Irma La Douce (1963)

        Billy Wilder's 1963 romantic comedy that reteams the stars of his 1960 THE APARTMENT gets a sparkling 4K restoration on Blu-ray from Eureka.

Nestor Patou (Jack Lemmon) is a Parisian policeman who ends up being fired when he inadvertently causes the arrest of his boss in a raid on a brothel. At a nearby bar he meets prostitute Irma (Shirley MacLaine). 

Nestor beats up her pimp but ends up becoming her pimp himself. However, he doesn't like the idea of her seeing other men so he poses as an English Lord who is her one and only client. Needless to say, complications ensue.

A cheerful, colourful movie that because of its subject matter was banned by US television networks for many years, IRMA LA DOUCE is a showcase for a number of talents at the top of their game. 

Marilyn Monroe was originally intended to play Irma but after her death MacLaine was cast and ended up getting an Oscar nomination. Wilder and co-screenwriter I A L Diamond deliver a script that's bouncy, witty, and full of smartly observed snippets of dialogue. 

Eureka's Blu-ray offers us two commentary tracks, one by film historian Joseph McBride and a new one by film historian Kat Ellinger. There's also a new talking head piece from Neil Sinyard.

Billy Wilder's IRMA LA DOUCE is out on Blu-ray from Eureka on Monday 18th March 2019

Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

Billy Wilder's 1957 version of Agatha Christie's WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION gets a dual format release from Eureka. As opposed to the 1982 Alan Gibson remake, the 1949 BBC one, or the recent (2016) mini-series.

Dashing, penniless Leonard Vole (dashing Tyrone Power) is accused of killing a rich widow he has befriended. Elderly, infirm, brandy-swigging barrister Sir Wilfred Roberts (a wonderfully endearing Charles Laughton) may be his only hope of defence. Vole's wife Christine (Marlene Dietrich) provides him with an alibi, but when her story changes in court it's just the beginning of a series of revelations culminating in an ending I'm not going to tell you, and not just because the voiceover at the end begged me not to.

The last time I was witness to such a plea was at a performance of Christie's The Mousetrap which, unlike WITNESS, has yet to make an entirely successful transition to the cinema screen. Stage plays do come with the inherent problem that they are intended to be, well, stagey. Here Billy Wilder opens the action out as much as he can, but sensibly lets the actors carry the drama for the most part, especially in the courtroom scenes.

Best of the performances is Oscar-nominated Laughton, ably assisted by wife Elsa Lanchester who plays Sir Wilfred's nurse. In a story that's about deception and infidelity their relationship is played as a pleasant counterpoint to the rest of what we learn.

Fans of horror and fantasy will enjoy spotting THE BODY SNATCHER's Henry Daniell, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN's Una O'Connor (still playing the same role thirty years on!) and Torin Thatcher managing to play chief prosecutor Myers without resorting to using a Ray Harryhausen dragon or Jim Danforth ogre.

Eureka's disc comes with a Kat Ellinger audio commentary, a video interview with Neil Sinyard, archival footage of Wilder discussing the film with Volker Schlondorff, and Simon Callow discussing Charles Laughton's performance in the film. You also get a booklet that includes essays from Henry Miller and Philip Kemp.

Billy Wilder's WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION is 

out on dual format from Eureka from 

Monday 10th September 2018

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

"Arguably the Best Sherlock Holmes Film Ever Made"

Eureka continues its releasing of Billy Wilder films on UK Blu-ray (hooray!) with his marvellous Sherlock Holmes picture from 1970 starring Robert Stephens as Holmes and Colin Blakely as Watson.

A locked strongbox at a London solicitors contains the Holmes adventures Dr Watson wrote about, but never submitted for publication on account of their delicate nature. First off is the attempts of famous Russian ballerina Madame Petrova (a fairly terrifying Tamara Toumanova) to get Holmes to be the father of her child. Less a 'case' and more an excuse for Clive Revill (as Madame Petrova's manager) to do some entertaining mugging as he and Stephens engage in some of Wilder and I A L Diamond's crackling dialogue, it's perhaps understandable that audience of the period were befuddled as to what the mystery of this story was intended to be (of course, there isn't any).

The second, much lengthier, tale takes the Conan Doyle story A Scandal in Bohemia as its jumping off point, but again things aren't straightforward as Holmes and Watson investigate submarine skullduggery off the coast of Scotland. There should have been other tales but the movie was cut down from its original run time of 200 minutes to the 125 minute print we have now.

A flop on its initial release, THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES  is far less about Holmes solving cases and far more about Holmes and Watson the men. As such the lead performances are marvellous. Robert Stephens plays Holmes as brilliant but almost constantly exasperated, with the suggestion of deep emotional scars being to blame, while Blakely plays Watson as a marvellous, down to earth and good-natured rugger bugger of a doctor.

Eureka's Blu-ray transfer is in 1080p. The print looks sparking in places but rather faded, worn and speckled with dots in others. One presumes a restoration of this is not on the cards any time soon. Extras include a new 20 minute interview with Neil Sinyard, plus stuff ported over from previous Region 1 MGM and Kino releases. These include 50 minutes of The Missing Cases - a mixture of audio, script pages, stills and surviving footage, an interview with Christopher Lee (who plays Sherlock's brother Mycroft), an interview with editor Ernest Walter, audio of the deleted epilogue and a trailer. You also get a booklet with new writing on the film from Philip Kemp. 

Billy Wilder's THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES is out on UK Blu-ray from Eureka on Monday 22nd January

The Apartment (1960)

"Classic Billy Wilder Gets the 4K Treatment"

Billy Wilder's Oscar-winning (Best Film, Director, Screenplay, Art Direction, Editing) and Oscar-nominated (Leading Actor, Leading Actress, Supporting Actor, Cinematography, Sound) 1960 'comedy drama' gets a sparkling 4k transfer from Arrow Academy packed with extras.

New York 1959. CC 'Bud' Baxter (Jack Lemmon) works at an insurance company. His plan to get promoted is unusual, novel, and immoral: he loans out his apartment to four of his bosses to use on a rotating basis for their extramarital affairs. Sweet on elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), Bud's life starts to fall apart when the firm's personnel director, J D Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray, who surprisingly didn't get an Oscar nod amongst all the others), reveals he wants to use Bud's apartment to rekindle his affair with her.

They really don't make them like THE APARTMENT any more. Perhaps they never did. What starts off as a comedy with an apparently morally dubious tone quickly becomes a measured study of human beings and the mistakes that they make. The cast weave their way through the screenplay's light and dark, the humorous and the deadly serious. Wilder's expert direction manages just the right balance between playfulness and melodrama that's all the more remarkable considering the subject matter.

Arrow's 4k transfer of THE APARTMENT is a crisp delight. Aside from what looks like a hair in the gate at around the 100 minute mark the image is as perfect as can be. Film producer and historian Bruce Block offers a commentary track, and there's a new video essay by David Cairns on the collaborations between Wilder and Lemmon. Cairns also provides an overview of Billy Wilder's career.

You also get a 30 minute making of featurette from 2007, and an archive profile of Jack Lemmon from the same year. Film historian Philip Kemp provides a new select scene commentary and appreciation of the film, and there's a trailer and newly commissioned artwork. 

Finally (and very impressively) you get a 150 page as part of the package featuring new writing on the film by Neil Sinyard, Travis Crawford, Kat Ellinger and Heather Hyche. 

Billy Wilder's THE APARTMENT is out on Blu-ray from Arrow Academy on Monday 18th December 2017

Fedora (1978)

“Billy Wilder does EuroHorror!”

Well it certainly feels like it, at least for the first 75 minutes of this, and now you can decide if you agree with me as Eureka brings this one out in a (on the whole) sparking Blu-ray transfer.

FEDORA starts with a woman throwing herself under a train. Is it for real or a movie? The (deliberate) ambiguity continues as we cut to a TV presenter and then we realise she’s not talking about the clip we have seen, but about the death contained within it. Great and long-lived actress Fedora (one name - like Garbo or Karloff) is no more, and she has a funeral like VALENTINO in Ken Russell’s film of the same name made a year previously to show just how adored she was.  

One of the many to attend the funeral is down on his luck independent movie producer Barry ‘Dutch’ Detweiler (William Holden), who then proceeds to tell us, in a voiceover reminiscent of the way in which Wilder’s own SUNSET BOULEVARD opens, how two weeks previously he had travelled to Corfu to try and get the reclusive movie star to appear in a new film.

It’s there that the EuroHorror feel kicks in, with Fedora (Marthe Keller) seemingly being kept prisoner in an isolated mansion by the kind of people usually seen in the more bonkers early 1970s Italian horrors. Fedora doesn’t even appear to be sane, and may have been the subject of bizarre ‘youth enhancing experiments’ performed by the disgraced Doctor Vando (Jose Ferrer, having a lot more fun here than in ZOLTAN HOUND OF DRACULA which he made at about the same time).

         Miklos Rozsa’s score channels some serious James Bernard as the plot gets stranger and takes a right turn into LES YEUX SANS VISAGE territory. I’ll leave the rest of FEDORA for you to discover, suffice to say that I don’t doubt for a moment that Billy Wilder (with co-writer I A L Diamond) was aiming for a commentary on the Hollywood of the 1970s compared with the 1940s while at the same time asking the question as to what a ‘star’ really is - a person or an elaborate construct that actually destroys lives. 

          What he ended up with is something a little more lurid and unexpectedly entertaining for fans of 1970s European horror films and FEDORA turned out to be an unexpected delight that was no doubt rather ahead of its time in having actors like Michael York and Henry Fonda play themselves. 

         Eureka’s Blu-ray transfer is excellent on the whole, and one of the extras shows you how the film was restored. You also get deleted scenes and a booklet featuring two new essays on the film as well as some archival images and text. 

Eureka are releasing Billy Wilder's FEDORA on a dual format DVD and Blu-ray set on Monday 26th September 2016