As Peter O'Toole tells it on his commentary for Peter Glenville's 1964 film Becket, French playwright Jean Anouilh hadn't really set out to tell the tale of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury in the 12th century under Henry II. Anouilh wanted to capture a personality clash within a theatre troupe he worked with, but couldn't find a way to frame the conflict on stage until he visited Canterbury. "He read about five sentences [concerning Becket's clash with Henry] giving a brief outline of what happened, and said" - O'Toole snaps his fingers - "I've got the plot. And that's all the research he did. Hence, many, many factual errors."
For instance, Henry II (O'Toole) was indeed the great-grandson of William the Conqueror, whose Norman army defeated the Saxons at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. And Henry did see Becket (Richard Burton) as a means of controlling both church and state, and, being thwarted when Becket placed God ahead of Henry, uttered the rash words that unwittingly sealed Becket's fate: "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" But Becket was a Norman, not a Saxon as Anouilh styled him; Anouilh said he made the mistake because he used a discredited source.
The banter is plentiful - as it would be in 1968's The Lion in Winter, with O'Toole playing an older Henry II. Becket at one point tells Henry he has imported a new invention from Florence: the fork. "It's for pronging meat and carrying it to the mouth. It saves you dirtying your fingers." "But then you dirty the fork." "Yes, but it's washable." "So are your fingers. I don't see the point."
O'Toole's commentary is a mine of anecdotes interspersed with exasperated opinions on actors "who pretend, or say, they're getting into character. When you then start doing it, they begin to speak in a voice which is much quieter and less articulate than they would if they were talking to you in the pub. I don't understand. There's a difference between reflecting human conduct and being alive." Other extras include revealing interviews with Burton from 1967 and 1977 ("I can't bear to be touched, physically touched, on the stage or on the screen"), though perversely neither interview mentions Becket.
A terrorist attack on the World Trade Center inspires a movie that imagines a series of Islam fundamentalist bombings in New York and a military response that rides roughshod over constitutional rights. No, not 9/11; the attack was the bombing of the centre in 1993, and The Siege was released in 1998, with Denzel Washington as an FBI special agent trying to catch the perpetrators and Bruce Willis as the U.S. Army general whom Washington's character berates near the finale ("What if what they really want is [for us]to bend the law, shred the Constitution just a little bit?"). In his commentary on The Siege: Martial Law Edition, director Edward Zwick plays spot-the-prescience and makes an inevitable observation: "To look at it now is to look at a very different movie than the one I made, not because the movie has changed but because the world has."
The year 1988 saw a bizarre rush of films about adults becoming children and vice versa - in fact, one was called Vice-Versa, joined by 18 Again! and Like Father, Like Son - but the only one that mattered was the magnificent Big, the comedy-drama that made Tom Hanks a bankable star as a 12-year-old who makes a wish and becomes a gawky thirtysomething. Big: Extended Edition, which offers the option of reinstating 20 minutes of interesting but unessential deleted scenes, has an unusual extra: a feature-length track of archival audiotapes made by screenwriters Gary Ross and Anne Spielberg (Steven's sister) in the course of their original working sessions to devise the plot, leavened with their present-day reflections. Among the actors offered the lead role when Hanks proved temporarily unavailable: Robert De Niro, whom co-star Elizabeth Perkins read with. "It kind of took on a Mean Streets quality," she recalls.
Also out: Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro's brutal, transcendent film of a young girl's fantasy defences against the harsh reality of 1944 fascist Spain, in a two-disc edition replete with extras, including the director's thoughtful commentary; Seraphim Falls, with Liam Neeson tracking Pierce Brosnan after the U.S. Civil War; and French director Jean-Pierre Melville's much-applauded 1969 movie set during the wartime French resistance, Army of Shadows, long unseen in North America and now on a Criterion DVD.
Extra! Extra!
Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain is a love story, a tale of a woman (Rachel Weisz) who has come to terms with her terminal illness and her husband (Hugh Jackman), a neuroscientist who is obsessed with finding a cure. But it's also an experimental film, filtering the story through tales of 16th-century Spain, the New World, a distant star and the hunt for the tree of life, elements in a book the woman has left unfinished. In the bonus features, which provide a bit of comic relief after a relentlessly serious and moody film, Aronofsky shoots a scene of Jackman in a swirling cape and remarks, "Who said I wasn't going to shoot Batman?" The movie was slated to be shot with Brad Pitt, at twice the budget, in Australia in 2002; it fell through when Pitt pulled out. The cast and crew regrouped in snowy Montreal to shoot a scaled-back version in 2004. Those with the patience for the elliptical story will find the visuals impressive and the music (by Clint Mansell) sublime.
Classics for kids
The DVD package carries the line "may not be suitable for children," which is a way of saying that a few of the 24 cartoons in Tex Avery's Droopy: The Complete Theatrical Collection reflect their period, the 1940s and 50s, in attitudes toward women and ethnic groups. Members of a Dixieland flea band crawl into cigarettes and smoke. In the western parodies, there is drinking and gunfire. But to deprive children of some of the zaniest, most inventive cartoons ever made would be a sin. Animation director Avery was a master of timing and the gag. In a world populated by leggy showgirls and wolves whose tongues roll out and eyes pop out, straight-faced basset hound Droopy triumphs with his minimalist movements and deadpan delivery. Voice artist Bill Thompson gave the dog the same cheek-popping drawl he used as Wallace Wimple on the radio show Fibber McGee and Molly; in fact, that show's line "T'ain't funny, McGee" turns up in a Droopy cartoon based on Robert W. Service's poem The Shooting of Dan McGrew, as "T'ain't funny, McGoo." The final seven cartoons are in widescreen CinemaScope, but six of those, directed by Michael Lah rather than Avery, lack the anarchic zest of the earlier ones. Sign that Droopy still has it: When he made a cameo appearance in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? as an elevator operator, audiences cheered.