BURT LANCASTER SIGNATURE COLLECTION - DVD review

Burt Lancaster (1913-1994) was one of Hollywood's most versatile actors. Handsome and acrobatic, he played in a number of action adventures, but he interspersed them with quite a few good dramatic films as well. The five-disc collection we have here, the "Burt Lancaster Signature Collection," clearly illustrates the point. Let me briefly tell you about a few of the titles, and then I'll concentrate on one of the several I liked best.

"Jim Thorpe--All American" (1951), directed by Michael Curtiz, stars Lancaster with Charles Bickford, Steve Cochran, and Phyllis Thaxter. In this biopic Lancaster plays the Oklahoma Native American who became one of America's greatest athletes, winning Olympic gold medals and helping to establish professional football. As always with a Curtiz film, the director glues you to the screen, and Lancaster seems born to the role. 7/10

"South Sea Woman" (1953) pairs Lancaster with Virginia Mayo in a film directed by Arthur Lubin. This comedy adventure has Lancaster as a World War II Marine sergeant fighting fellow Marine Chuck Connors, with Ms. Mayo a willing bystander. 6/10

"His Majesty O'Keefe" (1953) finds adventurer Lancaster again in the South Seas but this time in the nineteenth century. Directed by Byron Haskin, this is a swashbuckling action thriller that costars Joan Rice and involves a fight for coconut oil. It was one of several big adventure films that Lancaster made in the period, the others being "South Sea Woman," "The Flame and the Arrow," and "The Crimson Pirate." 6/10

"Executive Action" (1973), directed by David Miller, took Lancaster back to drama, with costars Robert Ryan and Will Geer. A few years earlier he had done the superb conspiracy picture "Seven Days in May," so "Executive Action" seemed a natural successor. Only this time the filmmakers based the script on Mark Lane and Donald Freed's novel about the real-life assassination of John F. Kennedy. Parts of the movie are gripping, and much of it seems far-fetched, too. 6/10

The film I like best in the collection, though, is "The Flame and the Arrow" (1950). After a series of film noirs that Lancaster did in the mid-to-late 1940s, this was the actor's first big adventure frolic, and it comes off rather well.

Director Jacque Tourneur ("Cat People," "I Walked With a Zombie," "Out of the Past") and scriptwriter Waldo Salt clearly patterned "The Flame and the Arrow" after "The Adventures of Robin Hood," WB's 1938 hit. There's the dashing, swaggering hero played by Lancaster, a natural successor to Errol Flynn; a beautiful young noblewoman played Virginia Mayo; a comical sidekick played by Nick Cravat, Lancaster's former acrobatic partner and a good friend with whom he would do nine films altogether; an evil nobleman played by Frank Allenby; an almost-as-evil nobleman played by Robert Douglas; a minstrel named Apollo played by Norman Lloyd; the business of the protagonist being an expert archer; an initial encounter between the hero and another fellow reminiscent of the one between Robin Hood and Little John; the period setting, in this case twelfth-century Italy; the downtrodden peasants; and all the derring-do you could ask for, including sword fights and swinging from chandeliers.

The story concerns the exploits of a band of brave souls who stand up against the German invasion of Northern Italy, of whom one, Dardo Bartoli (Lancaster), becomes a reluctant leader. Bartoli joins this hearty troupe of Italian freedom fighters because he wants to rescue his son from the clutches of the boy's greedy mother, who ran off five years earlier with the dastardly German Count Ulrich (Allenby), known as "The Hawk." In attempting to rescue his son, Bartoli meets the lovely Lady Anne de Hesse (Mayo), and there's a bit of romance along the way.

The movie uses some wonderfully evocative matte paintings to bring the story to life, and Warners filmed it mostly on location in various scenic Southern California locations. Director Tourneur never slackens the pace, and because the running time is a mere eighty-eight minutes, there is little opportunity for things to get dull. If somebody made the picture today, the filmmaker would undoubtedly stretch things out another hour, add a ton of CGI special effects, and bore us to death. 7/10

Video:
The screen size measures 1.33:1, taken from the original 1.37:1 frame of the day. The Technicolor is a tad dark, but there is a good, natural richness to it. Besides, it was the Dark Ages, after all. Warners cleaned up the print nicely, too, leaving very little dirt or lines, although there are occasional instances of minor flickers and fades. Definition is so-so, varying from crystal clear to slightly blurred.

Audio:
As we might expect of a typical 1950 film, the audio is a 1.0 monaural. The Dolby Digital processing helps smooth it out, and a small amount of noise reduction quiets the background. The midrange sounds excellent; otherwise, there isn't much range or impact.

Extras:
Each of the films in the set is also available separately and each contains vintage featurettes, classic cartoons, ten or eleven scene selections (but no chapter insert or on-screen chapter menu), trailers and trailer galleries, English as the only spoken language, English and French subtitles, and English captions for the hearing impaired. Specific to "The Flame and the Arrow" is, first, a ten-minute "Joe McDokes" comedy short, "So You're Going to Have an Operation" in black-and-white. Second, there is a classic Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies Technicolor cartoon, "Strife With Father," starring Beaky Buzzard. Finally, there are theatrical trailers for "The Flame and the Arrow" and "The Crimson Pirate."

Parting Thoughts:
For me, the prizes of the package are "The Flame and the Arrow" and "Jim Thorpe--All American." However, the others are not bad, either, just not quite up to the same measure. In any case, if you're a Burt Lancaster fan, the set is a must, remastered in fine picture and sound. And no one in Hollywood had a smile like Lancaster's. He was everything we think of in a handsome, leading-man movie star, plus he could act. Something of a rarity, actually.