Charles Bronson Collection (Telefon / St. Ives)
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DVD details
Actor: Charles BronsonBrand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 196 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2009-05-19
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Product features:
- Actors: Charles Bronson.
- Format: Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC.
- Language: English.
- Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only).
- Rated PG. Run Time: 198 minutes.
DVD Reviews of Charles Bronson Collection (Telefon / St. Ives)
DVD Review: A decent Charles Bronson double-bill
Summary: 3 Stars
Despite being packaged like any one of a dozen cheap Public Domain compilations (you know, the ones that usually include The Valdez Horses/Chino and an episode of Man with a Camera they're trying to pass off as a movie), this release is a legitimate one from Warner Home Video bringing together a couple of Bronson's 70s output just before his fame began to wane.
Although little loved by fans of Ross Thompson's novel, St. Ives is an entertaining thriller with largely unrealised aspirations to being seen as a throwback to Warners' 1940s detective movies. Charles Bronson's the heavy gambling retired crime writer and would-be novelist of the title, hired by John Houseman's gentleman crook to act as go-between for a series of incriminating volumes only to stumble across dead bodies in tumble dryers and burglars who've taken the shortcut to the sidewalk via the window. It's not an action film, an elevator shaft fight and a climactic shootout notwithstanding. Instead it's a slightly quirky number full of neat little touches, be it Houseman watching The Big Parade and Birth of a Nation because, as his analyst Maximilian Schell explains, "Films really are dreams, especially old movies, and Abner loves them. They're good dreams for Abner. They're splendid, splendid therapy," Elisha Cook (no longer billed as Jr.) turning up as a hotel clerk who can even sleep through a shootout in the lobby or an amusing scene where a drop-off in the toilets in Union Station turns into a quirky discussion of restroom quirks. With some surprising faces popping up in the cast (Daniel J. Travanti, Jeff Goldblum, Robert Englund among them), it's an enjoyable 90 minutes that aims to be nothing more than a good night out at the pictures, and in this case that's enough.
Warner's DVD offers a good widescreen transfer with original trailer and brief behind the scenes short as extras.
By the end of the 70s, world politics presented an increasing credibility problem to producers: how do you make a Cold War thriller in the age of détente? By having a good Russian trying to stop a bad Russian starting WW3 by activating several suicidal sleeper agents planted all over America during the Stalin era and long forgotten by the new management was the solution 1977's Telefon offered. Charles Bronson's the good Russian chasing fellow Great Escaper Donald Pleasance's bad Russian with the help of Lee Remick before the renegade Stalinist can write his name across the United States by triggering a series of pointless suicide bombings on out-of-date targets. A workable enough premise, but it's a film that never goes quite as far as it could. It's fun that a couple of the suicidal sleepers are a priest and an All-American pancake-making mom, but that's as far at stereotype subverting as it goes with the rest an anonymous bunch. The film's never quite as cold-blooded as it needs to be either: when he's unable to stop one reactivated sleeper, Bronson strangles him instead, yet it's a rather polite and bloodless scene that sheepishly cuts away. While it provides plenty of explosions it rarely kicks into full gear. There's one good chase in a San Francisco hotel familiar to anyone who's seen The Towering Inferno or High Anxiety that comes to a satisfyingly explosive end in an underground car park, but the film's climax seems more adequate than inspired. There's not even the remotest flicker of sexual chemistry between Bronson and Remick to carry the film between things blowing up.
It wasn't exactly an untroubled shoot, with original director and co-writer Peter Hyams being replaced by Don Siegel (Hyams also found himself fired from Steve McQueen's last film, The Hunter - obviously he didn't endear himself to the Magnificent Seven), although some of his typically quirky dialogue survives in lines like Tyne Daly's CIA computer analyst's comment "That's exactly the kind of attitude that led to the downfall of the Hittite Empire." The change in directors occasionally makes itself felt in wild changes in cinematography from pin-sharp to that irritatingly over-diffused soft focus that ran rampant in the late-70s, but the over-riding impression is of an average movie but not a particularly unlikeable one.
Unfortunately, as with the TV prints, the picture quality on this widescren NTSC transfer is pretty inconsistent: sharp in some scenes, grainy in others. The only extra is the original trailer.
Description of Charles Bronson Collection (Telefon / St. Ives)
He toiled for years in the second-tier of movie casts. Then along came Death Wish, and Charles Bronson muscled into the top ranks of action stardom. He brings iron-willed resolve to the spy thriller TELEFON (Side A), directed by Dirty Harrys Don Siegel. Enemy agents have slipped into the U.S., programmed to carry out acts of Cold War sabotage when they are triggered by lines of a Robert Frost poem. Bronsons job: stop the would-be terrorists before its too late. The woods are lovely, dark?and deadly. The star plays a crime writer caught up in a web of crime in ST. IVES (Side B), the first of his nine films with director J. Lee Thompson. Jacqueline Bisset and John Houseman co-star in a corpse- and twist-filled mystery.Bestsellers in DVD
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