On Blu-ray - David Hare is entranced once again by THE GHOST AND MRS MUIR (Joseph L Mankiewicz, USA, 1947)

To prepare for this I reviewed it on the projector this morning. A few things about this perpetual favorite were completely unexpected.

The score! - Herrmann of course - really is exhilarating and it dares to rake up the darker parts of the narrative emotionally that Mank has chosen to direct far more simply.

And then, needless to say, the incredible mood of the dialogue which narratively takes on such a completely Fordian tone. I had never felt it before but Muir’s/Tierney’s voice overs this time totally conveyed the shattering poignancy of my second favorite Ford movie, How Green was my Valley. The opening remembrance of that masterpiece, read by Irving Pichel which suspends time and space for us was written or more correctly adapted by Philip Dunne, who had indeed written both the Ford and the Mank films.

Dunne got an Oscar for his incredible screenplay for The Ghost and Mrs Muir, and you can see why by the time of the second shot after the credits. No wonder I was thinking and feeling Ford, in this space now occupied here by post war Hollywood’s most literate cinéaste, Joe Mankiewicz.

The movie is without hesitation one of that rarest of things - the perfect film. Nothing is misjudged, nothing is out of tempo, the celestially beautiful photography of the great Charles Lang, on loan to Fox from Paramount.

And the tears flowed like water, as they always do.

Happy New Year.

On Blu-ray - David Hare finds irresistible the new 4K scan of CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY (Anatole Litvak, USA, 1939)

The screens above and below are from the irresistible Confessions of a Nazi Spy directed by Anatole Litvak and released by Warner First National in 1939, just a short time before Borzage's comparably anti-Nazi film for Metro, Mortal Storm which he was only barely able to complete and release under the unspeakable Louis B Mayer later in 1939. Interestingly this might be the first American feature movie to run the credits at the end of the picture.

First screen above is George Sanders sporting an extremely short buzzcut, albeit kinkily fetching, but a look that features heavily these days in the current Australian White Supremacist meetings and Biker gang revivals. Second screen below is the sublimely named Hans von Twardowsky, here an active Nazi in New York, and just a few years down the road from his brief but unforgettable turn as one of the screaming nelly queens in the court of Sternberg's Scarlet Empress. Twardowsky was one of the genuinely bad boys of American cinema, and here he looks it.

The new Warner Archive Blu disc is another 4K scan from a nitrate O-neg and you can feel the image breathing on the screen.

They don't get any better than this.