There are few no lost masterpieces in Forgotten Noir Vol. 13 (VCI), the latest installment in the DVD series from VCI featuring orphaned crime films from the forties and fifties, and it’s a stretch to even call the films in this double feature “film noir,” but they are intriguing finds. Eye Witness (1950) is a moderately classy and somewhat sluggish murder mystery that has no real film noir credentials. Robert Montgomery directs and stars as a smart-talking American lawyer turned amateur detective in a rural British village, where his Yankee savvy and urban bluntness collides with British restraint and manners. It does have fun with the slang barrier, however, which recalls a classic quote about the American-British relationship: “Two great countries separated by a common language.” Longtime Hitchcock collaborator Joan Harrison produces and you can spot a young Stanley Baker in a bit part as a policeman on the witness stand. The disc is mastered from the “uncut British version” and features the British title on the opening credits: Your Witness.

Breakdown (1952), the sole screen effort by stage director Edmond Angelo, is a low budget and very American quasi-noir boxing drama set against a culture of political corruption and the brutal arena where young boxers are destroyed by greedy managers. The charismatically anemic William Bishop is a hot young boxer sprung from prison by a shady ward boss (Sheldon Leonard, who also narrates) to help out his kid brother, an aspiring boxing manager (Wally Cassell), only to be pressured into fighting the champ in a match he isn’t ready for. Though running a brief 76 minutes and shot on the cheap, it’s more of a low budget indie than an actual B movie. There isn’t much style to this stage adaptation but it moves along at a good clip and leaves more casualties than you might expect. The print quality is unexceptional but fine for both, with a softness to the image, minor print damage and hiss on the soundtracks.

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Mattel just announced a whole new retro-line in their Barbie doll line: the cast of Mad Men. Not all of them, just a few favorite fashion icons from the Sterling-Cooper offices: creative director Don Draper; his wife Betty Draper; Sterling Cooper partner Roger Sterling; and bombshell office manager Joan Holloway.

Design your own Mad Men adventures with these retro action figures

Yeah, they’re a little creepy – Roger apparently got a facelift in the transition, Don is reduced to a blank blandness and Betty is generic Barbie with a sixties flourish. But at least Joan doll suggests the bombshell original, even if she doesn’t look much like her.

My Mad Men self portrait

The set, priced at $74.95, will be available on March 23 at BarbieCollector.com, amctv.com and select retailers (including, one hopes, at Corky St. Claire’s memorabilia store, where the Mad Men can have dinner with Andre in Corky’s brand new production). Wet bar not included, sadly. I’d love to see a selection of cocktail glasses as accessories.

More details at the New York Times here.

Me, I’ll just stick with my Mad Men portrait, courtesy of MadMenYourself at AMC.

Everybody should have one.

Heck, everybody should be one.

It’s Oscar week DVD releases and this batch includes one film that went home with two statues and an honorable runner-up that went home empty handed and deserved better. But, to quote an Oscar winner (albeit in a radically different context), “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.” (That mantra is how I watch the Oscars without getting aggravated.)

George Clooney: Untethered

Precious came away with two wins but Up In The Air (Paramount) is, in my opinion, the superior film (it is certainly the more subtle and nuanced film) and should have taken the Adapted Screenplay award. It’s also a refreshingly mature movie about grown-up characters and serious issues, handled with a light touch with a depth of character and great intelligence behind it. George Clooney stars as a 21^st century traveling man who has trimmed his existence down to what can be packed into carry-on luggage and turned business class seating and airport lounges into his comfort zone. He’s spent so much passing through life that he treats relationships like layovers: a brief, impermanent stop on a never-ending journey. Which makes it easier to do his job: he’s the man that companies bring to fire employees that they don’t want to face themselves, and he’s just been assigned to show the ropes to an ambitious young professional (Anna Kendrick) fresh from business school who finds that the human equation can be a tricky factor in putting theory into practice.

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Think of the lighthearted eighties spy series Scarecrow & Mrs. King: The Complete First Season (Warner) as a Hitchcock lark of an American innocent caught up in the machinations of Cold War shenanigans, all relocated to the eighties-era suburbia of network TV. At least that’s what the pilot episode aspires to. Dashing American agent Lee Stetson (Bruce Boxleitner), aka Scarecrow, on the run from deadly foreign agents drops a package in the hands of Amanda King (Kate Jackson). Suddenly this divorced mother of two and busy soccer mom in the suburbs of Washington D.C. is thrust into the world of international espionage and Stetson’s mission gets hopelessly tangled with this civilian’s life.

Bruce Boxleitner and Kate Jackson

I can just hear the pitch: He’s a slick playboy, she’s the mom next door. He’s charming and worldly, she’s chatty and practical. She dotes on him and, despite himself, he becomes quite fond of her. Especially since his boss decides she’s just the stabilizing influence this risk-taking solo agent needs and drafts her help as a freelance operative whenever they need believable cover in “the real world.” Which, it turns out, is practically every week. Meanwhile she keeps her double life a secret from her mother (Beverly Garland, forever trying to get her remarried), her grade-school sons and her (unseen) dates. It’s hard to call the growing affection between them as romantic tension, but there is a slow build and couple of near-kisses (always interrupted by the timely arrival of a suspect or a world-shaking crisis) to string the viewers along to the next season of their very low-key flirtation.

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Turner Classic Movies celebrates the 100th birthday of Akira Kurosawa with a month-long retrospective of the director’s work. Every Tuesday in March features an evening of Kurosawa films. I wrote on a couple for the website,  beginning with The Idiot (aka Hakuchi) (1951), his adaptation of the Dostoyevsky novel.

Setsuko Hara and Masayuki Mori speak no evil in The Idiot

“This story tells the destruction of a pure soul by a faithless world.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky was one of Akira Kurosawa’s favorite novelists and a great influence on the director; he had long wanted to make his novel The Idiot into a film. After completing Rashomon (1950), he finally embarked on his passion project, which he transposed from 19th century Russia to a contemporary Japanese setting. Where Kurosawa took great liberties in adapting subsequent western works into Japanese contexts, from Shakespeare (Throne of Blood, 1957, and Ran, 1985) to Maxim Gorky (The Lower Depths, 1957) to Ed McBain (High and Low, 1963), here he remained almost totally faithful to the original novel.

Read the complete piece on the TCM website here. The film plays Tuesday, March 9, on TCM, and is available on DVD in a box set from Criterion’s Eclipse line.

One of my favorite films of 2009, Where the Wild Things Are (Warner) is Spike Jonze’s adaptation of/feature-length tribute to the Maurice Sendak picture book, expanded and reimagined in the spirit of the feelings that drives that story. Jonze and his screenwriting partner, Dave Eggers, preserve the imagination and the primal emotions of Sendak while grounding his preadolescent hero in a palpably real suburban world and then transports him to a landscape of craggy coasts and primal forests and sand dunes that is fantastical and primitive: the island of the wild things populated by a tribe of hulking yet childlike monsters equal parts mythological creature and demented stuffed animal. Call it an art film for kids or a fantasy for the child within, but it is unique and beautiful and as honest a tale of being a child as you’ll find on screen, with all of the joy of imagination and anxiety of childhood grounded in the imagery and the landscapes of a tyke’s mind. My feature review of the film is here.

A reflective moment for wild things

The DVD features four behind-the-scenes featurettes by Lance Bangs. Originally shown as webisodes, these pieces each have their own integrity as snapshots of an element of the production or profiles of collaborators and are full of personality and person expression in addition to providing a peak behind the scenes. Exclusive to the Blu-ray edition are the original live-action adaptation of Sendak’s Higgelty Piggelty Pop! or There Must Be More to Life (a fantastic live action/animated storybook creation brought to life with marvelous costumes, wonderful puppets, stop-motion figures and the voice of Meryl Streep), the “HBO First Look: Where the Wild Things Are” making-of featurette and four more webisode shorts.

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Hayao Miyazaki is one of Japan’s living treasures, a beloved filmmaker whose animated films number among the most beautiful and most enchanting productions ever drawn by hand. In this day of CGI productions, the aging artists still personally draws his key frames and defining characters, with a love and craft that comes through every frame. They may seem old fashioned and perhaps too sweet for American audiences—his films, while loved by many, have never found the huge audiences that flock to the more knowing and culturally savvy Pixar films and Shrek sequels—but the lovely fables, epic adventures, ecologically-minded dramas and modern fairy tales are all treasures.

Ponyo: Below the waves

His most recent film, Ponyo (Disney), is released this week by Disney, which—despite the great voice line-up of their English language adaptations—treats his films more like exotic imports than mainstream movies. Part Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, part ecological fable and part children’s fantasy come to life, this gentle storybook film is a simple, sweet tale animated with a delicacy unique to animated features. Ponyo is a water sprite, a curious undersea creature and daughter of the sea gods who gets swept to the shore, trapped in the pollution of the human world and rescued by a human boy, with whom she falls in love. This isn’t the romantic type of love of Disney’s The Little Mermaid but the unconditional affection of young kids and she takes human form to join him on land, which upsets the balance of nature so carefully kept in check by her wizard father (voice of Liam Neeson) and elemental mother (Cate Blanchett).

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Kurt Russell is the King in Elvis (1979) (Shout! Factory), John Carpenter’s 1979 TV movie, which charts the rise of Elvis Presley from Memphis rockabilly phenomenon to rock and roll superstar to his phoenix-like comeback as a Vegas showman, but keeps the focus on the man behind the iconic image. Russell’s effortless impression captures the voice and cadence and physicality of Elvis without tipping into impersonation. He delivers the unbridled energy and musical passion that the young Elvis unleashed in every performance while allowing us to see then man in the bubble offstage, trapped by the very success that has made his fame and fortune. Carpenter, meanwhile, puts the dramatic focus on the relationships and tricky social dynamic with the male friends who became Elvis support group and entourage. It’s the first collaboration between Carpenter and Russell and it remains the most perceptive of Elvis biopics.

Kurt Russell is Elvis - thank you very much

Elvis impersonator Ronnie McDowell provides the singing voice and Shelley Winters, Pat Hingle and Joe Mantegna co-star. Trivia note: the film is written and produced by Anthony Lawrence, who earlier wrote three of the silliest of Elvis musicals back in the sixties. This is the DVD debut of this superb made-for TV production and the first time that the complete 170-minute production that has been available in any form for decades. Includes the featurette “Bringing A Legend To Life” featuring archival interviews with Kurt Russell and John Carpenter, commentary by vocalist Ronnie McDowell and author Edie Hand (who co-authored a handful of Elvis recipe books) and rare performance clips from “American Bandstand” among the supplements.

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Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven plays on Monday, March 1 on Turner Classic Movies as part of their “31 Days of Oscar” series. I wrote a feature on the film for the TCM website.

"Days of Heaven": The magic hour

Malick’s use of the naïve narrator and the lovers on the run from a murder (they even create a short-lived Eden-like existence in the forest at one point) recalls his debut feature, Badlands (1973), but the resemblances end there. The story of Days of Heaven has echoes of the Old Testament story of Abraham and Sarah placed in the grandeur of the endless horizon and majestic skies of the Texas plains. The manor house and the grain elevators of this wheat empire stand like monoliths watching over the unending plains. The images of workers in their landscape look like impressionist paintings that cinematographer Almendros creates on the screen with the natural light of his location (Alberta, Canada, standing in for Texas).

Malick wanted to evoke the silent cinema of the teens, which was shot with available light and strove to create clear, sharp, vivid images. Almendros added to that the sensibilities and visions of such American painters as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, artists who strove for an evocative simplicity of image and lighting. In his autobiography, “Man With a Camera,” Almendros praised the working relationship with Malick, who not only approved of but encouraged his efforts to dispense with traditional Hollywood lighting and push his experiments with available light photography, and a core group of collaborators (including set designer Jack Fisk and costume designer Patricia Norris) who were equally dedicated to recreating the era in all its detail and texture.

Read the complete feature here.

It’s the annual “31 Days of Oscar” at Turner Classic Movies this month, with Oscar winners and nominees screening in the days leading up to the 2010 Academy Awards. On Friday, February 26, it’s Serpico and I wrote a feature on the film for the TCM website.

Al Pacino as Frank Serpico: a counter-culture character in a conformist world

The real-life Frank Serpico made headlines as the scandals broke and, as an independent commission delved into the scope of the corruption, he was almost killed on the job under suspicious circumstances. Peter Maas put his story into a non-fiction bestseller, which Martin Bregman optioned as his first feature as a producer. Previous films about police corruption tended to frame the issue in terms of bad apples in an otherwise healthy barrel. This was very different, yet Bregman was more interested in the man and his experience than a story of corruption and investigation, and the episodic script follows Serpico as he is bounced from one precinct to another and becomes more alienated, frustrated and desperate. He found a collaborator on the same wavelength in Sidney Lumet, a TV-trained director with a reputation for strong performances, literary adaptations and, in films like The Pawnbroker (1964), creating a sense of street realism. The New York-born Lumet shot most of Serpico on the streets and in standing buildings rather than sets wherever possible, and he brought a distinctive sense of place with his choice of locations and his documentary-style approach to shooting. While that became a hallmark of seventies police dramas and crime thrillers to follow, it was still quite new at the time. Along with The French Connection (1971), Serpico was one of the films that brought this new realism to the screen portrait of American cops with its realistic portraits of procedure and systemic failure and flawed, human characters behind the badges.

See the complete feature here.

My DVD of the week, Make Way For Tomorrow (Criterion), was reviewed a couple of days ago here. Of slightly newer vintage is The Informant! (Warner), a film that straddles multiple eras: released in 2009, set in the nineties, directed with seventies flavor and set to a swinging Marvin Hamlisch score that channels the groovy sixties. I reviewed this lightfingered film, based on a true story but directed with a jaunty snap and a deadpan style that makes the absurd cascade of complications all the more astounding and hilarious, on my blog last year here. “Matt Damon is a constant churn of gee-whiz earnestness, righteous indignation, nervous exasperation and self-aggrandizing swagger as Whitacre,” I wrote. “It’s a brilliant dance of charm and delusion delivered with an amiable enthusiasm and wavering resolve and accompanied by a running stream-of-consciousness narration of constant distraction… ”

Matt Damon is The Informant!

The DVD features four deleted scenes which run about six minutes and were cut simply to move the film along; the scene with Damon and his FBI handlers, however, is a nicely understated bit that adds to a twist to their complicated loyalties. Exclusive to the Blu-ray release is commentary by Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns. Soderbergh is one of the better commentary track jockeys around, having talked not just over his own films but been a guest on other film tracks. He brings that talent as a moderator to bring Burns front and center in a discussion that ranges over all aspects of the film, from its inspirations (Burns initially heard the story told on the public radio show “This American Life”) to Soderbergh’s conscious shift in style to working with composer Marvin Hamlisch. Also includes a bonus digital copy of the film for portable media players.

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G.B.H. (Acorn) is a savage satire of Thatcher-era party politics, a devastating drama of power and corruption and simple moral courage, and the best piece of dramatic television I’ve seen all year. Sure, it’s from 1991 and is perfectly reflective of its time, but it is so well written that the characters and conflicts haven’t aged a bit.

Robert Lindsay and Lindsay Duncan in "G.B.H."

The brilliant British mini-series, written by Alan Bleasdale and directed by Robert Young, stars Robert Lindsay as ferociously ambitious and fiercely vengeful Labour Party politician Michael Murray, who has just been swept into power in a small industrial city with the help of old-school socialists who have their own agenda. Murray is a working class guy ready to use his newfound power to take revenge on everyone who ever wronged him along the way and Lindsay plays him as both a cunning opportunist and a man whose identification with the disenfranchised ultimately sets him in opposition with his Socialist supporters. Michael Palin takes a rare dramatic role as Jim Nelson, the compassionate headmaster of a school for special needs children who lands in his crosshairs when he defies a citywide strike to care for his students. “I’m here to tell you that if you screw up this day, I’ll screw up the rest of your life!” promises Murray, and he proceeds to make it happen. Palin brings a heartfelt warmth to a fragile but morally firm Nelson, who uses humor to cover vulnerability and fear. It’s heartbreaking to see such bullying happen to such an honest and dedicated man with such an emotional fragility and crippling anxiety.

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