Fox Cinema Archives DVD Review: Kentucky (1938)

Now Available to Own   

He may have been typecast and he was definitely too young for most of the roles he was offered but when it came right down to it, nobody played an old man better than Walter Brennan.

A character actor before there ever was such a term, although he played old men nearly his entire career, there was never anything caricature-based or disingenuous about Brennan's portrayals (whether he was cantankerous, charming or a curmudgeon) and he never played the exact same man twice.

In 1938, Brennan was only 44 years old when he portrayed a character roughly double his age in a performance that would garner him an Academy Award and help inspire the Walter Brennan "type" he was sought to inhabit again and again.

Yet Brennan’s ferociously lively and powerful turn in Kentucky is so good that even though he was a mere supporting player, his presence loomed large over not only the main romantic star-crossed lovers plotline at its core but Brennan also dominated scenes in which he didn’t even appear.

The best of his early state-name horse pictures including Home in Indiana and Maryland, White Fang and Calamity Jane filmmaker David Butler’s winning drama has been brought back to digital life thanks to a lush DVD transfer as part of Fox Cinema Archives’ latest wave of manufactured-on-demand classic films.

Released this past spring, Fox’s debut of Kentucky (which was based on John Taintor Foote’s story The Look of Eagles) as part of the Archive series was well-timed to coincide not only with the recent Oscars telecast but also the Kentucky Derby.

It's a compelling work that grabs you from its remarkable period prologue. The film revolves around a Romeo and Juliet or – to use a more American reference – Hatfield and McCoy style feud between two Kentucky families that began when being on opposite sides of the Civil War resulted in Goodwin blood being spilled by a member of the Dillon family.

Seventy-five years after he saw his father gunned down during a disagreement over letting Union soldiers take their champion thoroughbred horses, Brennan’s Peter Goodwin has vowed never to have anything to do with the Dillons.

But when the youngest member of the Dillon tree (played by Richard Greene) falls for Loretta Young’s beautiful Goodwin lass from afar, he vows to put aside the bad blood between them in order to follow his heart.

Yet when history repeats itself in the form of more deadly betrayal, gossip and lies, the feud is forced back onto the front burner as the Kentucky Derby draws nearer, predictably pitting the two families against each other.

Admittedly, it’s hard to watch the cringe-inducing, degrading way that African-American actors are used in the movie as essentially cartoonish buffoons. However, if you’re able to look past it and keep the film’s time period in mind (given our contemporary era of political correctness, which was sadly, regrettably nonexistent in 1938), then you’ll appreciate the rest of the picture as a richly made, thoroughly engrossing piece of pre-WWII entertainment.

A beautifully lensed Technicolor horse epic from cinematographers Ernest Palmer and Ray Rennahan, this Daryl F. Zanuck production may show its age with regard to the aforementioned racial insensitivities and a few clunky edits that don’t flow smoothly by waiting a long while to follow up on gaps in logic.

Nonetheless, it’s buoyed by its convincing cast and the timeless tale of lovers whose romance thrives despite which side of the horsetrack they’re from.

Likewise, Kentucky’s strongest asset is in the always timeless Walter Brennan who, despite mastering the art of defying time on and offscreen always made us think of his age as an afterthought when contrasted with the larger-than-life personalities of the characters he embodied throughout his enviable career... starting with his Oscar wining turn as a Kentucky horseman.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Fox Cinema Archives DVD Review: Forever Amber (1947)

Now Available to Own   

Like the hand-painted pages in an old-fashioned storybook, Forever Amber is a lush Technicolor adaptation of Kathleen Winsor’s eponymous, scandalously sexual 972 paged epic.

Obviously inspired by Scarlett O’Hara, Amber concerns a willful social climber in 17th century England who escapes what she perceives will be a dull life as a farm wife for the first of many affairs and men until she reaches a higher status and title as part of the royal entourage.

Given the sudsy potential of Winsor’s rabid bestseller that in all actuality boasts too much plot to easily capture in a little over two hours, Twentieth Century Fox wasted no time in snapping up the rights of what they hoped would be the next Gone With the Wind.

Replacing not only its original lead (with a sensational Linda Darnell filling in for young inexperienced newcomer Peggy Cummins) but the film’s director as well, Fox pulled out all the stops to ensure that their adaptation of the book that had been banned by the Catholic Church and condemned by the Hay’s Code would be worthy of the public’s adoration.

Giving the work a whopping estimated budget of six million dollars, studio bosses kept a close eye on production. Needing to substitute Leave Her to Heaven helmer John M. Stahl (after thirty-nine days and three hundred thousand dollars worth of funds had been spent), they chose Otto Preminger, who not only had a history with Fox but with each successive film had begun branching out to different genres.

Following his work on early screwball comedies (like Danger – Love at Work) to Broadway adaptations (Margin for Error) and Film Noir (Laura), Preminger proved adept at period productions, tackling A Royal Scandal and Centennial Summer for Fox.

He banded together with an impressive group of behind-the-scenes collaborators including the man who’d lensed Stahl’s gorgeous Leave Her to Heaven and would go on to film South Pacific, The King and I, and Cleopatra in the form of Leon Shamroy. And together, Preminger and Shamroy made a staggeringly ambitious, sophisticated sudsy epic that painted Amber in Scarlett O’Hara light, complete with a heartbreaking final shot.

Reuniting with composer David Raskin who’d scored Laura with what is now considered a definitive Noir genre soundtrack, Preminger and Shamroy’s frames inspired Raskin to new heights as his lively, romantic Amber score garnered the musical virtuoso an Oscar nomination.

An easily compelling period work — while admittedly daring in its frank depiction of a morally loose woman — Amber also managed to make us empathize and identify with the self-sufficient and at times coldly ambitious (anti)heroine against the odds.

Given Amber’s multifaceted characterizations that are much more fascinating when viewed through the lens of a different time period, credit is due to its three talented screenwriters who’ve managed to address certain double standards about gender in a surprisingly daring work for its 1947 release date (not to mention its 17th century setting).

Hardly an era of women’s lib, nonetheless Amber’s struggle to reconcile her own needs and wants with her role as a single mother — while the father of her son lives a carefree life free from responsibilities — is touched upon in intriguing ways throughout the film.

While we can’t abide her more manipulative side, all in all, Amber is damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t while trying to find her way in a time period where women are defined by their associations with men.

Released during the height of the post-Casablanca/post-WWII women’s weepie subgenre, the film helped foreshadow the popular theme of ‘50s melodramas in which sometimes people don’t live happily ever after. Likewise arguing that there are different societal roles and expectations for each gender, Amber’s rich subtext makes Preminger’s long out-of-print, engrossing epic such a tantalizing find today.

A conflicted, complicated movie with its fair share of conflicted, complicated three dimensional characters, Forever Amber has been given a beautiful high gloss polish to the old Technicolor negatives for this Fox Cinema Archives release.

The latest entry in the studio’s collection of manufactured on demand Preminger titles (following the recent slate of his earliest directorial efforts released at the start of the year), Forever Amber will also be forever remembered for helping give birth to the popularity of its heroine’s name in post-WWII newborns of the baby-boomer generation.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.