Butch & Sundance – The Early Days (1979)/Death
Hunt (1981) + 11 Harrowhouse
(1974) + Lucky Lady (1975) + Trouble In Mind – 25th
Anniversary Special Edition (1985/Shout! Factory DVDs)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: C/C-/C+/C/C Films: C+/C+/C+/C/C
Though
DVD has been around for a good while, there are many titles, including
interesting feature films still not
available. However, as Blu-ray, High
Definition and even 3D arrives, a new market is surfacing for buried treasures,
more mainstream-produced cult classics fan favorites long overdue for
release. Participating in this with
their great reputation is Shout! Factory, who have issued the following titles
on DVD:
Butch & Sundance – The Early
Days (1979) was a
highly belated prequel to the hit 1969 Fox hit Butch Cassidy & Sundance Kid (reviewed on Blu-ray elsewhere on
this site) with William Katt in the Robert Redford role and Tom Berenger in
Paul Newman’s shoes. Directed by Richard
Lester, it is a watchable and somewhat ambitious project that would do anything
to try and recapture the energy and excitement of the first film, but they shot
it flat and not in Panavision, the script is neither as bold or witty and they
don’t have a hot film like Bonnie &
Clyde to pattern themselves after.
This is the tale of how they supposedly met, but it is just not that
good and even the great cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs could save it. Still, it remains a curio and should be on
DVD, but Shout! has paired it with another film…
Peter
Hunt (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service)
directed Death Hunt (1981), a tough
man vs. tough man film that was part of an unrecognized cycle of the late 1960s
to this time, when it was fading. In
this case, Charles Bronson is the man everyone is after and Lee Marvin plays
the man who is supposed to go and get him.
Hunt was a good director and like Don Siegel, began as an ace film
editor. Though watchable, the problem is
that we have seen this before and it is on the predictable side, but it still
is done with the kind of edge and gusto you would expect from a film with
survivalist overtones. Andrew Stevens,
Carl Weathers, Ed Lauter, Henry Beckman, William Sanderson, Maury Chaykin and
Angie Dickinson also star.
Aram
Avakian’s 11 Harrowhouse (1974)
wants to be a witty heist film with some counterculture hipness as Candice
Bergen and Charles Grodin plot to rob the title locale of a fortune in uncut
diamonds, but it will not be as easy as it seems. Of course, the vault 300-feet underground is
protected by the latest computer technology, other forms of security and get
away with it. Grodin wrote the
screenplay adaptation of the Gerald A. Browne book with Jeffrey Bloom, but gets
far too carried away with voiceover narration that backfires. Maybe this British production would have
worked better without it, but we guess this was a way to be witty. It did not work then when I saw it last and
does not work now.
The cast
includes John Gielgud, James Mason, Trevor Howard, Peter Vaughn, Glynn Edwards
and Jack Watling, plus has some great British locations, a few Jaguar XK-140s
and even a Lotus Europa. It does want to
be different, but was always a mixed film, but at least an ambitious one.
Stanley
Donen became very ambitious with Lucky
Lady (1975), a prohibition comedy that brought together top actor Gene
Hackman, soon to be top Hollywood star Burt Reynolds and Liza Minnelli that has
a big budget, big production values and never really takes off. Liza’s character even gets a brief early
musical number, but the Willard Huyck/Gloria Katz screenplay is closer to Howard The Duck than American Graffiti in being more about
the plotting than any character development and it never really feels like it
is part of the era it is supposed to be taking place in.
The title
is the name of the boat they are using for their operations, though it is
implied that Liza’s Claire character is also part of the idea of the
title. Though it is refreshing to see
such a film with no digital effects and so many period items, it sometimes
seems overproduced and Reynolds in particular seems straight-jacketed by his
role. John Hillerman helps, plus we get
Geoffrey Lewis, Val Avery and a very young Robby Benson. Too bad this was so uneven, but at least they
tried.
Finally
we have Alan Rudolph’s Trouble In Mind –
25th Anniversary Special Edition (1985) which is an attempt to
do an old fashioned melodrama and gangster film without it being a gangster
film, plus it has vocal music. Kris
Kristofferson (who wrote some of the songs here, usually sung by Marianne
Faithful in her “Broken English”
comeback period) was trying to come back after Heaven’s Gate (1980) failing killed his box office status, plays a
former policeman just coming out of jail for murder.
He gets
involved with a dysfunctional couple (Lori Singer and Keith Carradine) just
coming to his big city to have a better life, when they will find the
opposite. They cross paths when he
visits his ex-wife (Geneviéve Bujold) and things slowly start to get more
twisted. Unfortunately, this also wants
to be a Film Noir and has the pace of Coppola’s One From The Heart (1982, reviewed elsewhere on this site) which
was also experimental and juggled more than usual with items that do not
necessarily go together. At least this
attempts to be original and with Divine (the original Hairspray) as one of the characters, has become a curio.
I just
did not like the film much despite the good cast (Joe Morton also shows up) and
it comes from a sensibility of the time that is the tail-end of counterculture
cinema of the 1960s and 1970s that was pushed to indie productions like this,
the Coppola film and even Roeg’s Insignificance
that has some good moments, but is more like the end of an era than
anything else. At least it is restored
now and you can see this challenging work for yourself.
The anamorphically
enhanced 1.85 X 1 image (2.35 X 1 in the case of Harrowhouse in real 35mm Panavision, lensed by Arthur Ibbetson of Where Eagles Dare and the original Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory)
come from good transfers of good prints, but none of them look great all the
time and though they at least are all made to be seen on a big screen, they
have few demo moments between them.
However, all also have the soft, contemporary, natural look of the new
wave of cinematography at the time and they can be faithful to that look. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo (Lady was originally 6-track magnetic
stereo, including five speakers behind the screen!) sound fine for their age,
but have no Pro Logic surrounds to speak of and it is too bad Lady is not here in a 5.1 mix.
Extras include
trailers on all but Trouble, with Lady adding TV spots and two vintage
featurettes and Trouble adding a
booklet with liner notes by Rudolph and the disc adding a new making of featurette and interview with
Rudolph and composer Mark Isham.
- Nicholas Sheffo
