Lovsky, Celia

Man of a Thousand Faces

Lon Chaney earned his nickname "The Man of a Thousand Faces" with a gallery of grotesque, misshapen characters created through a combination of elaborate makeup, contorted postures, and sensitive performances. After a rich silent-movie career starring in such classics as He Who Gets Slapped, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and The Phantom of the Opera, he died after completing his first and only sound film, a remake of his silent crime picture The Unholy Three. James Cagney plays Chaney in this glossy Hollywood biography, a reverent, melodramatic tribute that focuses on his turbulent private life and rise from vaudeville clown to hard-working Hollywood extra to movie star. Dorothy Malone costars as his unstable first wife, who flees her husband and their young son after a failed suicide attempt, Jane Greer is the loving showgirl who fills her void, and future real-life superproducer Robert Evans plays legendary MGM producer Irving Thalberg. Cagney is a short, thick pug of an actor where Chaney is tall and lean, but he oddly resembles the star in his craggy face, and his rarely tapped dancing skills are put to good use in the early vaudeville scenes and contorted recreations of twisted Chaney characters. But most importantly, Cagney brings to the role passion and compassion that burn through the indifferent direction and show-biz clichés to create a vivid, energetic portrait of the enigmatic cult star who rarely let audiences see his true face. --Sean Axmaker

Academy Award winner James Cagney gives an unforgettable performance as Lon Chaney in this fascinating true story that follows the life of one of the most iconic and mysterious stars in Hollywood history!Known as the "Man of a Thousand Faces" silent film star Lon Chaney captured the imagination of the world through his incredibly expressive and transformative roles such as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Phantom from the original Phantom of the Opera. Behind the scenes however this long-suffering talented genius' life was filled with trials and tribulations that helped shape some of his most groundbreaking roles.The Academy Award -nominated Man of a Thousand Faces captures the dramatic private life of a humble vaudeville clown who rose to become one of the biggest stars the world has ever seen!System Requirements:Running Time: 122 minutes Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA/SILENT Rating: NR UPC: 025195032582 Manufacturer No: 61104080

Soylent Green

The is the year 2022. Overcrowding, pollution, and resource depletion have reduced society's leaders to finding food for the teeming masses. The answer is Soylent Green - an artificial nourishment whose actual ingredients are not known by the public. Thorn is the tough homicide detective who stumbles onto the secret so terrifying no one would dare believe him.

Soylent Green

Charlton Heston seemed fond of starring in apocalyptic science-fiction films in the late 1960s and early '70s. There was Planet of the Apes, of course, and The Omega Man. But there was also 1973's Soylent Green, a strange detective film (based on Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room!) set in 2022 and starring Heston as a Manhattan cop trying to solve a murder in the overpopulated, overheated city. His roommate (a necessity in the overcrowded metropolis), played by Edward G. Robinson, tries telling him about a better time on Earth before there were no more resources or room left; but Heston doesn't care. Directed by Richard Fleischer (The Vikings), the film has a curious but largely successful mix of mystery and bleak futuristic vision, somewhat like Blade Runner but without the extraordinary art direction. This was Robinson's last film and he's easily the best thing about it; his final scene seems terribly appropriate in retrospect. Joseph Cotten makes an appearance as the man whose murder results in the revelation of a shocking secret. --Tom Keogh

The is the year 2022. Overcrowding, pollution, and resource depletion have reduced society's leaders to finding food for the teeming masses. The answer is Soylent Green -- an artificial nourishment whose actual ingredients are not known by the public. Thorn is the tough homicide detective who stumbles onto the secret so terrifying no one would dare believe him.

World War II Collection, Vol. 2 - Heroes Fight for Freedom (36 Hours / Air Force / Command Decision / Hell to Eternity / The Hill / Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo)

If "Heroes Fight for Freedom" sounds like a rather hysterical label to slap on volume 2 of Warner Home Video's World War II Collection, take it as a hint that the six films in the set are wildly dissimilar in tone, style, reference, and origin, not to mention levels of quality. But don't worry, three of the six are classics, and each of their admittedly lesser companions rates a look. (The bonus features are quite perfunctory, with only a couple of contemporaneous cartoons being of note.)

Tops is Air Force (1943), which director Howard Hawks casually referred to as his "contribution to the war effort." It's also a masterpiece, standing with John Ford's They Were Expendable as the best WWII films Hollywood made while the war was still on. On the evening of December 6, 1941, a B-17 flies out of San Francisco on a routine peacetime training mission to Hickam Field in Hawaii. While en route, the officers and crew overhear radio traffic of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ("Whatcha got there," somebody asks the radio operator, "Orson Welles?"). They touch down in a smoking world like a vision out of Dante, then hop from one Pacific outpost to the next as the clouds of war roil. The plane itself, the Mary Ann, is the movie's main character; the biggest star, John Garfield, actually gets last billing as her newly assigned tail gunner. Air Force is one of Hawks's supreme guys-doing-their-job movies, and the definitive war-movie portrait of America as a melting-pot of diverse individuals and types making common cause. The ensemble (Garfield, Gig Young, John Ridgely, Arthur Kennedy, the great Harry Carey, et al.) is superbly directed, there's a strong Dudley Nichols screenplay (with an uncredited contribution by William Faulkner) and breathtaking editing of the battle scenes (which won George Amy an Oscar), and the camerawork is by James Wong Howe in peak form.

Another must-see among WWII movies is Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944), about the preparation for and execution of a 400-mile bombing raid to carry the war to Japan itself mere months after Pearl Harbor. Spencer Tracy plays James H. Doolittle, architect of the raid, but the emotional core of the film is B-25 pilot Ted Lawson (Van Johnson) and his wife, Ellen (Phyllis Thaxter). Lawson's bestselling memoir (with Bob Considine) of his training for the secret mission, his group's launching from the aircraft carrier Hornet, and his crash landing and protracted ordeal in China--where he lost a leg--has been faithfully served by director Mervyn LeRoy & co. The film is long on homely detail and all-American decency (including remarkably outspoken regret over the unavoidability of civilian casualties) but achieves its greatest impact in the raid itself, realized with Oscar-winning special effects and mostly allowed to play in riveting silence.

The other topnotch item in the set is The Hill (1965), made by Sidney Lumet in that period when his name was synonymous with powerhouse drama guaranteed to leave audiences wrung out and limp (Fail-Safe, The Pawnbroker). Still, there was a bigger name involved: Sean Connery breaking with his James Bond image to portray a volcanically outraged inmate at a British Army prison camp in Libya. The titular Hill is a steep mound erected on the desert floor for him and other British soldiers who have violated the (often absurd) rules of the military game to buck sacks of sand up one side and down the other, like so many sons of Sisyphus. Ian Hendry is unforgettably loathsome as the sadistic noncom Williams; other captors include Harry Andrews, Ian Bannen, and Michael Redgrave, while Connery's fellow prisoners are played by Ossie Davis, Roy Kinnear, Jack Watson, and Alfred Lynch. In Oswald Morris's black-and-white cinematography, you can almost feel the desert sun like a hot brick.

Command Decision (1949) takes on the kind of questions that Hollywood could never have raised during the war--questions about the cruel responsibilities of command, including the responsibility to spend a great many lives to save thousands more in the future. In 1943, from an American airbase in the English countryside, a campaign of daylight bombardment is being waged against aircraft factories in Germany. For much of the way to their targets and back, the bombers are bereft of fighter escort and at the mercy of the Luftwaffe. The mortality rate is shocking--but perhaps, for reasons that are not widely known, necessary. Clark Gable (himself an air war veteran) plays the commandant who has to call the next day's target, and the film never leaves command HQ; the closest we get to combat is a scene of an untrained crewman trying to land a crippled plane. Command Decision is earnest but outshone by the similarly focused Twelve O'Clock High. The main problem is that it's based on--and essentially remains--a play, static in setting and schematic in its arguments. Still, those arguments should be heard.

Hell to Eternity (1962) sets out to tell the true story of Guy Gabaldon, a white Angeleno raised from boyhood by a family of Japanese-Americans. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, his parents are interned, his brothers enlist to fight in Europe, and Guy (Jeffrey Hunter)--after clearing it with mama-san--offers the Marines his services in the Pacific as an interpreter. During the battle for Saipan (reenacted by director Phil Karlson on the island of Okinawa) he undergoes several transformations, from reluctant warrior to implacable avenger to, ultimately, a truce-seeker trying to save lives on both sides. That's a fine-sounding dramatic trajectory, but the two-hours-plus Allied Artists production is patchy, with some amateurish acting in the Los Angeles portion (including an early appearance by George Takei) and an excruciating, wishfully raunchy night of shore leave in Hawaii before shipping out to the war zone. Sessue Hayakawa of Bridge on the River Kwai fame dominates the final sequences as the Japanese commandant.

WWII films of the '60s were often half caper-movie, with ornate and muscular missions behind enemy lines dreamed up by the likes of Alistair MacLean. The caper in 36 Hours (1965)--which was dreamed up by Roald Dahl--reverses the dynamics. A U.S. diplomatic courier (James Garner) with knowledge of the plans for D-Day is kidnapped, drugged, and taken to a sanatorium surrounded by forest. He wakes up in the presence of solicitous doctors and staff who seem to be fellow Americans and ever so happy to have him back after all those years in a coma. War's long over, of course; we won--and isn't it a good thing the Allies scrapped that first, wacky invasion plan they almost used? The plan maybe he still remembers?... 36 Hours is an intriguing thriller up to a point--and the moment when Garner catches on to the trick is a grabber--but George Seaton's direction is pedestrian and the production has a soundstage-y look. Rod Taylor takes acting honors as the sympathetic German psychiatrist in charge of the plot, under the suspicious eyes of SS man Werner Peters. --Richard T. Jameson

Six action-packed World War II-themed films feature on this collection. The titles included are: 36 HOURS AIR FORCE COMMAND DECISION HELL TO ETERNITY THE HILL and THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO. Please see individual titles for synopsis information.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DOCUMENTARIES/MISC. Rating: NR UPC: 085391142140 Manufacturer No: 114214

36 Hours

WWII films of the '60s were often half caper-movie, with ornate and muscular missions behind enemy lines dreamed up by the likes of Alistair MacLean. The caper in 36 Hours (1965)--which was dreamed up by Roald Dahl--reverses the dynamics. A U.S. diplomatic courier (James Garner) with knowledge of the plans for D-Day is kidnapped, drugged, and taken to a sanatorium surrounded by forest. He wakes up in the presence of solicitous doctors and staff who seem to be fellow Americans and ever so happy to have him back after all those years in a coma. War's long over, of course; we won--and isn't it a good thing the Allies scrapped that first, wacky invasion plan they almost used? The plan maybe he still remembers?... 36 Hours is an intriguing thriller up to a point--and the moment when Garner catches on to the trick is a grabber--but George Seaton's direction is pedestrian and the production has a soundstage-y look. Rod Taylor takes acting honors as the sympathetic German psychiatrist in charge of the plot, under the suspicious eyes of SS man Werner Peters. --Richard T. Jameson

A gripping WWII thriller in which Nazis capture an American spy and try to trick him into thinking that the war has ended. Major Jefferson Pike has been sent on an intelligence assignment to Portugal. But once there he is trapped and drugged by Germans who take him to a remote hospital in the Black Forest. There psychiatrist Walter Gerber attempts to fool Pike into thinking that he's been suffering from amnesia for the past six years and that the fighting has ceased. With this plot the Germans hope to get the Major to reveal where and when the Allies will be mounting their D-Day campaign. To pull off this deception the Nazis convince Pike that the hospital is actually run by Americans -- a hoax that's easily accomplished because the entire staff speaks English. Will Pike realize what's going on or will he be duped into giving the Nazis the information they need?On the eve of the D-Day invasion an American intelligence officer in Portugal is captured by the Nazis. They brainwash him into believing that it's six years later so he'll reveal information about the invasion.Runtime: 115 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 012569797031 Manufacturer No: 79703

The Snake Pit

Virginia Cunningham (de havilland) appeared to have had an idyllic life - a nice home, a loving husband and prospects for a sriting career. But, something just wasn't right. Confusion, doubts about her husband's love, even violent outbursts led Virginia to be confined in a mental institution. She is put through a series of brutal treatments, including being forced into close quarters with patients whose disorders far exceed her own. The belief - the shock of the experience will return her to sanity.

The St. Valentine's Day Massacre

Jason Robards as Scarface teams with George Segal (in a rare bad-guy role) to battle the Feds. The 1929 massacre is bloody indeed.System Requirements:Features: Widescreen Feature Theatrical Trailers Fox Flix: Compulsion and Murder Inc. Running Time: 109 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 024543238669 Manufacturer No: 2233866

The Man Who Knew Too Much

MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH THE (DVD MOVIE)

The Last Time I Saw Paris

Soylent Green

The is the year 2022. Overcrowding pollution and resource depletion have reduced society's leaders to finding food for the teeming masses. The answer is Soylent Green - an artificial nourishment whose actual ingredients are not known by the public. Thorn is the tough homicide detective who stumbles onto the secret so terrifying no one would dare believe him.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: SCI-FI/FANTASY UPC: 012569647640