As DVDs go, this week's crop ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous. Schindler's List is the film Steven Spielberg had to make. Myra Breckenridge is the film no one wanted to make. The only thing they have in common is the care taken in preparing the discs for market.
Spielberg's 1993 movie captures a rare glimmer of light in the darkness of the Holocaust. Through bribery, cajoling and carousing with senior Nazi officials, Catholic German war profiteer Oskar Schindler saved 1,100 Jewish prisoners from certain death by arranging for them to work in a munitions plant near the Plaszow forced-labour camp in occupied Poland. One of those he protected -- Poldek Pfefferberg, 173rd on Schindler's list of requisitioned labourers -- spent decades as a leather-goods shop owner in Los Angeles after the war (under his new name Leopold Page) trying to get somebody to tell Schindler's story. Australian writer Thomas Keneally took him up on it and published Schindler's Ark in 1982, after which Page badgered Spielberg to keep his promise of turning the book into a film. The result won seven Oscars, including awards for best picture and best director.
The movie, shot in black and white with the poignant exception of a girl's red coat and a modern-day coda, transfers beautifully to disc as an involving, necessarily brutal dramatization of the positive difference one person, however flawed, can make. Certainly there were enough people prepared to make a negative difference, not the least of which was the sadistic camp commander Amon Goeth (played by Ralph Fiennes) with whom Schindler had to deal, and whose idea of sport was to sit on his balcony and use a high-powered rifle to pick off random prisoners. Liam Neeson plays Schindler, and Ben Kingsley the Jewish accountant who runs his factory.
There are no traditional extras on the disc -- no commentary, no deleted scenes, no making-of featurette. In their place is a 77-minute documentary, Voices from the List, in which survivors of the Holocaust provide first-person accounts of their experiences both as a catharsis and as a lesson for future generations. The accounts, introduced by Spielberg, are drawn from the files of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation he set up in 1994 to interview survivors and witnesses in 32 languages and 56 countries. (Shoah means Holocaust in Hebrew.) Elsewhere, two striking statistics are juxtaposed. There are fewer than 4,000 Jews living in Poland today. There are more than 6,000 descendants of the Schindlerjuden, the Jews protected by Schindler.
That's the sublime. On to the ridiculous. Myra Breckenridge (1970) was an attempt to film Gore Vidal's unfilmable book of that name, in which Myron Breckenridge undergoes a sex change into Myra and the plot hinges on Myra's rape of one of the characters, which is not the first twist one thinks of when preparing a comedy for a general audience. Twentieth Century Fox rejected Gore's own scripts and, impressed by a quirky low-budget 1968 drama called Joanna -- co-starring newcomer Donald Sutherland, with a bouncy musical score by poet Rod McKuen -- it asked novice director Michael Sarne to write and direct Myra. Sarne wanted to write the script, take the money and run, but Richard Zanuck said it was all or nothing. So Sarne signed on as director, and from that point on nobody agreed about anything.
John Huston, hoping to broaden his range as an actor after his triumphs as a director, lobbied successfully to play the scheming uncle whose drama academy Myra seeks to take over. (Sarne had wanted Mickey Rooney.) Raquel Welch signed on expecting to play both Myron and Myra, only to learn that Myron would be played by film critic (and non-actor) Rex Reed, shadowing Myra throughout the movie as an alter ego. Figuring that Welch couldn't carry the movie, Sarne offered a part to 1930s screen legend Mae West, who was in her seventies and hadn't made a film for 26 years, but accepted because her spiritualist told her to. Assigned the role of lascivious agent Leticia Van Allen, she proceeded to write her own racy dialogue, speak-sing a couple of songs and give the back of her hand to Welch, who wasn't happy to hear that West would receive top billing. To complicate matters, Sarne felt that producer Robert Fryer was actively sabotaging his movie because Fryer and Gore had a vision of the film that didn't reduce the gay characters to wildly effeminate caricatures as Sarne's did.
The DVD milks this battle for all it's worth. On one side, Sarne supplies his version in a running audio commentary over a "special edition" of the film. On the other, Welch delivers a commentary over the mildly different theatrical version, sounding exasperated. "I can't believe I took this part," she says. ". . . I love John Huston. Too bad he wasn't the director of this piece." In an accompanying episode of TV's Backstory , Reed describes Myra Breckenridge as a movie "made by people locked in their dressing rooms waiting for their lawyers to arrive."
And the result? The costumes are gorgeous, the pace is frenetic, Welch acquits herself surprisingly well (even if, as she notes, her accent wanders from southern to mid-Atlantic), there are a few inspired moments and you'll go blind from minor-celebrity-spotting. Farrah Fawcett has a major role; Jim Backus and Tom Selleck have minor ones.
Apart from that, it's a mess. Perhaps hoping to distract the audience, Sarne intercuts frequent film clips from movies starring Laurel and Hardy, Carmen Miranda, Marilyn Monroe and others, the cinematic equivalent of musical sampling. Shirley Temple threatened to sue unless one of her clips was yanked. Loretta Young sued and won $100,000.
In case you're wondering, Sarne staged the infamous rape scene as a vaudeville number -- he said the over-the-top style of the entire film was designed to make that one scene work -- and ended the film with the revelation that, like the lost season of Dallas, the whole thing was just a dream. "I thought it was pretty obvious that Myron was in the hospital because he's had a car accident and he's been unconscious all this time and he's had this dream. He dreamt that he's a woman and he's had a sex-change operation. If it's not clear, I think I'm going to have to add some extra scenes." The scary part is he almost sounds serious.
One footnote. Having made his mark in Schindler's List, Fiennes went on to star as John Steed with Uma Thurman's Emma Peel in the 1998 film version of TV's The Avengers. Last December, Britain's Total Film magazine named them as the worst movie double act of all time, ahead of Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty in Ishtar and Sylvester Stallone and Estelle Getty in Stop! or My Mom Will Shoot. Sublime to the ridiculous indeed.