As I grow older, one of life’s little pleasures is being able to revisit the movies of the past (especially my past) on home video. More often than not thanks to digital technology, these movies look better than they did when I first saw them back in the 1960s and 1970s. Even more enjoyable are the movies making their debut on disc for the first time. 3 movies I have long awaited recently appeared whereupon I quickly purchased them and watched them, and now shall tell you about them. 2 of the films are from 1970, the year I graduated high school and went off to college amidst a time of great social change. The third movie is from 1954 but I first saw it as a Freshman at the University of South Carolina which showed a wide array of films in their student center cinema.
The first of the 3 movies is THE KREMLIN LETTER, a complicated espionage thriller from director John Huston. It featured three of my favorite character actors…Richard Boone, George Sanders, and Orson Welles. It also featured Canadian actress Barbara Parkins, Patrick O’Neal and Swedish star Max von Sydow as the villain. Although I enjoyed it when I saw it, it was a little hard to follow and it failed at the box office. It has taken until now (2011) to make its first ever appearance on DVD. Take the spy novels of John Le Carre and combine them with the larger than life oddball characters from THE MALTESE FALCON and you’ll have some idea of what to expect. I think it flopped because it lacked the flashy superficiality of the James Bond movies.
The second film is WUSA which failed even more spectacularly at the box office especially when you consider it featured Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anthony Perkins, and Laurence Harvey. Newman was at the height of his popularity having just come from megahits BUTCH CASSIDY & THE SUNDANCE KID and COOL HAND LUKE. WUSA was even directed by Stuart Rosenberg, the man responsible for LUKE. So what went wrong? The problem was the screenplay which was ahead of its time. It’s a cautionary tale about a right wing radio station in New Orleans which broadcasts ideology hugely impacting its audience. In 1970, critics and audiences found the concept too far-fetched. 41 years later, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have made this a reality.
Returning to Laurence Harvey, who has a key supporting role in WUSA, he plays the lead in the 1954 Italian-British co-production of Shakespeare’s ROMEO & JULIET. Franco Zefferelli’s 1968 version had been made only 2 years previously when I saw this 1954 version. Everyone raved about Zefferelli’s film casting teenagers as R & J. Too bad those teens didn’t know how to handle Shakespearean dialog. Harvey was already an experienced movie actor at 26, so he’s not that far off age wise. Susan Shentell (Juliet) was only 20 and had never been in a film until then. Despite good notices, once the film was completed, she got married and never acted again. The movie was shot on location in Italy and was designed to look like Renaissance paintings. Maybe not the best R & J out there, but it remains my favorite.
In addition to my having first seen all 3 of these movies in 1970, another thing they have in common, although I didn’t realize it at the time, is that they all were box office failures especially R & J which proved to be too Italian for 1954 British audiences and vice-versa. Hopefully their release on disc will finally garner them the audience they deserve. All had been released on VHS but suffered from the usual shortcomings of reformatting to fit old school TV screens and had less than stellar sound. While these new releases upgrade the soundtracks and picture quality so they look and sound the best they ever have, only R & J has the option of subtitles. THE KREMLIN LETTER could have certainly used them while WUSA isn’t too hard to follow.
POSTSCRIPT 2024: I first wrote this article in 2011 for a local arts publication. Now 13 years later the video landscape has changed considerably. Streaming services and online providers such as You Tube and Roku are now the way most people prefer to watch movies. In fact, at the time of this re-publication, all of these films are available for free on You Tube so do check them out and see what you think.
The Capsule Critic 