On DVD: Warner Bros. Gets Sweet and Lowdown With The Eastwood Jazz Collection

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Clint Eastwood and I love jazz." -- from Eastwood After Hours: Live at Carnegie Hall (1997)

Three things I love in this world are good movies, good jazz, and good Clint Eastwood. When someone provides all three at the same time, you can catch me taking the A train to the nearest DVD store. This week Warner Home Video put the be in my bop with four movies -- two never before on DVD -- released individually under the umbrella label "the Eastwood Jazz Collection." Faster than you can say "Thelonius Monk," all four of these are headed for my permanent collection.

Eastwood has long been a passionate and public jazz fan, and one of the hallmarks of the movies he has directed is the influence of jazz in their musical scores. In 1988 he won the Golden Globe for Best Director for our first film in the Eastwood Jazz Collection. The other three titles reach back further into the Warner Brothers library, which happens to be celebrating its 85th anniversary this year. As an erstwhile jazz sax player myself, all I can say is -- Cool, man, cool.

Bird
Apart from being a notorious tough guy, actor/director Clint Eastwood is also a notorious jazz aficionado, and Bird is his sprawling, impressive tribute to one of the great jazz saxophonists of all time, Charlie "Bird" Parker. Parker, one of the originators of bebop, died at an early age due to a long-standing relationship with the high life. Forest Whitaker, who won best actor at the Cannes Film Festival for this role, does an excellent job of capturing the larger-than-life, ultimately destructive man whom many credit for inventing "cool." The film follows Whitaker's somber example, eluding explanations or historical documentation. Though Eastwood has made some very fine movies as a director, Bird is certainly his most accomplished and mature visually. He pulls out techniques that one might not have suspected he had. He also breaks away from the straightforward narrative style of his mentors, Don Siegel and Sergio Leone. Eastwood's almost impressionistic memory montage as Bird lays dying is probably the most striking directorial achievement that he has produced. The narrative is a bit too disorganized to deliver the full thematic punch that the movie strives for, but the performances of (Whitaker and Diane Venora as Bird's wife) and the lasting images make it a significant achievement for Eastwood behind the camera. -- Brendon Hanley, All Movie Guide

Bird gets a welcome 20th Anniversary DVD reissue. The film's sound won an Academy Award in 1988, and now it comes through with vividness and clarity in an impressive Dolby 5.1 surround mix. The extras are few, although we do get the option of a music-only audio track plus a second disc that's a six-song CD sampler from the Bird soundtrack.

Another self-destructive genius sax player is the at the heart of Round Midnight. This time it's fiction served straight, no chaser. We're in Paris, 1959, as aged American jazzman Dale Turner (Dexter Gordon) is "dying of everything, except music." Turner is a soulful genius of the tenor sax, but he's far less capable of coaxing beauty from the rest of his life. He is (rather, was) one of the greats, a pioneer who can trace a long history playing with Ellington and Basie and Parker. He's also addicted to booze and drugs, and inching his way toward a lonely death in a one-room tenement. Turner can barely manage to make his gigs playing with a combo in a smoky nightclub. But when he's on that stage, we hear everything he needs to say in the sublime sounds blowing from somewhere deep inside him. "Happiness is a nice, wet Rico reed," he says, and that's good because his music is the only happiness he's managed to hold on to.

That is, until he asks a young Parisian fan -- who's so broke he can't get into the club and so listens to Turner through a window in the rain -- to buy him a beer. The young man, Francis (Francois Cluzet), moves from being Turner's awestruck admirer to becoming his caretaker. As Francis comes to see Turner's darker side and the toll it's taking, both men are transformed, Turner toward improved health and personal responsibility, Francis toward his own creative inspiration and accountability.

And that's what 1986's Round Midnight is ultimately about -- the power of personal connections through music, surrender, kindness, and inspiration. That's not to say that Round Midnight is just a feel-good romp through descent and redemption. It's more somberly realistic than that. It's a brooding yet warm elegy, as plaintive as a slow, low-toned ballad in a minor key. Taking cues from the lives of Bud Powell and Lester Young, and lovingly written and directed by Bertrand Tavernier, Round Midnight evokes a dark, soft-edged ambiance that never feels anything less than authentic, thanks in large part to real-life jazz legend Gordon's performance as Turner. Sixty-three years old, Gordon's own experiences as an expatriate musician informed his performance, which earned him an Oscar nomination. Given that Gordon was a professional musician, not an actor, this may be one of the more impressive starring turns of the '80s. His slow smoke-and-whiskey voice is as musically appropriate to Round Midnight as his graceful saxophone.

To deepen the realism further, Tavernier had all jazz musician roles played by real jazz musicians, such as Herbie Hancock (who won the Oscar for Best Score and appears in the film as "Eddie Wayne"). Every combo performance was recorded on the spot, and hearing them you know that they're the real deal. One of the script's virtues is its lack of superfluous dialogue. Round Midnight is less talky than most movies we're used to, and every line counts in a story where music does so much of the speaking.

Trivia -- Look for that ol' jazzhound Martin Scorsese in a small but memorable role.

Sound is very important in Round Midnight, and this Warner Brothers DVD takes its sound very seriously. With a Dolby 5.1 soundtrack supervised by Herbie Hancock, the audio is powerful and flawless.

Pete Kelly's Blues -- "Gats. Gams. Gangsters. And the music that made the '20s roar."

Pete Kelly's Blues (1955) is arguably the most stylish of director/star Jack Webb's theatrical features. Beginning with a brilliantly evocative pre-credits prologue, wherein we see how WWI vet Pete Kelly (Webb) came into possession of his precious trumpet, the film traces Kelly to his 1927 gig at a Kansas City speakeasy. Most of the film concerns Kelly's efforts to keep his "Big Seven" aggregation together, his off-and-on romance with socialite Ivy Conrad (Janet Leigh), and his frequent confrontations with mob boss Fran McCarg (Edmond O'Brien).

The Richard L. Breen screenplay is full of the deliciously hyperbolic allusions, similes, and metaphors that characterized Webb's radio version of Pete Kelly's Blues, while the musical score is graced by the jazz artistry of such greats as Ella Fitzgerald and Teddy Buckner. Peggy Lee, cast as a mob mistress who is rendered an imbecile after falling down a flight of stars, deservedly earned an Academy Award nomination for her performance. Likewise superb is Andy Devine, cast against type as a corrupt, brutal Kansas City detective, and Lee Marvin as Kelly's best pal.

Disney art director Harper Goff, who'd been performing miracles on Webb's TV series Dragnet, brilliantly sustains the smoky zeitgeist of the Prohibition era. Pete Kelly's Blues was later spun off into a TV series starring William Reynolds as Kelly. -- Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Special Features:

• Soundtrack remastered in Dolby Digital 5.1 (from the original 4-track theatrical mix)
• Oscar-nominated shorts -- Gadgets Galore and 24 Hour Alert (both 1955)
• Classic Looney Tunes cartoon -- The Hole Idea. A mousey professor invents the portable hole. Directed by Robert McKimson and released in 1955.
• Theatrical trailer

Blues in the Night is not the greatest musical film in the world, but it's a good one and, more than that, an interesting one for musical fans to study. For that matter, film noir aficionados should give it a look as well, for it edges into that territory as well. Certainly Ernest Haller's evocative, moody, stark cinematography is tailormade for noir, and the underworld connection and the man in the clutches of a no-good-for-him femme fatale would also be right at home in an existential detective flick. Unfortunately, Blues doesn't go far enough in that direction, and much of its screenplay therefore comes across as trite and unconvincing melodrama.

To make up for that, however, we have some marvelous musical sequences. They're not the big production number type typically associated with musicals of the period, being typically band-with-or-without-singer segments. But the songs themselves are so good, and they're captured so well by Haller and director Anatole Litvak, that they don't need a lot of fancy trappings. The title song, of course, is one of the most remarkable popular songs ever created (even if the full version is not presented in the film). Complexly structured (by Harold Arlen), yet with an opening phrase that strikes so hard that listeners don't seem to care about its structure and blessed with a Johnny Mercer lyric that is sheer poetry, it's a landmark. But Arlen and Mercer have also given the film the incredibly beautiful and wistful "This Time the Dream's On Me," which in any other film would have been the undeniable highlight, as well as the simply delightful "Hang On To Your Lids, Kids" and "Says Who? Says You, Says I."

Blues is also worth a look because of its unusual cast. Elia Kazan and Richard Whorf are good, if nothing special, but it's fun watching these future directors plying the acting trade. The rest of the cast includes such second-string luminaries as Lloyd Nolan, Jack Carson, Howard Da Silva, Priscilla Lane and Betty Field, and they turn in strong performances. Blues is certainly flawed, but it's also an interesting, uneven film. -- Craig Butler, All Movie Guide

Special Features:

• Oscar-nominated musical short -- Jammin' the Blues, a 10-minute short with Lester Young, Harry Edison, George "Red" Callender, Jo Jones, John Simmons, Illinois Jacquet, and other class-act jazz musicians in a rare 1944 filmed jam session. In 1995, Jammin' the Blues was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
• Musical Short -- Melody Master: Jimmy Lunceford and his Dance Orchestra
• Classic cartoons -- Kitty Kornered, My Favorite Duck, and Swooner Crooner
• Audio Outtake
• Theatrical trailer

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