Tag: Alan Bates

More Blu-rays from the Warner Archive – ’42nd Street,’ ‘Ladyhawke,’ and more

Written by Sean Axmaker August 20, 2015

Last year I surveyed a number of Blu-ray releases from the Warner Archive, which is predominantly a line of manufacture-on-demand DVD-Rs offering films that otherwise wouldn’t support a traditional DVD release. It also, however, releases a few choice Blu-rays each year. The difference between the formats is that the Blu-ray releases are in fact pressed discs and they feature high-quality transfers as good as any classic released through Warner’s traditionally-marketed Blu-ray line.

Because they are available only by order online (through Warner Archive, Amazon, and other outlets), they don’t get the kind of public profile that commercially released and distributed discs get. So here are some of the highlights of the past few months (or more).

42nd Street (Warner Archive, Blu-ray) – Released in 1933 by Warner Bros., which specialized in snappy, fast-paced pictures with working class heroes and street smart characters, 42^nd Street launched a series of great backstage musicals that featured lavish production numbers in a Broadway culture where the depression was a reality just offstage and the dancers were one flop away from the breadlines. Lloyd Bacon directs the dramatic sequences while dance choreographer Busby Berkeley took this opportunity to completely reimagine the musical production number for the possibilities of cinema. This film is as much Berkeley’s as Bacon’s.

Warner Baxter stars as the Broadway producing legend who lost everything on the market crash and puts everything on the line to create one last hit and Bebe Daniels is the leading lady who hooks a sugar daddy (Guy Kibbee in leering old man mode) to finance the show. Ruby Keeler plays the chorus girl who takes over the leading role on opening night, a showbiz cliché that played out in real life: the film elevated Keeler and Dick Powell, who plays her boy-next-door co-star and love interest, to movie stardom.

by Robert C. Cumbow, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: An Unmarried Woman

Written by Robert C. Cumbow July 21, 2010

[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978]

This is the first Paul Mazursky film I’ve really liked. I haven’t seen them all, but what I have thought of Mazursky until now had a lot to do with the kind of people and topics he makes films about, and with his frustratingly ambivalent view toward them. He sees the satirical possibilities in the fads and fancies of the upwardly mobile, hip middle class, and anticipates the audience’s skeptical “What kind of problems could they have?” disposition; yet he also cares very much about these people, and tends to celebrate the same things he satirizes. Nothing wrong in that, certainly: Altman did the same in Nashville. The big differenceâ€”and it dates all the way back to Bob & Carol & Ted & Aliceâ€”is that what Mazursky sees at the heart of a meaningful existence in contemporary America is ultimately much thinner than what an Altman or a Michael Ritchie sees, and relies chiefly on touchy-feely trends and fads, honestandopen platitudes, nothing with the feel of solid human truth. An Erica Benton, cast off by her husband in any other time but 1978, would likely respond completely differently, seek different solutions to her problems, and behave in a different way. I wonder whether Mazursky would still redeem her, and if he could get away with doing it in the same way.

Read More “Review: An Unmarried Woman”

Film Reviews, Musicals

Review: The Rose

Written by Robert Horton November 20, 2009June 9, 2020

[Originally published in Movietone News 64-65, March 1980]

“You know, I’m so tired of the road,” sighs Bette Midler into a telephone near the end of the film. There’s a hesitation in her voice on the word ‘road’ as if she were going to say, “I’m so tired of The Rose” instead. This would not be unusual since the Rose consistently refers to herself in the third person. The film concerns her attempts to slip out from under that suffocating title, and the most intriguing tension within The Rose is that while wanting to make this escape the Rose nevertheless takes refuge behind her misleadingly flowery appellation whenever necessary. She has the ability to snap to brash, acid-tongued life, even from the depths of depression, when she is confronted by an audience: pursuing her sulking lover (Frederic Forrest) through a men’s steambath while keeping up an entertaining banter for the boys; being easily coaxed onstage at clubs she entered as a spectator; and finally, hopelessly drugged at her last concert appearance. This idea of the Rose being more at home while performing than at any other time is underscored by the way director Mark Rydell has filmed an early concert number. “When a Man Loves a Woman,” an exhausting ballad, is shot almost entirely in one long takeâ€”and the interesting thing about this song is that the closer we get to the Rose, the more we realize that she is making love with the microphone, her lips trailing over it, with a greater intimacy than we see in her contact with humans.