Boss: Season One (2011/Lionsgate Blu-ray)/Keyhole
(2011/Monterey Blu-ray)/The
Untouchables: Season Four, Volume One + Volume Two (Final Original Season/1962
– 1963/CBS DVD Sets)
Picture: B-/B/C+ Sound: B/B-/C+ Extras: C+/C/D Main Programs: C+/C+/B
There is
still a Gangster genre, even though The
Sopranos dominated it for many years.
We can also see the subject of such explicitly corrupt seeping into
other dramas and genres, but not always in ways that work, no matter how much
talent is involved or how much said makers try.
The following gives us two examples and one classic one.
There has
been much buzz on Boss: Season One
(2011), in part because Kelsey Grammer is here playing a bad, corrupt,
politician survivor and that is the total opposite of his work on Frazier. It is not easy to show such range or make a
change from one type of storytelling to the other, but here it is. Created by Farhad Safinia, the story of how
Tom Kane (Grammer) holds onto power takes some time to get started (and gets
caught up too much early on in King Lear aspirations and contrasts), but once
that runs its course, this show about power struggles in the great city of
Chicago lives up to more than half of its hype.
We get
actual gangsters, murders and a thin line between what is legitimate and
rotten. The cast is a plus and the
teleplays are at least decent, but sometimes more. On the down side, there is not enough of Chicago or the city as a
character and too many of the scenes take place indoors and in closed areas in
ways that hold back the show’s potential, but it is just getting started. I found some plot points more believable than
others and some scenes just plain dumb and unrealistic, but overall, it is a
show that is worth a look and giving a chance to simply because it has enough
interesting content to offer. We’ll see
if it can build on this work.
Extras
include episode commentaries with Safinia (who also co-produces), Director of
Photography Kasper Tuxen and Executive Producer Richard Levine, plus a making
of featurette with Grammer and Safinia entitled The Mayor & His Maker.
A more
classical Gangster persona meets surrealism in Guy Maddin’s Keyhole (2011) which has a yesteryear
mob boss (Jason Patric) hold up in a strange house with his gang and people who
are not as empowered as he, yet they are stuck there and there are sudden
intrusions by gunmen, odd people and something else odd about the house. Is the house haunted? Is it stuck in a time warp? With more than a few nods to the work of
David Lynch (down to casting Isabella Rossellini), Maddin joins Lynch as one of
the few directors around who knows, understands and even speaks the visual
language of silent films, but Maddin is even more explicit in recreations of
such and has made a career of it.
There is
a sense of some voyeurism here (thus the title, though it may have other
meanings you might not expect), but there is also an odyssey of sexuality often
made strange or on the verge of necrophilia, while other abstract sexual images
and nude persons also surface throughout.
If this was not trying to say and do something, it would be easy to
write this off as experimental and I credit Maddin for the bold use of
sexuality here, but in the end, this does not cohere as I had expected and is
not writerly enough (if that is his intent) to offset its readerly issues.
Still,
the actors are good and even bold (Udo Kier is among the talented unknowns) and
it is a visually and thematically dense enough film that it is worth a look,
but be prepared to be challenged on several levels. Maddin is very talented and he is
uncompromised here.
Extras
include two making of featurettes, including one on the music score by Jason
Staczek that was and had to be unusual and unique to match the film made.
So how about
just seeing the Gangster genre in its purest form? Remarkably, The Untouchables: Season Four, Volume One + Volume Two (1962 –
1963) was the final season of the big hit series that was a breakthrough at the
time for realism on TV and remained a high quality series throughout. Desilu (the great production company owned by
Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball) had their first regular series hit outside of
their own starring work and wisely ended the show while it was on top as Eliot
Ness (Robert Stack) finally gets to Frank Nitti and the rest of the mob after
so much hard work, so many casualties and so many cases.
Even
without the freedom of feature films, the show was remarkably smart and well
made to the point that after seeing it in these DVD reissues realize even I may
have underestimated its influence, groundbreaking success and the new high bar
it set for TV drama all around. It was
also a series actors wanted to be on and the show attracted (in part because
some of these persons were friends of the producers) some of the top talent in
the business.
Guest
stars for this final season include Nita Talbot, Edward Asner, Ruth White,
Barry Russo, Isabel Jewell, Anne Jackson, Murray Hamilton, Barbara Barrie,
Michael Constantine, Richard Conte, Ned Glass, Joseph Sirola, Malachi Throne,
Ken Lynch, Frank Gorshin, Albert Paulsen, Carroll O’Connor, Herschel Bernardi,
Nan Martin, Dane Clark, Elisha Cook, Jr., Harvey Korman, Mike Connors, Barbara
Stanwyck, John Larch, Woodrow Parfrey, Ford Rainey, Dan Dailey, James Caan, Lee
Marvin, Frank DeKova, Phyllis Coates, Joseph Campenella, Dorothy Malone, Scott
Brady, Stuart Erwin, Harry Morgan, Arthur Peterson, Sheree North, Telly
Savalas, Frank Sutton, Gerald Hiken, Robert Duvall, Kathleen Nolan, Barry
Morse, Roy Thinnes, Joe Turkel, Jack Klugman, George Voskovec, Pat Hingle, Joe
De Santis, Salome Jens, Nan Peterson, Barney Phillips, Penny Santon, Francine
York, Jay Novello, Rip Torn, Claude Akins, Joyce Van Patten, Tim Considine, Don
Gordon, Jeannie Cooper, Harold J. Stone, Vic Perrin, Robert Vaughn, Kent Smith,
Stanley Adams, Patricia Owens, Simon Oakland, Robert Emhardt, Jacqueline Scott,
Charles McGraw, Ed Nelson, Grace Lee Whitney, Jeremy Slate and Robert Yuro.
The cases
in each of the last 30 hour-long episodes featured in the two separate volumes
CBS has issued on DVD are self-contained, yet also contribute to an arc of how Ness and company did their job against some sometimes
serious odds. It has been a while since
we looked at the series on DVD, but the entire series is available and for
those who liked the feature film so much, the series holds up remarkably well
for its age and deserves a large new audience.
Later
came the 1987 Kevin Costner/Sean Connery, Robert De Niro hit film, followed by
a poor TV series revival, but the original remains impressive and really just
got better as it went along. Sadly,
there are no extras.
The 1080p
1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Boss has some style choices that one down color in phony ways, but
motion blur and other minor flaws hold back the overall performance in this
set, so it is faithful to what was shot by that is not always what it could or
should have been. The 1080p 1.78 X 1 black
and white digital High Definition image transfer on Keyhole is styled too, but that is in ways that do not ruin
definition, but make it look like an older monochrome film and the result is
(ignoring a few color frames) one of the best black and white films in quite a
while and a solid performer on Blu-ray.
The 1.33
X 1 black and white across the two sets of Untouchables
looks really good and so much so that it is a major improvement over the many
muddy broadcasts and lesser VHS versions we have seen over the years. When you can see how the show was actually
shot, a whole new appreciation down to the narrative results and this
marginally looks better than the earlier Season
One DVD we covered. Hope we get a
Blu-ray set of the show soon.
The
DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 7.1 mix on Boss
is a little better than the often quiet DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless
mix on Keyhole because that later
film is emulating silent films at times.
However, two more channels for Boss
does not mean the best-sounding TV Blu-ray to date as it sounds like they are
stretching out the sound a bit, plus the sound can still be a little more towards
the front speakers than I would like and some sound can be edgy in brief
section. The lossy Dolby Digital 2.0
Mono on all the Untouchables DVDs is
still good despite being the oldest set of recordings here despite not being as
quiet as Keyhole. It also sounds very well recorded for its age
and for TV, but we still have some distortion and flaws here and there. I cannot imagine any of these sounding much
better than they do in their respective releases.
- Nicholas Sheffo
