Virtually unrecognizable from its first few seasons, when The Lucy Show (1962-68) was about a Danfield, New York widow, Lucy Carmichael (Lucille Ball), sharing a big house with her two children, a divorced friend (Vivian Vance) and her son, the Official Sixth and Final Season finds Lucy a single if decidedly middle-aged, star-struck birdbrain ensconced in Southern California apartment and working for stingy, stuffy banker Theodore J. Mooney (Gale Gordon). What began as a slightly subtler, certainly more domesticated sitcom gradually gave way to “skit-com” slapstick, with The Lucy Show‘s final two seasons especially becoming a revolving door of big-name Hollywood guest stars.

Just as I Love Lucy was never quite the same the moment William Holden set Lucy Ricardo’s putty Pinocchio-like nose aflame, The Lucy Show “jumped the shark,” even earlier though, oddly, audiences not only didn’t seem to mind, a big ratings bump strongly suggested that’s how they loved Lucy best. Lucy’s wild-eyed obsession with Hollywood’s elite might have proved limiting for Ball’s team of writers, but audiences couldn’t get enough, so it seemed. In this, its final season, The Lucy Show garnered its highest ratings ever, ranking #2 among all primetime shows that season, and for which Ball was awarded her second consecutive Emmy Award, against much younger competition.

I didn’t much care for The Lucy Show in my youth, having endured it endlessly in reruns during the 1970s when television viewers had far fewer viewing options. Looking at it now, all these decades later, I’m more forgiving of its conceptual laziness and found myself enjoying watching guests stars like Jack Benny, Edie Adams, Joan Crawford, and Frankie Avalon clown for obviously appreciative studio audiences, and, by golly, I found myself laughing out loud a couple of times most episodes.

It helps that these Paramount/CBS video transfers are so good, and that they’re supported by a ton of extra features, all of it coordinated with the assistance of Ball’s image-conscious estate. (Thomas Watson, in tiny type, is credited as the DVD set’s executive producer. DVD labels should be less stingy giving credit where credit is due.)

The Lucy Show‘s seismic story shifts reflect its rather tumultuous history. Bob Carroll, Jr. and Madelyn (Pugh) Martin, veteran writers on I Love Lucy, left after the show after the second season, with like-minded scribes Bob Weiskopf and Bob Schiller, also of I Love Lucy, following soon after. Ball’s ex-husband (and savvy television producer) Desi Arnaz, was still one-half of Desilu when The Lucy Show began and by all accounts was a substantial part of its early success. When he left the company in 1963, Elliott Lewis and Jack Donohue took over in turn, but for the last season Ball’s famously less-talented current husband, stand-up comedian Gary Morton became The Lucy Show‘s executive producer, though probably Ball was really running the show.

It was a busy time for Desilu. During The Lucy Show‘s early seasons the company’s main source of revenue was renting out the many stages and backlot space Lucy and Desi purchased from RKO – two big lots in Hollywood and Culver City – bought back in the 1950s. But beginning in 1966 Desilu was producing two very expensive hour-long dramas: Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. At the time Star Trek wasn’t doing so hot ratings-wise, but Mission: Impossible was a huge critical and commercial hit, and Ball made the wise financial decision to sell Desilu to Gulf+Western, a conglomerate that had recently acquired Paramount Pictures, Desilu’s next-door neighbor on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood.

In another amazing shrewd commercial decision, Ball ended The Lucy Show, reworking it as Here’s Lucy in order to retain ownership and control of the sitcom in which she’d star. Here’s Lucy ran another six years.

More than half of these Lucy Shows feature Hollywood stars, usually but not always playing themselves. “Lucy Meets the Berles,” the season opener, is a typical example, with Lucy moonlighting (as she illogically often did) as a secretary to Uncle Miltie, who’s taking a break from comedy in order to produce his first picture. He wants to cast a reluctant Ruta Lee and Lucy, overhearing her script reading over an intercom, mistakenly believes the two are having a torrid love affair. Though only mildly amusing, it’s nonetheless fun to watch Lucy and Berle playing to the studio audience, with Lee and Mrs. Berle almost breaking up on-camera a la The Carol Burnett Show.

Ball, ever the canny manager of her shows, had a standing agreement to trade off appearances with the biggest stars. For instance, after Carol Burnett appeared on The Lucy Show, Ball returned the favor by guesting on Burnett’s new comedy-variety series. Clearly, scripts were also tailor-made to stroke the egos of Hollywood royalty. That Lucy Carmichael made such a fuss (all, invariably, were her “all-time favorite”) helped, but the lengths the writers obviously went to lure big names is also sometimes hilarious and obvious.

In “Lucy and the Lost Star,” for example, Joan Crawford appears. In an opening scene, Crawford’s agent informs her that one particular studio is just dying to sign her, and for good money, too, because the public is just clamoring “for new Joan Crawford pictures!” In 1968? Shlockmeister producer Herman Cohen, maybe – but all of Hollywood?

That episode garnered a certain amount of infamy due to Crawford’s reported drunkenness during rehearsals, her feuding with Ball, and Ball’s unsuccessful attempts to replace her (with Gloria Swanson), but the final show, in which Ball and guest star Vivian Vance wrongly assuming the Great Star is destitute and try to reinvigorate her career, is legitimately funny on its own terms.

Besides regulars and semi-regulars like Mary Jane Croft, Mary Wickes, Doris Singleton, Lew Parker, and Roy Roberts, the star-studded guest star list this season also includes Jacques Bergerac, Frankie Avalon, Jack Benny, Dennis Day, Robert Goulet, Dick Shawn, Richard Arlen, Charles “Buddy” Rogers,” Vivian Vance (two episodes), Jackie Coogan, Edie Adams, Buddy Hackett, Phil Harris, Ken Berry, Ralph Story, and Sid Caesar. About half are “celebrity” shows. Barbara Babcock, Lucie Arnaz, and Gerald Mohr also make appearances.

Video & Audio

As with all (official) Lucy-related DVD releases, The Lucy Show – Official Sixth and Final Season looks splendid in its original full-frame format, strong color and sharpness throughout, with 24 episodes spread over four single-sided, dual layered DVDs. Episode titles with brief descriptions and airdates are offered as part of the packaging. The English-only mono, with optional SDH English subtitles, sounds great, too.

Extra Features

Supplements include an okay sketch with Ball, Tim Conway, and Carol Burnett from the latter’s comedy-variety series; a black and white clip from Ball’s Emmy Award win and her sincere acceptance speech; outtakes; costume sketches, vintage openings and closing (with sponsor spots, permission for which is duly noted); extensive production notes, less extensive cast bios, and photo galleries; and one episode, “Lucy Gets Her Diploma,” also offered in an Italian-dubbed version with Italian credits.

Parting Thoughts

Not really a classic of television comedy but for its guest stars, excellent home video transfers, mountain of extra features, and even for some of the comedy itself, The Lucy Show – Official Sixth and Final Season is Recommended.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes film history books, DVD and Blu-ray audio commentaries and special features. Visit Stuart’s Cine Blogarama here.

The Movies:

Kino Classics’ three DVD set Fritz Lang: The Early Works collects some of the earliest, rarest efforts from the director of such provocative classics as Metropolis (1926), M (1931) and Fury (1936). Probably the most surprising thing about the trio of restored 1919-21 German silents assembled here is that they have very little of the austere, carefully composed visual style that Lang would later be well-known for. Truth be told, they fall along the lines of typical early silent cinema – melodramatic, stodgy, plain, sentimental. Yes, they are more slickly produced than their American counterparts (there’s none of the obvious outdoor-for-indoor stagings found in most Hollywood productions of the era) but still marked by their overwhelming quaintness. For fans of Lang’s work, however, the set is worth a look for the occasional glimpses of the virtuosity that was to come.

Fritz Lang: The Early Works consists of the following three films:

Harakiri (1919; 87 minutes)
In this visually resplendent, pastoral retelling of the Madame Butterfly saga, a Japanese maiden named O-Take-San (Lil Dagover) falls in love with a visiting military officer, Olaf Anderson (Niels Prien). After they marry and Olaf leaves for Europe, O-Take-San has a baby. She holds out hope that he will eventually return, even while being romantically pursued by a Prince (Meinhart Maur) and facing unrelenting pressure from a Buddhist monk (Georg John) to give up her child to be raised by a two-parent family. Four years later, Olaf does return to Japan – with his European wife.

The audacious faux-Orientalism and sheer melodrama throughout Harakiri must have served as cinematic comfort food to a German public still adjusting to life after World War I (similar to what Fritz Lang himself was going through). The filmmakers certainly pulled out all the stops to make this Berlin-shot opus look as Japanese as possible, but the final effect winds up being a busy, antique-store vision of Japan. Leaden-paced, adequately acted and hobbled by a European cast that never convincingly appears Asian, Harakiri exists mostly as a curiosity. Lang’s direction is pretty stodgy overall, but there are a few stylized, thoughtfully done shots which seem to indicate that he was attempting to capture some of the visual simplicity of Japanese print artists like Hiroshige. Amidst all the frou-frou goings-on in the rest of the picture, that was quite a feat.

The Wandering Shadow (Das wandernde Bild) (1920, 67 minutes)
The tangled story that unfolds in the torrid melodrama The Wandering Shadow centers around the character of Irmgard (played by actress Mia May), a virtuous woman who, like many such heroines past and present, gets involved with the wrong kind of man. As the film opens, she is seen fussing on a train headed for the picturesque mountains of Germany, fleeing an unidentified gentleman. Through flashbacks, we learn that Irmgard once found employment with a wealthy free-love advocate (Hans Marr). The two have an affair and, with Irmgard pregnant and desperate, arrive at an agreement to have her marry the man’s brother (also played by Hans Marr) so it at least appears that the child is being raised properly. The confusing story eventually has Irmgard trudging through the mountainous terrain to come across a generous monk who offers her a chance at the redemption she so desperately desires.

Something of a godmother to the robust, quintessentially German mountain-climbing adventures that Leni Riefenstahl would star in a decade later, The Wandering Shadow counts as another draggy melodrama – although one that isn’t without its own campy appeal. Lang’s direction is so subtle, however, that one would never suspect that a future cinematic genius was responsible for it. The film as presented in this set is a 67-minute version assembled from surviving elements; it’s choppy pacing certainly doesn’t help the story be any more comprehensible (once it was over, I actually needed to have my spouse explain it to me – and much of it still didn’t make sense). Confusing and terribly dated as it is, the film does boast some nice, natural photography of a quaint village and mountainside vistas.

Four Around The Woman (Vier um die Frau) (1921; 84 minutes)
With the intriguing, multi-layered drama Four Around The Woman, one finally begins to see an identifiably Fritz Lang style coming into view. The story here concentrates on Mr. Yquem (Ludwig Harteau), a wealthy merchant with a beautiful, virtuous wife named Florence (Carola Toelle). By chance, Yquem sees a man that he believes once had an affair with Florence and follows him to a hotel. The man in question, William Krafft (Anton Edthofer), is secretly persuaded by Yquem to meet up with Florence so the jealous husband could spy on them. However, Yquem doesn’t realize that the man he’s tailing is actually the twin brother of his wife’s ex-lover. William’s brother, Werner (also played by Edthofer) is a cunning jewel theif who is out to fleece Florence’s vampy best friend, Margo (Lisa von Marten). While all this is expiring, a shady gentleman comes to call on Florence, threatening to expose the shameful secret of what happened on the day she got engaged to Mr. Yquem.

Like The Wandering Shadow, Four Around The Woman‘s scandal-ridden storyline came as the results of another collaborative screenplay that Lang wrote with his second wife, Thea von Harbou (both, coincidentally, have plots involving lookalike brothers). Plot-wise, the film is still somewhat routine and melodramatic, but Lang’s more assured directing and the sophisticated, lavishly appointed production puts this one at a distinct step above the other films in the set. Although Four Around The Woman‘s quaint, soapy theatrics are a far cry from the fantastic visuals and complex issues explored in Metropolis only a few years later, it’s an enjoyable flick that amply demonstrates Lang’s talents.

The DVDs:

Video:

The films on Fritz Lang: The Early Works were mastered from 35mm prints restored by Germany’s Friedrich Wilheim Murnau Stiftung Foundation, with period-appropriate tinting and missing segments reconstructed through surviving script excerpts or publicity material. While the prints used have the usual scratches, artifacts, and wear associated with silent era films, they are nicely mastered (each film gets its own disc) with few obvious defects other than some examples of missing bits of film resulting in choppy flow.

Audio:

All three films are furnished with whimsical, often intrusive and (especially on Four Around The Woman) repetitive original scores played by a small ensemble. These are composed by Aljoscha Zimmermann and they are pleasantly mixed in stereo for the DVD edition.

Extras:

None. Kino’s packaging is nicely designed if misleading (these films are not in the Metropolis style), and the brief descriptions provided on the back of the case left me yearning for more background info on these films. Historical info on the Decla studio, Fritz Lang’s life at this time, or bios of the actors (nearly all of whom are unknown) would have been helpful.

Final Thoughts:

Kino Classics’ Fritz Lang: The Early Works brings a few of the renowned director’s neglected silents into wide circulation, which is a cause for celebration in itself. The films, however, are at best historical curios. Overall, the set pales in comparison with recent, more comprehensively done projects like Criterion’s Lonesome and Edition Filmmuseum’s Four Films with Asta Nielsen. It’s worth a peek for those curious to see what Lang’s artistically unsure, often plodding earliest work was like. Rent It.

Matt Hinrichs is a designer, artist and sometime writer who lives in sunny (and usually too hot) Phoenix, Arizona. Among his loves are oranges, going barefoot and blonde 1930s movie comedienne Joyce Compton. Since 2000, he has been scribbling away at Pop Culture weblog Scrubbles.net. One can also follow him on Twitter @scrubbles.

It may be that BBC Worldwide is marketing Kingdom (2007-09), a dramedy starring actor Stephen Fry, specifically to fans of the better and longer-lasting Doc Martin (2004-present). There’s a superficial resemblance: Doc Martin (Martin Clunes) is the respected physician of an eccentric, seaside Cornish community that everyone brings their health and other personal problems to; while Peter Kingdom (Fry) is the respected solicitor of an eccentric seaside Norfolk community similarly besieged by residents, this time with legal issues. Like Doc Martin‘s Cornish setting, Kingdom‘s location filming (in picturesque Swaffham) attracted an army of tourists. The major difference though is that Martin is (hilariously) abrasive and misanthropic, while Peter Kingdom is exceedingly kind, thoughtful, and humanistic. That Fry is nearly six-feet, five-inches tall and pushing 300 pounds also suggests something of a gentle giant to Doc Martin’s petulant child-man.

And like Doc Martin, the eccentricities of Kingdom‘s continuing characters is a bit overemphatic. Doc Martin gradually fleshed out its regulars into believable, sometimes endearing characters but, at least based on these six season one episodes, Kingdom is less successful in this regard and it’s more predictable overall.

Nonetheless, Kingdom still entertains and Fry, as almost always, is fun to watch. The six hour-broadcast (i.e., about 45 minutes without commercials) episodes are presented on two single-sided, dual-layered discs. The show is in 16:9 enhanced widescreen, however something appears to have gone terribly wrong along the way. The video transfer is a headache-inducing mess. Static shots look okay but whenever there’s any camera movement, such as hand-held shots and especially horizontal panning, the image becomes extremely blurred and ghost-like. On big monitors especially these shots look truly terrible.

Articulate, educated Peter Kingdom plies his trade in Market Shipborough with devoted legal secretary Gloria Millington (Celia Imrie), the mother of a teenage boy and a recent widow; and Lyle Anderson (Karl Davies) a green trainee solicitor with equal parts of ambition and ineptitude.

As the series begins Peter is mourning the apparent suicide-by-drowning of his half-brother, Simon. Throughout this first series, Peter tries to make sense of it all, but gradually uncovers scraps of information suggesting that there may be more to Simon’s death than meets the eye. At the same time Peter’s mentally unstable half-sister, Beatrice (Hermione Norris), appears on Peter’s doorstep, having left rehab and looking to stay with her brother indefinitely – much to Gloria’s consternation as Beatrice soon turns the practice upside-down with her self-destructive behavior.

Other continuing characters include Peter’s wise Aunt Auriel (Phyllida Law, Emma Thompson’s mother), who has retired to a luxurious country estate/retirement home (and whose function is similar to Martin’s two aunts on Doc Martin); and Sidney (Tony Slattery), a profoundly smelly local constantly suing various developers and local councilmen.

Part lightweight mystery series, with Peter’s investigations leading to mostly unsurprising twists, part family comedy-drama, Kingdom is worth watching mainly for Stephen Fry, whose basic decency and humanism as Peter Kingdom is the heart of the show. He’s unfailingly polite and his faith and humanity, as opposed to Doc Martin’s cynicism and short-temperedness, is rather refreshing in these cynical times. Where Gloria can’t stand Beatrice and Lyle has no faith in Peter’s latest apparently guilty client, Peter Kingdom responds with endless patience and understanding, a legal Dr. Red Beard.

The biggest and most justified complaint levied against Kingdom is the characterization of Beatrice, who instead of engendering sympathy and/or laughs is merely intensely annoying. She spends most of this series of episodes upending Gloria’s filing system and carrying on a decidedly one-sided love affair with a artist/gigolo clearly taking advantage of her.

Flamboyantly played by Hermione Norris like a young Siân Phillips, whom she somewhat resembles, the big problem with the character is the inauthenticity of her mental illness. The writers seem more interested in the character as provocateur (especially in terms of Beatrice’s sexual promiscuousness) than as a realistically unpredictable, sometimes exasperating mentally ill sibling in need of a lot of attention and care.

Where Doc Martin often finds himself the reluctant, short-tempered mediator in local disputes having little or nothing to do with his skills as a physician, Peter Kingdom likewise finds himself having to sort through personal issues and problems of his neighbors, clients, family and employees. But where Doc Martin‘s medical matters are better integrated and often interesting, the legal aspects of Kingdom‘s stories are underemphasized and a bit deus ex machina when they’re worked into the plot.

Video & Audio

As described above, while Kingdom is appropriately presented in 16:9 enhanced widescreen, something went wrong during the mastering process as all six episodes look quite terrible whenever there is any significant camera movement, which is much of the time. How this happened is unknown as is whether the BBC and distributor Warner Home Video will offer replacement copies down the road, though I wouldn’t count on it. I managed to still get through the series, so it’s marginally watchable but it is a major distraction. The Dolby Digital Stereo fares much better, and the two DVD9s include optional English SDH subtitles.

Extra Features

The lone supplement is an okay behind-the-scenes featurette.

Parting Thoughts

Mild but entertaining, in widescreen with good audio but a problematic video presentation, Kingdom – Season One is a mixed bag that I’d recommend were it not for the video presentation. As such you’d best Rent It first.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes film history books, DVD and Blu-ray audio commentaries and special features. Visit Stuart’s Cine Blogarama here.

THE MOVIES:

Gainsborough Pictures, I’ll admit, is not a company I had heard of, despite the fact that they produced Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (and, indeed, were instrumental in encouraging the master of suspense’s early career). Formed in 1924, they spent most of their first two decades struggling to get a foothold in the British film industry. It wasn’t until the wartime period, when the studio switched owners and also picked up distribution through J. Arthur Rank, that Gainsborough found its footing. The title of this boxed set, Three Wicked Melodramas, fairly succinctly details what that footing was. Costumed romances and gothic potboilers became the Gainsborough signature. If one were to argue that, say, Ealing was the English equivalent of Warner Bros., producing a lot of respected mainstream fare, then Gainsborough was RKO, a place to make energetic B-pictures that could also be artful crowdpleasers.

The major turning point for Gainsborough came in 1943, when the studio released Leslie Arliss’ The Man in Grey (116 minutes). In Hollywood, The Man in Grey would have been dubbed a woman’s picture, as it’s a hearty mix of romance and soap opera, doomed love and shattered dreams, with costume and setting playing an important role in the psychological drama being portrayed. Indeed Arliss co-wrote the script with Margaret Kennedy, and they were working from Doreen Montgomery’s adaptation of Lady Eleanore Smith’s novel. If any crew of writers were set to know what women might want to see at the cinema, it was this one.

Except for a bookend sequence set in modern times, which envelopes the tale in such a way to emphasize its theme that some love is fated to be, The Man in Grey‘s narrative is set in the early 19th Century. Phyllis Calvert plays Clarissa, an heiress to a modest fortune, who makes a move up the social ladder when she marries the mysterious Lord Rohan, a gadabout who is expected to carry on the family line, but whom has no real interest in conventional living. Lord Rohan is played by a fiery James Mason, and represented a breakout role for the actor. He accepts an engagement with Clarissa because he sees her blandness as the path of least resistance. Once she bears him a son, they begin to split their time between separate homes, with the Lord raising their child away from his mother.

This leaves Clarissa alone to occupy herself as she will. On a night out at the theater, she spots her old schoolmate, Hesther (Margaret Lockwood), who ran away from the girl’s school after a gypsy (Beatrice Varley) refused to read her palm, sensing that a great evil existed in this woman. The same fortune teller warned Clarissa that Hesther would also be her doom, but as is often the case with romantic heroines, Clarissa is loyal to a fault. Seeing that the life of a traveling actress is doing her friend no good, Clarissa invites Hesther to stay with her. At the same time, the kept wife falls for Hesther’s acting partner, the rogue Peter Rokeby (Stewart Granger). Peter is many things–a thespian, a highwayman, an auctioneer–but behind the rakish exterior lurks a nobleman in exile. He and Clarissa begin an affair, while Hesther sets her sights on Lord Rohan. Tragedy will soon follow.

It’s kind of a corny, well-worn story, but as with all the best melodramas, the plot is not as important as the tone of the piece. The true pleasure of The Man in Grey is in how Leslie Arliss wholeheartedly and unpretentiously embraces the lustier aspects of the material. Indeed, there is something refreshing in how matter-of-factly the story handles its more scandalous elements. Though more sensual than overtly sexual, one has little doubt that sex is at work here. With it comes the ever-present threat of violence, not just amongst the men, but in Hesther’s murderous plans and Lord Rohan’s barely contained rage. Indeed, there is some lady slapping. There is also a casual racism that is presented as utterly normal, including a young servant boy (Harry Scott) who is clearly a white actor in blackface. Even this is somehow absorbed into the heated atmosphere. Arliss has dropped his characters into a social oven, and he’s going to bake them until they deflate or explode. Given the fates of both Clarissa and Hesther, and the limited options available to them, one could easily make a case for The Man in Grey being more than a simple bodice ripper: it’s a film that comments on the role gender plays in society, while toying with the myths of the Byronic hero. (The servant boy, alas, gets no such subtext: he ends up being a plot device, pure and simple.)

There is nothing pure nor simple about 1945’s Madonna of the Seven Moons (110 mins.), a film that is as fevered and crazy as its heroine. Directed by Arthur Crabtree (Fiend Without a Face), and adapted by Roland Pertwee (Michael Powell’s The Spy in Black) from a novel by Margery Lawrence, this film purports to detail a condition proven by medical history, though the veracity of the details strike me as questionable.

In this pre-WWII drama, Phyllis Calvert returns to play Maddalena, an Italian woman who, as a girl, was raped while picking flowers in the field. The trauma has haunted her ever since, and caused her to develop a split personality. In her everyday life, she is the pious wife of a nobleman (John Stuart); when she is having one of her episodes, she is Rosanna, the lover of the petty thief Nino (Stewart Granger). Maddalena’s teenaged daughter, Angela (Patricia Roc) has been away at school for many years, and so has been kept unaware of her mother’s illness. When the girl returns, flaunting her modern ways and bringing along her modern friends, including the oily grifter Sandro (Peter Glenville), Nino’s little brother, the landscape suddenly gets crowded and, dare I say, secularly inclined. Overcome by all the stimulus, Maddalena succumbs and Rosanna takes over. She returns to Nino, leaving only a symbol of seven moons drawn on the mirror as any hint of where she’s gone.

Madonna of the Seven Moons is a bit of a mess in terms of narrative. A large cast of characters whirl around Maddalena, each with their own purpose and subplot. There is Angela’s fiancé Evelyn (Alan Haines), and his friend Logan (Peter Murray Hill), the painter who inadvertently sketches in the same criminal slum where Rosanna shacks up with Nino. Rosanna also has her own rival (Jean Kent), the girl who took her place in Nino’s bed while she was away. There are a pile of secrets to be exposed: Rosanna’s true identity; Sandro’s true identity; Nino’s plot against Rosanna’s husband, whom he jealously believes stole his woman. Eventually, Nino and Sandro hatch a plan to ruin the whole family. Nino will rob the house and kill Guiseppe, and Sandro will lure Angela away, drug her, and have his way with her–subjecting her to the same fate as her mother when Maddalena was her age.

Naturally, all of this envelopes the fragile woman, and Maddalena/Rosanna cracks again. In both identities, she is prone to mad fits and fainting spells, triggered by musical cues and familiar sites (including, later in the movie, when she’s broken bad, a religious procession that sends her into a breathless tizzy). Calvert goes for broke in these moments. Her mad eyes and fraught expressions predict Norma Desmond’s breakdown in Sunset Boulevard. It’s actually an impressive performance during the more level scenarios. The actress makes the two halves of the personality distinctive, in appearance and demeanor as much as behavior. There are light years between the buttoned-up housewife and the bawdy mistress.

Crabtree manages to keep all his balls in the air, and he lets them drop at the right moment. Though the story wanes at times, the overall tone of the picture has a lurid exaggeration, as if every frame were panting from the internal heat. Also, the finale is well worth any drag getting there. In the final confrontation, Maddalena exorcises her demons, but with a price, and lessons are learned all around. Even the dastardly Nino is given pause to reflect on his bad self. The Madonna of the title manages to sacrifice herself for her daughter’s life education, giving Angela time to correct her own wicked ways before it’s too late. If only Maddalena had better gadar and could give the girl a heads up about what Evelyn may not even be admitting to himself…

The Wicked Lady (1945; 104 mins.) reunites stars James Mason and Magaret Lockwood with writer/director Leslie Arliss to adapt a novel by Magdalen King-Hall. It’s my favorite film in the Three Wicked Melodramas from Gainsborough Pictures set, and unsurprisingly, also the studio’s most commercially successful during their run of pulpy romances.

Lockwood stars as Barbara Worth, a headstrong woman making her way in 17th-century England. Barbara is the sort of woman who has learned the hard way that if she wants something, she needs to take it. And so it is that at the outset of The Wicked Lady, she steals a husband directly from another bride. When they first meet, Sir Ralph Skelton (Griffith Jones) is due to marry Barbara’s best friend, Caroline (Patricia Roc again), but pretty soon Barbara has turned the man around and gotten him to switch fiancées. Too bad for him that, by Barbara’s own admission, as soon as she has a something she covets, she no longer wants it. At the wedding reception, she is romanced by Kit Lockley (Michael Rennie), and she’d just as soon run off with him as dance off to her honeymoon.

Alas, such romantic adventures are not to be, and Barbara soon becomes bored at the Skelton estate, far from London, in the province where Sir Ralph serves as judge. After a particularly catty card game with Ralph’s sister (a delightfully bitchy Enid Stamp Taylor) in which Barbara loses the brooch that is the last connection she has to her late mother, the scorned woman takes the drastic measure of pretending to be a highway robber and stealing it back. Liking the thrill of crime, Barbara makes night-time hold-ups her new hobby. This leads her to run into the real crook working the territory, Lucky Captain Jackson (Mason), a scoundrel known to empty a man’s pockets and then kiss his wife for good measure. Jackson is amused to have female competition, and the two become partners…and lovers.

Of all the movies here, The Wicked Lady makes the most of the subtext of the bored wife finding entertainment outside the home. Whereas Clarissa in The Man in Grey was matching her husband tit-for-tat in seeking happiness beyond the marital arrangement, and Maddalena invented a whole other persona to explore her sexuality in Madonna of the Seven Moons, this wicked lady is closer to self-actualizing. She is choosing to be as she is, and enjoying assuming the male role (her victims all think there is a man behind that gun and mask). In a sense, she is akin to the femme fatale of film noir, and eventually she will have to be neutralized as punishment for stepping outside the boundaries. Indeed, the last shot of Barbara has a bleakness worthy of the best noir, and The Wicked Lady would have been even better had Arliss cut the two small scenes that follow. No one really cares whether Ralph or Caroline are happy. Our allegiance is to Barbara.

And that’s despite the terrible things she has done. In defiance of Jackson’s warnings that killing a man will erase all hope of mercy if caught, Barbara ends up shooting a courier, albeit accidentally. Once she has crossed the line, she has even more reason to protect her secret, not to mention a taste of death. Subsequent murders become both easier and deliberate. There is an inevitable decline of a criminal enterprise, and outlaw stories hinge on our still rooting for the bad guy. It’s pretty easy to do here, because Margaret Lockwood is clearly having so much fun playing the horse-riding thief. James Mason, too. Both launch themselves into the roles with absolute abandon, though Mason practically runs away with the whole thing in his grandstanding scene at the gallows.

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Both Madonna of the Seven Moons and The Wicked Lady were shot by cinematographer Jack Cox. (It should be noted, The Man in Grey was actually shot by Madonna‘s director, Arthur Crabtree.) Both films are stylish, but there is something just a tad more thrilling about the look of The Wicked Lady. It is most likely the swashbuckling excursions, and the chance to photograph masked riders against a night sky. Yet, that aforementioned shot where Barbara is abandoned to herself works largely because of how Cox pulls his camera not just away from the subject, but up from the floor and out a window. There is a vivaciousness to The Wicked Lady, suggesting it’s not just the two main stars who threw caution to the wind during the production, but the entire team of artisans pulling this lark together.

Moviegoers of the 1940s (and indeed, the 1930s and 1950s, if not all decades) were particularly hungry for entertainment, and movies were being churned out across the world at a fairly rapid pace. A good portion of those came and went just as fast, and while there are certainly more artful films than the ones in Three Wicked Melodramas from Gainsborough Pictures, this trio endures because of the undeniably base pleasures they offer. These Gainsborough efforts were lusty and vivid and unafraid of pushing the boundaries of taste, in ways closer to pre-Code Hollywood than their American counterparts from the same period. Sex, violence, betrayal, romance, tragedy–all the dangerous ingredients of escapism. Not just dangerous, but essential. And timeless. Indulging the wrong impulses through the vicarious buzz of cinema is always going to be pleasurable, and that means movies like these never go out of style.

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left to right: The Man in Grey, The Wicked Lady

THE DVD

Video:
The trio of black-and-white films collected in Three Wicked Melodramas from Gainsborough Pictures are shown in their original 1.33:1 aspect ratio. The presentations here vary from the mostly good to the consistently solid. The prints used are not perfect, with instances of scratching and dirt that, while never enough to obscure the frame or ruin the viewing, are not on par with bigger home video restorations. The Man in Gray has a couple of scenes where the source material looks particularly battered, but they pass quickly. On the flipside, Madonna of the Seven Moons has very few marks, only the occasional light pop and one clunky edit; it’s otherwise clear and has decent blacks. The Wicked Lady falls somewhere in the middle.

Sound:
The original English language soundtracks sound decent, with only minor hiss and no real instances of glitches, pops, or distortion.

English Closed Captioning is available on all four discs.

Extras:
As with all the Eclipse Series boxed sets, this 36th release has no on-disc extras. Each movie comes in its own slim, plastic case and all three fit inside a top/bottom loading slipcover. The interior covers of the cases have liner notes about the movies and about Gainsborough Pictures.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
Though not perfect films and far from classics, all the movies in Criterion’s boxed set Three Wicked Melodramas from Gainsborough Pictures are good fun. Produced in England during WWII, this trio of pulpy romantic adventures represent the right kind of escapist entertainment to make them enjoyable at any time or age. There are three flavors to be had here: a period potboiler (The Man in Grey), a bizarre psychological drama (Madonna of the Seven Moons), and a swashbuckling, gender-bending adventure (The Wicked Lady). All of them are tasty in their own way, and definitely worth a nibble. Recommended.

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left to right: The Man in Grey, Madonna of the Seven Moons

Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. He is best known for his collaborations with Joëlle Jones, including the hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, the challenging romance 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?, for which Jones did the cover. All three were published by Oni Press. His most recent project is the comedy series Spell Checkers, again with Jones and artist Nicolas Hitori de. Follow Rich’s blog at Confessions123.com.

THE FILM:

There are some crimes that are obviously irrational, committed by stunted, helplessly monstrous people incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong — the kind of crime perpetrated in films like Psycho or >Halloween and not so very often in real life, however shocking when it does happen. Much more troubling and frightening is the much more common, everyday slide into moral chaos that leads to crimes committed and rationalized by sane people in broad daylight — the kind, to cite a recent example, committed and rationalized by certain areas of the financial industry against the rest of us. It’s a fascinating, scarily recognizable microcosm of that kind of crime — what leads up to permits it — that Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev (a former commercial director who made the transition to narrative features, earning accolades with his promising debut, The Return, in 2004) presents for our consideration in his latest film, Elena, a film unfolded like a drama that, because it doesn’t jar, is more horrifying than any psycho or monster movie. It’s Zvyaginetsev’s most mature work yet by a considerable margin — a haunting moral tale that, with a compelling, relatable, and sympathetic character for its conscience-deficient protagonist, draws us effortlessly into its web and doesn’t let us off the hook easily.

Nadezhda Markina is strikingly solid, sympathetic presence as she brings to life Elena, an ex-nurse who used to live in typical communist-era deprivation and near-dereliction but has now married into the privileged, orderly, affluent part of the former Soviet Union’s new post-communist world. Zvyagintsev and his perennial cinematographer, Mikhail Krichman, shooting on location in Moscow, place us into that alluringly modern, comfortable world from the very first images, when the film opens on still, dawn-lit shots of Elena and her retired-banker husband Vladimir’s (Andrey Smirnov) spacious, tidy, well-appointed apartment in a gentrified part of the city; the filmmakers take their time, only locating the sleeping Elena after have a full impression of the peaceful, comfortable environment she contentedly constitutes one human part of. After she rises, we follow her through what appears to be a typical day: breakfast, television, small talk with Vladimir, taking the train to visit her son from a previous relationship. It’s an existence not without its privations; Elena is treated a bit like an inferior and/or servant by her affectionate but undemonstrative, business-minded husband, who monitors the generous allowance that makes Elena dependent upon him; watch too much TV, sleep in separate beds, and have scheduled, passionless sex; and Vladimir disdains Elena’s poor son, Sergey (Aleksey Rozin) and his public housing-dwelling brood almost as much as Elena does Vladimir’s spoiled, party-girl young-adult daughter, Katerina (Elena Lyadova). But those opening shots, and many more throughout, combined with the glimpses that Zvyagintsev gives us of Sergei’s cramped, exceedingly inelegant existence in that massive, ugly housing tower, is enough to convince us that Elena has, between the limited options of a gilded cage on one hand and a messy, impoverished one on the other, chosen wisely.

Zvyagintsev, Krichman, and editor Anna Mass create a measured, even tempo like a steady, accumulating drip, metronomically seducing us into the smooth rhythms of Elena and Vladimir’s upper-middle-class existence — its sheltered routines, its minor frustrations and tensions. It’s around one of these apparently commonplace, recurring tensions that what lies beneath Elena’s contented and dutiful surface reveals itself, abruptly and decisively in the film’s shocking twist — all the more breathtaking because Zvyagintsev unerringly makes subtlety and restraint the name of his stylistic game, so no fanfare, emphasis, or blatantly foreshadowing preparation paves the way for the dark, disconcertingly plausible places Elena, and the film, are prepared to go. This narrative catalyst is, again, utterly understandable and convincing: Elena wants her wealthy husband to extend his watchful but not stingy largesse to her poor family, particularly because her high-school-age grandson, whose academic inferiority (probably due to his preference for violent video games and casual gang activity) has cost him any meaningfully subsidized higher education, needs a large sum of money to oil the university wheels and prevent his being conscripted into the Russian army and thereby permanently consigned to the lower economic class. Vladimir drags his feet, and after he becomes enfeebled after a heart attack (and therefore reliant upon Elena’s caretaking/nursing skills) and he and his slowly but surely maturing daughter reach a point of reconciliation, he tells Elena he’s altering his will to favor his daughter — leaving Elena with nothing but enough for herself, not her family. This planned writing into perpetuity of Vladimir’s double standard when it comes to his child and hers is the final straw for Elena, who visibly reacts not at all; what follows may not be all that surprising, but the near-reflexive deliberation and proficiency with which Elena takes this undeniably unfair twist of fate into her own hands makes it indelibly disturbing.

That indelibility, and the power and gravity with which Elena is replete, come from a central performance and an anesthetic approach that are both skillful, inspired, and right in tune with each other. As mentioned, Markina is counter-intuitively winning and not at all villainous as Elena, etching the character as a fully fleshed-out individual with at least her share of human good instincts and sensitive feelings (she’s even sort of religious) whose completely understandable buying in to a new, capitalistically prosperous, irresistibly prescribed way of Russian life extends with horrifying ease to the moral disregard and casual, ruthless rule-bending required, at least when it comes to those of her ilk, for inclusion in the new Russian dream. The filmmakers create a steady pace that starts off like the rhythm of life, slow and uneventful, and then, in the context of the calm assuredness with which Elena performs her misdeed, comes to seem relentless and harrowing — because of, not despite, the film’s even tempo, which lends every action depicted an air of such inevitability, it’s like being a bystander to an accident nobody knew how to avoid.

 These troubled waters are, aptly enough given the film’s nationality, Dostoyevsky territory, and Elena, with its chilling implications of crimes committed by “good,” ordinary people, all told from their relatable point of view, is like an even more unblinking rendition of Dostoyevsky fan Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, minus the comic relief. (Speaking of Allen, the presence of a cool, mesmerizingly repetitive Philip Glass score reminds one of how well-suited his music is to stories of moral reckoning and breakdown, whether here, in Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream, or Notes on a Scandal). Zvyagintsev’s abundant skill as a teller of moral tales is perhaps most evident in the symmetry with which he opens and closes Elena, bookending it with a near-identical shot that drives home (no sledgehammer necessary) the change for the worse the film documents — the moral sense that disappeared, without anybody noticing or caring, in the meantime. Life goes on, order is restored, desires are fulfilled, and there is a happy ending, at least for some. But at what cost, and at whose expense? Those are the questions that Elena poses so acutely and inescapably, guaranteeing that its disquieting, thought-provoking effect will linger long after the credits roll.

THE DVD:

Video:

The widescreen anamorphic transfer of Elena, retaining the film’s original ‘scope theatrical aspect ratio of 2.35:1, is a solid job. The colors are nicely variegated and vivid, skin tones look natural, and darker and solid-black portions of the screen are unblemished; the only real picture-quality drawbacks are some occasionally noticeable edge enhancement and a somewhat, but not too badly, flattening-out use of digital noise reduction leaving not quite as much celluloid texture as would truly do the film’s distinctive visuals justice.

Sound:

The film’s sound (in Russian with optional English subtitles) is presented in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround or 2.0 stereo tracks. While both are sparkling clear and free of distortion, it’s the 5.1 track, as usual, that disperses the sound farthest and fills the room (particularly with Phillip Glass’s score, which ebbs and flows, volume-wise, in a way that truly soars in the 5.1 mix); on the other hand, if you don’t want such an overpowering (or loud) experience, the 2.0 mix makes the sound more compact without really diluting it.

Extras:

“About Elena,” a 30-minute interview with director Andrey Zvyagintsev (apparently made for the French DVD release of the film, included here with English subtitles) in which he opens up about the evolution of the project and the film’s story, its Dostoyevskian moral dimension, and the contrast between the standard Good-triumphs meaning of many fairytales and fables (and films) with the mercenary Evil, explored in Elena, that he sees “alive and well” in Russian (and world) society today.

—“Making the Poster Screenprint,” a two-minute video rundown of the creation of the film’s distinctive poster by graphic designer Sam’s Myth (aka Sam Smith, designer of such distinctive re-release posters as House and World on a Wire.)

–The film’s U.S. theatrical trailer.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

The most accomplished outing yet for the rising Russian filmmaker Andrey Zyvaginetsev (The Return), Elena is a film with an implacably cool surface and a heart of darkness that will leave your mind reeling long after it’s over. The film’s two clashing milieux — Moscow’s post-’90s nouveau-riche high-rise apartment neighborhoods and its squalorous, rundown, still-teeming (despite unfettered capitalism) public-housing high-rises — are straddled by Elena (in an absolutely brilliant, petrifying performance by Nadezheda Markina), an ex-nurse who’s remarried well but whose husband, Vladimir, is reluctant to help his wife’s son and his family, left far behind by the post-communist wave that he’s so fruitfully ridden. Elena’s ordinariness — her very understandable needs, desires, and actions — becomes ever more unnerving as Zyvaginetsev details, with excellent stylistic restraint, the amoral, mercenary lengths to which she’s willing to go to spring her family from the still extant, poor old Russia and assure their place in the well-off new one. Zyvaginetsev’s observational, calm style, with his camera surveying his homeland’s brave new world as it forges inexorably on, perfectly reflects the blank slate that is Elena, and the effect, by the end and after we’ve seen what she (and, by extension, any ordinary, understandable person just following the implicit rules and values of their society) is capable of, is most unsettling. In the tradition of great Russian moralist/philosophical literature (Dostoyevsky, et al.), Zyvaginetsev has created a portrait of the banality of evil — morality eroded into total, complacent immorality — that’s riveting, beautifully played and filmed, and, in the end, quietly terrifying. Highly Recommended.