FILM FRENZY

Emilia Jones in CODA  (Photo: Apple TV+)

By Matt Brunson

 (View From The Couch is a weekly column that reviews what’s new on Blu-ray, 4K, and DVD. Ratings are on a four-star scale.)

THE BEAST OF THE CITY (1932) / THE RACKET (1951) / I DIED A THOUSAND TIMES (1955). W.R. Burnett enjoyed lengthy careers as both novelist and screenwriter, and there was plenty of overlap as he often brought his own books to the screen. He met instant success by penning the 1929 novel Little Caesar, which was turned into the 1931 gangster classic that made Edward G. Robinson a star. His genre-hopping included war (The Great Escape, Wake Island, the latter earning him his only Oscar nomination), Westerns (Law and Order, Yellow Sky), and comedies (The Whole Town’s Talking, Dance Hall), but he was best known for his crime sagas, which included The Asphalt Jungle, This Gun for Hire, and the three covered here.

The pre-Code offering The Beast of the City finds Walter Huston playing the same sort of humorless and unbending authority figure he essayed in the same year’s Law and Order (also from Burnett). He’s Jim Fitzpatrick, a police captain determined to wipe out big-city crime. His primary target is mob boss Sam Belmonte (Jean Hersholt), but complications arise when Jim’s policeman brother Ed (Wallace Ford) gets involved with Daisy Stevens (Jean Harlow), a duplicitous moll associated with Belmonte. The movie opens with a quote from President Herbert Hoover (reportedly, he personally endorsed its production) stating that there should be a glorification of honest policemen rather than the glorification of “cowardly gangsters,” paving the way for a picture in which the heroes register as much as vigilantes as they do law officers. This is brutal stuff — even a little kid gets killed — and the finale, in which the cops invade a party held by the criminals, is an orgy of blazing guns. That’s an uncredited Mickey Rooney as Jim’s son.

The 1951 drama The Racket was the latest version of a 1927 Broadway play (starring Edward G. Robinson) that was quickly made into a 1928 movie mostly notable for being nominated for Best Picture at the first Academy Awards ceremony. Howard Hughes produced that screen version and, as head of RKO, also had a hand in the 1951 adaptation. Co-scripted by Burnett, this film noir-ish take shares a major similarity with The Beast of the City in that its hero spends as much time battling government and police corruption as he does waging war against local mobsters. Robert Mitchum is the straight arrow here — he’s cast (some would say miscast) as Thomas McQuigg, a police captain who hopes to nail temperamental gangster Nick Scanlon (Robert Ryan). The fractured approach isn’t the result of an offbeat angle as much as it’s the victim of a sloppy screenplay, with some silly sequences (e.g. a cop patiently waiting at home for hoodlums to show up just so he can blow them away), a flat ending, and a weak role for second-billed Lizabeth Scott, whose potential femme fatale isn’t involved with either McQuigg or Scanlon but is instead wooed by two minor characters.

It didn’t take long for Burnett’s novel High Sierra to be turned into a motion picture — both book print and celluloid print were released in 1941, with the author co-scripting the film version with John Huston (Walter’s son). The superb High Sierra transformed Humphrey Bogart from supporting player to leading man and was popular enough to spawn two remakes: Colorado Territory, a 1949 Western starring Joel McCrea, and 1955’s I Died a Thousand Times. This version is a direct lift from the Bogie classic, but it doesn’t resonate as powerfully. Jack Palance takes over as Roy Earle, the soft-hearted criminal who’s drawn to a cheerful farmgirl (Lori Nelson) with a club foot but seems more likely to end up with dance-hall down-and-outer Marie Garson (Shelley Winters). Roy is loyal to his former mob boss (Lon Chaney Jr.) but is dismissive of the two clods (Lee Marvin and Earl Holliman) that he needs to pull off a major heist. Things go wrong almost from the start, and they only grow worse after the robbery takes place. I Died a Thousand Times is a competent if rather pointless remake, likely to be more appreciated by those who never saw the 1941 original. Palance is good (although Bogart was great), but Winters takes the role memorably handled by Ida Lupino and turns it into yet another of her interchangeable floozies.

Blu-ray extras on The Beast of the City consist of the 1932 cartoons Goopy Geer and Bosko and Bruno. Blu-ray extras on The Racket consist of audio commentary by film noir expert Eddie Muller and the theatrical trailer. Blu-ray extras on I Died a Thousand Times consist of the 1955 Bugs Bunny cartoons Hare Brush and Sahara Hare, and the theatrical trailer.

The Beast of the City: ★★★

The Racket: ★★½

I Died a Thousand Times: ★★½

CODA (2021). Coda is not only a musical term but also (when capitalized) an acronym for “child of deaf adults” — both definitions are central to this warm, witty, and overall wonderful seriocomedy. Set in Gloucester, Massachusetts, it focuses on the members of the Rossi family, who make their living in the fishing industry. The 17-year-old Ruby (Emilia Jones) is the only hearing person in their household, as her mom Jackie (Marlee Matlin), her dad Frank (Troy Kotsur), and her older brother Leo (Daniel Durant) are all deaf (as are the actors essaying the roles). All four individuals are integral to their fishing business, with Ruby primarily needed as an interpreter. So when she becomes interested in singing and, with the encouragement of her music teacher (Eugenio Derbez), hopes to attend a music college in Boston, her plans receive mixed reactions from her parents and sibling. Adapted by writer-director Siân Heder from the 2014 French flick La Famille Bélier (which was heavily criticized for employing hearing actors for the roles of the two deaf parents), CODA is earthy and emotional, refusing to take the “noble” bait by having its disabled characters presented as normal folks who frequently think about sex and swear a lot. The sequence in which Ruby flawlessly sings Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides, Now” while simultaneously signing it for her parents is enormously moving. This went 3-for-3 in the Oscar sweepstakes, winning for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Kotsur), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Heder). Unfortunately overlooked was Jones, whose central turn was one of the best performances in any category that year. Incidentally, Matlin was one of the celebrities I interviewed during my college years, when Paramount sent aspiring film critics to Toronto on the junket for 1986’s Children of a Lesser God. Matlin later won the Best Actress Oscar for her work in that film.

The 4K edition contains no extras.

Movie: ★★★★

EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990). Director Tim Burton and actor Johnny Depp have collaborated on eight movies, and the first of their joint ventures was this alternately sweet and bittersweet fairy tale. Depp plays the title character, who (like Pinocchio) isn’t a real boy but rather the creation of a kindly inventor (Vincent Price) who lives in a castle on the outskirts of a small town. The inventor meant to provide Edward with real hands rather than the scissors serving as poor substitutes, but before he can attach them, he drops dead. Living by himself in the vast castle, Edward soon receives an unexpected visit from Peg (Dianne Wiest), the local Avon Lady — feeling sorry for this orphan, she takes him back to her suburban digs, where he falls for Peg’s daughter Kim (Winona Ryder) while contending with gossipy neighbors who initially embrace him before savagely turning against him. Depp cuts a haunting figure as the frequently misunderstood Edward while Wiest’s typically excellent performance was notable enough to earn runner-up designations from a couple of major critics groups. The rest of the actors, however, are forced to play characters who are either underdeveloped or overcooked, and the broadness of Burton’s approach eventually leads to a wholly unsatisfying resolution. This earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Makeup (created by multiple Oscar winners Stan Winston and Ve Neill). Despite its decent box office, no sequel was forthcoming, but it did inspire the notorious 1991 porn spoof Edward Penishands.

Extras in the 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray edition consist of audio commentary by Burton; audio commentary by composer Danny Elfman; a vintage behind-the-scenes featurette; and theatrical trailers.

Movie: ★★½

HE WHO GETS SLAPPED (1924). Lon Chaney and John Gilbert were already established stars when they starred in He Who Gets Slapped, but the silent film did showcase two newcomers in featured parts. One was Norma Shearer, who began appearing in movies in 1929 but didn’t land leading roles until 1923 (she would later win a Best Actress Oscar for 1930’s The Divorcee). The other was Leo the Lion (née Slats), who made his debut as the animal at the center of the logo for the newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). This oddity was the first picture produced by MGM — a solid choice, as it was both a critical and commercial success. Based on a Broadway hit that was itself adapted from a Russian play, this stars Chaney as Paul Beaumont, a brilliant scientist destroyed by the fact that his wife Marie (Ruth King) and his patron Baron Regnard (Marc McDermott) are having an affair and have betrayed him by stealing his work. What’s more, Regnard has made Paul a laughingstock by slapping him in front of members of the scientific community. Cut to five years later: Beaumont is now a circus clown known only as HE, and his signature act involves the other clowns lining up and slapping him. HE falls for a big-top newbie named Consuelo (Shearer), but she’s immediately drawn to dashing horseback rider Bezano (Gilbert). Soon, another suitor arrives on the scene, and it turns out to be the Baron. Chaney was one of the greatest actors of the silent era, and he again shows why through his passionate performance here. (It’s a tragedy that he died of cancer in 1930 at the age of 47, having made only one sound picture.) A lion figures in the climax, but, no, it’s not Leo.

Blu-ray extras include audio commentary by makeup artist and Lon Chaney expert Michael F. Blake; the 1925 short He Who Gets Smacked; and a piece on Leo the Lion.

Movie: ★★★

LA FEMME NIKITA: THE COMPLETE SERIES (1997-2001). Although this is based on Luc Besson’s 1990 global hit of the same name, La Femme Nikita plays more like a poor person’s Alias. It wimps out right at the beginning with its introduction of Nikita (Peta Wilson). In the Besson original (and the 1993 American remake with Bridget Fonda, Point of No Return), the character is a drug addict who murders a police officer, an act that leads the members of a covert government agency to determine that she should be trained to become a professional assassin for their cause. The creators of this USA Network offering determined that would be too mentally taxing for its audience, so Nikita is now a complete innocent who’s wrongly accused of killing a policeman. As in the films, she has a handler at the agency — in this case, it’s Michael Samuelle (Roy Dupuis), who spends the entirety of the series speaking in such whispery tones that viewers would be forgiven for assuming he has a lifelong case of laryngitis. While embarking on various missions, the two develop a romantic relationship (not unlike Sydney Bristow and her handler Michael Vaughn on Alias), a real mystery since Michael is severely lacking in charm. It’s not just Michael, though, as the show is almost exclusively populated by nondescript dullards in the central roles. The exception is Wilson, who’s pretty good as Nikita. And luckily she’s not forced to work completely without a net, since some interesting storylines do occasionally pop up and give her material on which to build.

The DVD box set contains all five seasons and 96 episodes. Extras include audio commentaries by key personnel on select episodes; a making-of featurette; deleted scenes; and gag reels.

Series: ★★½

THE NEWSROOM: THE COMPLETE SERIES (2012-2014). Following the smashing success of his NBC series The West Wing (1999-2006) and the crushing failure of his NBC show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (2006-2007), Aaron Sorkin contributed to a few fine films (including his Oscar-winning script for The Social Network) before heading to HBO to create The Newsroom. Lasting three seasons and 25 episodes, the program could serve as a litmus test for one’s overall tolerance of the type of sense and sensibility found in most Sorkin projects. Decidedly left-leaning (well, left-falling) but blessed with the sort of high altitude, high IQ wordplay we’ve come to expect from him, this centers on the staffers at the fictional Atlantis Cable News Network. Jeff Daniels (never better) stars as Will McAvoy, the station’s news anchor whose ofttimes erratic and brittle behavior rubs those around him the wrong way. The network president is rascally Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston), who as the series begins has tapped Will’s former girlfriend, MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer), to serve as her ex’s new producer. Others involved in the network’s daily operations include the affable Jim Harper (John Gallagher Jr.), the vivacious Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill), the acerbic Don Keefer (Thomas Sadoski), the gentle Neal Sampat (Dev Patel), and the socially awkward Sloan Sabbith (Olivia Munn). Every role is perfectly cast, and Sorkin smartly uses real-life events (e.g. the killing of Osama bin Laden, the Boston Marathon bombing) as backdrops for the various episodes. Over the course of its three seasons, The Newsroom earned three Emmy Award nominations and one win for Daniels as Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and two nominations for Jane Fonda as Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series.

Blu-ray extras include audio commentaries on select episodes by Sorkin and various cast members, and deleted scenes.

Series: ★★★½

A SUMMER PLACE (1959). Ken Jorgenson (Richard Egan), now a wealthy chemist, returns to the coastal Maine resort where he once toiled as a dirt-poor lifeguard; at his side are his puritanical wife Helen (Constance Ford) and their burgeoning teenage daughter Molly (Sandra Dee). The resort is run by the once prosperous, now struggling alcoholic Bart Hunter (Arthur Kennedy); at his side are his unfulfilled wife Sylvia (Dorothy McGuire) and their burgeoning teenage son Johnny (Troy Donahue). Ken and Sylvia were lovers long ago, and they now weigh whether to rekindle their romance; meanwhile, Molly and Johnny are instantly attracted to each other but receive mixed behavioral signals from their parents. This adaptation of Sloan Wilson’s novel is a first-class melodrama for about an hour, setting up the various intriguing relationships, offering Helen as a thoroughly despicable villain, and drawing the expected excellent performance from Kennedy. It’s during the second half that this goes somewhat astray, with the movie almost completely handed over to the young lovers and their “should we or shouldn’t we?” dilemma. It’s handled in tedious fashion (I understand that the film largely follows the book’s plot, but maybe it reads better than it screens), and Molly and Johnny are more interesting when they’re interacting with parental units, not with each other. On balance, though, it still offers many perks, including the gorgeous Technicolor lensing. The Max Steiner composition “Theme From A Summer Place” was an enormous hit (nine weeks at #1 on the Billboard Top 100) and has remained more famous than the movie that introduced it.

Blu-ray extras consist of the 1959 Bug Bunny cartoon A Witch’s Tangled Hare and the theatrical trailer.

Movie: ★★★

FROM SCREEN TO STREAM

DRIVEN (2001). More like Drivel. Director Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger) hits a brick wall with Driven, which is so banal and preposterous that not even his constantly roving camera can disguise the bankruptcy of the project. In fact, his technique turns out to be an impediment, since the picture is so disorganized and chaotic that the myriad racing scenes result in nothing more than audience ennui (it doesn’t help that much of the race footage is so obviously computer-generated). Sylvester Stallone, who wrote the original story (Neal Tabachnick and Jan Skrentny tackled screenwriting duties), handles the tried & true veteran role: He’s cast as Joe Tanto, a former racing star who’s coaxed out of retirement by crotchety car owner Carl Henry (Burt Reynolds) to provide guidance to Jimmy Bly (Kip Pardue), a rookie sensation who’s in a dead-heat battle for the season championship with ice-cold defending champ Beau Brandenburg (Til Schweiger). Pardue and especially Schweiger are fine in their roles — certainly better than marquee stars Stallone and Reynolds — but the story itself is packed with too many needless characters, fetid dialogue, and ludicrous developments.

Movie: ★½

DUEL (1971) / THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS (1974). Before emerging as the most successful director of all time, Steven Spielberg cut his teeth on TV shows like Night Gallery and Columbo before being handed the reins on Duel, a made-for-TV movie (scripted by Richard Matheson) that was so popular, it ended up receiving theatrical distribution overseas. Duel was followed by Spielberg’s first American theatrical feature, The Sugarland Express; this in turn led to his assignment on Jaws, and the rest is cinematic history. Duel, about a businessman (Dennis Weaver) who’s terrorized on desolate highways by an imposing truck (we never see the driver’s face), gets plenty of mileage (no pun intended) out of its simple premise, with Spielberg exhibiting a firm grasp of the thriller fundamentals that would propel later hits like Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark. And The Sugarland Express, based on a true story about a poor Texas couple (Goldie Hawn and William Atherton) who resort to kidnapping and theft in an effort to get back the child the state has taken away, features real attention to the sort of character dynamics that would serve subsequent titles like E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Saving Private Ryan.

Duel: ★★★½

The Sugarland Express: ★★★

THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE (1992). Five years before adapting and directing the modern masterpiece L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson helmed this sizable box office hit that, like 1987’s Fatal Attraction, used home invasion as a crafty commercial hook. After a gynecologist (John de Lancie) is revealed to have acted inappropriately toward numerous patients, he takes his own life, leaving his pampered wife (Rebecca De Mornay) penniless. Swearing vengeance on Claire Bartel (Annabella Sciorra), the woman who lodged the initial complaint, the widow creates a new identity and lands a job as nanny to Michael (Matt McCoy) and Claire’s young daughter, Emma (Madeline Zima). Trusted by the family, she sets out to thoroughly destroy Claire’s life, with only the Bartels’ mentally challenged handyman (Ernie Hudson) and Claire’s best friend (Julianne Moore, memorable in only her second screen appearance) seeing through her. Hanson and scripter Amanda Silver respect their audience enough to avoid throwing in the usual nonsensical cheap scares — no cats suddenly jumping into the foreground in this picture — but the cluelessness of Claire and Michael is often too hard to swallow.

Movie: ★★½

PHENOMENON (1996). For a movie that’s ostensibly about intelligence, Phenomenon proves to be rather simple-minded. John Travolta delivers a touching performance as George Malley, a likable auto mechanic whose life dramatically changes on the night a light from the sky knocks him off his feet. Suddenly, average George becomes curious George, spending all his time reading books, creating ingenious scientific gadgets, and learning new languages in about the time it takes you and me to eat breakfast. He has also developed extrasensory powers which allow him to, among other things, sense the whereabouts of a lost child or move inanimate objects without touching them. But George discovers that being a combination of Einstein and Carrie has its drawbacks: The FBI suspects he might be a national threat, while the townspeople, with the exceptions of his girlfriend (Kyra Sedgwick), his best friend (Forest Whitaker), and his doctor (Robert Duvall), begin to shun him. Both manipulative and condescending, this is only made watchable by the contributions of its solid cast.

Movie: ★★

WESTWORLD (1973) / FUTUREWORLD (1976). The prolific Michael Crichton made his mark not only as an author but also as a screenwriter, and one of his earliest successes in this vein was the sci-fi yarn Westworld. The picture proved to be so popular that it was followed three years later by a sequel. (There was also a 1980 TV show, Beyond Westworld, but it only lasted five episodes; HBO, of course, had much greater success with its 2016 series.)

In addition to penning the script, Crichton also made his feature directing debut with Westworld, which offers such a tantalizing premise that it’s no wonder he later modified it by adding dinosaurs to the equation and coming up with Jurassic Park. In this picture, the setting is Delos, a theme park populated by robots programmed to do the bidding of the guests. Delos is split up into three distinct worlds: Medievalworld, where guests can joust and assume the throne; Romanworld, where customers can experience more hedonistic pleasures; and Westworld, where patrons can rob banks and take part in gunfights. Vacationers Peter (Richard Benjamin) and John (James Brolin) opt for Westworld, where their exploits include dallying with saloon prostitutes, busting out of jail, and engaging in duels with an ominous gunslinger (Yul Brynner). All proceeds smoothly until the robots malfunction and start killing the guests. The casting of Brynner is inspired, as the actor takes his iconic hero from the Western classic The Magnificent Seven and turns him on his head.

A sequel to Westworld seemed like a no-brainer, since there were countless imaginative ways to expand on the initial idea. Unfortunately, Futureworld fails to capitalize on any of them, choosing instead to focus on a feeble conspiracy plot that only moderately draws upon the unique setting. Here, Delos is up and running again, with all the kinks worked out and the robots once again behaving themselves. But reporter Chuck Browning (Peter Fonda), credited as the man who exposed the previous Delos disaster, feels that something’s still off about the place, so he and TV journalist Tracy Ballard (Blythe Danner) accept an invitation to tour the facilities, little realizing that the Delos heads have something planned for them. Stuart Margolin is touching as a Delos technician whose best friend is a malfunctioning robot (James M. Connor) that’s been put out to pasture, and it’s generally a pleasure to catch Danner in a leading part. But the fact that Crichton’s name doesn’t appear anywhere in the credits — he didn’t even give this his blessing under the usual role of executive producer — hints at a sterile drama with little wit or creativity, and its greatest offense (as well as a cheat to paying viewers) is that it plugs Brynner, again playing the gunslinger, in the main credits and ad copy but then relegates him to a single dream sequence in which he makes out with Tracy!

Westworld: ★★★

Futureworld: ★½