Perhaps keeping in mind Jack Warner's famous line, Warner Home Video will simultaneously release a Jimmy Stewart collection and a Ronald Reagan collection.
I don't think I'll be buying all the films, but I'll definitely be picking up Kings Row, still the best of the over-the-top Freud-besotted Hollywood soaps (unfortunately the DVD won't have a music-only track for the Erich Korngold score), and where several under-utilized WB contract players got their best chance to show what they could do, including Reagan and Ann Sheridan. And from the Stewart collection, the individual title most worth getting is Anthony Mann's The Naked Spur; there's also Billy Wilder's Lindbergh biopic The Spirit of St. Louis, but I haven't seen that yet.
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ReplyDeleteYOU haven't seen "Spirit"? Well, that's jarred me.
ReplyDeleteIt's a fascinating film--to me it's a kind of "Rope" that works, for several reasons(and I don't mean the use of flashbacks to get out of the the cockpit)--mainly the writing, and the voiceover performance of Jimmy Stewart. He's--what?--20-some years too old to play that part? And yet he pulls it off...almost like a great stage performance, it carries you along because you really want to believe that this is real. The score is great, the photography, of course the writing...you're in for a treat.
Spirit is a good one, I think it was a tough story to tell, I mean, a guy in an airplane for 30 hours, and they pulled it off pretty well. BTW, I later read a biography (Scott Berg) of Lindbergh, absolutely fascinating, he was a celebrity of enormous magnitude back before there were that many celebrities. And he did more in any year of his life than I'll do in my entire life (well, almost).
ReplyDeleteI would heartily recommend Storm Warning, a unjustly neglected flick that contains standout performances from both Ginger Rogers and Doris Day. Even Reagan isn't too bad, once you accept that he's playing a liberal lawyer.
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