Sonja Henie headlines a wave of five in the latest from Fox's Cinema Archives line. Alice Faye and Spencer Tracy also are in the mix. Click here to read the full story.
Criterion has scheduled a February 18th street date for their Blu-Ray / DVD Combo of Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940). Click here to read the full story.
A superb wave from Warner's Archive Collection this week as they have announced two films starring Jack Benny, four starring Danny Kaye and the final season of the T.V. series Cheyenne. Click here to read the full story.
Walt Disney has set a February 11th release date for their Diamond Edition Blu-Ray / DVD Combo of The Jungle Book (1967). Click here to read the full story.
Kino International has upgraded its six-year-old DVD release with a
brand-new transfer of this excellent, creepy, threadbare thriller,
brilliantly restored to HD. It’s sparse, tough movie-making with a
number of good sequences. If it’s eventually done in by its miniscule
budget, it is still one heck of a thrill ride.
Someone is killing drivers along deserted Southwestern desert highways,
and so one wonders what Frank Lovejoy and Edmond O’Brien, a couple of
guys off on a weekend fishing trip (in the desert?) are thinking when
they not only pick up a solitary hitchhiker, they pick up one that
appears to just have busted out of the loony ward at the prison
hospital.
Enter William Talman, forever known as the luckless prosecutor
embarrassed week after week (“YOUR HONOR! That’s irrelevant, immaterial
and argumentative!”) by legal eagle Perry Mason. With a permanent sneer
and one paralyzed eyelid, he couldn’t LOOK more like a psycho killer if
he were wearing a paper hat that SAID “Psycho Killer” on it in purple
crayon. Sure enough, soon the gun comes out and he delights in torturing
our two sad-sack heroes on a trek to Mexico.
Interesting film, a tense, no-nonsense 70 minutes, directed with flair
and artistry by the wonderful Ida Lupino, the only great noir director
who happened to be a woman. The opening sequence, with no one, killer or
victim, shown except for feet or covered in shadows, is a grabber, and
in fact Talman’s first appearance couldn’t be any more suspenseful.
Alas, the tiny budget meant that, well, for example, the police force
dedicated to finding the psycho killer makes only a cameo appearance. I
had also hoped that Lupino was saving what little budget she had for a
spectacular closing act to rival White Heat (1949); no such luck.
It’s Talman’s picture, probably the only feature film you can say that
about, and he does an excellent job as the tough guy whose only strength
is in the gun he keeps in his fist at all times; he boasts that the
reason he’s on top of his two captors is because he has no conscience,
while they’re soft and weak. They actually more or less prove him
correct in that, come to think of it. Talman doesn’t have a LOT of
big-screen credits, but two of his other juicy bad guy parts have
recently come to light; he plays a killer in both City that Never Sleeps
(1953) and Crashout (1955), two previously-overlooked crime drama/noirs
released in the past few months by Olive Films. Crashout in particular
is excellent and deserves to be better known.
It’s interesting that both Talman and Raymond Burr played “good guys” on
TV but were far more accomplished in films as despicable villains.
Talman was briefly suspended from the Perry Mason series following a
marijuana bust and a morals charge. Charges were dropped and he was
reinstated to the series, no worse for the wear. I think people probably
felt sorry for Hamilton Burger and his weekly embarrassment at the
hands of Mason week after week; I know I always did.
O’Brien and Lovejoy are functional in thankless roles (not easy to play
“soft and weak” in a film like this), and Lupino – who directed only a
handful of low, low-budget films but all of them with distinction –
makes the most of what she’s got for this independent production
financed by the distributor, RKO, and benefiting from some loaned-out
talent, including producer Christian Nyby (The Thing from Another World)
and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca (The Cat People, Out of the Past,
Clash by Night).
The Hitch-Hiker was written by Daniel Mainwaring (Invasion of the Body
Snatchers), but he was not allowed on the RKO lot (Howard Hughes
objected to his leftist leanings) and so Miss Lupino and Collier Young
shared the on-screen writing credits.
The film looks terrific on Blu-ray, a big improvement over the rather
dark Kino DVD. I wish they’d have asked me to do the commentary (or
somebody just like me only taller), but the only extras are trailers for
three other Kino releases, White Zombie with Bela Lugosi (a 1950s
reissue trailer that couldn’t BE any more bombastic), The Stranger with
Orson Welles, and Night Tide with Dennis Hopper. A nice photo gallery
with many stills and promotional art is included, but no trailer for
this film. Still, it’s a very good film and the Blu-ray is terrific.
Recommended.
Clifford Weimer is a writer and film historian in Sacramento, CA. He
can usually be found lurking about the dark corners of a movie theatre
at inthebalcony.com.