Recently released on Blu-ray and DVD: The Great Buster, The Strange Door, Becky Sharp.
The Great Buster
With his sad but otherwise expressionless eyes, his somber, unresponsive face, Buster Keaton played an everyman who fumbled his way through the calamity of modern life. Until his final film (1966), he used no doubles and did all of his own stunts. As film historian Peter Bogdanovich relates in his documentary, Keaton was born for pratfalls. As part of his family’s traveling vaudeville act, he was a human projectile at an age when most kids started kindergarten.
The Great Buster encompasses Keaton’s entire professional life. He is remembered for his deadpan, sometimes surreal masterworks from the 1920s, but Bogdanovich also shows snippets from earlier silent shorts from before he hit his stride as writer-director-star. Except for short breaks, Keaton was seldom far from a stage or a camera. The Great Buster includes many fascinating scenes from the TV commercials and variety-show guest shots he did in the ’50s and ’60s.
The Strange Door
Lordly in manner, Charles Laughton was well cast as a malevolent 18th-century French nobleman. He finds a visit to the torture chamber “diverting.” Adapted from a Robert Louis Stevenson story, The Strange Door (1951) is a late entry in the Universal Studios horror catalog. It features a fiendish plot, a castle wrapped in fake fog and plenty of maniacal laughter. The Strange Door also boasts Boris Karloff as a servant loyal to another master.
Becky Sharp
Becky Sharp (1935) is a historically important film, finally available in a clean print for home viewing. Based on a stage adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, director Rouben Mamoulian’s production was the first successful Technicolor feature film. The innovative Mamoulian (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) was unusually anchored to the stage for this production, but worked out elaborate color schemes and directed one scene with his usual dynamism. Miriam Hopkins plays the manipulative, sharp-tongued protagonist.
