PARIS BLUES - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review was originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2014.

Martin Ritt's 1961 jazz-infused drama Paris Blues is one of those films that, once you've seen it, you're kind of shocked that people don't talk about it more. A joint vehicle for Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman, Paris Blues is a Kazan-like social narrative that juxtaposes new Hollywood method with old Hollywood romanticism and somehow let's both win without compromising either.

Newman stars as Ram Bowen, a trumpet player with a moody demeanor worthy of his groaning pun of a name (say it out loud and then say, "Rimbaud"). He is the toast of Paris' side-street jazz scene, blowing nightly with his band, working alongside his cohort and musical arranger, Eddie Cook (Poitier). Eddie is practical and level-headed, a smooth balance to Ram's jagged edges. The ex-pat Americans have a good thing going in France. Ram even has a no-strings love affair with a chanteuse (Barbara Laage) who doesn't mind feeding him after gigs.

Yet, the boys have ambition, too. Ram is working on a magnum opus, his "Paris Blues," and he hopes to get some weight behind it by giving the sheet music to Wild Man Moore, a trumpeting legend who has just landed in the city as part of a European tour. Moore is played by none other than Louis Armstrong, just to give you an idea of Paris Blues' musical bonafides. The original scorce was also composed by Duke Ellington, who was nominated for an Oscar. Ritt isn't fooling around.

Yet, he's also not limiting his story--which was written by four different scribes from a novel by Harold Flender--to just difficult men in smoky bars. When Ram goes to the train station to meet Moore, he also meets a pair of young American women in town to see the sights. One white (Lillian, played by Joanne Woodward) and one black (Connie, as portrayed by Diahann Carroll). To give you an idea of how progressive Paris Blues was for the time, despite the eventual romantic pairing being just as you suspect, Ram at first flirts with Connie without race even being mentioned. (And who wouldn't. Have you ever seen Diahann Carroll?!) Lillian is more his match, however, in that she's been around the block and has an admirable patience. The single mother has dealt with her fair share of troublemakers, Ram's temperament suits her. It's going to take some effort to get him to value anyone over his music, though.

Which he sort of will come to do over the time he and Lillian spend together in Paris. For the next several days, both pairs of lovers will try to fashion their affections into some kind of common ground. Lillian sees the possibility of something more with Ram. Connie would love for Eddie to come back to the States, but he's frank about his reasons for living overseas: America is racist. She argues it's gotten better in the five years since he left; he counters that it's still not good enough.

Paris Blues is very frank about its politics, but not in a way that makes it seem like a polemic just for the sake of it. The topics broached in the narrative emerge naturally. These are things the characters would care about, they deal with life as it would genuinely affect them. For as traditionally structured as much of the writing is, Paris Blues treats all aspects of these folks' existence in the same realistic manner. It's never said, but we know that Ram and Lillian are having sex. Ram's guitar player (French cinema legend Serge Reggiani, Casque d'Or) is also a drug addict, a fact Ram confronts head on (as befitting a ram, natch). Race, sex, drugs, art--this is important stuff. Ritt manages to make all these things come off as both matter of fact and yet also important. Hell, look closely at the opening montage, you'll see a gay couple tucked away in Ram and Eddie's audience.

But forget all that. The sights! Paris Blues was actually shot on the Seine! And the music! Louis Armstrong struts into Ram's club to challenge him to the jazz equivalent of a rap battle. The only comparable jazz-scene movie of the period is Basil Dearden's All Night Long [review], released a year after Paris Blues. This flick is the real deal.

You also get an acting quartet that was at the height of their considerable powers. Apparently at one point this was going to be a movie for Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe. As wonderful as that is to imagine, you can't beat the chemistry of longtime paramours Newman and Woodward. They are the exception to the accepted rule that real lovers don't work on screen. Poitier and Carroll are wonderful, too--though much less showy. They are the practical couple, the counterpoint to the crazy Caucasians!

Final word: Paris Blues is a damn entertaining drama. It's romantic and toe-tapping and thought provoking. It deserves to sit next to Ritt and Newman's more famous collaborations, like Hud and The Long, Hot Summer. It's just that good.

SELECTED SHORTS II - CRITERION CHANNEL

The Criterion Channel, in addition to hosting a plethora of feature films, also has a varied collection of short films--live action, animated, fiction, documentary; comedy and drama; silent and talkies.

Short cinema--just like short stories--is a unique art form unto itself, employing different conventions, and bringing with it different expectations, but these pieces are no less worthy of consideration than full-length films. From time to time, I will take a look at a selection of what’s on offer. You can read the previous column here.

Lira’s Forest (2017; Canada; 9 minutes): An elderly woman on her front porch meets a boy wearing a fox mask, and he proves to be more than he appears. Simple in plot, a film of, essentially, only three or four actions, Connor Jessup’s tiny poem still manages to say something weighty about life and, more strikingly, relieving ourselves of our mortality. Beautifully shot, with no superfluous detail to speak of, it feels like a live action Hayao Miyazaki scene. I’d be curious what Jessup does with something more substantial.

(Note: Jessup is also the director of the Criterion Channel’s documentary on Apichatpong Weerasethakul.)

The Extraordinary Life of Rocky (2010; Belgium; 14 minutes): This black comedy about a boy who decides to give up loving his friends and family, believing that his affection is the reason everyone he cares about dies, aims for a tone and style not dissimilar to Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but its humor never sharpens and there’s no substitute for actual heart. Writer/director Kevin Meul has a whimsical eye for visuals, creating some fun rhymes throughout Life of Rocky (note how many times there is a helicopter of one kind or another), but it often feels like he accepted whimsical as being good enough rather than push his ideas further.

Daybreak Express (1943; USA; 6 minutes): Set to the music of Duke Ellington, documentarian D.A. Pennebaker’s art piece recreates the experience of a morning commute, capturing the light and the color of the city as the sun rises over the sky. More of a collage than a narrative, the montage nevertheless activates the right feelings, turning what was probably a daily slog for many workers into a thing of joyful beauty.

(Also available on the Criterion release of Pennebaker’s Bob Dylan documentary, Don’t Look Back [review].)

The Colour of His Hair (2017; United Kingdom; 22 minutes): A mix of documentary and fiction, The Colour of His Hair de-archives an unfinished script by Elizabeth Montague, written in 1964 for Britain’s Homosexual Law Reform Society. Montague’s brother, Lord Montague, had been involved in a high profile prosecution that sent him to jail for a year as punishment for being a practicing homosexual. The case sparked a movement in England to decriminalize being gay.

From what we see here, The Colour of His Hair looked to be a dramatic thriller, something along the lines of Basil Dearden’s Victim [review]. Two young lovers are being blackmailed and threatened with exposure if they don’t pay--a very real problem at the time. Though what exists of Montague’s script is just set-up, filmmaker Sam Ashby lends it gravity by splicing it together with archival footage about the Reform Society and testimony from men victimized in this way--both by opportunistic criminals and the law that empowered their crimes. At first I was hoping for less documentary and more story, but as Ashby carefully layers his narrative, including information about the Lesbian and Gay News Media Archive, where Montague’s script had been housed, he not only illustrates the heartache that many experienced, but the importance of the change that was brought about when the unctuous law was finally undone.

The Black Balloon (2012; USA; 21 minutes): A short from filmmaking brothers Josh and Ben Safdie (Good Time), The Black Balloon is the grown-up flipside to Albert Lamorisse’s children’s classic The Red Balloon [review]. In NYC, a gaggle of birthday balloons are accidentally released into the air, and a single black balloon drifts away from the pack. Searching for some kind of connection, someone to take its string and give it a life, the black balloon moves through the city, creating unique opportunities for various denizens of the metropolis to put it to use. One man (Larry “Ratso” Sloman, a collaborator of Bob Dylan and Howard Stern) instructs it to block a security camera so he can shoplift, another uses it to distract the daughter of his girlfriend, and a third to get the attention of his grown son. In each case, the adult abandons the balloon as soon as it served its purpose--the complete opposite of the little boy in The Red Balloon.

The Safdies have an agile shooting style that works well with the material and the locale. Stray, superfluous moments give a pretty good indication of how much the boys love New York, and you will marvel at how they pulled off some of the au naturale street scenes where the balloon bobs its way through the crowd. The characters all seem as if they are plucked straight from that mass, lending a credibility to what is otherwise a fanciful production. Though slight in its parts, the whole is effective.

(Side note: The Red Balloon enthusiasts should also check out Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon [review] to see an alternate update.)

Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d’un clown [Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Clown] (1946; France; 18 minutes): The first film from renowned auteur Jean-Pierre Melville is a long way from his more famous efforts like Le samourai [review] and Army of Shadows [review 1, 2]. This black-and-white documentary is exactly as advertised: a chronicle of what a famous clown, Beby, does between one night’s performance and the next. Narrated by Melville (there is little live sound), the film takes a rather lackadaisical approach to the reporting, embracing its subject and allowing for a little humorous staging--including an excellent sequence where Beby and his partner get inspiration from watching the mishaps of regular folks on the Parisian street (all staged, but don’t worry about it).

My favorite player, though, is Beby’s dog Swing, who goes wherever he goes. Try not to be completely charmed when Swing takes a prayer pose next to his master to say his blessings before bed. Just try!

(Note: Also available on the Criterion Collection release of Le silence de la mer, Melville’s feature-length debut.)

A TASTE OF HONEY - #829

“I dreamt about you last night, and I fell out of bed twice....”

Morrissey or Shelagh Delaney?

As most fans of the Smiths know, it’s both. Though, those with a big nose who know, know that the lyricist ripped it from the playwright, just as Moz lifted much from Delaney’s texts and nodded to her often. The above lyric is from A Taste of Honey and was embedded in the early Smiths track “Reel Around the Fountain;”  another song from the same period, “This Night Has Opened My Eyes,” not only borrows more lines from Honey, but the plot as well. Morrissey makes no secret of this. On the contrary, his sampling from Delaney, as well as putting her picture on album and singles covers (Louder than Bombs and “Girlfriend in a Coma”) helped drive many a dark youngster to her work. I read the original A Taste of Honey stageplay in high school, and finally found the film version many years later. The vocabulary theft made me predisposed to be a fan.

Shelagh Delaney on "Girlfriend in a Coma"

Rita Tushingham on the Sandie Shaw/Smiths EP

The movie adaptation of A Taste of Honey was released in 1961. Directed by Tony Richardson, it is considered part of Britain’s “kitchen sink” movement, so named not because the filmmakers in that school threw “everything but...” into their cinema, but rather they showed us how folks lived, kitchen sinks and all. Examining the working class citizens as they struggled to get by and potentially change their lives, Criterion fans can see the storytelling style in films as different as This Sporting Life [review], Billy Liar [review], and Victim [review], or even later, we can see how it influenced Ken Loach (Kes [review]) and Mike Leigh.

One hallmark of the kitchen sink films was the appearance of the angry young man (Harris in This Sporting Life, McDowell in If.... [review]--both in films by Lindsay Anderson, whom Shelagh Delaney collaborated with on The White Bus [review]). This makes A Taste of Honey a bit of a stylistic revolutionary, as its protagonist is an angry young woman. Starring Rita Tushingham (Doctor Zhivago, Girl with Green Eyes), A Taste of Honey tells the story of Jo, a teenager frustrated with her life of squalor and limited prospects. Jo lives alone with her mother, Helen (Dora Bryan), a woman with many lovers but never two shillings to rub together. This means the pair moves a lot, running out on one landlord after another. They also squabble constantly, tearing one another down, breaking up and making up because, begrudgingly, they are all they’ve really got.

This changes when Helen meets Peter (Robert Stephens) and decides to remarry. Though Jo is reluctant to finally let go of the apron strings, Peter is a much younger man than his new bride and not interested in having a grown daughter. So, Jo moves out on her own, getting a job in a shoe shop and a new roommate of her own. Also, she’s gotten pregnant by a sailor who has since left to sail the seas.

An unmarried teenager having a child all by her lonesome would have been social scandal enough, but Delaney--who co-wrote the screenplay with Richardson--was a progressive writer whose vision took in all aspects of life in urban Manchester. Jo’s lover, Jimmy (Paul Danquah), is a black man, and her roommate, Geoffrey (Murray Melvin), is gay. These facts are both approached delicately. No one comments on Jimmy and Jo being together, but the color of his skin is a factor in Jo’s anxiety about the impending birth. For instance, should she even want to take Geoffrey up on his offer to marry, people will know he’s not the father when they see the child. That’s if the gossips and wags buy their relationship to begin with. Though no one but Jo ever confronts Geoffrey outright about his sexuality, everyone looks at him sideways. They all sense the truth.

Which is always fascinating to see in an older film, since anyone with parents and grandparents born in “the good old days” knows that some members of those generations often tend to pretend that gays and lesbians weren’t around until that demonic disco music magically spawned them. But that’s what art is for--and history books--to show us what many would rather we not see. There’s a reason A Taste of Honey opens with a censorship board certificate indicating it’s only suitable for viewers over the age of 16. Much of the dialogue is frank about things that just weren’t acceptable: sex out of wedlock, abortion, alcoholism. Yet, Delaney avoids pushing a message. She and Richardson just want to show life as they’ve witnessed it and let the audience empathize or reject on their own.

Though Tony Richardson’s generation of filmmakers is often referred to as the British New Wave, their early work has little of the experimentalism inherent in the movies of their French contemporaries laboring under the same name. Rather, the Brits had more in common with the Italians in that realism was more important than style. Hence the director and his cinematographer Walter Lassally (who went on to shoot many of James Ivory’s lesser pictures) filming in the streets of Manchester, inside real apartments, and walking the boardwalk by the seaside. This was an existence that could not be re-created in a studio without adding a touch of glitz, so better to go where it was actually happening. The excursions out into public have an air of documentary, including a trip to the country where the child-like Geoffrey and Jo frolic with elementary school-aged kids. The mountainside expanse emphasizes how small they really are in the grand scheme of the universe (“I’m not happy and I’m not sad”), and the company they keep exposes just how young they are, too. Neither is really in a place where they should be having kids of their own.

It’s a great sequence, actually, with Geoffrey trying to prove he can be the husband and father Jo needs by awkwardly kissing her. The “traditional” roles are reversed with these two. Geoffrey probably feels too much, while Jo doesn’t quite know how to access all that is going on in her head and her heart. Back at their flat, Geoffrey cooks and cleans, while Jo goes out and earns a wage. One assumes it will all go wrong for these two, that somehow tragedy awaits, but A Taste of Honey sidesteps our expectations. Sure, it ends on a down beat, and everything isn’t necessarily okay, but we do leave with the sense that it will be. Lessons are being learned, and these characters will all carry on and get along in some fashion. Some ties bind so tightly, they will never be broken.

Criterion’s new restoration is, I believe, the first time A Taste of Honey has been available on disc in the States. The image quality is remarkable: crisp and clear, with strong blacks and an excellent level of detail. Supplements include interviews old and new, including vintage clips with Richardson and Delaney, and new chats with Rita Tushingham and Murray Melvin.

We also get a 1956 short film collaboration between Richardson and Lassally, co-directed by Karel Reisz (The French Lieutenant’s Woman). Made as part of the Free Cinema Collective that Richardson and Reisz formed with Lindsay Anderson, Mama Don’t Allow is a 22-minute documentary that displays the realist roots that Richardson and Co. grew from. Set inside and outside a jazz bar, with cutaways to some of the attendees preparing for an evening on the town, it’s a simple portrait of a particular nightlife. With a live soundtrack by the Chris Barber Jazz Band, including Lonnie Donegan, a.k.a. the King of Skiffle, a successful British rock musician that influenced the Beatles, Mama Don’t Allow is a winning snapshot of a specific scene, giving us a look at music and youth culture before the advent of rock ’n’ roll.

The screengrabs here are from an earlier DVD given away free with the Sunday Telegraph fifteen years ago and not from the Criterion Blu-ray.

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

BASIL DEARDEN'S LONDON UNDERGROUND - ECLIPSE SERIES 25

Basil Dearden is a name that is new to me, and so once again, Criterion's Eclipse Series has created a primer on a lesser-known filmmaker, putting together an intriguing boxed set that should provide an entertaining cinematic expedition for adventurous viewers. The 25th box in the collection, Basil Dearden's London Underground brings together four of the director's movies, made between 1959 and 1962, after the filmmaker had left Ealing Studios and struck out on his own. The movies here show the same mannerisms and penchant for light entertainment as was that studio's trademark, but Dearden's work nearly subverts the tradition with a progressive social conscience. In a way, Basil Dearden's London Underground shows us the bridge between post-War complacency and the cultural explosion of the 1960s. There are touches of the Kitchen Sink movement, though Dearden's aesthetic isn't as starkly realistic; rather, he practically creates his own reality, melding the familiar world of moviehouses with a point of view uniquely his own.

The box leads with Sapphire (92 minutes), a 1959 crime drama written by Janet Green. The film opens on a grisly scene: a dead girl being discovered in a pile of leaves in a public park. The color film stock of the late 1950s gives Sapphire a look that is more pastel than painterly, adding a surreal glimmer to the scene, as if Dearden wanted to undercut the murder's harsh effects by making it easy on the eyes.

The dead girl is Sapphire, and the mystery of who she is ends up being just as important as the circumstances surrounding her death. Sapphire is structured to lead viewers from the discovery of the body through all the steps the police take to solving her case. It's so straightforward, it struck me as having more in common with television police dramas of the period than with big-screen crime pictures. Superintendent Robert Hazard (Nigel Patrick) and Inspector Phil Learoyd (Michael Craig) could have easily been spun off into a Dragnet: London series.

While the one-two-three of the plot is not all that innovative, Sapphire is notable for the nature of the crime. As the girl's background is uncovered, racial tensions in English neighborhoods are also exposed. Dearden follows the investigation through all levels of social life, be it the whites-only college hang-outs or buttoned up middle-class homes, or the out-of-the-way black nightclubs and the more posh "international club" where immigrants of all stripes congregate. Though the storytelling can be stiff and the morality a bit obvious for modern sensibilities, when Sapphire is placed in its proper context, Dearden and Green should be seen as daring commentators who took a risk by being up front about the sticky hypocrisies and hidden animosity that polite society often covered up. Watching Sapphire, I often had the feeling that I was being led down back alleys I would not otherwise have seen. If the film itself falls short as entertainment, it's still utterly fascinating as a piece of art that tried to approach the times head on.

The second film in the set, The League of Gentlemen (116 mins.), falls back on more conventional genre trappings--it is a heist picture--and so it has aged and works better as cinema than Sapphire. It is no less of its time, however, as its band of crooks are British veterans who are bored with life after wartime and feeling disenfranchised. They "did their bit," as they say, but life has been no picnic in the intervening decades. Interestingly, they aren't noble soldiers fallen on hard times, they all have checkered backgrounds. Dearden doesn't avoid pat stereotypes about the Greatest Generation so much as he dances around them.

Colonel Hyde, played with acidic stoicism by Jack Hawkins, gathers together a group of ex-officers whom he knows to have had questionable careers and cajoles them into a cracking caper. His theory, which he bases off a dime novel called The Golden Fleece, is that if a group of military brass approaches a bank robbery with the same discipline as they would approach a battle, then there will be no stopping them. His group is a ragtag collection of personalities, including an old con man who poses as a priest (Roger Livesey) and a gentleman gambler (Nigel Patrick again). The film chronicles their preparation, including robbing an army base for weapons and supplies. (Another sign of the times: they affect Irish accents so the blame will be put on the IRA.) Once things are together, we then see Hyde's incredible plan.

The theft is excellently staged, like a British Ocean's 11, complete with the style and wit that made that original Rat Pack film a bit of a hoot. The League of Gentlemen has a gravity not found in the Vegas heist, however; these aren't men living the high life. The rascals have one more opportunity for adventure, and perhaps more important than the money is the camaraderie of the group. They are part of something again, and it gives them purpose. It's the British cliché of the "stiff upper lip"--the movie's sharp tongue and immaculate appearance covers for the heavy heart that beats just underneath.

The 1961 film that followed League of Gentleman is more grounded in its drama and has more in common with Sapphire, including screenwriter Janet Green. Victim (100 mins.) stars Dirk Bogarde (The Night Porter) as Melvin Farr, a well-known barrister whose secret life nearly goes public when a boy (Peter McEnery) he shared a brief relationship with is caught in a blackmail racket due to an incriminating photo of the two of them. When the boy is pinched for stealing money to pay the extortion, he ends up killing himself. Overcome with guilt and a sense of duty, Farr decides to investigate the crime and put an end to this victimization of homosexuals.

At the time of the movie, being gay was a crime in England, and as Victim points out, the law against homosexuality ended up doing more harm to one class of people than it helped any others. The legal stigma left gay men open to this kind of attack. Crooks could take advantage of their desire not to be exposed. Surprisingly, Victim doesn't tiptoe around the issue or couch it in euphemism. Though it begins as a thriller with a central mystery--we aren't sure why the boy is in trouble or what he's intending to do--once the secret is uncovered, there is no pretending otherwise. Victim depicts gays secretly congregating in bars and even questions how someone like Farr ended up married and passing as straight. The ring of blackmailees spans all manner of society, be it blue collar workers like the dead boy, car salesmen, or famous actors. There is some tendency for proselytizing here--the policemen in particular are saddled with especially clumsy exposition, just as they were in Sapphire (perhaps it's Green, though she co-wrote Victim with John McCormick)--but the movie otherwise deals with the material in a way that maintains the integrity of the story.

Dirk Bogarde is extremely good in what was likely a risky role. Even these days an actor who plays gay, whether he is gay or not, often ends up perceived as such. Bogard handles Farr's sadness and disappointment in himself quite well, showing how brittle the man's situation has become. It's a difficult state of affairs: he might finally be able to be himself, but the cost will be high. The film had its own share of troubles. It was given an "X" rating in England, and U.S. censors tried to have the word "homosexual" removed, severely limiting the film's options for where it could be seen and by whom when Dearden and his producing partner refused.

Though the title of the box is Dearden's London Underground, one interesting thing about Victim is how much the gay lifestyle is seen as aboveground. Dearden doesn't take us into seedy bars hidden away, but instead shows his characters in neighborhood pubs where everyone knows who they are but turn a blind eye. This adds to the effectiveness of the political message: gay men are among us, they are getting along fine, so why subject them to these unfair practices. It's an intelligent use of storytelling as allegory that works with the images and the scenario rather than relying on preaching or other heavy explanations. The system is seen working against itself, and that is illustration enough.

Dearden's jazz world retake of Othello, the 1962 drama All Night Long (91 mins.), hearkens back to Sapphire in terms of its portrayal of interracial romance, but this time around, the union between black and white is not looked at as something scandalous. On the contrary, within the multiracial world of music, it's just a fact of life.

Paul Harris and Marti Stevens play bandleader Aurelius Rex and chanteuse Delia Lane, a jazz power couple who are celebrating their first anniversary in an out-of-the-way nightspot. The story transpires over a single all-night jam session, including real-life legends Dave Brubeck and Charles Mingus. Set to a constant soundtrack of incredible music, All Night Long's rhythm is set, like all music, by the drummer. Patrick McGoohan (The Prisoner) plays Johnny Cousin, the manipulative skins man who is looking to break out of Rex's shadow and start his own band. Johnny needs Delia to front the group if he's going to succeed, but she has been retired since marrying Rex. So, Johnny sets in motion a plot to convince Rex that his current manager, Cass (Keith Michell), is making time with his wife. Once passions explode, the marriage will be kaput, and Delia will go back to work.

Basil Dearden, staging a script by Nel King and Peter Achilles, comes alive in this restricted setting, using the upstairs and downstairs and the side rooms of the club to create a physical puzzle box where he can move the different pieces of the narrative around. McGoohan is also amazing as the craven Johnny Cousin, oozing slime from every pore while playing his cohorts against one another. A lot of the other acting is a little stiff, though Richard Attenborough, who was also in League of Gentlemen, stands out as the owner of the club.

For many, the star of the film will be the music. Led by composer Philip Green, the revolving group of musicians, which also includes Johnny Dankworth and Tubby Hayes, is infections and keeps the movie bopping along, aiding its otherwise slim plot. Dearden shoots much of the jazz up close, and he lets the music affect the mood and, in a Shakespearian flourish, even the weather outside the club walls. It's fun stuff, and it closes out London Underground on an upswing.

Basil Dearden's London Underground is another great surprise from Criterion's Eclipse series. Staying true to its mission statement of bringing lesser-known material to movie fans in an affordable package, their newly released quartet of early '60s British movies sheds light on a progressive filmmaker tackling challenging subjects in ways that are surprising both for their innovation and Dearden's ability to work controversial material into traditional genre forms. A murder mystery, a bank heist, a blackmail sting, and an extended jazz party end up setting the stage for examinations of race, sexuality, and individual purpose. These aren't perfect films, but they are, for the most part, perfectly entertaining, and they make me eager to find more of Dearden's films and see what else this versatile filmmaker got up to, both prior to 1959 and after.

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVDTalk.