Miami Blues (Shout! Factory, Blu-ray) should have been the first film in funky crime movie franchise. It’s based on the first of four novels by modern hardboiled crime author Charles Willeford featuring Miami police detective Hoke Moseley; adapted and directed by George Armitage, who learned his trade making pictures for Roger Corman; and produced by Jonathan Demme, who brought in much of his regular production team, including cinematographer Tak Fujimoto and editor Craig McKay. Fred Ward is spot-on casting for Hoke, not so much a maverick as a slovenly oddball who isn’t all that concerned with procedure, but his character is played down in favor of the equally offbeat psychopath of a crook, a freshly-sprung career criminal who prefers to go by the name Junior. He’s played by Alec Baldwin in his first starring role, fresh off Demme’s Married to the Mob, and while I’m sorry that Ward’s role was eclipsed, it’s clear who had the star power in this film. Ward wears the role of Hoke like a rumpled suit pulled out from under a pile of weeks-old laundry. Baldwin, young and buff and with a spark of trouble in his eyes, inhabits Junior as a guy ready to follow his worst impulses at the first sideways glance, never jittery but constantly restless and overcharged.
The story is simple but never dull: Junior announces his arrival in Miami by (inadvertently) killing someone within minutes of landing, breaking the fingers of an airport Krishna and sending him into fatal shock. It sets Hoke on his trail; when Junior steals Hoke’s badge and gun and false teeth, it gets personal. Jennifer Jason Leigh co-stars as a guileless young hooker who Junior impulsively marries, fooling himself into setting up house in suburbia with the sweetly naïve and sincere lost girl. Armitage gets Willeford’s cracked black humor and slightly off-kilter universe and Demme is an appropriate midwife for the project, which mixes the energy and personality and color of Demme’s eighties film with Armitage’s ruthless, unsentimental sensibility. It should have been a hit and launched a franchise. Instead it launched Alec Baldwin.
The disc includes a featurette with new interviews with Alec Baldwin and Jennifer Jason Leigh reflecting on the film. It leans a little too much on film clips but it’s still interesting to hear these actors discuss the film and their early career.
Check out an interview with George Armitage at Film Comment here.
Breathless (1983) (Shout! Factory, Blu-ray) – I’m still not sure if it was an inspired or a terribly misguided idea to remake Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature, a French nouvelle vague classic of outlaw cinema in every sense of the word. Godard made his splash by defying conventions and announcing a fresh, energetic, new approach to telling stories on screen and a criminal anti-hero who revered American gangster icons and seduces an American girl. The story was less important than the style and attitude.
More than twenty years later, director Jim McBride and co-writer L.M. Kit Carson relocated the story from Paris to Los Angeles and swapped the nationalities of the characters: the two-bit thief is now a callow American (Richard Gere) who loves Jerry Lee Lewis and “The Silver Surfer” comic book and the girl (Valérie Kaprisky) a French exchange student at USC. He kills a cop (accidentally?) and tries to lure her into running off with him to Mexico, after he collects his share of a robbery, as the police close in on him. McBride and Carson try to find their own approach to the fugitive lovers on the run picture, updating it with oversaturated colors, a high-energy soundtrack of classic rock and contemporary punk rock songs, and lots of steamy sex and nudity. It never captures the zeitgeist of its era the way Godard’s original did and it’s in no way revolutionary or essential, but seeing it again now, more than 30 years after it was made and more than 50 years after Godard’s original, it is surprisingly entertaining and interesting on its own terms, a romantic reflection of its cinematic era of neon and music video aesthetics and hot, steamy erotic scenes. Gere is quite good as the narcissistic, emotionally immature, not-too-bright hood but Kaprisky struggles to make an impression beyond her beauty (and her willingness to get naked in scene after scene). Released over a decade ago on DVD, it’s been remastered for its Blu-ray debut.
Cooley High (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD) has been called the black American Graffiti. I can see the connection—high school kids, oldies soundtrack, best friends contemplating the future while getting in trouble in the present—but I see a lot more Mean Streets than harmless sixties nostalgia. Preach (Glynn Turman), a smart kid with failing grades and a passion for poetry, and Cochise (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs), the school basketball star with a college scholarship all but sewn up, are best friends in projects of 1964 Chicago. They spend their days cutting classes, picking up girls (or in Preach’s case, attempting said hook-ups), cruising the streets with questionable pals, and talking trash with high school buddies. English teacher Mr. Mason (Garrett Morris) knows that these boys have a chance and pushes Preach to make an effort and meet his potential. He’s a fascinating guy, trying to live up to some wise-guy ideal while watching his best friend Cochise dominate the popularity hit parade without seeming to make an effort.
Writer Eric Monte based the screenplay on his own experiences and director Michael Schultz made the film on location in Chicago with a largely local cast of non-professionals for the supporting roles around Turman (who was already a respected veteran of TV, movies, and stage) and Hilton-Jacobs (a newcomer about to make his name on Welcome Back Kotter). It’s episodic and has a rambling quality—these guys are basically marking time in high school—and a vivid sense of place and culture. This is Cabrini-Green. Crime and gang violence is rampant and few kids ever get out of the neighborhood. And though set in 1964, it doesn’t feel like a period piece apart from the soundtrack (the music rights, in fact, kept the film off of home video for years). It’s like things haven’t changed at all. Schultz, of course, went on to direct Car Wash, one of the most underrated portraits of seventies life and culture of its era.
Arlo Guthrie’s epic musical monologue “The Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” was a satirical anti-war folk anthem performed at coffee houses and clubs that became a best-selling recording and counterculture phenomenon when it was on LP in 1967. The 1969 film Alice’s Restaurant (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD), directed and co-written by Arthur Penn (fresh from Bonnie and Clyde), expands the events of Guthrie’s original performance piece into a loose, loving, bittersweet portrait of the counterculture in 1968 with Guthrie playing himself. The film follows the basic structure of the song—his Thanksgiving dinner with friends and commune leaders Alice and Ray (Pat Quinn and James Broderick), his arrest for littering by Officer William “Obie” Obanhein and the trial with Judge James Hannon (both playing themselves in the film), and reporting to the induction center after receiving his notice—but Penn plays them out like stops in a meandering road movie through the culture of the late 1960s. Unlike the original performance piece, the film uses the story to frame the unraveling of an ideal, a fragile sense of social freedom that gets confused with irresponsibility and rocked by possessiveness and jealousy. Guthrie is a marvelous performer but a limited actor and his awkward sweetness and modesty is hardly electric—the sharp, bubbling performances by professionals Quinn and Broderick serve that function for the dramatic backdrop—but his presence serves the film’s easy, intimate nature. Folk legend Peter Seeger also appears briefly as himself. It’s one the most interesting portraits of the sixties counterculture put on film, without the social clichés of most films of the era.
The film was released on DVD in 2001 with commentary by Arlo Guthrie, an edition that is long out of print. This is remastered for Blu-ray and DVD by Olive, but the commentary has not been carried over. This would have been a prime opportunity for Olive to make an exception on its no-frills releases and port that commentary over.
Stranger at my Door (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD) is one of the dozens of modest but sincere films made by William Whitney, who spent most of his career churning out B-movies and TV episodes and is best known today thanks to Quentin Tarantino, who “discovered” Whitney during a filmmaking sabbatical and championed him as one of his favorite directors. This 1956 western, produced for Republic (where Whitney directed dozens of films), stars Macdonald Carey as a frontier minister who dedicates himself to saving the soul of a young outlaw (Skip Homeier) hiding out in their homestead (neither his wife nor his young son are aware he’s trouble). To make the point that anyone can change, the minister buys a wild horse and Whitney makes his signature sequence—the wild “devil horse” gone crazy, attacking the humans within reach of his hooves—the action centerpiece of three scenes. This isn’t one of Whitney’s best movies—it’s a rather routine script with moments that strain logic—but he draws fine performances from all. Homeier is as good as he’s ever been as a dangerous outlaw who can be likable and even charming with ease and Whitney creates real erotic tension between his young gunman and the minister’s attractive (and much younger) wife (Patricia Medina) as he tries to seduce her away from the homestead with promises of a life of excitement and travel. Whitney’s innate goodness, a belief in an innate decency in the heart of his characters, gives this modest tale of redemption the integrity that made Tarantino such a fan.
What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD) is Blake Edwards’ return to the World War II service comedy. Seven years after Operation Petticoat, he turns to the infantry during the invasion of Sicily in 1943. James Coburn stars as the ranking officer in an exhausted unit with order to take a small but strategically vital village and Dick Shawn is the general’s aide given the company as his first field command. His inexperience and by-the-book approach does not prepare him for a village eager to surrender, but only after they hold their annual wine festival. Coburn is the savvy combat veteran and wily advisor who negotiates the détente, but after both armies get so drunk they sleep through the planned surrender, the ensuing confusion attracts the attention of both American and German forces. Blake Edwards, who hatched the complicated plot (scripted by William Peter Blatty), favors broad comic performances and slapstick gags (many of them revolving around drunken antics) and manages to play a counter-offensive against a Nazi division as a con-game comedy. Harry Morgan has a supporting role as an officer who gets loses his mind as he loses his way in a labyrinth of underground tunnels. Though it is in questionable taste, Edwards’ knack for choreographing physical gags and big comic set pieces makes it funny. Minor but funny.
Class of 1984 (Scream Factory, Blu-ray) – Made in 1982, this exploitation picture updates the fears of high school violence that crop up every generation to the eighties, where poverty and inner city crime turned urban schools into battlegrounds. Perry King stars as a the new teacher in a school where students pass through metal detectors manned by armed security guards and gangs go to war over the drug trade, and Timothy Van Patten is the hyper-intense gangleader and piano prodigy who rebels against his coddled upper-middle class upbringing by playing the brutal, bullying nihilist. “Life… is pain. Pain… is everything. You… you will learn!” he threatens the earnest teacher, growling the lines like a madman from a 1940s horror movie, and he turns his clash of wills with the teacher into a vendetta that ends with raping the teacher’s pregnant wife and a fight to the death in the school at night. It’s like Blackboard Jungle by way of The Warriors, with the high school hoodlums dressed in a confused mix of punk, new wave, neo-Nazi, and disco peacock fashions, as if the filmmakers wanted to represent all of the recognizable social youth identities of the time. It’s more interesting as a time capsule, a slice of early eighties exploitation cinema turning social fears into entertainment, than as a serious piece of filmmaking. Its cult movie status is based largely on the cast and the outsized portrait of eighties rebellion. Roddy McDowall co-stars as a veteran biology teacher driven to violence after the animals in his classroom are slaughtered and Michael J. Fox has one of his earliest roles as a good-natured music student. The theme song is by Alice Cooper.
Shout! Factory produces three new interview featurettes for this release: “History Repeats Itself” with director Mark Lester and composer Lalo Schifrin (21 minutes), “The Girls Next Door” with actresses Lisa Langlois and Erin Noble (16 minutes), and the long career-spanning interview “Do What You Love” with actor Perry King (over 45 minutes). Carried over from the earlier DVD release is commentary Lester and the 35-minute featurette “Blood and Blackboards.”
More notable recent releases:
Hollywood Shuffle (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD), directed by Robert Townsend, who developed the film—a satire of Hollywood stereotypes of black roles in the movies—to give him in part to give him a decent role. It launched his career as a filmmaker and a producer.
Little Man Tate (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD) is the directorial debut of Jodie Foster, who also plays the working class single mom of a seven year old genius son (Adam Hann Byrd), who is befriended by a teacher of gifted children (Dianne Wiest) and torn between the two, radically different women in his life. It’s a sweet, small little character piece.
Lord of the Flies (1990) (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD) is the second adaptation of William Golding’s classic novel, this one shifted to a class of military school cadets who crash land on an uninhabited Pacific island. Balthazar Getty and James Badge Dale got their starts here.
The Shanghai Story (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD) is a 1954 cold war thriller with noirish edges, starring Edmond O’Brien a physician in Communist China and Ruth Roman as an icy society woman who may be an informant. Frank Lloyd directs for Republic Pictures.
The Beat Generation (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD) is another youthsploitation picture from producer Albert Zugsmith, this one set in the “beatnik” culture, which provides the backdrop for a crime drama starring Steve Cochran as cop on the trail of a serial rapist (Ray Danton). Mamie Van Doren co-stars (of course she does) and Louis Armstrong makes a musical appearance with his All-Stars.
Calendar of upcoming releases on Blu-ray, DVD, Digital, and VOD
https://qgp.ykq.mybluehost.me/cinephiled/2013/11/12/coming-soon-blu-ray-dvd-digital/