True Aussie Crime Collection (Money
Movers/Great Bookie Robbery/Last Man Hanged/Hoodwink/Umbrella Entertainment/Region Zero/0/PAL DVD Set)
Picture: C+
Sound: C+ Extras: C Main Programs: B-
PLEASE NOTE: This DVD can only be operated on
machines capable of playing back DVDs that can handle Region Zero/0 PAL format
software and can be ordered from our friends at Umbrella Entertainment at the
website address provided at the end of the review.
Umbrella Entertainment has grouped four interesting tales
of real life crime you have likely not seen unless you have lived down under
for years into a convenient new set. The True Aussie Crime Collection offers
Bruce Beresford’s 1978 heist drama Money
Movers, 1986 TV Mini-Series The
Great Bookie Robbery, 1992 docudrama Last
Man Hanged (about the state execution of Robert Ryan) and 1981 drama Hoodwink about how criminal Carl
Synnerdahl pretended to be blind to avoid jail time.
Money
Movers is about an armored car heist when Beresford was more
willing to take on gritty material (versus his biggest hit, Driving Miss Daisy), just before his
classic Breaker Morant where
troubles inside the company robbed are as problematic as anything. A no-holds-barred look at the system and human
nature, this holds up well, is not bad and is sometimes brutal.
The
Great Bookie Robbery is a three-part (at one hour each) mini-series is
able to take its time to show how the robbers got their money, acted like
family, is if nothing was going to happen to them and get away with it. That leisure approach is more like what
really happens in such cases and this series gets it right.
Last Man
Hanged has star Colin Friels very good as Ronald Ryan, a man
whose hanging was such a mess and created such an outrageous situation that
such executions were ended. This was
made for TV, but for the hour that it lasts, is very compelling. Writer/Director/Co-Star Lewis Fitz-Gerald
takes the material seriously and turns out a professional piece of
journalistically sound work that holds up.
Hoodwink also
has Friels, but John Hargreaves plays the arrested man feigning blindness. Also featuring early performances by Judy
Davis, Wendy Hughes and a cameo role by Geoffrey Rush, Claude Whatham’s raw
look at the justice system and how people act in it is a serious drama with
little humor, even the dark kind. If
anything, it too can be brutal, but it works.
That amounts to one of the best such sets we have received
from Umbrella to date and all are worth a look.
The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image Movers (lensed by Donald McAlpine) and Hoodwink (lensed by Dean Semler) are
from restored print with good color, though the latter opens and closes with
1.33 X 1 credits centered in the anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 frame. Hanged
has a 1.33 X 1 image centered in an anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image with
some aliasing errors, but looking pretty good considering. The 1.33 X 1 image on Bookie is soft because it is a filmed production finished on analog
videotape. This nicely shot piece
deserves to be upgraded. Extras include
a trailer and making of featurette on Movers,
audio commentary and actual news report of the crime on Bookie, stills and 20-minutes featurette on Hanged and stills/poster gallery and making of featurette on Hoodwink.
As noted above, you can order this PAL DVD Set import
exclusively from Umbrella at:
http://www.umbrellaent.com.au/
- Nicholas Sheffo
