Almost An Angel/Some Kind Of Hero/Won Ton Ton – The Dog That Saved Hollywood
(Legend DVD)
Picture: C+/C/C+ Sound: B-/C+/C+ Extras: D Films: D/D/C-
Three of
the films Legend Films has licensed from Paramount have one thing in
common. Each are comedies that were
expected to be good and all were critical and commercial failures. Paul Hogan was on he map with his Crocodile Dundee films when he wasted
Linda Kozlowski, Charlton Heston (as God!), Joe Dallesandro, David Allen Greer
and Elias Koteas in Almost An Angel
(1990) where he plays a man who unfortunately comes back to the world of the
living and wastes what precious little time they have on the moral earth. He wants to do good things, but the bets
thing he could have done was to stay away. This helped kill Hogan’s career and things
have been getting worse ever since.
Some Kind Of Hero (1982) is a very awkward
drama/comedy about a Vietnam vet (Richard Pryor) coming back home after many
years in a POW camp. What could have
been a great film, including Pryor in his prime, backfires into the hands of
Rollback revisionists on the period by being an uneven, awkward and highly
problematic dud made worse by the fact that no serious African American films
were being made on the subject.
Michael
Winner is now known for all time as the director of the original Death Wish and some of its sequels, but
is also known as a kind British gentleman director who also helmed many other
thrillers and mystery films. However,
the one film in his personal mode, Won
Ton Ton – The Dog That Saved Hollywood (1976) is a mess and wants to send
yup 1920s Hollywood with a Rin Tin Tin clone and manages to waste the great
Madeline Kahn as the lead woman in a constantly unfunny film.
It also
does not know what to do with its all-star cast, but at least this was not yet
another terrible attempt to clone It’s A
Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The
amazing cast also includes Bruce Dern, Art Carney, Phil Silvers, Teri Garr, Ron
Leibman, Morey Amsterdam, Billy Barty, Edgar Bergen, Milton Berle, Joan Blondell, Janet
Blair, Rory Calhoun, John Carradine, Jack Carter, Cyd Charisse, Jackie Coogan,
Broderick Crawford, Dennis Day, Gloria DeHaven, Yvonne De Carlo, William
Demarest, Alice Faye, Fritz Feld, Rhonda Fleming, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Sterling
Holloway, Tab Hunter, Fernando Lamas, Dorothy Lamour, Peter Lawford, Keye Luke,
Victor Mature, Virgina Mayo, Ethel Merman, Ann Miller, Ricardo Montalban, Cliff
Norton, Aldo Ray, Walter Pidgeon, Dean Stockwell, Nancy Walker, Johnny
Weissmuller, Jesse White, Henny Youngman, The Ritz Brothers and Army Archerd
among others. Too bad it was such a dog!
The
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on Angel
is not so good, but better than the shocking soft anamorphically enhanced 1.85
X 1 lameness on Hero. That leave Won looking the best of the three, odd because it is the oldest of
the three. It easily has the most money
and the best production values. The
Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo on Angel
has good Pro Logic surrounds and was originally issued in Dolby A-type analog
theatrical stereo. The clarity was a
surprise. The other films are Dolby
Digital 2.0 Mono and Won sounds a
tad better than Hero despite the age
difference. There are no extras on any
of the discs.
- Nicholas Sheffo
