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Released by: Twilight Time Releasing
Released on: August 16th, 2016.
Director: Gordon Douglas
Cast: Frank Sinatra, Raquel Welch, Richard Conte, Simon Oakland, Sue Lyon, Gena Rowlands, Jill St. John
Year: 1967/1968
Purchase From Screen Archives
The Movies:
In the late sixties, director Gordon Douglas made two crime films starring none other than Frank Sinatra as hardboiled Florida based private eye Tony Rome, based on the character from the Marvin H. Albert novels. Twilight Time pairs up the two features for their Blu-ray debut with this release.
Tony Rome:
First up, a beautiful young heiress named Diana Pines (Sue Lyon) is out living the good life when her valuable diamond pin is snatched away. To get the valuable jewelry back, her family enlists the aid of Miami's best private detective, Tony Rome (Frank Sinatra), the same man who brought her home after finding her passed out at a seedy hotel. At home, Diana's mother, Lorna (Jeanne Cooper), seems content to fall inside a bottle while her step-father, Adam (Jeffrey Lynn), appears to be increasingly unhappy with his situation.
Their story connects to that of Rudy Kosterman (Simon Oakland), Diane's father and a wealthy builder, and his wife Rita (Gena Rowlands). They too are far from the married bliss they once knew. When Ralph Turpin (Robert J. Wilke), the man that Tony was partnered with during his days on the force, turns up dead in his own office, things start to get dangerous. The cops, led by Lt. Dave Santini (Richard Conte), start snooping around but as Tony gets closer to finding the pin, hunting down a series of fences and lowlifes for clues, the tables are turned. Is this really all about a piece of jewelry or is there more to this than our intrepid gumshoe realizes? And what do foxy Ann Archer (Jill St. John) and her former flame Nimmo have to do with any of this?
Sinatra is in fine form here, commanding our attention with his strong screen presence and handling the action, drama and humor inherent in the script with a naturalness that proves he really was a legitimately talented actor. He's well suited to the role, his gruff mannerisms work for the character but at the same time, he's never lacking in charm. He's got interesting chemistry with most of his co-stars, Jill St. John in particular. Richard Conte is also very good here, he too has great screen presence. There are a few other familiar faces here, like Shecky Green, Jeanne Cooper and Rocky Graziano. Tiffany Bolling has a very quick spot in the film as well.
The movie also does a great job of capturing some late sixties Florida locations. Rome lives in a houseboat so the movie spends a good deal of time near the water, but we also voyage into Miami a few times and get some nice footage shot up and down the cost. It's quite picturesque, but at the same time it has a strange sort of humid, sweaty quality to the visuals, the kind that is pretty much perfect for a crime caper like this one. The film is well paced, and it the storyline plays to stereotypes of the private eye genre, so be it. The mystery here is a good one, there are some solid twists and turns and no shortage of shifty characters to hold our attention.
Lady In Cement:
The second film opens with a startlingly macabre scene. The camera moves around the water and slowly reveals the corpse of a beautiful blonde woman on the bottom of the ocean floor. A block of cement prevents the corpse from floating up to the top, there are some sharks circling her. Tony Rome (Sinatra again) finds the body, pretty much by chance, and intends to find out who she is and why she wound up where she wound up.
At the same time, a woman named Sandra Lomax (Christine Todd) has gone missing and Tony needs to find her. Does her ex, a big lug named Waldo Gronsky (Dan Blocker), have anything to do with it? Kit Forrest (Raquel Welch) was the last person to see Sandra before she disappeared, so of course, Tony wants to talk to her but she's not much help, she blames her foggy memory on the booze. As Tony continues to go about his business, a mobster named Al Mungar (Martin Gabel) sets out to make things difficult for him. Before you know it, Sandra's roommate, a woman named Maria Baretto (Lanie Kazan), is also found dead, a knife belonging to none other than Tony Rome sticking out of her…
This second film, puzzlingly, takes things in a very different direction than the first film. Granted, the earlier picture had some humor in it but The Lady In Cement is played more for laughs than anything else. Sinatra is still good in the part but he's not as well written, he's a bit more of a cliché here than anything else. There are some good people in the cast and some interesting characters - Raquel Welch looks great here, there's no doubt about that. Conte reprises his role from the first film and is just as much fun here as he was a year before. But the storyline is a bit of a mess and there are some pacing issues (the movie feels about twenty minutes longer than it should be). It resolves things fairly cleanly by the time it's all over but along the way there are a few too many bad jokes and a couple of cringe-worthy stereotypes exploited (the movie is very much a product of its time that way) for laughs.
Still, the film is nicely shot. Again, the Florida locations are a big part of what makes the movie look as cool as it does, the cinematography in general is very nice. The score sounds great, and the opening scene with the corpse in the water has an eerie feel to it that you won't soon forget. Some of the humor is quite effective and the movie definitely has an interesting time capsule effect to it that does an interesting job of documenting the late sixties and all of the various collisions of culture that happened in America during that time.
Video/Audio/Extras:
The AVC encoded 2.35.1 widescreen 1080p high definition transfers provided for the two features are quite nice. Presented on a 50GB disc, there's a lot more clarity and depth here than was ever present on the DVD releases that have come before it. We also get considerably better color reproduction too. Black levels are nice and deep and you get a really impressive boost in detail and texture in pretty much every frame of the movies. Skin tones are nice and natural looking, and the image is fairly spotless. Grain is present but never overpowering and there are no noticeable compression artifacts to note. Edge enhancement and noise reduction never factor into the equation at all - these are very impressive, film-like transfer, it's hard to imagine them looking much better than they do here.
Each film gets a DTS-HD Mono track in English with optional subtitles provided in English as well. Both tracks are nicely balanced and free of any hiss or distortion. The scores from Hugo Montenegro and Billy May respectively have nice range and depth to them. This in turn helps the music to heighten tension in a few key scenes and also to complement some of the more dramatic moments as well.
The main extra on the disc is an audio commentary available for Tony Rome with Film Historians Eddy Friedfeld, Anthony Latino, Lee Pfeiffer, and Paul Scrabo. This is a good track that focuses quite a bit more on Sinatra than on anything else, but maybe that's to be expected given his star power. In addition to covering his music and film career in a fair bit of detail they talk about how he came onboard to play the lead in the pictures, offer up some trivia about the character and offer some observations about his performance. They also talk up the locations, give us some info on Gordon Douglas' career and generally over up an interesting and well-rounded history of the picture.
The disc also includes theatrical trailers for each film, isolated score options in DTS-HD format for both features, static menus and chapter selection. Inside the clear plastic Blu-ray case along with the disc is a six page full color insert booklet containing credits for the disc and the feature as well as some vintage poster art and stills from the film. Of course, an essay from Twilight Time's resident scribe Julie Kirgo is also included that makes some interesting comments about the two films and their history. Well worth reading as always.
The Final Word:
Twilight Time's Blu-ray double feature presents both of Sinatra's journeys into Tony Rome's world in gorgeous shape and with an enjoyable and informative audio commentary over the first film as the disc's main supplement. As to the two features, the first one is excellent and the second one an interesting, and fairly comedic, follow up that can't quite match the earlier entry. Both are worth seeing, and this disc offers fans a great way to revisit them with beautiful high definition presentations.
Click on the images below for full sized Blu-ray screen caps!
