Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray Reviews: "Holiday Affair" (1949) and "The Shop Around the Corner" (1940)

"Holiday Affair" (1949) 

Fresh off starring in two 1948 westerns, the romantic "Rachel and the Stranger," and the noirish "Blood on the Moon," perhaps the last thing that Robert Mitchum wanted to do was make a Christmas romcom. But pushed into starring in "Holiday Affair" opposite Janet Leigh, after RKO head honcho Howard Hughes ordered him to make the picture following his arrest and jail sentence for marijuana possession one year earlier, Mitchum turned in a sly, shaggy dog performance so sexy that had Hughes thought it all the way through, he might've changed his mind about casting him altogether.

Fortunately for Mitchum fans, hindsight is 20/20. And although the film was a box office disaster when it was released – which might have had more to do with the confusingly noir-inspired ad campaign than anything else – "Holiday Affair" has since turned into a classic Christmas staple, thanks to Turner Classic Movies, which regularly airs director Don Hartman's film multiple times every winter. 

In the movie, Mitchum stars as Steve Mason, a veritable Kerouac-like beatnik ahead of his time. Selling toys in an upscale New York City department store to make enough money to pursue his passion for making and restoring boats on the coast, Steve loses his job after he fails to report Janet Leigh's comparison shopper Connie Ennis, a war widow and single mother of the sweetly mischievous young Timmy (Gordon Gebert). Falling for Connie, after Steve makes the grand gesture of buying her son the expensive toy train set he'd had his eye on, he complicates Connie's already slightly strained relationship with her loyal and kind no-sparks beau, Carl (played by Wendell Corey).

With screwball-worthy elements including a hilarious sequence that plays out in court and one of the steamiest holiday screen kisses in this or any year (in a moment that word is Janet Leigh didn't even know was coming), "Holiday Affair" is a winning, admittedly odd, yet adorable romantic comedy. Featuring a Lux Radio Theater production of the tale, which was based upon John D. Weaver's story "Christmas Gift" and adapted by screenwriter Isobel Lennart (who would write for Mitchum once again in both "The Sundowners" and "Two for the Seesaw"), this crisp transfer of the wintry black-and-white film has been newly released on Warner Archive Blu-ray.

"The Shop Around the Corner" (1940)

Though by now the plot device has been used so many times in romantic storytelling that it's spawned an entire subgenre of the trope titled "enemies to lovers" fiction, one of the most endearing early examples of this in screen romantic comedy can be found in director Ernst Lubitsch's bittersweet 1940 holiday classic "The Shop Around the Corner."

Based on the 1937 play "Parfumerie," by Hungarian writer Miklós László, which was adapted by longtime Lubitsch screenwriter Samson Raphaelson (in addition to an uncredited assist by Ben Hecht), the movie led to a number of high profile stage and screen remakes, including Broadway's "She Loves Me," as well as the films "In the Good Old Summertime," and "You've Got Mail" (which was also inspired by the classic enemies to lovers Jane Austen novel, "Pride and Prejudice").

Notable for its decision to leave politics out of the equation but pay tribute to its origins by setting the action in Hungary at a time when America was on the long on-ramp towards the second world war, "The Shop Around the Corner" takes place just before Christmastime in the small Budapest based Matuschek and Company leather goods shop. 

Getting to know a trio of its handful of workers intimately, the film primarily revolves around the store's kind boss in the midst of a personal crisis, Mr. Matuschek (Frank Morgan), as well as his loyal right-hand man Alfred Kralik (James Stewart), and the store's newest employee Klara Novak (Margaret Sullavan). Pitted against one another in real life with their dueling sales practices and taste, the viewer soon discovers that Alfred and Klara are at the same time also falling in love on paper as anonymous correspondents, writing each other romantic love letters which are delivered to numbered post office boxes. 

With its trademark sophisticated Lubitsch wit, which boldly alternates from subtly sexy lines such as "I took you out of your envelope and read you, read you right there” and a startlingly sad subplot concerning Matuschek which takes the film into much darker territory, "The Shop Around the Corner" is that rarest of all holiday movies. Still incredibly modern in the way that it acknowledges both the romantic highs and lonely lows of the season, it's a refreshingly mature, grown-up work that makes today's overly beige, cookie-cutter, assembly line ready made-for-cable movies feel outdated and far too quaintly naive by comparison.

Though "The Shop Around the Corner" is a lovely romance all around, it's still undoubtedly Morgan's Matuschek that most tugs at the heartstrings both from an acting standpoint and when you watch the film in the devastation of 2020. Still, "Shop" generates most of its fire from the winning chemistry of Stewart and Sullavan as we find ourselves siding first with one lead followed by the other from one scene to the next. Enviably written and performed, despite how much I enjoyed both of its famous American remakes, this even-handed approach didn't translate nearly as well in "In the Good Old Summertime" or "You've Got Mail" since we're predominantly only drawn in by the female protagonists' plights throughout.

Beautifully shot by Lubitsch's frequent DP William H. Daniels, who's also well-known for being Greta Garbo's personal cinematographer, the film's lushly snowy black-and-white photography is given a glossy new shine in Warner Archive's new Blu-ray release of the film, which includes two radio broadcasts of "Shop" along with the bonus feature "A New Romance of Celluloid: The Miracle of Sound."

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray Review: Blood on the Moon (1948)

Now Available

A stylized western that — with its shadowy cinematography from Out of the Past lensman Nicholas Musuaraca — has much more in common with Film Noir than the genre best epitomized by other 1948 releases Red River and Fort Apache, director Robert Wise's distaste for the western and determination to infuse his feature with gritty realism helps his unique Blood on the Moon straddle both worlds. A minor effort when compared to River and Apache by Howard Hawks and John Ford respectively, the largely forgotten Blood is given new life in this gorgeously crisp Blu-ray debut from Warner Archive, which arrives alongside another 1948 Robert Mitchum western, Rachel and the Stranger.

No stranger to Film Noir, including two shot by Musuaraca (Out of the Past and The Locket), the masculine complexity of the ego, id, and superego contained in the aura of Mitchum as soon as he enters the frame lends itself incredibly well to the existential side of the genre, which is pushed to the forefront of Moon. As Robert Wise recalls in the Robert Mitchum biography Baby, I Don't Care, this belief was also shared by Blood on the Moon star Walter Brennan, who Wise describes pointing a finger at the smoldering Mitchum on set and saying to friends, "that is the goddamndest realest cowboy I've ever seen."

Caught between two sides in a battle over land and cattle, after drifter turned hired gun Jim Garry (Mitchum) is enlisted to help his old trail driving partner Tate Riling (Robert Preston) in his war with rancher John Lufton (Tom Tully), he realizes he's been tricked into being a villain rather than a hero. Manipulating the ongoing battle between Lufton and local homesteaders, who foolishly believe that Riling is helping them in order to stand up for the underdog rather than just to position himself for power and glory, Blood on the Moon's warnings about the motives of aspiring leaders makes this film timelier than ever with its post-2016 release in an election year.

A house divided by loyalties in the form of Lufton's two daughters whom we discover have each pledged allegiance to a different side, after Mitchum gets involved with Barbara Bel Geddes — whom he first meets and flirts with by gunfire in a bananas sequence that uses a trick-shooting standoff as foreplay — he starts to reevaluate his position.

Adapted from the Luke Short novel Gunman's Chance by former script editor turned prolific Hollywood screenwriter Lillie Hayward, although there's nothing terribly original about the moral quandary laced narrative faced by Mitchum's Jim Garry on the page, Wise leans into the ambiguity heavily and turns this into a black, white, and shadowy tale of good and evil. Augmented by not only some bravura shootouts and stampedes but especially by its well-choreographed fight scenes, which foreshadow Wise's brilliant work directing West Side Story and The Sound of Music, although the former Orson Welles editor had helmed other pictures, you can tell how much the film he described as his "first big feature" meant to him when we watch Mitchum and Preston go ten rounds.

Not wanting "one of those extremely staged-looking fistfights used in all the movies where the stuntmen did this elaborate acrobatic fighting and you saw the real actors only in close-ups," he vowed to deliver a scene "with that awkward brutal look of a real fight," where "when it was done . . . the winner . . . [should] look as exhausted as the loser." Recalling Mitchum's excitement about the brawl, again in Baby, I Don't Care, Wise remarked that his leading man “probably knew more than I did about barroom fights like this one.” And while 1948 is a notorious year in Mitchum's life because incredibly, this film and Rachel and the Stranger did big business at the box office after his arrest and brief jail sentence for marijuana use, the films' success undoubtedly helped land him more roles in the genre he slipped into as naturally as a second skin.

A critical hit which scored well-earned raves from Variety and The New York Times, Blood on the Moon's unusually noirish approach to a western showed once again the amount of range exuded by its director. At the same time, of course, it also paints one fascinating portrait of Mitchum, reminding us that no matter what genre we see him in, he's always the most interesting thing onscreen, waging a battle over right and wrong that seems to flash in his eyes as one of "the goddamndest realest" complicated cinematic protagonists we've ever seen.

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray Review: Rachel and the Stranger (1948)

Now Available

Long before he looked at a woman's changing role in society after the advent of the sexual revolution and the Vietnam war found Jane Fonda's housewife in Coming Home questioning just which of two very different men she should be with, screenwriter Waldo Salt crafted another love triangle film that broke new ground in its no-nonsense depiction of a woman's role in society in the old west.

Adapted from the short story "Rachel" by Howard Fast, 1948's hit Rachel and the Stranger was one of the few westerns to take an honest look at the treatment of women who were bought and sold into indentured servitude.

A rough around the edges western with a sweet, slow burn love story at its center, the film from veteran RKO house director Norman Foster stars William Holden as Big Davey Harvey, a farmer in the market for a new wife and mother for his wild son (Gary Gray) after he loses his beloved bride to fever at age twenty-eight. Purchasing a new bride from the parson (played by Tom Tully), Big Davey is content to treat the "kinda thin but not bad lookin'" twenty-five year old Rachel (Loretta Young) like just a "bondwoman" but the parson tells him it wouldn't be proper for her to live with him unwed so Davey marries her out of Christian duty.

Uninterested in any kind of relationship because as far as he's concerned, he already had and lost the great love of his life, it's only when his friend Jim (Robert Mitchum) arrives, eyes the beautiful new woman, and offers to take her away that Davey gives her a second look and must figure out where he stands before it's too late.

Efficiently directed by Foster, whose background helming everything from Charlie Chan to Mr. Moto movies for RKO serves him well here as the love story moves into exciting western action territory in its final act, this fine character piece is elevated by the charisma of its leads, especially Young who imbues Rachel with an intelligence and mischief sorely needed by the otherwise straightforward plotline.

Given a few tongue-in-cheek lines which, for a majority of the film had been reserved for either Gray or Mitchum, Young has a terrific, still relatable moment when, after Mitchum asks her if she can play the spinet piano and Holden answers for her in the negative, she ignores it and admits she can. Startled by the discovery, Holden asks her why she never told him that before and she says simply, "you never asked," in a line read sure to hit home with women everywhere.

Lighting up in her eyes at Mitchum as he chides her with the inquiry, "is Big Dave the all-devastative and devoted husband he makes himself out to be?" Young's spark of interest lights a fire in the film, which, after struggling to absorb Holden's rudeness to his new wife, gets noticeably lighter whenever Mitchum enters the frame. And although he is a very supporting player in Rachel and the Stranger, his presence helps the work pick up the pace again after it threatened to go a little stagnant, thus ensuring Rachel never loses its way.

Working considerably well with the director, Loretta Young — who some believe started her famous swear jar for blasphemous curses on the set of this one for Holden and Mitchum — reteamed with Norman Foster a few years later on her TV series The Loretta Young Show, where he helmed twenty-nine episodes.

Rushed to theaters by RKO in order to capitalize on the publicity surrounding Robert Mitchum's marijuana drug bust and short jail sentence, much like 1948's other Mitchum starrer Blood on the Moon, Rachel and the Stranger turned a tidy profit for the studio.

A very welcome new take on the old west which dares not to sanitize the fact that women were bought and sold into slavery, although it's turned into a love story in Rachel, you have to give Salt, Fast, RKO, Foster, and Young credit for daring to explore this terrain in the first place. Given a marvelous transfer to Warner Archive Blu-ray, along with the unusually noirish western Blood on the Moon, which suggests that Mitchum was drawn to intriguing projects at the height of his fame, if you're looking for something that expands the western myth beyond riding and roping cowboys to include more of the female gender, this is one Stranger you'll be glad you brought home.

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

DVD Review: El Dorado (1966) -- The Paramount Centennial Collection

New From Paramount Centennial Collection

In the oft-cited famous story of Hawksian lore, when Howard Hawks contacted Robert Mitchum about the possibility of making a movie together and an interested Mitchum took the bait and fished for the plot-- Hawks reeled him in telling the actor that, “There’s no story. You and Duke play two old cowboys.”

However, their perception of the film differed upon its completion with Robert Mitchum confessing that—truth be told-- El Dorado “was all character development,” whereas the traditionally anti-analytical Hawks had second thoughts, revealing in the notes of this Paramount Centennial Collection 2-Disc DVD that in all actuality there ended up being a pretty good plot (courtesy of Leigh Brackett’s crackerjack script) “even though it wanders around.”

For, in the familiar terrain of Hawksian male bonding pictures of “professional courtesy” even for one’s rivals-- along with a strong female character who’s one of the boys and the mentor/protégé relationship of pairing a cynical and wise man (usually Duke Wayne) with a naïve but earnest youngster--you can most definitely-- as he shares, “let a thing wander around.”

And despite the fact that Howard Hawks seemed to master every genre from the gangster picture with Scarface to the screwball comedy with Bringing Up Baby to the film noir with The Big Sleep-- making in fact very few westerns in comparison to the era’s most famous genre director John Ford (with whom he shared John Wayne countless times) -- it's his westerns that have become especially beloved over the years.

While my favorite Howard Hawks western is undoubtedly Red River starring John Wayne in the role he frequently stated made Ford finally realize that he could actually act alongside the irreplaceable Montgomery Clift-- Hawks' biggest hits seem to be the ones that blended together all of the elements from his previous genre pictures like the slapstick of Baby to the professionalism of Only Angels Have Wings to the sultry dames played by Lauren Bacall in movies such as The Big Sleep.

And to this end in 1959, Hawks made his most rousingly entertaining western with Rio Bravo (again starring The Duke and penned by Brackett) which was originally envisioned as a right-wing response picture to their distaste for the Gary Cooper classic High Noon which Hawks and Wayne found downright un-American (for more on this subject, read my essay on the films here).

Containing what can arguably be considered Dean Martin's best on-screen performance as an alcoholic law man driven to drink due to trouble with a woman (a frequent plot device), Rio Bravo found Martin teaming with veteran tough Wayne, the kid “Colorado” (Ricky Nelson), and a disabled Stumpy (Walter Brennan) to take down a ruthless villain.

After a couple of flops and although Hawks vehemently denied the claim, he remade the film for a second of what would eventually be three times (resulting in their final western together, Rio Lobo) via 1966’s El Dorado which began filming in ’65 but was ultimately released in ‘67.

In doing so, he returned to the same Old Tucson location set where he’d filmed Bravo years earlier complete with those smaller buildings that made the tall actors look even larger than life. Additionally he reworked the earlier premise with the help of Brackett who (along with Wayne) had actually wanted to be more faithful to novelist Harry Brown’s darker, Greek-tragedy inspired western book The Stars in their Courses but they ultimately abandoned most of the literary source material in favor of something Hawks considered far more entertaining.

A classically structured western and one that—as the antithesis to the increasingly dark but brilliant works of Ford (like my personal Wayne/Ford favorite The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) that didn’t give Wayne a whole lot to do—Hawks' film used a far more comedic, fast-paced structure that true to form, Hawks would add to on-shoot sitting in his chair and rewriting lines on yellow legal pads during filming.

As cinema scholar, filmmaker, and indeed commentary track contributor Peter Bogdanovich revealed--in one of two commentary tracks included on El Dorado’s most recent Paramount release—Hawks, who didn’t direct actors too much other than telling them to just pick up the pace, never wanted to linger over action and preferred to instead making his violence fast and economical without lingering over it, for example in the way that era’s up-and-comer Sam Peckinpah did in The Wild Bunch.

This is evidenced throughout the rather simple tale of Wayne’s hired gun who—upon realizing that El Dorado’s town sheriff is his old friend J.P. Harrah (Mitchum, basically taking on Dean Martin’s Bravo role)—turns down the offer to work for Ed Asner’s greedy land owner who’s violently strong-arming the local MacDonald family.

After gunplay erupts and time passes, Wayne’s Cole Thornton and his new knife-throwing vengeance-filled sidekick Mississippi (a dynamite James Caan in a better role than Nelson’s in Bravo)-- who can’t shoot a gun to save his or anyone’s life-- ultimately end up joining Harrah. With Mississippi in tow whom he’s fixed with a sawed-off shotgun to try and help even out his new friend’s weakness, Thornton returns out of friendship and loyalty when he discovers that his colleague has not only become a heartbroken “tin star with a…drunk pinned on it” but that Asner’s Bart Jason has recruited one of the best gunman in the area in the form of Christopher George’s Nelse McLeod.

While they weren’t exactly attempting to reinvent the wheel and upon its delayed release the very traditional studio picture became a surprise box office hit in the wake of a studio and Hollywood filmmaking atmosphere that had definitely begun to change to the era of ‘70s auteurs like Bogdanovich, Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma and others—it still holds up as an enormously entertaining work to this day.

Intriguingly, although he’d be crucified for it now, Hawks’ defiance of logic and geography was bold as brass throughout. In El Dorado, for the sake of a better shot, Mitchum switched which side he uses a crutch on throughout which resulted in hilarious problems in continuity that prompted a great line by former continuity expert Wayne in the final cut and likewise, he abandoned reason in having the men double back around town in a chase sequence that doesn’t really make a whole lot of geographical sense. However, in this case it's all completely forgiven.

This is owed as much to the overall excitement of the film and our reverence of all involved spouting spirited quips and undergoing some pretty great pratfalls (especially via a few humdingers by Mitchum that display his little-known comic side) as it is to the fact that Hawks was definitely right in his assertion that it’s always okay to let characters wander around. And this is especially easy to "fake" when a majority of the picture occurs at night to hide the gaffes and ratchet up the tension.

Filled with impressively lit night shots that resulted into a critical disagreement when Roger Ebert playfully suggested that Ms. Pauline Kael needed to have “her glasses scrubbed” when she penned an exaggerated complaint to the contrary, there’s a tremendous standout in the picture that finds the men slowly meandering through the streets, guns out and ready to take down a killer. However, as Bogdanovich noted it is filled with reaction shots that are more about Wayne and Mitchum’s relationship and less about getting the bad guy in the end.

In a terrific sequence that—like Dean’s in Bravo—finds Mitchum having to prove his mettle by no longer further embarrassing himself in a bar shootout—Hawks simply lets the men wander for what must have been more than a dozen minutes. In doing so, they stalk all around town, church bells are used to curious effect and despite the large absence of fast-paced jokes, they still manage to work in a great line and gag when Caan’s Mississippi “hits” a bad guy not with the gun but by shooting a sign that hits him instead.

The result is pure Hawksian western poetry (that also includes its Edgar Allan Poe namesake in the poem quoted by Caan) with its depiction of a group of male outsiders coming together to try and set things right. Additionally, much to Brackett’s credit in improving upon the role that Angie Dickinson played in Bravo, she offers not one but two superbly written characters for actresses Charlene Holt and Michele Carey, ensuring that although you’ll never mistake the look and feel of a Hawks western for the mid to late 1960s filmmaking going on elsewhere, at least on some levels (despite one horrible Asian caricature scene) the film tried to change with the time.

And in fact, the lovely Michele Carey (one in a long line of Hawks’ favored memorably voiced brunettes) actually gets the chance to legitimately become a part of the gang by the end in a great shootout that likewise includes a nice twist on Hawks’ and Duke’s thematic and conversational emphasis of “professional courtesy” in a final showdown.

El Dorado was released as part of Paramount’s ongoing 2-Disc Centennial Collection titles in tandem with their other Duke offering—John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And while the widescreen print looks gorgeous and sounds dynamic (watching as I did in its original Mono as opposed to an enhanced Dolby Digital), in addition to the commentaries and a beautiful full-color booklet of facts and photos, the second disc features a seven-part documentary on the film along with galleries, the vintage trailer and featurette on the American west artwork included as well as a remembrance of John “Duke” Wayne.