n Pride and Joy: The Story of Alligator Records
In the late 1960s, Lawrence College student Bruce Iglauer drove to Chicago’s South Side on weekends to check out the blues scene. Iglauer soon founded Alligator Records, the subject of this film by director Robert Mugge. Pride and Joy records Iglauer’s quest to expose the music he loved to a wider audience. Mugge doesn’t stint on that music, including concert footage of such dynamos of the blues as Elvin Bishop, Lonnie Brooks and Koko Taylor.
n Journey to Space
“We are the species that explores,” says Patrick Stewart, not once but twice in the IMAX film out now on Blu-ray. Aside from his résumé as Captain Picard, Stewart has the right authoritative voice to put across this optimistic call for humanity to take the next leap—to Mars. Also heard are astronauts describing the International Space Station as an environment for testing human endurance in space. The Red Planet, after all, is a two-year ride.
n Deadline U.S.A.
Humphrey Bogart looked at home as the hard-charging editor amid the clacking newsroom typewriters of a daily paper. In Deadline U.S.A. (1952), he brings the power of the press to bear on a politically connected mobster against the backdrop of problems familiar to contemporary media observers, including the spread of monopoly news conglomerates and the power of advertisers to kill stories. As Bogart says: “A free press is like a free life—it’s always in danger.”
n Five Miles to Midnight
Bob (Anthony Perkins) is an obviously disturbed American in Paris, unhappily married to a beautiful Italian, Lisa (Sophia Loren), in this suspenseful 1963 film. One suspects Five Miles to Midnight was an emotional autobiography for director Anatole Litvak, a Russian-Jew who traded Bolshevism for Germany, only to flee Hitler for France and then Hollywood before ending his career back in Paris. The story is suffused with deception, entrapment, emotional distance and a sense of homelessness.
