Penn, Arthur

The Train

This tense 1964 action drama from John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate) stars Burt Lancaster as a member of the French Resistance trying to prevent Nazi looters from taking valuable art treasures out of the country. A great ride all the way with Frankenheimer at his inimitable best. This is a true human-scale action movie of the sort we used to think of before "action" meant blowing up asteroids in space. Kinetic but almost rueful in tone the films chases and fights are not just eye candy but rather encourage audience involvement in moral stakes. Crisp and serious performances all around from Lancaster and 1960s icons Paul Scofield and Jeanne Moreau. System Requirements:Starring: Burt Lancaster et al. Director: John Frankenheimer Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating:  UPC: 027616753922 Manufacturer No: M110330

This is one of John Frankenheimer's breathless gems--all marvelous action that never lets up. Burt Lancaster plays a French train engineer during the waning days of the German occupation who tries to prevent Nazi colonel Paul Scofield from transporting a precious art collection back to Germany. Utilizing sabotage and cunning deception, Lancaster and his Resistance colleagues stall for time with the Allies on their way. It's a brilliantly made film, showing off Lancaster's acrobatic skills (he performed all of his own stunts) and Frankenheimer's sense of pacing and brilliant use of space. It's choreographed with the utmost precision (those are real explosions during the pivotal strafing sequence) and extremely authentic in its details. Lancaster is in rare minimalist form, and Scofield manages to extract intelligence and sympathy. A firecracker action film shot in crisp black and white, with yet another telling audio commentary by the always instructive director. --Bill Desowitz

The Miracle Worker

Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft had been playing their respective roles as Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan, on Broadway for some time before director Arthur Penn (The Left-Handed Gun) built a mesmerizingly beautiful film around their layers-deep performances. Duke is astonishing as the deaf, blind, mute Keller, who awakens to an awareness of language under Sullivan's determined guidance. Bancroft is fascinating and focused. Penn wisely kept his adaptation unencumbered by cinematic indulgence. The black-and-white film is sparse and charged with the immediacy of the drama. The script is by William Gibson, who also wrote the original play. --Tom Keogh

Starring in what is quite possibly the most moving double performance ever recorded on film (Time), Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke are remarkable in their OscarÂ(r)-winning* portrayalsof Annie and Helen. Ennobling and uplifting (Variety), this inspirational story of courageand hope is one of the finest works of art in the history of motion pictures (Boxoffice). Locked in a frightening, lonely world of silence and darkness since infancy, 7-year-old Helen Keller has never seen the sky, heard her mother's voice or expressed her innermost feelings. ThenAnnie Sullivan, a 20-year-old teacher from Boston, arrives. Having just recently regained her own sight, the no-nonsense Annie reaches out to Helen through the power of touchthe only tool they have in commonand leads her bold pupil on a miraculous journey from fear and isolation to happiness and light. *1962: Actress (Bancroft); Supporting Actress (Duke)

Bonnie and Clyde

One of the landmark films of the 1960s, Bonnie and Clyde changed the course of American cinema. Setting a milestone for screen violence that paved the way for Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, this exercise in mythologized biography should not be labeled as a bloodbath; as critic Pauline Kael wrote in her rave review, "it's the absence of sadism that throws the audience off balance." The film is more of a poetic ode to the Great Depression, starring the dream team of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the titular antiheroes, who barrel across the South and Midwest robbing banks with Clyde's brother Buck (Gene Hackman), Buck's frantic wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons), and their faithful accomplice C.W. Moss (the inimitable Michael J. Pollard). Bonnie and Clyde is an unforgettable classic that has lost none of its power since the 1967 release. --Jeff Shannon

The Paul Newman Collection (Harper / The Drowning Pool / The Left-Handed Gun / The Mackintosh Man / Pocket Money / Somebody Up There Likes Me / The Young Philadelphians)

Paul Newman's career slipped onto an unstoppable track with Somebody Up There Likes Me, his 1956 biopic about boxer Rocky Graziano. Of course that was his second picture, the first being the oft-joked-about bungle The Silver Chalice. Newman's Method-y intensity and dazzling good looks brought him stardom, and his intelligence and uncommon seriousness as an actor kept his movies interesting, especially as he tackled some of the best roles of the "antihero" era--an era he helped create.

Somebody Up There Likes Me is included in The Paul Newman Collection, a bulging seven-DVD package that shakes out thusly: three late-1950s titles from the beginning of his career, one mid-sixties hit, and three lesser films of the early 1970s. It's by no means a "best of" compilation, being limited to Warners and MGM titles, but it gives a flavor of Newman in his prime time. He got the Graziano role after James Dean died, and his performance is a very busy, post-Brando jumble of tics and mumbles. The movie holds up nicely as a boxing picture, and the location NYC shooting won an Oscar for cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg (you can see why director Robert Wise got hired to do West Side Story after this). Sal Mineo and Steve McQueen are in the cast as Newman's fellow j.d.s.

The Left-Handed Gun (1958), based on a teleplay by Gore Vidal, is a truly weird, compulsively watchable artifact from the psychological-Western genre. Newman plays Billy the Kid, glowering and grimacing like a rebel without a cause. It's one of those films that has much more to do with the time it was made than the time it is set; also notable as the big-screen debut for stage and TV director Arthur Penn. The Young Philadelphians (1959) is more conventional, an entertaining soap opera about a young lawyer (Newman) with an old-money Philly name but no money, who gets burned by love and decides to connive his way to the top. Young Robert Vaughn snagged an Oscar nomination for a showy turn as an alcoholic society lad.

Harper (1966) is chockfull of kooky mid-Sixties design and Rat Pack patter (courtesy screenwriter William Goldman). But it must be said that Newman is miscast as the melancholic private eye of Ross Macdonald's literary world, here re-imagined as a wisecracking hepcat who mugs his way through a missing-persons investigation. The supporting cast is a weird over-the-hill gang including Lauren Bacall, Janet Leigh, and Shelley Winters. That film's hero, Lew Harper (renamed from Macdonald's "Archer"), returned in 1976's The Drowning Pool, a more bearable if somewhat humdrum whodunit set in New Orleans. Newman's wife, Joanne Woodward, has a supporting part, but the picture is most notable for an early Melanie Griffith nymphet role.

Pocket Money (1972) is one of those only-in-the-seventies movies that pairs Newman with Lee Marvin in a drowsy, nearly plotless comedy. Both actors give elaborate performances: Newman plays a numbskull two-bit cattle broker who takes absolutely everything literally, and Marvin is his buddy in Mexico who signs on for an ill-considered cattle-buying job. One of the credited screenwriters is Terrence Malick, and the movie has a highly eccentric feel for language. Finally, The Mackintosh Man (1973) is one of the periodic duds that director John Huston would crank out in his otherwise starry career, with Newman as a spy on an incomprehensible case in England. The first half is a red herring, and Dominique Sanda (more recently of The Conformist) is out of depth with the English language. It's a bleak film with a kind of grinding fascination, and the Maurice Jarre score is catchy but fatally overused. --Robert Horton

With a career approaching nearly six decades Paul Newman has shown himself to be one of Hollywood's most enduring superstars. Now available on DVD are 7 of this Hollywood living legend's films in The Paul Newman Collection. Bonuses include new and vintage featurettes.Set Includes:HARPER (1966)SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES ME (1956)THE LEFT HANDED GUN (1958)THE YOUNG PHILADELPHIANS (1959)POCKET MONEY (1972)THE MACKINTOSH MAN (1973)THE DROWNING POOL (1975)Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 012569816763 Manufacturer No: 81676

Bonnie and Clyde (Two-Disc Special Edition)

Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway deliver pitch-perfect performances as the title characters Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker in this depression-era crime drama. Young beautiful Bonnie Parker is bored with life in her go-nowhere small town. When she meets the charming and ambitious fledgling criminal Clyde Barrow she sees her chance for a life of excitement. The two fall in love and gleefuly begin robbing small banks across Texas and Oklahoma making headlines and gaining noteriety along the way. But while the people see the gang as courageous rebels fighting the powers that be the law sees them as dangerous criminals who must be stopped.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA/CRIME & CRIMINALS UPC: 085391167983 Manufacturer No: 116798

One of the landmark films of the 1960s, Bonnie and Clyde changed the course of American cinema. Setting a milestone for screen violence that paved the way for Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, this exercise in mythologized biography should not be labeled as a bloodbath; as critic Pauline Kael wrote in her rave review, "it's the absence of sadism that throws the audience off balance." The film is more of a poetic ode to the Great Depression, starring the dream team of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the titular antiheroes, who barrel across the South and Midwest robbing banks with Clyde's brother Buck (Gene Hackman), Buck's frantic wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons), and their faithful accomplice C.W. Moss (the inimitable Michael J. Pollard). Bonnie and Clyde is an unforgettable classic that has lost none of its power since the 1967 release. --Jeff Shannon

Alice's Restaurant

You can get anything you want there, or so went Arlo Guthrie's song, a lengthy monologue about a Thanksgiving dinner and how its aftermath kept Guthrie out of the Vietnam-era draft. Arthur Penn's movie version, which stars Guthrie, James Broderick, and Pat Quinn, has a shambling, good-natured feel, much like Guthrie's epic tall tale. But as it follows Guthrie's adventures (he gets arrested for improper disposal of Thanksgiving garbage and the arrest renders him unfit for military service, in the draft board's eyes), it also examines the freewheeling nature of relationships in that period--and the toll that freedom took on those relationships. Guthrie is a natural performer, particularly funny during the draft board sequence; but the heart of the film is Quinn and Broderick's troubled marriage. --Marshall Fine

"It is hard to imagine a more beautiful movie" (time) than this critically acclaimed chronicle of hippie life during the late 1960s which garnered the acclaimed director of Bonnie And Clyde his second Oscar nomination. Based on the song by folk music troubadour Arlo Guthrie son of legendary "dust Bowl" balladeer Woody Guthrie this tribute film to "the lost generation" features memorable scenes with other folk artists like Pete Seeger who join Arlo in song to make a profound statement about war protest and change.In the late 60's a changing social and political climate inspired a new generation to create a lifestyle outside of the mainstream. Twenty-two year-old Arlo's journey to find a place for himself and his music includes a visit to his dying father in the hospital gigs in New York and romps with his friends Alice and Ray who run a small restaurant in Stockbridge Massachusetts. And when an incident at Alice's Restaurant plays a pivotal role in Arlo's avoidance of the draft it sends him down a road that he will consider a small price to pay to keep his freedom and his beliefs.System Requirements:Starring: Arlo Guthrie Patricia Quinn James Broderick Pete Seeger Lee Hays Michael McClanathan Geoff Outlaw and Tina Chen. Directed By: Arthur Penn. Running Time: 69 Min. Color. This film is presented in "Widescreen" format. Copyright 2000 MGM Studios.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY Rating: R UPC: 027616857644 Manufacturer No: 1001444

Night Moves

An LA detective leaves his marital woes behind to pursue a missing person case the Florida Keys and reopens an old murder investigation.Running Time: 101 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 012569688728

This vastly underrated Arthur Penn film from the mid-1970s ranks as one of the era's nastiest and most fascinating pieces of business, a detective story that shuttles back and forth between Hollywood and the Florida Keys, with a plot nearly as complex as Chinatown. Gene Hackman stars as a tired, aging private eye who, as a favor to a friend, agrees to track down a runaway teen. But the case turns out to be something much larger: a smuggling ring of Mayan antiquities. The human impulses get darker and darker and Hackman's character gets pulled in deeper and deeper, even as his own life is falling apart. Ultimately, in one of his best and most unsung performances, Hackman winds up hurting the people he is trying to help. A great cast includes Susan Clark, Jennifer Warren, a young James Woods, and a very young Melanie Griffith. --Marshall Fine

Bonnie and Clyde - Ultimate Collector's Edition

One of the landmark films of the 1960s, Bonnie and Clyde changed the course of American cinema. Setting a milestone for screen violence that paved the way for Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, this exercise in mythologized biography should not be labeled as a bloodbath; as critic Pauline Kael wrote in her rave review, "it's the absence of sadism that throws the audience off balance." The film is more of a poetic ode to the Great Depression, starring the dream team of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the titular antiheroes, who barrel across the South and Midwest robbing banks with Clyde's brother Buck (Gene Hackman), Buck's frantic wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons), and their faithful accomplice C.W. Moss (the inimitable Michael J. Pollard). Bonnie and Clyde is an unforgettable classic that has lost none of its power since the 1967 release. --Jeff Shannon

Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway deliver pitch-perfect performances as the title characters Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker in this depression-era crime drama. Young beautiful Bonnie Parker is bored with life in her go-nowhere small town. When she meets the charming and ambitious fledgling criminal Clyde Barrow she sees her chance for a life of excitement. The two fall in love and gleefuly begin robbing small banks across Texas and Oklahoma making headlines and gaining noteriety along the way. But while the people see the gang as courageous rebels fighting the powers that be the law sees them as dangerous criminals who must be stopped.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA/CRIME & CRIMINALS UPC: 085391167976 Manufacturer No: 116797

The Chase

A small town sheriff tries to recapture an escaped prisoner.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: UN
Release Date: 4-APR-2006
Media Type: DVD

An almost absurdly star-studded cast brings to life Horton Foote's story of prejudice, violence, and frustrated love in The Chase. When Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford) escapes from prison, a drunken party in his hometown turns into a vigilante mob. The news disrupts the birthday celebration of a local oil tycoon (E.G. Marshall), whose son (James Fox) is having an affair with Reeves's wife Anna (Jane Fonda). Meanwhile, a bank vice-president (Robert Duvall) knows his wife (Janice Rule) is cheating on him but can't do anything about it except spread a little misery. The sheriff (Marlon Brando) struggles to hold things together until he can persuade Reeves to give himself up. The accents are thick and the emotions seem overwrought at first, but director Arthur Penn (Bonnie & Clyde, Little Big Man) weaves the multiple storylines together into an unsettling finale. Also featuring Angie Dickinson and Miriam Hopkins. --Bret Fetzer

Target

Gene Hackman and Matt Dillon play a typical (if unlikely) father and son, at odds over the usual generational stuff. Then Gayle Hunnicutt, as the wife and mother, disappears--and suddenly Sonny Boy discovers something he never knew about stuffy old Dad: that he's actually a retired government agent who's pretty handy with a gun and more than willing to waste whoever gets in his way as he tries to get his wife back alive. They bounce around Europe in pursuit, with the kid getting in Dad's way, in a plot that winds up chasing its own tail. Hackman and director Arthur Penn were much more effective a decade earlier when they made Night Moves. --Marshall Fine

In TARGET, Chris Lloyd (Dillon) does NOT get along with his father Walter. Walter is too careful, cautious, and boring to Chris, and never tries anything new, and Chris had to live by the same standards when he was growing up. But when his mother is kidnapped while in Europe, to Chris's confusion, Walter suddenly turns into a man of action and springs to life.