This week’s post Fourth of July offerings represent the lightest slate of home entertainment releases of the year so far.  The most interesting offering of the week is the rare Japanese Transformers: Headmasters anime series and with the live-action Transformers movie tearing it up in theaters, what could be more appropriate?  But there are other items of interest including one of the best “B” movies of the year, a short-lived, but fascinating superhero TV series, and some very interesting discs from the vaults at MGM.

 

 

The top TV on DVD release is also this week’s top Anime entry. Transformers: Headmasters: The Japanese Collection (Shout Factory, 765 min., $29.93), which includes all 35 episodes of the late 1980s anime series produced in Japan by Takara. Unlike the American version of the Headmasters, which involved Transformers bonding with organic beings known as Nebulons, in the Japanese version, the Headmasters evolved separately under harsh conditions in the planet Master, where they constructed large bodies called Transtectors. Chromedome, Brainstorm, Hardhead, and Highbrow learned how to become the “heads” and control the Transtectors bodies as well as transform into potent mobile forms.

 

The Japanese Transformers: Headmasters episodes are presented with their original Japanese soundtracks (and English subtitles). Unfortunately the DVDs are not as sharp as Shout Factory’s previous Transformers releases, but they are far better than the bootleg editions that have been the only way to see these episodes—and Transformers fans will want to catch these “old school” anime mecha classics.  The Headmasters series presents viewers with pretty much wall-to-wall, robot-on-robot fighting action.

 

Also out this week is The Cape (Universal, 371 min., $29.98), a superhero-themed TV series that debuted on NBC as a mid-season replacement.  Originally slated as a 13-episode series, the network cut the number down to 10, the last of which never aired except on the NBC's Website.  In spite of a Heroes-like Webcomic, The Cape never caught on as ratings fell steadily after its well-received two-hour debut. Still the series was hardly the worst dramatic series on TV and was mercifully free of the campy attitude that ruins so many TV excursions into the world of superheroes.

 

Continuing series out this week include According to Jim: Season 4 (Lionsgate, 658 min., $29.98), Boy Meets World: Season 6 (Lionsgate, 528 min., $29.98), the classic hardboiled detective series Mannix: Season 5 (Paramount, 1224 min., $49.99), the Syfy science fiction “small town with big secrets" series Eureka: Season 4.0 (Universal, $29.98), plus two seasons of the softboiled crime series Macmillan & Wife: Season 4 (First Look, 540 min., $39.98) and Season 5 (First Look, 540 min., $39.98), as well as the primetime soap Dynasty Season 5: Vol.1(Paramount, 652 min., 36.98) and Season 5 Vol.2 (Paramount, 652 min., $36.98).

 

 

There are just two prime releases this week, but they do provide quite a contrast. For fans of hardcore grindhouse B-Movie fare there is Hobo With a Shotgun (Magnolia Home Entertainment, “R,” $26.98, BD $29.98), which stars Rutger Hauer in a movie inspired by the faux trailer with Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse.  This Canadian production doesn’t stint on the violence or gore, and at 86 minutes it stands in stark contrast to most of today’s bloated, self-indulgent films.  Rutger Hauer plays the eponymous drifter who blows into a corrupt city and proceeds to clean up the town with a little help from a pawn shop 12-gauge.  Obviously not for every taste, Hobo With a Shotgun, is nevertheless an excellent example of unpretentious genre filmmaking that scored an impressive 70% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

 

For those who prefer more serious movies there is the French film Of Gods and Men (Sony, “PG-13,” BD $45.99). Directed by Xavier Beauvois and based on a true story, Of Gods and Men is a quietly compelling saga about a French Trappist monastery in North Africa during the 1990s that won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2010.  When a terrorist incident caused by Islamic radicals happens in their neighborhood, the monks have to decide if they want to maintain their monastery or return to France, which would leave the poor locals without the medical care the monks provided.

 

 

The one major release is Sound of the Sky Complete Collection (Nozomi Entertainment, “16+,” 355 min., $49.99), an interesting slice-of-life comedy drama with a European setting in a post-apocalyptic world in which technology has regressed to mid-20th Century levels.  The 12-episode series was produced by Aniplex and aired in Japan in 2010. Nozomi is releasing the series in a box set with the original Japanese soundtrack and English subtitles.

 

 

MGM’s manufacture on demand program, which produces DVD-R discs of films that are not considered commercial enough for standard DVD releases, continues to make available some very interesting releases.  One of the best so far is Samuel Fuller’s Park Row (MGM, Unrated, $19.98), which Fuller financed with his own money in 1952. Fuller was a journalist before he became a filmmaker and it is easy to argue that Park Row, which he called his favorite film, was also the most personal movie of his idiosyncratic output.  In Park Row Fuller, who started as a copy boy on the New York Journal at the age of fourteen, pays homage to the great figures of American journalism from Benjamin Franklin to James Gordon Bennett, Charles E. Dana, Horace Greeley, and perhaps most specifically to Joseph Pulitzer, who like Phineas Mitchell, the protagonist of Park Row, collected funds for the erection of the Statue of Liberty.  Park Row has all the earmarks of a Fuller film in spades, including a “take no prisoners” style of acting typified by a smoldering protagonist who is provoked into violent, uncontrolled action, a fervent populist orientation on the side of the little guy fighting the establishment, and the use of long takes abetted by slick and smooth camera moves worthy of a Max Ophuls.  As in the well-researched novels of James M. Cain (a major influence), Fuller in Park Row gives the audience the inside lowdown on how a big city newspaper really works, why a “printer’s devil” is called a “printer’s devil,” the origin of the phrase “off the cuff,” and what “30” means at the end of an article.  Park Row is clearly a movie that anyone who enjoys the work of Sam Fuller will have to see.

 

Others should be forewarned of the film’s significant “cheese” factor.  This was, for example, a definite “B” movie with just three main interior sets, the bar, the offices of Mitchell’s paper The Globe, and those of his rival and nemesis The Star, an established paper run by a Miss Charity Hackett, who functions as both villain and love interest.  The exterior Park Row set, which features the offices of the great New York metropolitan dailies of the 1880s, is far from realistic, though it does provide Fuller with many opportunities for crane shots, which he uses continually.  While the general trend in Hollywood in the 1950s was toward location shooting and greater realism, Park Row definitely looks back to the studio-made B-movies of the 1940s.

 

And unlike the realism of other newspaper films of the fifties, which often attacked the news media for its ruthless and cynical exploitation (see Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole from 1951 or Mark Robson’s The Harder They Fall from 1956), Park Row is fervently idealistic in its view of the crusading editor.  Unlike in Citizen Kane, which documents the slide of newspaper mogul Charles Foster Kane from crusading reformer to jingoistic reactionary, in Park Row Phineas Mitchell stands as a shining example of the importance of freedom of the press in the hands of a crusading editor.  While Fuller is not blind to the excesses of tabloid journalism (Mitchell leaves The Star because he believes the paper helped convict an innocent man of murder in order to build circulation), Fuller wants to remind audiences that the rise of the modern mass circulation newspaper, which coincided with the onslaught of the industrial revolution, was a necessary antidote to the ravages of unfettered capitalism, championing progressive era reforms such as the abolition of child labor, food safety, trust busting, industry regulation, and advances in workplace safety that wouldn’t have happened without investigative reporting and crusading journalists.

 

Another very interesting release in the MGM program is The Fearmakers (MGM, Unrated, $19.98), which was directed by Jacques Tourneur in 1958 and stars Dana Andrews (Tourneur & Andrews teamed up numerous times, most notably in the brilliant Night of the Demon in 1957 and the underrated western Canyon Passage in 1946).  The Fearmakers is an interesting Cold War curiousity as Andrews returns to his job as a Washington pollster after a stint in a Red Chinese prison camp only to find that his firm has been taken over by a very oily Dick Foran, who is using it to push a phony “peace” agenda for nebulous foreign powers. As unlikely as the film’s premise is—the fearmongers of the 1950s who were using the threat of nuclear war to push the arms race were far more successful in that immediate post McCarthy era than those who were advocating a “peacenik” agenda—the filmmaking in The Fearmakers is first rate with excellent location work in a snowy Washington DC well integrated with studio interiors.  While far from the best of Tourneur’s work, The Fearmakers does hold the viewer’s interest, even if it is no Manchurian Candidate.

 

Even better is Richard Wilson’s The Big Boodle from 1956. Superbly photographed on location in Havana, Cuba by Lee Garmes, The Big Boodle stars Errol Flynn as a blackjack dealer in a Havana casino who accidentally runs afoul of a counterfeiting ring.  Flynn, who was only 47 when the film was made, looks much the worse for wear, but still gives a credible performance. At this point in his career Flynn had largely moved to the Caribbean.  He spent a fair amount of time in Cuba—he was a big supporter of Fidel Castro—and certainly The Big Boodle shows pre-revolutionary Havana to great effect. 

 

Also available from MGM is Mr. Wong Detective (MGM, unrated, $19.98), the 1938 Monogram B-movie starring Boris Karloff as an Asian-American detective living in San Francisco.  John Hamilton, who played Perry White in the Superman TV series, has a small, but important part, and Evelyn Brent, who starred in Von Sternberg’s silent gangster film Underworld in 1927, also has a key role.  There were six Mr. Wong movies altogether, and unfortunately it wasn’t until the last one that Keye Luke, an actual Asian-American actor managed to get the role.  While Boris Karloff was definitely one of Hollywood’s most effective thespians, he was totally miscast as Mr. Wong.  His performance makes those of Warner Oland as Charlie Chan and Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto look like Academy Award work.  Off course the Chans and the Motos were far better films with better stories and production values, but Karloff’s work in Mr. Wong Detective makes even Sidney Toler’s turn as Charlie Chan look good in comparison.  The Mr. Wong series appears to be in the public domain—and there are lots of compilations of all the films available—but while the quality of MGM’s version is not nearly as good as the crisp black-and-white discs for Park Row, The Fearmakers, and The Big Boodle, it is a lot better than the previously-released public domain versions of the Wong films.