Tag: John Schlesinger

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 Rick Hermann, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Day of the Locust

Written by Rick Hermann January 26, 2015

[Originally published in Movietone News 43, September 1975]

Maybe one of the reasons I don’t much care for the John Schlesinger film of Day of the Locust is an attitude towards his characters—Nathanael West’s characters in this case—which he has avoided in other films. In Sunday Bloody Sunday there was no overt judgment, no condescension towards his people, and in fact the film’s openness was a way of questioning the successfulness and validity of relationships between people whose strengths were admirable and whose weaknesses were sympathetically portrayed. Even in Midnight Cowboy there was the redeeming love and friendship between Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo that gave some value to an ugly world. But in Day of the Locust Schlesinger handles his characters as though at the end of a long stick, turning irony into a cruel form of entrapment by making them seem so bereft of normally human characteristics that we wonder how they could ever possibly rise above their bathetic gropings and mutual fear and hatred of each other.

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Blu-ray, by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, DVD, Film Reviews

Blu-ray/DVD: ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’

Written by Sean Axmaker October 30, 2012

John Schlesinger could write his own ticket after Midnight Cowboy, which won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay and earned him the Oscar for Best Director. He chose to return to England to make a small, personal, intimate film.

Sunday Bloody Sunday explores a romantic triangle that has settled into familiarity for the three members. Actor/musician Murray Head is Bob, a handsome, charismatic, somewhat callow young artist and free spirit who refuses to commit fully to his lover Alex Greville (Glenda Jackson), a divorced employment counselor, and slips off to see Daniel Hirsch (Peter Finch), a quiet, sensitive, middle-aged physician who treasures whatever stolen moments he is gifted with. Alex and Daniel know that the other exists but there’s an unspoken agreement that they don’t talk about it, for their own piece of mind as much as Bob’s. As the film progresses we learn there is more between them than a shared younger bi-sexual lover. It could make the whole arrangement quite lurid but for Schlesinger’s mature and compassionate approach.

Sunday Bloody Sunday came from an idea developed by Schlesinger himself and he brought on Penelope Gilliat, a novelist and film critic with no previous screenwriting credits, to write the script. He had taken on social realist drama in A Kind of Loving and the swinging London and sexual liberation of the sixties in Darling. Sunday Bloody Sunday acknowledges both worlds but belongs to neither. This is a kind of loving in the everyday lives of successful, mature adults yearning for fulfillment and not quite getting it, and Schlesinger eschews the stylistic flash of previous films for a quieter, more intimate approach. It’s not calm so much as oppressive, an atmosphere of disillusionment and disconnection, where anxious phone calls are answered by a tetchy, nosy answering service operator and Alex and Daniel both wait for their lover to find time for them.

Continue reading at Turner Classic Movies

Film Reviews

Review: Yanks

Written by Pierre Greenfield November 10, 2009June 9, 2020

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

As the donkey regards the carrot, so John Schlesinger looks on his screenplays: he either follows or swallows them. A follow-my-leader under the deadly misapprehension that he is an auteur, Schlesinger is happiest when partnering writers who share his tendency to scream Look at me, I’m an artist! With a Frederic Raphael (Darling) or a William Goldman (Marathon Man), he’s in show-off’s heaven, and his inability to provide the real impetus, the backbone, the solid core of a movie, the way a real artist would, is snugly disguised amidst a great deal of visual and verbal shouting. The cheesy verbal wisecracks of Darling are fleshed out by Schlesinger’s no less cheesy imagistic ones (e.g., fat ladies wolfing down the eats at an Oxfam bash), just as the greasy, lapel-seizing prose of Marathon Man is aptly pictorialised via such characteristic Schlesinger conceits as the shot of Lord Olivier framed distortingly through a glass tray whilst he slavers hammily at its contents, assorted gems. In both these movies, writer and director are as one in pretentious mediocrity, and each butters up the other. But with Schlesinger’s new film, Yanks, the screenwriters are two gentlemen with reputations for low-key, understated work, who would furthermore seem to have no great keenness for Schlesingerian ego-tripping. Colin Welland (the actor who played the cleric in Straw Dogs, and one of Britain’s best TV playwrights) and Walter Bernstein (The Front) appear only too ready to put their faith in their director and let him be the boss, guiding their scenario where’er he would lead it. And Schlesinger has no idea at all of how to be the leader, with the result that everyone gets swiftly lost.

Review: Yanks

Written by Robert C. Cumbow November 10, 2009June 9, 2020

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

Yanks is probably John Schlesingerâ€™s best movie since Sunday Bloody Sunday, and certainly one of the best of his career. But for me thatâ€™s not really saying much, since I continue to have serious problems with this directorâ€™s approach, a self-congratulatory mock-sensitivity that seems insincere at best and often downright wrong. Here, at least, for the first time in years, Schlesinger has foregone his irritating penchant for unproductive intercuts and flashbacks, opting instead for a straight, period-faithful, romantic storyline about the impact of American soldiers-without-women on a Britain without men. But no matter how polished and relatively controlled he gets, there is always something about Schlesingerâ€™s work that strikes me as shallow and ultimately inconsequential.