I’ve been remiss in my Twilight Time coverage. I have a great affection for this specialty outfit, which puts out five or six Blu-ray releases a month. It’s a different kind of model, most releases limited to 3000 copies, most (but not all) with commentary or some sort of supplements (most of those carried over from previous DVD releases), all with isolated score audio tracks and booklets with essays by Julie Kirgo.
In the scheme of the disc hierarchy, they are somewhere between Criterion and Kino Lorber Studio Classics, with fewer supplements than Criterion but unfailingly superb video and audio. They go the extra mile in making sure that everything they put out is of the highest quality, and ultimately that is the most important benchmark in a Blu-ray release.
Here are highlights from the past few months of Twilight Time releases.
House of Bamboo (Twilight Time, Blu-ray), Sam Fuller’s remake of the 1948 film noir The Street With No Name, is not based on his own screenplay (he only made a handful of films written by others) but he makes it his own while the script takes the film into whole new territory that transforms the tale and intensifies the conflict between friendship and betrayal. Set in Japan after World War II, where a crack gang of former GIs under the command of loyalty-driven Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan) execute heists with military precision, and shot in Technicolor and CinemaScope, it throws all of the usual noir stylistics into a vivid world of pachinko parlors, cherry blossoms, and the meeting of East and West in urban Tokyo. Robert Stack’s hard inexpressive exterior is perfectly employed by Fuller as Eddie Kenner, the undercover agent who betrays his own code of respect to trap the crime boss who killed his army buddy, Cameron Mitchell is the jealous “ichi-ban” replaced in Ryan’s hierarchy of trust and respect by Stack, and Shirley Yamaguchi is the widow who helps Stack maintain his cover. The finale in a Tokyo amusement park is amazing.
This was Fuller’s second film to be shot in color and CinemaScope and he makes the most of the opportunity, shooting much of the film on location and capturing the local color of 1955 Tokyo streets. While the location shots open up to a foreign world where our American characters are decidedly the alien elements of the landscape, the interiors are carefully composed to make the most of the character tensions, again with the Anglo actors set against Japanese backdrops both modern and traditional. Fuller loved the juxtaposition of such contrasting elements and complicates the contrast with the affinity that both Sandy and Eddie have for this adopted culture.
Features two different commentary tracks, one by film historians and film noir experts Alain Silver and James Ursini recorded for the original DVD release by Fox and a new track recorded by Twilight Time’s house film historians Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman, plus Fox Movietone News footage from the production (also carried over from the DVD) and the trailer.
As noted about, it features Twilight Time’s trademark isolated score track and Julie Kirgo writes the essay in the accompanying eight-page booklet. The run of this Blu-ray is, like all but select Twilight Time releases, limited to 3000 copies. The same goes for all the discs reviewed below, so I won’t be repeating this mantra with every review, though I will include all unique supplements to each disc.
One last thing: that is one beautiful cover.
Summer Lovers (Twilight Time, Blu-ray), the sexy 1982 tale of Americans in Greece learning to shed their inhibitions, is not your usual eighties sex romp. Written and directed by Randall Kleiser, riding high after Grease (1978) and The Blue Lagoon (1980), the film takes an adult look at love, sex, and modern romance in the uninhibited world of the Greek islands. Peter Gallagher and Daryl Hannah are Michael and Cathy, the American couple trying to rejuvenate their stalled romance with sun and sex—they have the good sense to avoid the American tourist hub and get a villa in a much more international neighborhood.
Within a week the initially inhibited couple is skinny-dipping with the Europeans, and not long after than Michael’s restless libido connects with a free-spirited French girl, Lina (Valérie Quennessen) and a one-night-stand unexpectedly becomes a ménage-a trois, with all three sharing a bed. Kleiser freely displays the unclothed bodies of his attractive cast and his scores of extras (more female than male nudity, to be sure, but he casts well-toned and tanned bodies throughout) but what’s interesting is his presentation of the emotional and physical intimacy of the couple. He’s a little ambivalent on the physical relationship between the women (I guess that was a sexual hang-up too far for an American studio film in 1982) but the body language and physical relationship suggests a connection beyond “just good friends” and at times Michael is more like a shared boy toy than an equal partner. Those nuances make the relationship much more interesting, and thankfully Kleiser resists falling back on conventional notions of morality as jealousy and possessiveness invades their equilibrium. The rest is a sunny, sexy romp through an endless summer of uninhibited intimacy, a travelogue for young adults looking to lose themselves in a decidedly continental approach to romance and intimacy.
Another gorgeous transfer from Twilight Time. While they are often at the mercy of the studios when it comes to digital masters, Kleiser is a friend of the Twilight Time founders and they made sure this was a crisp, clean, lush-looking disc. All the sun-kissed beauty of the sand and surf and ageless landscape of Greece, as well as the attractive bodies, comes through vividly. Features new commentary by filmmaker Randall Kleiser recorded for this release, the vintage EPK featurette “The Making of Summer Lovers,” screen tests, and the 1997 documentary “Basil Poledouris: His Life and Music,” on the film’s composer.
The Best of Everything (Twilight Time, Blu-ray) seems to me the epitome of the glamorous CinemaScope melodramas that 20th Century Fox made their specialty in the 1950s. Director Jean Negulesco was their house specialist—he made How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and Three Coins in the Fountain (1954)—and The Best of Everything (1959) is another variation on the theme of three women following their dreams. This one focuses on working girls in New York City, a variation of the shopgirl drama, with Hope Lange as the secretary with ambitions to a publishing career, Diane Baker as the romantic looking for love, and Suzy Parker as the older, wiser young woman who ducks out of her secretarial job for auditions. Lange is the star and carries the film ably but it’s Parker, a model with a brief screen career, who holds the screen. She lacks the skill of Lange and the energy of Baker but her poise and confidence and cool beauty draws all eyes. Next to all this, the film’s ostensible male lead, an editor played by Stephen Boyd (who is allowed to keep his British accent), is a bit of a sop: the most likable guy on screen but apparently passionless, like he’s ground up by the job and just going through the motions.
There’s plenty of grist for the melodrama mill in this busy story: romantic obsession, predatory men, premarital sex, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, suicide, and a shark tank of competitiveness climbing the corporate ladder (where Joan Crawford, in a small but central role, is the queen bee). Brian Aherne is a lecherous corporate president who makes a pass at every young thing in the office, Robert Evans is an utterly reprehensible playboy cad, and Louis Jourdan the continental director who gets tired of his possessive lover. But the real star is the elegant style. Negulesco designs as much as he directs the film, spotlighting the stylish dress and décor and giving it a handsome gloss while composing the CinemaScope frame with a strength that a lot of fifties directors lacked. I still prefer Negulesco’s noir films of the forties but this is marvelous stuff, an elegant soap opera that brings out the best of the 20th Century Fox house style.
Features commentary by the novel’s author Rona Jaffe and historian Sylvia Stoddard and Movietone News footage of the premiere, both carried over from the DVD release a decade ago.
The Night of the Generals (1967), a mix of murder mystery, war thriller, and morality play, is a great story in search of a great movie. This sprawling film, directed by Anatole Litvak and starring Peter O’Toole as the icily brutal German officer General Tanz, is not it, unfortunately. Tanz is one of the major suspects in the murder of a Polish prostitute, which matters to the occupying Germans only because she was also an informant. The investigating officer, Major Grau (Omar Sharif, not even attempting an accent), narrows the suspect pool down to three suspects: military hero Tanz, General von Seidlitz-Gabler (Charles Gray), a career man posted in Warsaw; and his associate General Kahlenberge (Donald Pleasence). It’s all quite poorly structured, like it was reworked in post-production, jumping from the war years to the 1960s, as witnesses are tracked down and interviewed long after the fact, and complicated by the added story of Corporal Hartmann (Tom Courtenay), a battlefield deserter who is awarded a medal for valor as a face-saving measure by the high command. O’Toole is rather miscast, called upon to play both implacable and excessive, and he walks through the film with rictus face and a twitchy demeanor. The plot works in the attempted assassination of Hitler, which feels like another movie shoved in the middle of the murder mystery. It is, however, a terrific-looking disc.
In The Young Lions (Twilight Time, Blu-ray), Marlon Brando is an idealistic Nazi officer disillusioned with the war and Hitler’s megalomania and shocked by the final solution, Montgomery Clift a Jewish private fighting racism in the ranks of the US Army, and Dean Martin a show-biz smoothy pulling strings to avoid front combat in this sprawling World War II drama adapted from the Irwin Shaw novel. Clift’s underdog private suggests his rebellious From Here to Eternity character, with a wrought up, wrapped up timidity that makes him a fidgety pressure cooker always about to blow, while Martin joked that “I just played myself. A likeable coward.” Odd to find an American war drama with such a sympathetic German soul (Clift accused Brando of turning his character into a “f—ing Nazi pacifist). The contrast between the almost saintly officer and his army’s “corruption” of his Nazi dream, and Brando’s intense, fascinating performance, make it one of the more compelling war films of the 1950s. Edward Dmytryk’s handsome direction avoids the spectacular war scenes of the rousing patriotic pictures of the war era to create a much darker drama marked by contradiction and complexity (not the least of which is the examination of prejudice in the American army).
Short takes:
Fat City (Twilight Time, Blu-ray), John Huston’s first masterpiece of the 1970s, is a tough, sad, uncompromising tale of scuffed souls in the slums of Stockton, CA. Stacy Keach is the boozy boxer trying for a comeback who takes amateur pugilist Jeff Bridges under his bruised wing after meeting him in a crummy gym. A clear-eyed look at the bleary, down-and-out dreams of survivors in a world of smoky bars and second-rate boxing arenas, this is a forgotten classic of the decade. Screenwriter Leonard Gardner adapted his own novel, and Huston surely drew from his own past as a young boxer. Susan Tyrrell earned an Oscar nomination as Keach’s alcoholic girlfriend. Features new commentary by film historian Nick Redman and screenwriter / historian Lem Dobbs.
Emperor of the North (Twilight Time, Blu-ray) stars Lee Marvin as the king of the hobos, a train-hopping drifter in the depth of the Depression who goes up against a sadistic train conductor (Ernest Borgnine), and Keith Carradine as his apprentice, a young kid learning the ropes. Robert Aldrich’s scuffed-knuckle drama is a mix of hard-scrabble adventure and scar tissue character piece. Features commentary by film historian Dana Polan, TV spots, and the trailer (carried over from the DVD).
Mississippi Mermaid (Twilight Time, Blu-ray), François Truffaut’s film of the Cornell Woolrich’s novel “Waltz Into Darkness,” combines Truffaut’s passion for Alfred Hitchcock movies and American crime pulp fiction. The story of a French Caribbean tobacco planter (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who takes a mail order bride and winds up with Catherine Deneuve, it’s an intimate con game that spirals into destructive romantic obsession. Call it his tribute to Hitch’s fascination and fears of overwhelming, irrational love. Twilight Time house historians Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman provide commentary.
Sally Field won an Oscar (“You like me! You really like me!”) for her performance in Places in the Heart (Twilight Time, Blu-ray) as a widowed mother on a small farm in the midst of the Great Depression who turns to a wandering sharecropper (Danny Glover) for help saving her cotton farm. Written and directed by Robert Benton (who won an Oscar for his screenplay), it’s a lovely little film shot in the muted colors of a period piece with a glowing warmth, and highlighted by marvelous performances. John Malkovitch received a Best Supporting Actor nomination in his feature debut as a blind boarder and Lindsay Crouse was also nominated as Field’s sister. Field joins Nick Redman for a new commentary track.
Real life siblings Jeff Bridges and Beau Bridges play The Fabulous Baker Boys (Twilight Time, Blu-ray), a dueling piano brother act who rejuvenate their stale nightclub act by bringing in a singer (Michelle Pfeiffer), who heats up the trio and falls for the younger of the Baker boys. Steven Kloves writes and directs and Dave Grusin provides the piano stylings. Kloves joins Twilight Time’s Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman for a new commentary track to complement commentary by cinematographer Michael Ballhaus recorded for an earlier DVD release, plus deleted scenes.
More recent Twilight Time releases:
At Close Range (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
10 To Midnight (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
Angel (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
The Little House (Chiisai Ouchi) (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
Absolute Beginners (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
State of Grace (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
A Month in the Country (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
The World of Henry Orient (Twilight Time, Blu-ray)
Calendar of upcoming releases on Blu-ray, DVD, Digital, and VOD