The
Best Offer (2012/MPI/IFC
DVD)/Call Me Crazy: A Five
Film (2013/Sony
DVD)/Dante's Inferno
(1935)/Esther & The
King (1960)/I'd
Climb The Highest Mountain
(1951/Fox Cinema Archive DVDs)/Simon
& The Oaks
(2011/Image DVD)/Sodom &
Gomorrah (1962/Fox Cinema
Archive DVD)
Picture:
C/C/C/C/C-/C+/C- Sound: C+/C/C+/C+/C+/C+/C Extras:
C-/D/D/C-/D/D/C- Films: C+/B/C+/C/C-/C/C
PLEASE
NOTE:
The Dante's
Inferno,
Esther
& The King,
I'd
Climb The Highest Mountain
and Sodom
& Gomorrah
DVDs are now only available online and can be ordered from Amazon on
our sidebar.
This
set of dramas includes a few campy entries, a big surprise and
projects that were all ambitious in their own way.
Giuseppe
Tornatore's The
Best Offer
(2012) is
the Cinema
Paradiso
director's attempt at an interesting character study with Geoffrey
Rush as an upscale art buyer, auctioneer and more, but his
well-rounded life is challenged and self intrigued when a woman who
wishes to remain unseen has an estate she wants to sell quietly, but
something is amiss in all of it and this will not be another big
business transaction by any means. Rush is excellent in the lead,
carrying the role with ease and heft, but the screenplay starts to
falter in the latter half of the film, interesting as it is.
Donald
Sutherland is a friend who goes to outbid for the better pieces Rush
is auctioning and the supporting cast is as slid as the locations.
Tornatore is trying to say and show things with his superior eye for
the world, but this ends too abruptly and does not go as far or as
all the way as the makers may think. Nice try, but somewhat mixed
results means this is worth a look for those interested, but do not
go into it with high expectations.
An
Original Theatrical Trailer is the only extra.
Call
Me Crazy: A Five Film
(2013) is an excellent anthology telefilm dealing with all forms of
mental illness and the challenges, abuses and struggles that can go
with it. We get five very well made short stories that even have a
tie-in at the end including Laura Dern's
Grace
(Sarah Hyland has to deal with a very ill mother who is ruining their
lives with her grandiose, sick behavior), Ashley Judd's Maggie
(Jennifer Hudson comes back from military service with an ugly secret
that is destroying her; Ernie Hudson and Melanie Griffith also star),
Bonnie Hunt's Eddie
(Mitch Rouse is a stand-up comic who is so seriously depressed that
he may be soon self-destructing), Bryce Dallas Howard's Lucy
(Brittany Snow is a legal student whose schizophrenia is ruining her
life; Jason Ritter and Octavia Spencer also star) and Sharon
Maguire's Allison
(Sofia Vassilieva has a young lady whose sister unexpectedly shows up
for dinner when she is trying to introducer her family to her
boyfriend; Jean Smart also stars).
Like
the great telefilms of the past, it takes on serious issues and
handles them extraordinarily, is actually co-produced by Jennifer
Anniston (who never supports anything like this but always should
have) and I hope is huge enough success that it becomes a series of
TV movies at least. I was stunned at how well this one worked since
so much can go wrong so easily even in the most sincere attempts to
deal with the serious issues covered. I strongly recommend it!
There
are no extras, but I will add that Melissa Leo, Lea Thompson, Ken
Baumann, Chelsea Handler, Aimee Teegarden, Jay Chandrasekhar, Dave
Foley, Nick Santoro, Adam Shapiro and Clint Howard also star.
Harry
Lachman's Dante's
Inferno
(1935)
has nothing to do with the myth or literary classic, but instead is
an early Fox Film (before they merged with 20th
Century Pictures) with Spencer Tracy as a down-on-his-luck worker
with a touch of con artist in him who is about to loose his latest
shipman job when he comes upon an amusement park area that includes a
show with the title of the film. Claire Trevor is the woman
connected to it and he falls for her while seeing dollar signs about
it, so he quickly starts going into ballyhoo mode and makes it more
profitable than it ever was.
This
brings out his predatory side (regardless of an early, prolonged
blackface sequence that really, really dates the film) and starts to
expand the park as he marries her, has a family and does not care how
cold he gets or who he pushes out. Thus, the script is a sort of
cautionary tale with the capable Lachman juggling some big production
design and an actual Inferno sequence that looks like it could be in
a Biblical epic. The studio was trying something different and that
Is a plus, but the resulting film was always uneven and has aged
oddly, yet shows how serious the original Fox Studios was about big
filmmaking. That is why you should see this one at least once.
There
are no extras.
Raoul
Walsh's Esther
& The King
(1960) is
the gusty director's attempt as a swords & sandals Biblical epic
including Richard Egan as a widowed King who becomes enthralled with
Joan Collins in her early prime as Esther. The 4th
Century has never looked so fake with so much money on screen, plus
the film comes across as stiff and stagey throughout its long 109
minutes. This was the peak year of the genre (a year after Ben-Hur,
the year of Spartacus)
and it cannot compare to the better films in that cycle, but it is a
curio for the talent involved and should be in print.
An
Original Theatrical Trailer is the only extra.
Henry
King's I'd
Climb The Highest Mountain
(1951) is an amazingly boring drama about two people (Susan Hayward
and William Lundigan) who fall in love in the middle of an isolated
Georgia town that gets very heavy-handed about faith, melodrama and
much more. Rory Calhoun also shows up in this film that wallow in
every idea it comes up with, making it one of the muddiest such
melodramas I have ever seen. Unless you like the genre, actors or
are very, very curious, skip it.
There
are no extras.
Lisa
Ohlin's Simon
& The Oaks
(2011) has Bill Skarsgard in a drama about two families in Germany
who suddenly pretend to become one as WWII sets in and the Nazis
start to go on a witch hunt for Jews, anyone who helps then and will
kill any and all who stand in the way. Written, acted and directed
with believability and well-rounded enough, the problem here is
simply that the film breaks no new ground on the subject for which so
many. In its 122 minutes, the thing any such film on the subject of
The Holocaust can do at this point is not trivialize it or botch the
facts and truths, which this does not seem to. It is worth a look if
you are interested.
There
are no extras.
Robert
Aldrich's Sodom
& Gomorrah
(1962) has
another gutsy director taking on a swords & sandals Biblical epic
and like Walsh, runs into thy same problems too and not just because
it was also partly an Italian production. You get some more good
actors, in this case being Stuart Grainger, Pier Angeli, Stanley
Baker, Anouk Aimee and Rossana Podesta, but the story is flat,
weighed-down in its overproduction and this is the longest, 154
minutes cut of the film.
This
is one of the only films explicitly about the events and we can see
why. It would take far less censorship and more honesty, not
counting political opinions, to do this with real impact and John
Huston took it on to better effect in part of his underrated,
70mm-shot The Bible in 1966, but this one ($5 Million at the
time, $38 Million adjusted 52+ years later, but that does not count
how much higher film production has soared, so think $100 Million +
at least) is the biggest stand-alone filmed telling to date. The
curious might be interested, but don;t operate heavy machinery
afterwards.
An
Original Theatrical Trailer is the only extra.
Including
some of the rough film prints used on the Fox DVD releases by Fox's
own admission, picture performance among the DVDs are not always as
strong as they could be. The letterboxed 2.35 X 1 image on Sodom
and 1.33 X 1 image on Climb
(originally issued in dye-transfer,
three-strip Technicolor 35mm prints)
are especially weak with damaged prints of uneven color, aged nature
and other fidelity issues
that are
very trying. The
anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image on Oaks
is the visual champ here despite some weakness issues.
I
expected the anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on Offer
to be as good considering the director, but it was weaker and softer
than I would have liked, as was the anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1
image on Call,
though both should have Blu-ray editions. That leaves the
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on King
(with color issues, had Mario Bava as its Director of Photography and
direct at least some of it in its Italian language variant) and black
and white 1.33 X 1 image on Inferno
(the print showing its age) also average and mixed with detail
issues, so those four titles fall in the middle.
The
sound on all the DVDs are what I expected, but the lossy Dolby
Digital 5.1 on Call
is a
bit softer than I would have liked, odder because it seems well
recorded and lossy English Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on Sodom
showing its age and post-production Italian lab audio work typical of
productions in that country post-WWII.
The
lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 on Offer
is barely the best release sonically on this list and Oaks
only has a lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo mix with some weak Pro
Logic-type surrounds. The rest of the DVDs have lossy Dolby Digital
2.0 Mono (Inferno,
King
(originally 4-track magnetic stereo, this has some echo and a little
shrillness) and Climb)
sounding good for their age.
-
Nicholas Sheffo
