Charly
Cliff Robertson earned an Oscar for his performance as Charly, a developmentally disabled man who becomes the lab animal for an experimental procedure to boost IQs. His intelligence soars with unnatural acceleration—maybe he suddenly knows too much? A period piece with split-screen visual interest (plus auditory input from Ravi Shankar), Charly (1968) critiques a technology driven, soulless society and wonders if “whatever we say the mind is, we’ll find that it is not.”
Desert Fury
A technicolor film noir? Adding to the oddness of Desert Fury (1947) is a desert landscape more familiar from westerns than crime dramas. Its small-town setting is populated with emotionally turbulent characters banging their heads against the trapdoors of life. The editing and hardboiled dialogue is encoded with implications of things left unseen and unsaid. Lizabeth Scott plays the rebel, Mary Astor the strong woman in a man’s world and Burt Lancaster the rodeo rider-turned-cop.
The Haunted Castle / The Finances of the Grand Duke
An uninvited guest turns up at the castle to the dismay of the lord and his guests. The mysterious Count Oetsch, suspected in his brother’s murder, brings only ill omens to The Haunted Castle (1921). The beautifully restored film by F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu) is slight but includes foreshadows of greater things. The Haunted Castle is coupled on its Blu-ray debut with another early Murnau film, a light comedy, The Finances of the Grand Duke.
Tea With the Dames
One might expect to find rivalry between British film and television’s grand dames—make that Dames, they’ve earned the title! Instead, it turns out the quartet of actresses—Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith—hang together. In Tea With the Dames, director Roger Michell (Notting Hill) watches as they swap their conflicting memories of their early days at the Old Vic, their theater background and some thoughts on how not to perform Shakespeare.
