The Screengrab : mitchell leisen

Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Remembering Claudette Colbert: "Easy Living" and "Midnight" on DVD

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:30:00 GMT

There were so many inventive, witty, sparklingly funny romantic comedies produced by Hollywood in the 1930s that the only logical reason that some of them aren't famous classics is that there were already too many famous classics in this genre and the Westerns were getting jealous. as noted already in our regular DVD roundup, today marks the first appearance on shiny steel discs for two winners, Easy Living (1937), which is not to be confused with a 1949 Jacques Tourneur film of the same title starring Victor Mature and Lucille Ball, and Midnight (1939), which is not to be confused with any of the fifty or sixty other movies with that same title, many of which center around a heavyset person who attempts to work out some childhood trauma that had been nagging at him by dismembering a co-ed. If you are unfamiliar with these films and the trend in fast-paced, fast-talking, sexy entertainment from which they arose, you might wonder how they compare with the modern sex comedies you can enjoy in today's theaters. There is no question that, when compared to a movie like Forgetting Sarah Marshall, they are in some ways deficient. For instance, you will search through these DVDs in vain for a single moment in which the penis of the third-string male lead of How I Met Your Mother is comically, and graphically, deployed. You won't be seeing Don Ameche unzip either. But they do have other things going for them.

For one thing, both hit the ground running, almost as if their makers knew that they'd someday be released into a mass-information age where they'd be competing for the attention of people who had a new video game to tackle. In Easy Living, which is set in New York when that was still way cool, Jean Arthur is on her way to work when she's hit by a fur coat that an enraged millionaire (Edward Arnold) has thrown out a window and makes the mistake of wearing it. (She loses her job because everybody thinks that she must be a gold-digging creature of loose morals and winds up without enough pocket change to afford dinner at the automat, which is staffed by the millionaire's son--Ray Milland--who's just stormed out of the mansion determined to make his own way.) In the continental-flavored Midnight, Claudette Colbert gets off a train in Paris in the middle of the night with nothing but the evening dress on her back and sets out to snare a rich husband--like, now, before she starves. (She meets a millionaire--John Barrymore, exultantly pop-eyed--who ropes her into his marriage problems by hiring her to bewitch the gigolo who's got his own wife, played by Mary Astor, fatally distracted.) You might have noticed that, unlike today's comedies, which depend for their plots and much of their humor on the emotional blocks of a bunch of Peter Pans (or "lovable slackers") and the overgrown cheerleaders (who are supposed to be "career women") who are doomed to sort of love them, the thirties films, which were made for audiences for whom the Depression was a still-fresh memory and the Second World War a looming reality, are full of more-or-less grown-ups who see their options being closed off by financial hardship. They have to resort to absurd, madcap strategies and improvisational stabs at reinvention to keep from falling into an economic pit that makes it seem that much more unlikely that they'll find true love at the end; Colbert's character in Midnight is not untypical of screwball romantic heroines in that she sees true love as a threat, a distraction that might wreck her plans by taking her eye off the ball. If I had gotten that job as DVD columnist for The Daily Worker, I could really go to town with this.

Easy Living and Midnight have a couple of big things in common behind the scenes. One is that both were directed by the insufficiently remembered Mitchell Leisen, a former art director who brought a shimmery, Art Deco look to the material that resulted in a near-perfect souffle, airily stylish but with enough earthly gravity to support slapstick pratfalls and such gags as Barrymore indulging in a funny voice when he makes a well-timed prank phone call. Another thing the two films have in common is that both were written by professional wisecrackers--Preston Sturges, who did the original script for Easy Living, and Billy Wilder, who wrote Midnight with his partner Charles Brackett--who hated Mitchell Leisen's guts. The news that Sturges, in particular, was unhappy was with Leisen did with his script for Easy Living (and also with Remember the Night, a cruelly little-known, Christmasey romance that Leisen and Sturges collaborated on the next year) remains puzzling, but maybe something in both Sturges and Wilder was pushing them to be dissatisfied with the director's work because both of them knew it was time to take charge of how their material was filmed; Sturges would move behind the camera in 1940, and Wilder would follow suit in 1942 (with The Major and the Minor, which also comes out on DVD today as part of the same TCM-approved series). So, in an indirect way, Leisen helped to launch a couple of directing careers that would soon eclipse his own. But the man who made Easy Living and Midnight need not be laden down with backhanded compliments. He's got the real thing coming to him.

DVD Digest for April 22, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a cinematic master gets the Eclipse treatment, and a viral-marketing-phenom makes its DVD debut.

DVD of the Week: In the past few years, a number of Yasujiro Ozu films have made their way to DVD, but he was so prolific that there are still many films missing, especially from his earlier work. For this reason alone, the arrival Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu- Three Family Comedies is cause for celebration. Comprised of three films made between 1931 and 1933, the Silent Ozu box has no extras to speak of (Eclipse doesn't really do extras), but each film features a brand-new score by silent-film composer Donald Sosin, as well as the high-quality transfers we've come to expect from the Criterion family. To date, I've only seen the box's centerpiece film, I Was Born, But..., but that film and the other Ozus I've seen have been so delightful that I have no reservations about recommending the other films- 1933's Passing Fancy and 1931's Tokyo Chorus- as well. Here's hoping that Eclipse continues to do right by Ozu in the years to come. He's certainly worth it.

Releasing today from Criterion itself is Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem's seminal, long-overlooked melodrama Death of a Cyclist. The class-oriented of a respected professor whose life goes into freefall when after a hit-and-run accident, the film is at times heavyhanded but always striking and beautifully shot. In addition, the film should provide a fitting introduction for many moviegoers to the charms of leading lady Lucia Bosé. An Italian stunner with screen presence to burn, Bosé was a mainstay of the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as appearing in work by Buñuel, Fellini, and Marguerite Duras. The DVD also includes a featurette on the life and work of Bardem, but the real story is the film which, like its female lead, is ripe for rediscovery.

Also of note on the classics front is the release of four comedies from Universal's Cinema Classics series. The four films are: the Mae West/Cary Grant vehicle She Done Him Wrong; Billy Wilder's early film The Major and the Minor starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland; and two films from director Mitchell Leisen, 1939's Midnight starring Claudette Colbert, and 1937's Easy Living with Jean Arthur. Each film is a gem, but of particular note is Easy Living, perhaps the greatest film written by Preston Sturges before he reigned over Hollywood comedy in the 1940s. And if it's sexy action you want, check out Image's new DVD of the Shaw Brothers cult classic Intimate Confessions of a chinese Courtesan, a movie I'm pretty sure I dreamed one night.

Compared to this week's selection of classics, the new titles can't help but look a little paltry. The big-ticket DVD this week is of course Cloverfield (Paramount), the Matthew Reeves/JJ Abrams rampaging-monster movie. For me, the film was never so much fun as when I first saw the trailer before Transformers, but the DVD should give people a chance to approach the film separated from all the hype. This week also brings a Philip Seymour Hoffman double feature, with Hoffman hitting DVD shelves with Tamara Jenkins' The Savages (Fox)- in which he appears opposite Laura Linney- and his caustic, Oscar-nominated performance in Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War (Universal), which also features mediocre turns by Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, and a pretty hot scene in which Emily Blunt slinks down the stairs wearing only a man's dress shirt.

In addition, there's a trifecta of indie releases hitting the market today: Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening (Lionsgate), which garnered awards buzz for the ever-dependable Frank Langella; Paul Schrader's The Walker (ThinkFilm), featuring Woody Harrelson as a too-helpful escort for society women; and Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs (Genius Productions), starring "mumblecore" darling Greta Gerwig. Also worth mentioning are the second season of Friday Night Lights (Universal), J.A. Bayona's supernatural chiller The Orphanage (New Line, also Blu-Ray), and the mostly-ignored Hollywood remake of One Missed Call (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Mind you, the latter is only worth mentioning for the sake of completism, but there you go.

Finally, David Huddleston would like the announce that there are no HD-DVDs hitting the market today. Frankly, he couldn't be happier.

Forgotten Films: "Remember the Night" (1940)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Of all the movies that might have become perennial stocking-stuffers over the years, none has been more undeservedly forgotten than the 1940 Remember the Night. The first few times I came across the title, I thought that I'd seen it already, and that it was about the Titanic. Instead, it's a romance starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, four years before their more acidic teaming in Double Indemnity, and directed by Mitchell Leisen, from an original screenplay by Preston Sturges. Three years earlier, Leisen had directed Easy Living, one of the funniest Sturges scripts from before Sturges started directing them himself. This film, though, is less a screwball farce than a gentle comedy than turns more and more into a swooning love story. Luckily, Stanwyck's just-barely meltable hard edge and Stanwyck's way with a wisecrack keep it just this side of mushiness. (The terrific movie blogger the Self-Styled Siren has observed that it was "written soon after Sturges's marriage (his second of four, but a honeymoon's a honeymoon)."

MacMurray plays a hard-nosed assistant D.A. whose last job before Christmas break is to prosecute Stanwyck, a shoplifter. (Explaining why she couldn't just plead to being a kleptomaniac, she sweetly explains, ""You can't try to sell the stuff afterward, or you lose your amateur status.") Recognizing that he's on the verge of losing the jury, MacMurray gets a continuance, figuring that they'll be in a less forgiving mood after the holidays. Then, nagged at by guilt over the thought of the new glittering babe in his life spending Christmas in jail, he bails her out, just so he won't feel like a grinch, yeah, right. He winds up giving her a lift home to see mom for Christmas, planning to drop her off before continuing on his way to his own family get-together, which is presided over by Beulah Bondi. The all-embracing, loving warmth of the MacMurray homestead sometimes threatens to be a bit much, but it's counterbalanced against the cold-eyed cheerlessness of the frost-covered shack from whence Stanwyck's character sprang; the thought of having grown up there is so godawful that the scenes with Ma Bondi couldn't entirely erase the chill if her house was set in front of a butterscotch waterfall with pet unicorns romping on the lawn. Unavailable on video, Remember the Night made its belated debut on Turner Classic Movies last year, and it doesn't seem to have returned this year. But this fine tribute by the aforementioned Siren does much to convey its sweet, distinctive flavor.