FILM FRENZY

James Coburn and Audrey Hepburn in Charade (Photo: Criterion)

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.)

CHARADE (1963). One of the best Hitchcock films that Hitchcock never got around to making, this delightful mystery-cum-romance sparkles with all the vigor of freshly uncorked champagne. Clearly a product of the early 60s — if the playful opening credits designed by Maurice Binder don’t tip you off, the lush score by Henry Mancini certainly will — this casts luminous Audrey Hepburn as a sheltered woman who’s constantly being terrorized by sinister cronies of her late husband. A mysterious playboy (Cary Grant) keeps popping up to lend his support, but is he really a hero or a villain? Director Stanley Donen gets the most out of Peter Stone’s scintillating screenplay, and the supporting cast is headed by a trio of stars-in-the-making: Walter Matthau as a CIA bureaucrat, James Coburn as a charming heavy, and George Kennedy as a surly one. This was incompetently remade by Jonathan Demme as The Truth About Charlie in 2002, with an out-of-his-league Mark Wahlberg cast in the Grant role. This earned Mancini and lyricist Johnny Mercer an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song for the title tune.

Extras in the 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray edition consist of audio commentary from 1999 by Donen and Stone, and the theatrical trailer.

Movie: ★★★½

CRACK-UP (1946). Based on a short story titled “Madman’s Holiday,” Crack-Up is a sporadically successful film noir, distinguished by some neat directorial touches from Irving Reis but hampered by a sleepy cast and a needlessly convoluted plot. Stiff Pat O’Brien is George Steele, a populist art critic who rails against snobbery yet comes across as a snob himself (leading a lecture, he encourages his audience to laugh along with him at a surrealist painting on display). Arriving at the museum late one night in an agitated state, he insists he just survived a train wreck; however, there’s no record of any railroad accidents, leading to his dismissal since it’s assumed that he’s merely drunk. Determined to find out what happened to him, he teams up with his girlfriend (Claire Trevor) and, reluctantly, with a mysterious British art historian (Herbert Marshall). The sequences set aboard the train are intriguing, and there’s a nice twist involving one of the tale’s most unassuming characters; beyond that, Crack-Up registers as a lesser noir, watchable but rarely inspired.

Blu-ray extras consist of the 1945 live-action short Purity Squad and the theatrical trailer.

Movie: ★★½

DUST BUNNY (2026). Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. An ice-cold hitman unexpectedly bonds with the little girl living in his apartment complex after her parents are murdered. Yes, that’s the plot of Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional (reviewed in From Screen To Stream below), but it’s also the plot of writer-director Bryan Fuller’s Dust Bunny … at least initially. Mads Mikkelsen plays the hitman (never given a name) who’s approached by Aurora (Sophie Sloan), the little girl down the hall, with a handful of money and a job: Exterminate the monster that hides under her bed and that killed her parents. Suspecting that Aurora’s parents were murdered by rival assassins and that he was the real target, he explains the situation to his handler Laverne (Sigourney Weaver). Not caring for her advice (kill the child!), he returns to his apartment building and proceeds to deal with an assortment of hardened professionals. From there, the story spins off in its own crazy direction, resulting in a film that’s both fresh and refreshing.

4K extras include a making of featurette; cast interviews; and the theatrical trailer.

Movie: ★★★

THE FRONT (1976). When is a Woody Allen movie not a Woody Allen movie? When it’s The Front, on which he served in no capacity except as actor-for-hire. He’s terrific in the film, adding a comic sheen to an otherwise serious examination of the horrors of the Hollywood blacklist in the 1950s. Woody plays Howard Prince, an apolitical diner cashier who’s asked by his friend Alfred Miller (Michael Murphy), a TV writer targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, to serve as his “front” by putting his name on scripts written by Alfred. The quality of the work Howard submits impresses network producer Phil Sussman (Herschel Bernardi), who’s terrified of HUAC, script supervisor Florence Barrett (Andrea Marcovicci), who’s disgusted by the right-wing hysteria, and popular star Hecky Brown (a superb Zero Mostel), whose career is destroyed after he’s suspected of being a Communist. The fact that Mostel, director Martin Ritt, screenwriter Walter Bernstein, and others were all actual blacklist victims only adds to the immediacy and import of an exceedingly well-written drama that earned Bernstein an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

4K extras consist of audio commentary by Marcovicci and film historians Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman, and the theatrical trailer.

Movie: ★★★½

OUR TOWN (1940). Thornton Wilder’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize winner, routinely cited as one of the best plays ever written, rapidly received a filmic treatment that imported several of the stars of the Broadway version. That would include Martha Scott, in the leading role of Emily Webb, and Frank Craven (who also wrote the screenplay with Wilder and Harry Chandlee), in the integral part of the Stage Manager, the all-knowing narrator who guides viewers through the town of Grover’s Corners in the early years of the 20th century. It’s a tale of life and love — and death, always death — with Emily and next-door neighbor George Gibbs (William Holden in his first top-billed role a mere two years after his film debut) growing up together, falling in love, getting married, and experiencing tragedy. Wilder’s play is indeed one of the greats (and also most performed; heck, even I appeared in my high school’s production), and while the film version isn’t nearly as powerful — the new happy ending feels like a cheat, even though Wilder himself insisted on it — it’s still a moving and even occasionally haunting experience. This was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Actress (Scott), Original Score (Aaron Copland), and Scoring (Copland).

There are no Blu-ray extras.

Movie: ★★★

SOUTHERN COMFORT (1981). This box office underachiever from director Walter Hill is often dismissed as an inferior version of Deliverance. True, it’s no match for the emotional and psychological heights scaled by John Boorman’s 1972 classic, but on its own terms, it’s a rousing popcorn flick bolstered by a sturdy cast and Hill’s deft direction … but also frequently marred — make that crippled — by titter-worthy dialogue. Keith Carradine and Powers Boothe are the headliners, two of a group of nine National Guardsmen who head to the Louisiana swamplands for some basic training. They end up angering the locals — a group of backwoods Cajuns — and soon find themselves fighting for their lives. Fred Ward and Peter Coyote are among those playing Guardsmen, Brion James (Leon in Blade Runner) impresses as a Cajun trapper, and that’s former porn actor, failed Libertarian candidate (rejected by his own party after he called for the wholesale slaughter of Arabs), and Predator co-star Sonny Landham as the mustachioed Cajun killer.

4K extras include audio commentary by film critic Walter Chaw; an archival making-of featurette; and an interview with Hill.

Movie: ★★½

FROM SCREEN TO STREAM

THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1940). An indisputable American classic, John Ford’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s great novel is, like To Kill a Mockingbird and too few others, one of those rare motion pictures that perfectly captures the essence of its source material without compromising it in any way. Director John Ford and scripter Nunnally Johnson pull no punches in relating the saga of the Joad family, poor Okie farmers who head to California hoping to find work after their own land is decimated by drought and taken away by heartless banks and corporations. Beautifully photographed by Citizen Kane‘s Gregg Toland and packed with memorable dialogue (Tom Joad’s climactic “I’ll be there” speech still stirs the soul), this features career-best performances by Henry Fonda as Tom, Jane Darwell as Ma Joad, and John Carradine as the philosophical ex-preacher Casy. Nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Fonda), and Best Screenplay, this won Best Director for Ford and Best Supporting Actress for Darwell. Astonishingly, this marked Fonda’s only acting nomination of his career until he won Best Actor for his final film, 1981’s On Golden Pond.

Movie: ★★★★

HERCULES (2002). Dwayne Johnson has long proven himself to not only be a commanding screen presence but also a pretty good actor. It was unfortunate, therefore, to see him aping Schwarzenegger-as-Conan by starring in Hercules and turning the titular hero into nothing more than a lumbering bore. Based on Steve Moore’s revisionist comic, this finds Herc and his posse (among them Ian McShane and Rufus Sewell) working as mercenaries for a feeble ruler (John Hurt) who fears that his kingdom will be conquered by an enemy army. Before it’s all over, our hero will battle Narnia’s Aslan, throw a horse over his head, and be forced to wear a beard made from the hair off a yak’s testicles (at least that’s what Johnson was stating in interviews at the time). The CGI work is expansive but not very distinguished (or convincing), yet the real culprit is the parchment-dry script by Ryan J. Condal and Evan Spiliotopoulos. McShane offers a few smiles as a psychic who wrongly keeps predicting his own death, but for true merriment, best to skip this arid endeavor and instead watch Joel and the Bots tackle Hercules Against the Moon Men on MST3K.

Movie: ★½

LÉON: THE PROFESSIONAL (1994). A favorite of IMDb fanboys (who have absurdly — but unsurprisingly — ranked it the 44th best movie of all time, putting it just ahead of Casablanca, Rear Window, and Once Upon a Time in the West), Léon: The Professional (titled The Professional when it originally played U.S. theaters) is noteworthy as marking French helmer Luc Besson’s first American production as well as showcasing the film debut of a then-13-year-old Natalie Portman. Jean Reno plays Léon, a seasoned hitman who appreciates Gene Kelly musicals, considers a plant to be his best friend, and drinks two quarts of milk a day. Among his neighbors is Mathilda (Portman), a 12-year-old girl who decides she wants to learn the ropes of the assassination trade after her entire family is wiped out by a corrupt cop (Gary Oldman) and his crew. In her first role, Portman makes a strong impression, and while Reno always comes across as more charismatic in his French-language features, he fares OK in this stateside production. Unfortunately, Oldman’s unbearably hammy turn ranks as perhaps the worst performance of his career — it’s impossible to take him seriously as an imposing villain — while Besson’s visual dazzle can only go so far in covering up a hollow story. There are two cuts of this film: the R-rated theatrical version and an unrated take with additional minutes that largely center on Mathilda’s desire to be Léon’s lover.

Movie: ★★½

RABBIT-PROOF FENCE (2002). Here’s one of those “based on a true story” sagas that showcases humanity at its vilest. It concerns itself with an Australian policy (in effect until 1970) that allowed the government to take half-caste children (part white, part Aborigine) away from their Aboriginal families and integrate them into white society — the idea was that after a couple of generations, all traces of “native” blood would be erased from the family line. Here, the focus is three girls ages 14, 10, and 8 (and earnestly played by non-professionals Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury, and Laura Monaghan); stolen from their moms and sent to a school 1,200 miles away, they soon escape and attempt to walk the entire distance back home. Despite sounding like a human version of Disney’s popular Incredible Journey films (indeed, with a PG rating, this would be fine for older children), this isn’t exactly an uplifting tale of the indomitability of the human spirit; rather, there are many heartbreaking moments, and the coda delivers an additional wallop. David Gulpilil, 31 years after Walkabout, co-stars as a veteran tracker, while Kenneth Branagh appears in several scenes as A.O. Neville, the misguided bureaucrat who plays God with the country’s indigenous people.

Movie: ★★★