The Host With the Most
The Pirate and Woody Woodpecker
Other terrific releases this week include Vincent Minnelli's 1948 The Pirate, an ahead-of-its-time musical, that, instead of giving audiences the All-American versions of its star Judy Garland and Gene Kelly placed them in a rococo Caribbean period fantasia with a practically self-reflexive storyline. (A good picture to watch in a double-feature with this would be Jean Renoir's 1953 The Golden Coach, another story about theater and the theater of life, set in a similar milieu and shot in similarly gorgeous Technicolor.) If that all sounds too hifalutin', well it's also got some nifty Cole Porter songs and some incredible dancing by Kelly as well as the immortal Nicholas Brothers. Garland biographer John Fricke contributes an excellent-as-usual commentary and is one of the experts consulted in a solid featurette about the making of the film. The disc is available on its own and also in a box set, Classic Musicals From The Dream Factory Volume 2. Not to knock Mario Lanza, but you know that, when such boxes start containing the popular tenor's films, the end of the tether is near for discs of classic MGM musicals.
Finally, if your exposure to the TV incarnation of Woody Woodpecker led you to believe that the purposefully annoying bird's adventures were largely staged around the bunco schemes of boozy Buzz Buzzard, and if this made you anxious as a child (what kind of adults would concoct such children's entertainments, for heaven's sake?), Universal's three-disc Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoons Collection will give you a wider perspective on the antic avian, if you're interested. And perhaps you should be; the early years of cartoon creator Walter Lantz were creatively fecund ones, and the early, bent-beaked Woody was almost as anarchic a cartoon sprite as Daffy Duck at his most destructive. Lantz's studio also did a number of cartoons featuring the Disney-created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, including 1933's "Confidence," in which Oswald duets with Franklin Delano Roosevelt to exhort moviegoers to fight the Depression. (The rights to Oswald were owned by Universal at the time; they went back to Disney only last year — he was traded to Disney by NBC Universal in exchange for sportscaster Al Michaels. Or so it is said.) One of the animators on "Confidence" was Fred Avery, the future "Tex"; Lantz had an eye for talent. While it might not convert those among us whose early years were traumatized by Buzz Buzzard, the collection will satisfy animation fans hankering for a little Woody.
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