A New Batch of Noirs
By contrast, every picture in Fox's new five-disc Joan Collins Collection — that's right, Joan Collins Collection — has a commentary. Each one is by the same guy, film historian Aubrey Solomon. I know what you're thinking: He must like Joan Collins a lot. From what I can glean, though — what, you think I listened to all the commentaries? — it's more a matter of his knowing an awful lot about the operations of Fox during the period Collins was under contract there. (That would be from 1954 to the early '60s.) I only bring the whole thing up because the box contains 1959's Rally 'Round the Flag Boys, a late work by the great Leo McCarey (Make Way For Tomorrow, The Awful Truth) that is lauded as a subversive classic by critic Robin Wood in his 1998 book Sexual Politics & Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond (which sports an image from Flag on its front cover). Flag is certainly a feisty piece of work that sees McCarey negotiating territory theoretically more congenial to the likes of Frank Tashlin (see, for example, Tashlin's Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?). Wood's take on the film astutely links it to McCarey's early work with Laurel and Hardy, and some might see that as part of this broad picture's problem for an up-to-the-minute satire, it's a trifle old fashioned. But it's more than worth watching, whether or not you read Wood. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward (who's almost unforgivably frumpified here) play a typically put-upon and discontented '50s suburban couple; their ordinary anti-bliss is deepened by the machinations of horny neighbor Collins and the threat of a military base going up in their peaceful town. The whole thing culminates in a holiday pageant that sees Collins dancing up a storm in the role of Princess Flaming Teepee. (That's Tuesday Weld to the left of her in the screen grab.) For those who don't want to delve too deeply into the Collins oeuvre, the disc is available on its own. But then you miss the likes of 1957's Stopover Tokyo, a thriller based on the final John Marquand Mr. Moto novel and the only Moto story told sans Moto — here the Asian adventurer is replaced by one Mark Fannon, played by Robert Wagner. Quite the curio…
|
