Bunny Lake Is Missing (Twilight Time, Blu-ray) – In the late 1950s and early 1960s, no American director melded classic Hollywood style and cool modern European elegance better than producer/director Otto Preminger. His handsome films are celebrations of introspection and stylistic remove and his best work defined not by heroes and villains but complex, flawed, achingly sympathetic characters. On the surface, this 1965 mystery is no more than smartly done, intelligently written thriller but Preminger’s fierce cinematic intelligence guides a fluid camera that effortlessly tracks, glides, and reframes characters as they shift through scenes, shifting our perspective along the way.
Carol Lynley is an American single mother who has just moved to London with her brother (Keir Dullea) and her young daughter Bunny, who we never actually see before she suddenly goes missing. Laurence Olivier delivers one of his best performances as a police inspector full of blank smiles, putting on a mask of practiced civility while investigating the disappearance of a child that no one can remember seeing. Lynley is another of Preminger’s lithe, lovely heroines who finds herself isolated and alienated, a stranger in a culture that feels just slightly off (Noel Coward is particularly unsettling as a landlord with questionable motivations), while devoted brother Dullea supports her through the ordeal. While Lynley’s panic tips into paranoia and makes us question her grasp on reality—does Bunny even exist?—Dullea’s glazed cool and dazed smiles make him a little questionable as well. Like Olivier, Preminger conceals his feelings, wielding the camera like a microscope examining the layers of his characters while setting in motion with a choreographer’s grace.
Please note, however, that the prominent billing of the British rock group The Zombies refers only to a rather contrived appearance on a TV screen in the background of one shot and a song playing on a transistor radio in another. They make no actual appearance in the film as such, yet I can’t help but grudgingly respect Preminger’s purely commercial movie. He made films his way, but as his own producer, he was savvy enough to play the promoter.
It’s a gorgeous CinemaScope movie and Twilight Time does the film up nicely, with a strong transfer of a good-looking HD master from Columbia Pictures, a studio with a superb record of preserving, restoring, and making high-quality digital transfers of their catalog. It’s a reminder that black and white films offer a whole new dimension on good-quality Blu-ray releases, not just added sharpness and clarity but a greater depth of gray scale and shading.
The original Twilight Time model was to provide high-quality releases of films from studio vaults in limited edition runs with minimal supplements beyond an isolated score track and a booklet with an essay by house writer Julie Kirgo. Since their launch, however, they have started including featurettes and other supplements from previous DVD releases where possible, and providing original commentary tracks on select releases. This release offers commentary by film historian Lem Dobbs with in-house historians Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman (who also founded the label), a trio that has done more than a few commentary tracks together, and their ease gives the track an easy-going quality as they dig into the film and offer historical and critical perspective. Also includes three trailers.
John Frankenheimer earned his first major big screen success with Birdman of Alcatraz (Twilight Time, Blu-ray), his third theatrical feature and his second collaboration with producer/star Burt Lancaster (they would make five films together all told).
Lancaster delivers an angry, brooding performance as real life criminal Robert Stroud, a violent killer who developed into an internationally recognized authority on birds and their diseases while in solitary confinement. Based on the book by Thomas E. Gaddis, Frankenheimer creates a portrait of a withdrawn, anti-social prisoner who discovers his own potential after reluctantly rescuing a wounded sparrow from a storm and nursing it back to health. Lancaster’s quiet portrayal comes from his eyes and restrained body language and it earned him his second Oscar nomination. Co-stars Telly Savalas (as the talkative “neighbor” from the cell next door) and Thelma Ritter (as his controlling mother) were also nominated, but Frankenheimer’s sensitive direction draws equally fine performances from Neville Brand, playing against type as the prison guard who slowly befriends Stroud, and Karl Malden as the tough warden whose ideas of confinement and punishment prompted Stroud to follow-up his studies of birds with a treatise on prison reform. This somber, subdued tale offers no real happy ending, but presents a powerful portrait of one man’s efforts to earn back his dignity and respect in the worst of conditions.
Features commentary by film historians Julie Kirgo, Paul Seydor, and Nick Redman, and it makes a great companion piece to The Train, another Frankenheimer / Lancaster collaboration that Twilight Time released earlier this year.
Judgement at Nuremberg (Twilight Time, Blu-ray), Stanley Kramer’s star-studded drama set against the Nuremberg trials of German judges accused of war crimes in World War II, is one of his best films. The fictionalized account of the trials of Nazi war criminals, originally written by Abby Mann as a Playhouse 90 teleplay and expanded to three hours (he won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his efforts), follows the moral struggle of an American judge (Spencer Tracy) presiding over the trial of four German judges (among them Burt Lancaster) accused of “legalizing” Nazi atrocities, while the so-called autonomous voices of justice are pressured by the American government to be lenient. Oscar nominations went to Tracy as well as Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift, as haunted victims of Nazi injustice serving witness on the German judges, and Maximilian Schell, who plays Lancaster’s defense attorney and won the Academy Award for Best Actor. The cast also includes a touching performance by Marlene Dietrich as a proud but shattered woman coming to terms with her country’s shame while living in the physical and moral rubble left by the war, and memorable performances by Richard Widmark, and (in one of this earliest roles) William Shatner.
This release include three featurettes previously included on the earlier DVD release: the interview featurette “In Conversation with Abby Mann and Maximillian Schell,” “The Value of a Single Human Being,” which features screenwriter Abby Mann reading selections from his Judgment at Nuremberg script, and “A Tribute to Stanley Kramer.”
Flaming Star (Twilight Time, Blu-ray), a lean frontier drama about race, identity, loyalty, and the bonds of family, is one of Elvis Presley’s best films and it features his most impressive screen performance. In fact, it’s less an “Elvis film” than a western starring a surprisingly well cast young Presley as the mixed race son of a white rancher (John McIntire) and a Kiowa mother (Dolores Del Rio). His fraternal chemistry with Steve Forrest (playing his elder half-brother) is so understated it feels natural and director Don Siegel brings out his character through body language and action, letting his angry silences and physical reactions carry his performance and his character. For the fans, he greases his hair back and flips up his collar for a few scenes and takes his shirt off in the third act, but otherwise the persona is absorbed into his character—his one song is essentially a family sing-along—for a quietly effective performance. Features commentary by film historians Lem Dobbs and Nick Redman and the trailer.
All Twilight Time releases also feature their trademark isolated musical score and an eight-page booklet with an essay by Julie Kirgo. Limited to 3000 copies, available exclusively from Screen Archives and TCM.
Sands of Iwo Jima (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD) is the best war film that John Wayne made outside of John Ford’s masterpiece They Were Expendable. Made four years after the end of the war in 1949, it was the biggest picture that Allan Dwan, once a major director of big silent movie spectacles and handsome star vehicles, had made in decade, and it was a rare role for Wayne to show a darker side of his persona. Wayne never served in the war but on the big screen he became the icon of the patriotic soldier ready to sacrifice himself for his country, an irony that haunted the actor. Perhaps his anxiety helped push his performance, which earned him his first Academy Award nomination.
Wayne’s films for Republic, a former B-movie studio with aspirations to class and critical recognition, were generally the studio’s biggest productions through the 1940s—they even got John Ford to direct Wayne in a couple—but most of them cast Wayne in conventionally heroic roles. Sands of Iwo Jima, co-written by regular Wayne screenwriter and drinking buddy James Edward Grant, has a patriotic charge and a sentimental streak and the signature moment, of course, is the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima, the photograph that made the cover of Life magazine and became the iconic image of the United States Marine Corps in World War II.
In counterpoint is the grueling training in boot camp, the horror of combat (watch them endure the moans of a wounded soldier in no man’s land, left alive by the enemy to lure victims into their sights), and the seemingly tyrannical command of Wayne’s Sergeant Stryker, the epitome of the veteran Marine. He’s tough and pitiless when it comes to training his recruits and leading his men into battle and they despise what they see as his sadistic abuse, but of course that training is what ultimately keeps them alive and binds them as a fighting force. With the war over, Hollywood was free to present a more complex portrait of men in war and Wayne was a perfect vehicle for it. Audiences knew him as the uncomplicated hero so such shadings—like a drinking binge that leaves him an angry, somewhat self-pitying drunk—were unexpected. It reveals him as a vulnerable and damaged man who sacrificed almost everything for his service. John Agar, Richard Jaeckel, and Forrest Tucker are among the soldiers shaped by Wayne’s leadership.
The films was recently remastered from archival film elements for special Veteran’s Day theatrical showings in advance of the Blu-ray and DVD release. It’s not restored but the new edition brings out the detail from the archival elements, which look quite good. No supplements.
Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD) was Altman’s first theatrical feature after leaving Hollywood to direct plays in the aftermath of Popeye, a big-budget flop. Altman had directed a stage production of the play, written by Ed Graczyk, on Broadway with Sandy Dennis, Karen Black, and Cher in the leading roles, and he brought them to the screen adaptation, the first in what became a series of low-budget films based on stage plays. With a single set, a small cast, and inventive cinematic ingenuity that allowed him to slip back and forth in time without resorting to flashback clichés, he created a cinematic experience that respected the stage origins, carried by strong performances and a shadowy atmosphere that seems to preserve the action in a bubble of memory. The play itself feeds on clichés of stifled dreams and failed lives but Altman’s direction is exhilarating. Features a video interview with playwright and screenwriter Ed Graczyk, who isn’t shy about expressing his dissatisfaction with Altman’s interpretation of his work.
Calendar of upcoming releases on Blu-ray, DVD, Digital, and VOD