Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

Skidoo Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 25, 2012

Note: This title is currently only available in this box set: The Otto Preminger Collection. Some aspects of this review refer to all three films in this collection.

Otto Preminger loved pushing the envelope, and a number of his films, while seeming fairly passé today, were the subject of major controversies when they were released. As incredible as it may sound, Preminger’s film version of The Moon is Blue was the focus of a major cause célèbre due to its perceived sanguine approach toward sex, something that will strike anyone seeing the film nowadays as positively weird. Preminger, ever the master showman, played the controversy for all it was worth, releasing the film without the vaunted Breen office Seal of Approval, and made the film into one of the blockbusters of the early fifties. Several more films in the fifties and sixties caused various ruckuses. Carmen Jones featured a largely African American cast and once again toyed with illicit seduction. A couple of years later Preminger caused headlines again when he tackled the subject of drug addiction in The Man With the Golden Arm. 1959 saw the release of both Preminger’s film of Porgy and Bess, a well meaning if flawed adaptation that has been tied up in rights issues with the Gershwin Estate (which hated the film) and has rarely if ever been seen in the intervening years since its theatrical release, and what has become probably Preminger’s most critically lauded film of this era, Anatomy of a Murder. That film created a sensation due to its then remarkably candid discussions involving sex and rape.

While Preminger’s 1960 film of Leon Uris’ Exodus wasn’t as patently controversial as some of his previous works, it continued Preminger’s tendency of being an agent provocateur, at least behind the scenes, when the director started pounding the nails in the coffin of the blacklist by hiring Dalton Trumbo under his own name to write the screenplay. Two years later Preminger offered Advise and Consent, a film which wasn’t circumspect about portraying homosexuality in the highest levels of government. Sandwiched before, after and in between this mere handful of films mentioned above are several other Preminger pieces, many of which are undisputed classics in their own right (Laura) or at least highly regarded if acknowledged as being somewhat flawed (The Cardinal). But the sixties saw a perhaps predictable decline in Preminger’s directorial fortunes, and few would accord his later films the same accolades that were regularly bestowed on his earlier works. That said, there’s virtually no Preminger film that doesn’t have something to recommend it, even if that something is nothing other than camp value. The three films in this new box set may well be in that category, but they each also are distinctive in at least a couple of other elements as well, not the least of which is the window they offer into Preminger’s late sixties and early seventies mindset.

Skidoo

Film: 3.0 stars
Video: 4.0 stars
Audio: 4.0 stars
Camp Value: 5.0 stars

To paraphrase a certain famous commercial featuring an egg frying in a pan, “This is Otto Preminger.” (Pause). “This is Otto Preminger on drugs.” Perhaps it was understandable after the disaster of Hurry, Sundown that Preminger would need to turn to mind altering drugs like LSD to recover (I jest, but only slightly), but evidently that’s exactly what happened with regard to Skidoo. And according to rumors which still fly around about the shoot of this extremely (as in extremely) odd 1968 feature, the director wasn’t alone in the sugar cube swallowing business. (Some reports indicate it may have only been Groucho Marx who consumed the drug in preparation for the film, but anyone watching Skidoo would be hard pressed not to think that Preminger was under the sway of some mind altering substance during the film.)

It’s possible to give a plot summary of Skidoo but that hardly even comes close to capturing the complete anarchy that runs rampant throughout this film. Jackie Gleason plays a retired hitman who is married to a frenetic Carol Channing. Their daughter (Alexandra Hay) has fallen in love with a hippie (John Phillip Law, evidently not having learned his lesson about working with the director). Gleason is ordered by another crime family (played by Cesar Romero and Frankie Avalon) that the city’s mob boss (Groucho Marx) has ordered Gleason to kill another mobster (Mickey Rooney) who’s being kept in a kind of high tech version of Alcatraz. That’s the basic plot of Skidoo but that’s a bit like saying War and Peace is about Russia.

There are no doubt some looking at the 3.0 star rating above and thinking this reviewer must be on some mind altering drug, but there’s a certain joyous cacophony to Skidoo that I personally find irresistible. The film is quite simply like nothing you’ve ever seen. That doesn’t necessarily make it good, mind you, and it’s frequently quite noisy and busy to absolutely no avail, but it is just so patently odd that I can’t help but like it, despite my awareness of its complete inanity. When you have Jackie Gleason dropping acid in a prison and hallucinating Mickey Rooney doing a song and dance with bags of money, you really are forced to cut the film a little slack, at least in my way of looking at things.

Skidoo has some charming songs by Harry Nilsson, and it also has two bookending elements that are quite remarkable in their own way. The opening has a pretty funny trip through late sixties television with faux advertisements (including Fat Cola), along with what is supposed to be a broadcast of Preminger’s own bloated war epic In Harm’s Way. The ending on the other hand has the credits sung by Nilsson, probably one of the few times (if not the only time) that’s happened in a major feature film.

Skidoo Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

All three of the films are delivered via AVC encoded 1080p transfers. Hurry, Sundown and Skidoo offer a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, while Such Good Friends is presented in 1.78:1. Both Hurry, Sundown and Skidoo look very sharp and naturally filmic, for the most part, while rather strangely Such Good Friends, the most recent of the three films, is far softer and less robustly saturated than the first two. Both Hurry, Sundown and Such Good Friends have some really weird anomalies, where brief sequences seem to have been culled from a second generation (at least element). In these sequences, things suddenly get much softer and less detailed and color is also nowhere near as saturated as the bulk of the films (see screencap 4 of Caine and Law in the car for a great example of this phenomenon, something that also happens late in Such Good Friends in a scene featuring Elaine Joyce in an apartment). All three films boast elements in very good to excellent shape, within certain limitations.

Skidoo Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

All three of the films feature lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono tracks that more than adequately recreate the rather modest sonic charms of these outings. Dialogue is very cleanly presented in all three of these films, and the music (which includes some sung elements in all three films, most notably in Hurry, Sundown and Skidoo) sounds just fine. Fidelity is very strong in all three of these tracks, though dynamic range is somewhat limited. Hurry, Sundown does have several boisterous explosions dotting its sonic landscape and Skidoo is so relentlessly frenetic it may give the impression of having dynamic range, but it's just an auditory hallucination.

Skidoo Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements of any kind are included on any of the three discs in this package.

Skidoo Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There's no denying that these three films are not exactly prime Preminger, but that doesn't mean they're worthless. Preminger's quality was frankly pretty spotty overall after his Anatomy of a Murder high, but there are glimmers of the director's innate brilliance, as well as his very pointed social justice attitudes, in all three of these films. The best of these is probably Such Good Friends, though those with an outré sense of the bizarre may well place Skidoo at the top of this particular pile for reasons only tangentially related to the film's actual instrinsic quality. I can't outright recommend this package on objective quality criteria, but I will say for certain fans, this collection is absolutely indispensable.