DVD Reviews: Icons of Screwball Comedy: Volume 1 & Volume 2 (2009)

Now Available to Own

Film Information

(Each Volume Contains 4 Films on 2 Discs)

Volume 1: If You Could Only Cook (1935); Too Many Husbands (1940); My Sister Eileen (1942); She Wouldn't Say Yes (1945)

Volume 2: Theodora Goes Wild (1936); Together Again (1944); The Doctor Takes a Wife (1940); A Night to Remember (1943)

Just like Monty Python, The Three Stooges, Cirque du Soleil, the game of golf and cats, screwball comedy isn't for everyone. You have to be the type of individual who's first and foremost unafraid of black and white movies which sadly has become a rare thing indeed as I was shocked to engage in a recent conversation with my grandmother wherein she confessed that-- having recently made the switch to HD television and DVD-- she no longer has any desire to watch black and white movies.

So last week, while my eighty-something grandparents were watching Liam Neeson fly to Paris to hunt down the sex-traffickers who abducted his daughter in the brilliant action movie Taken in crystal clear HD, I snuggled up to some vintage Columbia black and white classics from the '30s and '40s. And in so doing, I reveled in the romantic misadventures of fast-talking dames, the helpless fellas who struggled to keep up, and the wackiest plots that Hollywood screenwriters could crank out during that one, unforgettable golden age.

The works are often based on theatrical or literary source material-- whether adapted from a stage play, short story or novel but they are given that uniquely identifiable screwball spin. The films largely consist of the following: rapid-fire dialogue, mixed messages, only-in-the-movies coincidences, improbable set-ups, characters who fail to be talking about the same thing at the same time and they can't be persuaded otherwise, and enough eccentric supporting characters to fill a psychoanalyst's couch for a full year. And when writers put all of these ingredients together, audiences were in for some of the wittiest comedies produced in the romantic comedy genre.

Finally giving women roles that were on par with the male leads-- Columbia Pictures (now under the arm of Sony) was at the forefront of the trend. And beginning in the '30s, they released movies that still hold up today such as Frank Capra's incomparable It Happened One Night, which is the Best Picture winner that arguably started the screwball craze.

While the screwball effect still shows up every so often today (rent the indie charmer Ira & Abby for example), it flourished during the era of the Great Depression and World War II when audiences needed to see something completely different than their daily lives.

Offering viewers escapist works that ridiculed the elite upper classes in movies like My Man Godfrey, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby or letting the screwball format meander into mysteries in The Thin Man series-- one of its most celebrated achievements was for the ingeniously freewheeling Howard Hawks picture His Girl Friday.

As women began to join the workforce, Hawks' brisk newspaper comedy broke new ground by casting Rosalind Russell opposite Cary Grant in a part that had been played by a man that is likewise famous for shooting two pages from the script in one minute which is double the norm and explains why there's so much natural overlap and fast-paced speech in the movie.

While all of the aforementioned films have always been easily accessible, many have been remastered, become available on Blu-ray and given the deluxe treatment in the form of study regarding their content and history-- so many wonderful movies have been lost in the archives during the prolific studio years.

Although Warner Brothers has begun opening up their archives recently as well for low-priced downloads and releases along with premiering some gorgeous box sets earlier in the year for stars like Natalie Wood, Sidney Poitier, Doris Day, etc., Sony Pictures Home Entertainment-- which unveiled one of the finest collections of 2009 with their Jack Lemmon box set of films that had never been offered to fans in any format before-- is back with two volumes of forgotten screwball classics.

Boasting four films in each two-disc set, the titles feature such legendary Oscar winners and nominees that are synonymous with the genre and era including Rosalind Russell and Irene Dunne-- both of whom are starring in films that garnered them nominations. Along with these two, the films also star Jean Arthur, Fred MacMurray, Melvyn Douglas, Loretta Young, Charles Coburn and countless others in eight titles that are lovingly included along with classic shorts and original theatrical trailers.

And although they compliment each other nicely, conveniently Sony took great care to ensure that fans of certain entertainers woul be able to choose one volume over the other if they so decided as the first volume opens with a Jean Arthur double feature a la If You Could Only Cook and Too Many Husbands on disc one before Rosalind Russell keeps the laughs coming on the second disc with My Sister Eileen (for which Russell received an Oscar nomination in a role she would later play again in Broadway musical form) and She Wouldn't Say Yes.

Likewise, the second volume's first double feature centers on the irreplaceable Irene Dunne in her first breakthrough starring role via Theodora Goes Wild (which garnered her an Academy Award nomination) and Together Again before the likable Loretta Young concludes the set with The Doctor Takes a Wife and A Night to Remember.

While as a writer, I was especially enchanted with the three of the four works about writers-- including Eileen, Theodora, and Doctor-- it was Eileen that was the strongest of them all and it's no surprise that it initially originated first as a New Yorker piece before becoming a play, then the film, later a stage musical renamed Wonderful Town, until more remakes ensued.

The film centers on two Ohio sisters played by Rosalind Russell and Janet Blair who leave their community in disgrace after newspaper scribe Russell writes a rave review of her sister's theatrical debut before the show goes on only for the daughter of her boss to be put under the spotlight. When they decide to head to New York for success in print and on the stage, they discover the wild side of Greenwich Village life when they get suckered into renting a basement room that's busier than Grand Central Station. To this end, a bizarre cast of neighborhood characters and admirers of Eileen parade throughout, undaunted by the eighteen hour a day surprise explosions of a local construction crew building a subway nearby.

While most writers would be scrambling for any quiet location they could find, the chaos and the community become her muse in a film that-- at its heart-- recalled Capra's You Can't Take it With You, Cukor's Holiday, and the type of lineup you'd find in a movie by Ernst Lubitsch or Preston Sturges.

While the second half of the Rosalind Russell double-feature is also very entertaining-- yet not in the league of Eileen-- She Wouldn't Say Yes is similar in the same sense that it goes on for one act too many as it begins with a very relatable and intriguing opposites attract storyline and then pushes it a bit too far into a strange wedding plot that feels a bit tacked on.

Still, until then, it's good fun to see Russell as a no-nonsense professional psychiatrist who, having worked with soldiers suffering from stress and shell-shock upon their return from war, meets her match when she encounters a GI cartoonist (played by Lee Bowman) who encourages people to follow their Freudian id and act on their impulses.

As his impulse is to prove her wrong and to marry her before his work takes him overseas for military service, he schemes along with Russell's father in this light but mostly enjoyable comedy that reunited the actress with her Eileen director Alexander Hall. While the ending of Yes feels like it was the result of too many rewrites and makes Russell's double-feature uneven-- frequent Frank Capra leading lady Jean Arthur's opening duo of films are wholeheartedly entertaining works and true gems.

Indicative of My Man Godfrey and My Favorite Wife respectively, Arthur initially meets cute with a man whom she assumes is equally down on his luck and unemployed in If You Can Only Cook when a stranger (Herbert Marshall) sits down next to her on a park bench. Not realizing that he's actually the head of an automobile company who's designed cars she truly admires, Arthur unknowingly peruses the want-ads with him and suggests that he join her and pose as her husband so they can get hired as a cook and butler respectively.

Drawn by her ingenuity and that Arthur twinkle in her eye and adorable voice, he decides to help the young woman out and they gain employment working for a mobster at his mansion. But when they learn they're supposed to share a room and he has yet to confess not just his identity but the fact that he's engaged and he soon starts to develop feelings for Arthur, things get hilariously complicated.

In Too Many Husbands, it's Arthur's turn to find herself torn between romantic prospects when she realizes that the husband she'd assumed was deceased (Fred MacMurray) returns unexpectedly only to realize that his arrival has made Arthur a bigamist since she'd married his best friend (Melvyn Douglas) while he'd been away. While first tempers flare, when Arthur informs them that anger is never the right way to win a woman's heart, the games of wooing begin in this delightful charmer based on the play by W. Somerset Maugham.

With the first volume being so successful and witty, the bar had been raised very high by the time I began the second set released last week from Sony Pictures but I felt quite optimistic that our initial leading lady was Irene Dunne who had starred in one of my favorites of the era opposite Cary Grant in The Awful Truth (among others).

In the second "writer movie" contained in the volumes, we witness Dunne in her first legitimate star vehicle Theodora Goes Wild as a buttoned up, church going virginal small town girl who writes salacious bestsellers under a pseudonym to avoid scandalizing her family and friends.

Challenged about her prudish nature by the seductive artist (Melvyn Douglas), Dunne plays right along by trying to act like one of her heroines until eventually she runs out of his bachelor pad and is shocked when he follows her to her small town. However, instead of unmasking her in front of others, Dunne realizes that perhaps who she really is may be a cross between the woman on the pages and the spinster she pretends she is in her small town. Yet cleverly, the film delivers numerous twists that avoid us from guessing exactly where it's headed when we're startled to learn the truth about Douglas as well.

Released in 1936 and censored due to some of the suggestive situations and ideas the film puts forth about matrimony and male and female roles which make its Oscar nomination for Best Editing especially ironic-- refreshingly, this release from Columbia has been both restored and uncut for its DVD debut in the set.

However, I was less thrilled with the next Dunne selection of Together Again. Yet, perhaps it is most notable for marking the occasion of the first comedic collaboration of popular onscreeen couple Dunne and Charles Boyer after Love Affair (later remade as An Affair to Remember) and When Tomorrow Comes-- Theodora finds a great companion movie with the Loretta Young vehicle The Doctor Takes a Wife.

Much like the Doris Day and Rock Hudson movies, you can go ahead and cite this film as perhaps having been an inspiration on the clever and underrated Down With Love as it finds Young's nonfiction scribe famous for penning a work called "Spinsters Aren't Spinach." After Young forces her way into getting a ride home with neuropsychiatrist Ray Milland from Massachusetts to New York City and a child mistakenly attaches a "Just Married" sign onto their vehicle, suddenly the spokeswoman for single women who enjoy living alone is called a hypocrite.

So in order to spin this to her favor, save her book career and no doubt get another book out of the situation by writing a sequel about marriage, Young's publisher persuades both Young and Milland to go along with the ruse since it enhances his career as well when he's granted a professorship and can finally wed the real woman of his dreams.

Agreeing to keep up the pretense that they're married until they can feign a divorce when Young's sequel to "Spinsters" hits the shelves and climbs the bestseller charts-- predictably things get complicated when more people are let in on the situation, other feelings are hurt and Milland and Young realize that maybe this fake marriage is better than most real relationships they'd had before.

Setting the second Young film in Greenwich Village which was also the same neighborhood utilized for the pre-Beatnik era My Sister Eileen, we're offered A Night to Remember. A lackluster thriller comedy, this marks the fourth and final writer movie where this time where Young's husband played by Brian Aherne is the scribe.

Not nearly as successful as the movies about the witty female writers even when Young tries to persuade her husband to write a love story-- the movie moves uneasily between comedy and thriller which wouldn't be put together with quite the right ingredients until Cary Grant was cast alongside some sweet but deadly old ladies in Arsenic and Old Lace just one year later.

While despite the fact that the first volume comes wholeheartedly recommended, the outcome of its follow-up can be divided in half with simply Theodora Goes Wild and The Doctor Takes a Wife-- which thematically and structurally would've worked as a marvelous double feature-- being the only ones worth a repeat play.

However, similar to the Paramount Centennial Collection which as a film geek I've been ritually hanging onto for the quality and fact that some of these movie are just so rare, I can definitely understand the importance for devotees of the genre to get both. Although, if you're new to screwball or if your budget is tight, you may want to simply go with the first set for now and catch the aforementioned titles on TCM or via Netflix in the future.


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Blu-ray Review: Being There (1979)

Now Available

"Again and again throughout [Hal] Ashby’s films, his characters are confronted by authority figures and pressured to conform to societal norms, but they only gain a measure of humanity when they assert themselves and endeavor to experience life and to live it on their own terms.”
-- James A. Davidson; Images Journal:
"The Director that Time Forgot: Hal Ashby"

(Photo From Images Journal)

In the endless sea of film criticism, little ink has been spilled on editor turned director, Hal Ashby. When he is mentioned, journalists often attribute his success to his iconic collaborators (several of the actors in his films were nominated for Academy Awards) and most of the slanted coverage given surrounds his downfall to drug-induced paranoia.

Originally from Ogden, Utah, Hal Ashby was the youngest child born in 1929 to a Mormon family. His parents divorced when he was just six years old – forever-tainting young Hal’s view of marital relationships. After his father lost the family dairy farm in 1941, he committed suicide and Ashby found the body himself when he was twelve years old. This unfathomable event colored his filmmaking greatly as suicide and tragedy abound throughout his works, most notably in Harold and Maude, which when viewed with this in mind seems like Ashby’s cathartic and most personal work although the screenplay was written by Colin Higgins.

Before embarking on his Hollywood career, Ashby proved to be far worldlier than others his age, having been married and divorced twice before he turned twenty-one. He hitchhiked to L.A. at seventeen and worked at least fifty to sixty jobs before he walked into the California Board of Unemployment and asked for a position in a film studio in 1950.

He mimeographed scripts at Universal and eventually became a widely respected film editor, winning a richly deserved Oscar for his work with friend/mentor/collaborator Norman Jewison for editing In The Heat of the Night. Ashby has often stated that film editing provided him with the best film school background outside of traditional university study and he carried the techniques learned as an editor with him when he began directing.

While it was his skill as an editor that helped kick-start his career, becoming a director at the age of forty when an overworked Norman Jewison handed him the assignment to helm The Landlord, it's one that has helped make his direction nearly invisible as his work is so seamless – from Harold and Maude to Shampoo and Coming Home and ultimately up through his final work of the '70s, Being There, releasing onto Warner Brothers Blu-ray disc in honor of its thirtieth anniversary – that we just take it for granted.

The film boasts Peter Sellers in a role that Davidson noted was "Ashby's most fully-realized 'innocent' protagonist." And while on the surface it seems as though it's an archetypal Ashby free spirit, ultimately at the oft-debated end of Being There, it's left for viewers to decide whether or not Sellers' character – Chance the Gardener – may in fact be a higher being, brought in by the Gods to comment not on the '60s like Shampoo or Coming Home but on events as they were happening in the late '70s.

The film, you see, takes place as conservative sentiment began to creep into the pre-Reagan era foreshadowing the 1980s, that would find bearded, wandering Ashby not only “out” but ultimately dead, a literal testament that the idealistic era of the '60s and '70s was over for good.

In Being There, based on the 1971 novel by Jerzy Kosinski, who adapted his own work along with co-writer Robert C. Jones, Peter Sellers plays Chance the Gardener, a simple minded Forrest Gump meets To Kill a Mockingbird's Boo Radley-like character, who spends his days gardening for a rich man and every other moment is spent in front of the television.

When the master dies at the start of the film, Chance must leave the sole home he’s ever known – the only life lessons he packs with them were learned from the “idiot box,” and the music from Kubrick’s 2001 plays during his odyssey into the streets of Washington D.C. His journey eventually leads him to becoming involved in business matters, economic policy and politics in what Darren Hughes calls, “a satiric jab at the co-opting of the nation’s public discourse by television’s empty images and content-free rhetoric,” as Chance imitates the images that surround him, soaking it all up like a newborn child.

Some mistake his deadpan seriousness and naiveté for a sense of humor and others (mostly women) find him intense and seductive— disarming them with his genuine honest nature in a world comprised of double-talking politicians and others who conceal their real political motives. The president, I may add is impotent throughout the film, just like the only other major male character – an invalid with a sexually unsatisfied wife played by Shirley MacClaine — possibly serving as a symbol for the uselessness of figureheads and that the true power is hidden.

Although Chance never learned to read or write, he succeeds in this new gimmicky U.S. where sound bites thrive and ultimately appears on television (now dubbed Chauncey Gardiner) after his gardening comments are mistaken as political gems by the president of the U.S. Chance, who – like newspapers and television news – talks to audiences at a third grade level, is suddenly viewed as sexy not only by MacClaine, (ironically named Eve), but also by others including an attractive homosexual at a party who mistakes Chauncey’s earnest “I like to watch,” as an invitation to view him with another man.

Later, Chauncey is the subject of an investigation by no less than sixteen other countries until, after endless searching for a nonexistent past or any records indicating just who he may be, his character is mentioned by several characters near the end of the film as a likely candidate for the next presidential election.

Finally, as the film ends and Chauncey walks on water, the following quote from a deceased character is read – “life is a state of mind"– leaving viewers scratching their heads over whether or not Chance was merely a simpleton or a mystic/Christ-like figure sent to ease others approaching death (the film is book-ended by death, making one wonder if he is an angel).

The idea that life is a state of mind is fascinating when viewing the work of Ashby — a man with allegedly, as critics frequently state – no style. Upon closer inspection, one notices not only a signature style and recurring themes brought forth in his films, but also a greater understanding of the man behind the films, whose state of mind is echoed in the hearts and dialogues of the free-spirited wanderers who populate his films. Some, like George Roundy in Shampoo delude themselves, others like Harold in Harold and Maude finally find a way of accepting mortality in a cathartic celebration of life, until in Being There one actually walks on water.

Chance the Gardener was a man whose luck brought him wandering into all the right places at the right times, like Ashby whose life had taken numerous directions before he’d even turned twenty-one. Although, sadly, some consider him to be a casualty of the times as his dependency on drugs led to wildly erratic behavior that caused the studios to seize film away from him in the '80s as money entered studios minds more and more – yet, one cannot let this diminish the importance of his career.

He was a man of the times—possibly, like Chance, a mystic wanderer and as Hughes points out, “Being There is a strangely fitting conclusion to Ashby’s enviable run during the 1970s,” as his “politically motivated irreverence and his simple faith in humanity’s potential for radical change were suddenly an anachronism.” The tragedy may have indeed been with Ashby who began on a downhill spiral that ended with his excruciating last few years and death from liver cancer, but when viewed in retrospect with all honesty, the great tragedy was that as – to misquote Bob Dylan – "The times they [were] a-changin’."

Suddenly, a man whose characters made up their own life mottos as their lives were a state of mind went out of fashion and Reagan’s new-economy was in. Sadly, Ashby was the '70s and the '70s ended, for better or worse, and the new decade began. He perished before the dawn of the independent film boom and before a young man named Sean Penn, who stole an Ashby sign (violating Penn’s parole as was noted on the DVD of Coming Home) to bring to his memorial at the Director’s Guild of America, dedicated his first directorial effort to two men that defined the '60s and '70s: John Cassavetes and Hal Ashby. Ashby, through those of us whom he’d inspired, continues to live on and therefore so do the sentiments of the 1970’s.

Although to fans of Being There, the film is mostly synonymous with Peter Sellers who was so committed to the role that as revealed in the Warner Brothers press release, after Kosinski's novel was published, the author received a telegram from its lead character which read, "Available in my garden or outside of it." When a curious Kosinski called the number that accompanied the message, Peter Sellers himself answered the call and spent nine years committed to getting the film into production, which was greatly challenged until the success of his Pink Panther work solidified a deal with Lorimar.

Modeling the voice of Chance "after his idol Stan Laurel," Sellers, who once told Roger Ebert as quoted in his Great Movies series that he had "absolutely no personality at all. I am a chameleon. When I am not playing a role, I am nobody," was so deeply invested in the role that as a young Illeana Douglas reports on the Blu-ray, watching him in a scene was almost embarrassingly private as he nearly went into another dimension.

Douglas, the granddaughter of the film's Oscar winner Melvyn Douglas who was actually bequeathed his Oscar after his death, shares great insights and recollections in a wonderful intimate featurette on the Blu-ray – Memories From Being There – wherein she revealed the close relationship that her grandfather had with Sellers as incidentally they'd been stationed in Burma together when both were in the military (with Douglas in the American side and Sellers, the British one respectively) and she also elaborates on Sellers' complete concentration in his work.

Noting that he'd once said that the only enjoyment he ever had in life was when he was on the floor working or being in a scene – it seems like it was a natural fit for his best and penultimate work to star in a film where the final result or meaning is ultimately left up to the viewer – whether they want to assume it's indeed Christian or overtly religious is one interpretation or rather the way both Douglas and I ultimately believe, it simply celebrates the idea of being in the moment.

As the film ends with the idea that "life is a state of mind," it seems entirely practical that as such we can imagine walking on water and while there are those like Ebert who intriguingly share interesting and astute observations that the film could be a caution that perhaps we're all a bit like Chance the Gardener as passive participants in life, there's plenty of food for thought.

And ultimately, in my eyes and despite the film's slightly sluggish final hour involving a few scenes that should've been trimmed or abandoned altogether, I feel that it provides the precise and perfect final note for the careers of Ashby (who suffered terribly in the '80s) and Sellers, who died shortly thereafter and was amazingly denied an Oscar, which he blames on the inclusion of "outtakes" at the end that "broke the spell" of the film.

The film, which is captured in a rich high definition transfer from Warner Brothers also unearths two recently discovered scenes including the original alternate ending, a longer gag reel and the original trailer that fills widescreen television with Caleb Deschanel's gorgeous cinematography.

And in the end Being There seems to celebrate (at least in my eyes) the individual journeys we all take, choices and relationships we make, in going about our daily lives and the idea that not only is it okay to "like to watch" but it's equally important to process what we've seen as well and walk away from it with humanistic understanding on a deeper level, whatever that may be in our own states of mind.