Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		2.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Such Good Friends 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.

Such Good Friends
Film: 3.0 stars
Video: 2.5 stars
Audio: 4.0 stars
Camp Value: 2.0 stars

There must be tons of people out there with a deep, burning desire to see Burgess Meredith dancing naked, and for that vast population Such Good Friends is your film! I’ll just go out on a limb and state that for the rest of us, this is a decidedly mixed bag, although whether or not you end up in the “pro” or “con” camp probably will depend on how black your sense of humor is. Much as with Hurry, Sundown, Preminger optioned the book on which Such Good Friends was based before it was published. In this particular case, his prescience paid off as the book became a bestseller and the film version was a hotly anticipated property. It still got bogged down in development hell, however, with several screenwriters attached at one point or another and eventual lead scenarist Elaine May so disappointed with the final version that she only allowed her contributions to be included under a pseudonym, which of course didn’t prevent Preminger from widely advertising the fact that May was involved anyway.

Such Good Friends concerns a harried housewife and mother played by Dyan Cannon whose husband (Laurence Luckinbill) is a best selling children’s author. He goes in for a minor medical procedure (having a mole removed), and through a series of catastrophes, ends up in a coma and on life support. That may sound like a drama, but Such Good Friends is really a very (as in very) black comedy, and if you’re properly jaded, it is quite funny a lot of the time. Cannon’s main liaison at the hospital is a kind of manic doctor played by James Coco, and he repeatedly brings in all sorts of specialists to consult who put the screws to the Cannon character in terms of signing releases and other bureaucratic nonsense while never being able to treat the problem at hand. There are a couple of viciously humorous scenes, including one fantastic one at the hospital commissary where one of the specialists “assures” Cannon that now that her husband is near death (due to so many foul ups at the hospital), he’ll finally receive decent care. It’s a stunning and rather prescient indictment of the American medical system, one that in its own way is reminiscent of Paddy Chayefsky’s vastly underrated The Hospital.

Simultaneously unfolding with the medical drama is the fact that Cannon becomes aware that her husband had been having an affair with one of her best friends (played by the incredibly lovely Jennifer O’Neill). That of course puts the once devoted wife into an emotional tailspin, which she attempts to get out of by attempting to bed O’Neill’s lover (a rather hirsute Ken Howard) and, later, the doctor played by Coco. She ultimately discovers that her husband was in fact a serial cheater and had a not very cleverly coded “little black book” that detailed his conquests, romantic assignations that include just about every bit player seen earlier in the film.

Such Good Friends probably would have been a much better film had it completely jettisoned its supposedly dramatic (some would say melodramatic) content and played everything resolutely for laughs (albeit squirm worthy laughs). The film is tonally at odds with itself, not really having the requisite daring it needs to completely exploit this blacker and black humor. As with the two previous films in this collection, this film has a rather unusual composer, at least for you Broadway fans who like to read credits. If any of you have original cast recordings from the past several decades (including several high profile pieces by Stephen Sondheim), you may recognize the name of Thomas Z. Shepard, one of the two or three leading Broadway musical recording producers of the past half century or more. This was Shepard’s only feature film work as a composer (he did one television piece as well). Really astute lovers of Broadway trivia will also recognize the film’s production designer, Rouben Ter-Arutunian, who contributed to many Broadway plays and musicals, including a couple of legendary flops like I’m Solomon.

Such Good Friends 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.

Such Good Friends 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.

Such Good Friends Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

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

Such Good Friends 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.