Thoughts on a few low quantity titles:
"We get paid for this, ma'am - 75 cents a day."
One of those well crafted star vehicles from the twilight of the studio system era, not that much actually happens in Pony Soldier yet it still manages to be a pleasant and entertaining North Western. By 1952 Tyrone Power was getting on a bit to play a rookie Mountie who's still wet enough behind the ears to have let his man get away before the film starts, though he's more convincing once the story hits his stride and his ability to improvise solutions comes to the fore. It may begin with a spectacular battle (culled from Fox's 1944 Buffalo Bill) and a murderous raid for hostages but it's not an action picture, and nor is it a romance despite one of those hostages naturally being a pretty girl (an underused Penny Edwards). Instead, as Julie Kirgo's booklet notes in Twilight Time's new Blu-ray release observe, it's more a film about diplomacy and keeping the peace, with Power's tenderfoot having to persuade a tribe of Cree to return to their reservation and hand over two American hostages with only Thomas Gomez's portly and reluctant half-breed scout ("The Cree do not love the Blackfeet. Because I am half Blackfeet, half white man, they hate me double") and an orphaned Indian boy to help him. Naturally there's conflict in the Cree ranks to contend with as well, with Stuart Randall's chief leaning towards conciliation and an almost unrecognisable Cameron Mitchell eager for war. And it doesn't help that one of the hostages has a secret of his own, leaving Power with a bear by the tail - and a bear's tail is short...
There aren't many surprises and the film never makes a play for greatness, but it's a satisfying outdoor picture all the same. Gomez gets all the best lines ("Sometimes even when smart beaver cut down tree, tree fall on beaver"), the scenery is spectacular even if it was shot in Arizona and California rather than Canada and there's enough action and incident to satisfy most Western fans while its concise 82 minute running time ensures it never outstays its welcome.
Sadly the handsome Three-Strip Technicolor photography has lost some of its original lustre. As the name implies, the film was shot on three separate films that were printed together to form spectacularly vivid colour prints. Unfortunately over the years the three separate negative strips either suffered damage (not always in the same place on all three) or proved increasingly expensive to print, so in the 50s and 60s the studio made single combined negatives that were easier to handle and needed less storage space. As dupe negatives there was a slight loss of definition (not a major issue at the time with TV increasingly becoming the only market for old films) and the constant risk of the colour being slightly out of register if one of the three strips shrank slightly (the cause of the green lines sometimes visible around objects in 40s and 50s Technicolor films). Pony Soldier certainly doesn't suffer nearly as badly as some other films from the same era, and this is certainly the best it's ever likely to look again, but there are some problems with the surviving negative that not even the best transfer can overcome.
Nonetheless, Twilight Time have done a pretty good job with what they had to work with, with a lot more detail apparent than in Fox's Spanish DVD release - enough, indeed, to show up the limitations in one of the special effect shots of a conveniently well-timed mirage. Better still, Alex North's beautiful score gets an isolated track of its own, complete with recording session lead-ins from conductor Alfred Newman, and it's one of his best from the 50s. While the occasional motifs that would later be further developed in Spartacus have drawn the most attention, it's the more lyrical passages - particularly the seductive American Pastorale with its insidiously developing undercurrent of menace - that really stand out.
"You can never teach a man anything by killing him. Just the reverse - you make him forget everything."
The Roots of Heaven is generally regarded as minor John Huston and remembered, if at all, for the tales of its nightmarish production as the cast and crew dropped like flies (sometimes mid-take) in the 130degree heat in French Equatorial Africa, while the director got into a brief punch-up with Errol Flynn (Huston won by a knockout) before showing his dedication to the material by going off and hunting some big game. Which is ironic because the subject matter is the very antithesis of the White Hunter, Black Heart image of Huston, a big-budget shot on location CinemaScope adaptation of Romain Gary's novel about an animal rights campaigner (Trevor Howard) obsessed with saving the African elephant who gives up on trying to change things legally and takes direct action a bit far when he starts hunting the hunters. Although he never actually kills, along the way he becomes a folk hero and worldwide media celebrity, attracting a ragtag band of followers with various motives: Juliette Greco's *****, top-billed but not-in-it-that-much Errol Flynn's drunken and disgraced British officer, Friedrich von Ledebur's disillusioned nuclear scientist, Eddie Albert's cynical photojournalist and Edric Connor's African nationalist who's hoping to exploit his reputation to get some publicity for his own cause by tagging along.
It's certainly a film that was ahead of its time in 1958 and would probably fare better at the box-office today, and be slightly improved in the process. There's a lot of purple prose and speech making, some of it beautiful (especially when delivered by von Ledebur in one of his rare articulate roles), but Huston doesn't always make as much of the visual opportunities on offer or get the most out of some of his players - Flynn is awful in his early drunk scenes (shot last) but rather better in his later moments (shot first) - and the sprawling script struggles at times to fit in its expansive cast (Paul Lukas, Herbert Lom, Gregoire Aslan and Orson Welles, as a bellicose TV reporter who becomes a believer after getting a load of buckshot in the rear that should probably have been played by Huston himself are also along for the ride). Howard gives it his best, but he doesn't quite manage to hold the film together as the lead despite or perhaps because of having an intriguing character to play whose faith in the animal kingdom may be a rejection of his fellow man: Howard was never much of one for psychological nuances, and it's hard not to imagine original leading man and avid conservationist William Holden bringing more genuine passion to the role had he not dropped out. Yet if there's a second-best feel to some of the casting, the film is unusual and intriguing enough to survive the occasional bump in the road and come out ahead.
Twilight Time's excellent limited edition Blu-ray release has a fine widescreen transfer with isolated score and booklet as extras - though do note that because of a pressing fault it's Region A-locked rather than region-free as per the packaging.
"You write beautiful prose, Scott, but we can't photograph adjectives."
Despite its low reputation among devotees of the author, Beloved Infidel is a surprisingly decent attempt to turn a self-destructive F. Scott Fitzgerald's affair with gossip columnist Sheila Graham into a glossy CinemaScope love story in the 20th Century Fox house style of the Fifties. Not that it's going for pure soap, with undervalued and unfairly forgotten A-list director Henry King seemingly using A Star is Born for his template, with his screenwriting career failing because he can't adapt his style to the screen while his books fall out of favour - he can't even find a copy of his book to buy her. The comparisons are particularly pronounced in scenes where Gregory Peck's down on his luck author drunkenly barges in on a rehearsal for a radio broadcast and just keeps on making things worse or when he drunkenly insults an admirer on a plane while Deborah Kerr's would-be muse sits cringing in embarrassment. Elsewhere, it draws parallels with the author's own work as he falls for a woman who, like Jay Gatsby, has reinvented her humble origins but can't forget them.
For all his stolid reputation, Peck was always interested in challenging his screen image and even though he's one of the least likely casting choices imaginable for Fitzgerald, he's clearly relishing the opportunity to cut loose in the second half of the picture with the occasional homicidal drunken rage. Kerr's more obviously in her usual comfort zone, worrying, trying to manage a deteriorating situation and suffering as required. King's direction is polished and intelligent, pulling off a couple of nice moments such as their first meeting being played entirely by subtle eye contact or a nightmarish tableaux giving way to a suddenly empty room near the end of the film, though this being a 50s Fox film, the Love is a Man Splendored Thingish final scene where memories give way to a title song that really struggles to find rhymes with Infidel (the most awkward aspect of an excellent Franz Waxman score) is more likely to provoke smirks than tears. It's not the enduring classic it clearly wants to be, but it's still a much better melodrama than its detractors might claim.
Twilight Time's region-free limited edition Blu-ray release offers an excellent transfer in the film's original widescreen ratio, an isolated score track, original trailer and booklet.
Back in 1994 I interviewed Richard Fleischer, and he briefly spoke about Che!:
"I think probably Che! is the most disappointing picture that I've made. We started out with a very good screenplay and high principals on that story, but while we were shooting it the studio got cold feet about the picture because they were afraid it was too anti-American and they kept insisting that certain anti-American scenes come out.
"That was the whole point of my making the picture, to show, yes, we do a lot of very stupid things and Che was right in a lot of ways. Che was also wrong in a lot of ways and we wanted to show that too. Well, it just ended up that by the time they got through making all their requests to take out the scenes they didn't like it was just an anti-Che movie, and that's not what I started out to make.
"I was gonna quit the picture, but I was under contract to the studio and in all the many years I've made films I've never walked off a picture and I wasn't about to do that for Che! It wasn't worth it. Maybe a bigger principle sometime. But why get into a mess like that and make a lot of enemies when it really didn't matter? Whether I stayed on it or didn't stay on it, somebody'd finish it anyhow."
Yet despite the director's disappointment, Che! is neither the disaster nor the comedy classic of its lamentable reputation. True, it is the film of the T-shirt and often simplistic in its motivation - Omar Sharif's Che Guevara has to literally choose between tending the sick or passing the ammunition in one scene while in another fate lands a Molotov cocktail at his side at a crucial moment - but the film is an attempt at a minor revolution in epic biopic standards with its (staged) vox pop interviews and contrasting perspectives. Like Salvatore Giuliano, the drama is framed by the body of its dead protagonist and like Rossi's film it simplified and occasionally rewrites history. Unlike Steven Soderbergh's two-part epic, it's not obsessed with pseudo documentary trivia but opts more for an overview written in broad strokes - but then, with a running time little over an hour-and-a-half, it has to be. As a result, we are kept at a distance from Che for much of the first half of the film, the Cuban Revolution is rushed and not overly convincing and at times it turns into a typical studio picture shot on unconvincingly lit soundstages and at the Fox ranch backlot familiar from a hundred Westerns. Parts of it just don't work on any level, with the moment a Bolivian general talking to the camera excuses himself to go back into the scene seeming like an outtake from Woody Allen's Bananas. The film is at its best when dealing with the failure of Che's Bolivian adventure as he tries to impose his idea of salvation on a hostile population that neither seems to know or care it's oppressed as his followers and his ideals abandon him.
Sharif was an almost impossible to cast star - Genghis Khan, a Nazi officer (!!!) in Night of the Generals, a Jewish gambler in Funny Girl, a German schoolteacher in The Last Valley, a Spanish Catholic priest in Behold a Pale Horse, a cowboy in McKenna's Gold - but is for once quite well cast here. Palance's Castro certainly isn't the Yosemite Sam cartoon figure contemporary reviewers painted him as either, though there's not much depth in the writing. The characters don't quite seem to know what to make of Che and you get the feeling the filmmakers weren't that sure either. Yet there's just enough leftfield (rather than left wing) ambition in this flawed would-be epic to hold the attention. It would certainly make an interesting double-bill with the equally despised (but, unlike Che!, subsequently partially rehabilitated) Walker.
Never released on DVD in the US, Twilight Time's Region-free Blu-ray release offers a fine 2.35:1 widescreen transfer with decent extras - a vintage behind the scenes short, TV spot and trailer (both showing 20th Century Fox's uncertainty over how to sell the picture or even what kind of picture they had made), a booklet and offers Lalo Schifrin's score on an isolated track.
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