Bad Boys
(1983/Lionsgate Blu-ray) + Hell Harbor
(1930)/Jungle Bride (1933) + Lebanon
(2009/Sony Blu-ray) + Meet John Doe – 70th
Anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition (1941) + Rhineland (2010/VCI DVDs) + Welcome To The Rileys (2010/Sony
DVD)
Picture: B-/C/C/B/C+/C/C Sound: C+/C/C/B/C+/C+/C+ Extras:
C+/D/C+/B-/C/C- Films: C+/C+/C+/C+/B-/C/B-
Dramas
take many forms and what makes a drama dramatic changes with what is seen as
both the reality of the time the film is made and what screen reality is at
that time. The following seven films
show the differences and how that can work for and against a release.
After
silent filmmaking versus sound, the next divide for dramatic realism happened
before and after the Production Code was introduced in the 1934. We start with a nice double feature from VCI
of two obscure films: Hell Harbor,
an interesting 1930 soundie here in two versions and Jungle Bride from 1933.
Themes of sex, violence, sexuality and even language were still not
being monitored or regulated when these films happened, but they could not be
free-for-alls and followed filmmaking production approaches of the time.
Harbor has Lupe Valdez as a descendant
of an infamous pirate hanging around in the Caribbean
and gets stuck in the middle of a conflict between a pearl smuggler (Jean
Hersholt) and her father (Gibson Gowland) who has blood on his hands. Hersholt was a star at the time for a reason
and the camera loves Valdez. The 64-minutes version is from a pristine
print and looks good for its time, but the longer 84-minutes cut has a rougher
print, yet I like its leisurely pace and has more cinematic space for which to
tell its story. Henry King was a good
journeyman director and this works well enough 81 years later that it
embarrasses many new productions by just being so solid and competent.
Bride is just as entertaining (here in
a 61-minutes long cut from a decent print for its age) has Anita Page (another
star understandably so) as one of four people in relationships when they become
shipwrecked. This was done when it was
fresh before it became an old Hollywood standby (including TV hits LOST and Gilligan’s Island) to be stuck on an island, which means they are
free of some things, but not others.
This has the advantage of more sexual freedom, though hardly what we
would think of that as being today, yet it does this kind of tale so much
better than so many would later. It is a
nice second feature to have on the same disc.
By the
time Frank Capra made Meet John Doe
in 1941, the censorship had caused Tinseltown to become more clever and films
more about myth, dreams and therefore propaganda set it. Capra’s films about the little man being
recognized because that is what America
is all about made him the first director to have creative control like he had
at any studio, a then-smaller Columbia
in this case. Barbara Stanwyck is a
reporter so unhappy about losing her job at a newspaper that she writes a fake
letter to get at the editor who let her go.
However,
the result causes a chain reaction driving readers to find out who the letter
is about. When she gets rehired, she
needs to find a man who can play the man she lied about and when she goes
searching for him, she finds a broken man (Gary Cooper) who used to be a
successful baseball player now injured and without money. Ann (Stanwyck) agrees to help him out if he
helps her, but things become more complicated building up to a climax that
defined the corniness that would cause Capra’s films to be called Capra-corn,
but it is a well made film (some would say that is the problem) and the leads
definitely have the chemistry to make it work.
It has been referenced and imitated enough that it is a minor classic
and it is worth seeing, especially if you never have seen it before.
Fast forward
four decades and teens were rarely shown as juvenile delinquents then, but
became portrayed much more so as such as the counterculture arrived. By 1983, Rick Rosenthal’s Bad Boys (1983) was at the tail-end of
a cycle of films that started in the later 1960s (partly out of exploitation
films) that included underrated films like Little
Darlings, My Bodyguard, The Warriors and more (including
several Francis Coppola pictures in the 1980s) which deserves a separate essay
for another time. This film was at the
tail end of that cycle.
A young
Sean Penn is a young Chicago
hoodlum who eventually gets into more trouble than he can handle and lands up
in a juvenile detention center. He has
accidentally killed the brother of a Hispanic hood (Esai Morales) and does not
always have the best time of it in or out of the Center. Reni Santoni, Clancy Brown, Ally Sheedy, Jim
Moody and Eric Gurry are among the solid supporting cast, but the film did not
age well and did not always work then.
While I
like the performances and the directing is not bad, the film has issues. The actual character development from the
Richard DiLello screenplay is limited, especially for the non-white
characters. This renders them at least
semi-stereotypical. As well, we have
seen some of this before, so this was not as original as some of its
contemporaries. However, it is
ambitious, has a smart ending (we rarely see that these days) and is more of a
product of the 1970s and not what most 1980s films are now thought of as being.
Sadly,
this might have been shocking to some at the time, but with things much worse,
this sadly looks like “the good old days” for better and worse.
In all
this, the War genre resurfaced over a decade ago and the results have been
mixed. The realism of the likes of Vietnam that
made Bad Boys possible was being
erased when the subject of WWII surfaced.
After Saving Private Ryan,
the revival of the genre in the long run has led to more gimmick films and bad
films than anything realistic or constructive, even in ambitious projects, even
about other wars. Add disturbing,
manipulative real life events and the synthesis has been “war porn” like we
have never seen before.
Samuel
Maoz’s Lebanon (2009) wants to show us
what it is like to be in a tank during the majority of a series of conflicts
during the First Lebanon War in 1982, so most of its takes place in its
interior. A novel idea that could
quickly become a gimmick or collapse out of repetition, this has its moments, but
it its quest to make ‘the big statement’ by the end does not hold up all the
way. Some of it comes across as
gimmicky, intended or not, while we get people popping in and out of the tank
too often as to be almost comical.
Nevertheless, I liked it when it worked, but if it has been made before
the after-effects of Saving Private Ryan,
it would likely have been better.
All this
becomes much more of a problem for Chris Grega’s Rhineland (2010), about a WWII battle (in April 1945) pitting the U.S. and Nazi
forces in one of the last brutal battles of the war. The cast of unknowns may try hard to make
this work, but the low budget shows the strains of this production. The actors have limited chemistry, the
dialogue does not sound like the period, is not spoken like the period and can
even come across as anachronistically shrill, this is more talk than action and
I never bought it was taking place at the time.
In
addition, Grega is yet another would-be filmmaker who thinks imitating
Spielberg’s shaky camerawork in Saving
Private Ryan is a good idea, when even Spielberg did not use it the whole
time. The result is a bad, ill-advised
carbon copy of the approach so played out by now (think Blair Witch Project) and an unspoken implication that because this
is the story being told, there is some automatic artistic integrity that simply
exists without trying is a big mistake.
Such lofty prestige is earned in Saving
Private Ryan and Rhineland
could only find such glory by being original, which it never is.
Finally,
we have a drama that is somewhat familiar and has a screenplay with limited
originality, yet this is a case where the actors make it work more than it
should. In Jake Scott’s Welcome To The Rileys (2010), James
Gandolfini is a married man who is unhappy with his life and becomes involved
with a stripper (Kristin Stewart), but not as a customer or adulterer. Instead, he decides to try and help her
out. They become uneasy friends and at a
time when his wife (Melissa Leo) cannot suppress her personal issues anymore
and must confront what is wrong in their marriage. Their daughter died and they still have not
dealt with it.
In most
cases, this would have been handled ineptly and been a bad TV movie or
theatrical film not worthy of distribution, but these actors make this work
well and I really was surprised how much so.
No, it is no classic, but the drama works because it is based in truth,
including what the actors and director bring to it. It also shows how good Gandolfini always was
before The Sopranos and after. I hope
people start accepting him in other roles, because he has so much more to offer
here and as in Greg Mottola’s underrated Adventureland
(reviewed elsewhere on this site and with the honesty the films out of the
cycle that Bad Boys came out of has)
and The Runaways (also on this site)
is nice to see Stewart show her talents again outside of those Twilight films.
The 1.33
X 1 on the classic Pre Code films and Doe
are as good as they could look in the format, though maybe more restoration
could be done, but Video Black is good for DVD and they are not bad considering
their age. The 1080p 1.78 X 1 digital
High Definition image on Boys (in
Astrocolor) and 1.78 X 1 on Lebanon
are the best looking discs here, as you would expect from the only Blu-rays
covered, but Boys is an older transfer
with detail issues and a dated print.
Especially with Penn in the film, it needs further restoration and
preservation. Lebanon
has some minor issues and its stylizing, but is the most rich and solid of all
seven entries here.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image on the rest of the DVDs are as soft as
the 1930s films, each for totally different reasons. Rhineland is an HD shoot with toned-down color and too
much motion blur throughout, while Rileys
is just too soft here but might look better on Blu-ray. It has some motion blur, but a more
consistent look.
Audio
from best to worse includes the DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) lossless 5.1 mix on Lebanon is warmly and well recorded
with the only modern soundfield of the titles here, while the DTS-HD MA (Master
Audio) lossless 5.1 mix on Boys is
from a weak, second generation source. Where
are the original soundstems? This was a
Dolby A-type analog theatrical release in its time. Rileys
has a dialogue-based Dolby Digital 5.1 mix that is good, but a little too much
towards the front speakers. Rhineland had
a Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo mix that is mixed with audio that has issues with
how it was recorded on location and the soundmaster is inconsistent. That leaves Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on the
oldest films sounding good, but made me wish for lossless versions, but nothing
can hide their age.
Extras on
Boys include the original theatrical
trailer and feature length audio commentary by Director Rosenthal, the Pre Code
set has a trailer for Bride, Lebanon has a behind the scenes
featurette entitled Notes On A War Film,
Rhineland has Deleted Scenes, Photo
Gallery, Making Of featurette, trailer and short called Capdance, Rileys has its
own making of featurette called Creating The
Rileys and Doe has the most
extras in a two-DVD set. These include a
feature length audio commentary by historian Ken Barnes with clips of Capra,
three Making Of featurettes, Cast/Crew profiles,
restoration comparison piece, production background and two Lux Radio Theater shows: Sorry,
Wrong Number with Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster and For Whom The Bell Tolls
with Cooper and Ingrid Bergman.
- Nicholas Sheffo
