The Best Of Bogart Collection (African Queen/Casablanca/Maltese Falcon/Treasure Of The Sierra Madre/1941 - 1951/Warner Blu-ray Set)/The Bigamist (1953/Film Chest DVD)/City Of Bad Men (1953/Fox Cinema Archive DVD)/Kill Your Darlings (2013/Sony Blu-ray w/DVD)/The Patience Stone (2012/Sony DVD)

Picture: B/C/C+/B & C+/C+ Sound: C+ (Kill Blu-ray: B-) Extras: B/D/D/C+/C Films: B/C/C+/C+/B

Here are a set of dramas, including some classics, some lesser-seen older films worth a look and two new, ambitious entries....

The Best Of Bogart Collection is a new 4-Blu-ray disc set from Warner that features three of Bogie's most successful classic Warner films and one independent hit we finally caught up with.

That film would be John Huston's The African Queen (1951) with Bogart and Katharine Hepburn as a drunken boat captain and missionary respectively (who wants payback for the Germans killing her brother) in Africa during WWI and their clashing relationship speaks of class division (years before Wertmuller's Swept Away (1974)) as well as being a character study, offering some comedy and suspense that made this a critical and commercial hit.

Pulled off primarily because of the many obsessions and relentlessness of Huston, it holds up well and in some ways, seems as relevant as ever. Hardly a moment I wasted in the script and editing and the supporting cast including Walter Gotell, Robert Morley, Theodore Bikel and Peter Bull always make this one worth revisiting. If you have never seen it before, this Blu-ray is the best way outside of a really exceptional film print.

The only extra is the terrific featurette Embracing Chaos: The Making Of The African Queen.

The rest of the film's we have covered before, though this Blu-ray of Casablanca has a new darker HD transfer versus the earlier Blu-ray and out-of-print HD-DVD which we reviewed years ago and includes text on the history of transfers of the film. All the following discs also have the same exact extras as their predecessors.

Casablanca (1943)

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/4559/Casablanca+(HD-DVD

I like the detail and depth of the older HD copy, but like the richer Video Black on the newer HD master, but it is at the cost of detail and depth so it looks like this film (whose original camera materials are in good shape needs a 4K or 8K transfer with and possibly 4K playback to really get the most out of this classic. Until then, the version you want will be a matter of preference.

The Maltese Falcon (1941) + Treasure Of The Sierra Madre (1947)

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/10397/The+Maltese+Falcon+(1941)+++The+Treasure+Of

The only new extra for this nice, convenient Warner Blu-ray set is an envelope of poster art on cards, one per film.

Ida Lupino's The Bigamist (1953) was helmed by her the same year she made The Hitch-Hiker (see the Blu-ray review elsewhere on this site) with Edmond O'Brien as a happily married man, whose wife (Joan Fontaine) seems just fine, but it turns out it is not enough. He wants to have a second wife and lands up getting involved with another woman (Lupino co-starring in her own film effectively) without telling her his secret. Not as well known, it takes its 80 minutes and argues his motivation is purely loneliness and unhappiness, maybe depression. Today, we see guys with 5 wives seeming to be powered on egotism, pompousness, arrogance, entitlement and possibly a different kind of mental illness, so the set up here seems quaint by comparison.

This is still worth a look, despite not aging well and being very uneven, though this also seems timely again for a few reasons like the reemergence of this theme.

There are no extras.

Harmon Jones' City Of Bad Men (1953) is a drama and Western with Jeanne Crain in the middle of the conflicts that start when two bad men (Lloyd Bridges and Dale Robertson) head a crew bend on robbing the gross profits from a local boxing business in Carson City. Too bad Johnny Ringo (Richard Boone) and his gang have other plans. Just when the local Sheriff (Hugh Sanders) tries to get things under control, a third gang shows up in what is an interesting revenge western genre fans should check out if they are already unaware of it.

This smartly made film comes from the online-only Fox Cinema Archive DVD series and is surprising treatment for a first-rate Technicolor production, but I guess it needs rediscovery and for all the new substandard Westerns on TV and elsewhere, the time has come for this one to resurface. Carole Mathews also stars and and look for uncredited turns by John Doucette, James Best and King Donovan.

There are no extras.

John Krokidas' Kill Your Darlings (2013) is another film about Allan Ginsberg (here played by Daniel Radcliffe) and a look behind the lives of he and his friends, how they changed literature and helped launch a counterculture back in 1944 without knowing it. This also deals with their sex lives (usually gay), but also about the conflicts between each other and the people around them. Michael C. Hall gives easily his best performance outside of his hit Dexter series, Jack Huston is an understated Jack Kerouac, Ben Foster is on target (and not on screen enough) as William Burroughs and Dane DeHaan is effectively memorable as their key friend Lucien Carr.

This has some good moments, the cats makes sense and directing not bad, but the film seems flattened out despite additionally good turns by Elizabeth Olsen and Jennifer Jason Lee. It is not that the story and/or characters have been on film lately but that something is missing here. Not only is the pace off and not enough is being said and shown in its 103 minutes, but as I suspected, the extras show Deleted Scenes where the homosexual content (necessary and in context to the story) has been glossed over, truncated and even censored. It kills the credibility of the film which already had minor issues. Now you can see for yourself.

Extras include a feature length audio commentary track with Director Krokidas, Radcliffe, co-writer Bunn & DeHaan, Deleted Scenes, On The Red Carpet at The Toronto Film Festival, In Conversation with Daniel Radcliffe & Dane DeHaan and a Q&A with Krokidas & DeHaan.

Atiq Rahimi's The Patience Stone (2012) is a remarkable film out of Afghanistan with Golshifteh Farahani (Ridley Scott's Body Of Lies) as a married woman loyal to her very sick husband, staying with him no matter how much bloodshed and gunfire happens outside of her home even as it kills people she knows. She is challenged to leave him by people, circumstances and other deep, long stresses in her life. Now, things are getting worse and she is at her wits end. Can she survive and will she have to give up on her husband?

A character study of a woman, her country, her religion and of womanhood, the storyline may first seem like something we have seen before, but the film slowly picks up and when all is said and done, manages to make a big, important and long overdue big statement about the Middle East situation I thought we would never see. A remarkable film with a purely female discourse, it I very realistic, honest and should be considered must-see viewing for all serious film fans who are unhappy with the lack of truly mature adult narratives. Bravo!

A Making Of featurette is the only extra.

All of the Blu-rays here look good, from the 1080p 1.33 X 1 digital black & white High Definition image transfers on Casablanca (save the special comments), Maltese Falcon and Sierra Madre as Warner (and Ted Turner before them) took care of the movies early. African Queen was originally shot in and issued in original dye-transfer, three-strip 35mm Technicolor film prints and this 2009 restoration by Paramount (who licensed the film to Warner as part of a long list of Paramount catalog classics) is the latest of several attempts to fix the film and bring back its former glory.

Because this is actually the British version of Technicolor, it is a little darker than it might be otherwise and it is (like Jean Renoir's The River, shot around the same time) an early Technicolor shoot on location outdoors. Though I think some color might still not be 100%, this is easily the best the film has looked in a very long time and makes it much more enjoyable as a result to watch.

Master, genius Director of Photography Jack Cardiff, B.S.C., (The Red Shoes, The Prince & The Showgirl, Black Narcissus, Pandora & The Flying Dutchman) pulled off an innovative shoot here under tough circumstances and the result is a film that looks like hardly any other you'll see in the best way. The 1.33 X 1 frame has superior composition and remains one of his most successful and most seen films.

The 1080p 2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Kill can compete with anything here, shot on Kodak 35mm negative in the 3-perf Super 35mm format. Smartly styled and flowing well, only the fact that they used the same speed sock throughout holds it back, which still looks decent on the anamorphically enhanced DVD version, but that is no match for the Blu-ray,

As for the rest of the DVDs, the anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on Stone is also an effective shoot (shot with the Arri Alexa HD camera using Hawk Scope and Iscorama anamorphic lenses) fives it a nice look. The 1.33 X 1 three-strip technicolor print used for City is in decent shape and has been transferred well enough, but despite an HD transfer, the 1.33 x 1 black and white presentation on Bigamist is still a little soft despite a decent print.

In the sound department, the DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix on Kill is easily the best-sounding release on the list, warm, well-recorded, but quiet and dialogue-based (as expected) in nature. The only other lossless presentations are the DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 1.0 lossless tracks on Falcon and Madre, as African and Casablanca are surprisingly lossy Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono presentations that don't do justice to how the sound could and should be on their respective films. The lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on the DVDs of Bigamist and City sound just as good despite not being as clean.

That leaves the lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 on Stone also sounding good, but undercut by its own quiet nature, bet this would sound better in a lossless presentation.

- Nicholas Sheffo