Watching Brief; Newman’s Own… October 12, 2008
Posted by John Hodson in : Film & DVD Reviews, Watching Brief , add a commentLAZY, LAZY, LAZY JOHN. I sit in front of my computer screen, with all the best intentions and staring VERY hard indeed, meaning to post, promising myself. Honest injun I do. But, well, stuff - ya know; ’stuff’ - just gets in the way. How about a series (providing I can extract digit - okay; how about ’occasional’ series?) of mini-reviews describing what I’ve been viewing on DVD recently? Stuff (that other stuff won’t get in the way of) that doesn’t require too much effort, yet keeps my internet self out of intensive care and merely in rehab? Stuff like this in fact. Sounds like a plan…
In no particular order, ten from Watching Brief…
The Verdict (1982; R1 DVD); big beasts James Mason and Paul Newman slug it out for acting honours in Sidney Lumet’s cracking courtroom drama. It’s a film, scripted by David Mamet, that naturally loves language; Lumet lets the camera linger 
lovingly on Newman’s voluble, electric, silences, but it’s Mamet’s magnificent dialogue that ups the voltage. Newman’s panic stricken scene where he realises that he is absolutely, totally and irrevocably screwed is a master class of screen acting. Fantastic. This was Fox’s first attempt at a DVD transfer of The Verdict with decent extra features, and while it’s acceptable, it has apparently since been bettered.
All or Nothing (2002; R2 DVD); Mike Leigh’s tale of a London taxi driver, his dysfunctional family and life on a sink estate showing that it’s grim dahn sarf. Typically hypnotic, with the ever brilliant Tim Spall in the lead, and a host of Leigh’s stock company in ‘blink and you’ll miss ‘em’ roles. The two hours plus running time flies by, but the unsatisfying conclusion appears oddly rushed and against all expectations. Not first rank Leigh, but even then better than most. Nice transfer from Pathé; I have yet to listen to Leigh’s commentary, but, if past efforts are any measure, it’s bound to be fascinating.
No Country For Old Men (2007; Region Free BD); The Coens at the top of their game, with all the visual and verbal pyrotechnics that marks the brothers very best work. Essentially a chase film, it begs questions that most men of a certain age must ask themselves about fate and chance and our place in a dead eyed world that regards us without pity or sentiment. Ostensibly the narrative follows good (Tommy Lee Jones) who chases evil (the wonderful Javier Bardem), as evil chases Josh Brolin’s suddenly cash rich Llwellyn Moss. Moss, with $2m in white hot drugs money under his arm, stands in a nether world between the two; mere happenstance led him to that case crammed with crisp $100 bills, the moment he picked it up, Moss put it all on the line. The whole bundle. Everything.
Jones, heading a fine cast, proves himself, once again, one of the finest screen actors working today, and the brothers Coen, well, they have nothing to prove really. But prove it they do.
My first BD viewing; yes, I know what I wrote a few posts back, but I was doomed the moment I saw clips of How The West Was Won in Smilebox. Damn you George Feltenstein…
Paramount’s Blu-ray presentation of No Country For Old Men is impeccable, or at least, if it’s not, I cannot see how it can get any better with a lossless audio track that’s as impressive as the visuals are eye-wateringly sharp. Accompanying featurettes pay handsome homage to the Coens, and quite rightly so.
Macbeth (1948; R2 DVD); Welles version of The Scottish Play famously bombed on it’s premiere (apparently Stateside audiences had problems with the accents) 
and it wasn’t until relatively recent years that the original version, as premiered, surfaced once more. Welles monkeys around with the Bard a little (who hasn’t?), shuffling characters, lines even whole speeches, to cram the text into 107 minutes. It was a play of which he was intensely intimate, having triumphed with it on stage for over a decade; the result is a work incredibly imaginative, accessible and polished, yet supremely cinematic. While the whole defies the budget and speed of shooting (21 days) some of the imagery is typically, and mind bogglingly, breath-taking, as Welles homicidal and psychotic Thane bestrides a brutal, alien landscape.
The Mercury Theater’s actor manager long suffered under the burden of being dubbed ‘genius’; there is no other word, frankly.
Second Sight’s transfer starts off a little shakily, but gets significantly better after the first 20 minutes or so, is available cheaply and well worth adding to your collection.
The Spanish Gardener (1956; R2 DVD); Dirk Bogarde reunited with his young Scots co-star Jon Whiteley from Charles Crichton’s Hunted four years earlier, and as cracking as that film was, Philip Leacock’s The Spanish Gardener is pisspoor. Bogarde was never too comfortable playing workin’ clarrrss fugs (the reasons explained, to some degree, in his recently published letters), but he just gets away with it in Hunted. Here, he deals with impersonating Jose, the eponymous gardener, by the simple expedient of blessing him with the accent of a contemporary BBC newsreader (World Service), and the fashion sense, oddly, of not a horny handed son of toil but a fast rising, louche, British act-or…
The boy’s Scottish accent is explained away by the fact his mother lives north of the border, while father Michael Horden, whose received English has impinged on the boy not one jot, grumps around being a royal pain in the arse, painfully arrogant and keeping both the child and Johnny Foreigner firmly in his place. It really is tedious, inconsequential fluff.
Optimum’s transfer, part of the generally very good Dirk Bogarde; Screen Icon Collection, is merely okay, the colours are a little faded, and the print is dirty and scratched. But the real disappointment is that it’s a VistaVision film, which should look much better, and is presented not only full-frame, but, I suspect, cropped heavily on both sides (and thus not even open-matte).
The Appaloosa (1966; R1 DVD); What seems vibrant, imaginative and in keeping with the whole in the stylish The Ipcress File (down to Peter Hunt’s superb editing or am I being unkind?), gets plain bloody irritating during Sidney J. Furie’s Mexican western. I lost count of the number of over the shoulder (hat, rump, gun, you name it…) shots, and every nook and cranny is used as a frame. It’s almost a parody of a Furie film.
As each shot is reshot, relit and come at again from every conceivable (and inconceivable) angle, I empathised more and more with lead Marlon Brando. His patience with Furie snapped early on, to the point where he refused to acknowledge his director, preferring to pointedly read a book on set from the moment Furie said ‘Cut’ until he begged his moody star into ‘Action’ once again.
Pretty in parts, but fer cripes sake Sid, keep the bloody camera still. Part of Universal’s Marlon Brando Collection, the transfer, as per most recent efforts from the studio, is typically excellent.
Brothers In Law (1957; R2 DVD); There’s something uniquely comforting about a Boulting Brothers comedy. Set in time like a mosquito in amber, they have a reassuring niceness, and a sense of culture that’s only a short, slightly more vulgar, step away from Ealing’s England. It is, as we know, a country that never really existed but we wish with all our hearts that it did. Brothers In Law features a wonderful cast from the Boulting’s stock company; it doesn’t glitter as, say, the more acerbic I’m Alright Jack, but it’s amiable enough. Ian Carmichael plays yet another hapless lead (nobody did it better), and any film with Miles Malleson in the castlist is usually the guarantee of a pretty good time. Later to become both a hit radio and TV series with Richard Briers as the bumbling junior barrister.
Optimum’s DVD transfer, part of their Terry-Thomas Collection, is a little shaky, and doesn’t take too kindly to being zoomed to 1.85:1 (which looks a little better than 1.66:1, but either will do) from open-matte, but it’s watchable. It’s hardly a Terry-Thomas film by the way; the Great Gap plays the junior part of, believe it or not, a Cock-er-nee wide boy.
Othello (1955; R2 DVD); Or to give it it’s full title; The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice. As reviled as Olivier’s Moor is in some quarters these days, Welles portrayal is considered as one of his finest achievements. Having said that, it may be slightly heretical to say I preferred his Macbeth (see above), but from that bravura opening shot of the magisterial landscape that is Welles Big Giant Head to the final silhouetted funeral procession (which forms both the beginning and end of the film), there’s much to admire. The legendary Micheál MacLiammóir, revered by both Welles and Ford (there; I’ve shoehorned in my mandatory reference), is also impressive; his Iago is truly loathsome, so much so, one wonder’s what the Moor of Venice saw in him to keep such a vile creature so close to his bosom in the first place. Spare a thought for poor old Robert Coote’s Roderigo, for reasons best known to the director, revoiced by Welles himself.
Second Sight trumpets that this is the ‘restored’ version, and it’s not bad, though technology has moved on so much since it was cleaned up that today’s digital do-dahs would no doubt produce an end product far better. It is sometimes excellent, sometimes not, but part of the restoration included re-recording the music soundtrack…and in full, squeaky clean 5.1 surround it simply sets my teeth on edge, like a wristwatch seen on an extra, and permanently in shot. I would love it if someone of the stature of, say, Criterion got their hands on Welles Shakespearian forays, particularly Chimes at Midnight. We can but dream.
Winter Kills (1979; R1 DVD); William Richert’s political satire comes on like ‘Monty Python’s The Parallax View’, played with an almost dead straight face by a stellar cast (Jeff Bridges, Richard Boone, Anthony Perkins, Brad Dexter, Eli Wallach and John Huston in bright red under-trollies…). An off-kilter take on the Kennedy assassination, it has a nightmare quality - the all too fleeting cameos from the likes of Toshirô Mifune, Ralph Meeker, Dorothy Malone and Sterling Hayden only only serve to heighten this dream-like atmosphere - with some genuinely bizarre laugh out loud moments; from Richard Condon’s book, plus added dollops of Lewis Carroll.
Anchor Bay’s R1 transfer is very nice indeed, and is stacked with some genuinely insightful extra features rather than the usual fluff. The documentary Who Killed Winter Kills? adds to the production’s mythos, recounting the trials and tribulations during filming, the various breaks while everyone turned out their pockets and coppered up, and how one of the backers was bumped off by impatient dealers for failing to pay his drugs bill.
Cool Hand Luke (1967; Region Free BD); In The Observer, Sam Mendes told a story of how, while he was directing Road to Perdition, he saw the late Conrad Hall in floods of tears as he was filming a close up of Paul Newman. Mendes asked what was wrong, and Hall, who also worked as cinematographer on Cool Hand Luke, replied, great droplets running down his cheeks: “He was so beautiful.”
Director Stuart Rosenberg decides that the tale of this ‘natural born world shaker’ parallels the Christ story, thus we have thinly veiled representations of God (Strother Martin’s Old Testament prison warden, clad in white), the Devil who is the ‘Walkin’ Man’ (he’s in black, natch), Pharisees (the guards) and Apostles (the chain gang). And just in case you missed it, Rosenberg even captures Newman in a pose of crucifixion. Endlessly re-watchable and entertaining, 
God bless the Academy for giving George Kennedy his thoroughly deserved Oscar.
And yes, Newman was damned beautiful.
Another sumptuous Hi-Definition presentation, with an interesting featurette that set me to worrying as all the extant principals were interviewed save one, though in his absence, everyone paid fulsome tribute to their star. Turns out I was right to fret; a couple of days after my viewing, Paul Newman was dead. God (I care not which one) bless him too.