Extras:

• James Foley audio track
  
• Burns, Garcia, and Weisz audio track
  
• Doug Jung audio track
  
• Sundance Channel ANATOMY OF A SCENE (27:07)
  
• Three deleted scenes: several takes of Hoffman and a line of strippers, love scene between Burns and Weisz, and scene between Weisz and Chestnut (11:53)
  
• Ad for the soundtrack, with two music videos by F. C. Kahuna, and Zero Seven
  
• Trailers for CONFIDENCE, GODSEND, THE HARD WORD and FINDERS FEE
  

They like me! They really like me!

At the start of screenwriter Doug Jung's audio commentary track for CONFIDENCE, he explains how the project came to change once the director James Foley came on board. Foley wanted to shift the locale from a dark, morbid, and noirish New York City of the script for the sunny clime of Los Angeles. And Foley's reasons for doing so were very specific. According to Jung, Foley was inspired to do so by his memory of a review of an earlier film of his, AFTER DARK, MY SWEET. In the review, the reviewer noted that Foley's film, based on a Jim Thompson novel and set in the southwest, was less a film noir than a film soleil, and that Foley had managed to extract noirish qualities out of bright sunlight. They couldn't remember who wrote the review, but the notion stuck with Foley.

I was tickled to hear that remark, because I wrote the review. (For Jung's full quote, look to the end of this column.)

I have no idea how Foley came across that review, because it was published in 1990 in an obscure weekly newspaper in Portland, Oregon. Foley must have the world's best clipping service. In any case, I was enamored of myself for coming up with the concept, because I thought I had contributed something new to film criticism. I was so excited that I worked out a taxonomy of film soleil, tracking antecedents back to films from the '50s and earlier. I then sent the essay to FILM COMMENT, then edited by Richard T. Jameson. He sent it back with a rejection letter so mean that I couldn't even finish reading it and have never looked at it again (though the letter is sitting in a file folder somewhere). The essay probably was fairly amateurish, but still, I thought the idea was good and used the occasion of another film soleil -style movie to re-write and expand that essay in a Portland newspaper called PDXS that was even more obscure than the other one (tip to young writers: never write anything original when you can revise something old). Ever since then I've been trying to get somebody, anybody to publish a book on film soleil. but no publisher will bite.

So you can imagine my surprise and delight when the screenwriter for CONFIDENCE brings up the notion of film soleil. As far as I know, no one else has used that phrase in print besides me (though I think that J. Hoberman in the VILLAGE VOICE once talked briefly once in a review of film blanc). It's almost enough to make me love CONFIDENCE.

Almost.

But first a digression.

How easy it is to evoke the tones of traditional film noir. Street lamps. Dark alleys. Trench coats. Shadows slanting from Venetian blinds in dusty offices where the scent of death hangs in a plume of coiling cigarette smoke. A mysterious woman with golden hair and stiletto heels pleads her case to an impassive P.I. fighting inner turmoil, a man soon to be desperately on the run to nowhere.

Noir has been condensed to an easily cataloged visual vocabulary that evades its subtlety; and in fact, the multiple and sometimes incompatible variations of noir can render the genre difficult to define. As Wittgenstein might suggest in a lighter moment, no noir has all the genre's visual and narrative tropes, but every noirmust have some of them.

Yet as the culture ages and reconfigures itself, so, too, do its popular genres, and the same Wittgensteinian principal holds true for film soleil, a relatively recent variation or offshoot of noir. Reverse all those frozen noir images. Change the darkened street to a dry, sun-beaten road. Convert the dark alley to a highway mercilessly cutting through a parched, sagebrush-filled desert. Give the woman cowboy boots and stick her in a speeding car driven by a deranged man whose own biological drives lead him less often to sex than to fights over money. Institute these changes and you have film soleil. The string of sunlit crime films officially began in 1984 with the release of BLOOD SIMPLE, and eventually included KILL ME AGAIN (1989), AFTER DARK, MY SWEET (1990), and ONE FALSE MOVE (1992), heralding the arrival of a new cinematic style.

The critical breast beats with excitement when out of the cultural ether and the 400-plus films released annually by Hollywood comes a new genre. And in the ‘80s, one began to take shape. On its surface, film soleil is a simple reversal of film noir — night becomes day, city becomes country, lush love becomes raw and hate-filled sex. Tighter shooting budgets that require "closet drama" size casts and simple sets, a flood of neophyte directors on the market, and fluctuations in shooting practices all combined with a reaction to the Reagan ‘80s, to give rise to film soleil. Eventually, film soleil, a sub-genre or a sub-genre, will probably go the way of rural comedies and air mail delivery films. But for now its here, and invites analysis and assessment.

Arguably the most passionately followed of all film genres, the urban psychological crime drama dubbed by French cineaste Nino Frank as film noir has been commercially moribund for many years, while its films, made roughly between 1940 and 1959, live on in the VCRs and DVD players of passionate addicts and in a steady stream of books and articles that find the genre suitable terrain for multiple critical approaches (I have bought about 10 noir books in just the last two years alone). Other genres and mainstream films have easily utilized noir's appeal to male self-pity, its fantasies of lonely moral purity versus creatively cruel evil, its additions to cultural signatures of cool, and its skewed view of sexuality that is both frank and cunningly muted. Few of these borrowers have blended the elements of dark cinema into such a heady, flavorful cocktail.

Traces of film noirstill cling to the film soleil like last night's cigarettes on the fingertips and shirt. Male self-pity, money, guns and women remain the basic ingredients. Film soleil takes many fundamental noir elements and turns on the lights. That which is threatening in the shadows comes to seem more unremittingly bare and relentless under the sword-like rays of the sun.

Noir now has an ambiguous position within contemporary film. When attempts at traditional noirs are made, they are set in the past, such as the Robert Mitchum-Dick Richards FAREWELL, MY LOVELY from 1975, or evoke cinematic predecessors but without the constrictions of a Production Code, as in Lawrence Kasdan's BODY HEAT (1981), which is more of a soleil . But advances in color photography can be only one cause of traditional noir's demise, which noir needs to separate and isolate the visual components, human and otherwise, which make the genre's moral and narrative points.

As noir fell, film soleil rose, though not yet in an easily named cubbyhole. The key transitional film from noirto its new, sunnier incarnations came in Roman Polanski and Robert Towne's CHINATOWN in 19 74. Both an hommage and a playful variation on noir, CHINATOWN alternated images of urban squalor with those of the new frontier, of shade for sun.

Just as Herman Melville challenged western conventions in MOBY DICK by choosing the color white to symbolize evil, young filmmakers began overturning our expectations about where to find evil in their soleils. I think they gravitated toward film soleil because it's a genre that packs the kind of shock that comes when you overturn a box in your backyard and find a dead rat underneath. Consult Tarantino and the ears in RESERVOIR DOGS.

But film soleil is more than just a variation on noir. It represents the weaving together of many strands, foremost among them the work of Jim Thompson. That Thompson's books have proved a rich mine for soleil directors should come as no surprise to those familiar with earlier adaptations, such as Sam Peckinpah and Walter Hill's THE GETAWAY (1972). The prolific writer who was eventually reduced to IRONSIDE novelizations and a "mercy casting" in FAREWELL MY LOVELY is perhaps the most influential figure in film soleil, providing the setting, the women, and the heroes for actual soleils, and inspiring a host of mimics. As often happens the French were there first. Bertrand Tavernier's COUP DE TORCHON (1981), adapted from POP. 1280, and transplanted from the American south to Equatorial Africa in the mid-‘30s, nevertheless captures in its YOJIMBO-like story the essential Thompsonian hero, a man surrounded by conniving people who all conclude that he is too stupid to catch on to their blatant machinations.

This Thompsonesque hero is situated in a story that draws upon an assortment of earlier heist films, such as Phil Karlson's Reno-set 5 AGAINST THE HOUSE (1955) and Stanley Kubrick's THE KILLING (1956), as well as the "road thriller," from DETOUR (1945) and GUN CRAZY (1949) to its more philosophical manifestations, such as BADLANDS (1973). The genre also alludes to — or emerges from the same primordial soup as — two other important strains of popular film. Desert sci-fi from the ‘50s such as THEM! (1954), TARANTULA (1955) and THE BRAIN EATERS (1958) established the eeriness of that vast, lonely landscape. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956), blended bright California sun with dark closets and caves, reversing what is now the current trajectory by importing noir in the desert instead of the desert into noir. The dark "closet" westerns of Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher, with a little Raoul Walsh thrown in (PURSUED, from 1947), provide models for getting the most, narratively and thematically, from small casts and limited settings.

The slow and inexorable march of film soleil to its current preeminence finds benchmarks, either thematic or visual, in THE WAGES OF FEAR (1952), TOUCH OF EVIL (‘58), and PURPLE NOON (1960). Robert Ryan takes on the mantle of a pre-soleil icon with his appearance in numerous precursors, including INFERNO (1953). This little seen Roy Ward Baker 3-D film, which anticipates desert sci-fi, casts Ryan as a wealthy husband dumped in the desert as part of a murder plot by wife Rhonda Fleming. He also pops up BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (1955), which draws upon that strand of noir concerned with troubled veterans, planting them in the desert waste.

Unlike noir homages of the '70s, soleil takes a selection of traditional elements and shapes them to reflect modern concerns. These elements can be easily cataloged. Guns. Noir didn't fetishize or phallicize firearms. That's a modern obsession. The fist-fight, which is the usual action climax of so many simple crime films, doesn't appear in film soleil. In most modern action movies, the gun is the unequalizer, a symbol of a basic unfairness that combatants seek to have over each other. Now, it's the fire-fight that is the culmination of narrative tension in most popular films. In soleil, however, it only an occasional capper, such as in ONE FALSE MOVE. Most film soleil take a surprisingly modest approach to gunplay. Confrontations are psychological and emotional, as at the triumph of evil at the end of THE GRIFTERS or a stud's sexual enslavement at the climax of THE HOT SPOT.

Money. It's still the American grail, but more important than ever in the aftermath of '80s greed and desperation and the current economic crash. Money continues to fuel the plots of most soleils — THE GRIFTERS, ONE FALSE MOVE, AFTER DARK, MY SWEET, KILL ME AGAIN — as it did in many noirs. Villains. You also find a tougher breed of renegades, rogues, and gangster wannabes in film soleil. The disparity between rich and poor has regained Dickensian proportions, and the world is a meaner place; the home-invading, cop-killing drug-peddler trio in ONE FALSE MOVE is an especially frightening example. Gangsters are more ruthless — for example, Pat Hingle in THE GRIFTERS and James Woods in THE GETAWAY and AGAINST ALL ODDS — and roam freely in a world of their own making, a fishbowl of wealth and privilege that others are striving to enter.

Women. The women of film soleil are driven by the new selfishness. Like lottery players, they pin all their hopes on one big killing — which ends up requiring a series of killings. Knowing that as a commodity sex is now more valuable than ever, the slick soleil dames—Jennifer Rubin in DELUSION, Joanna Whalley-Kilmer in KILL ME AGAIN, Linda Fiorentino in THE LAST SEDUCTION — are the ruthless mercs who are so often associated with noir, but who are usually permitted to triumph in soleil.. There are a few nice women, the equivalents of Robert Mitchum's vanilla girlfriend in OUT OF THE PAST, such as Mimi Rodgers in WHITE SANDS, but they tend to be minimized; surely the female to which the genre ultimately aspires is Drew Barrymore's trouble, amoral but fair vixen in Tamra Davis's GUNCRAZY.

Heroes. If soleil's leather-clad or skimpy-dressed women are becoming gutsier and franker, the men are shrinking. They are weaker, dumber, poorer; their sorry state is only occasionally mitigated by a wit and self-reflection that remains hidden, in true Thompsonia fashion, to all but the viewer. Reckless and compromised, John Getz in BLOOD SIMPLE, John Cusack in THE GRIFTERS, Bill Paxton in ONE FALSE MOVE, and Gary Oldman in ROMEO IS BLEEDING, inspire in the viewer little faith that they can extricate themselves from a tight situation — and they usually don't.

Bad Marriages. Perhaps the true subject of film soleil, the bad marriage takes center stage when, as in for example KALIFORNIA, the feel good, self-help culture meets the serial killer on a friendless highway to nowhere.

But film soleil has also added to the panoply of noir-derived crime drama elements with variations drawn from other genres.

Cars. The wide open spaces find utterly disparate people battling each other in cramped autos. Whereas noirused the car, if at all, as a transitional space for conversation, in soleil it is the psychodramatic prelude to the killing ground. In Carl Colpaert's DELUSION (1990), perhaps the quintessential soleil, Jim Metzler, Jennifer Rubin, and Kyle Secor play mind games that no one of them fully grasps, and in KALIFORNIA, two separate, troubled relationships intersect like a car wreck.

The road. As in the road film, the highway invites movement, but as a antidote to facing oneself, and toward a goal that too often turns out to be illusory.

Trailer parks. This pervasive and fascinating American symbol joins the promise of movement with almost inescapable stasis, as shown in GUNCRAZY and KALIFORNIA. It has spawned a genre unto itself, represented by HOLD ME THRILL ME KISS ME (1992) and GAS, FOOD LODGING (1992).

The desert. This vast American landscape, in which one is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, which holds promise and death simultaneously, is crucial to the concerns of film soleil, where evil is open and out front to those who allow themselves to see it.

The film that sparked film soleil, the Coen Brothers' BLOOD SIMPLE, is emblematic of subsequent films soleils in that none of its successors really resembles it or each other. AFTER DARK, MY SWEET (1990) and THE GRIFTERS (1990) explicitly embrace Thompsonian nihilism. Director Carl Franklin and screenwriters Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson's ONE FALSE MOVE, which tracks a number of doomed people who congregate in Star City, Arkansas, explores the tensions underlying race relations in America with a Faulkneresque vigor. Tamra Davis's GUN CRAZY (1992) is a quietly hilarious social satire, presenting Drew Barrymore as a 16-year-old living in a desolate trailer with her mom's boyfriend (Joe Dallesandro). Barrymore's boyfriend (James LeGros) is an ex-con with a penchant for guns — which she picks up from him at the expense of her "stepfather," a few local teens and several cops (she then passed it on to Mickey and Mallory in NATURAL BORN KILLERS). Davis and screenwriter Matthew Bright draw on the rich heritage of American road films and criminal couplings to rub the viewer's nose in romantic dreams despite the dire circumstances. SUTURE, the debut feature of co-directing Coenheads Scott McGehee and David Siegel (who went on to make the soleil ish variation DEEP END), is a body-switching thriller akin to the Frederick Nealy novel that was turned into SHATTERED (1991). It's a meditation of the inability of people to see what is right in front of them, made clear by the Buñuelian casting of the two central characters, two brothers, one white (Michael Harris) and the other black (Dennis Haysbert), a fact upon which no one remarks. This recurring theme of moral blindness plays itself out in the concluding images, in which a shrink intones moralizing platitudes about Haysbert and his future over images that show him living happily ever after.

Among the many directors who have dabbled in film soleil — John Flynn (ROLLING THUNDER), Stephen Frears (THE GRIFTERS), Katherine Bigelow (POINT BREAK), Roger Donaldson (WHITE SANDS, THE GETAWAY), Martin Scorsese (CAPE FEAR), Richard Tuggle (TIGHTROPE), Bradley Battersby (BLUE DESERT) — some auteurs have emerged as specialists. Premier among them is John Dahl, whose films tend to be soleils. RED ROCK WEST, is set in Wyoming and offers a variation on his previous KILL ME AGAIN. In that one a Nevada P.I. (Val Kilmer) finds himself in the middle of battling criminal spouses (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, Michael Madsen). In RRW, a roaming, historyless man named Michael (Nicholas Cage) arrives for a job at an oil field that he sabotages himself out of getting. His finances at the end of the line, Michael ends up in a bar in the town of Red Rock, whose owner Wayne (J.T. Walsh) thinks Michael is the hit from Texas, that Wayne hired to off his wife Suzanne (Lara Flynn Boyle). Michael plays along for a while in order to get the money, but soon finds himself over his head. The real hit man, Lyle (Dennis Hopper) finally arrives, other people turn out to be not who they seem, and Red Rock becomes a calescent killing ground.

Darker yet funnier than KILL ME AGAIN, RRW is more "country" than desert (there's a cameo appearance by Dwight Yokum). It's a world of high neck beer bottles, truckstops and Stetsons. As a town, Red Rock is a noirish center of displacement. No one who lives there is suppose to be there or wants to be there. It's a place in which Suzanne, obsessed with horse riding, dons boots and jodhpurs more appropriate for a fox hunt than a gallop through a moisture-starved terrain that fails to yield up the elegance and social position to which her garb suggests she aspires.

Dahl digs deep into soleil concerns. His output, small though it is, helps codify the elements of the sub-genre — the uncompromisingly selfish woman, the blending of cop and crook roles, and the hero from nowhere with practically no identity. James Foley, it turns out, is another soleil obsessed filmmaker.

soleil has silently permeated the culture and influenced other movies. Variations on soleil 's concerns include: WILD AT HEART (1990), David Lynch's film from a novel by Barry Gifford, who also wrote a book about film noir; THELMA & LOUISE (1991), a semi-feminist reversal of the traditional road film drawing upon some elements of film soleil ; and FLESH AND BONE (1993), Steve Kloves's examination of memory and regret that features practically every element of film soleil except the ineffable patina of an actual crime film (though a crime takes place).

Film soleil is a fairly thriving genre for one not that many people have identified. Of about 153 noir-style films (listed in an appendix to the third edition of Silver and ward's FILM NOIR) released between 1980 and 1992, 46 — just under a third — have been soleils. Once it is pinned down by critical scrutiny, filmmakers may actually strive to make soleils, as Foley has, and thus possibly kill off the genre thanks to the self-consciousness — and ultimately the self-parody — that freezes the broad strokes of a genre and drains its life.

But the real impetus for film soleil was the economic forces in the ‘80s that heightened or made more attractive to filmmakers the already existing elements of noir, economic conditions that have returned with key variations. Most soleils are set in California and the west, the chosen playground and the ideological induction center for Ronald Reagan, whose economic policies created the America that spawn film soleil as a reaction, and now of George W. Bush and his advisors. If the economic climate changes, will soleil continue to be viable? Is it a style vital enough to adapt to change, as few highly specific genres seem to be?

Exploration of the genre has been based less on homage to Genres Past than on reactions to America Present. At the same time each individual soleil is more unlike than similar to all the others, a condition that obtains more so here than in any other genre — or style or approach (however one wants to designate soleil ). Can a genre survive when the characteristics that join all the members together are so fragile?

I fret about the fate of film soleil because outside of certain high-profile major Hollywood releases, it is the one form of film that actually confronted the world, be it race relations (ONE FALSE MOVE) or economic hazards (DELUSION) or the unblinkered war between the sexes (KALIFORNIA and most other soleils, in one way or another). The collapse of soleil would simply mark the continued trivialization of American cinema, in the grip of market researchers and unimaginative corporate robots. Let's hope that young filmmakers stick to their guns and continue to play desert solitaire.

Which brings us, finally, to CONFIDENCE. James Foley's film shows the genre alive and well, but compromised by the film industry's obsession with happy endings.

CONFIDENCE concerns a crew of roving con artists who as the film begins are winding up a scam. The team consists of Jake Vig (Edward Burns), the ostensive leader, and Big Al (Louis Lombardi, of the SOPRANOS second season), Gordo (Paul Giamatti), and Miles (Brian Van Holt). Unfortunately, their mark is a mere agent for someone else called The King (Dustin Hoffman), and through a complicated set of obligations, Vig and his team must work with The King on a specific scam to square things.

CONFIDENCE is reasonably entertaining up until its end. Though you know going in that not everyone or everything will end up being what they seem, but what's hidden from the viewer is some of the characters' motivations. These are subtly and cleverly woven into the film's fabric. But though the ending is an organic outgrowth of the incidents set up in the movie, it feels too much in line with the sort of "mega happy" ending that film studios favor and which, to me, suggests some kind of compromise, either from above or from within. I'm not advocating that every thriller have an unhappy ending; but this is a film about criminals who get away with theft and murder; a little cosmic justice might set the scales back into balance.

The transfer of the film to disc is good and captures DP Juan Ruiz Anchia's experiments in bold cartoon colors (not unlike a Michael Mann film). For a modest film the disc comes laden with supplements. There are no less than three audio tracks. Aside from the aforementioned Doug Jung track, there is also one by James Foley and a third with Burns, Andy Garcia, and Rachel Weisz. All of them are informative, though Foley, in mentioning the photos on the wall of the bar behind The King, confuses Robert Capa with Weegee. In the film itself, Weisz struck me as miscasting (the sort of novelty casting that put the British Helena Bonham-Carter as the street scuz in FIGHT CLUB), but her track comments are very charming and modest, which won me over to her more than the movie did.

The Sundance Channel's episode of ANATOMY OF A SCENE about the movie gives what appears to be a thorough account of the filmmakers' intentions, while three deleted scenes are that rarity: scenes that really should have been cut. The first consists of an ungodly number of takes showing Hoffman talking to an underling while inspecting a line of strippers. I suppose that it is a good object lesson in how an actor subtly varies what he does without losing the meat of a scene, but it is a boring sequence, except for the fact that there are about 16 nearly nude women standing in front of Hoffman. The second is the aftermath of a love scene between Burns and Weisz, and they don't come across as all that comfortable with each other, or on the same page about what the scene is suppose to convey. The last scene is between Weisz and Morris Chestnut, who plays the underling to Robert Forster, the mark for the team's scam. The scene was removed because it violated the principal that nothing in the film occur outside the consciousness of Burn's character (because he is narrating the film), but it is a nice little scene that shows dimensions to Weisz's character.

Finally, there is a ad for the soundtrack, with two music videos, and trailers for CONFIDENCE, GODSEND, THE HARD WORD and FINDERS FEE.

Bottom of the World

TITANIC: FOX STUDIO CLASSICS #11

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 16 April, 1953
  
• 98 minutes
  
• NR
  
• Fox
  
• Directed by Jean Negulesco
  
• Credited writers: Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch, Richard Breen
  
• Cast: Clifton Webb (Richard Ward Sturges), Barbara Stanwyck (Julia Sturges), Robert Wagner (Gifford Rogers), Audrey Dalton (Annette Sturges), Thelma Ritter (Maude Young), Brian Aherne (Capt. Edward John Smith), Richard Basehart (George Headley)
  
• Cinematography: Joseph MacDonald
  
• Editing: Louis R. Loeffler
  
• Significant music: Sol Kaplan
  
• Awards: Oscar for the screenplay, and one nomination
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: NA

Plot in one sentence: The experience of several people on board the Titanic.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Audio commentary by Richard Schickel (his name is misspelled on the box, but not on the disc)
  
• Audio commentary by Michael Lonza, Robert Wagner, Audrey Dalton, and Silvia Stoddard
  
• Audio essay by Silvia Stoddard (11:24)
  
• "Beyond Titanic" (1:33:14), from 1998, narrated by Victor Garber, made for Fox Television and A&E
  
• Movietone News newsreels: "TITANIC" Premiere Thrills South" (1:10), and "CinemaScope and THE ROBE win Oscars" (1:11)
  
• Trailer (2:29)
  
• Still gallery (20 screens)
  

If you needed any further proof that James Cameron's TITANIC was a great film, or if you needed evidence that bread and butter filmmaking has come a long way in 50 years, you need only turn to the Fox DVD of the 1953 version of the sinkable ship's saga, number 11 in the Fox Studio Classics series.

Jean Negulesco and James Cameron's versions of the story are surprisingly similar, not just in title and in the obvious historic facts that both directors had to hew to, but in the manufactured human dramas they use to glue together cast off and castaways.

Negulesco was a bland studio hack of virtually no distinction whose films look like those of every other hack studio director who shot a lot of exteriors in a hanger and relied on stock footage. His TITANIC, from a script credited to former Wilder partner Charles Brackett along with Richard L. Breen and Walter Reisch, tells three mini stories within the historical account. The minor one's concern a defrocked priest (Richard Basehart) who is drinking himself into oblivion (though we encounter these two facts in the opposite order), and the film's version of the Unsinkable Molly Brown, called Maud Young and played by Thelma Ritter, who is a baroquely garbed vulgar nouveau riche pursued by the ship's resident roué/coward. The alcoholic priest story probably comes from Brackett, who was known to down a few. The time spent on these sub plots is negligible, and in fact reading these summaries will take more time than viewing them on the screen.

The central "drama" is a Henry Jamesian story of a couple breaking up. The husband is Richard Ward Sturges (Clifton Webb). He is a rich American living in Europe in the Jamesian mode, doing little but playing bridge and adjusting the cuff of his sleeve. His wife Julia (Barbara Stanwyck), is more fully American, to such an extent that she is fleeing back to the states, after many decades, with her children, so they can be raised amid bedrock values. Richard has cottoned to this scheme and bribed his way onto the Titanic, by exchanging identities with someone else (a plot point vaguely repeated in Cameron's TITANIC). In the most "adult" part of the plot, Sturges learns that his beloved son is not really his (I wonder if this plot element is based on Brackett's affection for fellow Paramount screenwriter and eventual pioneering director Preston Sturges?).

This is all dull as dishwater and, coupled with pedestrian special effects (a model in a tub), this makes for torturous viewer for anyone but a film sociologist or historian. Richard Schickel, who does the first audio commentary track on the disc, seems to agree. He can barely maintain interest in the film, and talks about nearly everything but the film on the screen.

The gang on the other track are much more interested, if only because two of them were in it. Robert Wagner and Audrey Dalton, who play a college athlete and the object of his affection, the Sturges daughter, make appearances on what appears to be an edited commentary track. Dalton especially has interesting things to say about how movie sets work and some of the tricks used to get things done (Dalton, apparently, had a wide ass, but you'll never see it because the filmmakers conspired to hide it from the viewer). The other yakkers are Michael Lonza, who covers the technical and biographical side of things, and Silvia Stoddard, a writer and historian with a special interest in the Titanic. This track is over all very brisk and informative and maintains the high standards of the Studio Classics series.

Stoddard also presents a 12-minute audio-only essay on the aftermath of the Titanic sinking, and discusses briefly the discovery of the ship in the late '80s. This is basically an addendum to the commentary track and strikes me as left over, if welcome, material from the track's editing.

Other features include two short Movietone News newsreels, the theatrical trailer, and a gallery of about 20 stills.

But the best supplement on the disc, indeed the best feature on the whole thing, is "Beyond Titanic" a 90-minute made-for-TV documentary from 1998, narrated by Victor Garber (who was in Cameron's TITANIC), and made for Fox Television and A&E. This is a nice, long, meaty account of the sinking itself, but more important, of how the media has used or exploited the Titanic ever since. The doc contains rare footage of other Titanic movies, from a German version of the story that indicts the British as fools, to an episode of THE TIME TRAVELERS television show, in which the main characters find themselves on the ship, with no one listening to their pleas.

Bat Fight

THE VAMPIRE LOVERS/COUNTESS DRACULA: MGM MIDNITE MOVIES DOUBLE FEATURE

Original Movie:

• Theatrical release: THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, 4 October, 1970/COUNTESS DRACULA: 20 December, 1970 in the UK
  
• 91 minutes/ 93 minutes
  
• R/PG
  
• Hammer, AIP/ Hammer, Rank, Fox, AIP
  
• Directed by Roy Ward Baker/Peter Sasdy
  
• Credited writers: Harry Fine, Michael Style, Tudor Gates from the story "Carmilla" by Sheridan Le Fanu/ Jeremy Paul and Alexander Paal and Peter Sasdy, from Valentine Penrose book THE BLOODY COUNTESS
  
• Casts: Ingrid Pitt (Marcilla/Carmilla/Mircalla Karnstein), George Cole (Roger Morton), Peter Cushing (General von Spielsdorf), Jon Finch (Carl Ebhardt)/ Ingrid Pitt (Countess Elisabeth Nodosheen), Nigel Green (Capt. Dobi the Castle Steward), Sandor Eles (Lt. Imre Toth), Lesley-Anne Down (Ilona Nodosheen, Elisabeth's Daughter)
  
• Cinematography: Moray Grant/ Kenneth Talbot
  
• Editing: James Needs/ Henry Richardson
  
• Significant music: Harry Robinson / Harry Robinson
  
• Awards: none
  
• Budget: NA/ NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: NA/NA

Plots in one sentence: Plot./plot.

Disc Stats:

Extras: Side One

• Audio commentary with Ingrid Pitt, Roy Ward Baker, and Tudor Gates (19:29)
  
• Audio of Ingrid Pitt reading excerpts from Sheridan Le Fanu's CARMILLA, from 1871 (11:59)
  
• Theatrical trailer (2:48)
  

Extras: Side Two

• Audio commentary with Ingrid Pitt, Peter Sasdy, and Jeremy Paul
  
• Theatrical trailer (3:07)
  

Audio tracks are usually happy affairs. A person who presumably likes the film at hand sits down to talk about it. Or a group of people associated with a movie come together in a screening film to revisit a work that engaged their attention, either recently of from some time in the past. The more recent the occasion, the more likely it is that the participants will be happy and gay about working together. The longer that time has passed between movie and reunion, the more likely it is that the participants will be frank about problems on the set. With COUNTESS DRACULA, star Ingrid Pitt sprouts fangs and takes on her director in a yak track that descends into acrimony. It is one of the strangest audio tracks you are likely to hear.

Her track appears on a double disc from MGM, one of those economical Midnite Movie double features. Neither of the films on this disc is especially good. COUNTESS DRACULA is somewhat arty for a vampire movie, and THE VAMPIRE LOVERS is not about people who love vampires but Lesbian vampires who are lovers. This film is all a big tease, and represents Hammer studio's effort to goose its image into the '70s, after so many talky, staid horror remakes from the '50s (about the only Hammer films I really like are their Holmeses, which is the perfect marriage of material and studio tendencies, and THE STRANGLERS OF BOMBAY).

COUNTESS DRACULA is a dull story about the supposedly real life Countess Bathory, who also figures in the recent DVD release of THIRST. Called Countess Elizabeth here, she is a decrepit old crone who discovers that bathing in the blood of virgins restores her youth, whereupon she begins to flirt with a local young stud. THE VAMPIRE LOVERS concerns the Karnstein family, which has its own Van Helsing hunting for them. Pitt plays Mircalla who in her spare time seduces the local womanhood. The film was probably meant to be lush and sickly with the hothouse atmosphere of an orchid greenhouse but instead has the tedium of most Hammer films.

Neither film is especially good or especially bad, and the mere title of THE VAMPIRE LOVERS evokes expectations that its preceding reputation is bound to be misleading about. COUNTESS DRACULA is slightly more interesting because the people who made it were not the usual lot of British film hacks. Still, Ingrid Pitt didn't get along with the director and she maintains that animosity in the accompanying audio track.

It's not entirely clear what it was that bothered her about COUNTESS DRACULA, and caused her to turn against the film and its director, Peter Sasdy. She doesn't make it very clear in the audio track, perhaps out of discretion. But it had something to do with the way the film portrayed the deaths of the young women that Bathory slaughtered, or what Bathroy did with the blood. Supposedly she was so furious she walked off the movie and the finished film had to be dubbed with another actress's voice (though it sounds like Pitt on this disc).

It may be that Pitt is simply a difficult person to work with. She certainly had no lack of ego. On the VAMPIRE LOVERS side, she admits to enjoying nude scenes because she knew she had a hot body. In any case, for the most part, this audio track, which includes Sasdy, and someone named Jeremy Paul, goes along smoothly. It is only at the end of the film that Pitt can no longer contain her ire. Like a mistreated vampire resurrected from the grave for one last act of vengeance, she turns huffy and refuses to speak of the reasons why she hated COUNTESS DRACULA. It's a perplexing, fascinating portion of the commentary track and, thanks to its novelty, in itself makes the disc worth having.

A Nightmare on Elm Street

RUBY

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 27 March, 1992
  
• 111 minutes
  
• R
  
• Triumph/Polygram
  
• Directed by John Mackenzie
  
• Credited writer: Stephen Davis, from his play LOVE FIELD
  
• Cast: Sherilyn Fenn (Candy Cane), Jeffrey Nordling (Hank), Danny Aiello (Jack Ruby), Joe Viterelli (Joseph Valachi), David Duchovny (Officer Tippit), Richard C. Sarafian (Proby), Joseph Cortese (Louie Vitali), Marc Lawrence (Santos Alicante), Arliss Howard (Maxwell)
  
• Cinematography: Phil Meheux
  
• Editing: Richard Trevor
  
• Significant music: John Scott
  
• Awards: none
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: $919 thousand

Plot in one sentence: A reinterpretation of the actions of Mafia-connected Dallas strip club owner Jack Ruby in the days before and after the assassination of JFK .

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Trailers for RUBY, LITTLE NIKITA, and DONNIE BRASCO
  

As we come fast upon the 40th anniversary of the JFK assassination, I'm hoping that we will see more releases of old assassinolgy material and new documentaries on DVD. Instead what we receive so far is RUBY, which presents a shockingly sympathetic portrait of Jack Ruby and a bizarre theory as to why he shot Oswald, intermixed within material that shows great familiarity with the out reaches of conspiracy theory.

Ruby, it should be remembered, was the Chicago-born gangster who ran a strip club in Dallas. Two days after Kennedy was shot, Ruby went into the basement of the Dallas police station and shot the suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, as he was being readied for transfer from one station to another. How Ruby got into the basement remains a mystery, with different people telling different stories. That Ruby was friendly with Dallas cops is confirmed in the Warren Report itself, but subsequent researchers have discovered much more about the man, which director Mackenzie doesn’t incorporate here.

About 12 people have played Ruby at one time or another, from Oscar Orcini in the movie EXECUTIVE ACTION to Michael Lerner in the TV movie RUBY AND OSWALD, but also including Brian Doyle-Murray's more plausible Ruby in JFK (1991). But it must be said that Danny Aiello's turn is among the strangest. The cheap, murderous hood, who lived with a man in a motel room and is alleged to have favored his pet dogs over any other person, sexual partner or otherwise, is here portrayed as a soft-hearted old coot tormented by his moral sense that the Mafia, to whom he owes fealty, is "untoward" when it comes to Kennedy himself. Sherilyn Fenn, of TWIN PEAKS, plays "Candy Cane" (the same CB name used in JOYRIDE by the way), a waif he picks up in a bus depot who turns out to be more experienced than he imagined. They develop a Philip Baker Hall - Gwyneth Paltrow (HARD EIGHT) style friendship, and Ruby helps her meet the mobsters and Kennedy, for whom she becomes a Judith Exner-type go-between. The movie is very vague about just what the mobsters and Kennedy have in common, and things aren't any clearer when a CIA agent shows up (played by Arliss Howard in one of the all-time bad performances in an already ridiculous movie). Candy Cane ends up in Dealey Plaza to see Kennedy shot (from the Grassy Knoll, the film makes clear), although given her intimacy she would probably really have been back at a hotel room waiting for Kennedy to get back.

Because this movie was made in 1992, Fenn plays a stripper who never shows her breasts, the least of the film's implausibilities, but also because it is from 1992, it features David Duchovny in a small and ambiguous role as Officer Tippit, whom Oswald also supposedly killed. His flirtations with X Files began early. The film's worst implausibility is that Ruby shot Oswald to force the world to recognize that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Logic would indicate that keeping Oswald alive might be a better bet in terms of fact-finding, but the film's Ruby seems not to be the sharpest knife in the drawer.

The disc bears a decent transfer and no extras beyond a few trailers.

Samurai Padding

SHOGUN

Original Series:

• Originally aired: September, 1980
  
• NR
  
• NBC/Paramount Television
  
• Cast: Richard Chamberlain (Pilot-Major John Blackthorne), Toshirô Mifune (Lord Toranaga), Yôko Shimada (Lady Toda Buntaro, Mariko), Frankie Sakai (Lord Yabu), Alan Badel (Father Dell'Aqua), Damien Thomas (Father Alvito), Michael Hordern (Friar Domingo), Vladek Sheybal (Captain Ferriera), George Innes (Vinck), Leon Lissek (Father Sebastio
  
• Directed by Jerry London
  
• Credited writers: Eric Bercovici, from the novel by James Clavell
  
• Cinematography: Andrew Laszlo
  

• Significant music: Maurice Jarre
  

• Awards: Emmy Awards: Outstanding Limited Series, Costume Design for a Series, Graphic Design and Title Sequences; Golden Globes: Best TV-Series, Drama, Best Performance by an Actor in a TV Series - Drama (Richard Chamberlain), Best Performance by an Actress in a TV-Series - Drama (Yôko Shimada), plus 12 nominations
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: NA

Premise in one sentence: A shipwrecked English sailor becomes a samurai in 17th century Japan.

Disc Stats:

Extras: Disc Five

• "The making of SHOGUN" (one hour, 19 minutes)
  
• "The Samurai" (5:34)
  
• "The Tea Ceremony" (4:34)
  
• "The Geisha" (4:55)
  
• Selected director commentary on seven selected scenes
  
• Ad for the Indy set
  

It pains me to be critical of movies. It really does. Especially something like SHOGUN, which took eight months or more to shoot, cost millions of dollars, employed the labors of actors and crews on two continents, and was latter much beloved by television viewing audiences. But goddamn SHOGUN is a boring show.

As is well known, NBC took the 1975 best seller by James Clavell and turned it into a hit mini-series in 1980. Clavell, a former scriptwriter and producer, apparently wanted to be James Michener when he grew up, composing ponderous, dialogue heavy door stops with a lot of hot sex thrown in like an Ayn Rand novel, Clavell's specialty being miscegenation rather than rape. Naturally, readers loved the book. SHOGUN the miniseries tells the laborious story of an English sailor named Blackthorne (Richard Chamberlain) shipwrecked on Japan, where he becomes indispensable to the local warlord (Toshirô Mifune) while flirting with his lady and learning the language and the local customs, activities so "odd" to his western eyes that he spends most of his time looking on passively in wide eyed wonder.

The filmmakers take an exotic story and setting and manage to make them dull. Part of the reason for the movie's lassitude is that Blackthorne is usually a passive witness to other people's doings, and Chamberlain must have been exhausted at the end of the day thanks to having to come up with 2000 variations on looking quizzical. Another reason is that the miniseries is horribly padded. When a group of people exit or arrive somewhere, the transition must be show in exhausting but content-free detail. When Blackthorne rows over to his ship, anchored in a bay, the trip must happen in real time. Knowing that for 90 per cent of this mini series's running time nothing actually happens, the filmmakers rely on the music to cue the audience. This is the kind of throwback musical score that when something dramatic happens the music actually goes "DUM Dum dum." Within the first half hour a rebellious serf gets his head sliced off, inspiring hope that this mini-series might actually be interesting, but then nothing happens again for a full four more hours! It's more interesting watching Chamberlain perversely trying to put his pants on under a blanket and singing and dancing to a weird sea shanty than it is to see one more tea ceremony or listen to a crowd of samurai yak in untranslated Japanese (the filmmakers sort of give up on the untranslated Japanese trick by hiring Orson Welles to narrate and provide the vocals for several of the foreign actors. Thus when Mifune talks to the troops, Welles does the voice over and you get two actors for the price of one).

SHOGUN remains by common consent the most popular TV mini series of all time, though I'm not really sure how such claims can really be verified despite all the polls and focus groups and rating systems brought to bear. I guess there are a lot of people out there in TV land whom I don't know at all who watch whatever is put before them like prisoners receiving their daily gruel. Or it may be that shows like SHOGUN are the perfect narcotic, bringing the gift of sleep to millions of hard working insomniacs. I'd like to think that thanks to HBO we all have higher standards now. If this DVD set sells a billion copies I'll have to revise my optimism.

SHOGUN appears on disc with an OK transfer (for some reason old shows never look all that great on disc, looking as muddy and blotchy as they did when first broadcast), with two sound options. The supplements are modest but informative, but not even leading off with commentaries. Director Jerry London does a sort of "greatest hits" audio track with comments on only seven scenes out of the whole 12 hour enterprise.

The big feature is a 90-minute documentary that traces the history of the book, the show, and its reception. Many of the participants are especially frank about the money and the working conditions, but if anyone on the set feuded or behaved badly we wouldn't know it from this doc. It is supplemented with three little featurettes that examine aspects of Japanese life — as if the movie itself hadn't already gone into laborious detail about such things.

DVD QUOTE OF THE WEEK: CONFIDENCE screenwriter Doug Jung:"One of the first things that had to change with the movie was — it was originally set in New York, which was very dark and kind of grimy, and for various different reasons from production cost to whatever other aesthetic reasons there may have been, it was moved to Los Angeles instead of actually trying to shoot maybe in Vancouver or something for New York, which I thought was actually a great idea, and after talking to Foley about it I realized what he was going to do, which I thought was kind of interesting. He told me about a movie he did called AFTER DARK, MY SWEET, which he said one of the reviewers, I forgot who it was, had mentioned that instead of being a film noir it was actually a film soleil, which I thought was kind of interesting, because we weren't going to shy away from the brightness and the sun of Los Angeles. He was going to use that and there's a poppy feel to L.A. I think, which made sense in a way especially with these characters who are supposedly a little nomadic, and kind of bump around from town to town." —Doug Jung on the visual look of CONFIDENCE.

NEXT TIME:SHOGUN, SLEEPING BEAUTY, John Sayles, and more!

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