Blu-ray
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Orson Welles’s The Stranger and John Farrow’s The Sea Chase: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video
I’ve always been mystified by the relative lack of attention and acclaim Orson Welles’ 1946 thriller The Stranger has received compared with the director’s better known efforts, since on just about every level it’s top-tier Welles. Perhaps Welles’ own denigration of the picture, which he saw as an impersonal assignment designed to restore his box-office credibility after The Magnificent Ambersons, is to blame. It’s a genre film, sure, but then so is Touch of Evil, which many Welles enthusiasts (myself included) consider to be every bit as important in the director’s oeuvre as Citizen Kane. The Stranger is actually a […]
by Jim Hemphill on Sep 5, 2017 -
Bull, Season One, Duel in the Sun and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
The best new television series of the 2016-2017 season arrived on DVD last week in the form of CBS/Paramount’s Bull: Season One package. A smart, stylish and very funny drama with a killer pedigree – Donnie Brasco and Quiz Show writer Paul Attanasio is one of the show’s creators, Steven Spielberg is an executive producer, and indie auteur Rodrigo Garcia directed the pilot – Bull reinvents and reinvigorates both the procedural and the courtroom drama with consistent verbal wit, visual elegance and one of the most compelling protagonists in the history of television. The show focuses on Jason Bull (Michael […]
by Jim Hemphill on Aug 21, 2017 -
Blake Edwards’s Pink Panther Series: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
In 1963, Blake Edwards was set to direct The Pink Panther with a cast that consisted of David Niven, Ava Gardner and Peter Ustinov — all big stars at the time. The movie was a comedy about a French detective obsessed with catching a jewel thief — not realizing that the thief was sleeping and collaborating with the detective’s wife the whole time. What looked like a debacle — Gardner and Ustinov backing out of the film just days before production — ended up changing film history and Edwards’ career, not to mention the career of Ustinov’s replacement, Peter Sellers. […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jun 30, 2017 -
Anatahan, Woman of the Year, Baby Boom and La La Land: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations of the Week
Director Josef von Sternberg’s last film, Anatahan (1953), represents one of those rare cases where a director got to go out on the absolute perfect note: it sums up many of his philosophical and aesthetic preoccupations while also starkly departing from the kinds of lavish Hollywood productions that made him famous. Loosely based on a true story, it follows ten Japanese soldiers who are stranded on an island during World War II and remain there for years, reduced to their primal instincts by their surroundings as well as the lone woman they discover inhabiting the island. Von Sternberg shot the […]
by Jim Hemphill on Apr 21, 2017 -
The Delinquents, Peyton Place and The Wanderers: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
Robert Altman was making a living as an industrial filmmaker in Kansas City, Missouri when an opportunity arose that would change his life — and the history of American movies — forever. It was the mid-1950s and juvenile delinquent movies like The Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause were burning up the box office, so the son of a movie theater chain owner approached Altman with idea of producing his own teen film. Altman banged out a script in three or four days, and on a budget of $60,000 shot his first feature, The Delinquents, in two weeks with […]
by Jim Hemphill on Mar 31, 2017 -
Stitchers, Hooperman and Dennis Hopper’s Colors: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
I’d like to kick this week’s column off with a pair of television recommendations: one a smart and stylish contemporary series that’s currently streaming, the other a retrospective pick on DVD that deserves to be better known. Stitchers puts an ingenious spin on one of the most shopworn of all television genres, the procedural, breathing new life into the form via an elegant visual style and audacious premise. The show follows Kirsten Clark (Emma Ishta), a Caltech student with a medical condition that wreaks havoc on her sense of time. It also makes her a desirable candidate for a covert […]
by Jim Hemphill on Mar 10, 2017 -
The Yakuza, Interiors and Chilly Scenes of Winter: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
Sydney Pollack’s The Yakuza (1975) is an idiosyncratic but fascinating blend of incongruous tones made all the stranger by the difference in sensibilities among the men behind the camera. The film started as a script by brothers Paul and Leonard Schrader, who sold it for a boatload of cash thanks to the high-concept premise: an ex-soldier from the U.S. travels to Japan and infiltrates the underworld in a mash-up of the American action flick and the Asian martial arts film. Once Pollack came on board to direct the movie became something less commercial but, in its way, more compelling; uncomfortable […]
by Jim Hemphill on Mar 3, 2017 -
23 Paces to Baker Street, Mildred Pierce, Linklater and Almodovar, and More: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
In a career-spanning interview with Polly Platt for the DGA oral history series, director Henry Hathaway dismissed his 1956 thriller 23 Paces to Baker Street as a throwaway, one of those studio assignments he took without much relish. It’s yet another example of why filmmakers cannot be trusted when it comes to their own films, for while the material is slightly shopworn (and owes an enormous and obvious debt to Hitchcock’s Rear Window), Hathaway frames it with meticulous care and artistry. The movie follows Van Johnson as a blind playwright who thinks he overhears a crime being plotted; after the […]
by Jim Hemphill on Feb 24, 2017 -
The General, By Sidney Lumet and Postcards From the Edge: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
This week sees the Blu-ray release of one of the greatest of all silent comedies via Kino’s exceptional high-def transfer of Buster Keaton’s The General (1926) – though to categorize it as a mere comedy is a bit limiting. The film contains wall-to-wall laughs to be sure, but it’s also the most enduring action film of its era, a chase movie that still, over ninety years later, has the ability to awe the viewer with its flawless intersection of conceptual ambition, meticulously executed stunts, and visual elegance. Following essentially the same structure as Mad Max: Fury Road, the movie consists […]
by Jim Hemphill on Feb 10, 2017 -
Death Race 2050, Dragons, Worms and Parents: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Paul Bartel’s 1975 road race movie Death Race 2000 is one of the great exploitation films of all time, a model of how to use the creative freedom of working with limited resources within a marketable genre for the purposes of subversive satire. Produced by Roger Corman, it has a deliciously nasty premise: in the (then) future, the population is kept pacified by gory reality entertainment in the form of a cross-country road race in which drivers receive points for mowing down pedestrians. Bartel and screenwriters Robert Thom and Charles Griffith milk this conceit for all that it’s worth, ramping […]
by Jim Hemphill on Feb 3, 2017
