What Constitutes A Classic Anyway?

So my sis sends me this box set of 80 "Hollywood Classics" she bought at Big Lots for $10 and has given me the assignment of mining the set for any gold nuggets therein. Of course, being a public domain junkie, I go for this big time. At least 1/3 of these flicks, especially the pre-60's H-wood pictures, are available to watch online via various venues, such as Archive.org. The box was the brainchild of Mill Creek Entertainment, but has since been discontinued along with (alas) a set which I believe contained 250 PD films. Mill Creek's many box sets range from 4 to 50 features per re the movie collections. They also carry a line of PD television shows -- Beverly Hillbillies, Jack Benny, Bonanza, One Step Beyond, and The Lucy Show are ones I've bought from WalMart the last couple of years.

The term "classic" is one bandied about by the company, but not necessarily in a bad way. Half of the movies in this collection are made-for-television from the 70's - early 80's, and many of them are pretty good, starring respectable folks like Sissy Spacek, Ed Asner, Martin Sheen, Sally Field, and the like. Most of the stories revolve around social issues of the day like health and hippies, divorce and domestic terrorism, et al.

This blog will try to review all eighty films to see if they live up to the box-set's title.

First one I watched was Divorce His/Divorce Hers, a two-part 1973 mini-series starring Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor as an upper-class couple whose marriage is on the rocks. It is a rather turgid little number which lays down the unbelievable thesis that Dick would leave Liz for the Crypt Keeper in drag (albeit designer red chiffon drag) in the form of grisly Carrie Nye. Liz was just beginning her descent into tubbiness here, but she's still a beauty worth killing for, despite this film's glossy dullness.

Next picture was Deadly Drifter (nee Out), an absolutely unwatchable "art" film from 1983 starring Peter Coyote and O-Lan Jones (then Mrs Sam Shepard); according to my research, Coyote filmed this in a couple of days between ET and Cross Creek as a favor to a friend. A gang of existentialist terrorists get their orders from unscrambled letters in a bowl of soup, then proceed to cross the USA doing their dumb deeds. Flick is not-rated but I would give it an R for some explicit language.

Good Against Evil is the second flick on the same disk as Deadly Drifter; it's a failed pilot for a TV show from 1978 that starts out somewhat promisingly then veers off into a lame Exorcist rip-off, complete with a priest and a possessed little girl. Her mom is played by a young Kim Cattrall, former flame of the flick's hero, Dack Rambo. I can see why this crapola did not gain an audience.

The Brass Ring and Catholics, 1983 and 1973 respectively, are on one side of a disk. They have nothing in common: one is a crazy-mom-on-the-run flick directed by Bob Balaban and starring Dina Merrill; the other is semi-documentary style story of a group of renegade priests on a remote Irish island who get a visit from Martin Sheen as a Vatican envoy intent on making them stop saying mass in Latin. Neither story thrilled me, but some might go for the priest story because it has some sci-fi elements later in the script.

From the golden days of Hollyweird, one of the few true classics in this set is Meet John Doe, erroneously listed on the package as 62 minutes long. It is the full version folks, and well worth the watch. Directed by Frank Capra in 1941, it's the tale of a common man (Gary Cooper) who gets caught up in the political machinations of a ruthless publisher (Edward Arnold) and falls in love with Barbara Stanwyck's ace (and not so clean) reporter along the way.

Two of three entries (the other is a 1933 Claudette Colbert I'll get to eventually) on one disk, about 65 minutes each, are worth a view. The oddly-titled High Voltage of 1929 stars a wise-cracking Carole Lombard at the start of her talking-picture career (she had made a dozen silents beforehand) as a bad girl who gets snowbound in an abandoned church with five assorted morons, one of whom she falls in love with, future Hopalong Cassidy William Boyd in a tres wooden performance. Screenplay was co-written by actor/playwright James Gleason, who was Stanwyck's editor in Meet John Doe. The second feature is better, Hoosier Schoolboy, starring Mickey Rooney in a rare subdued performance as the title punk. Anna Nagel plays his kindhearted teacher in this tale of a mean ol' rich man trying to knock down the working man in the form of striking dairy farmers, with an intervention by his soon-to-be pinko son. Good writing and acting make this worth watching. Plot was based on stories of Indiana writer Edward Eggleston.