DVD|New DVDs
DVD | Critic's Choice
By DAVE KEHR AUG. 28, 2007
Glenn Ford, right, and Van Heflin in "3:10 to Yuma" (1957). Credit Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
With James Mangold's remake of "3:10 to Yuma" scheduled for release next week, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has thoughtfully rereleased Delmer Daves's original 1957 version in an excellent widescreen transfer.
Glenn Ford, who could be a bland hero but never an uninteresting villain, plays Ben Wade, the leader of an outlaw gang that robs a stagecoach (and kills a driver) while a downtrodden homesteader, Dan Evans (Van Heflin), looks on helplessly. Afraid that he has shamed himself in the eyes of his young sons, and desperately in need of the $200 promised by the stagecoach company for bringing Wade to justice, Evans offers to transport him to a regional prison after he is serendipitously captured.
Much of this lean 92-minute black-and-white film is about the psychologically intimate struggle between Wade and Evans as they sit in a hotel room, waiting for the train that will take them out of town (and away from Wade's rapidly approaching gang). The charismatic criminal does his best to seduce the sullen farmer, promising him freedom from financial care if Evans will let him go. But Evans won't be dissuaded, even when his wife begs him to take the money and run. Larger issues are now involved.
Though based on a story by Elmore Leonard, "3:10 to Yuma" seems just as much a reaction to the two big carpetbagging westerns of the 1950s: Fred Zinnemann's "High Noon" (1952) and George Stevens's "Shane" (1953), in which Mr. Heflin plays a similarly humiliated homesteader.
"High Noon," written by the soon-to-be-blacklisted Carl Foreman, was a thinly veiled account of Hollywood's cowardice before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Thematically, Mr. Daves sees no need to make a big political statement when a moral observation will suffice.
And stylistically, Mr. Daves completely avoids the pumped-up, self-conscious myth making of Mr. Stevens's Technicolor extravaganza. There isn't even much gunplay in "3:10 to Yuma": This is a psychological drama, as intense as a Bergman marital duel, but played out in a forceful exchange of looks and gestures rather than in Bergman's torrents of words.
Felicia Farr, Jack Lemmon's wife, makes a memorable appearance as a saloon girl struck by Wade's sexual power; she enjoys a guilt-free backroom dalliance with him, as discreetly filmed as it is erotically charged. Here is some marvelous filmmaking in the classical Hollywood manner, without an ounce of waste in it. (Sony Pictures, $19.94, not rated)
TRUE HEART SUSIE
Released in 1919, D. W. Griffith's "True Heart Susie" belongs to a brief period when Griffith was taking a break from the epic films ("The Birth of a Nation" and "Intolerance") that had made his name and fortune, and had returned to the small-scale rural melodramas that had been one of his specialties when he was making one- and two-reelers for the Biograph Company. It's one of his most beautiful films, and one of his most rhetorically complex: at once absolutely sincere and a self-tweaking parody of his sentimental streak.
Robert Harron and Lillian Gish in "True Heart Susie." Credit Image Entertainment
Lillian Gish and Robert Harron, a team Griffith had made popular at Biograph, portray residents of an Arcadian small town who seem destined for each other from childhood. "They don't know what poor, simple idiots they are," reads an intertitle, "and we, who have never been so foolish, can hardly hope to understand." But when Susie (Gish) sells her beloved pet cow to send William (Harron) to divinity school, he's exposed to a new kind of creature, the "painted and powdered" city woman, Bettina (Clarine Seymour), who steals the simple-hearted William away and marries him.
"True Heart Susie" is, essentially, the story of Susie's revenge, of how she wins back her true love through a combination of blind faith and passive aggression.
Gish gives a very sly performance, suggesting how Susie controls the weak-willed William, not through paint and perfume, but with little pouts and hesitations. (Watch how she wordlessly persuades him to take her to the local soda fountain on "ice cream day.") And when Bettina gets her comeuppance, it's through the agency of God and nature (a gigantic storm), rather than through any overt action on Susie's part.
As one of the handful of filmmakers for whom the rural United States of the 19th century was a living memory, Griffith paints a convincing portrait of a bygone land. And as American film shifts into a digital realm, his work seems more and more essential: his use of landscapes seen in long shots, the way he places actors in the context of a natural environment that extends into infinity, is just as important (if not more so) than his celebrated use of the close-up.
"True Heart Susie" may be close to 100, but you can still feel the warmth of the day, hear the rustling of the wind and see the clouds scudding across the sky, conveyed with a sense of wholeness and substance that no digital environment can ever hope to match.
This fine new print of "True Heart Susie" — as sharp and clear as previous public domain versions were soft and muddy — was mastered from original materials in the British Film Institute and is presented with the original color tints. Rodney Sauer has composed a new score, performed by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, which perfectly captures the film's knowing naïveté.
This disc, produced by David Shepard, also includes the 1916 comedy "Hoodoo Ann," written by Griffith under his Granville Warwick pseudonym and directed by Lloyd Ingraham. (Image Entertainment, $24.99, not rated)
ALSO OUT TODAY
HEROES: SEASON ONE This television show, about a band of ordinary people who slowly realize that they possess extraordinary powers, makes its DVD debut with a seven-disc box set. (Universal, $59.98, not rated)
BLADES OF GLORY Will Ferrell and Jon Heder fearlessly satirize the world of competitive figure skating in a comedy directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck. (Paramount, $29.99, PG-13)
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS: THE FIRST SEASON Life in small-town Texas, viewed through the prism of high school football, in a television series that has attracted a devout following. (Universal, $29.98, not rated)
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page E4 of the New York edition with the headline: New DVD's . Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe