The Fortune Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.0

The Fortune Blu-ray Movie Review

. . .and (con) men's eyes.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 24, 2014

Screwball comedy would seem on its face to be a relatively easy genre to define. Take any iconic screwball outing like My Man Godfrey or Bringing Up Baby, and at least some of the tropes would seem to be set in stone: a patrician female marauds through the life of a hapless male, with physical comedy and razor sharp dialogue (usually incredibly fast paced) ensuing in about equal measure. But odd films sometimes make it into various analyst’s inventories. Years ago I stumbled across a book (whose name I can’t recall, unfortunately) that spent a great deal of time praising Howard Hawks and Frances Farmer for the supposed screwball antics in Come and Get It, a film I would personally never have thought of as being a member of that particular class. Hawks of course was one of the progenitors of screwball, having helmed early efforts like Twentieth Century, and Farmer made one quasi-screwball with 1941’s World Premiere with John Barrymore, but Come and Get It was a pretty traditional Edna Ferber potboiling melodrama spread over two generations, with few if any outright comedy elements. If defining screwball is therefore a bit haphazard, trying to recreate a screwball ethos for a modern, cynical audience is probably a fool’s errand, though Peter Bogdanovich did a remarkably good job of it in What's Up, Doc?, where notably it’s a patrician male caught up in what is typically one of screwball’s potent subtexts, class consciousness. Three years after that film was a surprising success with both critics and audiences, no less a directorial light than (the sadly recently departed) Mike Nichols took on this hoary genre with 1975’s The Fortune, a film that seemed to have all of the right elements for a modern screwball classic, including a to die for cast including Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, as well as a celebrated “new star” performance from then ingenue Stockard Channing, who was touted as being the “next big thing” in film.

The Fortune begins with a brief textual introduction alerting viewers to the historical context of the film, when the perhaps felicitously named Mann Act was the bane of any male attempting to take a woman over state lines, ostensibly for the purposes of prostitution or (in the words of the Act itself) “other debauchery.” The opening sequence, which plays out under the credits, shows us obviously wealthy Fredrika Quintessa Bigard (Stockard Channing) leaving an immense mansion and getting into a car driven by Nicky Wilson (Warren Beatty). It’s obvious the two are an item, and Nicky can barely keep his eyes on the road due to Fredrika’s constant kissing and incursions into the driver’s side of the car. Only after a moment or two is it revealed that there’s actually a third passenger in the front seat, Nicky’s literal partner in crime Oscar Sullivan (Jack Nicholson, sporting a Harpo Marx “do”). In a wordless scene that initially is a bit confusing, the three are shown at an old time Justice of the Peace’s house, where a marriage ceremony is obviously taking place. But in something of a surprise, it appears that Frederika is marrying Oscar, though the fact that she runs to kiss Nicky after having said “I do” reveals that there’s obviously something else going on.

What ensues is a sometimes manic, sometimes curiously flat, farce where the trio sets up shop after a fashion in 1920’s Los Angeles. Nicky attempts to go straight, even while Oscar attempts to bed Frederika (who after all is his wife) while also (rather callously) urging Nicky to murder the heiress so that they can inherit huge piles of money. That sets up the chief allure of the film, a series of spectacularly dunderheaded murder attempts where of course nothing goes according to plan.

The recent passing of Mike Nichols brought the expected onslaught of accolades, reams of newsprint devoted to Nichols’ triumphs like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate. But it’s important to remember that for all the praise heaped upon Nichols in his long and storied career, he went through more than one dry spell, and in fact his immediate post-Graduate filmography is at best spotty, with both relative successes (Carnal Knowledge) and outright flops (Catch-22 and The Day of the Dolphin) appearing in about equal measure. The Fortune falls into this timeframe, and it is in its own way a kind of cinematic hybrid of Nichols’ triumphs and tragedies.

On the plus side, Nichols extracts comically adroit performances from the three leads, with Nicholson especially memorable as the not exactly genius level Oscar. Channing is also quite winning in her first major screen role, toeing a somewhat precarious line between playing dumb while also revealing native smarts. But there’s a curious heaviness to much of the farce here, some of which is attributable to the screenplay by the pseudonymous Adrien Joyce (actually Carole Eastman, who received an Oscar nomination for Nicholson’s Five Easy Pieces (available on Blu-ray as part of the Criterion box set America Lost and Found: The BBS Story). The story of two scheming con men trying to separate a wealthy woman from her riches may remind some of the later film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (based on the earlier Bedtime Story). But where Scoundrels played things completely hyperbolically, with absolutely ebulliently silly turns for stars Steve Martin and Michael Caine, The Fortune seems to want to interject a relatively more realistic mien into the proceedings, something that doesn’t always work in concert with the film’s supposed farcical ambience.

While there certainly are laughs to be found in The Fortune, the film often feels like it’s trying too hard to be funny, something that that tends to sink any inherent effervescence. Probably the biggest downside to the film is the expectation factor. With an iconic director and two A-list stars then at the absolute apex of their careers, The Fortune should have hit paydirt much more than it ended up doing.

The Fortune Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Fortune is presented on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. Cinematographer John A. Alonzo was just coming off of an Oscar nomination for another film which attempted to recreate an historical Los Angeles, Chinatown, and he invests The Fortune with somewhat the same syrupy yellow- brown ambience much of the time. There's appealing depth to this transfer, with a good, natural looking palette but a relatively soft looking appearance quite a bit of the time. Elements are in generally fine shape, with little in the way of damage or even dust specks to distract from the viewing experience. Film grain resolves naturally, and there are no signs of excessive digital tweaking on display.

The Fortune Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Fortune features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track which is a bit on the shallow side at times, but which more than capably supports both dialogue and David Shire's playful score. Fidelity is fine throughout the track, with no issues like dropouts or other damage to report. Dynamic range is not especially wide, but does tend to spike in several manic sequences.

The Fortune Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Isolated Music and Effects Track is presented in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. Interestingly, not all of the elements are intact on this isolated track. Listen to the opening credits scene for example, where the vocalist is not present on the isolated track version of the score.

The Fortune Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Fortune might be most appropriately compared to another 1975 "threesome" film that featured then top tier stars and a vaunted director, but which failed rather miserably to connect with either audiences or critics at the time of its release: Lucky Lady, starring Liza Minnelli, Burt Reynolds and Gene Hackman, with direction by Stanley Donen. When thrust up against that lackluster outing, The Fortune's whimsy is probably at least a bit more appealing. (Ironically, Lucky Lady fared somewhat better at the box office than The Fortune did.) There are pleasures to be had in The Fortune, but the film should have been much funnier than it is. This new Blu-ray sports excellent technical merits, and though the film is flawed, there's enough enjoyment to be had for it to come Recommended.