Kaye plenty of opportunities to show off his gifts for physical comedy as a possibly schizopheic ventriloquist who becomes involved with a spy ring when documents are secreted in his dummies. There are three songs by Kaye’s wife, Sylvia Fine.
Swedish actress Mai Zetterling makes her screen debut in this handome London-filmed Technicolor production, which is presented in its original 1:1.85 theatrical ratio. It was released in matted widescreen before Paramount rolled out VistaVision in 1954 with “White Christmas,” the biggest hit of Kaye’s career, and the studio’s biggest hit up to that time.
A somewhat similar story is employed in Norman McLeod’s “My Favorite Spy” (1951), the final and very entertaining installment in a very informal series with Bob Hope than ran concurrently with the more famous “Road” pictures. (It’s unrelated to the woeful 1943 Kay Kyser vehicle of the same name).
Hope plays a vaudevillian named Peanuts who also becomes involved with a spy ring, with the Paramount lot and environs representing Tangier.
The previous installments in the series were “My Favorite Blonde” (Madeline Carroll) and “My Favorite Brunette” (Dorothy Lamour) and apparently there was some discussion of “My Favorite Redhead” to co-star Lucille Ball, who had already teamed with Hope to great effect in “Sorrowful Jones” and “Fancy Pants.” But the studio went instead with the gorgeous erstwhile MGM star (and inventor of the technology behind cellular phones) Hedy Lamarr, who demonstrates comic chops in a very rare non-dramatic role.
By 1965, Paramount’s fate was largely in the hands of independent producers like Joseph E. Levine, who had scored a big hit the year before with a lurid adaptation of Harold Robbins’ best-selling “The Carpetbagger.”
Carol Baker had played a Jean Harlow-like star in that film, so it must have seemed like a good idea to have her actually play “Harlow” in an actual biopic to cash in on the nostalgia boom that was then gripping pop culture. Alex Segal’s Technicolor production was rushed through production and into theaters to compete with another “Harlow” starring Carol Lynley, which had been shot on black-and-white videotape and was presented in the mercifully short-lived Electronovision system.
Paramount’s “Harlow” was based on a memoir co-written by Harlow’s long-suffering manager, who is played in the movie by Red Buttons. Besides Harlow herself and her suicidal husband Paul Bern (Peter Lawford) the only other real-life characters depicted are Harlow’s mother (played by Angela Lansbury, generally judged inferior at the time to Ginger Rogers, the best thing in the Electronovision production) and sleazy stepfather (Raf Vallone).
Martin Balsam turns up as a benevolent studio chief very loosely modeled on Louis B. Mayer, but there’s no mention of Harlow’s fiancee at the time of her untimely death (William Powell, who was very much still alive) or her mother’s religious beliefs, which most film historians believe contributed to Harlow’s demise.
Baker, a fine dramatic actress, doesn’t really project how funny Harlow could be as a comedienne. But “Harlow” is interesting as an example of how the ’30s were viewed through the prism of mid-’60s Hollywood.
“Where Love Has Gone,” adapted from another Robbins potboiler, does not have a show business setting per se. It takes place in the artistic and high-society worlds of San Francisco, but 1964 audiences knew from the first scene that it was inspired by one of Hollywood’s most famous scandals of the 1950s — the fatal stabbing of Lana Turner’s boyfriend, gangster Johnny Stompanato, by her teenage daughter Cheryl Crane.
Susan Hayward plays the Turner stand-in, who for legal purposes is now a sculptor, and Joey Heatherton (wearing a deer-in-the-headlights expression throughout) is the unfortunate daughter, who in this “Mildred Pierce”-inspired retelling has been sharing the deceased lover with mom.
Mike Connors is Hayward’s ex-husband and Jane Greer a probation officer who tries to help the daughter. But “Where Love Has Gone,” which has a slick script by frequent Alfred Hitchcock collaborator John Michael Hayes (who also wrote Turner’s comeback vehicle “Peyton Place”) and direction by Edward Dmytryk, is most fun for the historionic fireworks between Hayward and Bette Davis, who plays her icy, controlled mother in the wake of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.”
Novelist Jacqueline Susann is the source for the guilty pleasure “Once is Not Enough,” which casts Kirk Douglas for the third time (after “The Bad and the Beautiful” and “Two Weeks In Another Town”) as a movie producer who dotes, perhaps too much, on his teenage daughter (Deborah Raffin).
He’s being passed over in favor of younger talent in Tinseltown, so to keep up his and the kid’s lifestyle, he marries a vastly wealthy closeted lesbian (Alexis Smith) who has long been carrying on a clandestine affair with a reclusive star (Melina Mercouri) who is also dating Smith’s nephew (George Hamilton), who Smith is trying to fix up with Raffin. But Raffin prefers Norman Mailer-esque novelist David Jannssen, who reminds her of Daddy. Brenda Vaccaro actually got an Oscar nomination for playing Raffin’s nymphomaniac (as we called sexually voracious women then) magazine editor pal.
Guy Green (“A Patch of Blue”) directs, with surprisingly good taste, a script by Julius Epstein (“Casablanca”) that’s a lot smarter than you might expect under the circumstances. Particularly interesting is Douglas’ commentary on how New York City was descending into squalor into 1975. His final scene with Smith, a big star of the ’40s whose last film was “The Age of Innocence,” is rather touching.
Coming Attractions: VCI has an “Ultimate Collector’s Edition” of Frank Capra’s “Meet John Doe” (1941) coming Nov. 30. It’s billed as a major digital restoration of the Gary Cooper-Barbara Stanwyck Classic, which has long languished in public-domain hell after the previous owners of this independent production (originally released through Warner Bros.) allowed the original elements to badly deteriorate before failing to renew their copyright. The commentary track will include archival contributions from Capra.
After many delays, Jack Webb’s long-awaited newspaper melodrama “-30-” finally arrived today at the Warner Archive Collection in a remastered edition, as did Boris Ingster’s long-promised proto-noir “Stranger on the Third Floor” (1940) starring Peter Lorre.
Also being offered are several silents, most notably Rex Ingram’s 1925 horror/fantasy “The Magician” starring Paul Wegener (“The Golem”) and Joan Crawford’s two Jazz Baby classics, “Our Dancing Daughters” and “Our Modern Maidens.”
WAC also has some new pre-Code double features: “Big Hearted Herbert” and “The Merry Frinks,” both with Guy Kibbee and Aline MacMahon; “Side Streets” with McMahon and the Chic Sale vehicle “Stranger in Town”; “Illicit” starring Barbara Stanwyck and “Girl Missing” with Glenda Farrell and Mary Brian; and the comedies “The Merry Wives of Reno” with Kibbee and Farrell and “Smarty” starring Blondell and Warren William.
