The Wall Street Journal - 26.11.2019

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Tuesday, November 26, 2019 |A

vis’s Charlotte Vale being so splen- didly appointed? And Sol Polito’s close-ups of Davis and Paul Henreid seem almost voyeuristic now. Equally welcome is Warner Ar- chive’s long-awaited Blu-ray of MGM’s“The Bad and the Beauti- ful” (1952), released last week. Di- rected by Vincente Minnelli, with an astringent screenplay by Charles Schnee, the movie, star- ring Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner and Dick Powell, remains the best film Hollywood ever made about itself. But this new 4K transfer makes clear that the picture’s real star is the great cinematographer Robert Surtees, whose Oscar-win- ning work on this film is a virtual primer on the camera’s potential to paint with light. It’s hard to pick favorite scenes—there are so many worthy ones—but the flop- house apartment Turner’s Georgia occupies is a model of what the studios could accomplish in their heyday. Part shrine to her dead,

director Leo McCarey’s sequel to the previous year’s hit “Going My Way.” In Olive Films’ new 4K transfer on Blu-ray, the grain in this Paramount picture appears substantial. Yet somehow that only enhances the reverential close-ups veteran cinematographer George Barnes lavished on Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman in this simple tale of a war of wills at an inner- city parish school. Releases like these serve at least two purposes. They can in- troduce younger viewers to classic movies in the best possible manner. And more seasoned fans may rediscover beloved favorites in a way few thought possible even relatively recently. The re- sult is the same: Great Hollywood films shine on, their partisans growing, their bright future in- creasingly assured.

Mr. Mermelstein writes for the Journal on film and classical music.

FILM REVIEW

Their Inner Glow

Restored

Classic films as they looked at their premieres

silent-film-star father; part alco- holic den; part grubby, little living space for a failing bit player, it lingers long in the imagination thanks to Surtees’s skillfully claus- trophobic shots. Even Hollywood’s lighter side profits when 4K technology gets applied. Take Preston Sturges’s zippy Paramount comedy“Christ- mas in July” (1940), with Powell and Ellen Drew as a working-class couple whose lives get turned up- side down following a practical joke gone bad—or is it good? Avail- able from Kino Lorber this week, the 4K Blu-ray has more visible film grain than similar releases, but that doesn’t detract from the clarity of the image and the unex- pected shadows captured by Victor Milner, who shot many of Ernst Lu- bitsch’s earliest American triumphs before becoming Sturges’s camera- man of choice. Also out this week is“The Bells of St. Mary’s” (1945), producer-

LIFE & ARTS

Bette Davis and Gary Merrill in ‘All About Eve’ (1950)

EVERETT COLLECTION

EVEN AS STREAMINGoptions in-
creasingly supersede DVDs and Blu-
rays as the medium of choice for
home viewing, something wonder-
ful is happening on disc—especially
for fans of motion pictures from
Hollywood’s golden age. The source
of this joy are 4K transfers, which
pretty much guarantee that movies
now look how we all dream they
did at their premieres, when, say,
Gary Cooper or Greer Garson
swanned out of a limousine and
onto the red carpet.
This technology—in which cellu-
loid is digitally scanned at four
times HD resolution—doesn’t make
vintage pictures look like the lat-
est “Thor” sequel. Nor, most of the
time, does the newfound clarity
reveal where bald caps end and
hairlines begin, or
break the illusion
that an imposing
oak desk is actually
made of cardboard.
Rather, the allure
of 4K transfers is
that they, along
with other technol-
ogies, restore a
movie’s inner glow,
as well as the grain that distin-
guishes film from its too-smooth
cousin, video.
Viewers should react with gasps
of gratified surprise on seeing
these transfers, banishing any con-
cerns that just because a movie is
“old” it is therefore uninvolving. In
particular, such transfers highlight
the cinematographer’s art, allow-
ing us to savor the shading and
shadow that give movies their
character and atmosphere and dif-
ferentiate them from being just
flat visual records of a narrative—
in other words, nothing more than
a filmed play.
And several recent releases have
bolstered this cause by returning
to the spotlight a number of be-
loved pictures that were perhaps

taken for granted by cineastes lately. Three of them star Bette Da- vis, who reigned supreme at War- ner Bros. in the 1930s and ’40s. In August, Warner Archive did the actress proud with its Blu-ray of William Wyler’s“Jezebel” (1938), for which Davis won the second of her two best-actress Os- cars. The 4K transfer focuses re- newed attention on Ernest Haller’s Oscar-nominated cinematography, in which the splendor of antebel- lum New Orleans is meticulously conveyed. And though the famed ball scene, where Davis’s Julie gets her comeuppance from Henry Fonda’s heretofore meek Preston, emerges as tense as ever, the film’s most haunting images come in its last minutes, when the prin- cipals have returned from the country to a New Orleans overrun by yellow fever. As pandemonium en- gulfs the city out- side, Haller throws shadows from ker- osene lamps and candelabras onto overwrought faces inside and casts grotesque shapes on brocaded walls, arguably foreshadowing the very different darkness shortly de- scending on the South. Moreover, this week Davis enters the Criterion Collection for the first time, with two essential pictures— “Now, Voyager” (1942), directed by Irving Rapper, and“All About Eve” (1950), written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz—both on Blu-ray in stunning 4K transfers. The sparkle of the latter’s acid- etched screenplay has never dulled, but Milton R. Krasner’s Oscar-nominated cinematography benefits hugely from this upgrade, with each stifling interior of New York’s theater world finely individuated. “Now, Voyager” is even more of a revelation in that regard, for who recalls the Boston mansion of Da-

With 4K transfers, celluloid is scanned at four times HD resolution

BYDAVIDMERMELSTEIN

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The Wall Street Journal - 26.11.2019

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