AND THE WINNER IS...
By Robert Meyer Burnett
Well, folks, because I spent the last four days at the San Diego Comiccon...where Director Bryan Singer graciously announced I am, in fact, producing the new X-MEN special edition DVD (more about that in the coming weeks...), this one's a little short this week...
And who are we kidding...there's only one thing any of you really want to know...
WHO WON THE STAR WARS - THE ORIGINAL VISION DVDs?
Now, before I answer, I suppose it's only proper to offer some kind of explanation as to why the lucky
winner gets to watch Greedo NOT shoot first on DVD for the rest of their lives...
While many of you made great choices backed up with impassioned reasoning, like Frank Grimes and his choice of THE SURE THING, I was rather disappointed by the lack of diversity of the many picks. Sure, STAR WARS, EMPIRE, JEDI, RAIDERS, JAWS, FIGHT CLUB and SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION kept coming up, legit picks all...as did a number of Kevin Smith's films (ass-kissing will get you nowhere), but where were the classics? No one said ALL ABOUT EVE, or even ALL THAT JAZZ, two of my favorite films. Sure, a few folks named CASABLANCA, but what about foreign films? No Traffaut. No Kurosawa. Not even an Atom Egoyan film. What about obscure titles? Heck, if one of you mentioned WITHNAIL AND I or KNIGHTRIDERS, you may have won. One hundred years of filmmaking and only a few people threw out titles from before 1975. Frankly, I was disappointed.
So without further adu, here's HAMMERHEAD, Member #3462, with the winning entry. Hammer buddy, you did right by me. I'm proud of you...
As for the rest of you...take heed...
Favorite movie, huh? I help run a movie theatre, and before that I managed a video store, so I get asked that question an awful lot. And my reply usually comes out like this:
"I can't pick just one-- there's more than one kind of movie! Top Ten? By the time I've named ten I'll have thought of twenty more! How about ten Billy Wilder films and leave it at that? What about foreign films? What about silent films? Pornos? Do you really want to know of the esteem in which I hold Misty Regan? Get away from me, you hopelessly shallow wannabe film buff! What's your favorite movie of all time? Aww, REIGN OF FIRE? Jeez, how'd I guess? Alright, already. My favorite movies as they come to my mind, starting now:
THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR...
It's a fact. Under pressure, forced to qualify and quantify my reputation as a walking film encyclopedia, drunk or sober I rant, rave, argue at length about the miracle of moviegoing that was 1982... and then inevitably name THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR (1947) first. So I guess that's the one.
Now I know there are a couple of other 32-year-olds on this board, but most of the rest of y'all are less than half my age. Hang in there. I'm gonna talk about a movie that was made 22 years before even I was born.
It's the turn of the century. The 20th century, that is. Lucy Muir, a young mother in her twenties, is a recent widow. Her in-laws want her to move in with them. For the first (but not the last) time in her life, she chooses independence, leaving with her daughter to live in a cottage by the sea.
She gets a very good deal. It seems the house is haunted, by the ghost of the man who built it-a retired seaman known only to us as Captain Gregg. The ghost tries to scare her off, but Mrs. Muir has nowhere else to go and stands her ground. The ghost come to respect her, and later, perhaps, to love her.
This film is never less than gorgeous to look at or to listen to. Thanks for this are definitely due the cinematographer, Charles Lang, who had previously shown his affinity for the supernatural in films like DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY and THE UNINVITED; and to the composer, Bernard Herrmann, whose scores for Ray Harryhausen and Alfred Hitchcock remain unmatched to this day.
But it wouldn't work at all without Gene Tierney's unearthly beauty or Rex Harrison's craggy charm. Halfway through the story, Mrs. Muir is in crisis: she has no more money and will have to return to her hated in-laws. The ghost has a solution: he will dictate a book for her to write, a sure-fire bestseller she will present as her own and live off the profits. The subject of the book? The story of his life, from beginning to end, as only a ghost could tell it. Although they never so much as touch, their intimate knowledge of each other at this point is palpable.
Where should Lucy/Lucia go from here? Continue a fulfilling but unworkable relationship, or rejoin the living? Can the ghost give her any more than he already has? Does he in fact exist at all, or is he just a figment of her lonely imagination?
I'm not going to go into the rest of the story here. Suffice to say this is the movie that Gets Me Every Time. Crying like a baby, every damn time. How much do I love this film? I first caught it by accident, surfing past the Disney Channel. I noticed there was a splice in the scene where the ghost watches Mrs. Muir get ready for bed. I scoured the TV guides for the next two years, taping it off of various channels.. and always that splice, in exactly the same place. When it was finally released on home video, I jumped again, and there was that splice again! WHO WOULD MAKE A MOVIE THIS BEAUTIFUL AND THEN HACK A PIECE OUT OF IT? Some five years later, it popped up at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, California. Now this is a place that only runs the best prints and in some cases has them specially made. I took the day off work. Took a two-hour train ride. Stood in line for an hour. Plopped myself down, and by gum, the print was flawless. No cuts, no scratches. All these years I'd only been missing half a second of film and you know what? It was worth it. And damn if by the end I wasn't sitting there, in a crowded theatre full of strangers, bawling my eyes out.
No matter how many wonderful and amazing pictures I list, CITY LIGHTS, CITIZEN KANE, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO, LITTLE BIG MAN, RUN LOLA RUN, SANJURO, DEADALIVE, DEBBIE DUZ DISHES, CHILDREN OF PARADISE, GROUNDHOG DAY... I'll know that Mrs. Muir has a room for me in that cottage by the sea.
That's all folks. There aren't any more STAR WARS - THE ORIGINAL VISION DVDs. They're all gone. Hammerhead...obviously, I'll need your contact information and some kind of proof as to who you are. As for the rest of my readers, do yourself a favor and rent a film you may have always heard about, but never taken the time to watch. But, in next week's column, a NEW contest begins.
Robert Meyer Burnett hopes to convince Paramount Home Video to give the upcoming STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER double-disc special edition the same treatment afforded to Robert Wise's STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE Director's Edition DVD.
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