Among the army of artists forced to flee Europe because of Adolf Hitler were Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger, both notoriously autocratic directors with a special gift for getting normally problematic material past Hollywood censors. Lang’s “Scarlet Street” (1945) and Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder,” both newly arrived on Blu-ray, were banned (at least initially), respectively by New York state and Chicago respectively but passed the Production Code Authority without much fuss.
The noir classic “Scarlet Street” was the even-better followup to Lang’s “Woman in the Window” from the previous year, which had the same three leads, the same theme (married middle-aged man led astray by a femme fatale) but was compromised by an “it’s all a dream” ending that allowed the hero to escape punishment for his criminal acts without incurring the PCA’s wrath.
The later film — a remake of Jean Renoir’s “La Chienne” (1934) that Hollywood had been contemplating since the mid-30s but was stalled by censorship concerns — contains no such compromises. There’s little doubt that sultry brunette Joan Bennett is a prostitute and that Dan Duryea is her pimp. After Edward G. Robinson interrupts Duryea’s roughing up Bennett on a rain-slicked Greenwich Village Street, he invites her out for a drink where he unwisely boasts that he’s an artist whose canvases sell for $50,000 apiece. In reality, he’s a henpecked bank clerk and Sunday painter (the film’s in joke is that in real-life, Robinson was one of Hollywood’s savviest art collectors).
Bennett and Duryea (who she passes off to Robinson as the boyfriend of her roommate, Margaret Lindsay) see an easy and lucrative mark. But even they’re surprised when Robinson’s Diego Rivera-esque canvases get snapped up by an art critic who brings along an eager gallery owner.
Bennett is passed off as the artist, at least until Robinson’s shrewish wife passes the gallery and, in neat twist, accuses him of copying Bennett’s work. There are a series of confrontations, and Robinson eventually discovers that Bennett and Duryea have been playing him for a chump.
Robinson stabs Bennett to death in a rage, but this time it isn’t all a dream. The crime gets pinned on the supremely sleazy Duryea, who goes to the electric chair for a murder he didn’t comitt. (Kino’s Blu-ray includes a photo of a remarkable deleted scene where Robinson watches the execution while hanging from a telegraph pole).
But our hapless hero doesn’t truly get away with murder. He’s already lost his job for embezzlement (to settle a blackmail demand unrelated to Bennett and Duryea) and, five years later, is a vagrant sleeping on park benches haunted by his crime — cops won’t believe his confessions and he can’t even successfully kill himself.
The three stars and Lang are working at the top of their games in this remarkably frank and adult film for its era.
Kino is offering a sparkling new high-definition transfer that highlights Milton Krasner’s shadowy black-and-white cinematography and production designer Alexander Golitzen’s remarkable simulation of 1934 Greenwich Village. Produced by a production company formed by Lang, Bennett and her producer husband Walter Wanger, “Scarlet Street” long ago fell out of distributor Universal Pictures’ library and has circulated in poor public domain videos for decades. While there are a few minor blemishes, this is by far the best video rendition I’ve ever seen.
Criterion’s spectacular new Blu-ray upgrade of “Anatomy of a Murder” — far surpassing anything previously seen on video or TV — was transferred from the original camera negative held by distributor Columbia Pictures. Though Sam Levitt’s black-and-white camerawork is heavily indebted to film noir, Preminger had by this point (1959) evolved well beyond the studio-bound style of his genre-defining “Laura” (1944) and shot this remarkable legal thriller — by common consent, his best film, as well as his most popular — on atmospheric locations in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Even the courtroom scenes were shot in an actual courtroom rather than in a studio.
Preminger had sucessfully taken on the PCA over “The Moon is Blue” (which introduced the word “virgin” to the screen) and “The Man With the Golden Arm” (which scarred me forever as a six-year-old when my mother took me to see its bluntly explicit depiction of heroin addiction). Standards had been loosened enough that Preminger — by this point, the second best-known Hollywood director to the public after Hitchcock, partly due to his PCA skirmishes — was able to release this very frank version of a best-seller centering on a possible sex crime with the PCA’s blessing (if not that of Chicago’s censor board, which as unhappy with a film with repeated references to rape).
For the last in his remarkable run of 1950’s roles — this followed “Vertigo” and “Bell, Book in Candle” — James Stewart knocks it out of the park as a former longtime district attorney who reluctantly agrees to defend a surly Army officer (Ben Gazzara) accused of killing a never-seen tavern owner. His defense: temporary insanity after the murdered man raped his sexy wife (Lee Remick).
Preminger rivets your attention for an unusually long 160 minutes, taking nearly an hour before the trial starts to develop the characters of Stewart, an avid fisherman with seemingly little interest in working and surrounded by a family consisting of the town drunk and legal scholar (Arthur O’Connell) and loyal secretary (Eve Arden); his problematic, hot-headed client and the wife who Stewart has to advise to wear a girdle and glasses to barely camoflage her female charms.
The main event is the courtroom duel between Stewart, whose aw-shucks manner belies a brilliant legal strategist, and a young George C. Scott as a hotshot lawyer from Lansing who’s been imported to help Stewart’s blustering successor as prosecutor (Brooks West, who was married to Eve Arden).
Helped by a Wendell Hayes script that sidesteps the genre’s cliches all the way to an ambiguous ending, Preminger (whose father in Vienna was a prosecutor) presents what’s still one of the most realistic portrayals of American justice at work — as the two lawyers manipulate, insinuate and attack each others’ motives to influence the jury while the judge determines just how far they can go in a case whose particulars get quite seamy (one lengthy exchange revolves on the question of whether Remick wears panties) for the era.
Though Stewart dominates, Preminger has assembled a flawless acting ensemble here. Kathryn Grant and Murray Hamilton are memorable as employees of the dead man, both with secrets of their own, and his big casting coup was the only screen appearance by Joseph N. Welch — the lawyer who famously told off Senator Joseph McCarthy on national television — as the quiet but authorative judge.
Other familiar faces in the cast include Orson Bean (an Army psychiatrist), John Ford stock company veteran John Qualen (as a deputy sherriff), Howard McNear (a photographer) and Preston Sturges mainstay Jimmy Conlin (as a petty thief whose case precedes Gazzara’s). Even Duke Ellington, who contributed the memorable score, turns up briefly as a friend of the jazz-loving Stewart.
“Anatomy of a Murder” gets precisely the kind of superlative extras package it deserves from Criterion. Besides video essays on Preminger, Ellington and title designer Saul Bass, they include an except from a 1967 William F Buckley interview with Preminger, and, best of all, a half-hour work-in-progress excerpt from an upcoming documentary about the true case that inspired the film — and the movie’s shoot in Michigan. The latter is also covered in a faux newsreel promoting the film.
Warner Home Video has scheduled a couple of notable, anniversary-themed high-definition upgrades in the Blu-ray book format for June. Steven Spielberg’s underrated “Empire of the Sun” (1987) with young Christian Bale (wonder what became of him?), John Malkovich, and Ben Stiller is coming on June 19, with a vintage 49-minute making-of documentary ported over from the 2001 DVD release, as well as the 45-minue, Spielberg-narrated “Warners at War,” a survey of the studio’s World War II movies (including “Mission to Moscow”) recycled from the DVD edition of “This is the Army.”
On June 26, John Boorman’s “Deliverance” gets a 40-anniversary edition. Besides special features carried over from the DVD, there’s a new cast-reunion featurette.with Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ronny Cox and Ned Beatty.
Besides offering a recent raft of Blu-ray upgrades in honor of its 40th anniversary (including such Oscar winners as Michael Cimino’s “The Deer Hunter” and Sydney Pollack’s “Out of Africa”), Universal has also been repackaging films (singly and in themed mini-collections) in the DVD format. The studio’s first authorized DVD release of Gregory LaCava’s “My Man Godfrey” is taken from the same Library of Congress restoration as the Universal-authorized Criterion Collection DVD from a decade ago, but appears to be a fresh transfer. It’s the best rendition I’ve ever seen of this public-domain warhorse; too bad it’s not on Blu-ray.
Olive Films is releasing three westerns licensed from Paramount in both the Blu-ray and DVD formats on May 22. The big marquee title is Nicholas Ray’s “Run for Cover” (1955) in Technicolor and VistaVision. The cast includes James Cagney, Viveca Lindfors, John Derek, Ernest Borgnine, and in his final screen appearance, Jean Hersholt. There are also a pair of Technicolor oaters directed by Byron Haskin, with Edmond O’Brien booked by solid casts: “Silver City” (1951) with Yvonne DeCarlo, Richard Arlen and Barry Fitzgerald; and “Denver and Rio Grande” (1952) with Sterling Hayden and Dean Jagger.
Today’s typically eclectic releases from the Warner Archive Collection include a pair of Ann Sothern musicals that the manufacture-on-demand services says are designed to whet consumers’ demand for the forthcoming debut of her “Maisie” series on DVD: Walter Lang’s “Hooray for Love” (1937) with frequent co-star Gene Raymond, Fats Waller, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson; and, from her MGM period, Norman McLeod’s “Panama Hattie” (1942) co-starring Red Skeleton, with a Lena Horne musical number directed by an uncredited Vincente Minnelli.
Also: W.S. Van Dyke’s psychological drama “Rage in Heaven” (1941) starring the estimable trio of Robert Montgomery, Ingrid Bergman, and George Sanders; and Robert Stevenson’s wartime drama “Joan of Paris” (1942) with Michelle Morgan (Warners No. 1 choice for Bergman’s role in “Casablanca”), Paul Henreid, Thomas Mitchell, May Robson and Alan Ladd.
From the ’70s, Warner has unearthed MGM’s campus unrest drama “The Strawberry Statement” (1970) starring Bruce Davidson and Kim Darby (an extended European cut is offered as a bonus) and the 1975 remake of “The Spiral Staircase” with Jacqueline Bissett and Christopher Plummer, which was never released theatrically in the United States. WAC is also releasing the first season (1966-1967) of the “Tarzan” TV series with Ron Ely and Manuel Padilla.
Finally, the manufacture-on-demand service is taking pre-orders for three lesser-known musicals with legendary stars being released a week from today: Edwin L. Marin’s ‘Listen Darling” (1938), the very last Judy Garland picture in the Warner vaults to hit DVD, with the budding star billed under past-his-peak Freddie Bartholomew; Edward H. Griffith’s “Sky’s the Limit” (1942), Fred Astaire’s only post-Ginger return to RKO, with Warners’ Joan Leslie and the ubiquitous Robert Benchley; and Gregory LaCava’s last credited feature, the 1947 flop “Living in a Big Way” starring Gene Kelly and Marie “The Body” McDonald.