Is it on DVD or not?

Yesterday, I mentioned that Make Mine Mink did get a DVD release in the UK, but doesn't seem ot have been released in the US. So it was to my surprise when I looked up today's TCM schedule and saw one of those "Buy DVD" icons next to Make Mine Mink. The thumbnail photo, and eventually the page for the DVD it linked to, looked suspiciously like one of the out-of-print DVDs on offer at Amazon, and a closer reading of the TCM Shop page led me to spot: "ON ORDER", followed by a JavaScript popup to give them your email address so they can tell you when it becomes avaialbe. Presumably, you could buy the DVD if only it were in stock! Or in other words, it's much the same situation as at Amazon.

And then there's tomorrow's airing of The Clock at 8:15 AM. There's no "Buy DVD" link next to this one, which really surprised me. And, sure enough, it's been released through the Warner Archive Collection. Although, to be honest, this is the sort of movie I'd have expected to end up on one of those four-film box sets you see mentioned between films on TCM, and a search of the TCM Shop didn't quickly reveal any such DVD. (The linked DVD was the first hit.) And, unforunately, these Warner Archive MODs are really more expensive than they ought to be.

Make Mine Mink finally back on the TCM schedule

I blogged about Make Mine Mink all the way back in February 2008. As you can see from that post, there's a photo of the cover are from a DVD box set including Make Mine Mink, so it has gotten a DVD release. At least, it did in Europe; all of the DVDs available for sale on Amazon are listed as Region 2, which is Europe and not the US. I don't know who has the rights to it in the US, but it really deserves a DVD release here too.

At any rate, I see it's on the TCM schedule for tomorrow morning at 6:30 AM, which isn't exactly the most convenient time, but then something has to be on at 6:30 AM. This is the first TCM showing in ages: I've got the monthly schedules on my hard drive going back to July of 2007, and tomorrow is the only hit for Make Mine Mink. It's well worth seeing if you haven't seen it before, and I have no idea when it's going to show up again.

Christmas in July

Tonight's the last Friday in November, so we're reaching the end of the Friday Night Spotlight on screwball comedies. This week sees a couple of Preston Sturges movies from the end of the screwball era. Of them, the one I haven't recommended before is Christmas in July, which you can see at 9:45 PM.

Dick Powell stars as Jimmy McDonald, a good guy working in the accounting department of some big business, but not really getting ahead in the world. He's engaged to Betty (Ellen Drew), but still lives with Mother in an apartment building in the poorer part of town. Part of the problem is that Jimmy dreams of getting rich, in a way peculiar to the decade or so just before World War II: winning big money in a radio contest. (You'll remember a radio contest being a major part of the plot to The Magnificent Dope.) This particular contest has a grand prize of $25,000, which would have been several years' income back in 1940, and involves coming up with the best new slogan for Maxford Coffee. (Where's Mrs. Olsen when you need her?)

Meanwhile, we get to see the contest in action. Everbody's sent in their slogans, and now it's tim for the jury to select the winners, but there's a problem: the jury can't agree on which slogan ought to be the winner. One juror, Mr. Bidlocker (William Demarest) has one slogan in mind, while everybody else has a different one. With the contest at a deadlock, some of Jimmy's co-workers decide to play a cruel joke on him: they send him a bogus telegram claiming that his slogan has been selected the winner, and he should go see Mr. Maxford (Raymond Walbourn) to pick up his $25,000 check. Some co-workers. Jimmy goes, and because Maxford has been unable to get in touch with any of the jurors, he assumes that the incompentent jurors simply never informed him that they had finally selected a winner. So, Maxford actually cuts Jimmy a $25,000 check on the spot!

Being declared the winner of one of these big radio contests changes Jimmy in that it gives him more confidence, but it really changes other people's perception of Jimmy just as much. Jimmy's boss gives him a promotion, and retailers are more than happy to give Jimmy an advance on his check when he wants to buy an engagement ring for Betty and gifts for all of the people in his apartment building. It's only at this point that the other shoe drops, and Maxford discovers that the telegraph was a phony, and that the jury still hasn't selected a winner. Maxford understandably presumes that Jimmy is trying to con him, and stops payment on the check. What a PR nightmare.

Things look terrible for Jimmy, but this being a Preston Sturges comedy, you know it's going to have a reasonably happy ending for him and Betty. It's more a question of how the characters are going to reach the resolution that allows the viewers to be happy for Jimmy and Betty. In that regard, Christmas in July succeeds fairly well, although I'm not going to give away the ending.

Christmas in July was only Sturges' second movie as a director following The Great McGinty, so even though he had written quite a few screenplays, the full Preston Sturges style isn't quite here yet. Christmas in July isn't quite as zany as The Palm Beach Story or The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and it isn't as pointed in its criticisms of people in power as Sullivan's Travels or Hail the Conquering Hero. It's fairly gentle, but a nice gentle. And it's still Preston Sturges. Even his mess The Great Moment was worth watching. And Christmas in July is much more successful than The Great Moment.

The TCM shop lists Christmas in July as being available as part of a Preston Sturges box set. It did get a standalone DVD release a couple of years ago, at least according to Amazon, but I don't know if that's still in print.

Tony Musante, 1936-2013

Tony Musante (center) terrorizing an el train car full of passengers together with Martin Sheen (background) in The Incident (1967)

The death has been announced of actor Tony Musante, who died on Tuesday at the age of 77. Musante had a varied career which included a lot of work on the stage and in TV as well as movies. I've recommended two of Musante's movies in the past. First was The Incident, in which Musante and Sheen play a pair of young hoodlums who board a late night el train in New York City and won't let the passengers out, terrorizing each of them in turn. It's a gripping movie, but as far as I know, it still hasn't received a DVD release, which is a huge shame.

The other movie was The Detective, in which Musante has a smaller role, again as a hoodlum. This time, he gets arrested by main character Frank Sinatra and charged with a murder he didn't commit, for which he's sent to the electric chair. When the real murderer commits suicide, it drives Sinatra to a crisis of conscience. It's a very interesting movie, and one that's well worth a watch. When I blogged about it back in June 2010, I pointed out that it was on DVD, but I don't know if that's a DVD that's still in print.

And for evidence that entertainment marriages aren't all doomed to failure, Musante is survived by his wife of 51 years.

The final night for Star of the Month Burt Lancaster

We're already up to the final Wednesday in November, which means it's one final night of Burt Lancaster's movies for his turn as TCM's Star of the Month. The overnight schedule includes The Professionals at 1:15 AM. This is another of those movies I thought I had blogged about before, but a search of the blog, as well as a search of the posts on my computer claims no, I haven't. So now would be a good time to blog about it.

The scene is the Amreican Southwest in 1917; a bit later than your standard-issue western, but just before World War I and the social change that would bring. Over on the other side of the border, in Mexico, there's a revolution going on. Sure, the government is bad, but it's just as likely that the rebels are going to turn out to be a problem, too, as we saw in Crisis many years earlier. Industrialist JW Grant (Ralph Bellamy) has had his wife kidnapped by bandits, and taken to a stronghold somewhere on the Mexican side of the border. And dammit, he wants his wife back! To that end, he's willing to hire the best mercenaries, and pay them a substantial sum. Leading them is soldier-of-fortune Henry Fardan (Lee Marvin). Hnery assembles a team of the best fot the operation: dynamite expert and bon vivant Bill Dolworth (Burt Lancaster), who always seems up for an adventure; horse wrangler Hans Ehrengard (Robert Ryan), and tracker Jacob Sharp (Woody Strode). Their mission, as Grant explains it to them, is to go into Mexico, find Mrs. Grant, and bring her back to him, for which they'll be mighty well compensated.

And so, they head off to Mexico, a place that is pretty desolate and tough to live in, as we saw when discussing the movie Bandolero! back in January 2010. But our team of mercenaries braves the conditions and eventually gets to the camp where Mrs. Grant has been spirited away to, which is where they discover the first of their problems. It's the camp of Jesús Raza, one of the more notorious revolutionaries. As a revolutionary, he's pretty well armed, and getting Mrs. Grant out of there is going to be a darn sight difficult. Additionally, with Raza being her kidnapper, there's also the problem that the Mexican government wants Raza, so our Americans dealing with Raza means they're also eventually going to have to deal with the other side of the revolution. But they want their money, and in a nice set piece they rescue the lovely Maria Grant (Claudia Cardinale; where do all these people in Westerns get their trophy wives from?).

At this point, with Maria in tow and Raza and the Mexican government going after them, the team faces its third problem: Maria doesn't want to go back to Grant. Hers is a marriage not born out of love, but out of Grant's rapacious and controlling desire to have a beautiful wife. In fact, Maria loves Raza and is happy to be with him. But our professionals, faced with all the other problems they have, understandably figure that the least bad thing to do is complete their mission and get the money; if Maria wants to escape back to Raza afterwards that's her business. Except that there are going to be complications getting back to the States, with another set in a mountain pass; more difficult is when Maria suggests that Grant isn't going to pay them according to the terms of hte deal he made with them....

The Professoinals is more entertainment than anything else, as it's not rying to address any social issues or make any really dark points the way that a lot of other movies started to do with the destruction of the Production Code in the late 1960s. But there's nothing wrong with a movie being pure entertainment, and in that regard The Professionals succeeds in spades. Lancaster looks like he's having the time of his life making this one, getting to be rakish at times as he gets knocked on his keister wearing just his long johns. Lee Marvin is good, even if he was more enjoyable when he was playing bad guys. Everybody else has smaller roles, but all of them do well. All along the way, The Professionals is lovely to look at.

The Professionals is available for purchase from the TCM Shop.

Stakeout on Dope Street

A few months back when I blogged about The Man With the Golden Arm, I mentioned in the comments that another movie with an interesting heroin withdrawal scene is Stakeout on Dope Street. That latter film is airing tomorrow afternoon at 1:00 PM on TCM, so now would be a good time to blog about it.

The movie begins with a drug bust gone wrong: two policemen try to catch a drug courier, but are ambushed, with the suitcase holding the drugs discarded where none of the parties were able to obtain it. Coming upon it accidentally is Julian Vespucci, nicknamed "Ves", one of a group of teenaged friends. He takes it to the room behind his father's store, where he and his other friends Jim and Nick hang out. They open the suitcase and find it's filled with... a salesman's cosmetic samples! Much like hiding the drugs in a doll in Wait Until Dark, this was done so that normal people coming upon the suitcase wouldn't spot that one of the containers actually had two pounds of pure heroin in it. Obviously, these teens don't get it either, and dump the canister of heroin, pawn the suitcase for some quick cash, and give the make-up to Jim's girlfriend Kathy (Abby Dalton, whom you might remember from the TV show Knots Landing or her many game show appearances).

One of the three reads about the drug bust gone wrong, and realizes that they had the suitcase involved in the bust! Unfortunately, the garbage truck has already picked up the trash, so they head off to the dump to try to find it, and when they do, they have a brilliant idea that they question whether or not is brilliant: sell the drugs themselves! Suuuure it's a brilliant idea. But there wouldn't be a movie if they hadn't gone for the drugs, or if they had taken the drugs to the police. (Well, they probably would have gotten arrested in the latter case, but that's a completely different story.) So, they decide to sell the drugs themselves, despite the fact that they know next to nothing about who the illicit drugs business works. They also don't get that everybody in town wants those drugs. The police want them off the street, while the drug dealers want them so they can keep making their profits, and the users want them so they can get their fix.

But among the three, one knows a former heroin addict, so they decide to use him as the fence for selling their drugs. As I said in the previous paragraph, boy is this a brilliant idea. Surely the regular dealers are going to figure out pretty darn quickly where the drugs are coming from, putting our three teens' lives in danger. It all leads to a climax that satisfies the strictures of the Production Code, which is probably the one big problem with the movie, but one the movie makers couldn't do anything about.

If there's another problem, it might be realism, or a lack thereof. I have no idea whether three reasonably good teens like this could so easily get themselves involved in fencing heroin, even if one of them did know a drug addict, and even if that addict is willing to help them without getting violent. The addict, however, provides, what is probably relatively realistic, and one of the film's best scenes, as he discusses going through withdrawal for the first time, in a scene that's played like a flashback. I don't know what drug withdrawal is really like, but as presented here, it's quite disturbing.

Stakeout on Dope Street was made with a cast of relative unknowns. Abby Dalton, the one cast member I named, probably went on to the biggest career, although this was made at the beginning of that career. I don't think it was designed to be one of the studio's prestige releases either, what with its black-and-white photography and if IMDb is to be believed, TV-friendly aspect ratio in an era five years after the introduction of Cinemascope. Still, it's quite an effective and entertaining little picture. As far as I know, Stakeout on Dope Street has not received a DVD release. That's a shame, because it deserves one, at least from the Warner Archive.

Another night at the movies

TCM is running another original documentary in its irregular series A Night at the Movies, which look at various genres. I think they've done epics, Christmas movies, and a couple of others before, but tonight, the subject is crime movies. The documentary runs at 8:00 PM, with a second airing at 11:00 PM for the benefit of those on the west coast, as is often the case for these documentaries. My memory of these A Night at the Movies programs is that they're more of a survey show, not providing any particularly new information that would be likely to be unknown by anybody who spends a lot of time watching TCM; the programs, however, are inoffensive enough and probably a reasonably good primer for people who don't know much about the movies.

TCM is also showing several well-known crime movies as part of the prime time lineup, naturally. (Well, of course they're airing crime movies; the "naturally" is for the fact that the ones they've picked are more well-known. I've briefly mentioned Bullitt a couple of times; that's the movie at 9:00 PM in between the two airings of the documentary. Then, at midnight, you can see The Naked City. Pictured above is James Cagney in White Heat, which is on 2:00 AM. The 1970s version of The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three follows at 4:00 AM, and the night concludes with The Thomas Crown Affair at 5:45 AM.

All of the movies in tonight's TCM lineup (not including the documentary) are available on DVD from the TCM Shop.

A night of "making of" featurettes

TCM has reached Part 13 of its Story of Film series, with the movies reaching the early 1990s. Once again, I'll admit to not knowing much about tonight's movies, so I can't really comment about them. I notice, however, that TCM has also scheduled several featurettes on the making of various 1980s films.

You've probably seen the sort of short I'm talking about before; I've mentioned shorts such as Redd Foxx Becomes a Movie Star before. In the January 2012 post I also mentioned All Eyes on Sharon Tate, although that one is a bit different because it's only partly about the making of the movie, and just as much about what Tate did away from the set. Not that it isn't interesting, of course; it's just not solely focused on the movie it's promoting.

As for tonight's "making of" featurettes, there are four of them showing up, although I think I've only seen two of them. First, at about 9:49 PM, is one on Cannery Row. The most interesting of the four might be the one on 2010, at 11:28 PM. 2010, being set in large part on a spaceship, has a lot of special effects, and this featurette discusses in part how they did the effects. That, to me, is much more interesting than hearing a bunch of dramatic actors.

The other two shorts, which I'm fairly certain I haven't seen before, follow the night's third feature, Beau Travail, which begins at midnight. First is one on Fame at about 1:33 AM, followed by a featurette on The Blue Lagoon at about 1:47 AM. Brooke Shields was about 15 when she made The Blue Lagoon, so no perving on her!

Any ideas on what the earliest "making of" featurette was? I know there was one on the trucks that ferried everybody across Africa for the making of King Solomon's Mines back in 1950, and even before that, I seem to recall a short popping up on TCM from time to time about location scouting in Idaho for Northwest Passage. But they really only seem to have become commonplace in the 1960s. (I'm not talking about simple trailers, of course.)

Found in New Zealand, Part 2

Tonight sees the second half of of the movies that were Lost and Found: American Film Treasures from the New Zealand Film Archive. This week actually does have the three surviving reels of The White Shadow, a film whose finding I've mentioned a couple of times in the past since it was written by Alfred Hitchcock at the beginning of his career. If the list on the TCM page is correct, it would be the final item, but I don't know if that list is in the order of airing.

The two-strip Technicolor short The Love Charm sounds reasonably interesting, if only because I'm always up for two-strip Technicolor. There's also a Keystone comedy with Mabel Normand very early in her career, although I don't believe this is a Keystone Kops short: the studio produced much more than just those cop comedies.

There are also a couple of newsreel-like things that look interesting as well. Much as with stuff in two-strip Technicolor, I always find period documentaries fascinating. Well, I don't know that these are documentaries in the sense that we use the words today, but films that were meant to document something more or less factually without actors. I don't think anybody would call the Traveltalks shorts documentaries, but that's the sort of thing I'm thinking of here.

Amazingly, the stuff has already been put on DVD.

Briefs for November 23

I get to complain about the IMDb's search algorithm again. As part of the salute to Ralph Meeker this past Thursday, they showed the movie Shadow in the Sky, one of those Dore Schary-era message pictures from MGM that certainly has some things to recommend about it but also goes hilariously wrong in places. I wanted to check on IMDb whether it was on DVD at all (it doesn't seem to be), but my first search got the title slightly wrong: http://www.imdb.com/find?s=tt&q=shadow+on+the+sky. You'll note the "on" instead of "in". Even with a small mistake like that, you'd think the movie I was looking for would be near the top, but it's way down. I can understand some of the Shadow on the [something or other] movies being above it, but many of the choices are baffling, especially those where there's [something or other] in the Sky before Shadow in the Sky. That having been said, it's fairly clear that the algorithm spits out movies in part due to popularity: the 1953 John Wayne version of Island in the Sky shows up, but not the 1930s Gloria Stuart movie. As for http://www.imdb.com/find?s=tt&q=shadow+in+the+sky, it does helpfully return the movie I was loking for right at the top. But this one also returns only the John Wayne version of Island in the Sky.

Jean-Luc Godard's feature film debut Breathless is showing up again as this week's TCM Essential tonight at 8:00 PM. It's not my favorite film, as I find it drags terribly once the police corner the Jean-Paul Belmondo character. But I'm sure some of you will like it.

The Four Feathers is on again tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM on TCM. This is a rousing adventure, even though it's got a wildly implausible plot. As I mentioned last September, it's another one that's not quite my type of film, but I can't deny the quality of it. It's also got lovely color.

I've mentioned the Pete Smith short Let's Talk Turkey several times. With Thanksgiving coming up, it'll be coming up twice in the following week, once on Thanksgiving, and once tomorrow afternoon around 5:45 PM following Plymouth Adventure, which begins tomorrow at 4:00 PM.