Joyce Glasser reviews British Legends of Stage

Tuesday, 18 December 2012

3 disc set: £13.79.  To buy a copy click here British Legends of Stage and Screen [DVD] 3-DVD As Seen on SKY Arts HD  

If you are searching for a lightweight, easy-to-wrap holiday gift for your film-buff friend, relative or loved one, you might want to consider British Legends of the Stage & Screen. This set of 3 DVDs is not specifically targeted at the over 50 market, but the eight stars interviewed just happen to have an average age of 76.  Here, in eight nutshells are the success stories of actors you’ve been watching all your life.

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Robert Tanitch reviews the latest DVDs

Thursday, 06 December 2012

ELENA (New Wave) is housekeeper, nurse and wife to an elderly wealthy businessman who intends to leave his fortune to his daughter by his first marriage. What is this seemingly good woman to do if he won’t give her any money for her good-for-nothing son and her good-for-nothing grandson? This Russian morality drama on greed, directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev and acted by Nadezhda Markina, is slowly and subtly gripping.

FLOATING WEEDS (Eureka) is a 1959 film by the great Japanese director, Yasujiro Oz. A tacky and bankrupt travelling theatrical troupe comes to small seaside town and performs Kabuki plays badly to poor houses. The actor-director is reunited after a 12-year absence with his former mistress and his son. The boy does not know he is his father and thinks he is his mother’s brother. A gentle heartbreaking story is beautifully told.

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Strike Force brings us Variety Acts of the 1930s for only £9.99!

Wednesday, 21 November 2012

Now available from Strike Force Entertainment – DVD social history and nostalgia specialist – are two new fascinating classic entertainment titles, that together chart the celebration of a glorious age of British Variety during the 1930s.

Featuring performances rarely seen since they were shown in the Pathe cinema newsreels of the day, VARIETY ACTS AND TURNS OF THE 1930s and VARIETY ACTS AND TURNS OF THE LATE 1930s, embrace the very best performers and singers from radio, music hall and the theatre, including balancing acts, bands, comedians, musicians, dancers and actors.

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Robert Tanitch reviews the latest DVDs

Monday, 19 November 2012

THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT (StudioCanal), directed by Alexander Mackendrick and released in 1951, is a witty satire on British management and one of the very best of the famous Ealing Comedies.

Alec Guinness is funny, touching and finally tragic-comic as the scientist who invents a fibre which never gets dirty and lasts for ever. The bosses and the workers, realizing they will all be out of work, are up in arms and ready to lynch him. Cecil Parker, Joan Greenwood, Ernest Thesiger and Edie Martin are perfect casting. The luminous white suit looks as if it is wearing Guinness.

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Robert Tanitch reviews the latest DVDs

Tuesday, 13 November 2012

THE PASSION OF SAINT JOAN (Eureka). Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 stark, silent masterpiece, which concentrates on her trial, burning and the resulting peasant riots, is notable for its constant use of enormous close-ups of the well-chosen, expressive sculptural faces of the clerical jury.

The cast are totally convincing as medieval personages. Renee Falconetti’s performance is in a different key and disturbing in its manic intensity.

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Robert Tanitch reviews the latest DVDs

Tuesday, 06 November 2012

DIE NIBELUNGEN (Eureka). Fritz Lang’s grandiose Teutonic epic in two parts – the death of Siegfried and the revenge of Kriemhild – is one of the great silent German films (1924). Slow and ponderous, the pantomime acting (those made-up eyes!) can seem a bit comic today but the tableaux and the spectacle are undeniably impressive; and for those who have sat through Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Lang’s mere five hours shouldn’t be a problem. Paul Richter’s Siegfried was the ideal Aryan youth for Nazi propaganda purposes.

THE FLYING SWORDS OF DRAGON GATE (Revolver) is a Chinese, acrobatic, computer-generated, martial arts action thriller. Who are the goodies? Who are the baddies? Your guess is as good as mine. It’s impossible to follow the story. The proper way to see it would be in 3D and at an IMAX.

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Robert Tanitch reviews October DVD releases

Tuesday, 30 October 2012

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (BFI). Eisenstein’s propaganda, with its masterly images and montages, and rhythmic editing, was filmed in 1925, twenty years after the event, and today is as powerful as ever it was. The terrifying scene, which everybody remembers, the massacre of the citizens on the steps of Odessa, one of the most famous sequences in world cinema, terribly convincing and endlessly quoted, is actually fiction.

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Robert Tanitch reviews the latest DVDs

Monday, 22 October 2012

SING YOUR SONG (Verve). A documentary on Harry Belafonte, singer, songwriter, actor and a tribute to a brave, committed social activist who has battled all his life against racism and for human rights in America and abroad.

PARADE’S END (BBC). Edwardian swan song: will the honourable aristocratic stay married to his ghastly, manipulative, self-absorbed wife or will he have an affair with a suffragette? Tom Stoppard’s classy TV adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s little-read cerebral classic spends too much time in the trenches but has the advantage of Benedict Cumberbatch’s masterly portrayal of inner sexual torment. Rebecca Hall, behaving abominably, is great fun.

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Robert Tanitch reviews the latest DVDs

Friday, 12 October 2012

JOUR DE FETE (BFI).  Jaques Tait’s impersonation of a tall and very odd French postman on a bicycle made him famous. He shot two versions at the same time: one in black and white released in 1949 proved highly popular; the other in colour (on this DVD) was not released until much, much later. The visual gags are very, very gentle.

WOJTEK (Bright Spark). Heart-warming documentary is about an unusual hero who was a great morale-booster in World War 2. A 500lb orphaned Syrian bear is adopted by the Polish military and fights at Casino. He thinks he is human; he drinks beer, smokes cigarettes and caries ammunition. He is made a corporal and given a ration book.

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