Armchair Commentary

DVDs from the Vault: Forgotten Noir, Jungle Thrills - Plus! Rock, Doris, Popeye, Penrod and Sam (and More!)

Let's begin this week's feast of vintage features on DVD with a newly remastered quintet of lessr-known noir, all culled from the Warner acquisitions library and released via their manufacture on demand imprint, Warner Archives. Monogram's The Fall Guy (1947) benefits greatly from its source material - the short story "Cocaine," by Cornell Woolrich,, whose doom-laden work also served as the inspiration for The Leopard Man (1943), Phantom Lady (1944), Rear Window (1954), The Bride Wore Black (1968) and countless other films. The Fall Guy draws from one of Woolrich's favorite tropes - the crime commited in the wake of an alcohol- or drug-fueled blackout (see also Black Angel and The Guilty, both 1947) - with actor/director Leo Penn (father of Sean, Chris and Michael Penn, and here billed as Clifford Penn) discovering that he may have murdered a woman while in the grip of a bender. The left-field upbeat ending and budget-driven is balanced by the presence of Robert Armstrong (King Kong, 1933) as Penn's cop brother-in-law and Elisha Cook, Jr., in full ferret mode as a highly suspicious stranger. 

DVDs from the Vault: Vintage Hollywood! Classic TV! Multi-Disc Mania! Westerns Aplenty! And More!

Independent distributors Olive Films continue to underscore their status as a dream label for cinephiles and collectors with its current batch of titles, all culled from the vaults of Republic Pictures and available in both DVD and Blu-ray formats. Chief among the current lineup is Mark Robson's Champion (1949), a scabrous, violent profile of a ruthless boxer (Kirk Douglas, who received an Oscar nod for his performance) whose desperate drive to rise above his bottom-floor social standing results in the ruination of his closest relationships (brother Arthur Kennedy, manager Paul Stewart and desire object Marilyn Maxwell) and ultimately, his own self-respect. The darker corners of the soul are also the focus of The Enforcer (1951), with Humphrey Bogart (in his final role for Warner Bros., which distributed the film for United States Pictures) as an assistant district attorney trying to bring down mobster Everett Sloane, who runs a Murder, Inc. style ring of contract killers, and Fred Zinneman's The Men (1950), with Marlon Brando as a former GI struggling with a wartime injury that has left him a paraplegic and Sloane, Jack Webb and Teresa Wright as the doctor, fellow patient and fiancee who aid in his recovery. Both The Men and Champion were early producer credits for director Stanley Kramer and penned by Carl Foreman (High Noon), who received Oscar nominations for both efforts.

DVDs from the Vault: Bowery Boys Volume 2, Jackie Chan, Repo Man, Eddie Cantor and More!

Warner Archives has issued The Bowery Boys: Volume 2, a four-disc collection featuring twelve titles from the impossibly long-running comedy series. The dozen pictures collected in the set roughly cover the first decade of the team's stint under the Bowery Boys' moniker after two previous decades as the Dead End Kids, Little Tough Guys and East Side Kids. The tone of the Bowery movies is decidedly more slapstick than in previous incarnations (thanks in part to the behind-the-camera presence of Three Stooges vet Edward Bernds and Jean Yarbrough, who directed numerous Abbott and Costello features and TV shows), and as the series progressed, swiftly moved into psychotronic territory: in Spook Busters (1946), a mad scientist wants to put the brain of Sach (Huntz Hall) into a gorilla, while a spate of candy consumption in Master Minds (1949) gives Sach psychic abilities, which attracts the attention of another mad scientist (Alan Napier from the TV Batman) with noggin-swapping designs for his monster (Glenn Strange). Bernds' The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters (1955) goes all-out in its grab for the horror-kid crowd, offering up mad scientist John Dehner a gorilla, robot, vampire and a man-eating tree (maintained by The Waltons' Ellen Corby). The other Boys' adventures included in the set are only moderately less weird - they develop a vitamin drink that makes Hall an unstoppable football champ in Hold That Line (1952), tangle with outlaws in Bowery Buckaroos (1947), faux spiritualists (Hard Boiled Mahoney, 1947) and con artist Amanda Blake in High Society (1955), which was accidentally offered up by the Academy for a Best Story Oscar. The Bowery Boys' titles are definitely an acquired taste, but for former Saturday afternoon matinee habitues of a certain age, their antics are comfort-food-level pleasures, dependably broad and daffy and entirely predictable; the WA set features pressed discs and widescreen presentations on Meet the Monsters and two other titles.

DVDs from the Vault: Code Breakers, Killers, Cronenberg, Screwball Comedy and More

Warner Archives presents Volume 6 of the exemplary Forbidden Hollywood series, which unearths remastered editions of long unavailable titles from the Pre-Code era (late 1920s to 1934). As with many pictures from this storied period, the quartet of films included in Volume 6 address a number of "hot" topics which, while handled in a manner that would be considered quaint today, were decidedly mature subject matter in their day, including alcoholism (The Wet Parade, 1932), racism (Massacre, 1934) and a heady bouillabaisse of criminal and moral peccadillos (Michael Curtiz's Mandalay, 1934). There's also John Gilbert as a sexually voracious cad who upends a well-to-do household in the dark comedy Downstairs (1932), a proposed comeback feature conceived and co-written by the former silent film star. There's star power to spare in all four films, from Walter Huston, Myrna Loy, Wallace Ford and Jimmy Durante buffeting stars Robert Young and Dorothy Jordan in their fight against the evils of liquor in Victor Fleming's The Wet Parade to Ricardo Cortez, Warner Oland and Lyle Talbot doing their best Tex Avery wolf imitations at the sight of "hostess" Kay Francis in Mandalay. And while Richard Barthlemess and Ann Dvorak in tan makeup as Sioux in Massacre might strike modern-day viewers as camp (at best) or offensive (at worst, and the depiction of black characters in the film isn't much better), the film takes a remarkably sober and sympathetic look at the wholesale indignities heaped upon reservation dwellers by white government and religious representatives. Forbidden Hollywood Volume 6 is again a treasure trove for aficionados of Hollywood's Golden Age and its more eyebrow-raising efforts.

DVDs from the Vault, Short and Sweet Edition: Gable, Stewart, Ford, Bakshi, Hanna-Barbera and More

There's a great deal of ground to cover this week, so let's dive right in, shall we? Sony Pictures Choice Collection's new edition of Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959) is, to date, the fifth presentation of this Oscar-nominated legal drama on DVD and Blu-ray, but it's also reportedly the first to be offered in its correct aspect ration (1.85 widescreen standard). That may or may not affect your appreciation for this stellar picture,with James Stewart and George C. Scott as lawyers facing off over an Army officer (Ben Gazzara) accused of murdering a bartender who assaulted his seductive wife (Lee Remick) and its groundbreaking jazz score by Duke Ellington.

Meanwhile, Warner Archives offers three titles starring Clark Gable that span his tenure as a leading man at MGM. Gable co-stars with Marion Davies in the light 1932 comedy-drama Polly of the Circus as a small town reverend who falls in love with Davies' circus aerialist, much to the consternation of his flock. He's then reteamed with his Call of the Wild (1935) co-star Loretta Young for the fizzy romantic comedy Key to the City (1950), which pits rough-and-tumble Gable against Young's well-heeled Maine mayor, with the expected fireworks. The Gable three-fer concludes with Never Let Me Go (1953), a sudsy Delmar Daves effort with Gene Tierney as the Russian ballerina and Gable as the American news reporter determined to get her out of the hands of the Soviets. No real classics here, but all three pics underscore Gable's magnetic screen presence and enduring popularity.

Also on the vintage Hollywood front: John Ford's Rising of the Moon (1957; Warner Archives), an anthology of Irish stories introduced by Tyrone Power and featuring a stellar cast of Emerald Isle players, including Cyril Cusack, Jack MacGowran, Donal Donnelly and Dennis O'Day. The trio of stories, culled fromg the fiction of Frank O'Connor and a controversial one-act play from 1907, hew towards the precious at times (and apparently earned the enmity of the Northern Irish, who banned the film over alleged revolutionary overtones), but Ford aficionados will appreciate this opportunity to see one of the director's more obscure and personal projects. The Hireling (Sony) has also been out of circulation for many years, despite having shared the Grand Prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival with Scarecrow. The class drama stars Sarah Miles as a bereaved aristocrat who forms a relationship with her chauffeur (Robert Shaw); the stars are better than the material, which takes a curious and heavy-handed offramp into anarchy for its conclusion.

For those seeking lighter fare, Warner has a trio of offbeat comedies, some more successful than others, but all with something to recommend a viewing. The political comedy First Family (1980) carries an exceptional pedigree, with script and direction by Buck Henry and a cast featuring (among others) Bob Newhart as the President of the United States, Madeleine Kahn as his wife, Gilda Radner as their hapless daughter, and a staff populated by Rip Torn, Fred Willard, Bob Dishy, Harvey Korman and Austin Pendleton. Despite this lineup, the movie is almost universally loathed, most likely for its broad slapstick tone, which wastes its cast, and a subplot involving slavery (!). Also on the nice-try front: Whiffs (1975), with Elliott Gould as a former guinea pig for Army chemical engineers who uses his first-hand knowledge of harmful gases to launch a series of bank robberies. Gould's presence was a clear indication that the filmmakers were aiming for a M*A*S*H-styled military farce, but what's delivered is a truly oddball mix of slapstick and counterculture gags. Again, it's the supporting cast that encourages a commitment to sit through the whole picture: aiding and abetting Gould is Harry Guardino, Eddie Albert, Godfrey Cambridge (as Gould's co-conspirator), Howard Hesseman, Richard Masur and Jennifer O'Neill. Eagle-eyed movie trainspotters will also note the presence of B-Western stars Don "Red" Barry and James Brown (not the Godfather of Soul). Nice one-sheet art by the prolific illustrator Robert Grossman, too.

There are a lot of interesting ideas floating around in Ralph Bakshi's Hey Good Lookin' (1982; Warner Archives), which looks at the Brooklyn of his youth and a pair of neighborhood ne'er-do-wells (voiced by Richard Romanus and David Proval) based on his childhood friends. Begun in 1975 as a mix of live action and animation that also featured the New York Dolls and Yaphet Kotto, it was held from release in the wake of the uproar following Bakshi's Coonskin and revised in 1982 as an all-animated feature at the insistence of Warner Bros. president Frank Wells. The end result is a mishmash of Bakshi's pointed satire and adult themes, as well as some striking visual elements, but probably best appreciated by the animator's diehard fans. 

One wonders what Ralph Bakshi might have made of Help!... it's the Hair Bear Bunch (Warner), a short-lived Saturday morning animated series from Hanna-Barbera circa 1971 about a trio of ursine semi-hippies and their constant attempts to escape the Wonderland Zoo and its uptight director Mr. Peevly (voiced by John Stephenson). As it stands, the series, which features voice work by cartoon vets Daws Butler, Paul Winchell, Don Messick and Joe E. Ross, doing his ooh-ooh bit as Peevly's assistant, has the not-unpleasant patina of weird that clings to most Nixon-era H-B efforts (see also The Funky Phantom, the recently released Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids and CB Bears) that also manages to be curiously comforting, especially for those who remember wolfing down their Quake and Quisp in front of such shows. Can Where's Huddles? be far behind? 

MODs of the Week: A Colossal Collection of Cowboy and Crime Pictures!

This week, there's plenty of action on the dark streets and the high plains in MODs from all three of the major MOD players - Warner Archives, Sony Choice Collection and Fox Cinema Archives. Sony Choice offers two terrific '50s-era thrillers, both previously released as part of their brick-and-mortar Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics series. Five Against the House (1955) is a taunt action-drama with Guy Madison and Brian Keith as Korean war vets attending college on the GI Bill and Kerwin Mathews (The 7th Voyage of Sinbad) as their smart-guy pal who hatches a scheme to rob a casino in Reno, Nevada. Since director Phil Karlson, a specialist in dark, taut B-crime (Kansas City Confidential, The Phenix City Story) is in the driver's seat here, you can expect the heist to go awry, thanks in part to a shellshocked Keith and William Conrad as a nervous casino worker. A pre-stardom Kim Novak also figures in the mix as a nightclub singer who gets mixed up with Madison.

MODs of the Week: Tarzan! The Falcon! Hudsucker on Blu-Ray! And More!

Hot on the heels of Warner Archives' three-disc Philo Vance Murder Case Collection comes another set of vintage screen mysteries, this time devoted to The Falcon, who was originally envisioned as a shadowy freelance crime fighter in stories by the pseudonymous Drexel Drake (or Michael Arlen, depending on which story you follow). In 1941, the character was refashioned for the screen by RKO as a roguish swell in the vein of Leslie Charteris' The Saint, whose own popular series for the studio, starring George Sanders had wrapped that same year. Sanders was quickly snapped up to play the Falcon for three pictures before bowing out of the franchise, which was then assumed by his real-life brother, Tom Conway (Cat People, 1942) who was made the original Falcon's sibling (before taking the whole thing full circle by voicing the Saint on radio in 1951). Conway's Falcon was suitably urbane, if lacking Sanders' charmingly droll self-amusement, and acquitted himself well to nine pictures between 1943 and 1946, six of which are collected in the remastered Falcon Mystery Movie Collection, Volume 2 (the first three Falcon films with Conway, along with Sanders' efforts, are featured in WA's Falcon Mystery Movie Collection, Volume 1). For those who remember whiling away a Saturday afternoon with pics like these on UHF broadcasts (or in theaters), the Falcon films virtually define the term "programmer": fat-free, no-nonsense crime thrillers anchored by a pre-ordained amount of suspense, light comedy (courtesy Edward Brophy and several other actors as the Falcon's rough-hewn sidekick, Goldie Locke), a glitzy location and a dash of sex appeal in the form of Barbara Hale, Rita Corday, Martha Vickers and other second-string starlets. There are flashes of bargain ingenuity along the way - Gordon Douglas and Joseph H. (Gun Crazy) Lewis, who helm The Falcon in Hollywood (1944) and The Falcon in San Francisco (1945), respectively, work their signature brand of under-the-radar sleight of hand, and Elisha Cook Jr. steals the show (again) in The Falcon's Alibi (1946) as a nervous hotel DJ trying to rein in his torch singer wife (Jane Greer). The other three movies in the set - The Falcon Out West (1944), The Falcon in Mexico (1944) and the last film in the series with Conway, The Falcon's Adventure (1946) - offer equally suave-on-a-budget pleasures.

MODs of the Week: Pirates, Cowboys, Illustrated Men and Dead End Kids

Warner Archives offers a remastered presentation of actor Robert Taylor's near-to-last screen outings in Return of the Gunfighter (1967), a made-for-TV feature originally broadcast on ABC before receiving a theatrical release overseas. Taylor's weathered visage, worn down from its former matinee idol glory by age and illness (he would die from lung cancer two years after the film's release), does much to sell his portrayal of an aging gunslinger whose attempt to retire in peace is cut short by a search to find a friend's killer (Lyle Bettger as yet another charismatic heel). A young Chad Everett joins Taylor on the trail, while the supporting cast is filled out by familiar players like Michael Pate, Mort Mills and John Crawford and John Davis Chandler as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Warner also has Taylor in the pungently titled Tip on a Dead Jockey (1957), a modest thriller adapted from a short story by Irwin Shaw, with the star as a guilt-ridden former pilot who accepts a job from Martin Gabel (first mistake) to transport smuggled currency (second mistake). Jack Lord is Taylor's down-on-his-luck pal, while Dorothy Malone and Marcel Dalio are his wife and gabby houseguest, respectively.

MODs of the Week: Bowery Boys, "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble," Robert Mitchum and More

The Bowery Boys, Vol. 1 (Warner Archives) Monogram Pictures' Bowery Boys series was the final incarnation of the tough-talking New York street kids that debuted in the 1935 Broadway play Dead End (as well as the 1937 screen version with Joel McCrea and Humphrey Bogart) and would go on to make over 40 additional films and serials under a variety of monikers and iterations, including the Dead End Kids, Little Tough Guys and East Side Kids. Malaprop-spouting Leo Gorcey and rubber-mugged Huntz Hall were the franchise's mainstays through their lengthy screen run, which began as straight dramas before turning to broad slapstick for the 48 (!) Bowery Boys pictures, which ran until 1958. Warner Archives' Volume 1 compiles twelve titles culled from the series' early years, including the first Bowery Boys picture, Live Wires (1946) and the horror-themed Master Minds (1949), though the popular Spook Busters and Mr. Hex (both 1946) appear to be slated for the subsequent compilation sets announced by Warner.

Also on the multi-disc front: The Film Noir Collection - Volume One (Sony). Not to be confused with Warner's Film Noir Classics Collection or Sony's own Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics series, the Film Noir Collection compiles five vintage B-thrillers previously released as part of the Choice Collection line, including The Case Against Brooklyn (1958), a police corruption story penned by blacklisted writers Julian Zimet and Bernard Gordon, who also wrote another film in the set, Escape from San Quentin (1957). William Asher's Shadow on the Wall (1957) is a tense riff on The Window (1949), with Jerry (The Beaver) Matthews as a boy traumatized after witnessing his mother's assault by three hoods during a break-in, while Richard Denning and Mari Blanchard pull a long con on Frank Lovejoy in The Crooked Web (1955). 

Noir vet Robert Mitchum also turns up in two new releases: in Robert Stevenson's sudsy 1951 period drama My Forbidden Past (Warner Archives), Mitchum is a New Orleans doctor whose marriage to Janis Carter puts a crimp in old flame Ava Gardner's plan to win him back. She arranges for her cousin (Melvyn Douglas) to seduce Carter, a scheme which naturally goes awry. Also from Warner is One Shoe Makes It Murder (1982), an agreeable, Edgar-nominated noir carbon from Mitchum's late-inning run as a TV-movie staple. Here, he does his best rumpled private eye act, searching for the wife of casino boss Mel Ferrer while fielding the attentions of Angie Dickinson.

And while we're on the subject of the Ghosts of TV Past,here's a pair of oddball small screen productions from the 1970s that have enjoyed cult status in the ensuing decades. The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (Sony) stars John Travolta at the height of his Welcome Back, Kotter fame in 1976 as a teenager whose compromised immune system forces him to live in an incubator-like environment until love - in the form of neighbor Glynis O'Connor - inspires him to risk entering the outside world. A relentless tearjerker, well remembered by legions of Travolta fans, Bubble is probably best enjoyed today as a camp transmission from the Aaron Spelling-Leonard Goldberg factory and director Randal Kleiser, who helmed Grease with Travolta two years later. Meanwhile, Warner offers the complete series run of Korg: 70,000 B.C., a live-action daytime series produced by animation czars Hanna-Barbera that concerned the daily lives of a family of Neanderthals led by the titular patriach (Jim Malinda). Narrated by Burgess Meredith, Korg played like the flipside of H-B's The Flintstones, offering a largely unvarnished look at the relentless challenges faced by early man with the help of the American Museum of Natural History and the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, which served as consultants to the short-lived program. Dinosaur-minded modern kids may still find Korg fascinating, while those who grew up with the series (including this author) will undoubtedly regard it as a fascinating curiosity from Saturday mornings gone by. -- Paul Gaita

MOD of the Week: "The Show" and "Vitaphone Varieties Volume 2"

Though not quite the same jaw-dropping spectacle as Freaks (1932), director Tod Browning's silent melodrama The Show (1927; Warner Archives) offers its own array of startling and contextually loaded visual images, as well as a robust performance from its lead, John Gilbert. Set in a Hungarian carnival, the film's central love triangle, between barker/rogue Gilbert, former flame Renee Adoree and the malevolent Greek (Lionel Barrymore), is really just the framework on which Browning hangs his true interest: the macabre denizens of the carnival sideshow, which includes the disembodied hand of Cleopatra (who collects tickets), a mermaid, half-lady, and most arresting of all, "Arachnadia, the Spider Lady," a baleful, glaring woman's head atop a huge spider body (played by Edna Tichenor from Browning's London After Midnight). It's a marvelously perverse showcase for the director's particular brand of erotically charged horror, as is the recreation of Salome's Dance, with Adoree smothering the severed head of John the Baptist (Gilbert) with post-decapitation kisses. The rest of the picture is moderately engaging, thanks in part to the leads and a genuinely bizarre moment involving a poisonous lizard, but the picture's real passion lies behind the sideshow curtain.

Only slightly less head-spinning is Vitaphone Varieties Volume 2 (Warner Archives), a two-disc collection of vaudeville shorts made by Warner Bros. and First National in the late '20s and early '30s using the titular sound-on-disc system. A wide variety of acts, from Hawaiian music quartets, jazz orchestras and early comic teams to the indescribable Chaz Chase, are showcased in the 35 shorts included in the set, as well as established stars of the period, like comic Joe E. Brown and actress Blanche Sweet. The shorts also provide a glimpse at name performers in the natal stage of their careers, like Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Wizard of Oz co-stars Jack Haley and Bert Lahr (in separate shorts), radio icon Fred Allen, actor Pat O'Brien and a young Natalie Schafer decades before her turn as Mrs. Howell on Gilligan's Island. The clips are energetic and more than a bit off-beat - how else to describe Guido Deiro, "The World's Foremost Piano-Accordionist" or the aforementioned Chase, whose act hinges on his consumption of paper and other found objects? Though the technology is dated, the sheer drive of the performers featured in the set outshines even the most ardent hopefuls on American Idol and the like, and makes for a fascinating glimpse at what kept audiences entertained nearly eight decades ago. -- Paul Gaita