Warner Bros. Romance Classics Collection (Palm
Springs Weekend/Parrish/Rome Adventure/Susan Slade/DVD Box with Troy Donahue)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C Extras: C- Films: C
Though
the studio has produced much better romance films, Warner Bros. produced
colorful soap opera melodramas of the sudsiest kind in the 1960s like the other
studios and this cycle was the last of its kind before TV overtook this
category permanently. With Troy Donahue
under contract, they brought in the stars and wacky situations in any way they
could to keep their target female audience interested. Now, these are campy films, though they
likely were then too.
Palm Springs Weekend (1963) has Connie Stevens,
Stephanie Powers, Robert Conrad, Ty Hardin, Jack Weston and Jerry Van Dyke in
the title location as basketball player Donahue and company go on spring
break. Amusing and one of the better
films here.
Parrish (1960) is more dramatic as the
epic tale of a tobacco family unfolds.
Claudette Colbert, Karl Malden, Dean Jagger, Diane McBain and Connie
Stevens overdo it in what feels like a cut-rate Giant, but we’ve seen worse.
Rome Adventure (1962) pairs future husband &
wife Donahue and Suzanne Pleshette, in a somewhat serious romp that does not
take itself too seriously and shows the late, great Pleshette’s star power and
winning personality. Rossano Brazzi and
Angie Dickinson also star.
Susan Slade (1961) has Stevens as the title
character who encounters more tragedy than a Nostradamus review trying to finds
happiness and finding disaster at every turn.
Dorothy McGuire, Lloyd Nolan, Kent Smith, Natalie Schafer and Grant
Williams also star in this melodramatic overkill that wears thin quickly; the
kind Carol Burnett used to make fun of on her show. You get the idea.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image on all four films are good, if not
great, with some definition and detail issues.
All four films were lucky enough to be issued in dye-transfer, Three-strip
Technicolor, which you can get the idea of at times watching this here. However, they could all look better. The Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono sound shows its
age on all four films, though all also sound a little more compressed than they
should. The only extra for all four are
trailers to each respective film.
- Nicholas Sheffo
