Robert Tanitch reviews the latest DVDs
THE SHOP ON THE HIGH STREET (Second Run). It is always good to finally catch up with a famous film you have long heard about but never seen. Jan Kadar and Elmer Klos’s award-winning Slovakian film is one of the earliest films about the Holocaust. It is also one of the very best Holocaust films. A young married carpenter in a small town in Slovakia in 1942 during World War 2 is given the job of Aryan controller of an impoverished haberdasher shop run by a very old and very deaf Jewess who doesn’t understand what is going on. The actors, the highly accomplished Jozef Kroner and the legendary Ida Kaminska are equally adept with the comedy and the dead seriousness of their relationship. He is frightened that if he hides her during the round-up of Jews and is caught he will be shot.
CRY OF THE CITY (BFI) is not as noir as other late 1940’s noir films and it was underrated because it wasn’t in the very top bracket of the genre. Robert Siodmark directed it on location in New York. Victor Mature is the good cop. Richard Conte is the wounded bad guy who escapes from prison hospital. The two men were brought up in the same Italian neighbourhood and were buddies when they were young. Shelley Winters has a tiny scene-stealing cameo as a good-time girl and everybody is dwarfed by the formidable strongwoman Hope Emerson (six foot two and 190 pounds). She’s not the sort of masseuse you wouldn’t want to mess around with. Emerson has a great first entrance, cleverly lit, as she advances down a long corridor to open a front door.
TOUCHED WITH FIRE (Metrodome). Two bipolar disorder poets (played by Katie Holmes and Luke Kirby) meet in a psychiatric hospital and decide to be even more manic together. They throw away their medication and paint the walls of their apartment to make it look like Van Gogh’s Starry Night. They want to escape to another planet. Their parents are worried. Are they fit to have and raise children? Paul Dalio, the director, is bipolar disorder and he wrote the script. So he knows what he is talking about. It might have been better if he had gone for a wholly documentary film rather than this hybrid.
SWEET BEAN (Eureka). A 76-year-old lady (the veteran actress Kirin Kiki) teaches a baker (Masatoshi Nagese) how to make delicious dorayaka pancakes (made with sweet red berries paste) and his shop flourishes. She has been forced to live all her life in a leper colony. Naomi Kawase directs this compassionate story about how leprosy victims were treated in Japan. Some may find the pace a bit slow; but then it takes time and patience to make dorayaka pancakes. The sentimentality may also be a bit cloying for some; but it’s beautifully and touchingly acted.
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