July 31-August 6, 2003

screen picks

by Sam Adams

The Day of the Dolphin ($29.95 DVD) So how did Buck Henry and Mike Nichols end up following their collaborations on The Graduate and Catch-22 with a movie about talking dolphins? Henry still isn't sure. Nichols "wanted to make the film for whatever reasons," he recalls from his home in Manhattan. "I came along because I'd always had a good time."

It didn't last. Though in his interview on the DVD, Henry recalls being interested in a chance to write melodrama, as well as probing the real-life possibilities of interspecies communication, his recollection now is a little less complicated. "It was awful," he says instantly. "I had a very hard time writing it."

Though he believes that "wonderful movies have been made from a kind of upper-level trash," citing The Maltese Falcon and Gone With the Wind, he remembers thinking Robert Merle's source novel was "silly," which led to some immediate pruning. If the spectacle of George C. Scott talking baby talk to an aquatic mammal strikes you as more than faintly ridiculous, imagine the same scene with the dolphin, as in Merle's novel, speaking in complete, well-rounded sentences. "When you see dolphins conducting a press conference in fluent English, you pretty damn well know this is not something you're going to get involved in," Henry says.

Among the more amusing images conjured by Day of the Dolphin's production history is that of Scott being cooed at by an offscreen Henry, who legendarily performed the "Fa loves Pa" dialogue during shooting, though Henry calls the notion that his voice can be heard in the movie "a kind of myth. It's my voice, and a lot of sounds and dolphin voices and God knows what else, but it isn't me."

The movie marked the last time Henry and Nichols would work together, although Henry says there was no break in the friendship, and Henry's career has had its dramatic ups and downs since then: Consider that the last two produced screenplays with Henry's name on them were the acclaimed To Die For and the barely released Town & Country. Still, there's always more in the offing, including a potential project with Steven Shainberg (Secretary), perhaps to follow his just-announced Diane Arbus biopic, and a 30-year-old script Henry's giving a dusting-off for an interested party. Just, please: no more dolphins.

The Chaplin Collection, Vol. 1/Charlie Chaplin Short Comedy Classics ($89.92 DVD/$99.99 DVD) The most delightful fringe benefit of the DVD revolution is the way it's reoriented the studios' (and the buying public's) attitude toward cinema history. The cinema of the pre-sound era (or, really, that of any movie old enough to have lapsed into the public domain) has been particularly ill-served over the years, with the same movie often released in a dizzying multiplicity of editions of widely varying quality; if you weren't careful, you could end up buying a shoddy bootleg of a legitimate company's product, inadvertently shaving down their already thin profits. (Here's a hint: If the price on that five-DVD set seems too low to be true, you're getting what you pay for.) At last, though, Warner Bros. has begun the process of giving Charlie Chaplin's features the treatment they deserve, and Image has collected its already commendable efforts to preserve Chaplin's short-film legacy in one nearly bottomless package.

The first installment of Warner's Chaplin Collection, available as a box set or as four individual double-disc titles, comprises The Gold Rush (1925), Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1940) and Limelight (1952), each stocked with a heaping helping of extras (many produced in France, which explains the choice of Bernardo Bertolucci, Idrissa Ouedraogo and the Dardenne brothers to offer their appreciations of Limelight, The Gold Rush and Modern Times, respectively). Bizarrely, the collection gives prominence to the 1942 rerelease of The Gold Rush, with cumbersome narration (added by Chaplin) smothering the original's purity: Toss disc one and head to the second, where the original, one of Chaplin's finest long-form excursions, is included as a "bonus."

By Modern Times, Chaplin's sense of his stature had begun to swell, and it was no longer possible to ignore the coming of sound. (It was released, after all, five years after M, and only five before Citizen Kane.) A fond adieu to Chaplin's beloved Tramp (though The Great Dictator's barber affects a similar guise), Modern Times features some of Chaplin's most pointed and delirious satire; it's hard to think of a more succinct depiction of assembly-line dehumanization than the image of Chaplin being sucked into the gears of a giant machine, a bittersweet comic echo of Metropolis' Moloch.

Still, the integration of sound and silent comedy doesn't really click until The Great Dictator, Chaplin's urgent warning to a world on the brink of war. As both "a Jewish barber" and Adenoid Hynkel, the Phooey of Tomania, Chaplin incarnates the range of human possibility, though his skill with dialogue never approaches his physical dexterity. The famous moment when Hynkel's delusions of conquest congeal in a brief ballet with a light-as-air globe manages to be beautiful and horrible all at the same time, whereas the six-minute speech that closes the movie (added after the invasion of France) merely threatens to drown us in sap. Limelight finds Chaplin in the twilight of his talents (if not his career), playing an aging vaudevillian (once know as the "tramp comedian") trying to make his way in a world that has ceased to care. Heartfelt, no doubt, but even his pas de deux with Buster Keaton can't get things going.

Image's seven-disc Short Comedy Classics collects all of Chaplin's work for the Essanay and Mutual companies. (Track down the out-of-print First National Collection to fill in the gaps before the Warner series starts up.) The presentation of the earlier Essanays is far superior, with the shorts arranged chronologically and accompanied by a live orchestra; by contrast, the historical-minded viewer must change discs a whopping eight times to watch the 12 Mutuals in order, and the scores are serviceable but synth-cheesy. ("Check out Image's Slapstick Masters for the Alloy Orchestra's superior take on the Mutuals' "Easy Street," presented in a far clearer print with three other non-Chaplin shorts.) Presentation notwithstanding, it's the Mutuals you want, at least at first, since Chaplin's unprecedented contract with the company gave him the creative freedom and (relatively) slow schedule (12 two-reel shorts in two years) to let him hone his craft. The emphasis is initially on Chaplin the performer; the camera rarely moves, but he does, in ways as graceful as they are funny. "One a.m." finds a besotted Charlie encountering opposition from every object in his house, while "The Rink" puts him on roller skates, to dazzling effect. Best of all are the last four Mutuals (collected, of course, on Disc 1); having cranked out eight shorts in the first year of his contract, Chaplin took most of the next year to make the final four. The wistful "Easy Street" opens with rescue-mission poverty, then proceeds to stage a knockabout brawl in the midst of the titular slum; "The Immigrant" details the newly arrived Tramp's efforts to survive in a strange new country. By the end, Chaplin's shorts play like mini-features; no longer collections of gags, they take on themes and develop at length, before elegantly resolving them. Without taking away from the attention justly lavished on Chaplin's features, it's fair to suggest that the Mutuals are every bit as accomplished, and substantially lighter in sentiment. Think of them as appetizers that quickly add up to a full meal.