The Gregory Peck Film Collection (Universal DVD)
Picture/Sound/Extras/Films:
The World In His Arms (1952) C+/C+/D/C+
To Kill A Mockingbird – Special
Edition
(1962) B-/B-/A-/A-
Cape Fear (1962) C+/C+/C+/B-
Captain Newman, M.D. (1963) C+/C+/D/B-
Mirage (1965) C+/C+/D/C+
Arabesque (1966) B-/C+/D/B
Without
any doubt, Gregory Peck is one of the great leading men going back to his
earliest appearances in films like Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 masterwork Spellbound. Hitting new highs and peaks over at Universal,
he made some of his most interesting and important films, six of which have
been collected in the new DVD box set The
Gregory Peck Film Collection. The
transfers are pretty good and we’ll now look at each film, some of which had
never been issued on DVD before until now in the U.S. market.
The World In His Arms is a Raoul Walsh drama with Peck
as a sea captain (in the 1850s!) and Ann Blyth as a Russian Countess. It is a beautiful production with a mixed
script, decent acting (including Anthony Quinn) and is a romance with mixed
results. The money is on the screen,
though and it has its moments. The DVD includes
the original theatrical trailer.
To Kill A Mockingbird is dubbed a “Special Edition” on
the back of the box, but is actually the newer Legacy Edition of this classic that we already covered at this
link:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/2792/To+Kill+A+Mockingbird+-+Legacy
Cape Fear is the original 1962 edition of
the thriller that has been in print for years and is J. Lee Thompson’s
memorable look at the thin line between innocence and guilt, good and evil and
pits Peck against Robert Mitchum in a film Martin Scorsese later remade into a
hit. Extras include stills and a making
of featurette.
Captain Newman, M.D. has Peck, Tony Curtis, Angie
Dickinson, Eddie Albert, James Gregory, Robert Duvall, Bethel Leslie, Jane
Withers, Dick Sargent, Larry Storch, Vito Scotti, Barry Atwater, Jack Grinnage,
Ted Bessell
and Bobby Darin in this David Miller–directed drama/comedy set in 1944 in a
mental institute and during WWWII. The
film is good and Darin is impressive in a role recently revisited by Kevin
Spacey, whose Darin film Beyond The Sea
recreates the behind the scenes of this film briefly. Bold for its time, it holds up better than
expected and deserves rediscovery.
Mirage is another one of Edward Dmytryk’s
interesting post-HUAC commercial film thrillers in which Peck plays an amnesia
victim who slowly starts to investigate what is going on, who is his friend,
his enemy and who is after what. Peter
Stone (Charade, Arabesque) wrote the script, but it just becomes too muddled
despite the talent involved. The cast
includes Walter Matthau, Diane Baker, Kevin McCarthy, Jack Weston, Leif
Erickson, Walter Abel, George Kennedy and Franklin Cover. It would be remade only three years later as Jigsaw.
Arabesque is my personal favorite on the
set, long overdue for release on DVD with Peck as a professor of hieroglyphics
who is recruited to figure out the meaning of a message he is unaware was
obtained by murdering its carrier. Soon,
he finds himself in a web of intrigue that includes a power struggle between
visiting Arab powers, a mysterious, beautiful woman played by Sophia Loren in her
best outright Hollywood film work ever and is one of director Stanley Donen’s
greatest, most underrated films.
Though he
had great success with Charade
(1963), Donen was unhappy with his film being compared to the work of Alfred
Hitchcock over and over again as if he was just some imitator. The film was much more and Donen decided to
make another witty thriller and go all out in a way that would distinguish it
from Hitchcock’s work, even if it was still in the Hitchcock mode. This time, it would be shot in real
anamorphic Panavision (a format Hitchcock never used), have even more action
& spy elements and with his cinematographer Christopher Callis (who was
also Director of Photography on Charade)
to push the camera and composition in every way imaginable, no matter how
unusual, distorted, unique or wild. Add
Henry Mancini’s score (including the great instrumental theme song) and the
result is a great comic thriller that was even more in the spirit of the new
spy thrillers (think The Ipcress File
and the darker side of the Bond films) than Hitchcock, who was set in his own
style with Spy thrillers like Torn
Curtain (1966, same year and studio) and Topaz (1969). The film would
influence everything from The Spy Who
Loved Me to True Lies and will
continue to be one of the great films of its genre, as well as one of the
visual Hollywood A-productions of its time.
Henry Mancini’s theme song and score are also
The 1.33
X 1 Technicolor image on World is pretty
good for color, though detail can be an issue; one that will hopefully be
solved when the Blu-ray arrives. The
anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image on Mockingbird
is better than Cape Fear (which is
simply an older transfer of good film materials), Mirage (which is a bit softer than I would have liked) and Newman (which is Eastman/PathéColor and
is a bit pale). The anamorphically
enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on Arabesque
is the real winner here, as shot in real anamorphic Panavision and printed in
three-strip dye-transfer Technicolor, this often looks like one of those great
prints,
Except
for Mockingbird with its 5.1
upgrades, all the films have good, clean for their age Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
tracks form the original theatrical mono sound.
Only Mockingbird, World and Cape Fear have extras, as noted above, but they all should have at
least had trailers and Arabesque
deserved even more. Still, this is a
fine set and highly recommended.
- Nicholas Sheffo
