Episode Six: Round Up of Makes, Online Films & Newspaper Freebies
© James Beswick Whitehead, 2004
revised and expanded version, 21st July, 2006
This piece originated in posts I submitted to the Fortean Times Message Board between September 2004 and November 2005, when an avalanche of old Hollywood movies started to appear in UK bargain outlets. This page collects some of the odd little makes which turn up at intervals and takes a look at the increasing range of DVDs which newspapers give away. Finally there is a look at some ways to view films for free online and a summary of some major pictures which have been reduced so as nearly to rival the poundstore ranges. In a final footnote, the obsolescent VHS tape is considered as a bargain source of rare material.
Do You Want a Bag With That, Dear?
I don't spend half my life in pound-shops, honest! When I see one, however, I can't resist a look to see if there are any rare and wonderful old films available for next to nothing. As with charity-shops, it pays to keep looking in, even if you are in danger of a lock-in by crazy assistants.
"Do you want a bag with that, dear?"
"No! You stay, I go. Now please let me out!"
So what mouldy old tripe did you find this time, you daft bugger? I hear an excited voice ask, quavering with anticipation . . .
Digiview
A tranche of ancient cartoons turned up in Tesco, Southport. These Digiview discs are to be found on the WWW and elsewhere for about £5 each. however these were priced at just £1 each. The brightly-coloured packages were nearly overlooked as they suggested later material, however a glance at the contents revealed these were original 1930s material, featuring Betty Boop, Bosco and many desirable titles from the Fleischers and Van Beuren Studios. I found ten of these discs, each with a running time of around an hour or so. Quality was variable but mainly fair - only one disc disappointed with a selection of Looney Toons given in black and white prints - presumably from 16mm - where Technicolor is announced and indeed survives elsewhere.
Unidentified Make, Elstree Entertainment on Splash Screen
R. D. Webb: Beneath the 12 Mile Reef, colour, widescreen, stereo, 1953, 101'
I did not expect much from this as inferior prints have circulated for some time. In fact, this version proved to be a widescreen and stereo version of this 1954 Cinemascope epic. The nine harps called for by Bernard Herrmann's score can be heard loud and clear - pretty good going for a poundstore purchase!
Dynamic DVD
DYNDVD 1028: Milestone: The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, 1946, b & w, 116'
Stanwyck turns up again in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, another noir thriller that turns up in the bargain bins. A youthful Kirk Douglas gets an untypical early rôle as Stanwyck's wimpish and alcoholic husband. The ending of this one is truly jaw-dropping even by noir standards, even if it has echoes of Stanwyck's earlier noir classic Double Indemnity. Still you won't find that Wilder Classic for a couple of quid. Lizabeth Scott was not much of an actress and Van Heflin is a dullish lead but a nice morbid atmosphere is generated from the start. It is over-long but well worth the low price usually asked.
Boulevard
BLVDD 0022: P. Haas: The Music of Chance, 1993, colour, 94'
An existential tale from 1993, this unusual and haunting picture is slow at times but succeeds in building its own hermetic world. James Spader over-acts as a sleazy guy in this odd couple tale and Mandy Patinkin steals all the acting honours. Not quite an allegory - some have read it as a study of the rules of chance. This full-frame version looks quite good and the disc is certainly a curiosity worth picking up for a pound.
BLVDD 0020: K. Waxman: I Shot a Man in Vegas, 1995, colour, 77'
An obscure independently-produced thriller, presumably for the video market. Experiments with varied points of view in contradictory flash-backs to a murder. Hard to recall much about it afterwards.
Wienerworld
This company appear to have acquired the catalogue of the Romulus company which was very active making films in Britain during the nineteen fifties. They appear to have placed a great deal of faith in the appeal of Laurence Harvey. The fifties public did not put up much resistance but he is now nearly unwatchable. If you doubt my word, you can see him for a quid a time being failing at humour in Three Men in a boat, failing at crime in The Good Die Young and failing at charm in I am a Camera.
WNRD 5029: L. Olivier: Richard III, 1955, colour, 151'
Over at The Works, the "publishers' remainder store" their £2.99 line are on offer at 5 for £5. I snapped up Olivier's Richard III - the 150' minute print, albeit panned and scanned not - alas - the original VistaVision ratio.
WNRD 5030: J. Huston: Moulin Rouge, 1952, colour, 115'
Moulin Rouge is not the noisy schlockfest of recent years but the1952 Technicolor saga of Toulouse Lautrec, directed by John Huston. I'm not certain how far the smokey look of the opening reel is intentional. I think the print could do with some work but it isn't that bad for a quid. From a firm called Wienerworld. I think that means Dickworld in the USA!
Perverse love in Paris. A crippled artist chasing worthless creatures who despise him for his defects. Where have we seen that one before? Willy Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage had been filmed at least twice before this biopic of Toulouse-Lautrec. Of course, most of that work is set in a grey England, after the artist has given up his vocation. I rather like the way Leslie Howard suffers from the youthful Bette Davies in the 1930s version. Here, as the stunted artist, José Ferrer hardens his face and voice to an icy mask so we have to conjecture the warmth within. Meanwhile the gaity of the can-can and the colour of the art offset the squalor of the streets of shame.
Not an easy film to relate to Huston's others. A sympathy with outsider-figures resurfaces in such later work as Fat City and Wise Blood. A lot of critics seem to have given up on Huston in a huff, finding only a sporadically-engaged film-maker with occasional aspirations to artiness. Though famous enough, it is on the strength of a few films only that his reputation rests.
This 1952 Technicolor picture filmed in England & France won two Oscars - Art Direction and Set Direction. The cheap Wienerworld DVD may be all we are likely to get as the movie has lapsed into the Public Domain, along with other Romulus productions of the time. They were the company responsible for foisting Laurence Harvey on an unresisting fifties public but mercifully he isn't in Moulin Rouge!
WNRD 5033: H. Cornelius: I am a Camera, 1955, b & w, 95'
The same firm has put out a group of Laurence Harvey movies from the fifties. I am a Camera, is the 1955 adaptation of Isherwood's Berlin tales, which were to become Cabaret. Refused a rating in the States, the film contains only the mildest of hints about the sexuality of the narrator and avoids the abortion subject completely. It suffers from uncertainty of tone and Julie Harris seems to have designed her performance with the stage in mind. The fascination of Sally Bowles has always seemed to me to be highly questionable even when supported by all the music of Cabaret.
WNRD 5031: L. Gilbert: The Good Die Young, 1954, b & w, 94'
Brit-Noir in which horrid posh criminal Harvey recruits a gang of desparate characters to rob a Post Office. It springs to life belatedly in the last reel which has some atmospheric photography around a railway setting. Stanley Baker gives good value as a punch-drunk boxer.
WNRD 5032: K. Annakin: Three Men in a Boat, 1956, colour, 87'
Harvey again and the other two men were David Tomlinson and notorious disciplinarian Jimmy Edwards. This was originally produced in Cinemascope but you'll get none of that nonsense for your quid. Little of the charm of Jerome K. Jerome's novel survives. Instead the script opts for slapstick and the ogling of some attractive ladies. Disappointing.
Given the irregular distribution of bargain-bin fodder, the punter becomes exactly that - one who takes a risk. Grab up what's on offer while it's there or risk it passing out of reach. While there are many hardy perennials in the PD trough, others turn up briefly and mysteriously not to be seen again.
Hollywood Entertainment
Over at The Works, there have appeared pallets full of boxed sets at low low prices. Many are from the Hollywood Entertainment bottom of the barrel - schlocky straight-to-vid. horrors and telly movies for the laydeez. These are actually marketed as Films for Men and Films for Women. Even at fifteen quid for twenty pictures, there is nothing much to detain movie fans.
Finally the weirdest cartoon of them all, Krazy Kat, turns up on a Hollywood DVD double-sider coupled with a pretty but bland Canadian feature-length version of the Nutcracker Prince from 1990. There were some very early animated versions of the surreal Krazy Kat strip but this disc gives us eleven colour cartoons made for King Features in 1963. The sado-masochistic antics and perverse relationships survive nearly intact surprisingly. Not so suprisingly, Krazy is referred to as a female throughout, losing the full force of the gay mouse-loving original. The disc does begin with a bizarre orgasmic sigh which might alarm cheapskate parents who pick up this odd little disc for the kiddies!
Series-ous Business & Arty Smarty - These seemed a cut or two above the others seen so far. Condensed into five minutes, these managed a lot of inventive gags. The first allows Ignatz, the mouse to control the picture as a film director so we pass from background to background and genre to genre at lightning pace. In the second, he is an artist, able to control the scene with his magic pencil. Both these are essentially chases of Ignatz and Officer Pup, with Krazy Kat appearing only at start and finish.
Sun, Weton-Wesgram
More interesting are the five-disc sets from a Dutch company with the name Sun. Tranches of PD American telly series, such as The Lone Ranger & I Love lucy, The Beverley Hillbillies (again) and the Ronald Howard Sherlock Holmes series. Going price was £9.99 before Christmas but these are now £6.99. Each disc seems to contain around three episodes.
In the same range, a set of five early Hitchcock movies (39 Steps, Jamaica Inn, MWKTM, The Lady Vanishes & Murder) all in softish prints from NTSC sources? Worth considering as Murder is no worse than the Orbit release - it probably derives from same source and HMV want £16 for that double-bill with The Skin Game. The fly in the ointment here is a flawed disc of The Lady Vanishes - it ends abruptly after about an hour - probably some layer format problem.
Two boxes of Chaplin movies named The Tramp & King of Comedy turn out between them to contain the Essanay and Mutual two-reelers, more or less complete and in decent prints. A selection of the Keystone shorts are used as fillers and are much poorer in quality. Music is from old jazz records but you could find something more appropriate. Two further boxes feature the silents of Laurel and Hardy - I have yet to sample these.
Dynamic DVD
DYNDVD 1041: W. Wellman: Lady of Burlesque, 1943, b & w, 90'
Back on the Poundstore beat. I picked up a disc of Barbara Stanwyck in Lady of Burlesque, a 1943 thriller, once regarded as very daring as it was based on a novel by the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. It turns out it was ghosted for her. There are lots of warnings online about how bad the PD prints of this film are, however the Poundstore version, from Dynamic DVD turns out to be strikingly good. Maybe it has been derived from the Image version, which is the only print to receive any praise.
Delta
Meanwhile, over in Poundworld - at least in one store - I found a selection of the Delta Chaplin series which features a nearly complete run of the Keystone films in the first four volumes. Some duplication and interesting variants. Not the highest quality but a fascinating window on the past, especially now these silent comedies are neglected on telly.
The Delta Chaplin issues are turning up all over the place. There are ten volumes in all. Typically for Poundshop fare, you will need to shop around to get the set. There are better prints around of the two-reelers but this is a cheap way to acquire copies of a lot of the Keystone pictures. These have not been well preserved generally and the Delta copies are fully down to expectations. Still, they may fill a few gaps.
The Delta-Laserlight print of His Girl Friday comes with a biography of Cary Grant and represents very good value as the quality is far better than other PD prints I have seen. I guess, from the restored Columbia logo that it may simply have been ripped from the official studio version. While it often called a Screwball Comedy, the tone is ultra-dark as Press and Politicians compete to execute a murderer.
Whistling Jack has mentioned the Felix the Cat cartoons on Delta. There are two colour cartoons from the thirties but most of the material on this disc comes from the early twenties. One title is transferred from a shortened home-cinema version but the quality elsewhere is not bad. These silent pre-code cartoons are inventive and often weird. I especially enjoyed the early strobing psychedelia of Felix Find Out, where the curious cat gets stoned on moonshine. If you only remember the rather annoying Trans-Lux telly Felix, then this disc could be an eye-opener!
There are also two Delta volumes of Betty Boop cartoons also but these concentrate on the post-code material which is rather tame. Still it is nice stuff to have on the shelf if you like to preface old fillums with some contemporary shorts.
Newspaper Freebies
Menzel: Closely Observed Trains
Donen: Charade
Morahan: Clockwise
Drury: Defence of the Realm
Chabrol: Le Boucher
Roeg: Don't Look Now
Lang: Metropolis
Forbes: Whistle Down the Wind
Reisz: The French Lieutenant's Woman
Hamer: Kind Hearts & Coronets
There was once upon a time a website where a thrifty Scots gent has catalogued most of the DVDs which newspapers have given away. It appears to have bitten the dust. This might seem a theoretical exercise since they have been and gone however a visit to your local charity shop may let you retrieve some. This may also salve the consciences of those who hate to touch the Mail or the Sun etc. What there wasn't on that site was any comment on the quality of the print given away. In some cases - notably the black and white Hitchcocks - it seems to be of the same standard as those sold, albeit without any extras.
Thanks to gerardwilkie and WhistlingJack for the Metropolis shout. It is, as Jack says, the good Eureka print! They used to put out the atrocious Aikman-Archive version which had a bloated running time due to slow speed transfer. In fact it was missing a lot of scenes - and the titles! - which are present here. I think the retail Eureka package contains a commentary and other extras but meanwhile this Times freebie at least contains Chapter stops.
Just a mention here for a few previous Newspaper DVDs which may be worth hunting down at Oxfam.
Two contrasting pictures from 1985: the John Cleese comedy Clockwise was scripted by Michael Frayn. It bombed at the box-office, perhaps because it misfires as pure farce and there are more wry smiles than laugh-out-loud moments. The widescreen print is watchable enough, the sound is mono and the Britain of 1985 seems worlds away now.
I enjoyed this film and thought it had been underrated. That was until the ending, which goes badly awry. Ironically, it is a matter of timing. Maybe writer Michael Frayn had attempted to graft too many ideas onto his farcial plot. Anal retentive timekeeper and headmaster, John Cleese, misses a train and the resulting diversions take us deep into his past to uncover a history of slackerdom. It ought to involve some sort of new understanding but the final conference scenes are a terrible disappointment. Frayn, like the embarrassed hosts, can only keep ushering his uninvited entourage of guests into an upstairs room in lieu of any resolution. Now over twenty years old, the road vehicles look positively antique! The fact this surfaced as a newspaper give-away - from The News of the World, of all ghastly rags - must have given many a second chance to catch up with this box-office flop. I was glad to.
The conspiracy thriller Defence of the Realm was essentially a superior tv movie. In this Kafkaesque nightmare with an old Fleet Street background. Denholm Elliot steals the show as a sozzled old reporter. As so often with British movies, the supporting actors give this a resonance it might otherwise lack.
Back to 1961 and Black & White for the Burnley-based childhood fantasy, Whistle Down the Wind. The movies of Bryan Forbes are a tad sweet for many but his debut here has some bite. When a convict takes refuge in a barn, a somewhat dysfunctional family of kids believe he is Jesus. It was an idea the Spanish director Erice took up in The Spirit of the Beehive a decade or so later - only the fugitive in his picture is taken to be the Frankenstein monster!
Finally The French Lieutenant's Woman, which dates from 1981, makes a very lavish middle-brow audience-pleaser. The rest of us may be convulsed by Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons doing their kind of acting. Still, there is lots of Production Design to relish and the widescreen print is very pleasing. Surprisingly, perhaps, the soundtrack seems only ever to have been mono. A pity that the great romantic sweep of those opening shots should have been so ripped off by those horrible insurance ads.
Kind Hearts & Coronets, 1949, b & w,
Kind Hearts & Coronets is a much-loved classic and it deserves its high reputation, though it must be the chilliest film to inspire such general approval. This DVD issue shows off the fine cinematography and set-design. It is said that Michael Balcon was apprehensive about the film chiefly on account of Joan Greenwood's purring sexuality. I see that the bbfc demanded cuts in 1949 before it could be shown as an 'A' rated picture. No details seem available about what the cuts were or how extensive they were. The social comment would be very hard to eradicate as it is more or less printed throughout the film. The Americans did not demand cuts but there had to be a ten second addition at the end to show that the confessional memoirs are actually found by the warders in Price's cell. The current print seems to be intact: allowing for the PAL 4% speed-up, it corresponds to the film as originally submitted to the bbfc in 1949.
I have the impression that my old VHS off-the-air tape of Closely Observed Trains was better and slightly wider than the one given away by The Independent. Still it's a great film and a very watchable print.
Some of the other papers have gone for Public Domain titles and these have not always been carefully chosen. Stanley Donen's Charade is very highly regarded by some - a glossy Hitchcockian thriller starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. In the US it has merited a full bells & whistles Criterion Edition in remastered widescreen format. Alas, that is not what the Sunday Express offered its readers. My jaw dropped at the horrid condition of this washed-out, distorted, scratched, scanned & panned version.
Ho-hum, perhaps I should start a 10p movies thread to cover these gems
Posted: 11-02-2006 18:17 Post subject:
I was kidding about a new thread! Don't mind if the title of this one gets changed but I guess it will attract the same darn, low-life, cheapskate customers as before.
Anything new to report on the cheapskate front, Whitehead?
Well, strange you should ask. . .
If you have a Play store near you, it is worth checking out their continuing Special Purchase Sale. It's not all rubbish - I picked up Bergman's The Magician for £2:50 and Schlesinger's horrid Hollywood fable The Day of the Locust for the same price. Some of their goods had undergone further reduction at the till than on the ticket. I visited the Rochdale branch and may go back for some more.
The Day of the Locust is slightly trimmed by the bbfc to remove cock-fighting scenes. It's so long since I saw it in the cinema but the bbfc site suggests it was once upon a time passed uncut.
Posted: 16-03-2006 20:15 Post subject:
Music Zone is selling the five disc Werner Herzog set for £9.99.
This contains Kaspar Hauser, Fata Morgana, Even Dwarfs Started Small, Heart of Glass & Stroszek. All with full-length commentaries by the Director.
A more Fortean box of movies would be hard to find. It's a pity the spoilsports at the bbfc have lopped out over two minutes of Dwarfs. They are very strict about monkey crucifixions.
Heart of Glass - not to be confused with the punk musical of the same era - is the only film I know in which the entire cast were hypnotized throughout.
Meanwhile, back at the Pound Shop - I think this was Pound World but I lose track sometimes - the Delta DVDs of a series called Ghost Hunters are available. There are four, I think, each with three episodes. So far I've found three. The cases are vague on details and my expectations were very low but these turn out to be part of a series made for the Discovery Channel in 1996. I couldn't immediately put a name to the familar voice of the narrator - it turns out to be William Woollard, late of Tomorrow's World. Anyway the series concentrates on witness statements from sceptics whose paths were crossed by spooks and a few experts, mainly with day-jobs as scientists. Well worth a quid each anyway
[correction, from Peripart: JamesWhitehead wrote:
"Heart of Glass - not to be confused with the punk musical of the same era"
Particularly as it was called Breaking Glass!
It's close: Heart of Glass was a Blondie song, whereas Breaking Glass was the musical with Hazel O'Connor.] Oops!
Posted: 21-03-2006 01:58 Post subject:
The Guardian is including a free Hitchcock on Saturday, I gather, from lurking elsewhere.
It's The Man Who Knew Too Much. The 1934 version with Leslie Banks, Nova Pilbeam and Peter Lorre.
I know from the imdb that lots of viewers can't be arsed with black and white movies and are not exactly mesmerized by the past. I still think this is an amazing movie, though it does require a bit of imaginative work from the viewer. Cheap PD prints of it abound and I don't know what the Guardian have secured for their freebie. With luck you might get the Carlton version which is scratched but not bad.
Much as I love the Jimmy Stewart "remake", this is a far more urgent picture. And where else are you going to see a Tabernacle of the Sun in Wapping? Except, maybe, Wapping today.
This is a dork fillum indeed!
PD Movies Online for Free
Movieflix
For those without a pound in the world - I know, I've been there - there is an even cheaper way to see old movies. True, you need a fairly recent computer and Broadband is recommended - though I managed tonight to see a 100 minute movie without a glitch on dial-up at 56kbs. If you are limited to dial-up and find the picture quality just too swimmy and murky try clicking on the Broadband option. You will no longer get moving pictures but a slide-show of stills from the picture. Meanwhile the soundtrack is unaffected.
http://www.movieflix.com/
I registered with this site many years ago but could not use it with my kit of the time. Plenty of free movies here. Not that the quality is terribly good. But if you have ever had a yen to see The Triumph of the Will and been reluctant to pay for it, here is your chance.
I did - at least in a manner of speaking - get to see a film that had scared me as a kiddie - The Red House, directed by Delmer Davies in 1947 and starring Edward G. Robinson. Well now I think I can understand why it scared me. I can't wait for this to turn up in the Poundshop and there's no reason why it shouldn't as it's a PD movie. Of course a fully restored version would be wonderful.
There is also the following site, based in Holland, which seems to offer some remarkable movies all free. Sadly, so far, I have not been able to get any of them to load:
http://welcome.to/watchmovies
That's All Folks!
Watchmovies
http://welcome.to/watchmovies#
has some wonderful things for free viewing. You really need a broadband connection, I guess, though dark ages persons like myself may get to see the movies as a series of stills accompanied by the soundtrack.
That is fine for Marker's La Jetée, which was made that way!
It depends on the bitrate, whatever that may be.
I think I posted the link once before but at that date I couldn't get it to work at all, however promising the contents seemed
You can see such wonders as Haxan - just original Danish intertitles, Lang's Tired Death and Hitchcock's Easy Virtue. It even has whole pictures by Fellini, Kurosawa etc.
It also has the most terrifying Hollywood movie of all - Delmer Davies' The Red House from 1947. The less said about that one the better! Maybe children understand its terrors instinctively. For the adult viewer, the horrors just multiply.
Unless the most terrifying film of all is Buñuel's 1933 documentary Las Hurdes - also on the site. Twenty-eight minutes that leave you astounded, if you have the capacity. I don't know if the American voice on the soundtrack is replicating the original Spanish. I do know that the Passacaglia from Brahms's 4th Symphony seems at first an odd choice of music then an inevitable one. Probably not Buñuel's though - he is said to have disliked all music!
Posted: 10-04-2006 22:11 Post subject:
Reliques of VHS
It is always worth keeping an eye on the local charity shops, if you still bother with VHS at all. True, you will have to rummage through endless Friends episodes, The Full Bleeding Monty with its oh-so-witty zipper on the spine and more Star Wars than you could wave a fluorescent tube at but hiding in there might be some worth having. It's still a valid enough way to experience things you may not wish to see often. I've found Altman's Short Cuts, Powell's A Matter of Life & Death, Zinnerman's The Nun's Story, Herzog's curious take on Nosferatu, Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, oh and Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces. For the last two you would have to buy Warner Brothers boxed DVD sets and you would get Dial M in a fake-widescreen format!
Commercial VHS tapes were often pretty dismal and it was ironic that the ones recorded off the air at home off the telly were much better. Needless to say, these also turn up as scrap second-hand. You have no come-back, alas if the box which promises Magnificent Ambersons, director's cut turns out to be three Coronation Streets and a Make-over show. Not such an exaggeration, that. I settled down one evening to enjoy Der Rosenkavalier from Covent Garden and about ten minutes into Act One, the screen broke up and reformed into an episode of an Adam Hart-Davis History programme. I should have noticed that Sellotape!
Quantum Leap
L. Carra: Shakespeare: Antony & Cleopatra, colour, 1981, 179'49"
A. Cook: King Lear, 1983, colour, 183'
A poundstore purchase, together with a Lear, from a company called Quantum Leap. In fact they seem to be American-produced on video by a firm called Bard Productions with a mixture of British & American actors. The credits give a date of 1983 but the imdb and allmovie sites give the date as 1981. The quality is, well of video quality and the camera-work very simple. Scenes are shot from middle distance or medium close-up. There are some ugly edits.
The production is austere on a single, architectural stage without further sets. Costumes are mainly undistracting. The Antony was Timothy Dalton, who came to more general notice afterwards as James Bond. He is notably good as the virile vain and deluded Antony of the first half of the play. Not much sign of softness or effeminacy here. As disillusion begins to break his shell, the performance becomes more general and histrionic in its gestures. It is an efficient and decent performance, though the death scene could move us more. Lynn Redgrave as Cleopatra has big frizzy hair and a toothy schoolgirlish sportiveness. Her big bones suggest arrested development: at times I was reminded of the girlish Queen Elizabeth who featured in the Blackadder comedies. We may be used to fruitier actresses in the rôle who make more of the regal elements to Cleopatra's character but her behaviour does suggest a vain and frivolous child, until she is finally cornered by Caesar. Redgrave does rise to the death scene very well and the advantage of her performance is that the relations with her devoted playmates seem genuinely warm.
Enobarbus is very well played, as he needs to be. Caesar isn't - an unsympathetic part, in truth, but should we resent his appearances so much? The chill of the man can be more telling if the bearing is more that of an official than a soldier.
Some jarring and very diverse American accents in the smaller rôles include a Pompey straight in from The Godfather. The pace of the performance is commendably swift with a bare minimum of music or extraneous atmospheric effects. The focus is kept on the words throughout. Granville Barker reminds us that in the Folio there are no Act and Scene divisions in this play and that the customary Five Act structure imposed on it is unhelpful. The video has a single break after eighty-five minutes, Antony's decline setting in after the interval, emphasising how extensive and luxurious the play is in catastrophe.
The cassette case refers to Anthony (sic) in the title and throughout the blurb.
Tartan Video
G. Tornatore: Cinema Paradiso, long version, 1989, wide screen, 167'21"
Over sweet and over long, this movie is one that is probably best experienced in its shorter version. Looking on the imdb, I see it has legions of fans. Yet for all its reflexivity, I don't feel it makes the best use of all the classic film excerpts. The affectionate and nostalgic look at Sicilian life is the best section but the film seems to get ever slower as we pass through the rather clichéd love story. It is with some dismay we realise that another fifty minutes is given over to middle-aged regrets. The problem is that I never for a moment felt outside the cinema and there is little subtlety or room for ambiguity here: if we are not convinced by the emoting, there is precious else to do except enjoy the pretty pictures. Not one I shall view again in a hurry.
©James Beswick Whitehead, 2006