The Movie

It may take a special type of science fiction fan to appreciate the wonders of Tokusatsu movies, the term for Japanese fantasy cinema – of which Warning From Spaceis an early example. Tokusatsu films may entail horror, monsters, and/or science fiction, but generally involve the use of special visual effects. Western viewers more accustomed to linear, rational storytelling can sometimes be a little confounded by the dreamlike logic and bizarre twists that these films can have, often made worse by bad attempts at dubbing them into English. Most of the general public is familiar with Godzilla as a character, though most people in the West probably don’t fully realize just what the creation of the monster brought about. Not only has Godzilla starred in over thirty Japanese films (including the recent anime seen on Netflix), his success resulted in a whole new film industry in Japan, unleashing a large number of movies and television shows about monsters and aliens. While many of these productions look pretty interesting, there is no doubt that they can also be confusing and strange.

In David Kalat’s excellent book A Critical History And Filmography Of Toho’s Godzilla Series, he explains some of the differences between Japanese and western culture, and how they relate to storytelling in film. While creators in the West favour logic, Japanese filmmakers may emphasize feelings and ideas, often dispelling with logic. Of course, American sci-fi films aren’t always totally adherent to logic either, whether one looks at the 1950s heyday of atomic, Cold War paranoia monster movies, or the effects-laden superhero blockbusters of today – but those Japanese movies can really be something else! Plots take off in different directions, sometimes without any real sense of cause-and-effect, odd happenings go unexplained, and one can tell that there are frequently aspects of Japanese myth and legend that enter into things, making it all somewhat impenetrable to the western viewer. Personally, though, I find these films incredibly fascinating and fun.

Prior to Arrow putting out their new Blu-ray of Warning From Space, I was familiar with the film only from seeing images of its preposterous starfish-like aliens, which I found more than a little reminiscent of the Justice League villain Starro The Conqueror, whom they fought in their first adventure in 1960 – which was actually a few years later! Seeing the frankly lame star-shaped costumes immediately puts one into a “camp” frame of mind. How can anyone take a film like that seriously, right? However, I had also read Stuart Galbraith’s Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo!, which seemed to indicate that Warning From Space was a much more earnest effort than what one might expect. I was intrigued. When I heard that the film had been prepared for an authorized Blu-ray, I was pretty excited to check it out.

From the opening moments, when we meet two friends at an eating bar, Warning From Space evokes thoughts of George Pal’s 1953 classic The War Of The Worlds. Lights are seen in the sky, meteorites appear to fall to earth, and eventually strange creatures emerge and terrify the populous. Rather than the superbly intimidating aliens in The War Of The Worlds, however, we get the rather silly star-shaped creatures previously mentioned. That’s okay, though, because the serious tone of the film keeps one quite involved, and one can forgive some bad costuming.

We come to know three great scientists and their families, though any attempts at characterization or personal growth are short-lived and ultimately quite subservient to the alien plot. For example, the daughter of one scientist has her choice of staying single questioned by her parents, but that storyline goes nowhere. Much more important is that the aliens turn out to be friendly, a message that is easier to take once they assume the forms of humans, including that of a famous, beautiful actress. At this point, my thoughts drifted more towards this movie being inspired a little by Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, also from 1956, though with more benevolent aliens. (Also, I recalled the later 1964 Godzilla movie Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster, where an alien entity appears as an Earth princess.)

The aliens offer a sincere message of warning: mankind much change its destructive ways or risk the consequences. Naturally, the film then reminded me of 1951’s The Day The Earth Stood Still. But hang on! There is also a rogue planet headed towards earth, ready to smash it to smithereens. Ah, so now the movie has become When Worlds Collide (also produced by George Pal, from 1951)! Mankind will undoubtedly perish, unless the aliens can work with an Earth scientist, who has a secret formula which can potentially destroy the hurtling planet.

If it sounds like a real hodgepodge of plots and ideas, it is. But it’s also good fun, though all taken quite seriously. Those starfish aliens don’t really appear too much, which helps. The constantly evolving plot actually keeps things moving. If you get bored, don’t worry – the story is about to head into another direction!

And I need to also mention one more instance of one film possibly inspiring another: Remember those spinning hoops seen on Krypton in Superman: The Movie? They appeared here first, on the alien star ship!

The Disc

Arrow’s Blu-ray has a reversible cover, so one may switch it to showing an English-language film poster, though the new art on the standard cover is also quite nice.

The disc contains both the Japanese version and the English-language version that was done for the American market. This US version was distributed by American International Television, and runs a little over a minute longer, perhaps mostly due to changes in the opening credits. The dubbing is okay, but there are the usual small differences in details or nuances that happen, making for an interesting comparison. I usually go for the original language version, but the dub is adequate.

Public domain DVDs have in the past used pretty crummy prints for this film, so word of a Blu-ray presentation was quite exciting. Well, temper your expectations. This is still an old film, shot on what I would guess to be lesser film stock. The Blu-ray image is quite clean, at least, with barely any dust or print damage evident. Sharpness, however, comes and goes, depending on the shot, with a few shots bordering on blurry. There is also some faint flicker. Color values also vary, becoming faded at times. Mostly, though, it’s a more pleasing presentation than one might expect, given the circumstances, and some scenes really look quite good. The mono sound is actually quite clear, with no discernible hiss in either version.

Looking at the extras, the aforementioned Stuart Galbraith IV provides a prepared, informative commentary that runs for a little over an hour, stopping just short of the complete film. No one knows Japanese cinema (especially Tokusatsu) like Galbraith, so it’s great that he could contribute. A teaser and theatrical trailer are here as well. The disc also contains a stills gallery, including many neat poster and lobby card images.

Cinematic Classic or Faded Print?

As the first true Japanese science fiction film to be filmed in color, Warning From Space does hold a certain place in film history. It’s not a great film, but it is a good one, and not at all campy once you get past the starfish pyjama suits. Lovers of Tokusatsu movies will find it a must-see, while fans of American ‘50s sci-fi will also find it engaging, if a bit derivative. Arrow’s disc does what it can with the faded elements, and gives the film by far its best representation in many years. With an informative commentary, the US version, a nice image gallery, and trailers, this is a satisfying disc for anyone inclined to check out this somewhat landmark film.

The Movie:

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were comedic performers who met doing burlesque in the 1930s. Once they made a permanent partnership, they went on to do radio, and then Universal Studios cast them in supporting roles in their film A Night In The tropics in 1940. They stole the show, and from then on they headlined films for the next fifteen years. Tall, thin Abbott played the often conniving or lazy straight man, while the shorter and rounder Costello played a bumbling simpleton who nevertheless could often end up getting the better end of things. Most of their films were done under their Universal Studios contract, but they were also allowed to make one independent film per year. Two of these were color films distributed by Warner Bros. The first, Jack And The Beanstalk, also used sepia-toned bookends a la The Wizard Of Oz. That film has entered the public domain and is available on a number of DVDs. Their other Warner Bros. film, though, has not been widely available until now.

Abbott And Costello Meet Captain Kidd was their first fully color film, filmed in SuperCineColor, and produced by Abbott’s production company Woodley Productions. The script featured typical Abbott & Costello silliness, in a plot about pirates and buried treasure. Of course, it’s all just a wonderful excuse to see the pair engage in their usual routines that saw Abbott sacrificing his pal Costello whenever danger appeared, and alternately dismissing him when opportunity arose.

In this case, the team play American expatriates trying to get home from an unnamed island. One night, said island is visited by pirates, led by Captain Kidd himself. Charles Laughton reprises the role of Captain Kidd, having played Kidd in the eponymous 1945 film. Laughton is even better known for having played Captain Bligh in MGM’s 1935 version of Mutiny On The Bounty, so audiences were quite acquainted with seeing him as an overbearing sea captain. In this film, he plays it mostly straight, before succumbing to the frivolity of the film’s final act. Abbott and Costello always worked best for me when going up against real threats (their best film naturally being Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein), where their comedy hijinks gain from the contrast.

The pirates are no doubt vicious cutthroats, but they do enjoy a rousing song, as evidenced by the film’s opening number on Kidd’s pirate ship. Once they reach the island, they pursue the town’s women with uncommon vigor. Today’s sensibilities may lead one to wince at the sight of such pillaging, not to mention at how the women eventually give in and enjoy the attention, as the action moves to the town bar. Two employees at the bar are Rocky and Puddin’Head, our heroes. On their way to work, they accept a scroll from Lady Jane that contains a message for her beloved, Bruce, who is a singer at the bar (where he is backed up by a dozen beauties as he sings A Bachelor’s Life in another rousing number).

Rocky and Puddin’ are asked to serve a meal to the cruel Captain Kidd, which is seen as a privilege, until numerous other waiters report their awful dealings with the pirate. Naturally, Rocky acquiesces and allows Puddin’ to wait on Kidd. In a private room, Kidd is discussing business with a statuesque lady pirate named Captain Bonney, whom he has recently cheated. He agrees to take Bonney to Skull Island, where he has buried treasure, a treasure for which he holds a treasure map. Once Puddin’ enters the picture, though, the map ends up switched with the love letter meant for Bruce. This is not the last time this occurs in the film— not by a long shot.

Suffice it to say that Rocky and Puddin’Head end up on Captain Kidd’s ship as Kidd’s guests (temporarily), alongside Captain Bonney (who later falls for Puddin’) and a shanghaied Bruce. The love letter and the map constantly go missing, are switched, and are recovered, during which time foes become allies and allies come into conflict. The comic potential in such a set-up is obvious, but the skill at which the scenario is played keeps it from getting tired. Lady Jane joins the ship’s complement before they get to Skull Island, setting up an all-out fight to the finish, for love and treasure.

The writing is witty, the songs are actually quite fun and well performed, and the pace rarely drags. Prolific director Charles Lamont, who got his start doing silent comedy shorts in the 1920s, helmed not only Abbott And Costello Meet Captain Kidd, but numerous other Abbott and Costello vehicles, Ma & Pa Kettle films, and many episodes of Disney’s Zorro as well as the Annette serial on Mickey Mouse Club. With such an experienced director at the helm, it’s no wonder the film’s stars come off so well. Abbott and Costello are in fine form, Laughton is a perfect foil, and Hillary Brook plays a sensual but dangerous Captain Bonney. Veteran actor Leif Erickson also puts in a skilled turn as Kidd’s first mate, Morgan. After viewing all this classic fun, I couldn’t believe that such a film had escaped my attention for so long.

The Disc:

The picture on this film is its original 4:3 frame. Much to my delight, it has been remastered; but is clearly unrestored, with numerous scratches and other marks appearing right from the beginning. The picture is relatively sharp and colorful, but forget about seeing any detail in the inky blacks of shadows. Skin tones sometimes veer towards pink, but are usually accurate enough. The SuperCinemaColor might have looked a little better on screen in 1952, but really comes off quite well here on DVD. Overall, the image is far from perfect, but neither is it a disaster. As a Warner Archive release, it’s par for the course and quite acceptable, though not as good as some other surprises from the Archive vault. The audio comes off just fine, with no hiss or distortion. Song lyrics and dialog are clear, and you won’t miss a syllable of Abbott or Costello’s punchlines.

The menu is the usual Warner Archive menu seen these days, and chapter stops come every ten minutes. No extras are on this release.

Cinematic Classic or Faded Print?

I grew up on the Abbott and Costello Universal Studios films, which saw plenty of play on my local TV station on Saturday mornings in the 1970s. For this reason, I have the same nostalgia for them as I do for Hanna-Barbera and Filmation cartoons. Even mediocre Abbott and Costello is worth watching for me, and fortunately I would consider Abbott And Costello Meet Captain Kidd to be a very strong effort, thanks largely to the presence of Charles Laughton, solid musical numbers, and a funny script. This film was made at the tail end of their theatrical popularity, with their next film being the interesting but lacking Abbott And Costello Go To Mars. At the same time, they were appearing on television in a series that reprised many of their best film bits. Given what was to come, Abbott And Costello Meet Captain Kidd may be their last great hurrah, fittingly captured in color just as they were about to fade off into the sunset.

The Movie:

Cheap, tacky, ludicrously plotted, badly performed and sometimes bafflingly directed, The Green Slime is everything you look for in a movie that, with a title like that, can only be so bad it’s great! Seriously, there’s a surprising amount of genuinely good stuff in here that lifts the film from the usual sci-fi schlock of the period and makes it pure, unadulterated, F.U.N. – so long as you can put up with my terrible acronym for Fantastic, Unintentionally-hilarious Nonsense!

With the success of the Americanization of Godzilla in the 1950s, Japan fairly quickly became the home of the Creature Feature: low-budget movies about giant freaks of nature running rampage through big cities, or unthawed dinosaurs running rampage through big cities, or robot monsters on the loose…running rampage through big cities! Although Japan’s Toei Film Company was one of, if not the, leader in home grown production, most of these movies would be re-framed for the international market to feature some kind of on the way up or on the way down marquee name from the States, additional scenes inserted to make it seem they were in the production from the beginning.

Although these films were pretty terrible (some even in a good way!), they were cheap to make and almost always turned a profit. Filmmakers from other countries – most notably Italy – were quick to jump in on the act, and the American studios did not let these successes pass them by completely. Shipping out entire stock players but using local crew in order to make “authentic” American films cost effectively in these countries, became something of its own sub-industry, leading to such brilliantly bonkers Japanese classics as King Kong Escapes and King Kong Vs Godzilla, in which the two legendary movie monsters run rampage through the big city!

Italy, where don’t forget, before they achieved critical acclaim, Eastwood and Leone’s Dollars Trilogy were originally envisioned as el cheapo westerns (hence the spaghetti western tag), bounced back with a whole slew of space set melodramas in the wake of the success of such shows on television.

The first in the so-called Gamma 1 Quadrilogy was 1965’s Wild Wild Planet, originally intended for television but given a big screen release by MGM. Four films had been contracted to shoot simultaneously, to save on special effects, and this was quickly followed up by Diaphanoids, Bringers Of Death (aka War Of The Planets) in 1966, War Between The Planets (you can see how this can get confusing) just a couple of months later, and The Snow Devils (aka Devil Men From Space) in 1967.

From those kinds of titles, you should know by now if reading anything further about The Green Slime will either have you navigating away from this review, or fervently reading on with excitement! Producers Ivan Reiner and Walter Manley certainly were: the pair had made the Gamma 1 films and were eager to make more of the same. MGM decided on a Gamma III series, set on a new space station, but pushed for a Japanese direction instead. Reiner and Manley decided on director Kinji Fukasaku to helm the new adventure, and though it very much follows in the footsteps of the previous Gamma movies, MGM’s financial struggles of the time meant it would be the only one produced, coming out in 1968, the same year as MGM’s more creditable space drama 2001: A Space Odyssey…talk about a questionable double bill!

Actually, although I was expecting a so bad it’s good movie, I wasn’t expecting The Green Slime to also include some pretty good ideas of its own. Yes, it does through in the typical love-triangle/feisty relationship between the station’s commander (Richard Jaeckel), the hot-shot problem solver come to save the day (Robert Horton) and the girl they’re both in love with (Italian Thunderball actress Luciana Paluzzi, and it does have the pre-requisite wooden plank performances and monkey scriptwriting, but it’s actually pretty well made…for a slice of cheap sci-fi junk!

The opening premise, that Earth is about to be blown to bits by a huge asteroid, has Horton boarding Gamma III, where he’ll take command of a mission to land two rockets on the chunk of space rock and blow it to bits. Put your imagination into overdrive, and it’s Armageddon thirty years before Bruce Willis went up to pull off the same trick, though granted the “spectacular effects” are cheesy as heck.

It’s on the rock that a scientist along for the ride accidentally contracts some “green slime” on his space suit, unintentionally taking it back with him (after the required slapping down from the commander for being so careless, natch) to Gamma III, where it quickly begins to spread uncontrollably. Any attempts to blast it create more slime creatures from its green blood, all of them energy guzzlers that grow in size with every zap! At this point, the film begins to resemble Alien, ten years before that milestone, though the basic “monster loose in an enclosed location in space” plot is hard to shake off.

Of course, The Green Slime is nowhere as mean or scary as Alien, as the film’s original G-rating will attest, the film is more geared towards families that watched Star Trek or Lost In Space at the time, though now it simply entertains with its ludicrous melodramatic turns and, at one point, an attempt to whip up some action frenzy with the camera zooming in and out wildly, desperately searching for the actors’ faces to focus on again and not doing anything really remotely dramatic other than absolutely creasing up today’s audiences. An early indication of where the film is going (even after the hilarious “asteroid”, which basically resembles a meatball…ahh the Italian connection again!) is when the opening song (yes, there’s a theme song!) starts to blare out: “Greeeeeen Sliiiiiime! Greeeeeen Sliiiiiiime!” – brilliant, just brilliant.

That song (covered, apparently, Josie Cotton on a 2007 album Invasion Of The B-Girls) and the film’s score was written by Charles Fox, composer of over one hundred films and the writer behind many of the 1970s and 80s’ best television themes: look him up, since the list is way too populated to start highlighting here.

Leading man Horton was in these kinds of things for a reason; solid but emotionless, he made a career from being a featured player on a multitude of television shows over the years (recurring in such anthologies as Studio 57, Matinee Theater, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the western series Wagon Train), while Jaeckel is a supporting actor face that I absolutely guarantee you’ll recognize from any of his endless list of TV and film appearances (among them the original 3:10 To Yuma, The Dirty Dozen and, bizarrely but perhaps most appropriately for readers of this site, as John Vernon’s accomplice in Herbie Goes Bananas)!

They’re joined by an impressive number of background players, many of them American military, amateur actors and female models based in Japan, and all of them displaying their uniquely terrible acting abilities to enormously amusing effect. And once the Green Slime itself has attached itself to the Gamma III space station and proven to be indestructible, the real fun begins, as the monsters become gaping one-eyed walking killers (or Japanese children in rubber suits, as they were)! Actually, that sounds totally ridiculous – and it is – but The Green Slime would just be a bad movie if it was only as good as that.

So, somewhat impressively given the budget and no-doubt strange working conditions in speaking to each other through a translator, director Fukasaku manages to hold together the pacing of the movie so that it never really lets up, as well as being able to rely on the actually quite good special effects, rubber suits aside, and the CinemaScope ratio framing that adds a heap of value to any of his shots.

What I was often reminded of, in the miniature set construction, was the detail of Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlett Super-Marionation programs, with giant rockets and wide shots of “sets” being well matched to the scale-sized sections the actors would then appear next to. There’s also a couple of instances of reverse footage depicting the slime “climbing” up walls and such, which is simple but effective!

On the flipside of this, though, the Gamma III station never really feels adequately big enough in size, and borders hilariously on the Ed Wood scale when fire engulfs it towards the end, though to nitpick on something like that in a film like this is to miss the point. The Green Slime was produced with a quickie B-Movie mentality in mind but, although it delivers on all points in those regards, it’s also good in it’s own way. Despite the space station’s doors not always swooshing closed as smoothly as they might, and despite the many clunking dramatic turns to camera to speak outrageously preposterous lines of dialogue, it’s a fantastically nuts, hugely enjoyable space ride in the low-grade tradition of the best worst movies!

The Disc:

Making its DVD debut as part of the Studio’s manufactured on demand discs, The Green Slime is the first of the Warner Archive discs that I’ve come across that has boasted the Remastered Edition banner along the top of the sleeve, leading me to assume that this would essentially be as good a release as a widely commercially available pressing in all but the proprietary DVD-R format. I’ve questioned for a while now if the Archive Collection has become something of a dumping ground for some titles to find an outlet even when a wider release would have originally been on the cards, and the popularity of The Green Slime suggests WB would have done well to put it out as such.

Instead, they’ve gone the Archive route – seemingly more and more a place for borderline titles to be found – though the Remastered tag doesn’t, ultimately, count for much going by the results here.

Transfers for the Archive Collection can be a random game of good or bad, and while there’s nothing really “wrong” with the correctly framed anamorphic widescreen print here, it’s not as spotless as a Remastered label might have you believe. I’ve seen plenty of WB Archive titles with transfers as good as this, and was initially disappointed with the amount of print debris to be found at the beginning of the film.

It soon clears up about five minutes in, but don’t be expecting to compare this to a commercial release: it’s a good, solid Archive release, but nothing phenomenally special. In a way, a few scratches here and there add to the B-Movie fun, and WB can only do what they can with what they have, but to slap the Remastered tag on the cover and charge $5 more for the privilege suggests a higher level of quality than we get here, good enough as it is. The mono soundtrack – probably as was original created – makes up for it, sounding as good as it needs to for such a film, without any distractions or signal noise to ruin things, and the slime creatures’ high-pitched whining itself is as bonkers an effect as they look.

In terms of extras, The Green Slime disappoints the most: even the most mundane and routine Archive releases have managed to muster up a theatrical trailer, and you’d think a Remastered Edition would once again provide something like that and more.

The film was the focus of Mystery Science Theater 3000’s never aired pilot episode, which would have been pretty cool to see, as would the 77-minute Japanese cut of the film, prepared by director Fukasaku to remove the love-triangle plot and run as a potentially more action adventure film, with alternate music cues, additional ending scenes, and re-named Gamma III: Big Military Space Operation (or Operation Outer Space) to play in a children’s double feature matinee with the animated feature Pinocchio In Outer Space.

Disappointingly, there isn’t even a theatrical trailer – easily available if the YouTube appearance is anything to go by – and the smart move would have been to include not only The Green Slime but trailers for the other Gamma movies, also available from the Warner Archives, or even package the series as a boxed set!? At least the theatrical poster art has been used on the front of the sleeve – typical in that it depicts a sexy-looking Paluzzi being tackled by one of the slime monsters in outer space, but a bit of a stretch considering the scenes that are actually in the movie! The black and white back cover photos don’t really sell the widescreen full-color cinematography of the movie, but chances are you’re looking at The Green Slime if you’re a bad sci-fi nut anyway, and pretty much know what to expect.

Cinematic Classic or Faded Print?

The complete lack of any extras other than a “Play Movie” menu screen coupled with a transfer that, while pleasingly sharp and in its correct anamorphic ratio, is otherwise not as speckle-free as the Remastered Edition label (and higher price tag) suggests, means a purchase of The Green Slime will be down to how much you may crave the title on DVD. And though it’s huge fun, the inflated $25 cost is more than even other Remastered titles, for some reason, which makes it hard to recommend a vanilla disc that only contains a “joke” movie, however funny that movie may be. A wait for a lower cost digital download, price drop, or deal on an Archive bundle may be the way to go, though for fans of this kind of film, you just have to see it to believe it!

The Movies:

“You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive”. So said Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s eminently proficient sleuth Sherlock Holmes to Dr John Watson on their very first encounter, and it’s a similar line that introduces them, for very different reasons, in Sherlock, the Doctor Who team’s new take on the classic stories. As one of the most filmed literary characters in screen history, current adaptations have been eager to break away from the deerstalker hat and pipe that characterized previous, though well celebrated, film and television series featuring Basil Rathbone, Peter Cushing and Jeremy Brett, who each made the character their own for different generations.

Most recently, Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law stepped into Holmes and Watson’s shoes for a more action-orientated account, and although “purists” argued against several aspects of that film, it seems many have forgotten that Holmes did use his fists when it came to it, a fact that those three previous actors’ more gentle renditions have almost wiped out. When the BBC announced its own take on the stories, the question was in what direction Holmes could be taken so that yet another version wouldn’t be a simple retread of before. The answer was to bring him “here”, to 2010, for a contemporary-set, modern day series of adventures.

Although that approach might, at first, seem like a desperate stretch, it actually works out to be Sherlock’s masterstroke. Co-created from Conan Doyle’s original works by the current master of Doctor Who, executive producer Steven Moffat (also the scribe behind Spielberg and Jackson’s upcoming Tintin adventure), and League Of Gentleman actor and Who writer Mark Gatiss (also of a terrific recent BBC series on classic scary movies, A History Of Horror), Sherlock works extremely well as a detective story for the CSI crowd while packing in lots of nods, names and references for the Holmes fans, as well as many smart little touches of its own.

The Afghanistan line, in Conan Doyle’s first story A Study In Scarlet, referred to John Watson’s returning to England after being wounded in the Second Afghan War in 1880: here it’s a much more topical war – in the same country – that has given him reason to return. Looking for lodgings, he and a presumptuous new companion, Sherlock Holmes, meet to check out an apartment at 221B Baker Street and, after Sherlock “convinces” Watson that sharing the rent will make it cheaper for both of them, they agree to move in together under landlady Mrs Hudson’s watchful eye (a cause of recurring humor is that they are often mistaken for a item, much to Watson’s chagrin).

As Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch displays Moffat’s wonderful knack for casting: he could quite easily have been the new Doctor Who, had Moffat not decided to go with Matt Smith, since both characters express themselves in much the same way. Indeed, although Smith may have been too young for Sherlock, it wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch to swap the roles around and had neither show suffer as a consequence. Ironically, Smith did audition for Watson before he landed the new Who (more perfect casting), but the role eventually went to The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’s Martin Freeman, whose face gives Sherlock a nice dose of established star quality (a star that is only set to go stratospheric with his next role as Bilbo Baggins in the soon to shoot The Hobbit).

I’m not, it has to be said, that much of a Sherlock Holmes connoisseur, my experience with the original books being pretty much relegated to reading The Sign Of The Four and The Hound Of The Baskervilles one drab summer vacation as a child, but I love the character and know enough to have enjoyed various screen interpretations in the past. So that I and a friend of mine, who is a confirmed Holmes freak, both took vast pleasure from this new incarnation says a lot about the fine balance between creating a new world for Holmes (who, instead of a cocaine and smoking habit, is instead addicted to nicotine patches) to work in, while retaining some heady references to the books, that Moffat and Gatiss have achieved.

Some of these are clearly obvious: the long-suffering Inspector Lestrade is reincarnated as Detective Inspector of Scotland Yard here, teasing Sherlock that his brilliant and perfectly calculated hunches are nothing but wild guess work, even if he deploys a reluctant admiration for Holmes to Watson and his other officers.

Others are less so: in checking on some online sources in order to sound as if I’m a Sherlock fan worth his salt (oops…given the game away there!) I was astounded at the level of intricate details that should provide genuine followers with plenty of chuckles. One of my favorite discoveries? That in the original Study In Scarlet, Watson meets an old colleague at the Criterion Bar, whereas here they share a coffee in the park. The name on the cup? Criterion.

Created as a trilogy, Sherlock’s plot spreads itself over three, apparently unconnected stories, each one of them a feature-length 90 minutes. In A Study In Pink, the crime-solving pair must unravel the clues to explain the truth behind a series of suspicious suicides which turn out to be the beginning of a game masterminded by a formidable foe. The mystery deepens in The Blind Banker, in which a criminal syndicate is broken by Holmes on his quest to discover the man behind the growing London crime wave, while the final The Great Game sees not only some loose ties connected up, but the eventual face to face showdown with the mysterious “M”, leading to a tense conclusion that…well, now that we know a second series is coming, leaves things a little more certain for our heroes.

In fact, it wasn’t always to be the case: the success of Sherlock caught the BBC off-guard. Word of a potential disaster had been mooted around before the series debuted in the UK, and the Sunday night timeslot in the middle of summer didn’t exactly display great faith in the program from the network. But with a surprising 30% audience share average for all three episodes, the company line was quickly switched to Sherlock’s unusual summer showing being an experiment for new television drama, etc, and that a second series would be forthcoming.

Except…no-one had expected there to be a second series, not least Moffat and Gatiss, who had ended their first run with a cliffhanger that would have worked both ways. However, success in the bag, and the BBC desperate to not look like that hadn’t forward planned for more, meant that the creators were quickly enticed to convene for a rush-meeting to discuss another three feature-length stories, to be shown in late 2011.

That’s good news for Moffat and Gatiss, both of whom now seem to be established in the BBC hierarchy thanks to their success with Sherlock and other projects. The spirit of Who looms large over this trilogy of stories, not least because it shares many of the same filming locations (a mix of city streets in Cardiff, Wales, doubling as in Who for London, as well as London itself, adding authenticity) and crew. Their episodes, the first (easily my favorite) and the third, are best, the second (written by Steven Thompson) being less successful but possibly containing more straight plot as opposed to the sometimes showier aspects of the other two.

But it’s those showier aspects that really make Sherlock work, especially elevating it into something quote unique and able to stand up as its own version of Holmes. Not absolutely everything works: I wish James Bond composer David Arnold’s main theme wasn’t so close to resembling Hans Zimmer’s music for the Guy Ritchie/Downey Jr movie – even if, as Arnold’s Twitter page updated, he had written that cue for the Sherlock pilot some seven months before Zimmer’s (who ended up being Oscar nominated!) score, which suggests some musical shenanigans that Holmes would do well to get to the bottom of.

Likewise, I’m definitely in the “not sure” camp in regards to the casting of Moriarty (I won’t reveal who, since it’s intended to be a surprise after dropping several hints throughout the first two episodes) and will wait with anticipation to see how this somewhat offbeat choice pans out. But where it counts, Sherlock is remarkably faithful to the books in spirit, as well as some great little touches that mark the series out as its own thing: phone text messages depicted on screen will never be the same again, a clever effect that will impress early and make the clear distinction that this isn’t the Sherlock of old. And yet, in many ways, it is. The game is once again afoot, in a very new and appreciated direction!

The Disc:

Released in the UK just a couple of months ago, it’s pleasing to report that Sherlock comes to Blu-ray with the same extras and presentation. Shot in HD, the three feature-length episodes themselves look fantastic (spread equally with the extras across two BD50 discs), with a very cinematic quality to them that just shows how great contemporary television can come towards big-screen quality. Being shown in their original 1.78 widescreen ratio helps add significant production value on the program, which also benefits from a first-rate audio treatment by way of Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks that create a nice atmospheric soundfield, especially the apparently pre-Sherlock Holmes music.

The first two episodes, A Study In Pink and The Blind Banker are featured on Disc One, along with an Audio Commentary track on the first episode, featuring writers Moffat and Gatiss and producer Sue Vertue, which just adds an unexpected extra layer to the bonus package in the set. On Disc Two, the third and final The Great Game episode also features another Commentary, again with Gatiss, this time joined by leads Cumberbatch and Freeman. Both tracks are extremely informative and light-hearted with their seriousness, the participants running through everything from the Who story meeting genesis and development as a 55 minute pilot, to scene specific remarks, Holmes references and, with the cast members, their approaches to the characters, location stories and the challenges of making the three episodes in reverse order, providing excellent insights.

Making up an episode-length grouping of supplements are two “exclusive” selections: Sherlock Pilot – A Study In Pink is the unaired one-hour show that got the series the greenlight. The British press made much fuss over the fact that the BBC had spent around $1.5 million on this initial outing for Holmes and Watson and then not shown the result, though the reasons are clear: realizing the pace would be much better suited to the longer breathing space, the eventual series differs in several aspects, but most notably in pace, the 90 minute length allowing for more nuance and feature-film feel. What’s more, this isn’t just a 55 minute edition of the first story: it’s an entirely alternate version (with no Mycroft, for a start), shot almost one year before the eventual season was finally shown.

Although it does share some similarities, including some cast members (obviously including the two leads), ironically the shorter run time doesn’t mean that it’s tighter: after enjoying the roomier final version, I found this to be a little choppy, too rushed at times in the editing, and much more like a (still a very good) television drama as opposed to the almost feature-approach of the proper season. Technically it’s proficient, and although the pilot origins are evident in the earlier costume choices and less inspired photography and locations, the sound mix and score are all in place (backing up composer Arnold’s confirmation that he wrote Sherlock’s theme before the debut of the Zimmer-scored movie) and this is still enjoyable in a different way, if not quite as assured and satisfactory.

Finally, Unlocking Sherlock – The Making Of is a handy, half-hour behind the scenes exploration of the series produced by the team involved in the Doctor Who Confidential programs found on that series’ discs, including producer (and an old friend of mine) Gillane Seaborne.

Again unaired on television, I’m glad that her efforts have found an outlet here, as not only is it a typically good, offbeat and well-compiled program in its own right, but it gives this set exactly the kind of bonus feature that is otherwise standard (and suggests a level of BBC foresight that wasn’t necessarily the case). Here, all the major players are heard from in soundbites, accompanied by much on-set footage that follows the project from the initial stages through to the music recording.

If you’ve ever seen a Who Confidential you’ll know that Seaborne and her crew pack a ton of information into those featurettes, and it’s all great stuff, with the fast but factual pace managing to cover a lot of ground in a full half hour and it’s great that, as with the pilot, the extras are all also presented in HD. The package is topped off by a standard slimline Blu-ray case featuring the show’s main publicity shot (of Holmes and Watson) on the front of the sleeve, and a nice and mysterious Holmes in shadow on the back (though with very teeny explanatory text!) , with Holmes and Watson each taking up disc art duties on the first and second platters respectively.

Cinematic Classic or Faded Print?

For any Holmes fans out there, I found Sherlock to be an unexpected delight and a total change from any previous incarnation of before.

As a contemporary telling, it works successfully in updating the characters to new situations, and the integration of technology as both an aide and a foil to Holmes’ crime-solving abilities is fun to see in the ways Moffat and Gatiss handle what could have otherwise been story-killers.

Sharp, witty and very well played, Sherlock is an affectionate return to the screen that I look forward to seeing continue with three further stories next year.

The Show:

Although Patrick McGoohan will forever be associated with his groundbreaking cult series The Prisoner, the question of where that program found its genesis is answered in Secret Agent or, more correctly under its original title, Danger Man. In fact, The Prisoner was only born when McGoohan was given carte blanche by ITC’s head Lew Grade – the man who also gave Jim Henson the go ahead to bring The Muppet Show to television – to write his own ticket when the star began frustrated with having to churn out week after week of the Danger Man series.

McGoohan hadn’t actually been on the scene for very long before being able to call the shots, making his screen debut only in 1953 and appearing in non-credited roles, such as a door guard in that great British war drama The Dam Busters.

A real breakthrough was the tough antagonist part of Red in the gripping road thriller Hell Drivers in 1957, alongside a who’s-who of later star talent including Stanley Baker, Herbert Lom, David McCallum and Sean Connery. More television bit parts followed, before McGoohan was approached to appear as arguably the screen’s first serious secret agent, John Drake, in Danger Man, re-titled Secret Agent for clarity in America.

Detectives and the like had appeared countless times in screens over the years: The Falcon and Charlie Chan were mainstays in the 1930s and ’40s, and Perry Mason and Columbo would continue the crime-solving on television. But Ian Fleming’s James Bond books changed everything, and a 1954 version of Climax! presented a now rather comical edition of Casino Royale but proved there was an appetite for small screen agents that did more than just follow up clues.

In England, Lew Grade’s ITC was more than adept at producing the kind of slick fare that sold well internationally: HG Wells’ The Invisible Man faked an American feel very well, and the globe-trotting exploits of many of Grade’s characters meant these shows worked all over the world.

Beating the big screen 007’s Dr No in the theaters by over two years, Drake, John Drake, laid the groundwork for the international espionage agent, McGoohan insisting on using his brain to get out of a scrape rather than simply resort to gunplay or chases. In the first season, which ran once only in the UK, there are plenty of those anyway, and each half-hour episode runs the gamut of the eventually predictable formula: NATO agent Drake, the man they call when there’s “a messy job” to be done, usually turns up in order to solve a missing persons alert, overthrow a dastardly dictator, or protect an innocent individual from insidious plots.

The episodes are actually very gripping, well made mini-thrillers in their own right, with the formula only really setting in when one catches a slew of them in a boxed set sitting like this. What’s most impressive is the use of stock location footage, melded in not only with backlot settings dressed in the flavor of whichever country Drake is visiting at the time, but with unexpectedly extensive real location work.

Not that McGoohan and his crew (including later major director John Schlesinger, head of the second unit on the pilot show) ever made it much past the gates of the legendary MGM British Studios, but that the show is not particularly tied to studio interiors only lends it a higher class of production value (incidentally, that pilot’s exteriors were shot in Portmeirion, doubling for Italy, a location that stuck in McGoohan’s mind when the whacky village of The Prisoner had to be found).

The good onscreen production value is topped off by a cool theme tune, which predated The Man From UNCLE but reminded me very much of the same vibe, and by McGoohan’s performance as well. He’s pretty good in the role of a character who must so often become various personalities under disguise, and although it’s all pretty silly and cheesy today, it’s all done with sincerity and a knowing wink to the audience, while the villains are all naturally fooled.

The first season, from 1960, has Drake frequently off on the kinds of missions that other shows, like UNCLE or Mission: Impossible, would later use as stock plots, and it was all pretty heady stuff, but not as successful as hoped and the series ended after one year, McGoohan then turning down the part of James Bond for being more of the same.

However, the show had caught the eye of Walt Disney, who offered McGoohan the role of Dr Christopher Syn, alias The Scarecrow Of Romney Marsh, in the celebrated three-part mini-series for the Disneyland television series. Dr Syn was a hit both on television and later in a theatrically released edition, significantly raising the actor’s profile.

He stayed at Disney’s to appear in The Three Lives Of Thomasina (directed by another Danger Man alumnus, Don Chaffey), but McGoohan now had designs on production and, when Danger Man had proven to be a big hit in syndication and Grade offered him the chance to make new episodes, McGoohan was able to dictate the rules.

Running from 1964 until 1968, Danger Man became more developed under McGoohan, expanding to one-hour stories with more depth, leading to 47 further episodes all collected here too. Secret agents were also now all the rage, from Bond to The Avengers, and Grade himself was by now enjoying success with a crime solver of a different kind, Roger Moore as The Saint, which had debuted in 1962. Though while that series enjoyed full color, Danger Man was to remain in black and white, something that rankled McGoohan, but in hindsight was probably a budgetary concern to off-set the otherwise luxurious look and scope of the production design.

Comparisons with The Saint are well founded: much of the same crew and writers bounced back and forth, and it was a well-known joke that ITC shows used variations on the same scripts (an early season one episode about a blind woman pretending to see in order to make the villain reveal himself is one almost direct steal from the earlier Invisible Man series). But whereas Moore was a more gentlemanly and suave battler of crime, basically performing a six year audition for James Bond, McGoohan was a bit dirtier, cleverer, rougher and ready to take on anyone and outsmart them with his mind or his fists.

From the second season onwards, the basic premise was simplified, too: gone was the talk about NATO and the inconsistencies about working for various authorities, as well as McGoohan’s wandering Irish-American accent. Here he’s much more Bond like, with a clear British accent and job working for the fictional M9 government security branch, though the emphasis is still placed on more realism.

Instead of fancy gadgets, Drake has to use his wits, even though there are still some ingenious usage of special items, and what’s neat is that Drake reuses them as trusty equipment rather than discard them after use. In its trademark black and white, the tone of the show still retains a very nice film noir feel, even though McGoohan’s gumshoe detective-styled narration is mostly MIA.

But the longer episodes feel much more substantial and fresh; also helping to repackage the program is High Wire, a brand new, hyper-exhilarating theme tune in the great ITC tradition, though this was swapped out for Johnny Rivers’ song Secret Agent Man, from which the show got its US brand name.

The one hour shows allow more development of plot, character and the various situations, playing out as half-length features is anything, the production value making them stand up against any supporting thriller of the time. And yet they’re still a lot of fun, with Drake taking on any number of personas – dangerous criminal types, foppish playboys, journalist, gambler, tourist or man servants – to crack into a given assignment and get results.

Not that his schemes always go as planned: instead of the pretty cut and dried adventures of the first season, the second through third runs often have Drake double-crossed, or the unfortunate user of faulty equipment, at which point anything goes and he will entertainingly pull something out of the hat to break out of a tight spot or solve the case.

This usually is done without the need for guns: McGoohan insistent that Drake would be a man that uses his mind and then his fists, and further moving away from the Bond image, Drake isn’t always to be found in the bed of his latest female conquest, choosing to be focused on the job rather than any other distractions (one episode also touching on the isolation this occupational hazard brings, which is a little more deep than most TV crime shows delve).

After three years of pretty much doing the same thing day in and day out, McGoohan had also become the highest paid television actor of the day with the success of the show, and was beginning to tire of the routine. Recalling his time working with Disney, he insisted that the only way to continue Danger Man into a fourth run was to future-protect it and shoot it in color.

Seeing that he could be about to lose his leading man, Lew Grade agreed, and the final two episodes were filmed but not broadcast until 1968. Whether it was by design or not, these two episodes would be all that there was of a fourth season, and so limited were their potential on television, that they were edited into a feature film spin-off, Koroshi, which showed as a Secret Agent special in the US.

But after only just winning his argument to shoot in color for the fourth, McGoohan had had enough – perhaps the slightly more straight Bondian aspects of the both halves of Koroshi also had something to do with it – and burst into Grade’s office ready to quit. Naturally, Grade didn’t want to lose the biggest actor on television at the time and asked McGoohan what he wanted to do.

Mirroring what was happening in real life, the star mused over the story of a secret agent who abruptly resigns without warning and goes home to start a new life but is knocked out and wakes up in an abnormally pleasant, and therefore sinister, location. The character, assigned a number, would spend the entire series trying to break out of this “Village” and find his way back home.

Who had taken him, and whichever side they were playing for, would remain a mystery to Number 6 and the audience, but The Prisoner was born and with a gentleman’s handshake a television classic was the result. As such, it’s now very interesting to see Koroshi knowing that it could work just as well as a Prisoner prequel – indeed, the two episodes were held back and eventually shown as lead in to the debut week of The Prisoner.

The bigger budget on these episodes is clear in the Bond-like sets, design, music scoring, underwater fight sequences and final conclusion, but part one’s two explosive sequences can be felt in the otherwise talky script.

The second part, with its curious resignation plot starter, is more interesting, especially when Kenneth Griffith turns up, further suggesting a Prisoner connection as he appeared in two episodes, in particular the climactic Fall Out. Character rights shared with Danger Man’s Ralph Smart prevented McGoohan from outwardly implying Number 6 was John Drake, but to most followers of both shows the characteristics are obvious.

The Prisoner opens with a Danger Man publicity shot of Drake being deleted from Number 6’s file, and there are several call-backs to the earlier program, not least an episode that was retrofitted from an original Danger Man script for the unfinished fourth season, in which Number 6 actually meets one of Drake’s contacts for information, in the same kind of record store location, no less.

For his part, McGoohan never explained the obvious connections (the genesis for The Prisoner can even be found in the Danger Man episode Colony 3) and, though even after both programs had long finished, he often included little knowing nods to them in other projects, especially his numerous appearances as a brilliantly formidable foil for Peter Falk’s Columbo in the 1970s, which McGoohan also directed.

Villainous feature parts also included Silver Streak, the brutal prison warden in Escape From Alcatraz, and Braveheart, before he returned to the Disney Studio in the 1980s for the ill-fated Baby: Secret Of The Lost Legend and again in his final credit, the voice of Billy Bones in the Studio’s Treasure Planet.

But it’s Danger Man and The Prisoner that will remain his legacy, and to my mind the characters he portrayed are one and the same. Though, perhaps of the black and white aspect, Danger Man hasn’t earned the same degree of cult popularity shared by the exploits of Number 6, it’s actually a very good show, adding some intrigue to the notion that John Drake would suddenly quit, only for his government to subject him to the confines of an inescapable location in order to learn the reasons of his resignation or if he poses a threat by defecting to another side.

And if you’re at all a Prisoner fan, then it’s well worth going back to see what Number 6 was doing as the day job, before waking up in the Village…

The Discs:

The latest in A&E’s recent packaging updates from their original thick Armary cases to thin-packs that are less cumbersomely stored in a box set, there doesn’t seem to be any new remastering done on these shows, other than sleeve updates to reflect the new release date. As such, as with the Monty Python Mega-Set and The Prisoner itself before it, this brings the Danger Man / Secret Agent package down to something more manageable for a multi 18-disc set.

Frustratingly the bonus features, listed on the back of the box, aren’t actually indicated on the sleeves as to which discs contain this added material, but otherwise the packaging is neat, with every two discs housed in their own case that presents unified artwork and full episode listings, major credits and brief synopsis for each.

The use of different fonts and text size manages to squeeze all these onto the back of the sleeves without feeling claustrophobic, though the later one-hour shows, with less on each disc, are given even more space to present longer plot outlines.

The amount of material on any given disc isn’t anything to be concerned about, however: even eight half-hour episodes equates to only a smidge over 90 minutes worth on each layer, so compression is never an issue for the appropriately shown 1.33:1 prints.

The sources for the first season are in remarkably good shape, too, and although there’s no remastering claimed on the box, it doesn’t look like it’s needed anyway, since everything is unexpectedly pin-sharp.

The “stereo” audio is also good, though I’m not sure they’re just Dolby 2.0 encoded mono. Nonetheless, they’re sharp soundtracks that may rise and dip in dynamics between the hush-hush dialogue scenes and the blasts of the cool 60s music, but they’re all expertly mixed.

Discs 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 provide the complete first season of 39 half-hour episodes, each approximately 25 minutes without commercials, including the aptly named episode The Prisoner, which turns out to bear no relation to the later series, though it’s name may have provided McGoohan with a title of his own.

Disc 5 also contains the first of a handful of bonus features, in particular on this disc a two-page Patrick McGoohan Biography, three pages of a McGoohan Filmography that gets some titles wrong and omits later work such as Treasure Planet, and, best of all on this disc, a Photo Gallery that offers a number of publicity shots from all 39 season one episodes: generous but amounting to little more than frame stills.

The one-hour shows (well, around 50 minutes minus commercials) are presented in groups of three from Disc 6 onwards, again meaning that there’s less than three hours of material over the dual layers: more than enough space to make sure the program looks great.

Here the menus switch to the Secret Agent AKA Danger Man logo that adorns the box, accompanied not by the original theme tune, but by Rivers’ Bond-influenced Secret Agent Man track. However, the episodes themselves are presented as originally intended, with the Hire Wire music and Danger Man title, with the running screen credits breaking into the beginning of the shows adding to the mini-feature film feel.

As a consolation to those expecting the Secret Agent openings as they may remember them, Disc 6’s supplements offer up the US Secret Agent Opening, which presents an alternate 40-second title sequence that clearly has Bondian aspirations, with abstract animated imagery, McGoohan clips shown “through” a watchful eye, and plenty of references to guns. The Rivers song may be fun, funky, in the Bond tradition and perfectly enjoyable as a song in its own right (and often used in other spoof spy films, such as Austin Powers), but it doesn’t actually suit the tone of the show, interesting as it is to see. The Biography and Filmography are repeated, adding McGoohan’s television credits to the list, as well as more Photo Gallery stills for this disc’s three selections.

This basic routine of including the Secret Agent opening, the biography, filmography and a Photo Gallery for the episodes contained on each individual disc is continued from Discs 7 to 18, although the three shows per platter is upped to four episodes from Disc 8, still well less than two hours per layer and not showing any signs of compression stress as a result. Discs 16, 17 and 18 revert to just three episodes per disc, including the Koroshi color two-parter in the final group, which looks just as sharp as the other episodes and actually withstands blowing up to a 16:9 zoom to create a theatrical feel presentation.

Some of the sound in the later shows can be a bit hit and miss, relying more on set recordings, and Koroshi’s first part has one or two softer dialogue scenes, but it otherwise makes good use of its Japanese stock shots, and there’s a fun cameo from The Pink Panther film series’ Burt Kwouk, so it’s not just the addition of color that makes them special.

While it’s great to see these final two episodes in their original versions, it would have been fantastic to have maybe bunched up the previous disc with four episodes, leaving space on the final disc for the final two color episodes and their feature-length version, a real bonus since I’m not aware of any separate release (though the intro to the first part clearly credits directors for both, including none other than Peter Yates).

A European theatrical trailer or publicity gallery for the film, or even standard previews for each episode would have been great too, as well as maybe a featurette on the comparisons between Danger Man and The Prisoner.

But there’s little else here, not even a promo spot for The Prisoner, arguably a continuation of this show and at least a companion.

As a genuinely individual part of the Danger Man/Prisoner conundrum, the film adaptation of Koroshi feels like the major component missing here, and a missed opportunity for A&E to lure in fans that may already have the previously released editions of these episodes.

However, this isn’t totally unexpected, given the sheer amount of material crammed into the box, to be fair, and having all the episodes – all 86 of them – is the main attraction, for which this set suitably fits the bill and is a handy gadget of its own!

Cinematic Classic or Faded Print?

The Koroshi two-parter is the stand-out story here, simply in terms of the addition of color and the expanded scope, good use of location and stock footage, but there are plenty of other episodes that provide just as much intrigue and plot twists.

It will probably come over as pretty predictable and obvious to most of today’s audience, though there’s still plenty to entertain in its less fanciful but still exciting approach, and it’s only time that might make anything of the fact that John Drake was as much an action hero as 24’s Jack Bauer has been during the 2000s.

The missing element of Koroshi in its film edition disappoints, especially since I can see how that would have worked when it was run as an “introduction” to The Prisoner that could only have tied the Drake/Number 6 connection even closer at the time.

But extras aside, what’s great with this set is the chance to catch Patrick McGoohan embroiled in the kind of espionage that his later groundbreaking cult hit would hint his character had been up to, and though it works in that regard as terrific background, it’s a thoroughly entertaining – if now quaintly appealing – collection of secret agent thrillers.

Danger Man / Secret Agent: The Complete Collection
is available to purchase from Amazon.com now

The Movies:

Hollywood has, of course, produced scores of directors who became big names in their own right, often selling a film by having their moniker on the poster in the same size as the leading man or lady just as well as the stars of a picture. But for all the Victor Flemings and Cecil B. DeMilles from Tinsel Town, if there was ever a producer/director from the classic era of Hollywood that could be counted alongside later “superstar” directors as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas in the same breath, it would have to be Hungarian-born animator-turned-visual effects movie creator George Pal, who arguably made what are now called “event” pictures years before the word “franchise” was ever applied to a film property.

Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, The Time Machine and the original War Of The Worlds…if made today, these films would easily be the kinds of big, Fourth of July spectacles that would blow any other competitors out of the multiplexes, combining solid screen storytelling with unique and groundbreaking visual effects touches. Pal had arrived in the US with help from his friend Walter Lantz, after moving from Hungary to run his own studio in Berlin, developing his patented stop-motion Puppetoon system. With the threat of war in Europe, Pal escaped to America, producing the Puppetoon series that powered his creativity for creating “trick films”.

The Puppetoons popularity and critical success saw Pal nominated for seven consecutive years in the Best Animated Short category at the Oscars, between 1942 and 1948, and a step to features was natural. The Great Rupert, a very sweet Christmas story that featured a stop-motion squirrel counterfoil for star Jimmy Durante, came in 1950, as did Destination Moon, an early space exploration picture that, while cheesy looking to our eyes today, actually got more right than it did wrong and, along with Things To Come was one of only a few serious sci-fi films to be taken seriously before 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Pal quickly became known as a purveyor of big-budget science fiction with the follow ups of When Worlds Collide and War Of The Worlds, which was directed by frequent collaborator Byron Haskin, but their next film together, Conquest of Space, was a visual effects tour de force that buckled under the demands of its weighty story. Pal’s career took a hit, but he continued to produce or direct a number of hugely entertaining films, including the fairytales tom thumb and The Wonderful World Of The Brothers Grimm, which featured Puppetoon story sequences.

In later years, as cinema moved away from spectacle towards more introverted, serious fare, Pal’s budgets became smaller though his imagination remained full of big ideas. Newly released to the Warner Archive Collection are a pair of films that finds the director in the midst of his huge success and towards the end of it: one of which is pure popcorn nonsense, but none the less entertaining for it, and the other a vastly underrated supernatural thriller that may show some restraint in the overblown visuals but only makes it a more compelling and intriguing outing that really gets in your head…

Atlantis: The Lost Continent (1961)
Finding Pal at an interesting juncture in his filmography, Atlantis came right between the Oscar-winning (for Best Special Effects) and commercial success of tom thumb and The Time Machine (1958 and 1960 respectively) and The Wonderful World Of The Brothers Grimm (1962), so it’s unsurprising to find the director in a whimsical place of fantasy, half sci-fi inspired and half fairytale. The likes of Jason And The Argonauts and the films featuring Ray Harryhausen’s animation effects were also hugely popular at the time, and Atlantis: The Lost Continent clearly takes its lead from those toga classics.

It follows the adventures of a headstrong young Greek fisherman Demetrios who rescues a damsel lost at sea. She reveals herself to be the daughter of the King of a fabled land, suggesting that, if the fisherman returns her safely, he would be rewarded beyond his wildest dreams. He, however, is more interested in her and the thought of discovering Atlantis, but instead of a benign civilization of friendly Atlanteans, Demetrios finds himself slaved amongst a war-hungry realm of barbarians and ungodly experimentation where the unfortunate are converted into beasts of burden. Undergoing the Ordeal of Fire and Ice to win back his freedom, Demetrios becomes an ally to the Princess and attempts to shake her father from the influence of his advisor, before the inevitable impending doom from a volcano threatens to destroy Atlantis forever!

Yes, it’s one of those movies, where everything is thrown in, in an attempt to hold the interest. And on the whole it does, though that might just be because it was calling to the big kid in me, and surprised me with some of its scenes as much as it made me grin. As is expected for a Pal production, the visuals are spectacular, especially for this age, with a really nice sea-creature submarine vessel design well designed and implemented, and better, I thought, in scale to Disney’s Nautilus.

The later effects, notably evil Zaren’s (John Dall, who naturally gets the best lines) crystal death-ray, aren’t quite as fake looking as something with that name would imply, actually calling to mind the Death Star, and among the Saturday matinee adventuring, there’s a real attempt to inject some thought into the script by way of political and religious themes that examine how a technologically aware society can bend that power to become corrupt and dangerous to more than just those around them.

Pal’s intentions were to push Atlantis more in these directions, to create an epic fantasy that would be taken as seriously as it entertained. However, the budget was a concern, a writers strike prevented a further script polish before the cameras had to roll, and he was forced to cut corners in several areas, not least in the unfortunate event of having to licence footage from other sword and sandal epics – Quo Vadis chiefly among them – to depict some of the more major crowd scenes (Pal also copied himself: his later film 7 Faces Of Dr Lao reused some of the destruction footage), although to be fair a lot of the films featuring Greek and Roman myths also pulled this trick. The costumes may also be the familiar colorful robes we remember from other such fare, and Demetrios’ himself, Italian singer Sal Ponti playing as Anthony Hall, might be as wooden as they come, though no more than Sam Worthington in the Clash Of The Titans update.

Comparisons to Disney’s modern Atlantis story, The Lost Empire, are pretty redundant for the difference in approach, both from a plot point and in the generations between both films’ release. Nevertheless there are still some similarities: the hero does indeed fall for the Atlantean Princess (Joyce Taylor, a real Hollywood starlet who’s make-up is never washed away despite the ample buckets of water thrown at her), while her father is also a frail King.

It’s more fun to pick out some other references: Daniel (Invasion Of The Body Snatchers) Mainwaring’s screenplay lifts ideas freely from any number of other gladiator pictures of the time, Russell Garcia’s thumping score borrows whole cues from his memorable music for The Time Machine, and the production design further draws from that film’s Wells/Verne sensibilities and Pal’s own sci-fi effects (Dall’s fate as his death ray spirals out of control is a shot that could have come direct from War Of The Worlds).

Long a film I’ve been unable to see (I missed out on a double-feature set of Atlantis and The Power on LaserDisc, much to my chagrin for many years!), this was one of the very few films of Pal’s that I had not seen or did not have in my collection. But now I’m very glad to, since it easily stands up alongside, and sometimes beats, Harryhausen’s films in its tone, and the visual effects shots really stretch the budget to bring the epic nature Pal was looking for, with exceptional miniature work that depicts the world of Atlantis very convincingly. Yes, it may be argued that this isn’t Pal’s greatest hour but, whatever the shortcomings, there’s a great spirit of fun running through the film, and as with any mythical adventure, belief is merely there to be suspended!

The Power (1968)
As a Pal fan, I’ve naturally attempted to catch everything he had his hand in, and it was late one night when I caught a pan-and-scan version of The Power on television. I had recently read director Byron Haskin’s book on working with Pal, and The Power was a project that received an interesting treatment, with the director not totally happy with the end result or the way the studio sold it.

As with Haskin and Pal’s previously heavy sci-fi collaboration, The War Of The Worlds, Haskin believed that the film would have been a major smash had it been marketed as an event movie, in the way that Jaws and Star Wars would be in later years.

While that trick might have worked for Worlds, The Power is altogether a much more layered film, with some scenes that bend the mind in the direction they go off in. It’s actually hard to discuss the film without giving too much away, and though there’s a bit of a twist towards the end that today’s audiences will probably see coming right from the start, I’d still hate to ruin what might be quite a thrilling surprise. You might say The Power was the Inception of its day, a film that plays mind games with both the characters on screen and with the audience watching.

George Hamilton, before he became something of a caricature of bland Hollywood stereotypes, plays extremely well here in a serious role as a government agent participating in scientific experiments with telekinesis, which begins to turn awry when one of their number exceeds any known boundaries of such superhuman power and begins to use it to influence others’ minds for their own benefit. Following the death of a suspicious professor, Hamilton begins to delve deeper into the mystery, but finds the phantom menace following him at every turn, becoming a growing threat until he is forced to go on the run with his only trusted colleague (Susanne Pleshette), and they attempt to track down the man identified in their only lead: the mysterious Adam Hart…

Ultimately a big break not only from Pal’s usual light-hearted fantasy, fairytale or mythical fare but from most of contemporary Hollywood of the time, The Power really is a one-of-a-kind movie, which is why it may either be underrated or loved by whoever you speak to. I can only say that, having caught it as a Pal fan and not knowing what to expect, I was captivated by its unique approach…a supernatural thriller with some real “what the…?” moments that kept me gripped throughout.

Yes, there are some moments where audience imagination may come into play, and an extended party scene that feels out of place and may have been an attempt to appeal to 1960s crowds, but even these can’t really be honest strikes against a film that attempts so much of a new thing.

In many ways, The Power predates later such eerie offerings as The Omen, Carrie, Scanners and, especially, the Kirk Douglas-starrer The Fury, which for me this film easily beats hands down, even if those later films attempted to shock with more gore as opposed to The Power’s entertaining thrills. There are back-references, too: the film is actually a remake of a 1956 Studio One episode, itself a version of Frank M. Robinson’s then-recent novel, though Pal and Haskin’s film expand things for the screen to include an oppressive hall-of-mirrors, a desert-set aerial attack that’s reminiscent of Cary Grant’s brush with the dust cropping plane in North By Northwest, and a psychologically turbulent climax that features some quite disturbing effects (including a decomposing head long before Raiders Of The Lost Ark).

The casting also includes a number of recognisable faces, including Pleshette, going for another serious role after a number of Disney comedies, who by all accounts didn’t understand the material and had continuous fallings out with director Haskin. Not that you’d know it: she’s quite excellent throughout in a largely thankless part, though it is said the rather abrupt ending was due in part on her insistence of being given more to do. Of great value is Nehemiah Persoff (later to be Fievel’s Grandfather in An American Tail) as another of the scientists, and The Day The Earth Stood Still’s Klaatu himself, Michael Rennie, as the government official who initiates the search for Hart, the man responsible for a number of recent deaths.

These feature a quite exhilarating “death by centrifuge” moment early on, and an ominously manipulated Walk/Don’t Run sign programmed to inflict maximum paranoia, while another touches recognisable as Pal moments number animated toy soldiers warning of impending danger by firing real gunpowder, and adding class to the soundtrack is the legendary Miklós Rózsa, providing his last score for an MGM film.

There’s a Hungarian undercurrent running through the film: Pal as producer, obviously, enlisted co-countryman Rózsa to come out of retirement to score the film, playing up the connection with the Adam Hart character, himself Hungarian, and The Power’s great heartbeat motif is combined with a main theme played on the Hungarian cimbalom instrument, which Pal loved so much he uses a visual of it in the opening credits.

For whatever reasons, The Power didn’t find its audience back in the late 1960s, but became something of a hidden cult hit among fans, amongst who actually having seen the film marked something of a badge of honor. As Pal’s penultimate film, coming just before the belated Doc Savage, it often gets overlooked alongside Atlantis: The Lost Continent. While that film can’t rightfully be expected to stand alongside Pal’s best work (Destination Moon, The Time Machine, War Of The Worlds), The Power certainly can, as a compelling thriller that expertly combines elements of film noir and fantasy. Remade nowadays it would literally be quite frightening, even if audiences back in the day weren’t ready to experience such a strange, and often intense, adventure. Forgive the one or two sometimes weaker than ideal workarounds, and The Power certainly has it.

The Discs:

Originally marked as one of Warner Archive’s “Remastered Edition” titles, The Power turns up on disc as a more regular entry in the line, which is a bit of a shame for a well-regarded fan favorite and a film that, even last year, was earmarked for the proper mainstream commercial release treatment. It’s a worry that some of these films, which may not sell in the millions, are being diverted to the WB Archive Collection, when fans would still be more satisfied with discs that are more easily purchased from other stockists, and often for far less than WB’s customary $20 a pop.

That’s quite a bit to pay for a vanilla disc that’s only been mastered from the current best available print transfer, but as I’ve said in the past it’s also the only way to own official releases of some often unseen and obscure titles. Warners do need to offer more incentive, however, such as pairing these two titles off into either a better value double feature set, as per a previous LaserDisc set, or a better deal on ordering both at the same time ($30 for both?). Even better would be even the most basic of extras: trailers have often popped up on other WBAC titles and here they’re a most disappointing omission.

Bonus footage does exist: Image Entertainment’s quite wonderful trio of Pal discs (The Puppetoon Movie, The Great Rupert, The Fantasy Film Worlds Of George Pal), collected in the exceptional and very highly recommended George Pal’s Flights Of Fantasy boxed set collection, featured a wealth of supplemental material that touched on these titles. Granted, permission to licence that footage may have been a stumbling block, but The Power especially was a well promoted picture and surely something could have been added.

The lack of value sadly stretches to The Power’s quite frankly poor image transfer, a real disappointment covered in speckles and print artefacts, gateweave and a recurring light scratch (especially in the opening reel as seen below) which Warners should really be quite embarrassed about. Opening up the frame is otherwise a revelation in its Panavision widescreen format, only making it harder to see how this visionary movie didn’t find more of an audience at the time of its release. There’s some unexpectedly serious stuff going on in the film, and the 2.35:1 framing only adds to the paranoia and sense of isolation throughout, while also adding a superior production value to the visuals, but ultimately the image treatment is a real shame for a film that deserves so so much more.

By comparison, Atlantis, despite showing a few visible print defects of its own (mostly on the more obvious optical effects, which suggests they’re inherent in the original negatives), looks unexpectedly sharp in its intended 1.78:1 aspect, most likely either opened up from 1.85, or just about making a fit from a 1.75 VistaVision type projection ratio. Color is vibrant, though one may notice a little bleed or smudging here and there, depending on the scene and its lighting.

On the audio side of things, both films are presented in Mono, which was the generally standard sound format of the time, though some prestige showcase presentations may have featured stereo tracks: certainly Garcia and Rózsa’s music scores were recorded as such. Again The Power comes off worse, with noticeable background noise present throughout that sadly seems to date the film more and is only drowned out when the music gets bombastically excited. Atlantis doesn’t fare nearly as bad, with a strong soundtrack that balances the music against perfectly audible dialogue, but it’s another disappointment over these two releases that the better film gets the poorer treatment.

As usual for the WBAC, the cover art continues to display a distinctive look, but like most of the new releases now, breaks away from the previous uniformed look to look more like regular DVD releases, with nice use of the original poster art including Atlantis’ high detailed panting and The Power’s evocative – and quite scary looking! – collage of melded faces and abstract imagery, suggesting the mind-playing games to be found in the film. Each film’s respective logos are nicely printed onto the discs themselves, raising the overall appearance of the DVD-R platters, a format that some continue to dislike but that, apart from two minor instances of picture break-up on The Power, I can’t say I’ve had any real trouble with.

Cinematic Classic or Faded Print?

One of the more derided and one of the more underrated of George Pal’s titles are to be found within the cases of these two new offerings from the Warner Archive Collection. Both films are valid additions to any library, especially those that have followed and collected Pal’s work. The man, at the end of the day, had a pretty decent track record, and there’s not really a true dud movie in his run of what would now be called high concept entertainments.

These films will play to different audiences, to be sure, with Atlantis a great family filler for turning a wet afternoon into an exciting adventure, and The Power perhaps something more occasionally intense for thrill-seeking adults to watch while the kids are tucked up in bed.

However, and despite the standard Archive Collection treatment, it’s a major disappointment to report that neither come with even the slightest of extras, and in particular to have to warn of The Power’s unexpectedly poor showing on its disc. Hopefully my words above on the movie’s merits may lead you to overcome those shortcomings, since the film really is one to see, and once it’s underway I became lost in its twists and the print cleaned itself up a bit.

I can’t say how pleased I am to be able to add official versions to my Pal collection, and certainly recommend both titles – The Power especially – as strong examples of their respective fantasy and supernatural genres, even if I can’t shake the feeling that Warners have simply dumped these titles on disc after making fans wait for, and expect, much better editions.

The Movie:

There comes a time when reviewing any multi-disc set that one must begin to take considerations of the clock into account and start to skim more and more of the content in order to make the review’s deadline. And, quite often, when that time inevitably comes, I start to crank everything into double or triple speed to still see as much as it as possible…not so with this new assortment of theatrical MGM “program filler” shorts – the latest in Warner Bros.’ fantastic made on demand Archive Collection titles – which I began last week and continued to be totally absorbed with until I’d seen most of the 34 selections almost in their entirety.

Apart from pulling out the best current video masters and offering hard-core fans a growing selection of rare, obscure and guilty pleasures, one of the best ways the WB Archive Collection has utilized is with large groupings of legendary, but rarely seen, theatrical short subjects, with multi-disc sets pulling together a host of collections featuring high-profile names long-forgotten by the majority of all but the die-hard nostalgic collectors. As one of those kinds of people, I’ve been lapping it all up, and after years of discovering the odd oddity in bonus feature sections and strange television channels, we finally have a chance to see full libraries of short films, many of which played alongside animated cartoons as part of a full evening’s movie theater program.

Already from the WB Archives, we’ve been able to enjoy the MGM Our Gang shorts, as well as the hilarious Dogville Comedies, the globetrotting exploits of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, sets dedicated to two comics whose films I was only ever to find late night or early morning as TV filler: Robert Benchley (he of Disney’s The Reluctant Dragon studio tour feature) and everyman Joe McDoakes (further sets for the brilliantly comical oeuvres of Edgar Kennedy and Leon Errol have yet to be announced – but there’s hope)!

What makes these sets most fun is the feeling of returning to that time when “a night at the movies” meant a newsreel, cartoon and a short subject played before the b-picture and top lining main feature, and a selection of any of Warners’ vintage sets will put you right back in time to a 1930s or 40s cinema seat for a slice of pure nostalgia. Following up the Warner Bros. Big Band, Jazz And Swing Short Subject Collection already available, this new collection of shorts from the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer factory provides a lot more of the same, featuring two packed discs of chronologically listed black and white shorts, as well as two discs in sparkling Technicolor, an unexpected treat!

Disc One’s Metrotone Shorts And Two-Reel Specials includes a potpourri of this and that, essentially offering time capsule recordings of some of the biggest stars of the day in some of the most exclusive venues. Thus we have performances from the Cocoanut Grove, the Ambassador Hotel, the Capitol Theater, etc, in as close to a “live television” broadcast as possible for the time, captured directly from the stage without the super-slick studio processes that polished the singing and choreography until it shined. Of course, that’s not to say the standard here isn’t as professional as we’d expect of any MGM output, but there’s a “you are there” live quality that puts you in the audience as opposed to simply watching a movie routine.

The disc is the most “static” of the set for these very reasons, mostly consisting of simple camera set-ups that are more interested in recording the performance rather than imposing any directorial tricks (remember that this was still the dawn of sound in the movies, and many such early films were hindered by the initial equipment). But it’s the stars we’re here to see anyway, and there will be great delight for those that remember names such as Leo Beers, Van & Schenck, with Jack Benny amusingly hosting another short that counts a certain Arthur Freed (“the lyricist, who also writes the words”) amongst its number, and a bunch of talented teens and kids in the Kiddie Revue, presented in a sepia tint.

On Disc Two’s Colortone Shorts, Novelties And More!, we find the early two-strip Technicolor process in full, saturated effect, though for those unfamiliar with the look of the coloring, the red and green-only filtered effect can be a little surrealistic. The format slightly veers away from straight musical content to also showcase some comic sketches, dance sequences (Earl “Snakehips” Tucker in Crazy House, and the MGM Dancing Girls, for example), and storylines, for what they are worth. In fact, the approach is more akin to being along the lines of miniature movies, with flimsy but fun bookends and narrative set-ups providing the structure for the musical scenes, some of which (The Devil’s Cabaret) are quite risqué!

There’s one black and white short snuck into the line-up here, but otherwise Technicolor had evolved into the three-strip process that we know and love by the time of 1934, and the remaining two films on this disc look pretty near wonderful considering that they probably weren’t ever kept in absolute optimum vault conditions. These are two of the best in the set: My Grandfather’s Clock a musical murder mystery told completely through song, as a Holmes-like detective sets out to solve a crime painted in the “rainbow spectrum” that MGM would use in abundance in the late 1930s onwards for their most iconic features. Absolutely gorgeously designed and photographed, The Spectacle Maker features Geppetto himself, actor Christian Rub, in a very similar role that seems to have been a very clear influence on Disney’s later Pinocchio.

The All-Star Technicolor Shorts that make up Disc Three’s collection is worth the price of admission alone, with a glimpse of the stars of the day in ultra rare color footage. Even the most prestigious stars’ movies were still being photographed in black and white during this period, so to see the likes of Mary Pickford, Buster Keaton and, especially a treat for animation fans, Cliff Edwards – Jiminy Cricket himself – in Technicolor is quite a marvel, as we join them poolside at the Cocoanut Grove for an evening’s entertainment. Star Night At The Cocoanut Grove has popped up as a supplement on another classic Warners title, if I recall correctly, but it makes sense to include it for completeness sake here.

The hike up in filmmaking is also evident as this disc begins, with the static black and white of the first disc now improved to full color and fuller sound, with editing and camerawork unhindered by the new processes as the filmmakers became more familiar and confident with them. This “Galaxy Of Stars” set-up provides the framework for many of the shorts on this disc, which often inserted shots of the most popular faces under studio contract enjoying the performances with us.

Thus Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Errol Flynn and Johnny Weissmuller pop up, Bing Crosby croons, and there’s a glimpse of the soon to be Judy Garland singing with her siblings the Gumm Sisters. Comics Mickey Rooney, Harpo Marx, Keaton, Leon Errol and Charley Chase provide the laughs, Andy Devine turns up as a toreador, and there’s a parade of Disney style caricatured costumed characters in Cinema Circus many to the strains of many a popular or well known classic Hollywood tune that would likely become better known thanks to exposure in later MGM pictures.

Finally, Disc Four concludes the set with a series of more All-Star Shorts And Big Band Specials, including a 1937 Technicolor Hollywood Party, not to be confused with the 1934 black and white MGM feature film, but still fun for star spotting (Gable and Errol again, plus Anna May Wong’s personal fashion show). This could be considered a “bonus disc” as it reverts to black and white and a reliance on the series of Martin Block’s Musical Merry-Go-Round, though there’s still entertainment to be found in an early version of Cuban Pete, some of the sheer spectacle at Billy Rose’s, and the chance to see a very young MGM contracted Keenan Wynn on his way to screen stardom (and later infamy as recurring Disney villain Alonzo Hawk) dropping in on Block’s “radio program”.

Ultimately, Classic Musical Shorts From The Dream Factory is intended for the classic movie star buff and those that will appreciate seeing the music hall and vaudeville acts in their heyday. It’s a real time machine that transports us back to those nights in Hollywood, when stars mingled with other stars at the most exclusive clubs to watch now quaint but no less entertaining acts that we have the fortune to have been preserved on camera. Warners doesn’t provide a disclaimer but, naturally and reflective of the times, there are plenty of routines and gags that wouldn’t pass muster today, so be aware that some stereotyping and pre-code humor does pop up from time to time.

I’ll admit that, even for a fan like me, not all the shorts have a lasting quality that will see them played over and over, and there are some honest clunkers in the mix to be sure, but there are more than several films here – particularly on the third disc – that warrant picking up the collection for those that consider themselves into this kind of material. Essentially, for the chance to even see this material in full outside of documentaries, clip compilations or DVD extras, let alone the wealth of it – over eight hours – for a very reasonable cost of one night out, this is very much a night worth staying in for!

Disc One – Metrotone Shorts And Two-Reel Specials (1928-1930): Walt Roesner And The Capitolians, The Locust Sisters, Leo Beers, Joseph Regan, Fuzzy Knight, The Ponce Sisters, Frances White, Marion Harris, Van And Schenck #1, Van And Schenck #2, The Kiddie Revue (color) and The Songwriter’s Revue.

Disc Two – Colortone Shorts, Novelties And More! (1930-1934): Crazy House, The Devil’s Cabaret, Over The Counter, Wild People, What Price Jazz (black and white), My Grandfather’s Clock and The Spectacle Maker.

Disc Three – All-Star Technicolor Shorts (1934-1937): Star Night At The Cocoanut Grove, Starlit Days At The Lido, Pirate Party On Catalina Island, Fiesta De Santa Barbara, Sunkist Stars At Palm Springs and Cinema Circus.

Disc Four – All Star Shorts/Big Band Specials! (1937-1938): Hollywood Party (color), Sunday Night At The Trocadero, Billy Rose’s Casa Manana Revue and six of Martin Block’s Musical Merry-Go-Round series (all 1948) featuring Freddy Martin, Tex Beneke, Les Brown and Virginia O’Brien, Ray Noble and Buddy Clark, Art Lund-Les Brown-Tex Beneke, and Frankie Carle And His Orchestra.

The Disc:

As per normal for the WB Archives, the intention is to simply get this rare material out there in simple but smart editions that don’t focus on dressing these editions up with any major restorations or supplements that would delay their release further. In many ways with these multi-disc sets, the films themselves feel like a wealth of supplemental material anyway, so the lack of any “true” bonuses ultimately feels like a redundant point, especially since some of these films have already turned up as extras on previous releases.

It’s true that a documentary retrospective on how shorts were packaged and shown in the body of a “main feature” programmed presentation might have served as context for those coming to these films for the first time, but mainly it’s going to be collectors springing for a set like this, and they’ll know their history and will have seen similar ground covered before (the “shorts story” documentary available on the TCM Laurel & Hardy set is well worth seeking out as a companion). As such, this Archive Collection comes as basic as they all have, though is nonetheless welcome for it, the main menus remaining as clear and concise as they need to be, listing the shorts’ titles for easy selection.

Warners once again make the point that they perform no additional restoration on their Archive titles, using instead the “best available” current video master, but considering the vintage of some of the material presented here – the earliest coming from that cutting edge time when sound had only just been applied to motion pictures – the results really are very good.

The native black and white photography should eliminate the possibility of color crosstalk, but some of them haven’t been desaturated and the sprinkling of color dot crawl was distracting enough for me to turn the color down on my display. But the color films themselves look good enough, and far from disappointing – some are quite stunning – with a distinct lack of heavy print artefacts and, of course, there are no onscreen station ident logos or other interruptions.

Even MGM’s b-pictures and short subjects were treated with just as much audio sheen as their feature-length counterparts, and even given that the soundtracks of this era were largely primitive in terms of the equipment limitations, I was generally pleased with the fidelity of the sound on a good number of the earlier shorts in the collection, which is surely the result of at least a little audio sweetening on Warners’ behalf. Though of course there are no subtitled or foreign language options, knowing that the Studio has made sure the films reach commercial release standards should please those anticipating this collection (though be aware that at least my copy of The Spectacle Maker features a volume-busting pop midway through).

Added to this, Classic Musical Shorts From The Dream Factory comes packaged in the WB Archives’ snazzy new approach to cover art, which jettisons a previous “uniform look” of before for a style that feels much more like a mainstream release. A light and breezy title treatment floats across the sleeve alongside stills and faces of yesteryear, while the back of the sleeve and disc artwork feature updated versions of the WB Archive designs.

Previous collections have provided release date information in addition to listing the shorts; I’d have preferred that again here, and had to resort to the Archives website for the title listing included above. If release years were available for the website, there’s no reason they couldn’t have been included on the sleeve (the room is here) along with the extra little tidbits of info found online.

The standard keepcase holds the four discs (two on each inside of the case, two in a flap tray) and, although they look like DVD-Rs, as always with the Archive Collection, Warners insist they use specific discs and propriety production software that make them more robust than home-made creations. Since I haven’t had an issue with any of the releases yet, I’m taking them at their word!

Cinematic Classic or Faded Print?

Complimenting Warners’ commercially released Classic Musicals From The Dream Factory line of mainstream features in boxed sets, this collection of shorter subjects from the same MGM Studio provides much more of the same in mini-form. Casual fans of the golden age of Hollywood may find themselves sitting through a selection of films which don’t hold much appeal for them, but older viewers and those fascinated by the vintage and time-capsule nostalgia will, I am sure, get a huge kick out of seeing, and owning, these great little films.

With releases like these, it’s not hard to remain a fan of the WB Archive Collection and the many titles that have been brought to DVD which might otherwise be languishing in the back of a vault somewhere, also providing exceptional running time value. I look forward to sampling more from Warner Brothers’ early Vitaphone days, such as that aforementioned Warner Bros. Big Band, Jazz And Swing Short Subject Collection, and truly hope that the very funny RKO comedy shorts of such robust performers as Edgar Kennedy and Leon Errol are not now too far behind.

The Movie:

I have to admit that, for all my appreciation for classic cinema, the comedic exploits of Red Skelton have continuously passed me by for one reason or another. Indeed, although I of course recognize the name and face, the only tenuously linked exposure you could say I have ever had to him was via Tex Avery’s classic 1943 pastiche of the murder mystery picture Who Killed Who?, in which a parading line of skeletons tumbling out from a closet stop mid-air so that one – naturally crimson in color – can make the dreadfully bad pun, “haha…RED Skeleton!”

Audiences at the time would have rolled over at the joke: by 1943, the third of Skelton’s Whistling trilogy had hit the screens and he had become Hollywood’s latest comic star, and in particular the center of that series of that popular genre, the comedy-thriller. Discovered as a teenager by none other than Ed Wynn, Skelton learned his profession in the days of vaudeville and various travelling shows and circuses, becoming enough of a name by 1937 to warrant guest spots on radio, where he was quickly contracted as a regular. Just a year later, he was on the screen too, by way of supporting roles in a couple of RKO and Warners Vitaphone projects, before earning a contract playing light relief in MGM’s original Doctor Kildare pictures of the early 1940s.

MGM were quick to promote him to star status, and the plots of the Whistling films allowed for a playful crossover of his radio and film careers. In the role of Wally “the Fox” Benton, a writer-actor of the kind of hugely successful murder mysteries that kept audiences glued to their radios at the time, the first of the series, Whistling In The Dark (1941, 78 mins) finds Wally’s “perfect crime” abilities under demand from a crooked cult leader, the wonderful Conrad Veidt (later to create the role of Jaffar in Korda’s The Thief Of Bagdad), to create the perfect murder in return for the freedom of his also kidnapped girlfriend, Carol Lambert (Ann Rutherford, who had previously played a similar role opposite Mickey Rooney in his Andy Hardy series) and his radio sponsor’s daughter.

As with many films of the era, Whistling In The Dark was based on a Broadway play, a popular source of material for many such films, but director S. Sylvan Simon (a collectible name for those into alliteration, and no relation to this reviewer!), a stage and screen helmer who was a solid handler of comedy sequences on other films (including the Marx Brothers’ The Big Store) and would go on to direct all three Whistling pictures, opens up the action and, despite the limited locations, leans it away from any staginess that often hampered these kinds of translations. He’s helped immensely by Skelton, who is a natural comic presence with the spitfire dialogue, but also able to handle the more dramatic aspects of the script too, especially in the genuinely exciting final scenes.

Whistling In The Dark is a pretty good example of the genre at this time, alongside such films as other “old dark house” spoofs featuring Bob Hope and the like (Skelton’s hapless “in trouble” expression often resembles Hope’s, too). At times Skelton reminded me of Bill Murray’s mistaken identity character in the underrated The Man Who Knew Too Little, though the films also clearly left their marks on the makers of Haunted Honeymoon, both the original 1940s murder mystery and the 1980s jokey remake with Gene Wilder. Having now seen the source of many of the references in that film (most notably the central “1930s radio star crime solving couple finding themselves embroiled in a real murder on the eve of their wedding” plot), I will forever see Wilder’s version in an entirely new light.

Such was the popularity of Skelton’s Whistling debut that a second film, Whistling In Dixie (1942, 74 mins) was rushed into production almost immediately, released to theaters just one year later. Far from being a fast-tracked cash in, Nat Perrin’s screenplay elaborates upon the characters’ personalities and situations, setting up some expanded action comedy sequences and, in its tale of the duo solving another crime, this time in the Deep South, builds on what came before instead of simply repeating it. Helping the flow of what feels like a natural continuation, Skelton and Rutherford are back, alongside the first film’s thug, Rags Ragland (a recognizable face popular for playing “heavies”), in a dual role that now also includes his more amenable brother via some pretty convincing split-screen.

Director S. Sylvan Simon again keeps things moving and, for what might have been passed over as a B-Picture at other studios, the film is again treated to top-level values, from the elaborate sets and location shooting, to the lighting design, camera set-ups and snappy editing, which remains expertly in tune with the photography and all works to play up the comedy and plot to their best advantages. The situations reminded me more here of MGM’s The Thin Man series, also featuring a pair of married sleuths, and, although it’s again all played for fun, some of the more dramatic perils the cast find themselves in, particularly a purposely drawn out sequence where they are trapped in a flooding basement, work equally well to qualify the film’s thriller tag in addition to the comedy.

Released once again just one year later, the third and final film Whistling In Brooklyn (1943, 87 mins) brings the three central characters (Skelton’s Fox, his girl Rutherford and the reformed Ragland) back home, but before the loving pair can finally marry, Wally is confused with a serial killer and they find themselves on the lam, fugitive style, on a mission to unmask the real culprit and attest the Fox’s innocence! Once again, Perrin’s script opts not just to repeat what went before, although the personality traits and some running gags remain rightfully in place, and the difference in approach leads to some nice twists and diversions from the usual plotting (a strong point across all three films is that the villains are quite genuinely villainous).

The action is stepped up too, with some of the series’ best of its usual good stunt work and a character development for Skelton that shows a little bit more to the Fox as opposed to simply being a virtuoso radio writer-performer who loses his nerve in a real situation. In fact, if anything, the action/thriller aspects take more precedence over the comedy this time out, even if the convoluted ending, where Skelton winds up in disguise as a player opposite The Brooklyn Dodgers (featuring the real team of the time) is more routine and a little sillier than usual, though no less funny for it, especially the way his beard manages to catch one baseball! Everything naturally works out in the end, and the real killer is apprehended, though by the end of the movie, Skelton/Rutherford’s Benton and Lambert still aren’t man and wife, but seem content to be happily un-hitched!

Skelton went on to appear in several other prestige pictures for MGM, including the Technicolor Zeigfeld Follies, and a long run of other appearances, winding up as the Neanderthal Man/Inventor in the lengthy prologue to Ken Annakin’s Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines – ahh, so I have come across Skelton on screen before, and didn’t ever realise it! Further radio success in his heyday led to continued references (“I dood it”, “Now let’s not get nosey, bub”, “I broke my widdle arm” and “He don’t know me vewy well, do he?” were all Skelton phrases) in cartoon shorts, and he later became a television mainstay in the 1950s and 60s, also founding a production company that would have a hand in, of all things, Irwin Allen’s Lost In Space.

A decline in ratings in the 1970s can’t have really been a surprise given the disappearing nature of such acts on the small screen at the time, and this took its toll on Skelton, who had already suffered much tragedy during his personal life.

But, recalling a happier age both for the star himself and the kinds of light, genuinely humorous films that amused audiences, it’s no real surprise that the Whistling trilogy firmly established Skelton as a leading comic player of the time. With some terrifically razor sharp one-liners (“Open that thing and tell him to let us in / I don’t think that’s such a good idea…he’s liable to do it!” in the first, “Who’s a coward? I’m as brave as they go, and I’m going!” in the second, and the third’s “I never forget a face, but this time I’ll make an exception!”) and delivery, this is a fun opportunity to catch the kinds of films the animators of the time would go see and take influence from…and they’re still funny today.

The Disc:

Another in the excellent line of Warner Archive releases, the series’ aim is to bring the more obscure material in the WB vaults to disc in smart but simple editions that are focused on getting these rarities out rather than dressing them up with any major restorations or bonus features that could only delay their release further. So, as per normal for the line, there’s little in the way of actual “bonus” content, but a nice and very welcome surprise on each disc is the inclusion of each film’s Original Theatrical Trailers.

Showing the films off to their best advantage, it’s always fun to see how old movies were marketed and, like the film itself, this actually plays like a template for any number of modern murder mystery-comedies. Perhaps a theatrical cartoon that includes a timely Skelton reference could have been considered for each disc, but then again that’s not really what the Archive Collection is about, the main menus for the discs being once again as basic as they need to be, including the same one minute Collection promo that adorns the beginning of each release.

But with the trailers intact, the lack of extras really doesn’t matter when Warners present the films themselves looking so clear. Although the general disclaimer is that the Studio performs no additional restoration on their Archive titles, using instead the “best available” current video master, I’ve yet to be truly disappointed by an Archive title’s audio or video attributes, and the Whistling Collection, in particular the first film, retains the high quality, perhaps even more so that other titles of this vintage.

The native black and white photography naturally eliminates the possibility of color crosstalk, but even so, it’s the sharpness of the images and lack of print artefacts that delight here and, of course, there are no onscreen station ident logos or other interruptions.

The soundtracks for all three films are also reproduced with a suitably nice punch, in authentic mono, and although there are no subtitled or foreign language options on what are essentially bare bones releases, knowing that the Studio has made sure the films easily reach commercial release standards should please those interested in this collection. Adding to this, the Whistling Collection comes packaged in the WB Archives’ snazzy new approach to cover art, which jettisons a previous “uniform look” of before for a style that feels much more like a mainstream release.

Still saving design costs, original theatrical poster art for all three films is employed to good effect on the front, while the back of the sleeve and disc artwork feature updated versions of the WB Archive designs. The standard keepcase holds the three discs, two in a flap tray and, as always with the Archive Collection, although they look like DVD-Rs, Warners insist they use specific discs and propriety production software that make them more robust than home-made creations.

Cinematic Classic or Faded Print?

The first film in the trilogy, Whistling In The Dark, is easily the best, perhaps due to the tried and tested plot being performed as a Broadway play before its screen adaptation, though there’s still a lot of fun to be had with the two follow-ups, Whistling In Dixie and Whistling In Brooklyn, the latter of which shows slight signs of series fatigue in its more outlandish situations but makes up for it with plenty of action. It was wise to wind up the movies at that point, but all three provide vintage entertainment that can still be enjoyed today. Whistling has never been so much fun!

The Movie:

Like the concurrently released Tombstone, just as rival movies came along depicting do-gooding outlaws (Robin Hood, Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves), computer animated insects (Antz, A Bug’s Life), or legendary marshals (Wyatt Earp, Tombstone), you wait a while for a movie about impending doom via global killing asteroids to show up at the nearest multiplex…and two come along at the same time!

Moviegoers have responded to amazing thrills onscreen since the movies began, one of the earliest being The Arrival Of A Train At La Ciotat Station, which created the myth of the then-stunned audience, seeing such sights on a screen for the first time, screaming out of the theater in panic! Destruction – seen up close but at a vantage point where the audience doesn’t have to actually partake in the carnage – has always had much interest, from newsreel accounts of such early 20th Century events as the First World War and catastrophes such as the Titanic tragedy, and later commercially produced films as those based on disasters such as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

World War II would provide pictorial horrors of its own, after which stories of war heroes and extraordinary military feats became the order of the day, in such epics as The Longest Day and D-Day, The Sixth Of June, which offered historical perspective coupled with the kind of multi-story arc narratives that would become a mainstay in the emerging “disaster movie” genre. It’s fair to say that many of the early entries in the genre were actually decent, well-made and performed films. True, the likes of Airport were based on soapy bestselling books, but the all-star cast brought gravitas and the mold was set: the film’s Best Picture Oscar cementing the fact that more of the same was to come.

Leading the pack was extravagant television producer/director Irwin Allen, who long after Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea and Lost In Space, began to mark himself out with a string of such films. The Poseidon Adventure became another critical and commercial success, leading to perhaps the pinnacle of the genre, The Towering Inferno, a “movie so big it took two studios to make!” as the publicity shouted: Allen had combined two books (The Tower and The Glass Inferno) owned by competing studios and managed to orchestrate a co-production deal between Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox.

But massive success, and another nomination for Best Picture, didn’t mean Allen’s Master Of Disaster title was impervious, and soon he had earned it for all the wrong reasons: unable to go anywhere but down after The Towering Inferno’s great heights, a run of bad TV movies (including such half-baked stinkers as Fire! and Flood!), over the top films from rival producers (such as the pretty dumb Earthquake!) and the impact of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker spoof Airplane! had truly turned the genre into a parody of itself. So-bad-they’re-good clunkers like Michael Caine in The Swarm (absolutely hilarious, if you should ever get the chance to see the extended version), When Time Ran Out, with Paul Newman witnessing the end of the world, and even a return to past glories with the ill-advised Beyond The Poseidon Adventure (again with Caine) failed to stop the sinking ship.

It wasn’t until a decade later, when Bruce Willis saved a group of hostages being held at the top of a skyscraper by terrorists, that the disaster movie was spoken about again in serious terms. Although the film was more of an action adventure, the similarities with The Towering Inferno and another quasi-disaster film, Rollercoaster (actually a very good thriller), had been noted in reviews, and it seemed the time was right to draw on extraordinary events surrounding ordinary people once again. That visual effects had also progressed to place these everyday folk in ever-increasingly fantastic situations with more finesse helped as well, of course, and throughout the 1990s, a hit run of action films gave audiences the same big casts and bigger explosions that they had enjoyed in the 1970s.

The culmination of these elements – drawn out story strands for extensive casts of names and faces, Earth-shattering events, big explosions, comeuppance and resolve – was Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day in 1996. A clear and acknowledged homage to the disaster epics, Emmerich threw in invading aliens as the threat, and watched the money come rolling in. Just as the movie business thought big budget event films might have been a dying breed, the likes of Jurassic Park and the emergence of directors such as James Cameron and Michael Bay – boys with toys who liked to blow them up – put such films very much back on the menu.

After several dubious entries early in his professional career, Bay had hit big directing exactly one of those such films, the Will Smith-starrer Bad Boys, joining forces with producer Jerry Bruckheimer and really firming up his front-line position as the ultra-modern, ultra-testosterone fuelled filmmaker of our age.

Bruckheimer had been one of the 1980s producing wonders with his partner Don Simpson and, when Simpson died, brought over his company to the auspices of the Disney corporation, which had seen new management come in led by Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, his old partners at Paramount.

Bruckheimer always had an eye for marketing his titles – one of the reasons he remains as successful as he does – and a big part of that was tapping into the recurring musical theme of a movie and turning it into a music video, and therefore promotional friendly, hit single. Bay, a previous video director, proved to be a perfect match, and their success with The Rock, an otherwise fairly routine action drama, meant they could next make whatever they wanted. With the likes of Titanic proving audiences were hungry for more world-shattering events tinged with emotional subplots and visceral visual effects, Bay and Bruckheimer announced that their intention was nothing less than the end of the world. On film, of course.

Bruckheimer and Bay’s weapon of choice was a giant “global killer” asteroid, though the thing that threatened to wipe them out first was the DreamWorks studio, who had their own asteroid picture in the making, Deep Impact. Although the press and audiences liked to play up the similarities between the two pictures, neither could be said to be the same: Deep Impact is a more thoughtful film that pretty much saves the pyrotechnics until the climatic moments, while a film that sports the name Armageddon could never be anything less than a gung-ho blast from start to finish.

Actually, the topic had been explored in film before, in another of the so bad it’s good disaster flicks of the seventies, 1979’s Meteor, an Irwin Allen film in all but name in which Sean Connery played the brilliant mind trying to convince the authorities that the end of life on Earth was imminent, then later the man they turn to in order to find a solution.

All three films base their answer on blasting the offending rock from the sky before it hits us, though in Meteor nothing much happens, and even then it all happens offscreen! Both Deep Impact and Armageddon choose to send rockets into space that will latch onto the asteroids and destroy them from the inside out, shattering them to pieces before they can do the same to us.

Unlike the two other films, Armageddon does all this right there onscreen and – don’t laugh – does so fairly believably for a film of this type. With such an event coming as something as a shock to NASA, there isn’t a team available at such short notice that can navigate themselves towards the asteroid, drill down into its core, and blow it to bits, so the task falls to “the best oil man in the business”, Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), and his motley crew of foul-mouthed drillers. Actually, they’re not that foul-mouthed, nor unhealthily inclined, since the amount of money Disney was putting up for the film meant that Bruckheimer and Bay would have to concede to making sure the film was family friendly in order to recoup its costs.

In many ways, it’s this excising of any risqué material that makes Armageddon so compelling and appealing to older family audiences. It takes itself seriously, of course, even if the events are completely over the top (“basically the worst parts of the Bible”) and the whole endeavor is painted with as broad strokes as possible. The film was such a colossal hit in the summer of 1998 that I doubt many people haven’t either seen it on the big screen or at home, and although some raised eyebrows at the inclusion of Armageddon in the prestigious Criterion Collection, I for one could see the value in opening up the list of titles to include such well-crafted blockbuster fare.

Armageddon is just one of those films where everything works, from the perfect note performances from the prerequisite bunch of names and faces actors that were all just in the right place at the right time with the right look, to the sprawling, multi-narrative script (by, among others, a pre-Lost JJ Abrams), production value that Bay and Bruckheimer were able to bring to the project, and the finishing touches that only a host of amazing visual effects houses could provide.

The economic storytelling, in which the asteroid is discovered in the first few minutes (with a nice prod at the same summer’s Godzilla), we meet the members of Harry’s crew and their mission is set up and rolling before the 30 minute mark, is a casebook example of the modern day (or should that be Bay?) blockbuster.

At two and a half hours, Armageddon does lag a little once one of NASA’s two rockets inevitably falters and the team finds themselves split on other sides of a rock (“the size of Texas”), but it gets back on track once they have to make a choice whether to stay and destroy the rock or attempt to return home, leading to a charged climax which Bay plays for all its worth. A huge part of these closing moments, and the film’s extended successful marketing, comes with the layering on of another Diane Warren super-ballad, here performed by Aerosmith. I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing not only kept thoughts of Armageddon in everyone’s minds during its original run, but became a huge hit in its own right, continuing another Bruckheimer template that he would only go on to beat with How Do I Live from Con Air later.

In fact, if there’s anything that can be leveled at Armageddon, it’s precisely that it set up the “rules” of almost every major event movie to follow. The sheer brassiness of the script, the sheen of the production, the movie’s percussive music score and staccato editing have now not only become de rigueur in just Bay or Bruckheimer’s films, but in just about ever other modern day Hollywood blockbuster too. The pair has never since equaled their collaboration here, and although Bruckheimer goes from strength to strength, producing the Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy for Disney and two of their tentpole pictures for 2010 in Prince Of Persia and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Bay has slid into a recurring circle of making the same movie over and over.

Since Armageddon, we’ve had the folly of Pearl Harbor, a film that attempted to mix Armageddon with Titanic only for it to sink quicker than the luxury liner, another Bad Boys and the awful noise of two Transformers movies. The only real film of note has been The Island, a box-office disappointment but actually a very well crafted thriller (even if certain elements were said to be lifted from a much earlier film). Bay has elsewhere given himself over to producing remakes of slasher and horror films to various degrees of success; unlike the knowing Dark Castle films from Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver, Bay’s remakes can be pretty nasty films.

As such, Armageddon seems to be the anomaly in Bay’s career. Bruckheimer has always seemed to find the balance between loud, flashy heroics and some form of emotional resonance, but one has to wonder what kind of legacy Bay hopes to leave behind or where his career is taking him. With more Transformers and Bad Boys still to come, there doesn’t seem to be the kind of variedness that a good director – and Bay can still chose to be a great one if he desires – needs. So it’s fortunate that the stars aligned for Armageddon, a big, dumb Hollywood blockbuster of the sort that hadn’t really come along before, but would leave its indelible mark.

The real-life horrors of 11th September 2001 made some of the shots seen in the modern disaster movie all too real, and the brakes were applied to such films in the short term following those events. Perhaps as a way to divert our attentions away from such memories, and point towards the growing issues with the environment, disaster epics now often call upon nature to provide the threat of extinction. If there’s one film that has come close to matching the best of the genre, it’s Roland Emmerich’s 2012, though even if the spectacle is greater (and certainly more definable than The Day After Tomorrow or any other of the director’s films), it can’t quite match the lean, and sometimes intentionally cheesy, storytelling of Armageddon, nor the digital work that, at the time, blew us away with its astonishing depiction what the future of the movies looked like.

The Disc:

Coming to Blu-ray for the first time, Disney seems to be on a bit of a kick at just putting out basic, bare bone vanilla discs of some of their more popular catalog titles at the moment, simply mirroring their original DVD counterparts in a lack of extras or new features. And let’s make it clear here that this is the Touchstone Home Video release of Armageddon. Although the film was selected as one of Disney’s films from this era to receive the full-on supplement laden Criterion Collection treatment, none of those extensive supplements have been included this time around.

The highlight of the Criterion disc was the addition of several minutes of footage spliced back into the movie by Michael Bay, who was one of the many voices who provided excellent audio comments for that release. We have to make do with the original theatrical cut here, but one area where this edition leaps over the Criterion is in the picture department, a new 1080p HD transfer replacing the non-anamorphic letterboxed widescreen of the earlier disc. However, it’s not as stand-out astounding as one would be expecting, and this can’t even really be put down to the vintage of the film.

There was some speak a couple of years ago that Armageddon had never properly been mastered for HD release, and that the original film elements had been lost to a fire in a storage vault. Director Bay often suggested the film would never make it to home video again, or would be some time in the offing, since visual effects would have to be recomposited, and the film effectively reassembled from scratch. With that in mind, one has to wonder how this release has been possible, and suggestions have pointed to the studio resorting to using a safety print instead, which would certainly explain the lack of super-sharpness and stability lost from not pulling the images from the original negatives or interpositives.

During the HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc wars, Bay was a huge proponent for Sony’s BD technology, but I’ll bet even he won’t be too pleased with the way his movie looks here. It’s actually none too bad if one takes in the claims of the fire, and better to have it on disc than not at all, though I don’t see why it should be quite so filtered looking at times and will undoubtedly be just that little bit disappointing for fans who will rightfully be expecting reference quality demo material.

You would hope that making up for it would be an excellent soundtrack, but even that seems a little flat even given the DTS-MA room to breathe. The original mix was a theater shaking experience, typically exuberant in that Bay/Bruckheimer/mega budget way, but here, from good old Chuck Heston’s opening narration onwards, there’s a distinct lack of really good, heavy bass. Pumping up your woofer will help, but this just isn’t the audio/video spectacular presentation that the film deserves.

It’s also unfortunate that the Criterion edition’s extras (a full serving of deleted scenes, outtakes, storyboards, visual effects analysis and more) weren’t able to be included either, at least in this release, meaning that all we are left with are the same limited “bonus” features that featured on Touchstone’s original DVD release: namely an Original Theatrical Trailer, an additional Teaser Trailer and the “MTV Award-Winning Music Video” for Aerosmith’s anthemic I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing, which if it’s still not blaring away in your minds from the original airplay it got back in 1998 will be again soon after playing this disc (and has added poignancy, of course, due to the Liv/Stephen Tyler connection, with the video mirroring the father/daughter dynamic).

All of them do their thing well, though only in standard definition interlaced 4:3 letterbox. Also bundled on are previews for the upcoming Disney/Bruckheimer Prince Of Persia and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice adaptations, the terminally unfunny looking When In Rome, the recent Bruce Willis thriller Surrogates and a Blu-ray promo.

The packaging is as simple as can be: a slimline BD case holding the sleeve art that again basically replicates the previous release, without any inserts or reverse sleeve printing offering chapter stops; the disc art following Disney’s usual half-blue/half-poster split down the middle design. I expect that these releases are being promoted more towards those that own these titles already but wish to own the movie itself in HD. If that’s the case, then the Armageddon Blu-ray does the job, even if in a pretty unspectacular and basic manner.

Cinematic Classic or Faded Print?

Knowing that there’s a feature-packed edition on DVD that contains an extended cut of the motion picture, one would have to tread very carefully in outwardly recommending the purchase of this disc without adding the caveat that, in all likelihood, a better edition may find its way to disc in the future. Perhaps it’s the extended cut that Bay insisted would have to be recompiled, in which case perhaps this is simply the best that can be achieved at this time?

Even so, there are many supplements from the Criterion edition that would have made this a more attractive upgrade, and the lack of these along with disappointing image quality that isn’t as superior as it should be does put a definite alert note on the title. For a film that made such a huge impact, perhaps a rental is the best option, just to catch up with Armageddon again. I would certainly expect it to be revisited again in time, but for now this almost vanilla disc won’t end your world, but it may rock it. Gently.

The Movie:

Like the concurrently released Armageddon, just as rival movies came along depicting do-gooding outlaws (Robin Hood, Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves), computer animated insects (Antz, A Bug’s Life), or impending doom via global killing asteroids (Armageddon, Deep Impact), you wait a while for a movie based on the legend of Wyatt Earp to show up at the nearest multiplex…and two come along at the same time!

Hollywood itself didn’t have to wait too long before Earp was a regular in movie circles: not even that long after the real life events at the O.K. Corral – where Marshall Earp and his team were forced into a showdown opposite the feared Clanton gang – occurred in 1881, Earp had put his legendary lawman days behind him and undertook a brief nomadic existence until settling in California, where he became embroiled in the then-fledgling movie business, making friends with such silent Western stars as William S. Hart, Tom Mix and a young prop man, John Wayne, who later said he based much of his screen persona on Earp.

Although various films had based characters upon the Earp legend, it was ten years after his death that Earp was portrayed as himself onscreen by another Western hero, Randolph Scott, in Frontier Lawman, the first “official” account of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Numerous remakes and reinterpretations of those events and the life of its legendary personalities would begin a steady stream over the next 40 years, among them John Ford’s iconic My Darling Clementine (1946) where Earp was played by Henry Fonda, and Gunfight At The O.K. Corral (1957, with Burt Lancaster).

Over the years, Earp has also appeared as a character in various other films and television pieces as well, from the expected (The Life And Legend Of Wyatt Earp) to the comedic (Bob Hope’s Alias Jesse James and The Three Stooges’ The Outlaws Is Coming) and the plain outlandish, showing up in sci-fi (Doctor Who: Gunfighters, Star Trek: The Spectre Of The Gun), tinsel town pastiches (Earp solves a 1920s Hollywood murder with Tom Mix in Sunset and consults on stunts in Young Indiana Jones And The Hollywood Follies) and even animation: who else could the James Stewart voiced Wylie Burp in An American Tail: Fievel Goes West be based on?

By the 1990s, the Western genre itself was as outlawed as the many characters that these films often portrayed. Where once John Wayne was the sole proprietor of keeping the flame alive, in recent times it had fallen to The Man With No Name, otherwise known as Clint Eastwood, to almost single-handedly provide the old time thrills, though with a style that added different angles to each project. The Dollars trilogy had helped establish him, Dirty Harry (a western in all but name) made him a star, and such films as The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider and Unforgiven brought critical success.

Although the genre had never really become extinct during the 1980s, Unforgiven’s early ’90s impact was an important milestone for the Western genre, its great critical (winning Best Picture and other accolades) and commercial success suggesting that there was still gold in them thar hills.

A slate of new, contemporary westerns were rushed into production, films that contained the black and white good versus bad elements we expected, but with a modern moviemaking edge that added nuance and shades of ambiguity. Among these were to be two new biopics based on the Wyatt Earp legend, by then a myth itself: Kevin Costner would direct the epic Wyatt Earp, while an all-star cast would form for George P. Cosmatos’ focusing on the events themselves, naming his movie Tombstone.

Of the two films, Costner’s film was overlong, ponderous and lacking a gripping tension that was inherent in the real life story, even if attention to detail meant one could almost breath in the dust and Dennis Quaid’s turn as Earp’s trusted friend Doc Holliday was a tour de force performance.

But Cosmatos plays the entire thing as a broader piece, as if he was heading the words of one of the genre’s fathers, director John Ford: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”. As such, Tombstone doesn’t lose the epic feel, but additionally takes on a wider, crowd-pleasing tone that at times resembles an all-star adventurous romp (that’s not to take away from the serious intention, but to also emphasize the somewhat old-fashioned plain excitement that the film offers over Costner’s “Dances With Wyatt” attempt).

Most of it is down to the stellar cast, starting with Kurt Russell as Earp, playing the Marshall with sincerity and a humanity that makes his relationship with the Val Kilmer’s terminally sick Doc Holliday all the more touching, though never emotionally overburdened, such was the peculiar nature of their friendship. There’s much to praise in the other performances as well, in a cast that includes exactly the right faces, with such veterans or rising names as Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Powers Boothe, Michael Biehn, Billy Zane, Dana Delany, Thomas Haden Church, Billy Bob Thornton and Terry O’Quinn among them, also finding room for a true legend in Charlton Heston, and even the Marshall’s own family: Wyatt Earp III stepping into Billy Claiborne’s boots for further authenticity.

Robert Mitchum was due to feature, before a riding accident rendered him incapable (though he delivers the opening narration), and Glenn Ford was another who was invited but unable to participate, leaving it to Harry Carey Jr to uphold the old-school Western movie traditions in the cast.

Cosmatos, who could arguably be called little more than a hack director on most of his other projects (Escape To Athena and Rambo II among them), but the scope of Tombstone seems to have stimulated him to up his game; the film is easily his crowning achievement and must have been quite a production to marshal himself. Based on a previously written and pre-produced screenplay, Cosmatos joined the crew some time into production, bringing a glossiness to the film that suits it well.

Although the attempt was to preserve historical accurateness, Cosmatos doesn’t let that get in the way of telling a good story with gripping characters and performers who really know their stuff, something that helps the film every now and then when it might seem in danger of just dragging ever so slightly before the final shootout (the famed O.K. Corral gunfight actually occurring soon after the midway point).

The rumored three-hour original cut, which featured more subtext and other plots for minor characters, would perhaps flesh out this world even more and would undoubtedly be something of a treat, but even though a briefly extended version was released on DVD, this Blu-ray debut retains the original 1993 theatrical cut only. No other deleted scenes have been incorporated into the film or included on this disc, but despite the curbing of the material as Cosmatos came onboard (to focus specifically on the Earp and Clanton dynamic), Tombstone emerges as one of the best audience pleasing examples of the genre in recent times.

The Disc:

Coming to Blu-ray for the first time, Disney seems to be on a bit of a kick at the moment in just putting out basic, bare bone vanilla discs of some of their more popular catalog titles, simply mirroring their original DVD counterparts in a lack of extras or new features. To be fair, Tombstone was never graced with a plethora of supplements on LaserDisc or DVD, and even the company’s Vista Series 2-disc edition didn’t add too much, being mostly memorable for several extra minutes being spliced back into the main feature.

That alternate cut, and its commentary with Cosmatos would have been the obvious choice for any new BD release, but that’s not included on this version and I don’t believe a track was ever recorded for the theatrical cut (a loss now, since the director’s passing in 2005). However, some other features from the Vista Series release have been carried over, the most prominent being The Making Of Tombstone documentary, a grouping of three perfunctory featurettes from the film’s 1993 release. An Ensemble Cast speaks with the star line-up for twelve minutes of insights into their approaches and the personalities they portray in the film, and Making An Authentic Western delves into the lengths taken to convey the events onscreen in as genuine a way as possible.

Finally, Gunfight At The O.K. Corral shows how the ultimate coming together of the Earp and Clanton gangs – an event of only a few seconds in reality – was conceived as a dramatic sequence for film. Adding to this exploration are a pretty poor presentation of Cosmatos’ Director’s Original Storyboards corresponding to the four-minute scene, and rounding things up are series of Trailers & TV Spots, including theatrical teaser and trailer and seven spots, which all do their jobs of selling the film’s various cast and plot elements as a dramatically rousing actioner, even if it does turn out to be more than just that.

The documentary footage doesn’t go into the film’s long and sometimes tortuous production (the original director was fired and Russell himself stood in until Cosmatos showed up), but the biggest bug-bear is that all of the standard definition 4:3 material has been stretched out to fill the 16:9 frame, meaning that everyone at all times looks short and fat. I wouldn’t have thought it looked like that on the Vista Series release, so this is purely the case of someone dropping the ball big time in the remastering process, a mistake carried over to the Storyboards and Trailers as well, pretty much rendering them all technically worthless.

Since one can’t reframe a locked 16:9 frame, we’re stuck with this presentation, a poor show, and the lack of the other Vista extras (mostly interactive features focusing on the real-life Tombstone) are a shame. Also bundled on are previews for the upcoming Disney/Bruckheimer Prince Of Persia adaptation (seemingly scored in the same old Hans Zimmer style by Harry Gregson-Williams or indeed with a Pirates Of The Caribbean cue), the terminally unfunny looking When In Rome, the recent thriller Surrogates and a Blu-ray promo.

Thank-goodness the movie itself has been framed correctly, with picture and sound quality that is more than adequate, if not the very best that has been achieved on the hi-def format even given the vintage of the material. The look is sharp, and the film origins are pleasantly clear, with an intentional “rough” nature that brings an earthiness to the images. At times, William Fraker’s cinematography can seem a bit dark in the shadows, but it always contains a remarkable depth and at other times it’s blisteringly hot and you can almost feel the heat burn off the screen.

The DTS Master-HD soundtrack is as lively as they come too, with a rumbling bass and none other than Bruce Broughton’s energetic music score (he was suggested to the production by original choice Jerry Goldsmith, who was unavailable) especially pounding away during the major moments, both quiet and thunderous (subtitles and Dolby Digital 2.0 are also included in French and Spanish flavors).

The packaging is again as simple as can be: a slimline BD case holding the sleeve art that basically replicates previous releases, without any inserts or reverse sleeve printing offering chapter stops; the disc art following Disney’s usual half-blue/half-poster split down the middle design. I expect that these obviously rushed releases are being promoted more towards those that own these titles already but wish to own the movie itself in HD. If that’s the case, then the Tombstone Blu-ray does the job, but the image screw-up on the supplements is unnecessary.

Cinematic Classic or Faded Print?

Tombstone is one of the most enjoyable Westerns of recent years, and gets away from the po-faced nature of Costner’s film by going for a broader audience appeal and injecting plenty of action and an intensity that, even when one knows the outcome, suggests you can never be too sure how events will play out. Indeed, even those that are not so inclined to the genre may find they can get into this one, since it’s economic with its plot and vague enough with the facts to work things into something more accessible than some films that have come before.

The lack of care and attention given to the supplements is lamentable, suggesting that $19.99 would have been a more reasonable price for the results, and be aware that the film’s R-rating is there for good meaning if you’re watching this in the family room, but if you do end up rooting for Earp, Holliday and his posse, then I also recommend the recent remake of 3:10 To Yuma with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale; another Western that, like Tombstone, breaks the mold to deliver authentic but highly visceral excitement.

Tombstone: Blu-ray Disc
is available to purchase from Amazon.com now