He was called “The Great Profile,” elevated as the great lover of the silent screen and held up as the greatest actor of his generation. In retrospect he left behind his share of hammy performances and lazy mugging, but when he was at his best, John Barrymore was a shining star of the silent screen. Kino has collected four Barrymore silents in The John Barrymore Collection, three of them new to Kino (but not necessarily new to DVD). The highlights come via the Killiam Collection, complete with the original seventies-era piano scores by William P. Perry recorded for repertory showings. The Beloved Rogue features Barrymore in swashbuckling form as François Villon, “poet, pickpocket, patriot” (as his introductory title card identifies him), a hard-drinking gadabout who satirized the King (Conrad Veidt, making his Hollywood debut in a comically gnarled performance) in his poetry but loved “France earnestly, Frenchwomen excessively, French wine exclusively.” The famed Shakespearean stage dramatist has a tendency to twist face into a clownish curl to play 15th century poet as a fun-loving fool and drunkard, parading about with his drinking buddies and playing the king of the beggars of Paris. But he also throws himself into the swashbuckling scenes, leaping across roofs less like an action hero than a child of the streets who hasn’t quite grown up, and tones himself down for romance with Marceline Day, the king’s ward. Alan Crosland previously directed Barrymore in Don Juan, one of another of his best silent films, and William Cameron Davies creates the lavish sets.

I’m even more partial to Tempest (1928), not a version of the Shakespeare play but a tale of a peasant soldier (Barrymore) in love with a princess (Camilla Horn of Faust, whose eyes burn with a mixture of haughty arrogance and guilty desire) in World War I Russia. Barrymore gives one of his most restrained performances as the tormented soldier whose hatred of the aristocracy is systematically stoked when he’s put through a living hell for his temerity at falling in love with a high-born beauty. The aristocracy systematically keeps the lowly peasant class its place until the revolution turns the tables, at which point the film tries to cast the Red Menace as the villain. It’s a hard sell given the brutality and contempt of the ruling class, but in a manner that suggests director Sam Taylor studied the works of D.W. Grifffith, he portrays the aristocrats as beautiful people tormented by the ugly peasants who take their revenge with a vengeance. In this new paradigm, Barrymore rejects class politics to save his fair aristocratic love from the grimy hands of the dark, unwashed proletariat brutes. Director Sam Taylor directed some terrific Harold Lloyd comedies before making this historical romantic drama, but he guide this gorgeous costume drama like he was a master of the epic form, and William Cameron Menzies once again contributes great sets. The box set also features the 1922 Sherlock Holmes and the previously released 1920 Dr Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, and the discs are also available separately. The films are preserved rather than restored but look fine and The Beloved Rogue is tinted.

Hollywood adventures don’t come more rousing than the 1939 Beau Geste. Gary Cooper, Ray Milland and Robert Preston are the boisterous Geste brothers, orphans raised by a society lady as gentlemen with a sense of playful camaraderie and undaunted chivalry. Read more »

Hollywood pro William Wellman directed more than 80 films in every genre over the course of four decades, but for my money, he was never more interesting than in the early sound era, where his energy and audacity powered over a dozen short, sharp, street-smart films filled with saucy sexiness and startling violence and mixed with varying measures of social commentary. Forbidden Hollywood Collection Volume Three collects six features by the enormously prolific director from that era (and two documentaries) on a four-disc set, and they are something else, films strewn with wild melodrama, romantic triangles, brawny action and some of the sexiest scenes of heavy petting and passionate smooching you’ve seen out of old Hollywood, with more frank sexuality more suggested than shown but there is no mistaking the suggestions.

I cover all six films – with special attention paid to the two mad masterpieces of depression-era outrage and helplessness Heroes for Sale and Wild Boys of the Road (both 1933) – in my review on Parallax View.

The intense and thoroughly riveting In Treatment, a series developed for HBO by Rodrigo Garcia (who directed half the series himself), is presented in an unconventional format: five half-hour episodes a week over the course of nine weeks. Each feature psychiatrist Paul (Gabriel Byrne) in a weekly session with his patients and, at the end of the week, with his own therapist (Dianne Wiest), with whom he has an adversarial relationship. Which isn’t all that different from many of his own patients: Laura (Melissa George) is in love with Paul and spends her sessions trying to rouse an emotion from him; Alex (Blair Underwood) is a hyper-competitive Navy pilot who treats his session like verbal sparring matches; Sophie (Mia Wasikowska) is a teenage gymnast with deep emotional conflicts; and Amy and Jake (Embeth Davidtz, Josh Charles) are married couple who can turn ferocious in the middle of a session. The show was adapted from the Israeli series Be’Tipul and many of the American scripts are based on episodes written by Ari Folman, the writer/director of the Oscar nominated film Waltz With Bashir. Garcia is a cinematic short story craftsman and this series, like his films, is adept at exploring uncomfortable relationships and tense emotional states.
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