On Blu-ray - David Hare finally comes round to appreciating TEA AND SYMPATHY (Vincente Minnelli, USA, 1956)

Below are four screen shots from the sublime "Shadowy glade" climax of Minnelli's 1956 adaptation of the Robert Anderson play, Tea and Sympathy. It's both this sequence and the extraordinary colour photography by John Alton, one of several pictures he shot for Vincente Minnelli during the fifties, that finally won me over, especially in this new 4K scan and Blu-ray from Warner Archive.

In fact it's taken me literally sixty years to finally come around to any sort of appreciation for the movie, so long has it has been a subject of disdain for me, perhaps thanks to skewed perspective.

Alton's single light source setups and Minnelli's Scope staging emphasize shadow, background and peripheral enclosure as much as they do the players. In this sequence it finally dawned on me that the subject of the movie is not only, as I always persisted in thinking, John Kerr's character Tom's "closeting and/or guilt resulting from the social constrictions of 50's America. In fact the substantially larger and ultimately more tragic core of the drama is Deborah Kerr's superb Laura, clad throughout the picture in shades of burnt orange, ginger and rustic warmth, a futile beacon of affirmative life against the grey and white suburban drudgery and conformity of 50s bourgeois America. Indeed the colour play in these Minnelli melodramas is easily the equal of Sirk's at Universal, although Sirk often extends the colour play to sets, decor and staging with coloured lights much as post expressionist painting.

If there's a real cry for acknowledgment and passion from a stranded soul buried in the daily inertia of suburban college town 50's America, it's not only John Kerr's Tom, with his affection for the classics and the piano and the light touch of his loafers. But also from the figure of Laura, left unsatisfied at the end. This penultimate sequence really delivers what must have been profoundly personal material for Minnelli himself, given his own bi- (or more majorly gay) sexuality and the trajectory of his professional life before and after Garland.

The new Warner Archive derived from a 4K scan and regrade is predictably a thing of staggering Eastman (via proprietorial "Metrocolor") beauty.