Tag: Richard Donner

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 Kathleen Murphy, Contributors, Film Reviews, Horror

Review: The Omen

Written by Kathleen Murphy April 2, 2012

[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976]

What partly recommends and partly handicaps The Omen, the latest entry in the horror film genre, is its old-fashioned quality. The film develops its tale of the modern-day birth of Satan’s son with a modicum of special effects and supernatural gimcracks, relying instead on tried and true methods of suspense such as not letting you see things too clearly (à la Val Lewton), mining the potential inhabitedness of any given space for its lode of ominousness, and allowing the implicit contrast between ancient horror and present complacency to breed an unsettling tension. On the negative side, the script too often takes tedious refuge in the old cliffhanger device that traditionally slogs up the action in soap operas and mediocre horror films. The paradigmatic example in The Omen occurs when Gregory Peck, inadvertent parent to devilspawn, is visited by a priest who possesses all sorts of crucial information that, we know, ought to be immediately and cogently communicated. But is it? Of course not. Instead the priest incoherently proselytizes Peck, marking himself at once as an irrelevant religious fanatic and getting kicked out of the busy man’s office for his pains. This ploy ensured several more encounters between the two men before Peck ever got the point. I had gotten the point some time ago and simply went away for awhile, to wait out this spurious method of generating suspense by unnecessarily retarding and prolonging narrative development.

Review: Superman

Written by Richard T. Jameson July 12, 2010

[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979]

People come up and they ask, “Is Superman any good?” The unspoken question seems to be: “Could they spend all that money and generate all that hype and fail to make anything but a dog?” The answer to both is Yes: the movie is a lot of fun, and the lot of talented people involved have managed to get a lot of their talent very enjoyably on view.

How satisfied you feel about Superman will depend in part on how readily you accommodate the idea of its partaking of three different, but provocatively counterpointed, styles. The first segment, a reel-or-so’s worth of film, deals with the last days of the Mighty Man’s native planet Krypton, an ice-mirror environment where the electric whiteness of Marlon Brando’s hairâ€”he’s Jor-El, father of Kal-El, the as-yet-unrenamed baby Supermanâ€”and the solarized, lucent whiteness of the costumes suggest both the abstract superiority (though not necessarily superior abstractness) of the race and the imminence of their burning themselves out. From Brando’s opening peroration before the grim, grey, titanic floating physogs of the other ruling elders, while three unspeakably depraved Kryptonians stand trapped within a shaft of light and a sort of perpetually self-balancing MÃ¶bius strip, this episode is stunningly visualized in audacious sci-fi terms, and a note of high sentence is convincingly sustained in the face of inspired preposterousness. (It is only after leaving the theater that one realizes the three monstrous villains, exiled to the blackest reaches of the universe via a genuinely disturbing special effect, have never been referred to again. As with the earlier Salkind superproduction, The Three/Four Musketeers, there is another part to Superman mostly in the can already; tune in next Christmas for the terrible vengeance of Non, Ursa, and the satanic General Zod!…) As a solar storm predicted by the all-wise Jor-El shatters the crystalline splendor of Krypton civilization, the elder dispatches his only begotten son in his own personal starship, complete with memory bank of instructive aphorisms to prepare the infant for life on Earthâ€”a backward planet, but a not-inhospitable destination for a healthy boy with such a dense molecular structure.