New on Disc: 'Project Nim' and more …

Project Nim

Street 2/7/12
Lionsgate, Documentary, B.O. $0.4 million, $19.98 DVD, ‘PG-13’ for some strong language, drug content, thematic elements and disturbing images.
2011. James Marsh’s new documentary makes it clear that Nim Chimpsky didn’t relish his time in the limelight. In the case of this chimpanzee, screen appearances were restricted to scientifically mandated home movies, which provide a lot of rich source material for Marsh in his follow-up to 2008’s Oscar-winning Man on Wire, which this also-amazing story nearly equals.

It was the 1970s, which meant that when Columbia Prof. Herbert Terrace hatched a brainstorm to raise a young chimp in a human environment to see if the creature could end up communicating in sign language, at least one of the participants (beyond, it sometimes appears, Terrace himself) would turn out to be a flake. The biggest, at least from Nim’s presentation, was probably the wife of a wealthy poet who offered her family’s Manhattan brownstone as a kind of chimp flophouse. Nim occasionally was given alcohol and even a reefer, and he enjoyed knocking the poet’s books of the shelf in an offbeat form of domestic violence. Much later, with the now much-larger Nim treated to intended peace that didn’t quite pan out on writer Cleveland Amory’s ranch for abused animals, his “attitude” escalated. This is when he picked up a pet dog that had proven to be a personal irritant and smashed it to death against a wall. The story has several more byways, and while it isn’t a black-and-white harangue against using animals for research, it likely will be a subject of conversation at PETA mixers and fundraisers because this is one melancholy story.
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The Jazz Singer

Street 2/7/12
Inception, Drama, $14.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Jerry Lewis, Anna Maria Alberghetti, Eduard Franz, Del Moore.
1959. For all its importance as the technological and marketing innovator that put talking pictures into popularity more than any other single movie, Al Jolson’s corn repository The Jazz Singer wasn’t that far away from being an instant museum piece when it opened in 1927. But let’s not forget this Jerry Lewis NBC-TV version intended as homage to Jer’s childhood idol Jolson — one that’s been too obscure in recent years to be notorious, though it certainly was at the time when I watched it live. We can and should view this print from the Lewis archives as the archeological find it is.
Extras: The nicest feature of this release is its inclusion of not just a kinescope of the black-and-white version that actually aired but (as a bonus) one of the earliest color videotape versions that currently exists of a TV show.
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Tall Story

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Anthony Perkins, Jane Fonda, Marc Connelly, Bob Wright, Ray Walston, Tom Laughlin, Anne Jackson, Murray Hamilton.
1960. If you recently saw 74-year-old Jane Fonda looking so smashing on the Golden Globes, it’s possible that you can project how she affected, at age 22, young boys who were entering puberty. The object of Fonda’s affection here is a college hoops star played by Anthony Perkins, who soon after would appear in Psycho. Between the sports and sex angles, I’ve always had some mild affection for what undeniably is romantic piffle, a modest black-and-white comedy running less than 90 minutes.
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New on Disc: 'Revenge of the Electric Car' and more …

Revenge of the Electric Car

Docurama, Documentary, B.O. $0.15 million, $29.95 DVD, ‘PG-13’ for brief strong language.
2011. Director/co-writer Chris Paine’s sequel to his 2006 film Who Killed the Electric Car? exists in an interim universe it simultaneously captures, much as last year’s Page One: Inside the New York Times became a permanent time capsule of the newspaper industry at a crossroads of change. Will electric cars catch on in any great measure if the prices can ever come down? I don’t know. But their owners (like featured Danny De Vito) seem to like or even love them, and the vehicles certainly tap into an American yearning that will never go away. You know: the one that says to Foreign Oil, “We’re not interested anymore.” The other principals featured here are Carlos Ghosn, whose Nissan Leaf may determine the fate of Renault/Nissan; Greg “Gadget” Abbott, who soups up existing cars with electric technology and has to survive an arson attack on his makeshift factory; and Elon Musk, an entrepreneur-ish developer of the Tesla who also has a parcel of other interests, including five children and a fiancée (later wife) who says she wants more. Paine’s film makes reference to doomed ‘40s auto maker Preston Tucker (who never was able to buck a system that demanded endless resources of capital), and Musk’s home life has some of the hustle-bustle seen in the very underrated Tucker: The Man and His Dream from 1988. Paine’s portrait, which includes a nourished menu of DVD extras, isn’t exactly in your face. Dramatically speaking, it lacks the natural story arc of its predecessor and isn’t necessarily the kind of documentary that makes one say, “Hey, you gotta see this” to friends. And yet, if you’ve seen the original (which is still burned fairly prominently into my movie mind), you may think it a story that virtually demanded to be filmed, given its back-from-the dead hook.
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American Madness

Manufactured on demand via online retailers
Sony Pictures, Drama, $20.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Walter Huston, Pat O’Brien, Kay Johnson, Constance Cummings.
1932. I have a sweet spot for Frank Capra’s early talkies, and American Madness is one of my favorites. It is nothing if not topical. You don’t find too many Hollywood movies sympathetic to bankers, but the one Walter Huston plays here is a straight shooter with an altruistic streak. Huston’s character trusts his customers and his own instincts in loaning money (which, of course, puts him on the outs with his board of directors). In about 75 zippy minutes, Capra and his longtime screenwriter Robert Riskin manage to work in boardroom battles, Huston’s mildly straying wife (Kay Johnson, real-life mother of actor James Cromwell), a gangster subplot, a bank robbery that erroneously implicates a bank clerk (Pat O’Brien), and a run on the bank by depositors who don’t need Depression economics and heist artists with their own ways of depleting bank funds.
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Youngblood Hawke

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars James Franciscus, Suzanne Pleshette, Geneviéve Page, Mary Astor.
1964. There’s not exactly an eBook-era feel to the quaint movie version of Herman Wouk’s doorstop novel about the novelist’s angst, but this is probably the trashy selling point for a black-and-white potboiler about a Kentucky truck driver who comes to New York as a hotshot writer to conquer publishers, editors, agents, effete critics (well, at first) and the bed of another man’s wife. It’s all very broad and overripe in that early-1960s Warner fashion.
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New on Disc: 'Godzilla' and more …

Godzilla

Street 1/24
Criterion, Sci-Fi, $29.95 DVD, $39.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Akira Takarada, Momoko Kochi, Takashi Shimura.
1954. Though no one will ever categorize the vintage Toho library holdings as a cache of pristine print sources, the fact is that the new Criterion DVD of 1954’s Gojira (which launched the by now all-but-eternal “Godzilla” franchise without necessarily intending to) looks and sounds even better than the Blu-ray version of it that Classic Media put out in 2009. So let’s get this not insignificant point established right up front — even if the real fun from this release is in learning about Gojira’s production and its re-editing into the most commercially successful Japanese import that had reached U.S. shores at the time — as, of all possibilities, one of screen history’s stranger Raymond Burr showcases.

This latter and largely English-dubbed version, which became the source of much school playground discussion when I was in the third grade, was titled Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Directed by the era’s well-known “film doctor” Terry O. Morse (who was often called upon to reconstruct and save the life of ailing productions), it is included in full here as a bonus feature, which effectively makes this Criterion release a two-fer.

The fun of watching director Ishiro Honda’s original comes in being able to appreciate it as a more solemn (even mournful) Godzilla pic, one that is not quite as sensationalistic as the American re-edit.

Extras: The Criterion extras here touch upon the special effects, actor reminiscences and the effective score — plus an interview with film critic Tadao Sato. Film historian David Kalat offers commentaries for both versions of the film, though the Morse-Burr cut (which he likes and defends) offers more opportunities for voiceover revelry.
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The Last Hunt

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Western, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Robert Taylor, Stewart Granger, Lloyd Nolan, Debra Paget.
1956. In this Richard Brooks Western released two years before the end of his MGM run, Robert Taylor played one of the few bad guys of his career. I’ve known or read of more than a couple of people who think The Last Hunt contains Taylor’s best performance, and I’d probably concur. Swashbuckler Stewart Granger plays a former Dakota buffalo hunter wary of resuming his old trade, who gets nudged into doing so by a cattleman hopeful (Taylor) whose stock is stampeded by an already endangered species.
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Frontline: The Anthrax Files

PBS, Documentary, $24.99 DVD, NR.
2011. The material forming the basis for this documentary led to editorials calling for investigations into the FBI’s wobbly case against the late army scientist Dr. Bruce Ivins. But whether you’ve determined for yourself that Ivins didn’t — or actually did — send anthrax-filled letters to government officials in 2001, this multilayered cautionary tale shows how a mere accusation of having done “A” can cause a lot of hitherto well-concealed “Bs” to become a part of the public record to abject embarrassment and despair. This was a major tragedy with huge national security ramifications — yet it’s this documentary’s portrayal of a personality disintegrated (Ivins is portrayed as a sometimes very jolly, funny guy) that gives it the extra kick that a lot of viewers may not expect going into a film with this kind of title.
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New on Disc: 'The Hellstrom Chronicle' and more …

The Hellstrom Chronicle

Olive, Documentary, $24.95 DVD, $29.95 Blu-ray, ‘G.’
1971. Producer David Wolper’s rather astonishing documentary Oscar-winner — as in astonishing that it beat Marcel Ophuls’ more or less nonpareil The Sorrow and the Pity — comes close to being what you’d expect from a screen portrait of the insect world that happened to be directed by the co-screenwriter of The Wild Bunch. Any of that feel-good, Walt Disney wonder-of-nature stuff is a no-go here for Chronicle director Walon Green, whose worldview seems to be that insects almost certainly have man’s number in any survivalist battle of the fittest. Apparently, it was one shared with Chronicle scripter David Seltzer, who later penned The Omen. There’s nothing wrong with taking such a defeatist attitude when the premise is more than credible, yet the film’s frequent scenes involving humans are so transparently staged (these Green did not direct) that I’ve never felt that the film should have even qualified as a documentary. As the fully fabricated Dr. Nils Hellstrom, who handles the on-camera narration, actor Lawrence Pressman is so over the top that the effect is risible. Shaky as art but not bad as entertainment, Chronicle was so brilliantly marketed it turned into a kind of hit in the summer of ’71.
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Rapture (Blu-ray)

Available at www.screenarchives.com
Twilight Time, Drama, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Melvyn Douglas, Patricia Gozzi, Dean Stockwell, Gunnel Lindblom.
1965. Transferred from its source novel British setting to the coast of France, the picture headlines Melvyn Douglas not long after he won his Oscar for a sizable supporting performance in Hud and Hollywood was trying to figure out if he was still lead material (as he had been in younger days before a long period of screen inactivity from the early ‘50s through early ‘60s). Playing this widower’s daughter as a 15-year-old was 12-year-old Patricia Gozzi, previously a critics’ sensation in 1962’s Sundays and Cybele. Rounding out the dynamics here are a handsome escaped prisoner played by Dean Stockwell, and we also see Gunnel Lindblom playing the kind of friskily available housekeeper who’d have most traveling salesman wanting to play (quoting Preston Sturges) “Hey Hey in the Hayloft.” Embittered by his wife’s death, Douglas plays one of those guys (here, it’s a judge) who wants to do a lot of socially conscious favors for mankind in the abstract — yet is kind of a task-masterish prig at home. George Delerue’s score (isolated here on a separate track in Twilight Time fashion) is a plus, though the release’s chief selling point is the black-and-white cinematography by Marcel Grignon. Here’s a case where Twilight Time has come up with B&W of Criterion caliber.
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The Constant Nymph

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Charles Boyer, Joan Fontaine, Alexis Smith, Charles Coburn.
1943. The long-awaited unearthing of this absolute Warner Bros. treasure apparently shows how potent vintage marquee power remains even today when it comes to marketability. Oscar-nominated Joan Fontaine is 25 playing a love-struck 14 over Charles Boyer, and the arithmetic shows. Otherwise, this is probably the 94-year-old actress’s all-time performance (note her dead-on adolescent body language). Boyer is just about Fontaine’s equal in what is arguably his career performance as a symphonic composer who wallows in “dissonance” instead of making music from the heart. The other selling point here is Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s famous score.
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New on Disc: 'Mildred Pierce' and more …

Mildred Pierce

HBO, Drama, $39.98 two-DVD set, $49.99 four-BD set, NR.
Stars Kate Winslet, Guy Pearce, Evan Rachel Wood, Melissa Leo, Brian F. O’Byrne, James LeGros, Mare Winningham, Morgan Turner, Hope Davis.
2011. Despite Kate Winslet’s Emmy-winning performance (and Todd Haynes’ HBO miniseries of the James M. Cain novel got 21 nominations in all), she couldn’t have been anyone’s knee-jerk casting choice for the famed title hard-knocks restaurateur here. Yet by the time all five-and-a-half hours of this miniseries have elapsed, many or most should concede that she has met enough of the challenge to add even more heft to her filmography in the career long run. At the heart of the story is the still-true degree to which parents bust themselves for their children, often without getting thanks in return. This version has it detractors — but on the other hand, I’ve noted it on some year-end critics’ best lists devoted primarily to theatrical releases. On balance, it really kept me going for the duration without quite knocking me out, despite an explosive and then wistful wrap-up that I found extremely satisfying.
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Stars and Stripes Forever (Blu-ray)

Fox, Musical, $34.98 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Clifton Webb, Robert Wagner, Debra Paget, Ruth Hussey.
1952. What Blu-ray can do to showcase real-deal Technicolor goes a long way to carry this (high-side-of) boilerplate biopic that combines patriotic music with not-exactly-obligatory shots of Debra Paget in tights and other safely suggestive dress for the Korean War 1950s. But what really lingers in my memory is the degree of fun it is to watch Clifton Webb in splashy conductor’s duds and a John Philip Sousa beard in front of what passes for the United States Marine Band and later Sousa’s traveling own — plus the zeal Webb applies to his conducting labors, which is infectious to watch. Whenever Paget isn’t dancing, this 89-minute release keeps its eye on the rah-rah ball.
Extras: According to nonpareil movie musical historian Miles Kreuger and other experts featured in the bonus section, Lamar Trotti’s script is uncommonly adherent to the facts, even though it concocts a sometimes obtrusive love story built around a pair of then-new contract players being groomed for stardom: Paget (who’s given several decidedly non-Sousa-ish musical numbers) and Robert Wagner (decades before fatal boat outings and reverse mortgages were even a glint in his eye).
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Death of a Scoundrel

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars George Sanders, Yvonne De Carlo, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Victor Jory, Nancy Gates, Coleen Gray.
1956. This late-in-the-game RKO release does a good job concealing what had to be a frugal budget, thanks in part to its Max Steiner score and James Wong Howe cinematography. Star George Sanders and fast pacing, even over a full 120 minutes, carry the day — as does some intriguingly topical stock market finagling practiced by its fact-inspired protagonist. We are talking about real-life con man Serge Rubenstein, whose real-life 1955 murder was never solved after his body was found in the kind of posh New York apartment you’d expect a wheeler-dealer/femme magnet to have. Sanders, as fictional stand-in Clementi Sabourin, is pumped full of lead to open the movie, with only the assailant’s identity (not necessarily the one you’d expect) concealed until the end. What our scoundrel does with stock manipulation gives the movie a little extra narrative oomph in these troubled times.
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New on Disc: 'A Farewell to Arms' and more …

A Farewell to Arms

Street 12/20
Kino Lorber, Drama, $24.95 DVD, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Helen Hayes, Gary Cooper, Adolphe Menjou.
1932. In addition to winning the Academy Award for sound, Frank Borzage’s adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s World War I perennial got Charles Lang a companion Oscar for his prototypically “1930s Paramount” cinematography, which gets in the marrow not just in the love scenes but during the more grimy combat scenes as well. You really do believe that Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper are in love here, which carries this rendering over some bumps. Hayes playing opposite a Cooper we see evolving from semi-cocksure to vulnerable is a pairing that clicks. And historically, you can probably advance the case that this is the movie that took Cooper from popular leading man to the next level of his career. Certainly, by 1935’s The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, he was a superstar, and it’s doubtful that the movies Cooper made between Farewell and Lancer are the ones that did it.
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The Nickel Ride/
99 and 44/100% Dead (Double Feature)

Shout! Factory, Drama, $19.93 DVD, ‘PG.’
Stars Jason Miller, Richard Harris, Edmond O’Brien.
1974-75. Whenever DVD box art slaps something as impersonally generic as “Action Double Feature” in larger typeface than the respective movies’ titles, you naturally expect the result to be a pair of 1947 John Ireland ‘B’-melodramas about insurance fraud taken from scratchy 16mm prints. But, no: this two-fer highlights not only a pair of 20th Century-Fox/DeLuxe Color productions from, say, the Average White Band era — but a duo that’s even from name filmmakers: Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird) and John Frankenheimer. For director-oriented completists, you can’t say the price isn’t right for a playbill where the Mulligan contribution turns out to be the more assured of the two yet less entertaining than its slipshod companion. The Mulligan is 1975’s The Nickel Ride, a decidedly un-slick underworld mood piece that fell in the director’s career between The Other and the early Richard Gere showcase Bloodbrothers. Frankenheimer’s contribution is the tone-deaf but not unwatchable gangland oddity 99 and 44/100% Dead (1974), which I suspect is a title that market-tested well with only a certain demographic. Chronologically, it followed the director’s four-hour American Film Theater epic of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, which he once called his best movie.
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Lost Horizon

Manufactured on demand via online retailers
Sony Pictures, Musical, $20.95 DVD, ‘G.’
Stars Peter Finch, Liv Ullmann, Sally Kellerman, George Kennedy.
1973. On an apparently never-completed promotional featurette that’s part of the surprisingly extensive bonus material for this on-demand release, the now long-deceased producer Ross Hunter claims that this remake of Frank Capra’s famed 1937 played-straight drama “wasn’t a musical.” Now, don’t you love hearing something like that when the movie’s score has 11 Burt Bacharach-Hal David songs?  Anyway, the picture was such a colossal disaster that its belated DVD release constitutes a contribution to film history. One reason this very handsome DVD gets billed as “uncut” has to do with a beefcake musical interlude that got jettisoned (I was told) because audiences were falling out of their seats with hysterical laughter. I do have a soft spot for big-budget disasters as long as they don’t drag or run for four hours.
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New on Disc: 2011 World Series Film and more …

2011 Official World Series Film
St. Louis Cardinals 2011 World Series Collector’s Edition

A&E, Sports, World Series Film $29.95 DVD, $34.95 Blu-ray; Collector’s Edition $79.95 eight-DVD set, NR.
2011. The St. Louis Cardinals (with, of course, a major assist from the Texas Rangers) sparked one of the cream entries in postseason MLB contests from the past quarter century. The Cards beat the heavily favored Phillies in the prelim National League Division Series despite the fact that teams more than 10 games out in late August aren’t even supposed to be in the NLDS. And then the Cards advanced to a six-game NLCS victory over the Milwaukee Brewers — an ascension made possible, lest we forget, by pitcher Chris Carpenter’s 1-0 shutout over the Phillies in the NLDS deciding game 5, which is about what it takes when you’re facing the latter’s Roy Halladay in a money game. That Cards-Phils clincher is included as one of the bonuses on the World Series 2011 Fall Classic DVD and Blu-ray whose documentary portion is narrated by St. Louis native Jon Hamm. Like past MLB wrap-ups of any October action that has just transpired, it stands to rise or falls on the quality of the Series in question. The full evidence of how good this one was (20-hour running times have a way of making a case) is set forth in The St. Louis Cardinals 2011 World Series Collector’s Edition — the annual Series boxed which is naturally bathed this year in Cardinals red. The boxed set proves that this was a Series to be savored.
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Meet Me in St. Louis (Blu-ray)

Street 12/13
Warner, Musical, $35.99 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Judy Garland, Margaret O’Brien, Tom Drake, Lucille Bremer.
1944. This long-awaited Blu-ray version of Vincent Minnelli’s own career-maker is a kind of color alternative to what Warner did earlier this year with black-an-white on its release of Citizen Kane — employing a kind of “artful grain” that shows up if you’re fairly close to the screen but contributes marked detail if you move just a few inches back. This is how neighborly 1903-04 should have looked for anyone not totally hooked by the ultra-urban experience. 
Extras: The release rates the same cardboard book-like packaging that Warner reserves for its most prestigious Blu-ray releases, and also included is a short CD of the Hugh Martin-Ralph Blane staples (“Have Yourself a Marry Little Christmas,” “The Trolley Song,” “The Boy Next Door”) the movie produced. The other extras recycle a lot of what was on the deluxe 2004 standard DVD version.
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Lafayette Escadrille

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Tab Hunter, Etchika Choreau, David Janssen, Clint Eastwood.
1958. The story here deals with a spoiled high school jock (Tab Hunter) whose father is something of a swaggering lout. After a serious brush with the law, the aggressively blond Hunter starts thinking about the French Foreign Legion — but instead ends up as a volunteer flyboy in France before America’s belated entry into World War I. Director William A. Wellman is said to have called his big-screen swan song the worst movie of his four-and-a-half-decade career. Thanks to uncommonly specific WWI subject matter plus ahead-of-its-time casting, this pronouncement is something of a negative stretch — though, this said, it’s true that a picture into which Wellman put so much of himself was severely compromised and artistically bludgeoned by the studio.
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New on Disc: 'Mysterious Island' Blu-ray and more …

Mysterious Island (Blu-ray)

Available at www.screenarchives.com
Twilight Time, Adventure, $34.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Michael Craig, Gary Merrill, Joan Greenwood, Michael Callan.
1961. The Jules Verne crew that constitutes the cast here encounters a crab the size of a tank — and with a body of conveniently just-discovered “hot springs” water supply. After this creature generates the kind of mayhem you’d expect from a Ray Harryhausen concoction rendered in the famed effects artist’s SuperDynamation stop-motion animation process, it is miraculously dispatched as a flying projectile into the springs for what must be the all-time crab feast anyone has ever enjoyed (well, without butter). Island came out just before the Columbia Harryhausen films with producer Charles H. Schneer started to ebb. It is amazing how frequently the team was able to churn out these fantasy-adventure favorites. The other auteur of these movies was composer Bernard Herrmann, who almost did as much for them as he did for Alfred Hitchcock‘s oeuvre from 1955-64. 
Extras: As has been the case in Twilight Time’s previous limited releases, the musical track has been isolated for pure listening pleasure. Options are the original mono or 5.1. Usually, I’m a purist, but this is Herrmann … so pump it away, I say.
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6 Ed Sullivan Shows Starring The Rolling Stones

SOFA Entertainment, Music, $39.98 two-DVD set, NR.
1964-69. Two months ago, the same distributor brought out a DVD devoted to 11 tunes versus these 17 (and over just four of these six shows) performed live by the Stones on the once weekly Sullivan outing — which from 1948-71 was a remarkable mix of highbrow, lowbrow and sometimes cutting-edge pop and rock. As with previous Sullivan volumes devoted to the three shows that featured Elvis Presley in 1956-57 and four that featured the Beatles a decade later, this set gives you the full context (e.g. comedy acts by Joan Rivers and Rodney Dangerfield, George Fenneman Lipton Tea commercials, etc.) of what it was like to see Mick, Keith, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts and (for a while) Brian Jones in your living room for free. A few of the numbers throughout are miked differently from what we’re used to hearing, which makes for a fresh experience.
Extras: The set includes some grade-A liner notes by Greil Marcus, who thinks it is their third appearance (February 1966) where they come to resemble the Stones of the ages.
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Give a Girl a Break

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Musical, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Marge Champion, Gower Champion, Debbie Reynolds, Bob Fosse.
1953. If you’ve seen Bob Fosse’s heavily autobiographical All That Jazz, you know that cigarettes, sauce and women dancers with women dancers’ legs counted as his best friends. So it’s definitely snicker-bait to witness Fosse on screen in this agreeably minor Stanley Donen musical (with some major participants) pulling some substantial wool over our eyes. Running just 82 minutes and back-ended with enough pigment-happy musical numbers to make the second half notably superior to the first, the movie is actually about plural girls (as they used to be called) competing for the same Broadway role after a pending show’s huffy femme star ankles it in a dispute with the show’s director.
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New on Disc: 'Tabloid' and more …

Tabloid

MPI/IFC, Documentary, B.O. $0.7 million, $24.98 DVD, ‘R’ for sexual content and nudity.
2011. The entirety of Tabloid is in the great tradition of my favorite twisted moments from nonfiction filmmaker Errol Morris. This is because Tabloid heroine Joyce McKinney, who’s on screen most of the time, is so batty that the movie never gets out of the Twilight Zone (not that we’d want it to). At 88 minutes, Tabloid is roughly divided into half-hour thirds, and in each of the second two, there is a revelation that knocked me for a loop: one about McKinney’s “resumé” and one involving her choice of pets. The basics are that the onetime beauty queen got an obsession for not just a Mormon male — but one who was then sent to England to perform a devout mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After McKinney hired a pilot to fly her there so she could abduct her former lover, he either was or wasn’t a willing participant when she tied him to a bed, and here the documentary naturally gets into a discussion of whether one can fake an erection.
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12 Angry Men (Blu-ray)

Criterion, Drama, $29.95 DVD, $39.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley, Jack Warden.
1957. Director Sidney Lumet’s Oscar-nominated adaptation of Reginald Rose’s famed teleplay 12 Angry Men is especially durable. Over 95 minutes, there isn’t a single lull — and, as is pointed out on one of the accompanying featurettes here, a sizable number of its edits occur in the final sections when the filmmaking goes into an accelerated frenzy with increased close-ups.
Extras: As Vance Kepley from the Wisconsin Historical Society points out in one of this release’s typically succulent Criterion bonus extras, the casting smoothly traded in on Henry Fonda’s past movie history with (as it turned out) predominantly John Ford. Rounding out the stops-pulling collection of extras are a 38-minute treatise about cinematographer Boris Kaufman, edited-together passages from various Lumet interviews about his career; an essay by writer/law professor Thane Rosenbaum (who seems to know his film scholarship); a new interview with screenwriter Walter Bernstein about old pal Lumet; and the Feb 19, 1956, “Alcoa Hour” Rose-Lumet teleplay Tragedy in a Temporary Town, in which Lloyd Bridges got so worked up in a scene about racial prejudice that he cursed on live TV.
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The Left Hand of God

Available at www.screenarchives.com
Twilight Time, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Humphrey Bogart, Gene Tierney, Lee J. Cobb, Agnes Moorehead.
1955. Being one of the last movies filmed by Humphrey Bogart before his death is one reason director Edward Dmytryk’s movie of a novel by William E. Barrett (also of Lilies of the Field) is more interesting outside the frame than in it. Another is co-star Gene Tierney, who had been one of Twentieth Century Fox’s biggest attractions until a well earned mental breakdown that extended beyond this picture slowed her career. The year is 1947, China is in civil war, and Bogie is a pilot who crashed and ends up working for a warlord. After a while, he has enough and elects to take over the identity and garb of a dead priest. At just 87 minutes, it’s short enough to be a serviceable time-killer.
Extras: Twilight Time has given this its usual pro rendering, and the print looks good, with California and some first-class production design standing in for more exotic locales. In TT fashion, the musical score is isolated on a separate track; this time, it’s by the great Victor Young.
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New on Disc: 'These Amazing Shadows' and More …

These Amazing Shadows: The Movies That Make America

Street 11/22
PBS, Documentary, $24.99 DVD, $29.99 Blu-ray, NR.
2011. There’s something special and, yes, even unique about the United States National Film Preservation Board’s National Film Registry. These screen achievements deemed extra worthy of preservation by the Library of Congress are selected by a board of scholars and film professionals who tend toward a historical perspective that Oscar voters and even some day-to-day critics don’t always have. As this grabber Paul Mariano-Kurt Norton documentary explains, the process began in 1988 in substantial reaction to Ted Turner’s decision to colorize the black-and-white movies he purchased from the MGM Library. This 88-minute history (with enjoyable extras) also makes the tandem case for film preservation, spending a lot of its time at the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Va., where prints are stored. Interviewees include Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and Packard Campus chief Dr. Patrick Loughney — also technicians who regularly handle the prints. Mariano and Norton don’t work a representative clip from every single Registry pick into the proceedings (at least, I don’t think so), but they get a lion’s share and certainly enough of them to remind any viewer of why he/she loves the movies.
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Little Big Man (Blu-ray)

Paramount, Western, $24.99 Blu-ray, ‘PG-13’ for intense battle sequences and some sexual content.
Stars Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway, Chief Dan George, Richard Mulligan.
1970. Director Arthur Penn’s take on novelist Thomas Berger’s revisionist Western Little Big Man has its moments in addition to two or three outstanding performances. Dustin Hoffman’s Jack Crabb character, something like 121 years old as the movie begins, spends most of his early life going back and forth between the white and Native American cultures, even taking an Indian wife at one point. Having also befriended Wild Bill Hickok and stumbled into several encounters with General Custer (including a final one at Little Big Horn), he has come out of the experience with a wealth of sardonic perspective by the time of the opening pre-flashback scene, which finds actor Hoffman buried under mounds of latex that make him look more like 921. Hoffman’s performance holds it together, while Chief Dan George as Crabb mentor Old Lodge Skins was a stroke of casting gold.
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The Last Time I Saw Paris

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Elizabeth Taylor, Van Johnson, Walter Pidgeon, Donna Reed.
1954. This ubiquitously home-distributed screen version of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story (Babylon Revisited) gets a welcome 1.85:1 release. Even the image on MGM’s old Paris laserdisc wasn’t nearly as horizontal as what we get here. The movie begins with an irresistible hook: A Paris-based reporter, played by Van Johnson, is kissed by a stranger, played by Elizabeth Taylor, during the celebration of V-E Day. He then meets another more instantly smitten looker (Donna Reed), who turns out to be the kisser’s sister. What follows is a passionate Taylor-Johnson love affair/marriage full of boozing, while rejected Reed holds a grudge. Before the story plops into suds during the final half hour, Taylor fanatics will enjoy tracking her changing hairstyles (as her character’s life gets more complicated, the cuts get increasingly shorter).
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