High Time
(1960/Fox/Twilight Time Limited Edition Blu-ray)/Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993/Sony/Umbrella Region 4 PAL DVD
Import)/Umberto D. (1952/Criterion
Blu-ray)
Picture: B/C+/B Sound: B-/C+/B- Extras: C+/C-/B Films: C+/B-/B
PLEASE
NOTE: The High Time
Blu-ray is limited to 3,000 copies and is available exclusively at the Screen
Archives website which can be reached at the link at the end of this review,
while this DVD version of Manhattan
Murder Mystery is a PAL Region 4 DVD edition and can also be purchased from
links listed below.
The
male-centered comedy film only works when the lead actor is funny and can be
capable of comedy beyond being amusing.
What follows are three different films that prove this, even when one of
them is playing against Hollywood standards.
Blake
Edwards became a well-known and very successful comedy director and High Time (1960) with Bing Crosby is
interesting in that it is one of Crosby’s only
solo starring efforts. When I told
people he made this film, several of them, not knowing the plot, asked me what
it was about. I said that he gets bored
hanging with Bob Hope, so he seeks out the counterculture and tries LSD!
Of
course, that is not the case, but it gets big laughs. In real life, Crosby
plays a middle-aged widow and food industry businessman who decides to go back
to school and pick up in college. He
graduated high school in the 1920s! It
is a little more than a one-note comedy and there are a few good gags and funny
moments, but somehow not enough to fill its 103 minutes. Still, it is interesting to see him try and
be hip, living with Fabian (from the bobby soxer era between serious eras of
real Rock Music) and Richard Beymer (of The
Diary Of Anne Frank, about to really break out in West Side Story and The
Longest Day, all reviewed elsewhere on this site).
There are
a few new songs for Crosby to suddenly sing,
but they actually are breaks in what is obviously already weak scripting. Tuesday Weld, Nicole Maurey and soon to be
Batgirl Yvonne Craig make up the female cast and even Gavin MacLeod shows up,
so this is worth a look to get all the laughs and unintentionally funny moments
out of it, but don’t expect it to hold up overall.
Extras
include an isolated music score, Original Theatrical Trailer and nicely
illustrated booklet on the film including informative text with another winning
Julie Kirgo essay on the film.
Returning
to his comic roots around the time his scandal broke with Mia Farrow, Woody
Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery
(1993) holds up pretty well two decades later as he and his wife (played by
Diane Keaton, replacing Farrow for obvious reasons) are having fun, but he is
not one for the arts. She agrees to go
to his baseball game, but he walks out on her Wagner concert for personal
reasons, but all that is soon put aside when an old couple they know suddenly
finds the stamp-collecting husband a widow.
The couple starts to suspect it is murder.
Anjelica
Houston and Alan Alda help make up the supporting cast and sadly, this is one of
Allen’s last comedies set in New York
City before he started doing more serious films and
found NYC too expensive top make his low-budget films in. It is a nice return to form, even though some
complained at the time it was regressive, that missed the point. Woody Allen is one of the great comedy
directors and he can go back and be funny anytime he wants. He proves that here. A trailer is the only extra.
Finally
we have one of Vittorio De Sica’s Italian Neo-Realist classics, Umberto D. (1952) with Carlo Battisti
as the title character, an elderly man with a dog, limited resources and few
alternatives in life on his pension.
After working for the country for 30 years, he is barely getting by, has
few friends and now his big-mouthed landlady wants him out if he cannot pay his
rent on time. This has much comedy to
it, but also some drama, melodrama and eventually, some more profound points
about life, living and our worth to ourselves and others, even when we are
increasingly invisible to society in general.
Umberto
Domenico Ferrari (is that last name supposed to be ironic?) is one of the
Italian cinema’s classic characters and the script and directing by De Sica
take their time to also make this a character study, as well as an examination
of the human condition. Some moments
work better than others, but this stands up as among his best work along with Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief among the best works of the famous key
international filmmaker who also had a long, successful character actor career.
This new Criterion Blu-ray edition is a
major upgrade over the many copies on video and even film I have seen in the
past, so it was like seeing the film for the first time and is a must-see film
for anyone serious about filmmaking and its art.
Extras include Criterion’s always nicely illustrated booklet on the film
including informative text, technical information, reprints of writing on the
film by De Sica and Battisti and a new essay by film scholar Stuart Klawans,
while the Blu-ray itself adds a nice Theatrical Trailer, 55-minutes-long 2001
Italian TV special called That’s Life: Vittorio De Sica and 2003
interview with actress Maria Pia Casilio, who played the title character’s
young female teen friend.
The 1080p
2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Time can look a little color limited at times, but considering the
age of the film and distortion the old CinemaScope lenses were capable of,
looks about as good as it is going to and was issued in DeLuxe color, which
tends to have some fading more often than not.
The scope frame is used very effectively and you get the idea of good
the film looked upon first release from most of the scenes here. The 1080p 1.33 X 1 digital black and white High
Definition image transfer on Umberto
has been sourced from the original nitrate camera negative, including some
damage that has not been fixed, but the new transfer yields detail, depth, jet
blacks and ivory white missing from most copies of the classic 60 years after
its smash international debut. DuPont
film was used to shoot it and it is not always the sharpest stock, but this
looks as good as it is going to here.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image on Mystery
is the same video master as the U.S. Sony DVD and looks good for the
format, but this is a good-looking film and I hope we see a Blu-ray sometime
soon.
The
DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 4.0 lossless mix on Time is towards the front speakers as expected with a film that was
a film originally designed for 4-track magnetic sound with traveling dialogue
and sound effects, but the DTS-MA 2.0 Stereo isolated music track offers
fidelity you just will not hear in the music mixed-down with the rest of the
sound elements. This too is as good as
this is going to sound, but don’t expect a consistent soundfield as we know it
today, plus some dialogue is more in the center channel than I would have
liked.
The lossy
Dolby Digital 2.0 sound on Mystery
is basically mono with weak stereo-elements at times and analog Dolby noise
reduction to make it sound cleaner. That
leaves PCM 2.0 Mono on Umberto
coming from the original analog optical soundtrack and it does show its age,
but Criterion has cleaned it up and this is as good as this film is ever going
to sound.
As noted
above, High Time can be ordered while
supplies last at:
www.screenarchives.com
… and you
can get the PAL Region 4 DVD import of Manhattan
Murder Mystery exclusively from Umbrella at:
http://www.umbrellaent.com.au/
- Nicholas Sheffo
