Film Freak Central

Singin' in the Rain (1952) - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Cyd Charisse
screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green
directed by Stanley Donen

click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer Not just the best Gene Kelly film, and not just the best movie musical ever made, Singin' in the Rain is a genuine national treasure--a single text proving for posterity what a wondrous thing the Hollywood studio system could be when it was firing on all cylinders. It's the quintessential studio picture and smart as hell about its own nature. Unpretentious and unabashedly entertaining, it's a self-reflexive product of the same filmmaking process it simultaneously documents and lampoons.

Cinderella (1950) [Diamond Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
directed by Clyde Geronomi & Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske

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by Bill Chambers Despite its streamlining of the particulars, Walt Disney's feature-length Cinderella ultimately takes fewer liberties with the source material (chiefly, Charles Perrault's "Cinderella, or The Glass Slipper") than almost any of his other animated fairytales. Consequently, there remains the problem of a heroine who'd still be sweeping the floors were it not for her Fairy Godmother, the deus ex machina to end deus ex machinas. The Cinderella myth, as Perrault interpreted it, is at best anachronistic--we learn that beauty is a virtue but that grace is a gift...whatever that means. Disney's contemporization turns it into a karma fable of sorts, with martyrdom paying off like a jackpot and the comeuppance of Cinderella's tormentors the real happily-ever-after of the piece. Cinderella's a less-than-ideal role model for the millions exposed to the movie in childhood, really, because she accepts victimhood until external forces intervene on her behalf.

Summer with Monika (1953) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Sommaren med Monika
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Harriet Andersson, Lars Ekborg, Dagmar Ebbesen, Åke Fridell
screenplay by Per Anders Fogelström
directed by Ingmar Bergman

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by Bryant Frazer In the annals of Early Bergman, Summer with Monika is The Big One--the international hit that established the striving Swede's cred as a major filmmaker. The irony is that it's among the slightest of his works. Its notoriety is mainly the result of a promotional campaign selling it as a sex film, using imagery that suggested a nudie pic rather than a melancholy (and cautionary) rumination on life, love, and gender relations. Of course, it wasn't just the trenchcoat brigade that turned out in force for a movie that was at one point evocatively retitled Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl(!). In fact, Monika was the one that made Woody Allen a lifelong Bergman fan. And it left a huge impression on Jean-Luc Godard, who, in 1958, wrote that Monika is "the most original film by the most original of directors," arguing that Bergman's loving photography of Harriet Andersson predated (and thus eclipsed) Fellini's widely lauded use of Guiletta Masina in a neo-realist mode in Nights of Cabiria, and that it surpassed in craft (mais oui!) Roger Vadim's employment of Bardot in And God Created Woman.

Love Me Tender (1956) [Cinema Classics Collection] - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Richard Egan, Debra Paget, Elvis Presley, Robert Middleton
screenplay by Robert Buckner
directed by Robert D. Webb

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. As far as drugs go, Love Me Tender is more pot than heroin. It won't curl your toes, but you'll get a smooth, mellow buzz. It's sort of the perfect film to watch on a Sunday morning on TCM while you're eating a bowl of Cap'n Crunch. Love Me Tender doesn't have a lot of urgency and it moves pretty slowly, yet there's never a moment in which it's not compulsively watchable--and at just a shade under ninety minutes, it doesn't wear out its welcome. Director Robert D. Webb keeps the camera pretty still and shoots the outdoor scenes in long shot, the better to encapsulate the sheer enormity of the under-settled frontier. All this space lends the film a distinctly melancholy feel; there's something lonely and isolated about the picture. But bittersweet is a flavour, too (a good one), and melancholy is the right attitude for this story and the right attitude for a film titled after Elvis Presley's tragically romantic hit single "Love Me Tender." This was the only film that ever killed off Elvis--and it earns the right to do so.

Bell, Book, and Candle (1958) - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, Jack Lemmon, Elsa Lanchester
screenplay by Daniel Taradash, based on the play by John Van Druten
directed by Richard Quine

by Jefferson Robbins What a strange companion piece this makes for Vertigo, released the same year by Paramount. Columbia issued Bell, Book, and Candle as a Christmas confection, but it's bitter chocolate--both for the extratextual residues carried over by Vertigo co-stars James Stewart and Kim Novak and for the conceit of a powerful woman who must rein herself in to become worthy of a clueless paramour. In each, Stewart is a bewitched man who throws away much of his dignity in pursuit of a sexual obsession and torments a beautiful apparition of a woman to tears. Re-examined now, despite its technical proficiency, its occasionally risqué dialogue, and its mindfulness of New York's post-Beat subculture of the time, Bell, Book, and Candle is also a fantasy of limited vision. It posits a world of real magic but never contemplates the ramifications beyond its heroes' immediate personal needs. This shortsightedness, unfortunately, is now engraved on the thirteenth chromosome of all romantic comedies; the exceptions that dare glance up at the wider world are mutations. Still, Bell, Book, and Candle carries off some covert gender reversals most contemporary comedies couldn't muster, and it echoes in the "Harry Potter" franchise of novels and films in ways that make me think J.K. Rowling was a fan.

Summer Interlude (1951) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Sommarlek
***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras D
starring Maj-Britt Nilsson, Birger Malmsten, Alf Kjelin, Annalisa Ericson
screenplay by Herbert Grevenius and Ingmar Bergman
directed by Ingmar Bergman 

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by Bryant Frazer 1951's Summer Interlude offers a glimpse of Ingmar Bergman's later career in embryonic form. Maj-Britt Nilsson plays a sexy, precocious teenager in love, and if that doesn't sound very Bergman-esque to you, know that she also plays a wary, regretful dancer approaching the functional end of her career at the Stockholm Royal Opera. The story darts forwards and backwards in time as the dancer, Marie, recalls an ill-fated love affair on the Stockholm archipelago while considering the status of her current relationship, a tentative affair with a newspaper hack who doesn't deserve her.

Vera Cruz (1954) + The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) (DigiBook) - Blu-ray Discs

****/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Burt Lancaster, Denise Darcel, Sarita Monteil, Cesar Romero
screenplay by Roland Kibbee and James R. Webb
directed by Robert Aldrich

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Clint Eastwood, Chief Dan George, Sondra Locke, John Vernon
screenplay by Phil Kaufman and Sonia Chernus
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Jefferson Robbins One mistake in looking at the U.S. Civil War is to assume it began at Sumter and ended at Appomattox. If the wars of living memory have had such tremendous social and personal repercussions, how much could that war among countrymen have? Western movies, for better and often worse, have plumbed this question in the same way noirs and horror movies inquire about their own present moment. Think about the sheer number of greedy killers and dead-eyed psychopaths required to populate "the West" as we came know it through our cinema; what else but a national trauma could create so many murderers and flush them out to the frontiers.

Leave It To Beaver: The Complete First Season (1957-1958) - DVD

Image A- Sound B+ Extras C
"Beaver Gets 'Spelled'," "Captain Jack," "The Black Eye," "The Haircut," "New Neighbors," "Brotherly Love," "Water, Anyone?," "Beaver's Crush," "The Clubhouse," "Wally's Girl Trouble," "Beaver's Short Pants," "The Perfume Salesmen," "Voodoo Magic," "Part-Time Genius," "Party Invitation," "Lumpy Rutherford," "The Paper Route," "Child Care," "The Bank Account," "Lonesome Beaver," "Cleaning Up Beaver," "The Perfect Father," "Beaver and Poncho," "The State vs. Beaver," "The Broken Window," "Train Trip," "My Brother's Girl," "Next-Door Indians," "Tenting Tonight," "Music Lesson," "New Doctor," "Beaver's Old Friend," "Wally's Job," "Beaver's Bad Day," "Boarding School," "Beaver and Henry," "Beaver Runs Away," "Beaver's Guest," "It's a Small World"

by Bill Chambers "Leave It To Beaver" was the first TV series to show a toilet. That sort of illustrates a point I want to make that while it may be an idealized portrait of the nuclear family, it's not a lie. Indeed, there's a touch of neo-realism in the show's emphasis on the bathroom, on laundry, on haircuts and making the bed. It's the only series I can think of where the characters are seen grooming themselves on a regular basis, and this almost blithe disregard for fourth-wall etiquette extends to not only frank discussions of hygiene, money, faith, and morality, but also an aesthetic that eventually supports 360º blocking. You won't, in other words, see the standard set-up of four people all sitting on the same side of the dinner table, except in the earliest episodes.

Looney Tunes [Platinum Collection - Volume One] - Blu-ray Disc

by Bill Chambers It's been fun to skylark about a Blu-ray release of vintage Looney Tunes since the format's inception, but until Warner announced this "Platinum Collection" box set, I don't think anybody truly expected it to happen. And while the DVD transfers that graced the "Golden Collection"s were more than adequate, the truth is that a taste of Bugs, Daffy, et al in standard-def--via recycled "Behind the Tunes" featurettes--after seeing them in all their HiDef splendour is a lot like Dorothy's unintentionally depressing return to Kansas at the end of The Wizard of Oz. Presented pillarboxed in their original 1.37:1 aspect ratio, these shorts pop like never before but have not, unlike Disney's animated features, undergone a digital repainting--though I remain skeptical of a radioactive shade of green that crops up in Daffy's Robin Hood outfit and on the bars of Tweety's cage in Tweetie Pie (to cite two examples), because it looked so revisionist when applied to the title character of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" on Warner's Blu-ray version of same. Nevertheless, the restorers use a gentle touch, dustbusting and correcting damage to the prints while leaving grit trapped between the cels alone. The dark Scaredy Cat is dotted with so much white you might think the background plate doubled as a coke tray.

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) - Two-Disc Special Edition DVD + Blu-ray Disc

****/****
DVD - Image A Sound A Extras A+
BLU-RAY Image B+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden
screenplay by Tennessee Williams, based on his play
directed by Elia Kazan

by Walter Chaw Marlon Brando is liquid sex in A Streetcar Named Desire, molten and mercurial. He's said that he modeled his Stanley Kowalski after a gorilla, and the manner in which Stanley eats, wrist bent at an almost fey angle, picking at fruit and leftovers in the sweltering heat of Elia Kazan's flophouse New Orleans, you can really see the primate in him. (Imagine a gorilla smelling a flower.) Brando's Stanley is cunning, too: he sees through the careful artifice of his sister-in-law Blanche (Vivien Leigh, Old Hollywood), and every second he's on screen, everything else wilts in the face of him. It's said that Tennessee Williams used to buy front-row seats to his plays and then laugh like a loon at his rural atrocities; he's something like the Shakespeare of sexual politics, the poet laureate of repression, and in his eyes, he's only ever written comedies. In Kazan's and Brando's too, I'd hazard, as A Streetcar Named Desire elicits volumes of delighted laughter. The way that Stanley's "acquaintances" are lined up in his mind to appraise the contents of Blanche's suitcase. The way he invokes "Napoleonic Law" with beady-eyed fervour. And the way, finally, that he's right about Blanche and all her hysterical machinations. The moment Stanley introduces himself to Blanche is of the shivers-causing variety (like the moment John Ford zooms up to John Wayne in Stagecoach), but my favourite parts of the film--aside from his torn-shirt "STELLA!"--are when Stanley screeches like a cat, and when he threatens violence on the jabbering Blanche by screaming, "Hey, why don't you cut the re-bop!"