Extras Side One:

• Audio commentary by Ford biographer Scott Eyman, with occasional comments by Wyatt Earp III
  
• Trailer (2:20)
  

Extras Side Two:

• The Pre-Release version of MY DARLING CLEMENTINE
  
• "What is the Pre-release Version?" (41:48), narrated by preservationist Robert Gitt
  
• Stills gallery (18 frames), a blend of location shots and sketches
  

I feel sorry for film preservationists. I really do. Their occasional successes at finding that rare print or that alternative audio track are far outweighed by the frustrations caused by studio practices of the past, the elusiveness of most footage and many prints, and the hazards to health of rooting around in the bowels of largely ignored European museums. And even if the searcher finds what he is looking for, there is no guarantee that when the film is released or transferred to DVD that someone in the studio won't fuck it up the disc or the package in some nearly disastrous way.

Still, when it works (like finding a different version of THE BIG SLEEP), it works really well, and even when the film isn't worth it, so to speak, it's still always a good idea to fight against the natural entropy of the studios and keep any movie, all movies alive.

The distinguishing characteristic of the Fox Studio Classic edition of John Ford's MY DARLING CLEMENTINE is that the preservationists managed to find a different print, a preview version of the movie that Darryl F. Zanuck used to try and fix the film's "problems." Now, if you are a Ford buff, don't get too excited about this. Ford didn't have much to do with all of the new footage that's been unearthed, and at least one other Fox house director, Lloyd Bacon, shot some of the footage that remains in the finished film. But there are a few scenes that are extended thanks to the discover of the pre-release print, such as in the introductory chat between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday.

MY DARLING CLEMENTINE is, to state the obvious, Ford's post-war western about the showdown between Wyatt Earp and his brothers with the Clanton clan at the OK corral in Tombstone in the 1880s. Ford supposedly knew Earp and got the straight account from him about the showdown, but in fact Ford hyper-mythologized it, apparently not giving a wit about historical accuracy as he instead pondered a dark and brooding conflict between good, ugly, and bad.

The story had been told before, and in fact, CLEMENTINE is a remake of FRONTIER MARSHALL, an earlier Fox version of the same material (Zanuck appears to have liked this story quite a bit). In Ford's version Earp (Henry Fonda) is herding cattle across the country when his youngest brother is killed and his stock stolen. In response he moves into Tombstone and becomes sheriff, with his two surviving brothers his deputies. It's not exactly clear from the movie whether he knows that it was the Clantons (led by Walter Brennan), but at the very least he is in search of proof for that assertion (and later it comes as a surprise that the whole movie takes place in the course of about three days).

Meanwhile, Earp gets to know the town, whose unofficial ruler is Doc Holiday, the tubercular gambler loved by two women, both of whom he spurns. Doc is played by Victor Mature, who was the Sylvester Stallone of his day. Mature was the sort of richly handsome hunk consigned to muscular roles because everyone thought he was a moron. Instead, Mature had a little bit of complexity to him (Ford appears to have liked him because he wasn't pretentious, though they never made another film together). Both here and in KISS OF DEATH Mature shows otherwise unplumbed maturity (Tyrone Power was originally suppose to be Doc). In any case, Earp and Doc become friends, their alliance complicated only by the fact that Earp falls in love with Doc's fiancé, who has tracked him down to this hell hole. After a seemingly endless series of digressions Doc helps Earp get the Clantons and once again all is right with the west, now becoming slowly gentrified by encroaching civilization.

CLEMENTINE isn't the best Ford western. Hell, it isn't even the best film about the Earps (that honor, I think, goes to TOMBSTONE). But it is certainly one of Ford's most interesting westerns, in that he has inflected the piece with a darkness he was beginning to feel back in the late '30s, interrupted by the start of World War II and which that conflict only deepened. Ford's Tombstone is a gloomy town of dark shadows and low hanging lanterns, of smoke filled bars and of back alleys blackened by night, a town of harlots and lone stagecoaches and churches not quite caught up with its clientele. In fact, until SHANE, the westerns didn't really have another town so bereft of people and amenities. It's also a city where evil resides uneasily with ordinary folks. Brennan is one of Ford's classic whip-wielding fascists. In a line that anticipates a similar quip from Eli Wallach in THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY, Clanton beats his cowering sons for failing to kill Earp in a bar. "When you pull a gun, kill a man," he snarls.

Given the importance numerous critics and scholars have given CLEMENTINE Fox's Studio Classic release is a modest affair — if you can call two full versions of the movie modesty. Side one has the CLEMENTINE that many of us are familiar with, in a crisp and dark full frame transfer, nearly perfect except from the occasional distraction, such as the pesky hair in the gate at the bottom of the screen in Chapter 11. The mono sound is audible.

The extras on side one consist of the trailer and an audio commentary track by Ford biographer Scott Eyman, whose words are buttressed with the occasional comments of Wyatt Earp III. Eyman's chat is crisp and brisk, and in stark contrast to the rather leisurely film itself, Eyman sails through the track and probably provides twice the amount of information found on a typical audio commentary. Yet it doesn't feel rushed. Eyman knows a lot about Ford and the context of the film (he only makes one error that I noticed, saying that this was Fonda's last western with Ford, which is true if you consider FORT APACHE a cavalry film and not a western).

The extras on side two include the complete pre-release test version of MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, along with a 40-minute feature that isolates the differences if you don't want to sit through the whole movie again. Finally, there is a brief stills gallery that in reality consists of a blend of location shots and production sketches. By the way, anyone interested in an in-depth discussion of Ford's film and its western contexts can consult the lengthy section dedicated to it in Scott Simmon's excellent book THE INVENTION OF THE WESTERN FILM.

Other DVDs of the Week

LOO GRANT

THE CARY GRANT COLLECTION
I recall well the exact moment that I knew Pauline Kael was full of shit.

It was on page 21 of the WHEN THE LIGHTS GO DOWN, Kael's seventh collection of NEW YORKER reviews, which kicks off with a career survey of Cary Grant (originally published in July, 1975). Like many of Kael's reviews and essays, "The Man From Dream City" begins on a high, by lauding Grant as the sophisticated alternative to the brutish Clark Gable, and praises Grant's skill at both comedy and romance. Like Kael's "Raising Kane," her assassination attempt on Orson Welles, "Dream City" is a celebration of screwball comedy under the guise of something else. The essay goes along like this, doling out that dollop of praise and this demurral, for several pages. But then, almost exactly halfway through the essay, Kael turns on her subject, and from then on, Grant, who could before that do no wrong, now could do no good.

I realized that this was a feature of all Kael's so-called "positive" reviews. Love turns to hate. Praise turns to disparagement. It's as if the writer could dwell on a subject she felt kindly to for only so long before the urge to destroy it sat in, as if exposure even to something she liked fed its contradiction. After page after page of praise, it comes as a shock to read, on page 21, a paragraph that begins, "Nearly all Grant's 72 films have a certain amount of class and are well above the Hollywood average, but most of them, when you come right down to it, are not really very good." The reader is permitted a modicum of confusion, since Kael has just spent the last score pages deconstructing every nuance of Grant's cinematic persona.

Kael's perpetual contradictions and reversals are annoying, and Grant's career as a whole contains more enjoyable films than, say, Victor Mature's. Still, to paraphrase Theodore Sturgeon, 90 per cent of everyone's career is crap, and the four entries in Fox Home Video's Cary Grant Collection are sad testimony to the fact that if you watch the wrong four Grant films in a row you might wonder what all the fuss was about. The quartet of films on offer in this collection span Grant's career from the early scratchy sound era to the final widescreen color sex comedies that lacked both sex and comedy.

BORN TO BE BAD is a negligible film directed by Lowell Sherman and shows little of the wit or drama that later Grant films would have when he had the power to select his projects. In fact, it's not even really a Grant film. He's just in it. BORN TO BE BAD is really a Loretta Young film, and since it is pre-Code, there are plenty of shots early in the film of Young in her undies or sprawling around with her legs perilously in danger of widening further to reveal all. Young plays a golddigger who sees Grant's rich industrialist as an easy mark for an extortion scam when Grant's character, driving one of his company's trucks, knocks down the unwed mother's ill-tempered brat. Via plot complications, Young and progeny move into the married Grant's mansion, where Young can render the millionaire thoroughly ensorcelled. But even though the film is pre-Code it still has a moralizing ending, designed, no doubt to bring tears to the eyes of women spectators addicted to tales of noble suffering.

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Fans of Howard Hawks will be sorely tested by I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE, Hawks's 1949 comedy that trades on a catch-22 of wartime bureaucracy. Grant and his new WAC-wife (Ann Sheridan) must work around the lack of provisions for female service-people bringing back mates to the states. Their solution, late, late in the film, is to tart Grant up as a woman and slip him through the hoops of bureaucracy. If Grant in a ghastly black wig and skirt sounds funny to you, this is the film.

The problem is why Sheridan and Grant like each other in the first place. Charles Lederer, Leonard Spigelgass, and Hagar Wilde's unfunny script begins with the two pitted against each other, the reasons all confined to backstory, referred to only in dialogue. All their bickering doesn't make them an attractive couple, which shows that by the end of the '50s the screwball comedy has lost its edge and its attractiveness. In addition to that, Grant is actually playing a French soldier, though he makes no bid for a French accent or even acts "French." In other words, he is completely miscast for this film (Charles Boyer might have been better). Sheridan is a much better Hawksian woman than you'd expect, or at least than I expected, but there is hollowness to the film, and a sensation that nobody really had a story to tell; the film is padded out with endless shots of Sheridan driving Grant around on a motorcycle. Robin Wood, in his excellent monograph on Hawks, praises WAR BRIDE as one of the successful comedies and contextualizes it with Hawks's adventure films, but I didn't get it. Maybe it's because the film is 50 years old, but I couldn't understand the characters' motivations. Why did this couple like each other? Where did they start to like each other? Why did they pretend to dislike each other? It wasn't clear to me.

WAR BRIDE finds Grant in reserved mode. There are periodic stretches of his career in which the actor simply ceases to offer anything. He becomes immobile and expressionless on the screen. Sometimes he's even a little mean spirited, but most of all he is just plain hard to read, and this is one of those films.

The production history of PEOPLE WILL TALK is more interesting than the film itself. Like CLEMENTINE, it's another film that producer Zanuck felt he had to supervise closely, thus driving writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz crazy, even though they were both coming off the success of ALL ABOUT EVE. The film is based on a German comedy called "Dr. Praetorius," apparently about a mystically talented MD, but in Mankiewicz's hands it becomes a forum for him to decry current trends in American life, such as political witch hunts and harsh medical policy. It's Mankiewicz in Shavian mode.

This set of films could easily be called the Unwed Mother Collection, as in this film Jeanne Crain (whom Mankiewicz loathed) plays a woman bearing the child of her dead boyfriend. The noble Dr. Noah Praetorius (Grant), who runs a clinic, takes her under his wing and ends up marrying her. Meanwhile, a mean-spirited academic (Hume Cronyn, the Simon Callow of his day) at the local med school who hates Praetorius has organized an investigation geared in part to explain the mysterious and ominous man who follows Praetorius around, one Shunderson (Finlay Currie, from GREAT EXPECTATIONS), a kind of gigantic human pet. After a lot of speechifying, all injustices are righted.

PEOPLE WILL TALK is based on a play and ultimately it feels stagy. Its philosophy of kindness in medical practice, which seems to have anticipated PATCH ADAMS by several decades, is sacrificed to the romantic narrative, which itself is not integrated into the HUAC subplot. Cronyn, who looks a little like Bob Balaban, is awful in the part of the weasly nerd, but his awfulness may be due to the way the part is written; nothing seems consistent in this film, and Cronyn's arch character is not of the same tone as the other characters. The dialogue tends to be pretty bad: "I never look a gift horse in the mouth. Do you?" "I never look any horse in the mouth."

And again I had problems with character motivation. Everyone from Cronyn to a toy store clerk is annoyed with everyone else, but why? Because Mankiewicz thinks that is funny? I actually think that George Stevens might have handled this material a lot better, but don't ask me why. It's just a gut feeling. Anyway, Grant is still in his oblique mode and you can't really get a read on him. Still, intimacy is a hard thing in real life, and Grant makes it seem easy. And it was during this film that I noticed that Grant was a great weaver; he doesn't just approach his partner, he dips, tilts, spins, and lurches, all smoothly executed, like a dancer.

KISS THEM FOR ME is a war comedy from 1957 that was probably riding the crest of MR. ROBERTS, and is the only widescreen and color movie in this batch. Grant plays a wartime pilot who is being urged by the military to promote the war effort back home, and to that end is followed around by Walter Klemperer, a press liaison. What Grant and his two buddies (Ray Walston is one of them) really want to do, however, is party in a swank stateside hotel. While in San Francisco, Grant meets Suzy Parker, the fiancè of an industrialist (Leif Erickson) who is getting rich off the war effort, and they sort of fall in love. Jayne Mansfield pops in as a continual guest at the boys' 24-hour hotel suite party.

Though written by Julius Epstein, who did CASABLANCA, the film is really derived from a popular play, which was itself derived from a novel called SHORE LEAVE, a bitter attack on the munitions industry and the soldiers who fell victim to it. By the time this material fell into the hands of director Stanley Donen it had become a frothy naughty comedy with lame double entendres, a glossy military comedy like OPERATION PETTICOAT.

There is something weird vocally about this movie. Grant's voice is raspy, the way Pacino and Eastwood's have become in their old age, and Suzy Parker's voice sounds ethereal, as if she were dubbed later, and I have no idea if that is her real voice. Parker is an interesting person, a former fashion model who provided the inspiration for Audrey Hepburn's character in FUNNY FACE.

All four discs enjoy good transfers and adequate sound, and in terms of extras each disc has at last the trailers for all the other films. Only WAR BRIDE has any substantial supplements beyond that, consisting of unedited newsreel footage of Hawks shooting the film, and of the European premiere, and a gallery of stills.

NEXT TIME: FREDDY VS. JASON, CABIN FEVER, JEEPERS CREEPERS 2, and more horrors!

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