New on Disc: 'Another Year' and more …

Another Year

Sony Pictures, Drama, B.O. $3.2 million, $38.96 Blu-ray/DVD combo, ‘PG-13 for some language.
Stars Lesley Manville, Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen, Imelda Staunton.
2010. Among its many grown-up virtues, Mike Leigh’s Another Year offers testimony to the life advantage of finding the right soulmate — as dramatized by the perfectly synchronized relationship of married Londoners Tom (Jim Broadbent), a geographical engineer with a flair for shared yard work, and Gerri, (Ruth Sheen) a psychologist who deals with unhappy people as a daily diet. Gerri’s toughest test case is co-worker Mary, played both intensely and unforgettably by another Leigh regular, Lesley Manville. The plasticity of Manville’s face is something to see: In half a beat, she can go from warmly approachable to withered and party-killing. Year isn’t exactly the kind of production Blu-ray was designed to enhance for home audiences, but the format’s capabilities do add some punch to the searing quality of the actors’ faces.
Extras: The disc includes commentary with Leigh and Manville and the featurettes “The Making of Another Year” and “The Mike Leigh Method.”
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Public Speaking

HBO, Documentary, $19.98 DVD, NR.
2010. You can tell that Martin Scorsese is having a grand time of it with his documentary on comic essayist Fran Lebowitz (Metropolitan Life; Social Studies) when he cuts from a discussion of her owning and driving a Checker cab in New York City (where no one has a car) to a shot that pays homage to Travis Bickle in the director’s own Taxi Driver. You even get the Bernard Herrmann scoring. With this kind of documentary, Scorsese can only shoot the material conventionally, but somehow his “conventionally” always seems to have a zestier pace than other filmmakers.
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When It Was a Game: The Complete Collection (Blu-ray)

HBO, Documentary, $29.99 Blu-ray, NR.
1991-2000. After 20 years (the first “When It Was a Game” aired in 1991), we have never quite re-seen the likes of this HBO series, which was culled from 8mm and 16mm (mostly) color home movies — with a little aspect ratio tinkering to render them as widescreen presentations. Originally aired over a decade as three separate hour-long documentaries, the shows are packed with shots of Ebbets Field, Crosley Field, the Polo Grounds plus players from the same bygone eras those bygone stadiums represent. You can watch these films over and over and spot something new, but perhaps their greatest beauty is that occasional shot you’ll never forget. For me, it’s a bare-chested Billy Martin tossing a beach ball at someone’s pool party. The other one is an in-the-stands shot of Roy Rogers sitting next to Gabby Hayes, both in sartorial splendor. I’m pretty sure it’s from a World Series — though it would be even more surreal were it a Boston Braves-Phillies game with 852 people in the stands, counting the concession guys.
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Those Lips, Those Eyes

Manufactured on demand via online retailers
Fox/MGM, Comedy, $19.98 DVD, ‘R.’
Stars Frank Langella, Tom Hulce, Glynnis O’Connor, Jerry Stiller.
1980. Despite a rather marked absence here of “Cleveland verisimilitude,” Those Lips, Those Eyes is somewhat of an underseen sleeper/charmer that has just been made available in Fox’s new on-demand package of predominantly United Artists titles. It gets a huge boost from lead Frank Langella as an aging theatrical performer who takes a youthful stagehand (Tom Hulce) under his wing. The major reward of a likably minor movie comes from savoring the svelte flamboyance Langella brings to a role that possibly no other actor at the time could have played this well.
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New on Disc: 'The Comancheros' Blu-ray, 'Night Flight' and more …

The Comancheros (Blu-ray)

Fox, Western, $34.99 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars John Wayne, Stuart Whitman, Ina Balin, Lee Marvin.
1961. John Wayne’s second notably relaxed outing in as many years for 20th Century Fox placed him early in the final chapter of his Western career — the one where he got a lot of fun out of intimidating a tenderfoot. Fox has given this easy-to-take escapism more than a half-hearted Blu-ray treatment, but there are times when it looks a little on the muddy side. But make no mistake: Fox deserves credit for taking the high road by issuing The Comancheros in high-def.
Extras: The single best thing Fox has done with this release is to revive the great pieced-together commentary with co-star Stuart Whitman, Wayne’s actor son Patrick (who takes an Indian arrow in the back here) and two actors who play heavies: Nehemiah Persoff and Michael Ansara. Originally assembled for the 1994 laserdisc release, it was left off the standard Comancheros DVD. Other bonuses include, but are not limited to, a historical backgrounder about the title traders to Indians (who apparently weren’t always as reprehensible as the bad breed of merchants here) and one on Wayne’s two tenures at the studio, separated by about 30 years.
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Night Flight

Street 6/7
Warner, Drama, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars John Barrymore, Helen Hayes, Clark Gable, Myrna Loy.
1933. The movie isn’t very distinguished but is somewhat more fun to watch than I recalled — which proves again that you can never underestimate what a good print can bring to the table. I like Barrymore’s performance as a boss man who’s so demanding that he fines pilots for being a few minutes late in arriving despite flying over mountains in rain storms without even cover in the cockpit. Playing a pilot who runs into perilous weather is Clark Gable, and he gets a lot more out of next to no dialogue than poor Helen Hayes does as his wife. The movie is obviously a strong curiosity but nothing much more than that.
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Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno

Flicker Alley, Documentary, $39.95 DVD, NR.
2010. We live in an era when nearly every film classic of note comes equipped with a “look-back” featurette or more in its DVD or Blu-ray bonus section. Yet every once in a while a documentary about the movie industry qualifies as a standout, though usually they’re about movies that actually got made. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno is definitely special for sure with its almost foolproof central hook: the story of an important filmmaker who, from all indications, underwent some kind of mysterious crack-up while working on what might have ended up being either a cinematic fiasco of major proportions or the movie of his career.
Extras: Affable co-director Serge Bromberg spins an incredible anecdote involving Clouzot’s widow that illustrates how close this documentary came to not being made.
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Fate Is the Hunter

Available from www.screenarchives.com
Twilight Time, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Glenn Ford, Rod Taylor, Nancy Kwan, Suzanne Pleshette.
1964. Fate’s barebones story has to do with an investigator (Glenn Ford) determining what caused a passenger plane to crash when there didn’t seem to be any reasons for it to do so — other than perhaps a guy at the controls (Rod Taylor) who was known to have a taste for revelry. The transfer is very good on Twilight Time’s latest trek into the 20th Century Fox library.
Extras: Program notes by Julie Kirgo and an isolated audio track for Jerry Goldsmith’s musical score.
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New on Disc: 'American Graffiti' on Blu-ray and more …

American Graffiti: Special Edition

Street 5/31
Universal, Comedy, $19.98 DVD, $26.98 Blu-ray, ‘PG.’
Stars Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford, Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips, Suzanne Somers.
1973. American Graffiti was the definitive nostalgia piece of its day, and Blu-ray serves the movie’s sensual subtleties well: bright colors coming through the nighttime grain of early morning shooting and a Walter Murch sound design that took the place of a musical score the picture couldn’t afford once George Lucas & Co. shelled out for the oldies soundtrack that plays wall-to-wall. With occasional halo-ing that reflects how I recall it looking in theaters plus an old-school 2.0 soundtrack, I love Universal’s new Blu-ray edition. Director Lucas was going for a documentary feel, and shooting in Techniscope was a good start. That widescreen process used less film and, thus, created more grain — one step up from 16mm, as is noted in this release’s outstanding making-of documentary carried over from the earlier DVD edition.
Extras: Beyond a picture-in-picture feature where Lucas comments on the action, Laurent Bouzereau’s 78-minute documentary is one of the best behind-the-scenes looks ever.
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Pale Flower

Criterion, Drama, $29.95 DVD, $39.95 Blu-ray, NR.
In Japanese with English subtitles.
Stars Ryu Okebe, Mariko Kaga.
1964. Director Masahiro Shinoda’s yakuza/gambling toughie is one enigmatically hip movie that keeps lingering in the mind. Flower has one of those endings that makes you reconsider everything that’s come before, which makes one want to find the time to take a second look.
Extras: In one of the bonus extras, an amazingly youthful-looking Shinoda (he turned 80 in March) says Toru Takemitsu’s feverish score was probably the most avant-garde music around anywhere at the time. Film scholar and Takemitsu expert Peter Grilli does a partial commentary for one of the other extras, and I like the accompanying essay by Chuck Stephens.
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Bhutto

First Run, Documentary, B.O. $0.1 million, $27.95 DVD, NR.
2010. Several reviewers have noted that this documentary about assassinated two-time Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was as much a history of her country since its 1947 partition as it was her personal story. Using a flood of old clips dating back to the regime of her father (Prime Minister and President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto), this portrait leaves little doubt about the degree to which trouble has followed Pakistan around in most of our lifetimes. If Bhutto doesn’t quite feel rounded, it is compelling all the way — and it would be even without the recent Pakistani intrigue in Osama Bin Laden’s dispatching.
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Marlowe

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Mystery, $19.95 DVD, ‘PG.’
Stars James Garner, Gayle Hunnicutt, Carroll O’Connor, Sharon Farrell, Bruce Lee.
1969. An obvious reason to catch this rather pedestrian L.A. mystery is that it is what it is: the only screen adaptation ever made out of Raymond Chandler’s 1949 novel The Little Sister. There are two fabulous altercations — one in an office, one outside of a skyscraper restaurant — between Marlowe (James Garner) and a whacked-out Asian, played by Bruce Lee, who works for one of the movie’s heavies. I don’t know which is more fun: to have seen these scenes cold at the time or to see them in full context, knowing what Lee’s career became.
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New on Disc: 'The Manchurian Candidate' Blu-ray and more …

The Manchurian Candidate (Blu-ray)

Fox/MGM, Thriller, $19.99 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, Laurence Harvey, James Gregory.
1962. The JFK assassination changed how everyone looked at everything political, and Candidate eventually came to seem so far ahead of its time that Hollywood did the obligatory lame remake in 2004. It had brainwashing for real; Frank Sinatra in a rare role with real dimension; an eventually Oscar-nominated Angela Lansbury; Leslie Parrish in that sexy Halloween outfit; and the nail-biting finale in which one party’s presidential nominee is targeted for sniper’s fire in Madison Square Garden. Even the original Candidate’s strange mix of tragedy and ticklish satire seems positively modern. It looks better on Blu-ray than it has before without looking particularly distinguished, but it must do something right because I noticed more than ever how much Sinatra, a career-best Laurence Harvey and so many of the male principals sweat.
Extras: Candidate has been issued for the home market many times, and its premiere on Blu-ray not unwelcomely recycles its interviews with director John Frankenheimer, screenwriter George Axelrod and Sinatra, all of whom are long gone.
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Such Good Friends

Olive, Drama, $24.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Dyan Cannon, James Coco, Jennifer O’Neill, Ken Howard.
1971. This adaptation of Lois Gould’s novel about a woman’s interior thoughts brought on by her husband’s coma is arguably the one later movie Otto Preminger directed that had significant merit. Friends’ black-comic premise starts with Julie’s (Dyan Cannon) art-director husband (Laurence Luckinbill) becoming a hugely successful children’s author committing adultery with everyone in sight (itself a not-bad gag). He then becomes one of those people too many of us have known: the person who goes into the hospital for a relatively benign procedure — and never comes out. This allows the script to get in some funny observational zingers about how the couple’s well-heeled Manhattan family and friends remain oblivious to what’s really important. As a satire of conspicuous consumption and what later became Yuppie-dom, the movie was ahead of its time.
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The Sign of the Cross

Universal, Drama, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Fredric March, Claudette Colbert, Charles Laughton, Elissa Landi.
1932. The Sign of the Cross is a prototypical Cecil B. DeMille religious spectacular set in ancient Rome. It previously was available in Universal’s five-title DeMille boxed set and now is available individually. It is very much worth seeing for the cast, the décor, Karl Struss’s shimmering Oscar-nominated photography and — most of all — its still incredibly bloodthirsty arena sequence, which doesn’t get lazy with that same old lions-eating-Christians stuff.
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Get Yourself a College Girl

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Comedy, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Mary Ann Mobley, Chad Everett, Joan O’Brien, Nancy Sinatra, Chris Noel.
1964. We begin with a student played by onetime Miss America Mary Ann Mobley, who does her part for coming sexual liberation here by almost getting bounced from something called Wyndham College for composing a randy tune on the subject. The Dave Clark Five and The Animals appear in what had been a big year for both groups but don’t sing any of their hits. Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto do perform their biggest — “The Girl from Ipanema” — but the staging is bereft of imagination. If it’s all getting too complicated, this Warner burn-on-demand title simply is what it is — which means that male lead Chad Everett is going to be characteristically unctuous, in a Midwest country club kind of way.
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New on Disc: 'Something Wild' and more …

Something Wild

Criterion, Comedy, $29.95 DVD, $39.95 Blu-ray, ‘R.’
Stars Jeff Daniels, Melanie Griffith, Ray Liotta.
1986. Assuming a certain degree of competence in terms of execution, some movies get a blistering shot out of the gate from their premise alone — E. Max Frye’s original screenplay for one of director Jonathan Demme’s most characteristic achievements easily among them. The screenplay by Frye is first-rate, but the movie is quintessential Demme. It loves and respects minorities; has dead-on casting instincts down to the smallest roles (including bits by directors John Sayles and John Waters); wallows positively in the byways of America; employs sizzling color schemes; and has a zesty rock soundtrack — among the tops of the decade — that embraces David Byrne, UB40, Oingo Boingo, Fine Young Cannibals and more. Criterion yet again delivers a print that precisely replicates how a movie looked at the time it was born. In fact, you can use the indoor shot of Melanie Griffith’s apartment — or the color upholstery design from her character’s first of many illegally procured cars — to calibrate your big-screen monitor.
Extras: Demme mentions in the Criterion interview — without naming names — just how much the experience of making 1984’s Swing Shift pained him and how Wild became the project that made him want to resume directing again. The set also includes a Frye interview and a booklet with a new essay by critic David Thompson.
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Shoeshine

Street 5/17
eOne, Drama, $29.98 DVD, NR.
In Italian with English subtitles.
Stars Franco Interlenghi, Rinaldo Smordoni.
1946. Historically notable as winner of the first foreign-language Oscar when the category wasn’t yet competitive but simply a one-shot honorary citation, director Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist landmark is also the film that Orson Welles pronounced the greatest he’d ever seen (while critic-of-the-day James Agee wasn’t far behind in praise). Today, some might argue that time has eroded some of the edge off its fastball — but only in comparison to other neorealist classics, including one or two De Sica made himself. Visually, this is a very striking release.
Extras: The new commentary by scholar Bert Cardullo is also a model of its kind — pointing out things we’ve missed that are right in front of us but trapped in our subconscious.
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Hurry Sundown

Street 5/17
Olive, Drama, $24.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Robert Reed, Robert Hooks, Michael Caine, John Phillip Law, Jim Backus, Jane Fonda, George Kennedy, Faye Dunaway, Diahann Carroll, Burgess Meredith.
1967. This nearly 2½-hour Otto Preminger Southern opus may have been the most critically panned high-profile Hollywood movie of the entire 1960s. Still, a lush Olive print and the film’s fine production design make this a reasonably diverting sit-through, especially whenever Burgess Meredith is on the screen.
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The Prizefighter and the Lady

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Myrna Loy, Max Baer, Primo Carnera, Jack Dempsey, Walter Huston, Otto Kruger.
1933. On the heels of hitting paydirt with swimmer Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan, MGM next cast boxer Max Baer in this boxing-backdropped romance. Before Baer ended up annihilating Primo Carnera for real the following June, the latter got cast as the reigning champ that challenger Baer must beat in the movie’s climax.
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New on Disc: 'Blow Out' and more …

Blow Out

Criterion, Thriller, $29.95 DVD, $39.95 Blu-ray, ‘R.’
Stars John Travolta, Nancy Allen, Dennis Franz, John Lithgow.
1981. Though I’ve never been too wild in the past about this thriller that remains revered by many, Criterion gives Brian De Palma’s Hitchcockian homage to Antonioni’s Blow-Up by far the fairest shake it’s gotten in my previous experience with it. This is a movie that’s about sound: John Travolta plays a soundman regularly working on movies so trashy that De Palma himself could have made them. The new Blu-ray’s soundtrack sounds as if it has been pumping some iron, and visually, this is just one more example of how Criterion can make a movie of 30 years’ vintage look great.
Extras: Thanks to Criterion, I now appreciate Blow Out’s technical virtuosity more than I ever have — though hardly enough to curtsy to one of Pauline Kael’s most famously unbridled reviews (the kind that made so many revere Andrew Sarris). Reprinted in the Criterion booklet along with critic Michael Sragow’s less breathy brief, it terms the film “great” and puts De Palma’s direction on a level with Robert Altman’s for McCabe and Mrs. Miller. The set also includes several new interviews with the filmmakers.
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Hail the Conquering Hero

Street 5/10
Universal, Comedy, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Eddie Bracken, Ella Raines, William Demarest, Raymond Walburn.
1944. Hail the Conquering Hero is the definitive 4-F movie. Eddie Bracken plays the son of fallen World War I Marine “Hinky Dinky” Truesmith — he has been mustered out of the Corps with chronic hay fever and is hiding out in a San Diego shipyard because he’s ashamed to face his mother, former girlfriend (Ella Raines) and the rest of his small town. This may be my favorite Preston Sturges movie due to the power of Bracken’s performance; its expert skewering of slippery politicians (a Sturges specialty); the best-ever showcase for William Demarest’s brand of gruffness this side of Sturges’ preceding The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek; and, for the time, some incredible satirizing of wartime hero worship (though not of the Marines).
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Violent Saturday

Available at ScreenArchives.com
Twilight Time, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Victor Mature, Richard Egan, Virginia Leith, Stephen McNally, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine.
1955. There’s something about seeing Lee Marvin use a nose inhaler in early CinemaScope that’s guaranteed to stay in the memory. The bank robber he plays joins J. Carrol Naish and the ever-malevolent Stephen McNally in a small-town heist, which is a pretext for exposing a whole slew of small-town peccadilloes that movies began to expose around the middle of that decade. Tight (91 minutes), slight and a decent time at the movies, Saturday is the second 20th Century Fox deep library title to be limited-released under the once-a-month banner of a new enterprise called Twilight Time. The movie lovers who run it are invading the Fox vaults, and their launch release The Kremlin Letter (John Huston, 1970) got a crisp transfer last month. The one here has excellent color values but isn’t anamorphically enhanced, apparently because the right elements weren’t available.
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I Love Melvin

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Musical, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Una Merkel, Richard
Anderson, Allyn Joslin.
1953. Singin’ in the Rain opened on April 11, 1952, and just one month later MGM had this most unpretentious Technicolor spin-off in production, showcasing two of that all-timer’s stars: Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds. He plays a Look magazine photographer, and she is a show biz hopeful who, in one Broadway gig, literally gets tossed around like a football in a pigskin-motifed musical number — a fairly amazing scene.
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New on Disc: 'Kes' and more …

Kes

Criterion, Drama, $29.95 DVD, $39.95 Blu-ray, ‘PG-13’ for language, nudity and some teen smoking.
Stars David Bradley, Freddie Fletcher, Lynne Perrie, Colin Welland.
1970. A pre-release festival favorite whose subsequent niche popularity even astonished its makers, director Ken Loach’s critical breakthrough (with longtime producer Tony Garnett) is, in trivial shorthand, a boy-and-his-falcon movie. This is among the few of its ilk with a social conscience. As story-central Billy, young David Bradley had a youthful face with no shortage of adult character lines. Finding a kestrel and nurturing it is Billy’s respite from a no-future future that’s been in store for him since birth by a rigged system fostered by bureaucrats and tough-guy teacher/administrators who’ve carved out their own fiefdoms.
Extras: David Bradley is interviewed here in his late 50s as part of an excellent 45-minute look-back that also features Loach and Garnett. The making-of documentary has a lot of interesting material on how Bradley and the crew worked with the falcons. Other extras include 1966’s Cathy Come Home, a Garnett-Loach TV film about homelessness that made major waves in England at the time; and a 1993 “South Bank” show on Loach.
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The Night of the Generals

Sony Pictures, Drama, $14.94 DVD, NR.
Stars Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, Tom Courtenay, Joanna Pettit.
1967. Part hefty epic, part camp and part showcase for an over-the-top lead performance that’s in keeping with the rest, Sam Spiegel’s typically un-frugal production was less popular with reviewers and audiences of the time than it is with at least some of today’s fanciers of World War II extravaganzas. Peter O’Toole gives a performance straight from the Nazi-sadist playbook as a general who likes to murder loose women. Investigating the 1942 death of a prostitute in occupied Warsaw is a major in German Intelligence (Omar Sharif), who’s obsessed by a case in which it’s established that the kinky perpetrator had to be one of three highest-ranking honchos (the other generals had alibis). The brass’s feathers get ruffled, but Sharif keeps pursuing matters. Though Generals really isn’t a very successful movie, it is one that can keep you going for an evening if it catches you in the right mood.
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A Thousand Clowns

Available via Amazon.com’s CreateSpace
MGM, Drama, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Jason Robards, Barbara Harris, Martin Balsam, Barry Gordon.
1965. Stagebound and patched together with the cinematic equivalent of chewing gum, the low-budget screen version of Herb Gardner’s play breaks most of the rules for constituting a movie that grabbed me from the duration, but sometimes a single performance can be infatuating. However, the performance in question is not Oscared Martin Balsam’s — which gets remarkably little screen time — but Jason Robards’ re-creation of his role from the stage original: as TV kids’-show writer Murray Burns.
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The Unfinished Dance

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Margaret O’Brien, Cyd Charisse, Danny Thomas, Karin Booth.
1947. Here’s some vivid color photography back-dropping the story of a ballet company where Swan Lake is part of the repertoire. But if the hook sounds familiar, we’re not talking Black Swan. Captured at the time when she was no longer tiny but not yet an adolescent, Margaret O’Brien plays a lonely child ballerina in a kids’ troupe packed with pre-pubescent hopefuls.
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New on Disc: 'The Ernie Kovacs Collection' and more …

The Ernie Kovacs Collection

Shout! Factory, Comedy, $69.97 six-DVD set, NR.
1951-62. The line from Ernie Kovacs to “Laugh-In” (which is one reason why that show’s producer George Schlatter appears on this boxed set’s extras) to Monty Python to “Saturday Night Live” to David Letterman to “Mystery Science Theater 3000” and right up to today is not exactly a crooked one. This is an uncommonly comprehensive view, basically unfiltered. We see Kovacs on local TV, on morning network shows, summer replacement shows and on the classic but not particularly highly rated ABC specials that he did at the end — just before his untimely 1962 death in an auto mishap.
Extras: The set includes superbly knowing and loving essays by David Kronke and Jonathan Lethem, a thorough episode annotation by curator Ben Model, recollections from friends and plenty of vintage videos.
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American Experience: Stonewall Uprising

Street 4/26
PBS, Documentary, $24.99 DVD, NR.
2010. Though the folkloric reaction to 1969’s famed NYPD’s Stonewall Inn bust has often been termed the Stonewall Riots, this 83-minute remembrance includes a lesson in semantics. As someone notes here, what happened on June 28 — and for an apparently indeterminate number of nights after — was, indeed, closer to an uprising. It was then that the modern-day gay movement launched — once gay customers in a Greenwich Village hole of a bar refused to disburse when the cops ordered them to do so. One disadvantage this documentary has is scant existence of any on-the-spot news footage of the event itself. As a result, some of the events by necessity have to be re-enacted. What the documentary does have is lots of interviewees, who include incident patrons, two on-the-scene Village Voice reporters (the paper was nearby) and even a participating cop who gets in this chronicle’s final words (strong ones they are, too).
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Stan Kenton: Artistry in Rhythm — Portrait of a Jazz Legend

JazzedMedia.com, Documentary, $14.99 DVD, NR.
2011. Not surprisingly and perhaps unavoidably, this is predominantly a talking-heads treatment. We see significant musical clips that span the ages. Interviewed are a couple ex-wives, though the marital chronology isn’t easy to follow. The fact that one former wife committed suicide and a son once got into hot water in an incident involving a rattlesnake and a mailbox — well, it’s indicative of a rather turbulent life. What you will not get here is any discussion of daughter Leslie Kenton’s recent book about the incest she suffered at the hands of a father she loved, though there are allusions in the documentary to his drinking, which eventually got out of hand. Appropriately, the focus here is on Kenton’s prolific output, and the best of it still gives great pleasure: Cuban Fire, Adventures in Jazz and a standout West Side Story album (of many) to name three.
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Not as a Stranger

Available via Amazon.com’s CreateSpace
MGM, Drama, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Olivia de Havilland, Robert Mitchum, Frank Sinatra, Gloria Grahame.
1955. The high-profile adaptation of Morton Thompson’s novel remains, whatever else it is or isn’t, a conversation piece on several levels. It was the movie version of the previous year’s best-selling piece of fiction, published after the author’s 1953 death; it marked the first time that famed producer Stanley Kramer ever directed; it put Robert Mitchum, Frank Sinatra and Lee Marvin in the same med-school class of heavy smokers — and at jarringly advanced ages; and it boasted five Oscar-winning actors in its line-up — some of them in unsuitable roles.
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New on Disc: 'Rabbit Hole' and more …

Rabbit Hole

Street 4/19
Lionsgate, Drama, B.O. $2.2 million, $29.95 DVD, $39.99 Blu-ray, ‘PG-13’ for mature thematic material, some drug use and language.
Stars Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Dianne Wiest, Tammy Blanchard, Miles Teller, Giancarlo Esposito, Sandra Oh.
2010. Just as this past December was wrapping up, two of the best movies in years about marriages in trouble opened 10 days apart: Blue Valentine and this adaptation of the David Lindsay-Abaire play that won a 2007 Tony. Each got its lead actress (respectively, Michelle Williams and Nicole Kidman) merited Oscar nominations. Rabbit Hole is a strong ensemble work with an especially good role for Kidman, who’s had a tough go of it recent years after a spate of indifferent, or at least indifferently received, pictures. The couple that Kidman and Aaron Eckhart play recently have lost their son, who ran into the street chasing his dog and got hit by teen who wasn’t driving recklessly. In a tight 90-minute rendering that never gives much indication that it was ever a play, we see how both parties (friends and relatives, too) react to the situation. Dianne Wiest plays Kidman’s mother, who keeps on trying to equate the loss of her own 30-year-old son to heroin with a little boy who was chasing a pet. The script (which Lindsay-Abaire wrote) never wavers too far without injecting some humor, which is something viewers should know if they’re thinking of rejecting this subject matter out of hand.
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The Explosive Generation

Available via Amazon.com’s CreateSpace
MGM, Drama, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars William Shatner, Patty McCormack, Lee Kinsolving, Billy Gray.
1961. “Bud” is bothered — or at least confused — by hormones. An almost grown-up Patty McCormack has graduated from The Bad Seed to the kind that, at least potentially, can leave you “with child” (as it used to be termed in Pearl Buck novels). And the high-school teacher who protects student rights when it comes to talking about sex is played by … Bill Shatner? Not to oversell the result, but in truth a drama that sounds as if it’s going to be pure exploitation along the lines of Teenage Doll or The Cool and the Crazy has to rank among the more prescient movies of its decade, or at least the early part of it. When the usual array of uptight parents try to put the clamps down on free expression here, their children organize a protest — just as this exact same generation would just a few years down the road. Generation goes a little soft at the end when the parents do the same, but the movie is fundamentally concerned about free speech. The school is full of familiar faces, even beyond McCormack’s. Billy Gray, who had recently wrapped up six seasons playing Bud on “Father Knows Best” is the car dealer’s son; wouldn’t it have been great seeing him ask TV dad Robert Young on that fabulous series for advice on the best brand of condoms?
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While the City Sleeps

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Drama, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, George Sanders, Vincent Price, John Barrymore Jr.
1956. Shrewdly marketed as the screen pursuit of a punk serial killer who’ll terrorize the entire Naked City if the New York Sentinel can trumpet his deeds enough, director Fritz Lang’s penultimate Hollywood feature actually is a sexually frank (for its day) look at old-school metropolitan journalism, especially in the after-hours. Take one look at Rhonda Fleming in a two-piece doing twist-and-turn exercises around the house in front of clueless husband Vincent Price (ill-coordinated shirt and shorts with dark socks). Even a 9-year-old would suspect that she’s getting naked in the city with someone else — and she is. Despite the large cast and keen use of widescreen throughout, this was a low-budget affair just as RKO and Lang’s Hollywood career were winding down in the same year — though Lang’s swan song (also with Andrews) would follow in three months. That was Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, which also is just out as a Warner on-demand release.
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Dogtooth (Blu-ray)

Kino Lorber, Drama, B.O. $0.1 million, $34.95 Blu-ray, NR.
In Greek with English subtitles.
Stars Christos Stergioglou, Michelle Valley, Hristos Passalis, Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Christine Anna Kalaitzidou.
2010. When Greece’s recent foreign-language Oscar nominee also turns out to be something John Waters calls (on the box) “by far the most original film I’ve seen in a long time,” you’ve got my attention.

Judging solely from personal experience, cinematic works this twisted and “out there” tend to be products of Spanish-speaking countries, and IMDb.com, at least, claims that Dogtooth is a remake of a 1973 obscurity from Mexico called Castle of Purity that would be interesting to see for contrast. The original likely doesn’t have director/co-writer Giorgos Lanthimos’ disorienting framing of actors — not always but sometimes — that had me wondering at first if the aspect ratio setting on either my TV or Blu-ray player was out of whack. It’s disorienting because oftentimes the composition is clean and even formally pristine — which goes along with the story’s physically spic-and-span home (well-tended grass and a pool as well) that houses a father, mother, two growing-up daughters, one growing-up son … and another son who’s imaginary and supposedly dwells over the backyard wall.

No one except for dad has much grasp on reality, and dad is no open-and-shut case himself. Not unlike the punks in A Clockwork Orange, the family speaks its own language — though in this case, they misapply words known to all instead of making them up whole cloth the way they did in the Anthony Burgess novel and classic Stanley Kubrick film version. Dad keeps everyone in a household prison (though mom seems to be a conspirator), but he himself goes to work at a factory he either owns or manages. His one family concession to the outside world comes courtesy of a female security guard at the plant. He regularly blindfolds her (no fair knowing where we live) and takes her home to provide sexual release for the son. The real one, that is.

If the movie is trying to say anything (and here, all bets are off), it seems to be that if a fissure or two starts to appear in the supremely rigid existence you’ve established for yourself, the symbolic result is likely to be something akin to the climax to the World War II drama The Dam Busters when those initial cracks in the targeted dam’s cement gives way to massive flooding of the Ruhr Valley. The imported outsider starts communicating with the sisters, even partaking in mutual licking regimens — but that’s another story. Soon, the siblings (and these are kid who are not “all right”) are have grown more rebellious than dad would like.

This is one of those movies where you either go with the flow or incessantly ask, “How soon will it be over?” Dad has engendered a familial fear of cats, teaching his offspring to bark like dogs. In one scene, the son graphically kills a housecat with a pair of garden shears, a passage guaranteed to jettison the PETA moviegoer demographic in about one second. There’s also a scene where dad plays an LP of "Fly Me to the Moon," complete with the familiar Count Basie/Quincy Jones arrangement. He tells everyone the featured singer (who isn’t Frank Sinatra but someone doing a fairly good imitation) is grandfather calling — which almost makes you wonder if there’ll be follow-ups from Uncle Dean, Uncle Joey and Uncle Sammy. But the movie has set up such weird ground rules that one is never sure whether we’re getting a bogus Frank because someone didn’t want to pay the music rights — or because filmmaker Lanthimos is trying to make some arcane point.

It takes a certain mindset to accept these hijinks, which evolve into something lower when the story takes some genuinely disturbing turns. As a result, it wasn’t too difficult to toss Dogtooth onto my mind’s “reject” pile — until the next day, when I found myself thinking about it more than expected. In other words, it’s one of those naggers. To me, the most interesting thing about it is the fact that same Oscar voters who could award best picture to a movie as conventional as The King’s Speech could also find a way to even consider this one for the foreign-language designation. This has to be the final nail in the supposition that the academy votes in a homogenized mindset.
 

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New on Disc: 'Mesrine,' 'Behind the Burly Q' and more …

Mesrine — Part 1: Killer Instinct, Part 2: Public Enemy #1

Music Box, Drama, B.O. Part 1 $0.6 million, B.O. Part 2 $0.3 million, $29.95 each DVD, $34.95 each Blu-ray, Part 1 ‘R’ for strong brutal violence, some sexual content and language, Part 2 ‘R’ for bloody brutal violence, a scene of sexuality, nudity and pervasive language.
Stars Vincent Cassel, Gerard Depardieu, Cecile De France, Ludivine Sagnier.
2010. The home release of France’s four-hour crime gangster saga has likely caught a bigger break than its subject gave many of his victims. In the interim between Mesrine’s two-part theatrical release and recent two-part launch (a month apart) on DVD and Blu-ray, lead Vincent Cassel got a lot of ink and exposure to mainstream moviegoers by appearing as the ballet maestro in Black Swan. Directed by Jean-Francois Richet, who did the not-bad 2005 remake of John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, this is a tough movie to gauge artistically, and I understand why reactions were somewhat polarized. Given a protagonist who at times expanded his operation into the United States and Canada as well — and broke out of jail several times and once broke back in to spring pals — it is inevitably episodic. On the other hand, it is no everyday achievement to fashion a movie of uncommon length that has very few lulls or at least no lulls of consequence. A lot of this is due to Cesar winner Cassel’s constant charisma.
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Behind the Burly Q

Street 4/12
First Run, Documentary, B.O. $0.02 million, $27.95 DVD, NR.
2010. On balance, the mostly aged former burlesque strippers that filmmaker Leslie Zemeckis interviews for this talking-heads remembrance claim to have had a jolly good time of it and speak of the now quaint old profession with fondness. A major high point is hearing Alan Alda reminisce about his long-ago backstage time as a “child of burlesque” because father Robert spent his early career working in the burly-q trade.
Extras: The DVD extras include a tribute to several performers who died during the documentary’s long production process. The extras also include a reunion party of many of the featured principals.
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The Mountain

Olive, Drama, $24.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Spencer Tracy, Robert Wagner, Claire Trevor, Anna Kashfi.
1956. One time, it actually happened: Paramount Pictures made a movie set in the Swiss Alps in which the mountain that figures so prominently in its plot (and, of course, title) looked nearly identical to the studio’s famous logo minus the surrounding stars. And they shot it in resplendent VistaVision for images that still are almost beyond belief. In truth, there are a lot of Blu-rays, especially of current movies, that aren’t up to the visual wonders that this standard DVD from Olive Films routinely boasts in every frame. But this is a movie that’s significantly more fun to talk about than sit through, not that the latter is any particular chore. But this was one very weird project. The story, fairly simple, has to do with an airliner crashing in the mountain as winter’s coming on and the difficulty of assembling a party to rescue the mail on board.
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Yolanda and the Thief

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Musical, $19.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Fred Astaire, Lucille Bremer, Frank Morgan, Mildred
Natwick, Mary Nash, Leon Ames.
1945. Yolanda is mostly exasperating to sit through, but you can’t dislodge its abject dreaminess from your brain. The Fred Astaire/Lucille Bremer “Coffee Time” number is one of my 20 favorite movie scenes ever.
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