New on Disc: 'Cameraman' and more …

Cameraman: The Life & Work of Jack Cardiff

Strand, Documentary, B.O. $0.02 million, $24.99 DVD, $34.99 Blu-ray, NR.
2011. It’s almost inconceivable that anyone could ever demur from the widely held assertion that Cardiff was the greatest color cinematographer who ever lived — what with a filmography that includes Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, Stairway to Heaven (also from the Shoes/Narcissus team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), Scott of the Antarctic, Hitchcock’s underrated Under Capricorn, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, The African Queen, The Barefoot Contessa, The Prince and the Showgirl, The Vikings, Legend of the Lost (lousy movie, fabulous lensing) and the King Vidor version of War and Peace (in VistaVision). And speaking of lookers, you can also address this point from a slightly different direction — one that Craig McCall’s loving documentary made me think about to a degree that hadn’t quite hit me before — which is that Cardiff’s work also represents the apogee — or pretty close to it — of color glamour photography (moving-image category). Working with some admittedly great raw material, he conjured up breathtaking visages of Ava Gardner (twice), Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn (or as much as that War and Peace costuming would allow), Janet Leigh and even Deborah Kerr in those Narcissus fishing-stream flashbacks before her character became a nun. Interview subjects are top of the line: Martin Scorsese, Lauren Bacall (along with Bogie on the Queen shoot) and Charlton Heston are just a few.
Extras: Cardiff liked to shoot home movies on the set, and both the documentary itself and its copious bonus extras (among the most enjoyable I’ve seen in a while) incorporate a lot of this material. A highlight is some fabulous stuff from the set of The African Queen taken before cast and crew took ill from impure drinking water that spared only two of the principals (Humphrey Bogart and John Huston), who ignored water from the get-go in favor of booze.
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The Colossus of New York

Olive, Sci-Fi, $24.95 DVD, NR.
Stars John Baragrey, Mala Powers, Otto Kruger, Ross Martin.
1958. In this twisted pretzel of a domestic drama, sibling scientists John Baragrey and Ross Martin are in a kind of Smothers Brothers situation over the affections of their brain surgeon father (Otto Kruger). You see, dad loves the latter more (winning a Nobel Prize probably helped). When the favored son is killed, the father determines he can take his dead son’s brain and implant it into a giant robot. But the robot is discomforted and confused (this is not a normal state) on his way to a psychotic state. The robot costume, if that’s the word, is pretty cool, and Colossus has a spare and very effective piano score, which, when juxtaposed against this behemoth, is substantially eerie. As these things go, Colossus is pretty decent of its kind — with a 70-minute running time that keeps the picture from wearing out its welcome, especially when the print looks as clean as it does here.
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Where the Boys Are

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Comedy, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Dolores Hart, George Hamilton, Yvette Mimieux, Paula Prentiss.
1960. As it turned out, the Glendon Swarthout novel upon which this film was based was more hard-edged than the resulting movie. Still, the movie has a little more edge than expected (maybe 5% to 10%) in addressing the pressures and even psychological abuse young women endured at the outset of the Pill — everyday, but in this specific instance, during college vacations where there were going to be a lot of men who didn’t want their time to be exclusively spent tossing footballs on the beach. But given its release date during the period when JFK had been elected but Eisenhower still was in office, the movie makes it clear that the women are always back in their motel (with pool) by evening’s end — and sleeping six or seven to a room.
Extras: Uncommonly for a made-to-order release, Boys is a re-issue of an out-of-print onetime retail title — complete with carried-over bonus extras that include a Paula Prentiss commentary.
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New on Disc: 'Queen to Play' and more …

Queen to Play

Street 8/16
Zeitgeist, Drama, B.O. $0.5 million, $29.95 DVD, NR.
In French with English subtitles.
Stars Sandrine Bonnaire, Kevin Kline, Francis Renaud.
2011. Sandrine Bonnaire, now approaching her mid-40s in real life, plays a married, attractive maid who changes bed sheets in a hotel. Living in Corsica, her “Helene” character still regards her husband (Francis Renaud) as attractive, but the family’s blue-collar status alienates the snobbish teenaged daughter they’ve raised, creating some household tension. What’s more, Helene is more intellectually curious than her mate and seems to sense that some fundamental zest is missing from the union on both mental and physical planes. But she’s faithful by nature, and this easy-to-take story ends up turning on chess — specifically, Helene’s afternoon tutelage by widowed doctor/employer (Kevin Kline) with whom she starts to play. This is a bearded Kline speaking French and looking, if not exactly rumpled, getting there. Their contests (which begin to affect her work performance and punctuality) start local tongues to wagging, to which Helene’s husband is not oblivious. It goes without saying that any viewer who’s consumed by the game will probably be even more intrigued. Though Kline has always been a malleable actor, it’s worth taking five minutes with his filmography to note just how extensively he’s been able to mine a fairly mild screen person into all kinds of characterizations, even outlandish ones. This is Bonnaire’s movie, but someone had to have the inspiration to think even think that Kline might fit nicely into this role. Given that this is Bottaro’s first feature, she either caught a break or she has killer instincts for a little movie with killer dimples.
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Breaking Glass

Street 8/16
Olive, Drama, $24.95 DVD, $29.99 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Phil Daniels, Hazel O’Connor, Jon Finch, Jonathan Pryce.
1980. As with other movies that now come off as artifacts of an age, the late writer-director Brian Gibson’s musical punk saga is possibly an object of nostalgia these days — though then, as now, its demographic is on the rarefied side. One wonders if any affection Glass engenders will ever be on the cuddly side. As portrayed here — particularly in a scene where the police invade a flat to bust the plot-central band without much right or provocation — this government looks like a pretty good one to rebel against. And to this end, punk-ishly aspiring lead singer Kate (Hazel O’Connor, often killing the pancake makeup budget) is to the manner born when it comes to ranting and railing on stage. But will she keep her integrity and not sell out to industry promoters? This is the crux of a story that’s more interesting around the edges than down the middle.
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The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Ray Danton, Karen Steele, Elaine Stewart, Warren Oates.
1960. Of all the movies Budd Boetticher directed that aren’t revered Randolph Scott Westerns, there are at least two with fairly sturdy critical reputations. One is 1951’s The Bullfighter and the Lady, and the other is this underworld biopic. Starring cleft-chinned Ray Danton as the Prohibition-era lowlife, Legs also offers an older screen version of Arnold Rothstein as portrayed by predominantly ‘40s player Robert Lowery. By the time of this biopic’s setting, Rothstein — the famed operator who allegedly fixed the 1919 World Series — is aged enough for “Legs” to be having fun with the inside gams of the elder hood’s mistress (Elaine Stewart) after winnowing his way rather creatively into the Rothstein organization. Glossy sheen or not (and allowing for the widescreen differential), Legs still looks something from the studio’s ubiquitous TV lineup of the day — something that might have starred, well, Ray Danton (who was a regular on the Warner/ABC show “The Alaskans”).
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New on Disc: 'Streetwalkin',' 'The Egyptian' and more …

Streetwalkin’

Street 8/2
Shout! Factory, Drama, $14.93 DVD, ‘R.’
Stars Melissa Leo, Dale Midkiff, Julie Newmar.
1985. This is presumably the only screen portrayal of street prostitution to find a role for Julie Newmar. Surprisingly upfront — though no more than honesty dictates — about the tawdriness of the trade, Streetwalkin’ ends up having a little more conviction than you might expect within swaggeringly melodramatic conventions. For its smidgens of integrity, we can thank a young Melissa Leo, whose recent supporting Oscar (and two nominations in three years) has doubtlessly sparked this fairly raw melodrama’s entrance into the DVD domain. Leo goes so many extra miles here, in terms of acting intensity, that it’s tough to figure out why she never got the early break she deserved. Sporting a fresh face that doesn’t exactly synch with that Oscar performance in The Fighter, Leo and her handsome kid brother bus into New York City from an obviously boozy mom/abusive stepdad situation — whereupon she’s immediately befriended by someone who turns out to be a pimp. The moral here, as always: Beware of men who befriend you in strange-city subway terminals that are adjacent to bus stations.
Extras: Writer-director Joan Freeman provides a commentary.
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The Egyptian

Available at ScreenArchives.com
Twilight Time, Drama, $19.95 DVD, $39.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Jean Simmons, Victor Mature, Edmund Purdom, Gene Tierney.
1954. This artifact-packed, would-be blockbuster with opulent trimmings and a fabulous score is famed on at least one might-have-been level: This is the movie where Edmund Purdom replaced Marlon Brando when the actor balked at making the picture. Set 13 centuries B.C., The Egyptian is a shaggy pyramid saga about the long life of Pharaoh Akhenaton’s court physician (at least when things are going harmoniously between doc and the court) and all the events that have contributed to his age lines and gray hair before the film’s opening flashback begins. It’s been famously said that no one ever goes to a movie for the sets and costumes, but there are times where I disagree. This is one, especially when such a big-scale production gets this kind of rendering; even with my nose almost touching the screen in an experiment, this transfer looked spectacular.
Extras: Alain Silver and James Ursini do the commentary (lots to talk about), Julie Kirgo’s liner notes are often funny, and there’s an isolated soundtrack of the famous score — split between my two favorite screen composers ever (Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Newman) because there were too many screen minutes (140) and too little time.
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Follow Me Quietly

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars William Lundigan, Dorothy Patrick, Jeff Corey.
1949. Long before Hollywood glutted the market by turning serial killer melodramas into a major sub-industry, this 60-minute toughie — the kind of double-bill supplement that screen-cheapie fanciers used to term “efficient” — was one of the first movies I know of to deal with the subject in an American urban setting (as opposed to say, your standard garden variety Jack the Ripper pic). What got me about Quietly was the idea of the cop played by William Lundigan requisitioning police funds to construct a “suspect” mannequin that fit meager witness descriptions, akin to the standard composite sketch but throwing in a suit, a tie and hat. The director does a lot of moody things here with noir-style rain (the killer always strikes during heavy precipitation), and the chase ending seems heavily influenced by Jules Dassin’s once-landmark The Naked City, as so many crime thrillers of the late 1940s were. Dorothy Patrick plays the pesky journalist and love interest, and Jeff Corey plays the secondary cop, not too long before the actor was politically blacklisted in Hollywood for nine years.
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New on Disc: The Minnesota Twins 1991 World Series

•Magic in Minnesota: Remembering the 1991 World Series Championship
•The Minnesota Twins 1991 World Series Collector’s Edition

Street 8/2
A&E, Sports, Magic in Minnesota: $19.95 DVD, 1991 World Series: $69.95 seven-DVD set, NR.
1991. Five of the seven ’91 contests were decided by one run (and five of six after game one); four wins came in the final at-bat; three of the games went extra innings (a record); and the final two rose to special heights, with game seven an all-timer on multiple levels — but especially for containing one of the gutsiest pitching performances in Series annals. The 20th anniversary look-back Magic in Minnesota is an overview with lots of older (and, in some cases, heavier) Twins participants — including manager Tom Kelly, who always seemed to keep the franchise in there every year (the Twins won the Series in ’87, too). You can see from this Series why Braves manager Bobby Cox always seemed to be, whether he literally was or not, in the dugout chewing a Costco warehouse’s worth of antacids. The Braves went back to Minnesota with a 3-2 Series advantage and then lost the sixth game 4-3 (on a Kirby Puckett walk-off home run in the bottom of the 11th) and then game seven by a score of 1-0 when Twins ace Jack Morris went all 10 innings for the shutout with a “don’t even think about taking me out” attitude in what he called the most focused game of his career. I’ll bet.
Extras: The Magic DVD includes Puckett’s great Hall of Fame induction speech. The box of complete game broadcasts has a nice feature that allows you to hear the game via either its TV or radio feeds. And each individual disc jacket is splashed with trivia-fancier stats — including even the running time, attendance and (for completists) game-time temperature.
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Sands of the Kalahari

Street 8/2
Olive, Drama, $24.95 DVD, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Stanley Baker, Stuart Whitman, Susannah York, Harry Andrews.
1965. As a drama about the moral limitations of social Darwinism, Sands has its provocative moments. It centers on nature’s downing of a two-engine job that has been chartered after a regular commercial flight was delayed: There’s nothing like running into a five-mile swath of locusts. This is no hyperbole — it’s what the pilot, in fact, claims — resulting in the worst windshield wiper gunk you’ll ever see, a shot I’ve never forgotten after all these years. The Panavision is easy on the eye, and the story ends with one of the more memorable (and certainly uncompromised) endings from any movie of the era. The film generally is devalued as a lesser cousin of two tangentially related movies of the same era: 1964’s Zulu and The Flight of the Phoenix.
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Athena

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Musical, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Jane Powell, Debbie Reynolds, Vic Damone, Edmund Purdom.
1954. In one huge regard that makes it interesting viewing today, Athena was ahead of its time in its advocacy of a healthy lifestyle — which led to casting the studio’s professional cuties Jane Powell and Debbie Reynolds with a cast of musclemen who included male-boomer icon Steve Reeves (the former 1950 Mr. Universe later immortalized by two Joe Levine “Hercules” epics). Though Powell was just coming off the biggest hit of her career (Seven Brides for Seven Brothers), the sea change in popular music at the time was so dramatic that her big-screen career would be over in four years and her MGM career in one.
Extras: This is a handsome release, and there are some raw musical outtakes included that are fun to watch.
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New on Disc: 'Amelie' Blu-ray and more …

Amélie (Blu-ray)

Lionsgate, Comedy, $19.99 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for sexual content.
In French with English subtitles.
Stars Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kasovitz, Rufus, Lorella Cravotta.
2001. The story of a gamin-like cutie who plays a good Samaritan/Cupid to the detriment of her own stunted emotional development, France’s internationally popular five-Oscar nominee (a striking tally for a foreign-language release) offers proof that modern-day movies can still “do” saturated color, and it’s the added ocular benefits that get my vote when it comes to maximum enjoyment of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s peripatetic screen original.
Extras: The Blu-ray extras do the old Buena Vista DVD one better by adding a commentary by Jeunet to the original tally.
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Hey, Boo: Harper Lee & To Kill a Mockingbird

First Run, Documentary, B.O. $0.03 million, $24.95 DVD, NR.
2011. Writer-director Mary Murphy’s appreciation of all things Mockingbird has to be the most appealing book junkie’s documentary (or movie of any kind) since 2002’s The Stone Reader — and she had to pull off this feat with a huge crater in the middle of her picture. That would be author (Nelle) Harper Lee’s total abstinence from interviews since a New York radio Q&A in 1964, which Murphy’s portrait samples generously. The documentary approaches Mockingbird from the angles of the racial progress it portended; as a work of Southern literature (many Southern writers weigh in); as a formative experience for other well-known folks (Oprah Winfrey, Rosanne Cash, Tom Brokaw); and as the source of a movie that will turn 50 next year. Assumed to be something like the no-nonsense tomboy “Scout” narrator she invented for the only novel she ever wrote, Lee turns out to be something of a “Boo” Radley — the elusive key character Robert Duvall played in the 1962 movie version of the book (his big-screen debut). In her own milieu, Lee hasn’t been a recluse, and no one has had any trouble spotting her walking around hometown Monroeville, Ala. It’s just that she doesn’t like to speak in public — and more recently has been severely impaired by a stroke and significant blindness (something the documentary doesn’t address).
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The Letter

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Jeanne Eagels, O.P. Heggie, Herbert Marshall.
1929. This comparably stilted and nearly “lost” film based on Somerset Maugham’s 1927 play, released by Paramount early in the sound era, is very much worth seeing — primarily because it preserves one of the first performances ever nominated for the Best Actress Oscar: by famed stage actress and legend-of-the-day Jeanne Eagels not long before her death at 39. The movie is only a little more than a photographed stage play, but the hot-house atmosphere is fairly convincing, allowing for the primitive filmmaking origins.
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The Goddess

Manufactured on demand via online retailers
Sony Pictures, Drama, $20.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Kim Stanley, Lloyd Bridges, Steven Hill.
1958. The Goddess, Paddy Chayefsky’s thought-to-be takeoff on Marilyn Monroe, is a most compelling project to have been mounted — then or now — because there’s no time in history when it could have been a feel-good project; it’s almost the “anti-Amélie” in that regard. What’s more, Monroe was still an active and very public figure at the time this not exactly flattering portrait was released in the late spring of 1958. Making things even more compelling is the fact that The Goddess marked the big-screen debut of revered stage actress Kim Stanley. The director is the underrated John Cromwell (father of actor James), who was especially good with actresses.
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New on Disc: 'Potiche,' 'Skidoo' and more …

Potiche

Street 7/19
Music Box, Comedy, B.O. $1.6 million, $29.95 DVD, $38.94 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for some sexuality.
In French with English subtitles.
Stars Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu, Fabrice Luchini.
2011. Befitting a comedy that’s well out of its time in terms of no longer revelatory content, Francois Ozon’s pigment-happy filming of a Pierre Barillet/Jean-Pierre Grady feminist play is set in 1977, when there were still a handful of wheezy stand-up comics left poking fun at women’s liberation. As a somewhat portly homemaking grandmother, Catherine Deneuve is pressed into taking over her reactionary husband’s umbrella factory when he suffers a seizure battling protestors during a labor skirmish. The atypically fun-loving Deneuve enjoys a little disco time in the company of her provincial town’s communist mayor (Gerard Depardieu) — one of several lovers she had during her childbearing years after discovering her husband’s serial philandering. It’s smoothly performed with color schemes that are easy on the eye.
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Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune

Street 7/19
First Run, Documentary, B.O. $0.3 million, $27.95 DVD, NR.
2011. The shadow of Bob Dylan hangs over this portrait some, just as it hung over Phil Ochs’ career (a lot). As a Midwesterner who, given his future legacy, improbably loved John Wayne and Gary Cooper, Ochs was a true believer in the social turmoil of the ‘60s just as Dylan artfully danced around it. The documentary doesn’t make this point, but Dylan’s unabated ability to reinvent himself likely saved him from an eventual monotony factor that might have afflicted Ochs career-wise if alcohol and personal demons hadn’t. Though the documentary short-shrifts Ochs’ formative years, it offers a full portrait of the New York folk scene of the early 1960s — interviewing such key we-were-there figures as Ochs’ widow and daughter, journalists Lucian Truscott IV and Christopher Hitchens, activist Tom Hayden, plus singers Joan Baez, Judy Henske and Dave Van Ronk (who is said to be the model for the Coen Brothers’ in-the-works movie about that same Village coffee-house era).
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Skidoo

Street 7/19
Olive, Comedy, $24.95 DVD, ‘R’ for some nudity and drug content.
Stars Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Groucho Marx, John Phillip Law.
1968. Director Otto Preminger’s Jackie Gleason LSD movie is one of those legendary mega-bombs that not many people have actually seen — or at least seen in a version that can compete with Olive Films' correct 2.35-to-1 framing, which is packed with pretty colors itself. The picture isn’t as much fun as you’d hope, though it inspires a certain level of awe just the same. Skidoo is still the kind of “you won’t believe this” mindbender that reaps long-term benefits and enriches the form as a whole when viewed as a window into an era.
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A Damsel in Distress

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Musical, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Fred Astaire, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Joan Fontaine.
1937. A spotty curio with big league compensations, A Damsel in Distress merits at least mild affection — not too arguably superior to the lesser Astaire-Rogers movies. Oddly, the two musical all-timers for which the movie is best known come late in the picture, which helps accelerate the pace in the second half. “A Foggy Day” is an unfussy Astaire solo (classy and effective), but “Nice Work If You Can Get It” is all but thrown away by a chorus in a party sequence.
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New on Disc: 'Damnation Alley' and more …

Damnation Alley

Street 7/12
Shout! Factory, Sci-Fi, $19.93 DVD, $26.97 Blu-ray, ‘PG.’
Stars Jan-Michael Vincent, George Peppard, Paul Winfield, Dominique Sanda.
1977. The story deals with the ramifications of Earth having been tilted on its axis and the resulting precipitous population dip. The few remaining survivors include three U.S. Air Force cronies who managed to be in a Mojave bomb shelter: Jan-Michael Vincent, George Peppard and Paul Winfield. If the “Mystery Science Theater 3000” crew had been allowed access to major studio releases, Alley (adapted from a Roger Zelazny novel) would have been a natural. But even without snarky commentary, the movie and Jack Smight’s direction are so outlandishly ham-handed that Peppard and this D-team always will have an honored place on my DVD shelf.
Extras: In one of the featurettes, co-producer Jerome Zeitman basically says he was in over his head and the filmmakers did the best they could with the available technology. Screenwriter Alan Sharp is the focus of another featurette.
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The Best of The Dean Martin Variety Show: Collector’s Edition

Time Life, Comedy, $59.95 six-DVD set, NR.
1965-72. The show was a watered-down variation on Dean Martin’s booze-‘n’-broads Vegas nightclub act. The show worked for eight seasons, though it got a little shaky toward the end. Credit infectiously good on-the-set tidings, Martin’s ability to play off almost any guest and his utter lack of pretension (who else began his show by sliding down a fire pole in a tux?). Unlike the old mail-order DVDs that utilized a kind of “snippet” format to present the Martin shows, this six-disc set (smaller and cheaper variations are available as well) consists of 20 individual programs with certain segments and a lot of Martin solos from each edited out. The purist in me balks at this, and I am among the online chorus who would have preferred complete programs. But beyond allowing disc space for a larger show sampling, it’s possible some of the edits were judicious: The shows move speedily, and even some of the obscure guest stand-up comics (who would have been potentially removable) remain and are funnier than expected. In any case, the set makes it clear that Martin was a — and maybe the — transitional figure for changing television times.
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Frontline: Football High

PBS, Documentary, $24.99, NR.
2011. Broadly speaking, director Rachel Dretzin’s reportage deals with the ways in which successful high school football programs now resemble those of their college counterparts. High school players take more hits than college players while their brains are still developing, and doctors are starting to see brain injuries and memory loss identified with NFL retirees in youngsters. This is a very powerful documentary in the low-key “Frontline” style that simply asks that football programs and the public at large keep pace with the current medical knowledge.
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Tortilla Flat

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Comedy, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr, John Garfield, Frank Morgan.
1942. Director Victor Fleming’s moderately weighted but still slightly overlong movie of John Steinbeck’s first bestseller illustrates a lot of what was both slick and snapless — and yet in other ways wonderful — about MGM during the Louis B. Mayer years. The picture casts Irish Spencer Tracy, Viennese Hedy Lamarr, Jewish John Garfield and The Wizard of Oz’s Frank Morgan as Northern California Hispanics — or paisanos — who live, loaf, imbibe wine and pack a lot of fish at the area canneries.
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New on Disc: 'The Making of the President: The 1960s' and more …

The Making of the President: The 1960s

Street 7/5
Acorn/Athena, Documentary, $59.99 three-DVD set, NR.
1963-69. If the three TV documentaries respectively spun off from Theodore H. White’s political bestsellers about the 1960, 1964 and 1968 elections didn’t fully achieve the same degree of landmark status on their own moving-image turf, they were still galvanizing at the time and permanently valuable. It’s the time capsule aspect that really makes this boxed set cook. This is because footage of on-the-stump politicians — eating rubber chicken at fundraisers or captured in their hotel rooms — no longer is the novelty it once was. Every political junkie can take something special out of each of these roughly 80-minute moving snapshots.
Extras: Spicing up the package is a 16-page backgrounder booklet that even elucidates the elections’ respective party platforms — plus two bonus documentaries that include the JFK remembrance from the ’64 Democratic Convention.
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The Breaking Point

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars John Garfield, Patricia Neal, Phyllis Thaxter, Juano Hernandez.
1950. The second Warner screen version of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not shrewdly avoids any attempts to beat the earlier picture at its own game — showing what the life of fishing boat captain Harry Morgan (John Garfield) might have been like (this time postwar) if his Newport Beach, Calif., business was lousy, he had a wife and daughters he loved and was forced by circumstances to get mixed up with some shady characters. The result is one of director Michael Curtiz’s best movies. The script has some tangy dialogue, and the story doesn’t get bogged down in the melodrama that dominates the final quarter, as some movies that shift their focus near the end frequently do. There’s also no cop-out at the end, and the final shot is a killer — its emphasis quite unlike any other I can recall from the era.
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Report to the Commissioner

Manufactured on demand via online retailers
Fox/MGM, Drama, $19.98 DVD, ‘R.’
Stars Michael Moriarty, Yaphet Kotto, Susan Blakely, Hector Elizondo.
1975. With the exception of Susan Blakely (which is, in a way, a key plot point), even the cast needs a serious dose of urban renewal in the relentlessly grimy screen version of James Mills’ NYPD bestseller. Yaphet Kotto plays a cop — and for that matter, so does Blakely. In fact, just about every principal in the movie is on the force, except for Bob Balaban as a street person, Richard Gere (his big-screen debut) as a dandy-in-his-own-eyes pimp and William Devane, who shows up at the end in one of those assistant DA roles he and his arching eyebrows were born to play. Speaking strictly chronologically, Commissioner arrived around the middle of the great cycle of NYPD dramas that spanned Madigan (1968) to Prince of the City (1981) — but in reality most of the really good ones had come earlier.
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Woman Obsessed

Available at www.screenarchives.com
Twilight Time, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Susan Hayward, Stephen Boyd, Barbara Nichols, Theodore Bikel.
1959. A recent Canadian Rockies widowed mother weds a widowed guy (Stephen Boyd). As with almost every movie that top-billed her following her Oscar win, this is purely a Susan Hayward vehicle: She emotes, sports professionally sculpted hair and wears some decent nightwear.
Extras: The disc comes with detailed Julie Kirgo liner notes and an isolated music track.
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New on Disc: 'Kiss Me Deadly' and more …

Kiss Me Deadly

Criterion, Mystery, $29.95 DVD, $39.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Ralph Meeker, Albert Dekker, Cloris Leachman, Maxine Cooper.
1955. Kiss Me Deadly turned out to be a bedrock masterpiece of American cinema, one with a far more illustrious international reputation than any book or movie with which Mickey Spillane’s name was ever associated. Director Robert Aldrich and screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides took the author’s politically reactionary thug/cretin of a detective, Mike Hammer, and used him to personify most of what they thought was wrong with America in 1955. What’s more, it totally ignored or upended the novel’s plot in the process. This will likely end up being one of Criterion’s top releases this year.
Extras: The set includes a revealing 40-minute documentary about Spillane, a predictably pro-job commentary by top-drawer noir specialists Alain Silver and James Ursini, a couldn’t-be-better Criterion essay by Jim Hoberman, plus instructive supplements about Bezzerides (who, judging from the footage here, must have fallen on hard times) and about the mostly vanished Los Angeles locales Aldrich used for this definitive L.A. movie (even if the original novel did take place in New York state).
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Bad Blood: A Cautionary Tale

PBS, Documentary, $24.99 DVD, NR.
2011. The lines of personal and clinical filmmaking intersect to maximum power in a landmark story of how the hemophiliac community got contaminated by a drug designed to help them. Some documentaries on PBS run only an hour, but I don’t think that would have been long enough to construct the kind of history director Marilyn Ness has assembled over 82 minutes. Ness was a lifelong friend of one of the central hemophiliacs interviewed here and originally intended for her film to be more limited in its context. Then the friend — health activist Mathew Kleiner — died of hepatitis and an HIV infection contracted from a blood transfusion received years earlier, and Ness was left with the footage and practically a mandate to expand the scope of her film. All in all, about 10,000 hemophiliacs contracted AIDS and 15,000 got hepatitis — the worst medical disaster in U.S. history.
Extras: This is one of those cases where it is crucially instructional to view the filmmaker interview included as a DVD bonus, which in this case turns about 15 minutes. For one thing, you get a real sense of Ness’ compassion and struggle to get the story right.
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Hearts of the West

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Comedy, $19.95 DVD, ‘PG.’
Stars Jeff Bridges, Andy Griffith, Alan Arkin, Blythe Danner.
1975. Set in 1933 Hollywood, Hearts of the West tells the story of an aspiring writer (Jeff Bridges) who becomes a stuntman. The movie probably never had much of a box office chance and still exists almost in the exclusive domain of movie cultists — which doesn’t mean that anyone coerced into seeing it won’t have a mellow good time, without necessarily feeling the need to write home about it.
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Burn, Witch, Burn!

Manufactured on demand via online retailers
Fox/MGM, Horror, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Janet Blair, Patrick Wyngarde.
1962. For anyone who finally gets around to seeing this unfussy horror sleeper, one of its treats pops up in the opening credits: “Twilight Zone” veterans Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont share a writing credit for this adaptation of Fritz Leiber’s source novel Conjure Wife. The film provides a novel twist on the backbiting rivalries that always have existed in academia, where faculty spouses act on their jealousies despite the phony smiles they throw each other during supposedly collegial bridge games.
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New on Disc: 'The Makioka Sisters' and 'Orgasm Inc.'

 

The Makioka Sisters  

Criterion, Drama, $19.95 DVD, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga, Yuko Kotegawa.
1983. Director Kon Ichikawa’s splendid sprawler, adapted and modified from Junichiro Tanizaki’s popular novel, takes place in 1938 Osaka and Ashiya but only tangentially addresses Japan’s escalating state of war in that decade. Whenever there are fleeting references to the army during the course of 140 event-packed minutes, they usually have to do with how the military economy is contributing to tougher times and other concerns involving money, a subject never far from the minds of the movie’s title quartet. Sibling rivalry knows no geographic storytelling boundaries, and it would take a pretty dour type (or maybe the least-enlightened red-meat macho man) not to get caught up in the roller coaster emotions of older sisters Tsuruko and Sacahiko, who both “married down” — though one wouldn’t say unhappily — after their merchant parents died, or to those of younger Yukiko and Taeko, whose attempts to land husbands from something less than an ‘A’-list of contenders constitute much of the narrative.
Extras: Uncommonly short on bonus features for a Criterion release, Sisters does have a lovely new transfer befitting its classiness and a solid essay by Audie Bock, still one of the first scholars you think of when it comes to any knowledgeable discussion of Japanese cinema.
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Orgasm Inc.

Street 6/21
First Run, Documentary, B.O. $0.05 million, $27.95 DVD, NR.
2011. If the title sounds a bit on the flip side, it turns out to be a dead-on precise one to serve subject matter that could have befitted a Robert Altman comedy. Documentary filmmaker Liz Canner casts a wary eye on scientific attempts to develop a kind of equal-opportunity Viagra: a pill to enable women to have more and better orgasms. Perhaps a little of this public servicing has been for altruistic reasons: the pleasing kind involving patient blood flow. Much more of it is for the cash flow of pharmaceutical companies. Before very long, the tone relaxes some, and Orgasm Inc. simply elects to mine the rich material at hand. Eventually, it even turns footage of FDA testimony into a mild nail-biter.
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The Prize

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Paul Newman, Edward G. Robinson, Elke Sommer, Diane Baker.
1963. As part of a movie designed to remind us of Hitchcock all the way down to Hitch regular Leo G. Carroll’s subordinate role, this glossy adaptation of Irving Wallace’s same-name novel has a script by Ernest Lehman, who wrote the brilliant original screenplay for North by Northwest as well. Sometimes, it’s harder to go back to the drawing board than it is to go back to the well. For all its handsome Panavision clunkiness partly redeemed by a mostly snappy on-demand Warner Archive print, there’s more than a smidgen of amusement in seeing Newman involved in Cold War intrigue much lighter in tone than anything in the actor’s “official” Hitchcock movie: 1966’s Torn Curtain.
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Park Row

Manufactured on demand via online retailers
Fox/MGM, Genre, $24.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Gene Evans, Mary Welch, Bela Kovacs.
1952. Even by Sam Fuller standards, this affectionate (and affection-engendering) labor of love by the distinctive writer-director is undeniably on the broad side — not that the world of cutthroat New York City journalism in the mid-1880s would be portrayed very accurately with a dainty approach.
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