For the week of April 11th, the Criterion Collection is offering yet another HD version of Howard Hawks' classic Only Angels Have Wings. Hawks holds a special place in the hearts of auteurist film fans for the way he maintained his personal style/obsessions even while jumping from genre to genre; whether he was making a Western (Red River, Rio Bravo), crime thriller (Scarface, The Big Sleep), horror (The Thing from Another World), or screwball comedy (His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby), Hawks put a premium on valorizing tough, no-B.S. men and women who are good at their jobs, even if their passions come at the expense of their own lives or personal relationships. Only Angels Have Wings is certainly no exception in those latter regards, even as it defies easy categorization. There's something so wonderfully ineffable about the drama: a show girl (Jean Arthur, wonderful as always) gets stranded in the South American port of Barranca, only to fall in with a group of hot-dog pilots (led by Cary Grant's pragmatically charismatic Jeff Carter) who risk life and limb through frequent mail runs in and around Barranca's treacherous mountain surroundings. To some degree, the movie is a romance, as Arthur and Grant's characters hungrily circle one another every time he's on the ground, but Grant loves the sky more than any dame, and long stretches of the second half pass without any commentary on their whirlwind love affair. You might expect, then, that Only Angels Have Wings is a flying movie - and to be fair, it has a couple of still-nerve-racking aviation scenes - but the vast majority of the movie unfolds back in Barranca, with Hawks mining a great deal of tension from the perilous radio reports that Grant receives. As such, Hawks cultivates an air of consistent tension and fatalism except we'd never mistake this movie for a mere melodrama: Jules Furthman's supremely witty script provides a near-never-ending string of great one-liners and banter. To wit: the repartee between Grant and Thomas Mitchell's Kid Dabb threatens to turn the proceedings into a buddy picture, at least until Richard Barthelmess's Bat MacPherson enters the picture and becomes the recipient of a stirring redemption narrative. Hell, Hawks even flirts with letting Only Angels Have Wings be a full-fledged musical during a few instances. You can't pin this one down. Ultimately, it's a hang-out movie of the highest order - no matter what genre kinks we run into, no matter what tonal shifts we face, we're on board because the whole cast is so charming, and their company is so engaging. We like watching them work, and so we like the movie. That's Howard Hawks to a T, and Only Angels Have Wings is his masterpiece.
The Cary Grant-on-Blu-ray Train keeps rolling with Warner Archive's new Suspicion disc. This romantic thriller is the first of Grant's four collaborations with director Alfred Hitchcock, and it reveals that along with Howard Hawks, Hitchcock made the best, most subversive uses of Grant's moviestar qualities. If Mainstream Hollywood saw only the dimpled chin and easy charm, Hitch took a certain glee in exposing the rake beneath Grant's perfect veneer, whether casting him as an amoral, manipulative intelligence agent in Notorious or an ad man so shallow that the web of murder and intrigue endangering his life in North by Northwest almost counts as his just desserts (even in the comparatively minor-key To Catch a Thief, Hitch gets in a good jab at Grant's dashing figure - his retired cat burglar is the most honest, decent character in the movie, yet everyone thinks he's back to his old criminal tricks). And Suspicion is certainly no exception - he plays a degenerate gambler who worms his way into the life of Joan Fontaine's sensitive heiress. All her friends and family are sure that Grant's heel is only after her money, but Fontaine wants to believe that this gorgeous guy is really into her...except doubt begins to creep in, and she begins to worry that he's plotting far more nefarious ways to separate her from her fortune. This picture is really Fontaine's story, a decision which allows Hitchcock to frame her relationship with Grant through ever-more subjective means, with Grant taking on a distant opacity. Like Fontaine, we want to believe in the goodness of his image, but he's so alien and remote that we too can't help but to suspect the worst. Hitch does such an expert job of milking (pun intended, for those who have seen the film) the tension that it's beyond disappointing when we arrive at the conclusion, and Suspicion just deflates. Without getting too far into spoilers (for a seventy-five-year-old film!), let's just say that Hitchcock found the perfect moment of black irony to end Suspicion, and then the studio copped out, forcing him to reshoot a far tamer iteration that renders much of the proceedings fairly toothless. Still, as an appreciation of Hitchcock and Grant's pear operating powers, Suspicion more than merits a viewing.
More problematic but just as essential to a certain subset of film buffs is the 1995 horror remake Village of the Damned. The 1960 original is one of the best horror films ever made, a tense, creepy look at a town under the thrall of preteens with dangerous telekinetic powers. It holds up so well while the remake commits the cardinal sin of all bad remakes: it never justifies its own existence. Outside of some nice Northern California location work and a couple of good performances (Christopher Reeve does good work as a doctor trying to empathize with the violent tykes), Village of the Damned '95 makes the same basic moves; its major distinction is that it's noticeably more violent, but all the graphic bloodshed in the world can't paper over the fact that the 1960 version could get under your skin through suggestion and its shivery black-and-white cinematography. Still, for some of you, the new Village of the Damned is still a must, if only for the fact that it comes courtesy of director John Carpenter. Carpenter is a deserved legend among filmmakers - from 1976's Assault on Precinct 13 to 1995's In the Mouth of Madness, no one made genre movies like John Carpenter - and his unofficial retirement makes even lesser works like Village of the Damned all the more treasured. Sure, it's a pale shadow of the original and of Carpenter's best films, and it's even more depressing when you consider that Carpenter's career masterpiece is itself a remake (1982's nihilistic and terrifying The Thing), but it's something, and Bad Carpenter is better than No Carpenter. Except for maybe The Ward. That movie's just no good.
Finally, Arrow Video is offering a new, features-packed edition of Brian Yuzna's Bride of Re-Animator. Unlike Village of the Damned, Bride of Re-Animator is one of those sequels/reboots/redos that actually works, more often than not. The 1990 follow-up to Stuart Gordon's landmark cult classic Re-Animator, Bride picks up the continuing adventures of Dr. Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs), a brilliant mad scientist obsessed with re-animating dead tissue. West and his partner Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) are working in Peru after the bloody failure of their experiments in Re-Animator sent them fleeing North America, and their easy access to dead bodies - they've lucked into a civil war - spurs West and leads him to create, you guessed it, a female test subject; complicating matters (as if all those details weren't complications enough) are the unfortunate tendency of West's experiments to becomes bloodthirsty zombies and the reappearance of West's psychotic rival Dr. Hill (David Gale), albeit in severed-head fashion (it's a long story). Bride of Re-Animator should satisfy any horror fans who grew up on splattery practical effects. Society's Screaming Mad George contributes some ghastly makeup gags which might be disturbing if the whole endeavor wasn't so silly - the film definitely skews towards the comedy side of the horror-comedy equation, with Combs' deadpan lunacy again a clear standout. About the only problem with Bride of Re-Animator is that it's not Re-Animator. That earlier picture remains as singular a blend of graphic gore and whacked-out humor as I've ever seen, and while Yuzna does a good job of replicating Stuart Gordon's control of the material, he also doesn't add much to the equation. In a lot of ways, the new movie feels like a slightly spiffier remake that hits many of the same beats, including an ending that also leaves West's fate on a funny-spooky cliffhanger. If we're looking at the obvious sources of inspiration here, then one of the things that distinguished James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein from his Frankenstein was the sequel's willingness to be more: funnier, weirder, darker, more perverse. It's a credit to Re-Animator, I guess, that maybe it set the bar too high the first time out, but I would have liked to see Bride of Re-Animator try a little harder.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "the film's humor that repeatedly pays the best dividends. There is such a goofy ambience running through this film that it's hard not to surrender to its downright silliness. Little throwaway moments like the 'finger-eye' beast West fashions (which hilariously gets 'loose') are expertly handled and provide Combs with the chance to chew the scenery to his (or anyone else's) heart's content. Abbott is understandably more restrained, but anchors the film in a bit more of a realistic mien, even when saddled with a probably unnecessary 'new' romantic interest (a lovely Fabiana Udenio). The film goes the Freaks route (or, perhaps, The Sentinel or The Island of Dr. Moreau route) in its closing moments, as the hapless victims of West's experiments take vengeance. The film's special effects are surprisingly well done, especially when one considers the relatively miniscule budget the filmmakers were utilizing. Bride of Re-Animator is perhaps at least slightly less appreciated by some fans than its progenitor tends to be, but for those in a darkly comic frame of mind, it provides blood, guts and laughter in about equal amounts."