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After twenty years honing his craft on ever-more precise filmic constructions, David Lean opened up his imagination for a story of loneliness and romance in Venice, Italy. A vacationing American woman searches for — she doesn’t know what. Katharine Hepburn reveals the vulnerable side of her personality, and the woman eventually leaves her fears behind. Lean creates the most compelling ‘relaxed vacation’ ever, yet every shot is as keenly envisioned as in any of his films. It’s an amazing ‘on location’ show that initially ran into trouble with U.S. censors — some thought it was morally incompatible with the Production Code, and shouldn’t be released here at all.

Summertime

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 22

1955 / Color / 1:37 Academy (1:66 widescreen?) / 100 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date July 12, 2022 / 39.95

Starring: Katharine Hepburn, Rossano Brazzi, Darren McGavin, Jane Rose, Mari Aldon, Macdonald Parke, Gaetano Autiero, Jeremy Spenser, Isa Miranda, Virginia Simeon,...

“You crazy rat you croaked him!” Yes, you’ve probably heard better hardboiled dialogue, but this British imitation of American gangster pictures takes the cake for screwy line deliveries. It’s derived from a book and play that’s already derived from a salacious William Faulkner story. Jack La Rue and Linden Travers try to make a kidnapper-rapist into a sympathetic, romantic figure, with marvelously awkward results. This Brit import comes with significant extras.

No Orchids for Miss Blandish

All-Region Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1948 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 103 min. / / Street Date May 27, 2019 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £17.00

Starring: Starring: Jack La Rue, Hugh McDermott, Linden Travers, Walter Crisham, MacDonald Parke, Danny Green, Lilli Molnar, Charles Goldner, Zoé Gail, Leslie Bradley, Richard Nielson, Michael Balfour, Frances Marsden, Sydney James.

Cinematography: Gerald Gibbs

Film Editor: Manuel del Campo

Original Music: George Melachrino

From the novel by James Hadley Chase

Written, Produced and Directed by St.

This strange blend of French série noire and English Brit noir was filmed in glowing Technicolor on location in Holland and Paris. Runaway bookkeeper Claude Rains teams up with the highly fatale Märta Torén, evading the law in pursuit of the good life promised by a valise packed with money. Georges Simenon’s crime tale has an undertaste of Poetic Realist rebelliousness.

The Man Who Watched Trains Go By

Blu-ray

ClassicFlix

1952 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 82 min. / The Paris Express / Street Date May 29, 2018 / 29.99

Starring: Claude Rains, Märta Torén, Marius Goring, Herbert Lom, Anouk Aimée, Felix Aylmer, Ferdy Mayne, MacDonald Parke, Lucie Mannheim, Eric Pohlmann.

Cinematography: Otto Heller

Film Editor: Vera Campbell, Arthur H. Nadel

Original Music: Benjamin Frankel

From the book by Georges Simenon

Produced by Josef Shaftel, Raymond Stross

Written and Directed by Harold French

The Man Who Watched Trains Go By is from a 1938 novel by Georges Simenon, one of...

Devotees of crime and film noir will get a kick out of this Brit attempt to capture the American style, that now comes off as screamingly funny. It was both a huge hit and a big scandal in London, 1948, where the censors came down hard on the film’s flagrant immorality and over-the-top violence. Former pre-Code second-banana thug Jack La Rue tries hard to be Humphrey Bogart. Leading lady Linden Travers’ role is as non-pc now as it was then: an heiress falls in love with the gangster, who has raped her, because she likes it. But the film’s maladroit hardboiled dialogue is hilarious fun.

No Orchids for Miss Blandish

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1948 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 103 min. / Street Date March 20, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Jack La Rue, Hugh McDermott, Linden Travers, Walter Crisham, MacDonald Parke, Danny Green, Lilli Molnar, Charles Goldner, Zoë Gail, Leslie Bradley, Richard Nielson,...

'Saint Joan': Constance Cummings as the George Bernard Shaw heroine. Constance Cummings on stage: From sex-change farce and Emma Bovary to Juliet and 'Saint Joan' (See previous post: “Constance Cummings: Frank Capra, Mae West and Columbia Lawsuit.”) In the mid-1930s, Constance Cummings landed the title roles in two of husband Benn W. Levy's stage adaptations: Levy and Hubert Griffith's Young Madame Conti (1936), starring Cummings as a demimondaine who falls in love with a villainous character. She ends up killing him – or does she? Adapted from Bruno Frank's German-language original, Young Madame Conti was presented on both sides of the Atlantic; on Broadway, it had a brief run in spring 1937 at the Music Box Theatre. Based on the Gustave Flaubert novel, the Theatre Guild-produced Madame Bovary (1937) was staged in late fall at Broadway's Broadhurst Theatre. Referring to the London production of Young Madame Conti, The...