With the weekend passing of Olivia de Havilland, two-time Oscar winner and last surviving star of 1939’s ‘Gone With The Wind,’ so goes our last living link to Hollywood’s legendary Golden Age. From the mid-1930s thru the late ‘40s, Hollywood’s studio system, an efficient, highly profitable factory, made movies for the world while making movie stars for the ages. During the 1941-45 war years especially, the movies were our national obsession. Then came television which — exactly the way streaming today has completely altered the way people find entertainment — changed and ended it. Movie stars with carefully created images were no longer protected by the industry that created them – similar to what Princess Diana and Prince Harry find when they left the protective cocoon of the Royal Palace. Acting changed with the Method, Brando, Pacino, Streep, Chastain and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Movies themselves may not have fundamentally changed but their status has.
What de Havilland represented so vividly was a world where stars were “discovered” onstage at the Hollywood Bowl and whisked before the cameras. They became part of a family, defined by fellow performers who were under contract: At Warner Bros. Olivia was Erroll Flynn’s frequent co-star, Bette Davis was her comrade in arms and work they did — for six days a week. It only looked glam.
As de Havilland knew, ‘Hollywood’ and her ‘Golden Age’ were tinsel and canvas and illusions, not granite or gold. She decamped for Paris and settled for another life rather than working actor. She also proved again and again, she may have been 5’3” but she was made of steel with the will to do things her way.
Is that yesteryear, that Golden Age, nostalgia personified? Or is it, as I believe, an indelible portrait of America, a nation that could with utter conviction talk about the Land of the Free, about crushing those who would deprive us of our freedom – and ‘us’ we now know didn’t mean all Americans. You can look at so many great movies of that Golden Age that are peopled by a wholly white cast. Racial diversity was rarely a consideration.
They remain enchanting, they remain our common history and like de Havilland’s most notable credit ‘Gone With The Wind’ they are being replayed today with different perspectives. What do they say, we ask these days, about patriarchy? What does that monument say about women’s and minority’s status, hopes, possibilities? With de Havilland’s passing, the living link to what was is gone. The legacy endures.
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COOL CALM, NOT SO COLLECTED KRASINSKI I doubt there will ever be a time when the bellicose works of Tom Clancy, like the hit reboot ‘Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan Season 2’ (Blu-ray, Paramount, Not Rated), will ever be politically correct. But boy is ‘Season Two’ compelling, a twisty trek to South American power politics with the CIA complicit and lots of nasty double crosses, double dealings. This time it begins with an illegal arms shipment to Venezuela that brings CIA analyst Jack Ryan (an excellent John Krasinski though minus the sexualized hunk aspect that marked his debut) onto the investigation.
Ryan connects with his former boss (Wendell Pierce, dependably terrific) and the city’s CIA Station Chief (Michael Kelly whose casting alone is enough to immediately sets off flares). This being Tom Clancy, a conspiracy is uncovered, one steered by el Presidente and one that expands to eventually engulf the UK, Russia, the US and our unlucky host country Venezuela. Special Feature: Deleted Scenes.
AND DON’T CALL ME SHIRLEY Has it really been 40 years since ‘Airplane!’ (Blu-ray, Paramount, PG) flew into national consciousness – and never left?? This supremely smart, supremely silly, instant-classic comedy from the writing-directing trio of Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker has lost none of its wacko charms with time’s passing. Now upgraded as part of the Paramount Presents classics collection, this ‘Airplane!’ offers a new Filmmaker Focus on the directors, a Q&A with the directing trio recorded just last January at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre and even an isolated music score by composer Elmer Bernstein. There is also the previously released audio commentary.
GONE TOO SOON One of the Golden Age’s most luminous, beloved stars, Carole Lombard was Hollywood’s first WWII casualty, killed in a plane crash while on a War Bonds tour in 1942, just five weeks after war was declared. ‘Carole Lombard Collection 1’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, Not Rated) reveals a serious Lombard before her 1934 breakthrough in the screwball classic ‘Twentieth Century’ (named for the celebrated passenger train) where Lombard’s movie star is trapped with her desperate ex (John Barrymore).
Lombard actually began in silents when she was 12 with 1921’s ‘A Perfect Crime.’ The first film in ‘Collection 1,’ the 1930 ‘Fast and Loose,’ stars Lombard as chorus girl in a class-conscious drama. ‘Man of the World’ (’31) paired Lombard with her first husband, future screen legend William Powell (‘The Thin Man,’ ‘Mister Roberts’). ‘Man of the World’ interestingly examines a Paris-based tabloid publisher (Powell) who blackmails his subjects.
At least until he falls for the niece (Lombard) of one of his targets. The third film ‘No Man of Her Own’ (’32) is fairly well-known and teams Lombard with Clark Gable, her future second husband (they wed in 1939; he enlisted the day after she died). ‘No Man’ has Gable as a crook on the lam in a small town who falls for the local librarian (Lombard, and NO, this did not inspire ‘The Music Man’). The newlyweds head back to the city where Gable must strenuously try to hide his past from his inquisitive bride.
SPELLBINDING SPELLBINDER American soprano Wilhelmena Wiggins Fernandez is hardly a familiar name today but in 1981 she was integral to the cinematic sensation that was Jean-Jacques Beineix’s colorfully crafted thriller ‘Diva’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, R). An international box-office success, ‘Diva’ begins with Jules, a motorcycle riding postal carrier, gaining possession of an illicit recording of this great American diva (guess who!). Unknown to Jules, a hooker slips another illicit tape into his bag – a very incriminating tape that targets a corrupt police chief.
Jules’ life is endangered as he protects the 2 tapes. What marks ‘Diva’ – and what made it an arthouse blockbuster — is Beineix’s imaginative, candy-colored vision which he would extend to the incredibly sexual, awesomely romantic ‘Betty Blue’ a few years later. Cesars, France’s equivalent of the Oscar, went to Beineix, Philippe Rousselot’s unforgettable cinematography and Vladimir Cosma’s score. A remarkable number of Special Features here: Beineix’s audio commentary, an introduction by a professor who wrote the book on Beineix, another audio commentary, this by film critic Simon Abrams, and individual interviews with Cosma, the casting director, set designer, cinematographer and several actors including the star Frédéric Andréi who plays Jules. In French with English subtitles.
TONY! TONY! TONY! Tony Curtis, Bronx-born as Bernard Schwartz, began his extensive career in the early ‘50s as a pretty face. By the end of the decade Curtis showed he was the real deal with ‘The Defiant Ones,’ ‘Trapeze,’ ‘Sweet Smell of Success’ and, of course, ‘Some Like It Hot.’ ‘Tony Curtis Collection’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, Not Rated) honors his comedic chops at his home studio, Universal Pictures. Blake Edwards’ ‘The Perfect Furlough’ reteams Curtis with his movie star wife Janet Leigh – they made five films together, beginning with the imaginative biopic ‘Houdini’ in ’53 and topped by the 1958 epic ‘The Vikings.’
Yes, Jamie Lee Curtis (‘Halloween’) is their daughter. The 1958 ‘Furlough’ is a rom-com set in a Paris that unfortunately resembles the Universal backlot. Co-star Linda Crystal, the film’s movie star who shares the perfect furlough with raffle winner Curtis, just recently died. She’s lovely. ‘The Great Impostor’ (’61), directed by Robert Mulligan (the next year he would helm the classic ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’), was the incredible-but-true story of a glorious impostor – a compulsive liar and impersonator who passed himself off as a Trappist monk, prison warden and even a Canadian Naval surgeon. It’s an ideal premise for Curtis’ caffeinated hustler image. The 1962 family comedy ’40 Pounds of Trouble’ concludes the box-set. It’s a remake of the Damon Runyon Thirties blockbuster ‘Little Miss Marker’ with Shirley Temple. Curtis is directed by Norman Jewison (‘In the Heat of the Night,’ ‘The Thomas Crown Affair,’ ‘Moonstruck’) in his directorial debut. Suzanne Pleshette plays a Lake Tahoe singer targeted by the cute little girl in Curtis’ charge as his should-be wife. Today ‘Trouble is best known for being one of the few pictures to ever film in Disneyland.
A REAL SHARP-SHOOTING HERO With WWII receding into the distance, what to make of America’s most honored soldier Audie Murphy? As the three-film ‘Audie Murphy Collection’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, Not Rated) shows, the baby-faced Medal of Honor veteran specialized in Westerns for pretty much his entire career. Exceptions however are notable and make a case that Murphy really had something:
Consider his first film, John Huston’s adaptation of the classic novel ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ (’51) , his hit autobiographical picture, 1955’s ‘To Hell and Back’ where he recreated his dazzling wartime exploits (and now we wonder, At what cost?) and as the titular character in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1958 Graham Greene Saigon-set ‘The Quiet American.’ The Texas-born Murphy was just 19 and in France when he kept a company of German soldiers at bay for an hour in a heated battle, then led the counterattack although wounded and out of ammunition. Today, the decades of suffering Murphy endured while he acted would be immediately diagnosed as PTSD – he slept with a loaded pistol under his pillow. He was just 45 when he died in a Virginia plane crash in 1971. This ‘Audie Murphy Collection’ is missing my personal favorite, the 1957 Texas-set ‘The Guns of Fort Petticoat.’ Murphy’s three movies in ‘Collection’ are significant. The great Don Siegel (‘Baby Face Nelson’) directs the earliest Western here, 1952’s ‘The Duel at Silver Creek’ with young Murphy as the gun-slinging Silver Kid. ‘Ride a Crooked Tail’ (’58) was the last collaboration with his ‘To Hell and Back’ helmer and film producing partner Jesse Hibbs. In ‘No Name on the Bullet’ (’59) which his company co-produced Murphy dives into the dark side to play a hired gun.
TRAGICALLY ROMANTIC Burt Lancaster has never looked younger, more lithe or as passionate in the doomed noir romance from 1948, ‘Kiss the Blood Off My Hands’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, Not Rated).
Paired with Joan Fontaine who, six years after playing Hitchcock’s naïve innocents in ‘Rebecca’ and ‘Suspicion,’ remains easily able to suggest a tender vulnerability. They meet, not exactly cute, when Lancaster’s Bill Saunders kills a man in a bar fight and eludes the London bobbies by hiding out in terrified Jane Wharton’s apartment. They find they share heartbreak: Fontaine’s Jane is mourning a dead war hero and Saunders is haunted by his wartime exploits. Robert Newton, who would go on to be a memorably nasty and crafty pirate Captain Kidd, epitomizes the Devil, a malicious crook always popping up to criminally entice and entrap Saunders. The studio settings recreating wartime London are marvelous as is cinematographer Russell Metty’s (‘Touch of Evil,’ ‘Hitler’s Children,’ ‘Spartacus’) black-and-white imagery. Special Feature: Audio commentary by film historian Jeremy Arnold.
SURF, SAND, CRIME While the 21st century version of ‘Hawaii Five-O: The Final Season’ (5 discs, 22 episodes, CBS-DVD, Paramount, Not Rated) never quite became a TV phenomenon, neither did the Jack Lord original back in ’68, although it lasted 12 seasons. It was always better known for that bouncy theme music than its sun-soaked plots. This series ends with a long shadow cast by its producers’ refusal to compensate its ‘Hawaii’ supporting players, prompting Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park to exit in 2017. There are over 50 minutes of Special Features: An Alex O’Loughlin interview, deleted scenes and the crossover episode with current ‘Magnum P.I.’ star Jay Hernandez.
DUTY, HONOR, DEFENSE Slow but steady, minus any histrionics, Mark Harmon has steered his hit series to 17 seasons and shows no signs of stopping. Deliberately, cozily old-fashioned while tackling terrorists, murdered Marines, even an attack at Arlington National Cemetery, ‘NCIS: The 17th Season’ (5 discs, 20 episodes, CBS-DVD, Paramount, Not Rated) celebrates American patriots of every stripe.
SO TENDER & TRUE There are 2 heavyweights that make the 1983 ‘Tender Mercies’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, PG) a must-see. First is the extraordinary screenplay by Horton Foote (‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ ‘The Trip to Bountiful’) who won his second Oscar here. Second is Robert Duvall’s Oscar-winning Best Actor performance as the alcoholic drifter Mac Sledge. Duvall may be best known as the hawkish general in ‘Apocalypse, Now’ who ‘loves the smell of napalm in the morning’ and his consigliere to the Corleone family in ‘The Godfather’ trilogy but it’s his work in smaller films like ‘Tender Mercies’ that really defines his brilliant career. Sledge, it’s revealed, isn’t just any bum — he’s a country western singing legend and ‘Mercies’ charts his redemption.
A Best Picture and Best Director nominee for Bruce Beresford (‘Driving Miss Daisy’), the film also scores with memorable work from Tess Harper and Betty Buckley. Special Features: An informative audio commentary and ‘Miracles and Mercies,’ a documentary with interviews with Duvall, Harper, Beresford and the late Foote.
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Stephen Schaefer’s Hollywood & Mine - Boston Herald
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