Stuart Galbraith Iv

For what’s billed as a Blu-ray “mastered in 4K from a 35mm restoration facilitated by the UCLA Film & Television Archive,” Kino’s new Blu-ray of For Whom the Bell Tolls is a very problematic, disappointing release. The Ernest Hemingway adaptation starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman is restored only in the sense that its original roadshow release version, with a total running time of 166 minutes, including an overture, intermission break and entr’acte (apparently there was no exit music), along with about 30 minutes missing footage long unavailable from at least the late-1950s through the 1990s have been restored back into the picture.

A real oddity, The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1939) apparently began as an idea by writer S.S. Van Dine, a fan of the popular comedy duo of George Burns and Gracie Allen, to team them with his most famous creation, amateur sleuth Philo Vance. It’s not entirely clear if Dine initially developed a full treatment or screenplay based on this idea, but eventually he turned it into a same-named novel in 1938, his penultimate Philo Vance story prior to Dine’s death in 1939.

Adapted from Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, The Quiet American (2002) received rave reviews when it was new, particularly for the leading performances of Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, though I was surprised to read many commenting on the IMDb and elsewhere that they found the film too confusing and uninvolving. That’s like calling Greene’s The Third Man (1949) too confusing and uninvolving, especially insomuch as their stories are structurally similar.

Picture Bride (1995) is a nice, little film, an historical humanist drama distilled from real history and personal anecdotes about a particular time and place, from people that were there, and made by sympathetic, indefatigable filmmakers determined to tell that story. You’ll be glad you saw it, too, though you may have little interest to watch it again... except for the brief, cameo appearance by an iconic actor in a cleverly conceived if small role. That was, at least for me, one reason I wanted to see it again after 25 or so years.

A four-film set of Joan Crawford films, at least for me, is something of an endurance test. Bette Davis and James Cagney were great actors, but Crawford was a *STAR*. Rightly or wrongly, today she’s remembered best as the allegedly abusive, self-absorbed sadist of Mommie Dearest, and for the campy performances of her later career, in films as varied as Johnny Guitar, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Strait-Jacket, and Trog. But this set yields a few surprises, modest though they are.

Being the same age as actress Marlee Matlin, seeing her Academy Award-winning film debut in Children of a Lesser God in 1986, when it was new, how could I not help but fall in love with this stunningly beautiful, smart, and fiercely independent woman onscreen, whose deaf character develops a passionate romance with William Hurt? In the decades following that historical win, Matlin defied the odds as a deaf actor, working in film and television both constantly and often memorably, tearing down little and big barriers along the way. Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, directed by actress Shoshannah Stern, also deaf, is an interesting, sometimes surprising documentary about Matlin’s life and career, and larger issues of being deaf in a hearing world.

Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-1968) is a disarmingly charming and impressively elaborate puppet series produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson in their emblematic “Supermarionation” process. The Andersons did eight Supermarionation shows in all, from 1960-69, and in some respects Captain Scarlet is the best of these.

Yet another Warner Archive 4-fer, this set focuses on actor James Cagney and his Warner Bros. career in a repackaging of four Blu-ray titles released individually before, using the same video masters and extra features.

It must be hard for British television-makers to come up with fresh ideas for their overworked mystery series genre, a staple import to American TV and elsewhere since the mid-1980s especially. The 24-seasons-and-counting Midsommer Murders alone would seem to have thoroughly exhausted every conceivable plot by now. Death Valley (2025-present) works from a highly improbable yet appealing premise—an ambitious female Welsh detective sergeant teams up with a retired actor, star of a popular if long-ago TV detective show. This mystery-comedy has been winning rave reviews from both critics and viewers, but its scripts are borderline insufferable in their super-aggressive self-effacing approach.

Dramatically, Irving Rapper’s The Miracle (1959) is pretty bad, but Warner Archive’s video transfer of this Technirama production looks outstanding, and the film is not without interesting scenes here and there, and the production values are lush on this largely forgotten religious epic.