I think I see your problem. You have this list. It’s a list of people you need/want to buy a Christmas gift for. The trouble is that they’re into home theatre, and you don’t know Star Trek from Star Wars. You couldn’t tell a Wolf Man from a Wolverine. And you always thought that Paranormal Activity was something too kinky to talk about. Fortunately, Upcomingdiscs has come to the rescue every Christmas with our Gift Guide Spotlights. Keep checking back to see more recommendations for your holiday shopping. These gift guides ARE NOT paid advertisements. We take no money to publish them. With conditions as they are, shopping won’t be easy this season. The nice thing about discs is that they’re so easy to get from places like Amazon that you can give a great gift and stay perfectly safe while you do it. Kino Studio Classics has put out some great classical films on UHD/4K. Here is a great selection:
Escape From Alcatraz
“It’s opening up all kinds of doors.”
Alcatraz Prison was one of the country’s most secure facilities for over 60 years. It was built on a rocky island off San Francisco. You couldn’t dig through the rock, and the surrounding ocean was cold and heavily populated by sharks big enough to feed off the plentiful seal population. For 60 years no one had successfully escaped the prison. That record was broken in June of 1962 when three inmates, brothers Clarence and John Anglin, escaped with Frank Morris, who was believed to have masterminded the plot. Sixty years later the case remains officially open, and no one knows what happened to the three men. In 1963 J. Campbell Bruce wrote a non-fiction book called Escape From Alcatraz. The book attempted to document all of the serious attempts to escape the prison, which of course included the 1962 escape. The book also called attention to some of the conditions of the prison and was a part of the reason it shut down completely just a year after publication of the book.
Enter Hollywood screenwriter Richard Tuggle, who took on the script on spec and researched the events of the book and created a treatment to shop around. The problem was he couldn’t find a single party that was interested in the property. He used a lie to get director Don Siegal’s agent to forward a copy to the director. The ruse paid off, and Siegal shared it with his Dirty Harry partner Clint Eastwood, who wanted very much to do the film. That interest led to the story finally making it to film in 1979. Escape From Alcatraz was a go, and now it’s finally made its way to UHD/4K, and that’s where the fun begins, thanks to Kino-Lorber.
“Welcome to Alcatraz.”
While the escape is the obvious draw to the film, Siegal and Eastwood agreed early that the film wouldn’t just be an escape plot drama. The decision was made early to populate the film with interesting characters that if well cast (and it was) would make for a compelling drama even without the escape plot points. They put that idea to the test when the escape plot doesn’t even really begin until halfway through the film. Instead we’re introduced to these amazing characters, and this would be a model followed later by Steven King and his gang for his prison films The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. But that kind of prison film started here with Escape From Alcatraz.
“If you disobey the rules of society, they send you to prison; if you disobey the rules of the prison, they send you to US. Alcatraz is not like any other prison in the United States. Here, every inmate is confined ALONE … to an individual cell. Unlike my predecessors, Wardens Johnson and Blackwell, I don’t have good conduct programs, I do not have inmate councils. Inmates here have no say in what they do; they do as they’re told. You’re not permitted to have newspapers or magazines carrying news; knowledge of the outside world is, ah, what we tell you. From this day on, your world will be everything that happens in this building.”
The opening of the film features a first six minutes with no dialog. We watch the process of a prisoner, lost in shadow of a dark night, who is being transported by boat to Alcatraz. Once there, he’s processed, and the first inkling of dialog begins. Clint Eastwood plays Frank Morris, who is sent here because he’s escaped from a few other prisons over the years. He’s the “new fish”, and that means having to establish himself as someone not to be messed with. That kind of action is required almost immediately when fat thug Wolf (Fischer) decides that Frank is going to be his next butt buddy. Of course, Frank takes him down, but now he’s made a dangerous enemy, and attempts on his life are going to inspire the timetable when the escape plan begins.
“Alcatraz was built to keep all the rotten eggs in one basket, and I was specially chosen to make sure that the stink from the basket does not escape. Since I’ve been warden, a few people have tried to escape. Most of them have been recaptured; those that haven’t have been killed or drowned in the bay. No one has ever escaped from Alcatraz. And no one ever will!”
As I’ve mentioned, the prison is filled with wonderfully crafted characters. Frank first befriends Litmus, played by Frank Ronzio. He a wise kind of man ho feeds some of his meal to a mouse he keeps as a pet. This idea of a prison pet would be used by King in both of his prison stories/films. Then there’s Chester ‘Doc” Dalton. He’s a kindly old lifer who passes his years by painting. That is until he paints the wrong subject and gets those privileges taken away That event leads to one of the more dramatic and emotional scenes in the prison wood shop. Frank meets mild, fatalistic English, played by Paul Benjamin. Don’t let his mild exterior fool you. He’s the leader of the black element in the prison and I suppose some are going to be offended by the fact that Frank and English trade racial barbs even though it’s completely clear that the barbs are traded in an affectionate way. Danny Glover gets his first film appearance as a background inmate. Then there’s Charlie Butts, played by Larry Hankin. He’s a car thief who just can’t catch a break and that follows him here and in the escape plan. He’s a kind of ignorant guy who can’t get out of his own way even though he’s not by nature a horrible guy. It was the first sizable role for the actor. Of course, the warden is the kind of a guy who would have been just as at home as a German Nazi camp commander. Patrick McGoohan eats up the part and couldn’t have been cast better. Part of Frank’s need to escape is premised on his need to show up the warden as evidenced by the film’s final scene actually added by Eastwood where the warden finds the flower on Angel Island.
The escape plot begins when Frank’s friends from another prison get sent to Alcatraz. The Anglin Brothers, Clarence (Thibeau) and John (Ward), inspire Frank to find a way out. He discovers that the cement of the buildings has been weakened by years of salty and damp air. He thinks he can dig around his ventilation grill and work himself up to the roof of the prison. From there they can build floatation devices using raincoats and rubber cement to get through the water. They made dummy heads to make it look like they were sleeping in their cells to give them a several hour head start. We never know if they made it, just like the actual events. The film does, however, lead us into believing they did make it. After all, a lot of time was spent getting us to like these guys, and we don’t really want them to have died in the attempt, do we? I still think there’s a chance Butch and Sundance made it, so it’s not that much of a stretch for me.
The film benefits from the long-time collaboration of Clint Eastwood and Don Siegal who brought us Dirty Harry. But the film would also lead to a falling out between the partners and become their last film together. It’s unfortunate, to be sure. It all came about over production companies. Siegal wanted the film produced under his Don Siegal Films banner, while Eastwood insisted that it be his Mariposa company. They both ended up sharing the production, and it’s a fight that wouldn’t have existed today. Watch any film and you sit through a few minutes of tags from various studios and production companies. Hollywood has since learned that multiple companies means sharing the risks, and if there are rewards, it’s not a bad deal. Rarely does a big-budget film carry only one production company. In 1979 it was rare for those duties and credits to be shared. Escape From Alcatraz was a turning point in how films are made from the production point of view. Eastwood and Siegal have since reconciled, but they never did work together again.
High Plains Drifter
“It’s what people know about themselves inside that makes ’em afraid.”
Clint Eastwood might have gotten his film career started with bit roles in the sci-fi classics Tarantula and Return Of The Creature, but he made his mark in Europe with Sergio Leone and his famous spaghetti westerns. He became The Man With No Name in a trilogy of films, and it would create the character of Clint as much as it would any film character. Eastwood was smart, and he used the time on those films to learn. He was observant and took in all of the technical aspects of the business of making movies, and it continues to serve him 60 years later, as Eastwood has become as much of an icon behind the camera as he ever did in front of it. His first directing job was Play Misty For Me, but he returned to those still fresh spaghetti-western roots for his second time in the director’s chair and his first time directing a western. High Plains Drifter would fit nicely into the trilogy of Leone films. The character called The Stranger could very much be the same Man With No Name, and it’s clear enough that he took away more than a paycheck from his time spent in Italy and Spain with Leone. High Plains Drifter would be Clint Eastwood’s exclamation point on his earlier career and would take him to places I’m sure even The Stranger could have imagined. Let’s just say he’s earned more than a fistful of dollars. Now thanks to Kino-Lorber it’s out in UHD/4K, and it’s never looked better.
A stranger (Eastwood) rides into the small Western town of Lago. It doesn’t take him very long before he’s raped a local woman and taken out a trilogy of thugs who got a little too up close and personal. We’ve seen this character before, but it’s a whole new story. The Stranger is having nightmares of a man who is savagely whipped to death by three outlaws while the town merely watches from the shadows. The scene was inspired by the real life events of Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed to death in front of a New York tenement building while 38 neighbors saw or heard the attack but never came to her aid.
The townsfolk appear to be frightened of three outlaws who are about to be released from prison and swore revenge on the town. They are desperate for someone to protect them, and after the swift way The Stranger took out the first three thugs, they figure he might be their savior. They are so scared they offer him free rein in the town. He can have anything from any merchant free of charge. Of course, he takes advantage of the offer and offers to train a voluntary squad to protect the town from the thugs. It doesn’t take long before they understand they’ve made a deal with a devil. Naturally, The Stranger’s nightmare turns out to have actually happened. We learn this through the film’s jester Mordecai the dwarf, who has been overlooked and even taunted by the town, played by Billy Curtis. He is having flashbacks to the event. The Stranger ends up forcing them to paint every structure in the town red and changes the name of the town to Hell. He’s not there to save them. He’s there to inflict another kind of justice on the citizens and is no help against the outlaws who were the ones who whipped the man to death. Eastwood has gone on record that The Stranger was the brother of the man whipped to death. There are certainly indications of a more supernatural answer. Speculation runs from the ghost of the whipped man, and there is a strong resemblance to an avenging spirit.
Eastwood populates Lago with the kinds of characters that were common in his spaghetti western days. Also, you should take a closer look and you’ll see nods to both Sergio Leone and Don Siegal, both huge influences on Eastwood’s directing. Take note that one of the outlaws is played by Anthony James, who would have quite a prolific career in films and television and would reunite with Eastwood on his classic Unforgivin as Skinny, the man who owned the “Billiards” parlor where the prostitute is cut, leading to the tragic events of that film. Robert Donner would play a preacher here. You might remember him best as the crazy Exidor, friend to Robin Williams’ alien in Mork And Mindy. Verna Bloom would go on to play the Blessed Mary in Mel Gibson’s The Last Temptation Of Christ. Marianna Hill plays The Stranger’s rape victim and would be mostly known for television guest roles, but she’s played the small role of Fredo’s wife in The Godfather Part II.
Some Like It Hot
by Brent Lorentson
If you ever wondered just why Marilyn Monroe is the icon that she is today, all you have to do is watch Some Like It Hot, and you’ll see how she captured the attention of audiences from 1959 and well beyond to this day. She was already a star by the time she made the Billy Wilder classic after being in films like Gentleman Prefer Blondes and The Seven Year Itch, but it’s her role as Sugar that really showcases all of her talent, though unfortunately it was the film where her troubles off screen were taking a toll on her physically and emotionally. This would also be the film that would launch Jack Lemmon’s career and be the first of many collaborations with the acclaimed writer and director Billy Wilder. Some Like It Hot isn’t simply a classic film, it is literally a piece of film history that made a profound impact on the motion picture industry, and the American Film Institute proclaimed it to be the greatest comedy of all time.
Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) are a pair of down-on-their-luck musicians in Chicago 1929 who are playing jazz clubs during Prohibition. After narrowly escaping a raid at a club they are playing, their luck takes a turn for the worse when they become the only witnesses to the St. Valentines Massacre, and the mob is after them to keep them quiet. Looking for a quick escape, Jack and Jerry find a way out and a gig that will have them performing in Florida all expenses paid. Unfortunately it’s for The Sweet Sues, an all-girls band. Knowing their lives are on the line, they decide they have no other choice but to disguise themselves as Josephine (Curtis) and Daphne (Lemmon), and of course hilarity ensues.
The introduction to Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe) is memorable and borders on iconic, though for me I feel her iconic scene is when she is performing “I want to be loved by you” personally that was the moment I understood why so many before fell in love with the bombshell actress. The train sequence allows Josephine and Daphne to integrate with the band and builds on their relationship with Sugar. It’s not till the film gets to the hotel in Florida that Joe decides he wants to make an attempt to have a relationship with Sugar by posing to be a millionaire. Basically we see Curtis performing three different characters, and as a member of the audience we are just sitting back waiting for him to be found out, though seeing him put on the charade is simply so much fun. Then there is poor Daphne, who catches the eye of a real millionaire suitor with several ex-wives, and he simply finds Daphne irresistible. Osgood Fielding (Joe E. Brown) plays the millionaire suitor, and his advances on Daphne are hilarious mostly because we know Daphne is really Jerry, but it is these interactions that do show the level of sexism of the time. I don’t believe Wilder is endorsing the behavior; instead he’s holding up a mirror and judging it in his subtle way.
Just as the Overlook Hotel is a character in The Shining, The Seminole-Ritz Hotel is almost as important. Though the real hotel is actually the Hotel del Coronado, which isn’t in Florida at all but San Diego, California. The hotel is a beautiful backdrop for this film, and it is no surprise that the hotel has played host to the stars since its creation in 1988.
What makes this film work so well is the script. The storyline is clever especially for its time; the movie definitely takes chances that didn’t sit well with all audiences. But what really works is the dialog. I don’t think there is a bad line in this film. But the verbal tit for tat between Joe and Jerry from the beginning sets the tone for the film, and as the film progresses and the dialog is injected with innuendo, it’s more than clever; it reflects how this script is a piece of art. Then you have Billy Wilder’s direction. The film doesn’t look flashy, but you hear the stories about the making of the film and how difficult it was to work with Monroe, who would sometimes need up to 50 takes to get a scene right. When you see the final product, everything just works. From the performances to the pacing, it’s hard to believe they had any difficulty making this film.
At this point I think I’ve seen the film about half a dozen times, and I still love it from start to finish. Even taking a critical eye to this film, I can’t find anything to complain about, but instead I find myself more engrossed with the film. There are so many moments in this film that I love. I hold it up to films that have come out in the past decade, and there are few that match it in wit and style. The tango between Daphne and Osgood, the birthday cake scene, the rendezvous on the yacht, and so many other moments stand out and linger rent free in my brain long after I’ve watched the film. If you’ve seen the film and it has been a while, now is as good a time as any to pick up the 4K version of the film, and if you’ve never seen the film, well, now you have no excuses; this is required viewing for any cinephile.
Touch Of Evil
“Susie, one of the longest borders on earth is right here between your country and mine. An open border. Fourteen hundred miles without a single machine gun in place. Yeah, I suppose that all sounds very corny to you.”
Orson Welles was a huge personality in Hollywood both in his stature and his work. Taking a controversial poke at media giant Randolph Hearst, he struggled against fierce odds to direct a film that is often considered the best, or at least one of the best films ever made. Of course, I’m talking about Citizen Kane. I happen to believe the first two Godfather films are better, but there’s little doubt that Citizen Kane was a masterpiece. Because it was so good and because Welles never functioned well in the Hollywood system of his age, his other films often get overlooked. Touch Of Evil is one of those films, and in many ways it’s just as good or better than Citizen Kane. Like that film and pretty much everything Welles ever did, it came with plenty of controversy and behind-the-scenes drama. But Welles was used to that by 1958, so he should have known better. Still, this is the guy who scared the crap out of this country 20 years earlier with the Mercury Broadcasting presentation of H.G. Wells’ (no relation) War Of The Worlds. His infamy would follow him the rest of his life with one project or another.
Touch Of Evil would end up being Welles last film made in America or for an American studio. It was kind of the last straw for many. You see, Welles wasn’t even scheduled to direct the film. He was just going to star in the film, and that was it. But his friend Charlton Heston intervened with the studio executives and used his own clout to get Welles the directing job, since he was going to be there anyway, reasoned Heston. The shoot got off to a crazy start when Welles decided to shoot some really simple stuff first to show the executives everything would be fine. He got ahead of schedule, which lasted exactly three days. From then on it was all classic Orson Welles, and the picture got behind schedule and over budget. It might have still worked out fine, but Welles made a fatal mistake. After submitting his cut of the film he left the country to scout locations in Mexico for another film. While he was gone his studio bosses looked at the film and decided it wasn’t quite right. They hired another director/editor and shot more footage and re-edited the film with no input from Welles. Charlton Heston tried to use his clout again and refused to participate in the new shoot but was forced to comply because of his contractual obligations. When Welles saw the new cut he went bonkers and fired of a now famous 58-page memo asking for changes in the film’s structure. He didn’t get them until after his death in 1998 when a version of the film was cut using Welles’ original script and that 58-page memo. If you’re counting along at home, that makes three different versions of the film that were released in one form or the other. This Kino release gives us all three versions of the film on three different UHD 4K discs, and I watched all three.
Touch Of Evil was based on Whit Masterson’s novel Badge Of Evil. Obviously Welles decided he didn’t need no stinkin’ badges and changed the title. He was also given a screenplay which he disregarded and wrote the film himself.
There are three versions of the film here. The first ran about 109 minutes ands was used for press and test screenings. This was followed by the studio’s reworked film, which was the one released wide in 1958. It ran shorter at 96 minutes. Finally there was the 1998 film based on Welles’ memo. It ran 111 minutes. Many of the differences can be found in length and different shots. The basic structure remains the same. The attack on Leigh’s character was a bit of a controversy, and the manner in which the two stories played out with each other were the two biggest changes. Welles intended them to be intercut often while the studio opted for longer complete scenes with each. It ended up muddying the narrative, and in the studio version it drastically reduces the suspense with the two stories. I found the reconstructed version to be the best of the three, and so glad all are included in 4K here.
The film begins on what has been lauded as one of the best opening tracking shots ever made. For about three minutes we follow Mexico’s famous detective Mike Vargas (Heston) and his new American wife Susan, played by Janet Leigh, who would follow this film with another groundbreaking film with another often infamous director. Of course I’m talking about Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. As they walk toward the border to get some ice cream on the American side, we also watch an unknown perpetrator plant a bomb in the trunk of a car. This car travels side by side with our newlyweds, where at the border the young lady in the passenger seat complains about ticking in her ears. It’s an ominous foreshadow of the explosion just on the other side of the border. Vargas excuses himself from his young bride and heads to the crime scene, worrying that the event could be bad for Mexico. He offers himself as a kind of observer and meets a star detective from the other side of the border.
Enter Captain Hank Quinlan (Welles). He takes over the investigation while Vargas tags along. Meanwhile his wife has been approached by a youth she calls Poncho (de Vargas). It’s kind of a Vargas-on-Vargas type of situation. She’s told someone has something to give her for her husband, and she’s taken to the store of “Uncle” Joe Grandi, played by Akim Tamiroff. Mike is investigating his brother who sits in jail. The message, of course, is one of intimidation, and just as Mike makes his way back to tell her he’s going to be busy awhile, an acid attack nearly gets the cop. This really begins a story that happens at the same time as the investigation, and we’ll go back and forth. Mrs. Vargas ends up at a hotel owned by Uncle Joe, and she’s attacked in a rather disturbing scene while her husband is busy getting on the wrong side of Captain Quinlan.
Quinlan is a dirty cop who frames a suspect for the bombing. Vargas knows he’s lying and ends up a target of Quinlan’s when he insists on repeating that knowledge. The stories collide when his wife is drugged and assaulted in order to make it look like she was an addict and possibly a hooker. The only way out is for Vargas to prove his accusation, and he attempts to get one of Quinlan’s own men to get that proof. It all leads to a suspenseful climax where Vargas is trying to get recorded evidence on the corrupt cop.
There are some interesting things going on in this film. The location was slightly changed when Welles could not get the studio to spring for actual Mexican location shoots. It’s also the first time that a driving scene was shot inside an actual moving car. We take that for granted today, but up until this film the interior shots of conversations in cars were always shot on a soundstage with a rolling background projected against the car. That process is still rather dominant today but was exclusive until Touch Of Evil and Orson Welles. It was also the first film to be predominantly shot with the new at that time use of handheld cameras. Today it would be a huge PC violation to have an American play a Mexican character as Charlton Heston does here. He doesn’t try to use an accent, and the makeup does a fair job of selling it. Heston was said he wished he had used an accent, but I don’t believe his performance suffers one bit here. Another milestone concerns a difference between the studio and Welles’ vision and was intended to be another first. In those days and really through much of the 1970’s, film credits were primarily in the front of a film. Very little was in the back. Jaws had less than 30 seconds of end credits. But the various craft guilds got into the game, and the number of people who were credited in a film grew massively. Welles thought his wonderful tracking shot was spoiled by having credits occur during that time. He asked that the credits be moved to the end of the film. It was a bold idea, too bold at the time, so the theatrical film had them in the opening shot. Another example of Orson Welles being ahead of his time.
The film saw one career just starting and another coming to an end. Zsa Zsa Gabor has a cameo as a strip club owner here, and silent classic star Marlene Dietrich would only appear twice more. She had a meatier part as a psychic madam and old friend of Quinlan’s who tells him he has no future when he asks her to read his. Dennis Weaver was a regular on Gunsmoke when he was cast here by Welles himself, who was a fan of his Chester character. He plays the hotel manager where Leigh is attacked.
This is a standout quality release from Kino here. When you look at this and films like Some Like It Hot, you’ll see that Kino is trying to bring some wonderful classic films to the 4K level of home video. They also went the extra two miles here and gave us all three versions in 4K on separate discs. Most studios would have relegated the other versions to Blu-ray or stuffed them all on one disc, thus reducing the bandwidth and image quality. I hope you go out there and support this kind of effort, because I want to see it continue. There are many ways to get your entertainment these days. “The customers go for it – it’s so old, it’s new. We got the television too. We run movies. What can I offer you?”
