THE YOUNG SAVAGES - FILMSTRUCK

Originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2014.

The Young Savages was the second directorial feature from John Frankenheimer, a pioneer of live television, and his first of four collaborations with Burt Lancaster. That it's the weakest of their team-ups should not be altogether surprising then, as Frankenheimer goes through some growing pains trying to apply his learned techniques and the social drama of his TV work to a larger canvas.

Lancaster stars in The Young Savages as Hank Bell, formerly Bellini, an Italian kid from a tough New York neighborhood who is now a respected district attorney. Hank is assigned a case involving three kids from his old block, including the son of one of his old girlfriends (Shelley Winters). The boys are the members of a street gang, and they are charged with a vicious stabbing of a blind Puerto Rican teenager. They claim self-defense, a story that doesn't add up. While racial tensions rise, Hank and his boss (Edward Andrews) push for the death penalty.

As Hank begins to build his case, he is pulled from many sides. His ex asks him to keep an open mind about her child, while the dead boy's mother cries for justice. Hank's partner (Telly Savalas) maintains a cynical cop's-eye view of the matter, while Hank's wife (Dina Merrill) angrily chides him for being so politically vicious. Not to mention the Italian and Puerto Rican gangleaders who send their minions to apply their own kind of pressure. This all weighs on the prosecutor as he tries to sift through the evidence and testimony. Not everything is as cut and dried as it seems.

The interviews Hank conducts with the various witnesses comprise some of the best stuff in The Young Savages, especially as Frankenheimer takes his actor to different sections of New York, shooting life on the streets in at least some attempt to counterbalance the near-cartoonish portrayal of urban juvenile delinquency. The script tackles racism with an admirable frankness, never shying away from either the unctuous bigotry of the killers or the more seemly criminal behavior of some of their Puerto Rican rivals. One gets the sense that finding the balance Hank seeks is also important to Frankenheimer. Throughout the eventual trial, when Hank is questioned about his seemingly bizarre prosecutorial tactics (he appears to be tanking the case), he insists he is just trying to find the truth.

The problem is, The Young Savages lacks the same rigor its fictional D.A. shows in his pursuit of a righteous outcome. One can feel the filmmakers straining to find ways to justify their own bias by adding challenging elements to bolster the counter-argument. This devil's advocacy comes off as overly convenient and slightly disingenuous. An attack on Hank's wife, for instance, compels her to question the empathy she has shown the accused, while Hank's own confrontation with street toughs gives him concerns about his personal bloodlust. These sequences make sense in the grand scheme of the dramaturgy, but they are poorly integrated in the whole and seem only minor distractions from a film that is not at all shy about its driving point. (Which, is not wrong in and of itself; have a point of view! It's fine!)

And it's not Hank that tanks the trial, it's Frankenheimer and his writers. Things never get messy, nor are there any unpredictable revelations. The bits we see only hit the right points and are come by too easily, hurrying too fast through the complexities that have been cultivated, rushing to bring us to Hank's inevitable redemption. At least in the eyes of the concerned white women in his life. His bosses, the press, and the victim's family? Not so much.

Still, there's a lot to like. Frankenheimer pulls of some artfully amazing shots, and his general storytelling skills are so facile, the movie never really lags. The way in which the action moves between different settings is so well choreographed, the narrative picks up a real momentum, almost like you're being led through a maze. Lancaster is really strong, as well, providing a stoic wall for other characters to bounce off. I also really liked Merrill, who allegedly never got on with Frankenheimer; her scene where she drinks too much and makes fun of Lancaster's character is edgy and funny. The actress has a good drunk shtick.

The Young Savages is also very earnest, and that both works for it and against it. As silly as its knee-jerk liberalism feels at times, the sheer force of belief combined with the talent behind it wins out. The Young Savages still has a relevancy in its dissection of race and systematic justice (or lack thereof), even if it doesn't still crackle with the same energy as 12 Angry Men [review] or other contemporaries.

SECONDS - #667

“I’ve been assigned to go over the circumstances of your death with you.”

So goes the sales pitch that kicks Seconds into high gear. After watching middle-aged, upper-middle-class businessman Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) navigate mysterious instructions from long-lost friends, meat packers, and dry cleaners, we finally get to the heart of the matter, the thing that he is being lured toward. The program isn’t something you choose, they choose you, whether you’re looking for it or not. You ready to take that mid-life crisis of yours by the horns? Look no further. You can wake up tomorrow with a new face, a new vocation, and a new identity. The only price is...well, everything.

A predecessor to Fincher’s The Game [review], a close cousin to Orson Welles’ The Trial, John Frankenheimer’s 1966 paranoid freak-out is an enigmatic, intriguing hallucination. It hits the ground with both feet and runs like hell, never worrying too much to stop and explain itself, confident the audience will get on board, banking on our wanting to understand what it all means, putting us in our anti-hero’s shoes by never letting us know more than he does. It’s fascinating and weird and strangely prescient. It wouldn’t shock me at all to find out this was Charlie Kaufman’s favorite film as a child.

After plastic surgery and rehab, and a complete overhaul of his most telling physical features (new teeth, removed fingerprints, etc.), Arthur wakes up as Antiochus Wilson (Rock Hudson, Magnificent Obsession [review]), a painter with a beach house in California. It’s a fresh start where the husband and father is now a single swinging bachelor, primed to pursue his art, no matter how impractical; he just has to go along and get along. Which naturally, he can’t. The new Mr. Wilson can’t quite wrap his head around what happened to him, and he starts trying to scratch at the veneer.

“Rebirth is painful...Is it easier to go forward than go back?”

Released at the center of a cultural revolution, Seconds pursues a question of the times: can the past be assimilated into the future? (The present need not apply.) If Arthur Hamilton has bought into the dream of the establishment, living a life of quiet desperation in the suburbs, then he is part of the old guard, one ill prepared for changes to come. Yet, he’s also one with the means to buy his way out. As Wilson, he is set up with a new bohemian lifestyle, free of responsibility, disconnected from cultural change, even if in some ways he is embracing counter culture. The drunken bacchanal that baptizes him as a member of his new community is at once a throwback to the orgies of Rome and a reflection of the Free Love 1960s. Yet it’s false, the whole experience is, which is what Wilson can’t accept. His partying is a bit like Roger Sterling’s experiments with LSD on Mad Men: he has stepped beyond the point where he could maybe pull it off.

The conundrum here is in which direction Frankenheimer’s critique flows. Is his disdain for the squares or for the hippies? The fact that Seconds exists almost within a void, with little hint as to the time it was actually made, it could be viewed as relevant regardless of where you are standing on the continuum. Wilson could just as easily be any struggling white man trying to outrun obsolescence in 2016. The problem is that once Arthur/Wilson has woken up, as it were, he cannot go back to sleep. You can’t roll back history--even if many today try to pretend them can. To not accept change is to end up back in limbo. In this case, an office job within the program, only escapable by selling someone out to your same fate. To once again invoke Mad Men, Wilson is a little like Don Draper at the end of that series, becoming aware that he must relinquish material things, but in this case, too late to bend this enlightenment to his will or exploit it.

Hudson is perfect for the role of the man lost in the construct of himself, perhaps because he knows the pain of living a false identity all to well, having done it for so long in his real life. The restlessness and self-loathing of Wilson grappling with his fraudulent existence is agonizing. Something was lost in the endeavor to have everything. Hudson lends a heaviness to the performance, and when Wilson begins to self-medicate, the actor makes for a very convincing drunk. It’s one of the funniest scenes in a movie full of black humor, and one of the creepiest when the crowd all turn against him. That drunkenness gives way to a tangible despair, and the self-medication turns to literal medication when Wilson returns to the company. They give him pharmaceuticals to keep him pacified. It’s yet another turn that is all too current and relevant, 50 years later.

Seconds is nothing if not immediate. Even how it was shot was intended to make it seem as if it were happening at the exact moment each viewer witnesses it. Director of photography James Wong Howe (Sweet Smell of Success) uses a stark photographic style, one with a more realistic, unenhanced look we might expect from more contemporary pictures shot on video or digital. He favors extreme close-ups and even over-the-shoulder moves to put us in the thick of it. In the various party scenes, the camera practically gets buried in the revels. And when things get weird, reality warps under fish-eye lenses and tricky perspectives, pushing us away at one moment and pulling us in the next, like we are dangling on a spring. There is an intimacy to our participating in the unraveling that keeps us firmly in Wilson’s shoes. We are trapped in the same horror movie as he is, but with the added enhancement of gothic organ music.

“Just who the hell do you think you are?”

For Wilson, that is an unanswerable question in the end. He is either/or, neither/nor. He surrendered the identity he spent a lifetime building in exchange for an altogether different, artificial construct, and when he fails to maintain it, that is stripped from him, too. It’s a fairly chilling ouroboros: you have to assimilate in order to be different. It’s the illusion of freedom, and there’s nothing really to be done, the more you push against it, the more it dissipates. So it goes, same as it ever was. THE END.

Special thanks to Francis Rizzo III, from whose DVDTalk.com review of the movie I snagged the majority of the above images.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 5/13

IN THEATRES...

* Frances Ha, Noah Baumbach, having found a new muse in Greta Gerwig, strikes out anew.

* Gimme the Loot, street-level cinema verite following two graffiti artists preparing for a big tag.

* The Great Gatsby in 3D has two-wasted dimensions. Shtick and spectacle from Baz Luhrmann.

* The Iceman, a biopic about one of America's most notorious contract killers. Michael Shannon lends the role intensity, but the script only touches the material gingerly.

* The Purge, Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey in a tense little thriller with inklings of political allegory.

* Sightseers, the new film from Ben Wheatley, a rebel in search of applause. Take a tour of misanthropy.

My Oregonian columns:

* May 3: the food documentary The Food Hunters, Harold Lloyd's classic Safety Last! newly restored, and the 18th-annual HP Lovecraft Film Festival.

* May 10: a two-week film noir festival at Cinema 21; Rock Hudson starring in John Frankenheimer's whacky psych-out Seconds, and the political/social documentary The Mosque in Morgantown.

* May 17: a rare noir Fallguy; Luis Bunuel directs Catherine Deneuve in Tristana; and Guy Pearce sends 33 Postcards

* May 23: Douglas Fairbanks as The Thief of Bagdad; Paul McCartney gives us a Wings Rockshow; the Experimental Film Festival 2013.

* May 30: Take a visit to Skull World; look at the making of two different forms of art with Becoming Traviata and Bel Borba Aqui; get gay married for a greencard in I Do.

* June 7: underground crime fiction by way of Flamingos; the activist-focused environmental documentary Elemental; and Stress Position, an agitprop art school prank.

ON BD/DVD...

* Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing, a 1973 disjointed road-trip romance from Alan J. Pakula.

* Save the Date, a wedding-centric sorta rom-com with Alison Brie and Lizzy Caplan, co-written and featuring artwork by cartoonist Jeffrey Brown.

* Wake of the Red Witch, a seafaring, bodice-ripping potboiler with John Wayne.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF TELEVISION - #495

Years ago, I was co-host of a cable access show. Every two weeks, we'd be live on Portland television for an hour, showing music videos, working without a script. Hardly anybody watched it, there were no consequences if we sucked, but even so, that hour was a nerve-wracking, electrified, exciting time. We were beaming across the city to whatever homes had cable, to whoever might have happened across us while scanning the airwaves with their remote controls. What a thrill! From the signal that we were on the air to the studio's screen going black, whatever happened happened, there was no taking it back.

I can only imagine what it must have been like to do live television dramas in the 1950s. The best I can do is try to marry my slim community theatre experience with the cable access experience. Put together a scripted show where I had to remember lines and hit my marks with that feeling of reaching beyond the protected performance space, that what we were doing wasn't just going to be seen by those in the immediate vicinity, but potentially by hundreds. Thousands. Millions. It wasn't just a matter of showing up and running out the clock, you'd really have to perform.

That's how TV was done in the early days. Live shows, like hour-long plays, often with the best and the brightest of Broadway, new talent cutting their teeth in a new media. Eight of these programs are collected in the new Criterion boxed set, The Golden Age of Television. The collection is named for a PBS series that showcased this exciting time. The original presentations were performed live on the East Coast, shot with multiple cameras, but in the days before video tape, so no clean way to capture what was happening. The filmmakers edited as they went, it wasn't on film. What PBS resurrected and what they showed when this series first ran back in the early 1980s, bringing these vintage teleplays back to the air for the first time in decades, were recordings called "kinescopes." Essentially, kinescope was a process of photographing the broadcast by pointing a special camera at a video monitor. Like if you took a camera yourself and set it up in front of your TV and recorded a show. It wasn't perfect--you can sometimes see the curve of the screen, or a speck of dirt on the glass, or any number of glitches--but it was the only way to prevent these programs from just disappearing into thin air.

The material here is the cream of the crop, chosen from hours of television. Amongst the shows, we get early scripts from writers as revered as Paddy Chayefsky, Ira Levin, and Rod Serling, direction from future legends like John Frankenheimer, and performances by Ed Begley, Andy Griffith, Rod Steiger, Elizabeth Montgomery, George Peppard, Paul Newman, Julie Harris, Kim Hunter, Jack Palance, Mel Torme, and Piper Laurie in roles both big and a small. There are also small-screen turns by established big-screen stars like Everett Sloane, Edmond O'Brien, and Mickey Rooney. Structured more like the legitimate theatre, these high-wire acts show a precision of craft and a dedication from the talent we don't see all that much anymore. There were no do-overs. They only got one shot.

*** Disc 1 ***

Marty (1953): Directed by Delbert Mann and written by Paddy Chayefsky, this initial version of Marty predates the Oscar-winning movie by several years. It stars a young Rod Steiger in the role later popularized by Ernest Borgnine. He plays Marty, the lonely butcher in his late 30s whose bachelorhood is beginning to weigh heavy on his shoulders and his heart. His mother (Esther Minciotti) is worried that her eldest will never marry the way her younger children have--though even as she encourages Marty to get out there, she begins to doubt whether his finding a wife is the best thing for her. Life changes affect everyone, including the old moms who live with their sons.

Marty eventually meets a woman, a schoolteacher (Nancy Marchand), at a dancehall. He becomes aware of her when another guy asks him to take her off his hands. They had come here on a blind date, and he's decided she's a dog. Seeing a familiar crack in her broken heart, Marty risks further pain by sharing his hurt with the girl, and they see glimmers of happiness in one another. It's a tender story, enacted with a touching sensitivity. Steiger is the epitome of a gentle giant, and his expressions of doubt and heartache are disarming coming not just from a man of his size, but any man really. It's not usually the fella we see waiting at home for the phone to ring in romantic stories. Chayefsky builds Marty's predicament with such care, layering the story with thematic parallels, that he staves off any impending mawkishness. Marty is sweet and touching, but it's not manipulative, it comes by those heartstrings it tugs honestly.

Patterns (1955): Rod Serling's big-business drama caused a sensation when it first aired, and it went a long way to building the reputation that would eventually lead to the writer landing his own series, The Twilight Zone. Unlike that show, this Fielder Cook-helmed drama stays close to the earth, detailing the regime change in a large corporation. Fred Staples (Richard Kiley) is a new vice president being brought in to edge out the old, Andy Sloane (Ed Begley). The boss, Mr. Ramsie (Everett Sloane), sees Andy's moralistic approach to business as a relic from his father's age, a hold-over from a time long gone. Fred doesn't know he has been fashioned into an assassin's bullet, but it doesn't take long for his true purpose to be revealed.

Rod Serling's strength has always been socially conscious dramas that manage to wear their pointed message out in the open, but like Chayefsky, he wrote in such a way that it never seemed obvious or cloying. In Patterns, the pieces all move with precision--there is the hard-charging boss, the rising star and the fading champ, the secretary who sees everything (Elizabeth Wilson), the wife (June Dayton) who wants to see her husband climb the ladder. Everyone has a function, but the way the gears lock together never show. Grandstanding speeches come off as natural. They are written with an ear for speech, and spoken by true masters. Ed Begley is fragile as the aging executive, losing the last grip he has on stability, and Everett Sloane is ruthless as the company president. It's all Richard Kiley can do to remain standing between them as they obliterate one another.

No Time for Sergeants (1955): The lone comedy in the set stars Andy Griffith as Will Stockdale, the country bumpkin draftee who gets through the army on his blind luck, blind charm, and well, blind everything. His is the kind of character who never seems to clue in to what all is going on around him, to the precariousness of his situation or the dismay he may be causing others. In truth, they are uptight and overly concerned with rules and such; he is free to be himself.

No Time for Sergeants was adapted by Ira Levin (Rosemary's Baby) from a novel by Mac Hyman, and this Alex Segal-directed production actually predates the more famous Broadway version, which grew out of this show and also starred Griffith. It's also the first show in The Golden Age of Television to feature a first-person narrator that talks directly to the audience (Bang the Drum Slowly is another), and we follow Griffith as he crosses through the sets, even makes jokes about the empty facades and the ease with which he gets from one place to the other. Griffith is definitely charming (if not also a little annoying), and though the humor is of an antiquated variety, the down-home joking hasn't grown stale. Harry Clark plays Will Stockdale's foil, the flummoxed Sergeant King, and he and Griffith play off each other really well. It's a little like watching a live-action Looney Tune.

*** Disc 2 ***

A Wind from the South (1955): This quiet love story set in Ireland stars Julie Harris as Shevawn, the sisterly half of a brother/sister duo running a bread and breakfast in the countryside. Unlike her angry brother (Michael Higgins), Shevawn hasn't resigned herself to a life stuck in her hometown, she dreams of travel, a fantasy life fueled by the lives in transit passing through their establishment. Amongst the current guests is the American ad man Robert (Donald Woods), a man equally frustrated with his stagnant life, but who covers his frustrations with jocularity, poetry, and drink. Shevawn and Robert share a brief one-night affair, one that stirs both of them, and that plays out in surprising, satisfying ways. The emotional denouement shows a lot of depth. The script is by James Costigan, a notable name in early television, and inspired by, of all things, an album of songs recorded by Merv Griffin in tribute to The Quiet Man (Collector's Edition). While the future talk-show host doesn't appear on screen, he does sing "A Soft Day" at the start and close of the show, as well as at the act breaks. As the lyric goes, "A soft day, thank God/ A wind from the South with a honeyed mouth."

Harris was a Broadway star who would be one of the emerging talents in 1950s television; she would match this success with big screen triumph in A Member of the Wedding and East of Eden. I quite liked her in A Wind from the South, it's a role filled with earnestness and longing, but tempered by sweetness--the actress' specialty. Directed by Daniel Petrie (Rocket Gibraltar), the tiny drama has a remarkable sensitivity, exploring the notions of dreams and how desires often must give way to reality.

Bang the Drum Slowly (1956): Daniel Petrie also directed this baseball story, adapted by Arnold Schulman from a book by Mark Harris. A young Paul Newman stars as Henry "Author" Wiggen, the first-person narrator of the story. He is a minor league pitcher who becomes entangled in the life of his catcher, Bruce Pearson (Albert Salmi), a player of little talent and even less brains. When Bruce becomes terminally ill, Author takes him under his wing, doing his best to keep his ailment a secret so he doesn't get cut from the team. The locker room talk here is pretty tame, but the camaraderie is still a lot of fun. Author is an amusing character, hung up on taxes and caught up in his own story to a point where he almost forgets that it's someone else's tale he's telling.

Or maybe that's the consequence of having Paul Newman leading the charge. He's an electric performer, even at this stage, imbuing Author with an Actor's Studio twitchiness. The method gets in the way of Newman's naturalism a little, but his inherent charisma and comfort in front of the camera was too pronounced to squash. Albert Salmi is also very good. I am used to seeing him as the heavy, but he is quite convincing as a big palooka.

Speaking of big palookas...

Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956): This famous Rod Serling drama was one of the first productions on "Playhouse 90," the series that ushered in the 90-minute drama. If these guys could do a full hour, why not an hour and a half? No big deal, right?

Well, it was a big deal, but Requiem makes it look easy. Jack Palance stars as Mountain, a boxer who is over-the-hill at 33. He lost his latest bout in a big way, and the doctor says if he keeps fighting, he'll go blind. To make matters worse, his trusted manager, Maish (Keenan Wynn), didn't think he could make it past three rounds, and when the bruiser manages to take it to seven, Maish doesn't make book and it puts the gambler in big-time hock. As Mountain tries to figure out what to do with himself if he's not fighting, Maish has to figure out how he's going to pay off the gangsters. In between is the cut-man Army (Ed Wynn), who'd like to see both of his friends get out of their predicaments with dignity.

Requiem for a Heavyweight is a remarkable piece of work. It set the standard for boxing stories, so much so that filmmakers are still borrowing from it to this day. Jack Palance is nearly unrecognizable as the punchy knuckleduster, turning his massive girth into sensitive mush. His relationship with Kim Hunter's employment officer is sweet and believable, the smart gal falling for the gentle giant. Serling's ability to capture the essential human decency of any situation makes Requiem more than your basic sports story, he takes this very specific tale of descent and makes it a play about universal triumph.

*** Disc 3 ***

The final disc belongs to John Frankenheimer, an innovative director who would move from television to direct movies like The Manchurian Candidate and Ronin. What Frankenheimer brought to the screen in terms of style is immediately apparent from the very first scene on this DVD. There is a tremendous sense of movement, of smart choreography and tricky set-ups, that is unlike anything that came before it. With the constant creativity of the age, of new programs being staged every night, such innovation was inevitable. It's like exercising: you only get stronger the more you do it.

The Comedian (1957): The Comedian opens in a television studio, jumping back and forth between the control booth and the floor, staging close-ups using a video monitor in the extreme foreground, showing us the tail end of a disastrous rehearsal for comic legend Sammy Hogarth's latest extravaganza. Hogarth, played with knowing verve by Mickey Rooney, is making his transition into 90-minute television. How meta can you get? Based on a story by respected writer Ernest Lehman, this Rod Serling teleplay tears the live TV world apart, showing us the inflated egos of its stars and the people they destroy from the top on down. Edmond O'Brien (D.O.A.) plays the washed-up writer who chisels Sammy's schtick, and singer Mel Torme is his hapless brother, a do-it-all assistant who is also the butt of most of Sammy's jokes. In a Sweet Smell of Success-style twist, Whit Bissell plays Elwell, a gossip columnist looking to take Sammy down because of a vicious impersonation of his signature style the actor once performed. (Note: Lehman also wrote that picture.) It all comes to a head on the big night.

The Comedian is unrelenting and sometimes brutal. Sammy is an irredeemable character, even with the hidden pain Serling unearths in the final act. He's not meant to be redeemed, we're only meant to see the source of his pathology. The actors are all incredible. Rooney is incendiary, O'Brien is tragic and feral, and the only nobility in the play belongs to the women, with Kim Hunter and Constance Ford seeing the writing on the wall long before their men do. Torme is the only weak link, his portrayal of Lester Hogarth never quite coming together, perhaps a case of the character's weakness overtaking the actor.

Frankenheimer is the real star, though. The Comedian is an ambitious piece of work, full of inventive, nearly surreal set pieces and featuring a final-act montage that must have been a real bear to undertake. Layering stock footage and scenes of the Sammy Hogarth show, he elevates this one-off production to a level that was equal to anything playing at the local movie house.

As an aside, The Comedian is introduced by Claudette Colbert, whom we learn over the closing credits is scheduled to be on "Playhouse 90" the following week. Likewise, Sterling Hayden introduces the next program...

Days of Wine and Roses (1958): This hard-hitting drama about alcoholism was probably the first time most Americans saw inside an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Cliff Robertson stars as Joe Clay, the anonymous witness for this session, who tells the story of his drinking life with Kirsten Arnesen (Piper Laurie). They met through booze and stayed together with booze, and the J.P. Miller script tracks the ups and downs of their relationship, the highs and the incredible lows. They fail more than once to kick the sauce, and Joe's AA membership acts as a wedge between them, redefining how they look at one another. The show looks at not just how drinking affects the pair, but their family and the people around them.

Like Requiem for a Heavyweight's boxing clichés, a lot of what we see here has become standard practice for addiction-based melodramas, and though the final scene featuring Joe reciting the serenity prayer may seem a little hokey now, I doubt it was as commonplace in 1958. Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie really go through the ringer in Days of Wine and Roses, they must have felt like they were running a marathon. So demanding was the show, Frankenheimer actually elected to pre-record the scenes at AA, he couldn't have Cliff Robertson running back and forth and changing his suit as much as would be required. One scene these guys are sober, the next they are drunk--there are even a couple of detox sequences. Surprisingly, Miller doesn't wrap everything up neatly in the end, either. Not everyone walks away happy.

The thing about watching The Golden Age of Television is that you would never know these productions were recorded live if you weren't told. They aren't gimmicky or shambolic, they aren't simply one-room sets like filming a stage play within its confined space. What is still amazing to see is how deftly these filmmakers pulled this off, how seamlessly they move from one location to the next, from character to character, never letting the cracks show. These are fine-tuned productions, expertly rehearsed, carefully honed to come off without a hitch. These dramas were meant to compete with motion pictures--and they do. Quite easily.

The Golden Age of Television - Criterion Collection is an invaluable historical document that also manages to be a potent testament to the quality of early television drama (and one comedy!). These eight shows, recorded live between 1953 and 1958, show a medium in emergence, propelled by unmatched talent. The writing, direction, and acting--every aspect of the performance--is a wonder to behold, and all the more impressive for the fact that this was all done exactly as we see it here. No retakes, no do-overs, pure live theatre--though not the traditional trodden boards, the theatre of the air!

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.