THE DVD SHELF: Twenty-one Movies for April

By Steven Suskin
20 Apr 2008

THE DVD SHELF: Twenty-one Movies for April

This month's column discusses two collections celebrating the 100th birthday of Bette Davis (with films including "All About Eve" and "Watch on the Rhine"); a collection of M-G-M musicals (including "Kismet"); and David Lean's "Passage to India."

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Bette Davis was not one might call a creature of the theatre. Even so, she created one of the most enduring prototypical Broadway characters ever, in the person of Margo Channing in "All About Eve." And I think it's safe to say that anyone who saw her in her two stage musicals, the Vernon Duke-Jerome Robbins Two's Company and the Josh Logan-Emlyn Williams Miss Moffat, will surely never forget those performances.

How did Bette wind up in a musical, anyway? Back in 1952, a couple of young producers had the idea to do a musical revue with a twist — the twist being that they would use a star not associated with musicals. They went to Judith Anderson, who was interested but couldn't work out the dates. They were renting office space from Ralph Alswang, the set designer. One day he was talking on the phone to Gary Merrill, the new Mr. Bette Davis. One of them yelled out to Ralph as a joke, "ask if Bette will do it." Things went downhill from there.

This is as good a place as any to add my Bette Davis story, such as it is. I was drafted to hand-deliver a script to her, in 1977 or so. There she was, in a charming little house alongside a brook in Weston, CT, with a Volkswagen station wagon in the driveway. No cigarette in hand, no sneer, just looking and acting like someone's suburban grandmother. (She didn't have any interest in the script, as it happens, and no wonder.)

At any rate, Ms. Davis would have turned 100 on April 8, a milestone commemorated by the release of not one but two multi-film DVD sets, Bette Davis Collection: Volume Three [Warner] and Bette Davis Collection [Fox]. Clever titles, no? The Warner collection is the third installment of films made under contract to that studio. Six titles are here, including film versions of two important plays, the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Old Maid" (which starred Judith Anderson on Broadway) and Lillian Hellman's "Watch on the Rhine." Paul Lukas, who recreated his stage role as an anti-Fascist German refugee in the latter, received an Oscar for his efforts (defeating Bogart of "Casablanca"). Also on hand from the Broadway production are Lucile Watson, George Coulouris, and director Herman Shumlin; screenplay comes from Dashiell Hammett, with "additional scenes and dialogue by Lillian Hellman." Pretty nifty, still. Also on hand are "The Great Lie," with a Best Supporting Oscar performance by Mary Astor; "All This, and Heaven Too," with Charles Boyer; "In This Our Life," with Olivia de Havilland; and "Deception," with Paul Henreid and Claude Rains. Warner, as usual, has supplemented each single DVD with numerous bonuses, replicating what they consider to be a typical selection of shorts and cartoons that might have accompanied each film in the theatre.

The Fox set includes five films on six DVDs, beginning in 1950 (after Davis parted ways with Warner) and continuing through 1965. The big title, naturally enough, is "All About Eve." This is the carefully-restored two-disc "Cinema Classics Collection" version that has already been released separately. "Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte," featuring Bette battling Olivia de Havilland, has also been previously available, although this release seems to add some new extras. The other three titles are appearing for the first time on DVD: "Phone Call from a Stranger," with Shelley Winters and Gary Merrill; "The Virgin Queen," with Joan Collins; and — most interestingly, perhaps — the psycho-thriller "The Nanny." The titles in the Fox box are also being released individually. Continued...