Let's Get Physical Media: The Lee Gambin Memorial Column (May 2024)
Let's Get Physical Media: The Lee Gambin Memorial Column (May 2024)
Reviews of the following titles released on Blu-Ray courtesy of Allied Vaughn: The Rain People, 12 Strong (4K), Devil's Doorway, City of Hope
First and foremost, thank you to Allied Vaughn Entertainment for giving me the opportunity to review a few titles here for the first edition of the “Let’s Get Physical Media” feature here on the Substack newsletter. Blu-Ray reviews were already in the works before they kindly came on board and back when I had the V&V blog, I did cover several titles provided to me as well (Olive sent me quite a few back then). But it was harder to balance the time while getting my Master’s Degree and get my career stabilized so Voices & Visions ended. Now I’m back on track - podcast, 5 Years favorite essays, new reviews and now, physical media highlights once a month, every month!
Since I am so pleased to see how many subscribers this newsletter has along with the podcast, I am not planning to retire at any point within the next few years the way I did with the interview podcast / blog I mentioned. In other words I’m not going anywhere and I wanted to dedicate this column to the late, great Lee Gambin who loved physical media and contributed so much. I’m also going to include a link at the end of something he contributed to, whether it’s writing or a commentary track. I’m sure many titles he contributed to will come up down the road. Now onto the content. Thank you so much to everyone for the support, pick up these titles via the links!
The Rain People (Warner Archive) (1969)
Label: Warner Archive
Region Code: Region-Free
Rating: R
Duration: 102 Minutes
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Cast: Shirley Knight, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Robert Modica, Tom Aldredge
Special Features: None
Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray of The Rain People is a beautiful restoration, done in 2019, by Zoetrope and Warner Bros. The movie focuses on three adults whose lives come crashing into one another as a woman runs from her unhappy marriage and becomes entangled with two other damaged souls, forcing all three to confront their struggles both past and present. It’s akin to reading a great novel at times, where every single person is full of imperfections and unsure of their place in their world. You slowly begin to relate to them even if you’ve never done what they have.
The audio and sound design here is particularly striking to where I recommend it for that reason alone. I mainly listen through headphones and can pick up on little nuances that way, making it more intimate of an experience which serves this story quite well. There is a quiet vulnerability and stillness early on especially when we enter a hotel room, hearing the sound of traffic driving by that is precisely my memory of listening to cars whizzing past while trying to sleep alone in a secluded, unfamiliar environment that I know is transient.
This is shot in a way that is meant to be raw, imperfect and yet has a beauty in capturing the open road, inclement weather and brutal confrontation. Coppola’s early naturalistic style attempts to use as little artificial light as possible, and the contrast helps to retain grain and image texture particularly in deep shadow. There’s also a controlled chaos the way he depicts internal thoughts, often cut in and out abruptly as if they’re interrupting the present.
I couldn’t help but think, what if Coppola had only made films like this and The Conversation? What if Spielberg only made films like Duel and The Sugarland Express? The early works by renowned, revered blockbuster storytellers are absolutely worth tracking down to discover their storytelling roots. But it’s just a pleasure to see them working with limitations, a lower budget, and capturing a specific time and place the way this film does. The editing choices that serve as memory recall are akin to what Coppola would later achieve in what remains my favorite film of his, The Conversation.
The Rain People definitely touches on themes that are akin to what Scorsese captured in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, with a remarkable lead performance by Shirley Knight. James Caan is a welcome surprise here in stark contrast to the kind of work he would later be known for particularly as Sonny in The Godfather. I adore a compelling road movie that almost feels improvised at times, but this is also a story about a lost soul trying to find themselves again through random encounters and unexpected connection. I’m so glad I finally caught up with this early Coppola gem and expect to be rewatching it again in the near future. The Rain People (Blu-Ray)
12 Strong (4K) (Warner Brothers) (2018)
Label: Warner Brothers
Region Code: Region-Free
Rating: R
Duration: 130 Minutes
Director: Nicolai Fuglsig
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Navid Negahban, Michael Shannon, Michael Peña
Special Features: “12 Strong: The Making Of An Impossible Mission” featurette. “Monumental Effort: Building America’s Response Monument”- A look at the creation of the horse soldier statue.
I remember this being one of the first movies I sat down to watch when I was back on WGN Radio reviewing movies weekly alongside Erik Childress for Nick Digilio’s radio show. If memory serves, I also saw The Choice that same day? Sitting down to revisit this, I immediately thought of why this film was able to sustain interest throughout: the cast. Particularly the two Michaels.
12 Strong is set in the days following 9/11 when a U.S. Special Forces team, led by a new Captain, Mitch Nelson (Chris Hemsworth), is chosen to be the first U.S. troops sent into Afghanistan for an extremely dangerous mission. There, in the rugged mountains, they must convince Northern Alliance General Dostum (Navid Negahban) to join forces with them to fight their common adversary: the Taliban and Al Qaeda allies. In addition to overcoming mutual distrust and a vast cultural divide, the Americans accustomed to state-of-the-art warfare must adopt the rudimentary tactics of the Afghan horse soldiers. But despite their uneasy bond, the new allies face overwhelming odds: outnumbered and outgunned by a ruthless enemy as the troops ban together.
Stuff blows up a lot and if you want a war movie that rarely lets up, this definitely serves as a reasonable diversion for the most part. Sadly, there isn’t much in the way of characters to be invested in and things mostly play out as expected. The film keeps us at a distance from these soldiers to the point that they seem only to exist as a means to accomplish a mission. But I also can’t deny the fact that watching explosions rendered so vividly here with this 4K release brought me back to the days of my dad enjoying Apocalypse Now especially when we got the new Beta player. It’s all about showing off enough cool military gear, weapons, and token heroism to cause an uptick in enrollment in a rah-rah sense, though this is more Zero Dark Thirty than an old timey John Wayne war picture. The transfer is terrific (and loud) so if you’re a fan of visceral action, you could do a lot worse. 12 Strong (4K)
Devil’s Doorway (Warner Archive) (1950)
Label: Warner Archive
Region Code: Region-Free
Rating: Not Rated
Duration: 84 Minutes
Director: Anthony Mann
Cast: Robert Taylor, Louis Calhern, Paula Raymond
Special Features: Classic Cartoons "THE CHUMP CHAMP" and "CUE-BALL CAT"; Original Theatrical Trailer
The 1950s were a remarkable decade for Westerns and for filmmaker Anthony Mann. I feel honored and blessed to have covered Mann for my podcast alongside Patrick Ripoll and the late Sergio Mims (much like Lee Gambin, another physical media champion and cinema savant who remains an inspiration). Catching up with Devil’s Doorway is a must for any fan of early Westerns. This one was certainly groundbreaking for its time even if I didn’t find it as entirely successful as something like Broken Arrow (1950).
Director Anthony Mann made a lot of great films particularly The Furies, Winchester ‘73 and my personal favorite, Man Of The West. Any one of these three would earn him a standing ovation in the Westerns Hall of Fame. Three in one year is very impressive, and a strong argument for the studio system. No time spent developing properties by the director, the studio did it for you.
After returning home to Wyoming after fighting for the Union army in the Civil War, Shoshone Native-American Lance Poole (Robert Taylor) welcomes the beauty of his home and cattle ranch at Sweet Meadows. But he quickly learns that, even though he has long held great relationships with the townsfolk of Medicine Bow, including newly appointed marshal Zeke (Edgar Buchanan), there are new residents in town, namely lawyer Verne Coolan (Louis Calhern), who don’t see the value of his native culture. Poole, whose land is now threatened by homesteaders, employs a lawyer (Paula Raymond), to help protect what is rightfully his land. But while the law doesn’t seem to agree with him, Poole and Coolan are set up for an inevitable fight over the land that rightfully belongs to Poole and his people.
There’s a lot to appreciate in this film even if it didn’t entirely enthrall me, perhaps due to expectations when it comes to my love of most of Mann’s work. Taylor is fine, Raymond is decent, but their romance and on screen chemistry is just ho-hum and vanilla. One of the stumbling blocks in the film is the need to get over Robert Taylor portraying an Indian. That said, he handles the role admirably for an actor I have never been too impressed by. I also didn’t particularly enjoy the action scene that was executed in the finale. Something felt off despite most of the film being a compelling portrait of xenophobia and bigotry for that time and place. This is not to take away from its accomplishments as a visual experience which is the reason to own this.
Mann and cinematographer John Alton film many scenes like a noir. There's a barroom fight where the spectators watch in sweaty-faced close up without an accompanying score to accentuate the conflict. Think The Set-Up (1949) on the frontier. Another film from this era isn’t coming to mind where an intense fight breaks out in a saloon and it just feels so primal due to the lack of a punchy score. (Perhaps it’s another Mann film?). Much of the action plays in the shadows with some characters barely visible in conversations. It’s so beautifully photographed and this transfer/presentation is truly special. Devil’s Doorway seems to have got lost between Mann’s earlier noir pictures like Raw Deal and his subsequent psychological westerns mentioned above, but it actually acts as something of an effective amalgam that is worth tracking down if you’re a Mann fanatic. And you should be!
Extras include a pair of cartoon shorts from 1950, we get the 7-min Tex Avery directed "The Chump Champ" which has previously been issues on Blu-ray on the Tex Avery Screwball Classics: Volume 1, which is terrific, plus the 7-min Hanna Barbera/Tom & Jerry short "Cue Ball Cat", which I thoroughly enjoyed being a cat person (and a Tom & Jerry fan). Available here: Devil’s Doorway
City of Hope (Sony) (1991)
Label: Sony
Region Code: Region-Free
Rating: R
Duration: 129 Minutes
Director: John Sayles
Cast: Vincent Spano, Angela Bassett, Joe Morton, David Strathairn
Special Features: Commentary by Filmmaker John Sayles
Say, did you pick up the recent Criterion release of one of the best films of the 90s: John Sayles’ Lone Star? Well there’s another brand new release that I can’t recommend enough because it’s been a long time coming. Before The Wire came along, there were films like City of Hope and Clockers that really captured the same varying perspectives of urban life. This is one of John Sayles’ best films which has been in limbo on the home video market because of legal issues which are finally over. City of Hope is a underseen 90’s drama and that’s probably because of it’s lack of availability over the years. It was Haggis’ Crash way before Crash happened, or you could even look as recently as Steve McQueen’s Widows for something along the same lines as well.
Vincent Spano plays a disillusioned young man who quits a job working for his father and struggles to find a way of keeping his soul uncompromised while living on his own. Tony Lo Bianco plays his father, a successful contractor who gets in trouble with City Hall when he refuses to involve himself in a shady deal to put up a profitable development in place of the slum apartments he runs. And the reliably great Joe Morton plays a black city councilman whose leadership abilities are tested in several incidents which polarize the hatred and misunderstanding between the races.
It has a wide variety of interconnected people interacting with each other caught up in challenging circumstances surrounding politics, class issues, homelessness, race, unrest, crime. Nearly every character gets an arc and a chance to shine since Sayles always cared about the individual performer every bit as the cohesive ensemble in all of his work. It’s probably why he has so many talented actors involved in each project. The impressive supporting cast has so many recognizable faces that you’ll immediately light up the moment they appear. No part is too small in this movie as every scene, every character has a clear purpose that is understood. I can’t wait to dive into the audio commentary in the near future as well. Sayles has a way with words.
Fans of this film are going to be overjoyed that this is finally available to own. Added to that, the video here looks the best it ever has - a new hi-def transfer for a lost title like this is something to treasure which is precisely why I wanted to bring it to everyone’s attention. It’s nice to see an unsung film get the treatment it deserves and will most definitely be rediscovered as an important film for its time. Sayles rarely goes wrong throughout his entire body of work so don’t hesitate on picking up one of his best. City of Hope
Thank you so much for subscribing to the 5 Years Substack and partaking in the first of many “Let’s Get Physical Media” columns to come. I’ll also be sure to list many other titles of note for the next round even if I’m not reviewing them. As promised here’s something from Lee Gambin that I recommend. So much gratitude to Lee, taken from us way too soon but leaving a treasure trove of content and contributions that I can’t wait to sift through. Here’s one:
https://www.acmi.net.au/stories-and-ideas/meow-meow-massacre
