Children
Of Divorce
(1927/Paramount/Blackhawk Films/Flicker Alley Blu-ray
w/DVD)/Sentimental Journey
(1946/Fox Cinema Archive DVD)/Something
Wild (1961/United
Artists/MGM/Criterion Blu-ray)/Western
Union (1941/Fox Cinema
Archive DVD)
Picture:
B & C+/C/B/C Sound: B- & C+/C/B-/C+ Extras: B-/D/B/D
Films: B-/C/B-/C+
PLEASE
NOTE:
The Sentimental
Journey
and Western
Union
DVDs are now only available online from Fox and are both limited
editions, so order from Amazon via our sidebar while supplies last.
Here
are four classic dramas with plenty of melodrama to offer from four
fine filmmakers to be in the know about.
Frank
Lloyd (and an uncredited Josef von Sternberg)'s Children
Of Divorce
(1927) starts during WWI when parents would leave their children in
Paris for long stretches due to the awful conflict, then
fast-forwards to the period of release where a young man (a young
Gary Cooper on his way to superstardom) is about to marry his
childhood sweetheart (Esther Ralston), but Kitty (Clara Bow) won't
have it and does what she needs to do to break them up and steal him.
The
idea of the scenario is to push Bow as the sex symbol and huge
sensation she became, resulting in an icon of the free flapper era
and new ways human sexuality was being thought of and addressed, but
no doubt Bow was amazing the camera loved her, people loved her and
this film shows us why even nine decades later and counting why she
was such a big deal. From the #2 studio of the time, Paramount
Pictures, it only runs 71 minutes, but that was considered long for
the silent days and it delivers a surprising amount of impact. Keep
in mind the Hollywood Code had not kicked in yet either and the film
will definitely surprise you.
Extras
in Flicker Alley's usual, sturdy, clear, hard plastic packaging
include another
thick, high quality Souvenir Booklet with rare photographs; an essay
by film preservationist and Clara Bow biographer David Stenn; notes
on the production of the documentary by producer-director Hugh Munro
Neely; and a brief write-up about the music by Rodney Sauer, score
compiler and director of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, plus
the DVD version and both discs add the hour-long film "Clara
Bow: Discovering the 'It' Girl"
narrated by Courtney Love, that documents the life of the woman who
would become the icon of the flapper era, from her tragic childhood
to her tumultuous personal life as Hollywood's first sex symbol. Be
sure to watch it after
seeing the film.
Walter
Lang's Sentimental
Journey
(1946) is an efficient, successful melodrama about sacrifice with the
always great Maureen O'Hara as an married actress who is secretly
sick, so she adopts a daughter so her husband (John Payne) is not
totally alone when she is gone. Is this moral, ethical or personally
wrong, or is it something else? The film is not always interested in
answering that as it goes for the weepiness of the matter, a
commercial move that worked, but at the expense of skipping deeper
concerns.
Despite
the leads and supporting turns by William Bendix, Sir Cedric
Hardwicke, Mischa Auer, Glenn Langan, Kurt Krueger, Trudy Marshall
and Ruth Nelson among others, it is amazing how stale and flat the
film is. Fox later remade it as Gift
Of Love
with Lauren Bacall and Robert Stack (reviewed elsewhere on this
site), but the results were no better. Thus, both versions have been
issued as Fox Cinema Archive DVDs in limited runs.
There
are no extras.
Jack
Garfein's Something
Wild
(1961, not connected with the Jonathan Demme film in any way that
Criterion actually issued on Blu-ray a few years ago) has been
restored and Criterion has issued a remarkable special edition on the
tale of a young woman (Carroll Baker) who is going to school and has
much to live for, but is sexually assaulted one night and is never
the same again.
Instead
of going to the doctor, a hospital or getting help, she keeps the
horrific event a secret as it slowly chips away at her inner peace,
psyche and more. This includes leaving home unannounced, moving into
a new place, leaving school and taking a job at a retail store.
Needless to say it does not end there as she is still
in pain the film unexploitively examines how she deals with the
unspeakable in event after event that offers a new twist and turn in
her life that is disturbing, confusing, offers no comfortably simple
answers and gives us a vital train of thought about how such hurt
leaves permanent scars and how complex that really is.
Jean
Stapleton and Doris Roberts have great turns as busy bodies that just
get better with age, though they're work only lasts so long. Clifton
James is the detective who does not know what happened to her and is
not sure why or how she is missing. Mildred Dunnock and Charles
Watts play her good-if-unconnected parents and Ralph Meeker appears
later as a mysterious new figure in her life who also has issues.
Far
from politically correct in unexpected ways, it asks question and
poses adult situations you hardly ever see in feature films or
uncensored TV, even if it has its own issues I cannot get into
without revealing spoilers. It has been a while since I have seen
the film and am glad its back. A very ambitious film and important
pre-American New Wave piece of pure cinema, it certainly deserves
serious rediscovery and I believe it could and would find a larger
audience now as a result.
Extras
include a DigiPak with a nicely illustrated booklet on the film
including informative text and an
essay by critic Sheila O'Malley, while the Blu-ray disc adds a new
conversation between Garfein and critic Kim Morgan, new interview
with actor Carroll Baker, new interview with scholar Foster Hirsch on
the Actors Studio's cinematic legacy, and Master
Class with Jack Garfein,
a 2015 recording of one of the director's world-famous lectures on
acting technique.
Finally
we have Fritz Lang's Western
Union
(1941), tells the tale of the split of two criminal brothers who
split because one wants to get clean and contribute to the title
enterprise, but in this revenge western drama, this will not be as
peaceful a split as it could be... or we wouldn't have a movie.
Based on the Zane Grey book, Robert Young and Randolph Scott are the
brothers, but the film is a mixed affair with fake 'Hollywood
Indians' and melodrama more than you usually get from Lang, though
his trademark angered conflict between characters typical of his
studio films are here.
Despite
being shot in Technicolor and with Dean Jagger, Robert Carradine,
Chill Wills and a decent supporting cast with money on the screen,
this has aged oddly and I can see why it has been issued as a limited
run Fox Cinema Archive DVD release. Lang alone is more than
significant enough that this should be in print, but it didn't stick
with me when I first saw it eons ago despite some good scenes and
that hasn't changed much since. However, seeing nice guy and future
TV star Young, still a big movie star here, is an amusing change from
Father
Knows Best
and Marcus
Welby, M.D.,
et al.
There
are no extras.
The
1080p 1.33 X 1 black & white digital High Definition image
transfer on Divorce
can obviously show the age of the materials used, but this is far
superior a transfer to all previous releases of the film, especially
as this has so many sequences that look amazing for their age. Of
course, Bow looks great throughout and any time I see a silent
classic saved, there is always a special pleasure in that since so
many have been lost for reasons too sad and numerous to go into here.
Thus, expect some remarkable playback at times.
The
1080p 1.66 X 1 black & white digital High Definition image
transfer on Wild
is even better (not just because it is shot 34 years later) and I had
not seen this one for a very long time. Monochrome film had come a
long way in about 35 years and there were more companies making such
stocks then (DuPont, Kodak, Agfa, Ansco/GAF, 3M Ferrania, etc.) so
the competition furthered the progress of making them more
light-sensitive. Sadly, color was starting to take over, but at the
time of this release, such films were very commonplace and expected.
This new 2K scan from the original 35mm negative offers detail and
depth like nothing seen of the film in decades (save those with fine
film prints) and Video Black, shadow detail and gray scale are very
impressive all the way through.
The
1.33 X 1 image on the DVDs follow with the
black & white Journey
transfer a bit softer than expected all around, while Union
is not what I had hoped for in a film that was originally issued in
35mm dye-transfer,
three-strip Technicolor. It is simply that Fox wanted to have these
in print until they could get to restoring them, which is often the
case for such limited editions, but they are still both watchable.
The
Blu-rays also have the best sound, if limited, both in PCM lossless
sound. Divorce
is a new stereo recording for the silent film that is good, but the
PCM 2.0 Stereo can have a little of an edge to it, though still
sounds better than the lossy PCM 2.0 Stereo on the DVD. Wild
offers a remarkable PCM 1.0 Mono from its original optical
soundmaster and is as clean as possible to the point that I doubt it
could sound much better.
That
leaves the lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on the Fox DVDs. Union
sounds good for its age and ties the Divorce
DVD sonics, but Journey
is too far down a generation or two and is a disappointment as last
place sonically among these releases.
-
Nicholas Sheffo