Since the silent-film days of Mack Sennett's Keystone Kops, the cinema has delighted in the chase. As have DVDs, if the current crop is any guide.
In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the fourth in the series with Harrison Ford as archeologist-adventurer Indy, our main man is once again distracted from his duties as a college professor (one who disconcertingly pronounces nuclear and library as nucular and liberry). A knife-flicking youth (Shia LaBeouf, sporting a Marlon Brando Wild One jacket) urges him to rescue an old colleague (John Hurt) who has entrusted the lad with riddles about a major treasure hidden in Peru. Instead of Nazis as before, the villains are Stalinist Commies, led by Irina Spalka (Cate Blanchett, with a pageboy hairdo she found in a high-school yearbook), who seeks universal mind control, as villains are wont to do.
But really, it's just an excuse to throw everything into the mix: Tarzan-like vine-swinging, killer fire ants, atomic explosions, swordfights, breathtaking stunts and aliens. Well, "aliens." Although producer George Lucas wanted to make a pastiche of 1950s sci-fi movies and call it Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men, Steven Spielberg balked at making a third alien film after Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial. Lucas offered to import the creatures from another dimension. "So I said, fine, fine, and what are they going to look like?" Spielberg recalls in the DVD's copious extras. "George said, 'They'll look like aliens, but we'll call them interdimensional.'"
Alfred Hitchcock made some terrific chase films, and one of them makes its official DVD debut this week. In Young and Innocent (1937), based on Josephine Tey's story A Shilling for Candles, a man wrongly accused of murder (Derrick de Marney) escapes police custody with the assistance of the police chief's daughter (Nova Pilbeam). It's a light effort along the lines of Hitchcock's 1935 thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps, and relies for its climax on a much-admired crane shot. The villain's eyes, as we know from the start, have a pronounced twitch. The camera sails over a hotel lobby, glides through a ballroom full of dancers and, 70 seconds later, arrives with pinpoint precision at a pair of eyes - which promptly twitch.
It's among eight films released in a grand MGM-Fox package, Alfred Hitchcock: Premiere Collection, buttressed by retrospectives, isolated musical scores, and expert commentaries. The other movies range from the rare (the 1927 silent film The Lodger, with two optional scores, and 1936's Sabotage) to the classic (1940's Rebecca, 1944's Lifeboat, 1945's Spellbound, 1946's Notorious) and the not-so-classic (1947's The Paradine Case, a courtroom drama with a miscast Gregory Peck).
As for the Keystone Kops, those comic silent-film policemen make a cameo appearance in the 1939 movie Hollywood Cavalcade, in a black-and-white sequence supervised by Sennett. The film, a romantic comedy-drama with Alice Faye and Don Ameche set in the silent-film era, is the only non-musical in The Alice Faye Collection Volume 2. Other titles: The Great American Broadcast, Four Jills in a Jeep, Hello, Frisco, Hello and Rose of Washington Square, so thinly disguised a version of Fanny Brice's life story (retold in Funny Girl) that Brice sued. Best bonus: Hollywood Cavalcade outtakes in which Faye and Buster Keaton stage a pie fight. It's rare to see the stone-faced Keaton laugh.
Librarians may live vicariously through The Librarian: Quest for the Spear (2004), a made-for-TV adventure comedy with Noah Wyle of TV's ER as a new employee at New York's Metropolitan Public Library. The movie borrows from better action films and Wyle's character is inconsistent (smart one moment, idiotic the next), but the supporting cast has fun (Jane Curtin and Bob Newhart as Wyle's new employers) and the premise is cute: that a secret section of the library houses Pandora's box, the Holy Grail, Excalibur and other legendary artifacts. When an item is stolen, the librarian must make like James Bond and, helped by a savvier agent (Sonya Walger), rescue it. There have since been two sequels.
A couple of the Wyle-Walger scrapes recall Romancing the Stone (1984), a superior adventure with Kathleen Turner as an unworldly author and Michael Douglas as a dashing mercenary. It has just been released on Blu-ray disc (the next generation of DVDs, incompatible with regular players) alongside its sequel, The Jewel of the Nile, though the bonus features are not new. The Blu-ray version of Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein has fresh extras, including a picture-in-picture feature in which Brooks praises Blu-ray. "I look beautiful now. Before Blu-ray, I looked very much like Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I looked like Quasimodo." Biggest Blu-ray news is that The Matrix and its sequels are now available in that format.
Also out: Martin Rosen's Watership Down: Deluxe Edition (1978) is an admirable animated version of Richard Adams's masterpiece about rabbits forced to seek new quarters. Rosen says he had originally considered making the film with puppets or with Royal Ballet dancers in costumes. Albert Lewin's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), with a wicked turn by George Sanders as an insinuating aesthete, benefits from a lively audio commentary by Angela Lansbury, who played nightclub singer Sibyl Vane. She says sailors in the closing days of the Second World War weren't interested in watching the movie aboard ship, but they did play and replay the scene where the comely Vane sings Little Yellow Bird.
Extra! Extra!
An oddly timed release among the ubiquitous Halloween titles, Holiday Inn: Collector's Edition contains the original black and white version of the 1942 Christmas musical, a colourized version (well done, but the original wins) and a CD with 12 of the songs, written by Irving Berlin and sung by stars Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. Film historian Ken Barnes underlines the significance of the moment when Crosby sits at the piano to sing White Christmas. "What you're listening to right here is the first performance of the most popular pop song ever written, sung by the most successful recording artist from the 20th century."
Extra! Extra! Extra!
Author Anne Michaels is generally happy with writer-director Jeremy Podeswa's 2007 film of her novel Fugitive Pieces. In a feature-length commentary, she approves of his keeping the on-screen violence to a minimum in this tale of a boy (Robbie Kay as the child, Stephen Dillane as his older self) rescued from certain death in wartime Poland by a Greek geologist (Rade Serbedzija). To have filmed it otherwise would have been "almost a blasphemy," she says, "a kind of lie, as if an image on the screen could replicate the depth of that horror."