Tag: Tyrone Power

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

Blu-ray: ‘The Black Swan’

Written by Sean Axmaker January 12, 2014

Tyrone Power was one of the top stars of 20th Century Fox, thanks to his turns as the glib, arrogant golden boy in the studio’s colorful musicals and melodramas and the earnest, driven young visionary or angry rebel of Lloyds of London (1936), Jesse James (1939), and Johnny Apollo (1940), where his dark good looks and brooding presence gave his handsome romantic lead a bit of smoldering intensity. In the 1940s, Fox decided to mold him into an Errol Flynn-style swashbuckling hero and found success in The Mark of Zorro (1940), as the Robin Hood of old California, and Blood and Sand (1941), as a bullfighting hero led astray by the temptations of fame and fortune. The Black Swan (1942) was the next logical step: a swashbuckling pirate rogue turned hero. It shouldn’t have been a good fit for Power, who was better at brooding and flashing his temper than flexing his physicality, but he brings a bit of both the flashy arrogant and the brooding hero to the role.

Captain Jamie Waring is clearly unfulfilled as a pirate captain pillaging Spanish colonies and ships, but he’s not so sure he’s any happier when he teams up with Captain Henry Morgan (Laird Cregar), the former pirate king appointed by Britain to take over as Governor of Jamaica. It sets him against his former, more savage partners in pillage, especially Billy Leech (George Sanders), and his outlaw instincts don’t fit into polite society. Complicating matters is his nearly fatal attraction to Lady Margaret Denby, daughter of the former Governor, played with flashing eyes and furious temper by Maureen O’Hara. The film gets Power’s shirt off with great frequency, from a turn on the rack to a swim in the sea to a brawl on the deck of the titular Black Swan, and tries to generate some sort of smoldering love-hate passion between Power and O’Hara as they cross paths and trade barbed exchanges. They get the hate part right–Lady Margaret all but boils over in righteous indignation whenever the outlaw dares insert himself in proper society and Jamie seems exasperated at himself for his obsession with the fiery beauty–but there’s no electricity when they collide and no passion in their furious denial, just umbrage and acerbic bickering.

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

Videophiled: Eight Blu-ray Debuts from the Vaults of 20th Century Fox

Written by Sean Axmaker December 5, 2013

Early in 2013, 20^th Century Fox invited consumers to vote on what they wanted to see released on Blu-ray from the Fox archives. The ballot was limited to about 50 films released between 1930 and 1969 for which Fox already had good original materials, all of which have been previously released on DVD, but it got folks involved and excited to see some of the studio’s classics in Blu-ray HD and the response prompted Fox to double their original release slate. Instead of one film per decade, Fox chose the top two most popular films from each decade.

The films got their long-awaited release this week and true to their track record of Blu-ray releases of archival classics, they are terrific-looking editions of well-crafted Hollywood movies. At least the few I’ve watched since they arrived the other day (I sampled through the rest).

Being a Tyrone Power fan, I first grabbed The Black Swan (1942) (Fox, Blu-ray), Fox’s bid to make their handsome romantic lead into an Errol Flynn-style swashbuckling hero. It shouldn’t have been a good fit – Power is more at home as the glib, arrogant golden boy (who evolves over the course of the film) or brooding as the earnest, driven young visionary – but he brings a bit of both the flashy arrogant and the brooding hero to the role. His Jamie Waring is clearly unfulfilled as a pirate captain pillaging Spanish colonies and ships, but he’s not so sure he’s any happier when he teams up with Captain Henry Morgan (Laird Cregar), the former pirate king appointed by Britain to take over as Governor of Jamaica. It sets him against his former, more savage partners in pillage, especially Billy Leech (George Sanders in a wild red beard), and his outlaw instincts don’t fit into polite society. Complicating matters is his nearly fatal attraction to Lady Margaret Denby, daughter of the former Governor, played with flashing eyes and furious temper by Maureen O’Hara.

It’s based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini, who also wrote The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood, and it’s kind of a poor cousin to those in terms of both story and action, but what Technicolor glory! They set sail against Maxfield Parish skylines and battle in a riot of indigos and royal blues and crimson reds with flourishes of gold. Sturdy Henry King directs and the disc carries over the commentary by film historian Rudy Behlmer and actress Maureen O’Hara from the DVD.

Before The Black Swan, King directed Power in the western Jesse James (1939) (Fox, Blu-ray), with Power in classic brooding mode and Henry Fonda as brother Frank in Hollywood’s romanticized take on the outlaw. Randolph Scott plays a sympathetic sheriff and Henry Hull, Nancy Kelly, Slim Summerville, John Carradine, and Jane Darwell costar. It’s another Technicolor beauty and the disc features two Fox Movietone News featurettes.

Continue reading at Cinephiled

by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, DVD, Film Reviews

MOD Movies: Fox Cinema Archives Debuts

Written by Sean Axmaker July 29, 2012

20^th Century Fox finally follows the leads of Warner, Sony, and MGM and launches their own manufacture-on-demand program aimed at releasing some of the older titles from the vaults, the kinds of “catalog” releases that no longer sell in the DVD sales crash. The 20th Century Fox Cinema Archives debuts with 35 titles in the first wave.

The first wave of releases is now available and the results are… mixed, to say the least. Here’s my review of the first three discs I received.

Suez (1938), directed by Allan Dwan and starring Tyrone Power, is one of the better of the big, “respectable” historical dramas that Power made in the thirties and early forties, in the mold of Lloyds of London and In Old Chicago (both previously released by Fox in DVD box sets) but with a grander sense of spectacle. Power’s Ferdinand de Lesseps is engineer, entrepreneur, and diplomat, negotiating support from Napoleon III in France and Prince Said in Egypt, battling sandstorms, enduring political catastrophe (being a Hollywood history, Napoleon III’s coup is as much a personal betrayal as a national one) and romantic treachery (lover Loretta Young throws him over for a much more politically advantageous suitor) with the pluck of… well, Tyrone Power.

This is classic Hollywood historical melodrama, with dynamic individuals changing history with a mix of vision and sheer fortitude, and a whirlwind tour of geopolitical history as drawing room drama. Annabella plays a spunky, spirited Egyptian girl devoted to the oblivious Ferdinand (again classically Hollywood, the Americans play the French while the film’s French star plays the exotic “foreigner”). Allan Dwan, a silent movie pioneer whose long career began in the pre-feature era and straddles blockbuster epics (Robin Hood with Douglas Fairbanks) and low-budget comedies and everything in between, keeps the potentially stodgy material moving at a lively clip, giving the political maneuverings a dramatic flair and a personal dimension, and delivering a spectacular sandstorm that remains the film’s standout sequence.

This is the best looking disc of the initial batch I received, a fine mastering of a clean, strong print, with good contrasts and sound and no apparent digital artifacts: a solid presentation of a handsome Hollywood classic.