DVD Reviews

DVDs have been pouring In The Balcony lately, and we haven’t done any new reviews ‘round here since… well, since talkies came in, more or less. Here are some highly enjoyable discs we’ve popcorned through lately; we’re gonna take ‘em in alphabetical order, rather than do it chronologically, best-to-worst, or on a ratings system based on whether or not Allen Jenkins sings in ‘em. They're all from the Warner Archives series of made-to-order DVDs, save for a Sabu double feature from VCI that makes up for what it lacks in flying saucers with what it has in stock footage of elephants.

Crime School (Warner Archives, 19.95) was the second starring role for the Dead End Kids (1938) after (what else?) Dead End, and it just may be the most enjoyable film they ever made. We’ve always been proud that we can rattle off all six of the Dead End Kids (Gabe Dell, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Billy Halop, Bernard Punsley, and Bobby Jordan, unless you prefer them in reverse alphabetical order, in which case it’s Bobby Jordan, Bernard Punsley, and so forth). Here, the Kids are stooges working for a small-time fence, see, and when he don’t come across with the dough, one of ‘em slugs ‘im, ya git me? The result being that all six of the hooligans are sent to reform school, where the crooked warden (Cy Kendall) and sadistic guards await. Can the blossoming love of do-gooder Humphrey Bogart and Halop’s sister Gail Page redeem the Kids before it’s too late and they end up as Little Tough Guys or Bowery Boys? Colossal entertainment; I liked it better than the rather stagy Dead End, that’s for sure. Typical for them, the Kids were such a pain in the ass that Warners let four of them go off (keeping Gorcey and Jordan, to go fetch coffee for Jack Warner, maybe) to Universal to make Little Tough Guys movies, but Crime School was such a hit that they were quickly retrieved to make Angels With Dirty Faces with James Cagney, They Made me a Criminal with John Garfield, and Hell’s Kitchen with… Ronald Reagan?!? There’s a downhill move. After another film with Reagan (Angels Wash Their Faces) and a patriotic swansong, The Dead End Kids on Dress Parade, their Warners careers ended and they were on to the B-movie series that marked the second stage of their career. Crime School is, typical for Warner Archives, a nice print but not stellar, and contains no bonus material.

Jungle Hell (VCI, $14.99) is part of a new Sabu Double Feature disc, and to say all of America was holding its collective breath for THIS baby is perhaps too much of an exaggeration. The opening credits thank the “Maharajah of Mysore” for his assistance with the film, and that’s going to explain a lot as we go forward, believe you me. To say that this film includes stock footage of elephants would be like warning you to that you might see some tall guys at an NBA game. 

David Bruce, whom you might remember from older, better movies, but probably don’t, is a U.N. doctor in the Asian jungles who discovers that strange rocks littered around the village are causing “x-ray burns” on the skin of whomever touches them. (“It’s probably just something he ate,” the doctor’s colleague says, while another bitches that the “constant interruptions” of children in agony are interrupting their chess game.) At one point, the sick Indian child leans up and says “I wanna get up” in perfect English, and Sabu – the punk’s uncle – has to hold him down. Yes, really. Sabu, by the way, plays Sabu, a “Jungle Boy” in his 30s who wears a diaper and rides elephants. Eventually, Dr. Bruce meets up with a beautiful lady scientist but they have nothing to do and their scenes all appear to have been filmed in the same day. In the same 15-minute break from some other picture on the lot, maybe. Y’see, folks, approximately 60 minutes of the film’s 83 minute-running time consists of stock footage of elephants, with an occasional break from the tedium with scratchy film of a snake, a mongoose, a wolf, what appears to be a masturbating monkey, an ostrich, a coyote, a jackal, and maybe a penguin and a koala, too, I seem to recall. I’ve seen still photographs of elephants that didn’t have as much elephant as this movie has. I began to wonder if maybe Sabu didn’t die a few minutes into the film and, like Bela Lugosi in Plan 9 from Outer Space or Shemp Howard in Commotion on the Ocean, get replaced by the kind of “actor” who’s only instructions from the director are “keep your face covered and your back to the camera.”

A little research indicates that the film was produced in 1956 by stitching together episodes of an unsold Sabu TV series, but the film’s official plot synopsis includes descriptions of Sabu narrating the adventure and the mysterious rocks being part of an invading flying saucer from space. Sabu barely opens his mouth in this film (and when he does, he says stupid stuff like, “When YOU get to be the Jungle Boy, then they shall obey YOU” to another native). Anyway, there’s no flying saucer, either, and the film carries the title Jungle Boy and a copyright date of 1964, a year after Sabu’s death at age 39. It seems that this was a reissued, recut, restupid film – five minutes longer than the ’56 version, but no less comprehensible. Nobody at VCI has any idea what th’ heck is going on with it, but I have heard from Kit Parker himself and he’s promised to get back to me with more information, or maybe with a flying saucer. In any case, I can tell you something right now: forget the “unsold episodes” claim, there can’t have been more than one half-hour pilot filmed, because there’s so little footage of Sabu in this feature – he disappears completely from the final reel, in fact, diaper and all. Maybe he went in search of the flying saucer, or just got sick of the stock footage? The print is actually quite beautiful, despite the fact that most of it is elephant footage from a decade or two earlier, and the second feature – Savage Drums, 1951 – and some bonus materials are probably just as good, although to be honest we were pachydermed out and haven’t watched ‘em yet.

Mammy (Warner Archives, $19.95) is one of the crown jewels of the Archive series, directed by Michael Curtiz, songs by Irving Berlin, and starring the greatest entertainer of the 20th century, Al Jolson. Despite the plethora of musical numbers, it’s really a good ol’ Warner Bros. melodrama in musical raiment, as Al gets mixed up with his best friend’s girl, framed for a crime he didn’t commit, and belts out a song or two to his blessed dewy-eyed mother, Louise Dresser. Al’s part of a traveling minstrel show, and there are an awful lot of white men in blackface, although that aside, the racist content is surprisingly low (well, there IS a giant watermelon gracing one scene, that’s true). Jolson sings some of his best-loved songs, including “Let Me Sing and I’m Happy”, which is a Balcony favorite, and “Yes, We Have No Bananas”, which isn’t.

For years, only B&W prints of this 1930 film were thought to exist, despite the fact that two sequences were originally known to be filmed in primitive 2-strip Technicolor. Well, a few years ago a battered color print turned up in the Netherlands (in a crate marked “American Beer”, which nobody had opened in decades, and hey, while you’re at it over there, see if you can find Hat’s Off or London After Midnight, will ya, pals?) and has been restored by Warners, although the color sequences are pretty rough and repaired with sepia-tinged footage where necessary. The film was a tremendous success in its day, perhaps Jolson’s most popular picture, and it’s nice to see it in some semblance of its full glory – and in case we didn’t mention it, he’s terrific in it. The trailer’s a hoot, with Al granting an exclusive interview to a reporter – where the whole subject is how great the film is. A keeper.

The Singing Kid (Warner Archives, $19.95) A string of Jolie’s pictures are available through the Archives, and here’s another. Al Jolson plays Al Jackson, a character based on Al Jolson playing Al Jackson. He's a radio/stage/movie performer, see, and his rotten manager (Lyle Talbot) has absconded to South America with all his dough (and all his fiancé) and left him in Dutch with the Internal Revenue Service. Al has a breakdown, and heads up into the mountains with pals Edward Everett Horton and Allen Jenkins to recover. Up there, Al meets an aspiring writer and her talented little niece, and songs and love develop.

Allen Jenkins sings in this movie, but don't let THAT scare ya away. It's actually a highly entertaining film, never aiming very high but definitely enjoyable. It was Jolson's last starring role for Warners (and probably for anyone else) and the film actually opens with him doing a medley of his prior hits before segueing into the show's big number, "I Love to Sing-a" (performed with Cab Calloway). An affable film, and you have to LOVE any movie in which the finale is a chorus of guys singing a song to Jolson about how he shouldn't sing "Mammy" songs any more – followed by a sequence in which a truck splashes mud on ‘em and turns the whole gang into minstrels, who instantly drop to one knee. The Warners Archive DVD is very good. Loved the film, which was originally released in 1936.

They Learned About Women (Warner Archives, $19.95) Hoo, boy, dunno where they dug THIS one up, but if you’re a fan of Van & Schenck, you’re gonna love it, and if you’re not, you will be, but probably not from watching THIS thing. In fact, let’s not even review it, let’s talk about Gus Van and Joe Schenck, shall we? They were a team of vaudeville singer/comics; Schenck played the piano and sang REALLY high and Van stood next to him and made fun of various ethnic and racial groups via song and faux accent. They were the Smothers Brothers of the 1920s, I guess you could say, and they were terrific. They pop up on early sound shorts of the 1920s (currently included as bonus material with select Warner Bros. DVDs), and in 1929 MGM handed the pair their first (and alas, as it turned out, last) starring feature, originally named after their calling card, The Pennant Winning Battery of Songland but retitled – or no reason I can figure – They Learned About Women. Gus & Joe are a pair of professional baseball players (Gus, in his mid ‘40s when this was made, wears a toupee, but just looks like an old baseball player in a bad cap most of the time) who work the vaudeville stages during the off-season, tailed by a couple of teammates who are trying out a comedy act, only one of them has a thick Yiddish accent and the other stutters, and this description is actually funnier than their act, but what th’ heck.

Bessie Love plays the girl who can’t decide which one of ‘em she likes better, the guy who sings like Tiny Tim or the guy who belts out a song about how Wops have-a lots-a babinos. Tough cherce, Bessie. A nice print of a highly entertaining picture, directed by Jack Conway & Sam Wood. A few months after the release of They Learned About Woman, Joe Schenck dropped dead of a heart attack, age 39. Gus Van carried on until 1968, but by that time he’d stopped singing songs about how adorable the hummin’ darkies are on plantations back home in the South. At least, we assume so. This was remade by MGM as couple of decades later as Take Me Out to the Ball Game, but Sinatra & Kelly were hardly Van & Schenck, now, were they?

Older Reviews, but still just as spiffy as ever, maybe, with a bit o' spit & polish

Here’s a look at some new DVDs for your enjoyment, all of which we here In The Balcony consider superior entertainment, which tells you all you could possibly need to know about us.

In 1957, after successfully supplying fledgling studio American-International Pictures with successful drive-in fodder like The Day the World Ended and It Conquered the World, Roger Corman was hired by Allied Artists to produce and direct a couplet of low-budget sci-fi features. The result, Attack of the Crab Monsters and Not of This Earth, is a pair of the most fondly-remembered and highly regarded cheesy films of the decade. Once a staple of TV “Creature Features”, the films have fallen into some sort of ownership hell and have never gotten a decent VHS or DVD release. Attack of the Crab Monsters made it to DVD in 2002 in one of the worst transfers ever to be foisted on the public, but it’s long out of print. Not of this Earth (not to be confused with the 1980s remake with porn star Traci Lords) hasn’t even managed that sort of respect, and Your Balcony Webmaster has spent many years trying to find a decent copy of the film, one of Corman’s best.

The wait is over! Not of this Earth, under the title Gesandter des Grauens (roughly “Messenger of Horror”), has been released on DVD in Germany (Region 2) and it’s swell. Paul Birch has come from outer space to save his dying race; atomic war has poisoned their blood, and some fresh, homogenized Earth plasma is needed to replenish their nuclear-polluted supply. Balcony fave Beverly Garland is the nurse who’s trying to figure out why all these bloodless corpses keep popping up. Balcony fave and perennial Corman featured player Dick Miller is a door-to-door salesman who blunders into the atomic vampire in a comic scene that turned out to be the film’s best-remembered sequence. Corman: “This became a very funny scene… audiences responded so enthusiastically to this combination of suspense and comedy that I continued to experiment, particularly in horror films.”

The DVD of Not of this Earth (Entertainmarket, 11.95 Euros) is full-screen and appears matted that way; it’s a good print and transfer, although the opening scene (with Gail Ganley of Blood of Dracula as the seminal victim) is lightened so that it appears she’s being attacked at noon, rather silly when there’s an owl hooting over her (the film’s trailer shows the scene day-for-night as intended). The film is in English or (dubbed) German, sans subtitles. The disc includes a strange 20-min. truncated version of Corman’s The Terror and several trailers in German.

Stateside, Warner Bros. has released a little something for horror fans that can’t get enough of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi; a 2-disc set of four films that are would be considered the nadir of their iconic careers if they hadn’t starred in The Ape (Karloff) and Bride of the Monster (Lugosi). Which is actually being mean; here in the Balcony, we like all of these movies, although we also like Ish Kabibble, so take our opinion accordingly.

The set is entitled Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics ($26.98) but could well have been called The Walking Dead and included the others as throwaway bonuses and nobody would’ve much cared (or noticed). Dead is a 1936 Warner Bros. gangster picture with a walking corpse in it. It’s a minor gem directed by the great Michael Curtiz. Ricardo Cortez is one of the mobsters and Edmund Gwenn is the scientist who brings the executed Karloff back to life; Boris has a silver streak through his hair that makes him look like Mr. Bride of Frankenstein, oddly enough. Boris also stars in Allied Artists’ Frankenstein 1970 (1958), but I don’t think he ever included it on his resume. A film crew comes to town to shoot a movie at the actual Frankenstein castle, not realizing there’s the actual Dr. Frankenstein who lives there is building a brand-new monster. Karloff shares screen villain time with Bela Lugosi and Peter Lorre in the 1940 comedy-musical You’ll Find Out, which was actually an RKO-Radio Pictures vehicle for Kay Kyser. Mr. Kyser’s orchestra (including the aforementioned Mr. Kabibble) was a mainstay of radio with the “Kollege of Musical Knowledge”, but don’t ask me, that was way before my time. Speaking of RKO, when they weren’t trying to tailor vehicles to the peculiar talents of Ish Kabibble, they were trying to fool the ticket-buying public into believing that the studio-built team of Wally Brown & Alan Carney, who looked like Abbott & Costello, were as funny as Abbott & Costello, which they most certainly were not. The only one of their films that anybody remembers is… well, okay, nobody remembers ANY of their films, but the least unforgotten one is Zombies on Broadway (1945), which besides its million-dollar title has Lugosi as the chief zombie-maker, Sheldon Leonard as the tough gangster, and Brown & Carney as the guys who aren’t Abbott & Costello. You know you’re in trouble when your rotund funnyman disappears for nearly the entire last reel of the film.

All four movies look and sound fine, particularly Frankenstein 1970, and there are trailers for two of the films and commentary on two of them as well, and if you listen to them you’re more hardcore for this stuff than I ever will be.

To augment your Halloween fun, Passport Video has released a couple of very nice collections of vintage science-fiction trailers ($9.98 each) in excellent condition and with only a very small, very faint watermark in the bottom right corner. Two of the nicest trailer compilations we’ve ever viewed her in the Balcony, in fact. Destination Earth: Alien Invaders offers 50 “they came from outer space” coming attractions, from Invaders from Mars (1951) through The Man who Fell to Earth (1976), with an emphasis of course on such 1950s gems as The Blob, Night of the Blood Beast, Invasion of the Saucer Men, and It Conquered the World. On their way to attack earth, all those various beasties and bug-eyed monsters passed a lot of U.S. spaceships blasting off for Venus, Mars, and beyond, hence a second collection of 50 trailers entitled Destination Outer Space. Highlights here include Wizard of Mars, Phantom Planet, Flash Gordon and Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars, Have Rocket Will Travel with the Three Stooges, Way… Way Out with Jerry Lewis, as well as more “modern” fare as Galaxina and Star Crash. Highly enjoyable and perfect for a party. Well, the kind of parties WE have, anyway.