MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

(Das Geheimnis des Wachsfigurenkabinetts [de])

USA 1933
d: Michael Curtiz
Visionary Communications (Region 0 uk)

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In the early '30s, when Universal were riding high with Frankenstein and Dracula, Warners hunted round for their own horror subject, and found one in the idea of a sculptor who murders his models and embalms them in wax to achieve death-in-life. It's an interesting Poe-like theme, full of bizarre implications, and has since been remade several times (once in 3-D); but this remains the classic. Filmed in one of the earliest two-tone Technicolor processes, it is beautiful to look at, full of muted green compositions and stunningly modulated colour effects. Interesting, too, to note that its tough, wisecracking girl reporter (Farrell) and newspaper setting bear the unmistakable stamp of the Warner house style. There's a slightly cruel, almost fascist streak throughout, especially in the police's handling of things, and the shocks are a little sparse by present standards. But it holds up amazingly well, and its pale, shimmering images linger in the mind.
— DP, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Feared to be lost for many years, MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM gained a mighty reputation when film historians' memories of the movie were jogged by the 1953 3-D remake, HOUSE OF WAX. When a print of the original film surfaced in the late 1960s, however, many critics were disappointed with it, shrugging it off as a silly mystery picture, though their initial reaction was entirely unfounded. An amazing film filled with stunning sets (by Anton Grot), exceptional moments, and perhaps Atwill's greatest performance, THE MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM is also a very adult film that deals explicitly with drug addiction, necrophilia, and insanity. Notable for its wonderful use of color, it was also one of the first horror films to be set in the everyday reality of modern-day New York and not in a mystical foreign land.
— TV Guide
•••••
In "Mystery of the Wax Museum", a disfigured, maniacal sculptor (Lionel Atwill) resorts to corpse-snatching and murder to achieve his demented artistic aims. On the trail of the fiend is a wise-cracking girl reporter (Glenda Farrell); a beguiling Fay Wray is the near-fatally innocent heroine. Mystery of the Wax Museum was the last feature made in the two-color Technicolor process, the pallette of which lacked a true yellow, giving all the color effects a bluish-green or a pinkish-red element. Art director Anton Grot and director Michael Curtiz turn these color liabilities into assets by keying the real and unreal elements to the process' eeriness: natural scenes like the newspaper room look entirely normal while the sequences in the wax museum have a gruesome blue-green tint. These color elements are wonderfully combined with Grot's German Expressionist sets with their trapezoidal doors, leaning walls, and twisted staircases. Curtiz serves up some truly terrifying moments including Wray's unmasking of the disfigured Atwill and the fire in the wax museum, where the figures themselves melt into a parody of decaying human flesh as they twist and sink into oblivion.
— Sally Syberg, PFA

Captain Blood

(Unter Piratenflagge [de])

USA 1935
d: Michael Curtiz
Warner Home Video (Region 0 us)

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Angels With Dirty Faces

(Chicago / Chicago - Engel mit schmutzigen Gesichtern [de])

USA 1938
d: Michael Curtiz
Warner Home Video (Region 0 us)

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Dodge City

(Herr des Wilden Westens [de])

USA 1939
d: Michael Curtiz
Warner Home Video (Region 0 us)

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The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex

(Günstling einer Königin [de])

USA 1939
d: Michael Curtiz
Warner Home Video (Region 0 us)

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Not so much a swashbuckler as a costume romance, kept high-toned (not to say strangled) by its source in a Maxwell Anderson play. Dominated by historical inaccuracies and a tightly controlled performance from Davis as the waspish queen, all too conscious of her fading charms and her favourite Flynn's roguishly roving eye. Some spectacular pageantry too in what was, oddly enough, the only colour film in which Davis appeared until the '50s.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Warner Brothers produced a series of splendid spectacles, designed to add prestige to the studio name. Tonight we present--in a beautiful, restored color print--a lavish dramatization of the love affair between Queen Elizabeth of England and Lord Essex, a love rocked by pride, jealousy and ambition. Unable to separate their "private lives" from their public lives, the power dynamics of their love affair were echoed in their struggle for the rule of England. Director Michael Curtiz minimizes action to focus on the psychological and emotional interactions between the Queen and Lord. According to rumors of the time, Bette Davis and Errol Flynn's on-screen arguments were matched by off-screen ones. Reigning queen of Warner Brothers, Davis didn't feel Flynn was capable of the part. However, she was clearly capable of hers, and as a reviewer remarked on the film's release, she was able "to throw her entire weight into the film...to add fire to scenes she knew were beginning to smoulder."
— PFA
•••••
Much of this picture is visually arresting. The rich color, the ornate sets and costuming, the swift and sweeping direction by Michael Curtiz, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold's opulent score, present a feast for the eyes. The film earned Academy Award nominations for Best Color Cinematography, Best Score, and Best Special Effects, losing to GONE WITH THE WIND, STAGECOACH, and THE RAINS CAME, respectively. But the acting is stiff, especially in the scenes in which Davis and Flynn interact. Reportedly, the lack of chemistry between Davis and Flynn, then the reigning king and queen of the Warner Bros. lot, was a result of Davis' hatred of Flynn and his pranks. She had to bend to the Flynn's will in 1938, when she was billed beneath him in THE SISTERS, but this time around she demanded and got top billing. Davis also demanded that Warners give her Laurence Olivier in the Essex role, but she got Flynn instead. For his part, Flynn is said to have resented Davis' high-handed ways, and he looks uncomfortable with her in almost every scene they share. As a result confrontations between them that should be filled with passion are hollow and unconvincing.
The seething animosity between the two exploded before the cameras in the scene in which Essex defies the queen and she slaps him. In the first take of this scene, Davis swung her bracelet-laden arm full force into one of Flynn's ears, jarring the actor and leading to a between-takes confrontation between the actors that Flynn described in My Wicked, Wicked Ways. Davis refused to pull her punch on the next take, and Flynn, knowing that it would reflect badly on him, still planned to retaliate if Davis hit him as hard as she did in the first take. This time around, however, Davis' hand only breezed by Flynn's face. This was the take used by Curtiz, but Flynn would get his revenge in another scene, when the actor allowed his hand to sail through Davis' Elizabethan dress and land on her "Academy Award behind." Davis never again spoke to Flynn off camera. Olivia de Havilland has a thankless role as the lady-in-waiting, but she had promised executive producer Jack Warner that if he allowed her to go to Selznick to play Melanie in GONE WITH THE WIND, she would return to her contract studio and not make any demands.
The title of this film was long in debate. Warner wanted to shorten the original Maxwell Anderson play title to ELIZABETH AND ESSEX until he learned that a novel by Lytton Strachey had the same title and that agents for the novel wanted $10,000 just to use the title. Flynn, who felt that he was playing second fiddle to Davis, demanded that a title be used in which he would at least take precedence, especially since he was losing out on billing. He proposed THE KNIGHT AND THE LADY. When Davis heard about this, she threatened to walk away from the production and the original Anderson title was adopted. Studio booking agents, however, hated the title THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX, and begged Jack Warner to change it, claiming that exhibitors were objecting to it on the grounds that it sounded too much like the Alexander Korda-produced British films THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII (1933) and THE PRIVATE LIFE OF DON JUAN (1934). But Davis held firm and Warner let the title stand. The most incongruous fact about the film was that Essex and Elizabeth were never lovers; he was only 34 when he was beheaded in 1601 and Elizabeth was 68. The age difference is suggested in one scene where Lady Penelope taunts the red-wigged queen about her age in a song (performed with another lady-in-waiting played by Nanette Fabray, who later would become a success on TV), causing Elizabeth to go berserk and smash every mirror in her chambers. Davis was also well aware of the age difference between herself and the woman she was playing. When her friend Charles Laughton, who had played another British monarch in THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII, visited Davis on the set, she told him that she felt she had a lot of nerve trying to play Elizabeth at her age. "Never stop trying to hang yourself, Bette," Laughton said, and those words became a credo for Davis (Whitney Stine, Mother Goddam).
The blank verse employed by playwright Anderson is often marvelously delivered by Davis (as it was by Lynn Fontanne and her husband Alfred Lunt during the Broadway smash run in 1930), especially her keening and melancholy statement at the finale, when she sends her lover to his death, saying: "I could be young with you, but now I'm old. I know how it will be without you. The sun will be empty and circle around an empty earth...And I will be queen of emptiness and death...Why could you not have loved me enough to give me your love and let me keep as I was?" Davis would play Elizabeth once more, this time closer to the age of the character she so dearly loved, in THE VIRGIN QUEEN (1955), where her younger lover this time was Richard Todd, playing Sir Walter Raleigh.
— TV MovieGuide

The Sea Hawk

(Der Herr der sieben Meere [de])

USA 1940
d: Michael Curtiz
Warner Home Video (Region 0 us)

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Casablanca

(Casablanca [de])

USA 1942
d: Michael Curtiz
Warner Home Video (Region 2 de)

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Once a movie becomes as adulated as "Casablanca", it is difficult to know how to begin to approach it, except by saying that at least 70 per cent of its cult reputation is deserved. This was Bogart's greatest type role, as the battered, laconic owner of a nightclub who meets a girl (Bergman) he left behind in Paris and still loves. The whole thing has an intense wartime nostalgia that tempts one to describe it as the sophisticated American version of Britain's naïve "Brief Encounter", but it has dated far less than Lean's film and is altogether a much more accomplished piece of cinema. There are some great supporting performances, and much of the dialogue has become history.
— DP, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
The most romantic picture ever made? The best film to come out of a Hollywood studio ever? More an icon than a work of art, CASABLANCA is still thoroughly entertaining romantic melodrama, flawlessly directed, subtly played, lovingly evoking our collective daydreams about lost chances and lost loves and love versus honor; everything about CASABLANCA is just right--it seems to have been filmed under a lucky star. ...
Since its November 1942 release, CASABLANCA has been the movie, one that perfectly blends a turbulent love story with harrowing intrigue, heroic and evil characters, and the kind of genuine sentiment that makes the heart grow fonder with each viewing. Even upon its initial release, the film appealed to nostalgia for the vanishing, romanticized world between the two great wars, a cafe society crushed by fascism, a civilized, urbane generation in white linen suits, spectator shoes, and wide-brimmed sunhats desperately clinging to values no longer cherished.
Given its turbulent production history--the script was being rewritten almost on a daily basis--CASABLANCA was also most fortunate on all levels. The original leads were to have been Ronald Reagan, Ann Sheridan and Dennis Morgan. Other casting packages included George Raft, Hedy Lamarr and Herbert Marshall. And Lena Horne or Ella Fitzgerald might have crooned "As Time Goes By" instead of Dooley Wilson. Chemistry, that indefinable element, was surely carefully considered by veteran director Michael Curtiz.
So was timing. The film opened on Thanksgiving Day, 1942 at the Hollywood Theater in New York, three weeks after the Allies had landed at Casablanca, and further enjoyed widespread publicity generated by the Casablanca Conference two months later, when the eyes of the free world focused upon its leaders' meeting in the Moroccan city. It propelled Bogart's star to new heights, adding a romantic component to his world-weary persona, and gave Bergman a tragic edge to blend with her healthy radiance, making her seem complex and emotionally fragile.
— TV MovieGuide

Passage to Marseille

(Fahrkarte nach Marseille [de])

USA 1944
d: Michael Curtiz
Warner Home Video (Region 0 us)

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Something of a follow-up to Casablanca, but without that movie's deft and evocative script. Bogart plays Jean Matrac, a journalist converted, by a confrontation at sea with Greenstreet's elegant fascism (shades of Huston's Across the Pacific), from bitterness against a France that has wronged him to self-destructive patriotism with the Free French. The movie is brought to earth by its unnecessary complexity - at one point we're in a flashback from a flashback from a flashback - but the central scenes on Devil's Island have a cogency and atmosphere, particularly Bogart's spell in solitary, which demonstrate the movie it might have been. The last reel quivers with the sort of emotionalism that wartime audiences adored. Bogart hasn't much to do beyond gritting his teeth, Rains typically holds the plot together, and Michèle Morgan is thanklessly cast as the wife waiting at home 'till we meet again'.
— SG, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Although Curtiz draws superb performances from his great cast, many of whom (Bogart, Lorre, Greenstreet, Dantine, Claude Rains, Corinna Mura, and Louis Mercier) appeared in Warner Bros.' recent smash hit CASABLANCA, which was also directed by Curtiz, the story is more than a little confusing because of the unwieldy flashbacks used to tell the tale. Yet the great action director packs the film with marvelous adventure and exciting scenes, not to mention stirring patriotism. Warners attempted to time PASSAGE TO MARSEILLE's release to coincide with what the studio thought would be the invasion of southern France, but when this failed to take place the film was distributed without an international news event to boost the production (as had been the case with CASABLANCA, released just after American troops landed in Africa and Allied leaders met in that African city for top-level conferences). James Wong Howe's gritty photography helps set the mood, and Max Steiner's music dynamically establishes patriotic fervor.
— TV MovieGuide

Mildred Pierce

(Solange ein Herz schlägt [de])

USA 1945
d: Michael Curtiz
Warner Home Video (Region 0 us)

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James Cain's novel of the treacherous life in Southern California that sets house-wife-turned waitress-turned-successful restauranteur (Crawford) against her own daughter (Blyth) in competition for the love of playboy Zachary Scott, is brought fastidiously and bleakly to life by Curtiz' direction, Ernest Haller's camerawork, and Anton Grot's magnificent sets. Told in flashback from the moment of Scott's murder, the film is a chilling demonstration of the fact that, in a patriarchal society, when a woman steps outside the home the end result may be disastrous.
— PH, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Everything about MILDRED PIERCE is first-rate, from stellar production values to Curtiz's marvelously paced direction, which refuses to allow sentiment to rule the story. The MacDougall script, adapted from Cain's terse novel, is adult and literate, with plenty of sharp dialogue. The Curtiz string-pulling is greatly aided by Grot's imposing sets, Haller's moody photography and Steiner's haunting score. Bravely cresting the waves of disaster is a mature Crawford in a real tour de force, defying the industry to write her off as washed up. She's matched every slap of the way by Blyth, here giving the performance of her career.
The support in MILDRED is, without exception, expertly handled. Scott is an exceptionally attractive snake and Arden turned in a definitive job as Crawford's wisecracking pal. Two peak scenes among aficionados of Saint Joan: Veda smacks Mildred; Mildred calls the police. Unforgettable.
— TV MovieGuide
•••••
Deceit, money lust, sexual jealousy, violence - all the elements of James M. Cain's chillingly nasty novel, 'Mildred Pierce,' have been preserved in Michael Curtiz's film version. Ostensibly presented as a whodunit in the grand film noir tradition, Mildred Pierce is actually an indictment of a woman determined to overcome the impotence of her middle-class existence. Deserted by her husband and chided by her eldest child for her 'common' values, Mildred channels her culinary talents towards an amazingly prosperous restaurant career. In her Academy Award-winning performance, Joan Crawford plays the ambitious housewife whose keen business sense and desire for financial security are matched only by her obsession to buy everything - including a wretchedly spoiled vixen of a daughter and a disenchanted dilettante lover on the dole. "Stylistically considered, Mildred Pierce incorporates all the visual elements of Hollywood's classic '40s dark cinema; compositions assume a fractured, threatening mood via the use of oblique camera angles, harsh linear formations, and brooding light. Narratively speaking, however, Curtiz's film more closely approximates a melodrama with the mother-daughter conflict at the forefront. As the story unfolds, Mildred and Veda's precarious relationship deteriorates into a vicious and hateful rivalry, the intensity of which precipitates the calamitous denouement.
— L.A. Thielen, PFA
•••••
Joan Crawford--after an absence of almost three years--triumphantly returned to the screen as Mildred Pierce in Warner Brothers' adaptation of James M. Cain's novel of a mother's obsessive love for her daughter. Under Michael Curtiz' direction, Mildred Pierce was a disquieting mixture of '30s and '40s film styles--the suspicious, unsettling world of film noir intertwined with the open, daylit world of melodrama. Although the film opens as a whodunit (who done killed Mildred's husband), as the story unfolds--told by Mildred Pierce in a series of flashbacks--the murder emerges as one of many interconnected crimes: crimes born, not of physical violence, but rather of emotional and psychological needs, crimes rooted in family and work relationships. It is in its emphasis on these two spheres that Mildred Pierce is a product of its time. Filmed in 1945, as World War II was ending and the soldiers were returning home anxious to get back to work, Mildred Pierce as housewife turned baker, waitress and restaurant-chain owner, was the cinematic representation of female financial independence standing in the way of conversion to a postwar (male-dominated) economy. It is for this, more than for her family 'failures', that she is indicted.
— Kathy Geritz, PFA