Product Description
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Controversial Classics (DVD) (7-Pack)
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Otto Preminger expanded his vision in the 1960s with a whole
series of ambitious, expansive dramas with huge casts and big
themes. Advise and Consent (1962), an examination of deal making,
party politics, and congressional diplomacy in Washington's
legislative halls (based on the novel by Allen Drury), is one of
his best. Preminger broke the blacklist with his previous film,
Exodus, and it rings through in this drama about a controversial
nominee for secretary of state (a confident, stately Henry Fonda)
accused of being a Communist. The nomination process becomes the
center ring of the political circus, with fidgety accuser Burgess
Meredith in the spotlight; devious, silver-tongued Charles
Laughton cracking the whip as a southern senator with a grudge
against Fonda; and party whip Walter Pidgeon lining up votes
behind the scenes. Arm twisting and diplomatic hardball turns to
perjury and blackmail, and a melodramatic twist gives this lesson
in party politics a salacious soap opera dimension.
With The Americanization of Emily (1964), screenwriter Paddy
Chayefsky (Marty) sinks his satirical fangs into a story of an
American naval officer (James Garner) selected to be the first
victim at the invasion of Normandy. Julie Andrews plays a prim,
British war widow who falls for him. Cynical in tone, the story
becomes an interesting collision of manipulative interests and
renewed life, the same formula that worked so well in Chayefsky's
scripts for Network and Hospital.
One of the first Hollywood films to deal openly with white
racism toward Japanese Americans during World War II, Bad Day at
Black Rock (1955) (directed by action maestro John Sturges, The
Great Escape) stars Spencer Tracy as a one-armed stranger named
MacReedy, who arrives in the tiny town of Black Rock on a hot day
in 1945. Seeking a hotel room and the whereabouts of an ethnic
Japanese farmer named Komoko, MacReedy runs smack into a wall of
hostility that escalates into serious threats. In time it becomes
apparent that Komoko has been murdered by a local, racist
chieftain, Reno Smith (Robert Ryan), who also plans on dispensing
with MacReedy. Tracy's hero is forced to fight his way past
Smith's goons (among them Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin) and
sundry allies (Anne Francis) to keep alive, setting the stage for
memorable suspense crisply orchestrated by Sturges. Casting is
the film's principal strength, however: Tracy, the indispensable
icon of integrity, and Ryan, the indispensable noir image of
spiritual blight, are as creatively unlikely a pairing as
Sturges's marriage of Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen in
The Magnificent Seven.
Novelist Evan Hunter burst America's postwar bubble when he
described an inner-city school terrorized by switchblade-wielding
juvenile delinquents. Director-screenwriter Richard Brooks's 1955
adaptation of Blackboard Jungle still packs a tremendous wallop
(even if it was mostly on the back lot). A forerunner of
Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story, this black-and-white
classic--set to Bill Haley and His Comets' "Rock Around the
Clock"--is part exposé, part melodrama, part public-service
announcement. Glenn Ford, at his slow-to-rile best, plays Richard
Dadier, an incoming English teacher at North Manual High School.
An idealist who knows how to handle himself in a dark alley,
Dadier stands his ground and earns the begrudging respect of
school thugs led by Vic Morrow and Sidney Poitier. Anne Francis
plays Ford's especially vulnerable wife; Richard Kiley is the
timid math teacher with the priceless jazz-record collection;
Louis Calhern and John Hoyt are among the more cynical North
Manual High veterans. See if you can ID Jamie Farr and director
Paul Mazursky as gang members. The film was nominated for four
Os.
More timely now, perhaps, than when it was first released in
1957, Elia Kazan's overheated political melodrama Face in the
Crowd explores the dangerous manipulative power of pop culture.
It exposes the underside of Capra-corn populism, as exemplified
in the optimistic fable of grassroots punditry Meet John Doe. In
Kazan's account, scripted by Budd Schulberg, the common-man
pontificator (Andy Griffith) is no Gary Cooper-style aw-shucks
paragon. Promoted to national fame as a folksy TV idol by radio
producer Patricia Neal, Griffith's Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes turns
out to be a megalomaniacal rat bastard. The film turns
apocalyptic as Rhodes exploits his power to sway the masses,
helping to elect a reactionary presidential candidate. The
parodies of television commercials and opinion polling were
cutting edge in their day (Face in the Crowd was the Network of
the Eisenhower era), and there are some startling,
near-documentary sequences on location in Arkansas. An
extraordinary supporting cast (led by Walter Matthau and Lee
Remick) helps keep the energy level high, even when the satire
turns shrill and unpersuasive in the final reel.
Fury is tough stuff from director Fritz Lang (M), making his
first American film with this 1936 story of an innocent man
(Spencer Tracy) who escapes a lynch mob and then orchestrates his
apparent murder at their hands. Tracy is superb, and the film is
uncompromising, until studio interference takes some of the wind
out of Lang's sails right at the end. But as the portrait of a
character who comes to reflect the destiny he is trying to avoid,
this is still essential Lang and a pre-noir classic.
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) is one of the toughest
and most uncompromising movies to ever come out of Hollywood.
Paul Muni stars as a regular Joe, just back from World War I, who
is unjustly convicted of a crime and sentenced to 10 years of
bruisingly unfair on a chain gang. Even a successful
escape can't shake the spectre of the chains, nor the amazingly
alistic twists the screenplay has in store. This picture could
only have been made at Warner Bros., where social-justice movies
flourished in the 1930s and criticism of judicial systems and
prisons was sanctioned. Muni's weird acting style (he was
recently off face) somehow fits the film's furious tone, and
director Mervyn LeRoy--as in his earlier Little Caesar--was
dexterous enough to build the action to an unforgettable ending.
It's a film that filters the American Dream through Depression
realities and noirish pessimism (with a streak of pre-Code sexual
frankness--note the one-night "friend" Muni makes the night of
his escape). This one holds up, folks; it's a stunner.