Lady in the Lake (1946) is often described as a failed experiment, but that sells it short. It's a fascinating oddity. Actor Robert Montgomery (father of Bewitched's Elizabeth) talked the studio into letting him direct a movie in which, although he stars as Raymond Chandler's private eye Philip Marlowe, he seldom appears. He shows up at the start, as Marlowe, and addresses the audience directly about his latest case: "You'll see it just as I saw it. You'll meet the people, you'll find the clues, and maybe you'll solve it quick and maybe you won't." From then on, we see everything solely from Marlowe's point of view. His voice is heard, and when he lights a cigarette smoke rises in front of the lens, but only when the camera glances at a mirror do we catch sight of him.
This approach has consequences. Because the editor can't cut between angles, each scene is one long take in which the other actors interact with the lens as though performing an audition. Because Montgomery can't use his actor's face -- furtive glance, smile or grimace -- the camera has to make roughly analogous moves, panning to another part of the room to indicate Marlowe's head turning. In a commentary, film historian Alain Silver says Montgomery squatted on a platform beside the camera to deliver his lines. As the actors got into their roles, they would inadvertently look at him instead of at the lens and would ruin the take.
Lady in the Lake is one of five films in the Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 3, with Border Incident (1949, with Ricardo Montalban), His Kind of Woman (1951, with Robert Mitchum in jeopardy, Raymond Burr as the heavy and Vincent Price as a parody of an actor), On Dangerous Ground (1952, with Robert Ryan as a cop) and The Racket (Mitchum as cop, Ryan as gangster). A sixth disc has a discussion of film noir and five 20-minute shorts from the 1940s MGM series Crime Does Not Pay.
The French film How Much Do You Love Me? ( Combien tu m'aimes?, 2005) could have been a film noir if tackled differently. It has an insecure man (Bernard Campan), a femme fatale (Monica Bellucci) and a shadowy underworld ruled by a violent pimp (Gérard Depardieu). But it's a film by Bertrand Blier ( Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, Too Beautiful for You), which means it's another of his unpredictable explorations of how men and women get along or drive each other mad. Campan's character has won the lottery and tells Bellucci's prostitute that he will give her all his money if she lives with him; all seems well, but she remains drawn to Depardieu. Blier recognizes that the story could end several ways -- tragic, comic, romantic -- so he wittily rehearses them all.
Michel Deville's The Art of Breaking Up (2004, based on the Georges Feydeau farce Un fil à la patte) is pure, exhilarating farce. Doors slam, people who shouldn't see each other do and romance complicates all. Monsieur de Bois (Charles Berling) and Lucette (Emmanuelle Béart) are mad about each other, but he has agreed to marry someone else to get a dowry and tries to keep the news from Lucette, while the other characters make this impossible. In a 24-minute making-of segment, unfortunately in French only, Deville says this kind of comedy "must be brilliant, champagne, so you need the sparkles -- great actors." The films proper, both from Seville Pictures, offer English subtitles.
Nine years after Shirley Booth won a best-actress Oscar for the wrenching 1952 drama Come Back, Little Sheba, she filled the sitcom role of an officious live-in maid who runs rings around her employers, a lawyer (Don DeFore) and interior decorator (Whitney Blake) with a young son (Bobby Buntrock). Created by Ted Key for a recurring cartoon panel in The Saturday Evening Post, Hazel sorts out people's lives after messing them up in the first place. Hazel: The Complete First Season compiles 35 episodes, all in black and white except one -- about buying a colour television.
The Flying Nun: The Complete Second Season (1967-68) is Hazel without the rougher edges. Sister Bertrille (Sally Field), a winsome novice at the Convent San Tanco in Puerto Rico, creates complications for the other nuns and then helps straighten them out, often by catching the wind in her headgear and flying through the air. There are 26 colour episodes and no extras; the series was developed by Bernard Slade, later the playwright of Same Time, Next Year.
The Simpsons: The Complete Eighth Season (1996-97) is the latest compilation of the Energizer Bunny of animated series, with the usual wealth of commentaries (on all 25 episodes), multi-angle options and rough sketches. This batch includes Lisa creating a miniature civilization and nuclear-plant employee Frank Grimes seething with rage at the uncomprehending Homer. Oh, and Johnny Cash voices a coyote.
EXTRA! EXTRA!
Distributors were so alarmed by the surreal touches in Francis Ford Coppola's early cut of the 1979 film Apocalypse Now that he and his editors excised great sections to make it more conventional, reducing the length to 153 minutes. In 2001, he reinserted that material to create the 202-minute Apocalypse Now Redux. Both appear in the two-disc Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier, along with an optional "redux marker" that identifies the restored scenes. But the highlight, as in any Coppola project, are two new commentaries by the writer-director, who is frank, entertaining and harder on himself than any critic. "Anyone who has seen my wife's great documentary Hearts of Darkness [not included here, alas -- so much for "complete"]can know how I really felt. . . . [The movie]was never anything other than a project in jeopardy." -- W.C.
CLASSICS FOR KIDS
As classics go, it's hard to think of a more shiver-inducingly awful adaptation than the three-hour 1985 television version of Alice in Wonderland (with elements of Through the Looking Glass tossed in). But as a lesson in how to suck the magic from a tale or as an excuse to see a motley parade of familiar actors, it has a certain morbid fascination. Alice speaks in a flat American accent, the fall down the rabbit hole is wasted in three seconds flat, and the elaborate sets and generally fine costumes are inhabited by cast members who have nothing interesting to say and must have been assembled with only their TV-Q (familiarity to TV audiences) in mind. Carol Channing as the White Queen, Scott Baio as a guinea pig, Ringo Starr as the Mock Turtle, Telly Savalas as the Cheshire Cat -- the list goes on. The dreadful songs are by Steve Allen, and the film is produced by the master of disaster, Irwin ( The Towering Inferno) Allen. Only Sammy Davis Jr. as the Caterpillar, dancing and singing You Are Old, Father William with Alice (Natalie Gregory), comes close to enlivening the show. Want more? Oh, you masochist. Arte Johnson as the Dormouse, Martha Raye, Red Buttons, Sally Struthers. . .
-- W.C.