Man Of La Mancha / Star! / Guys And Dolls Peter O’Toole 2007 DVD Top-quality

Man Of La Mancha – Hit stage musical given the movie treatment. A skinny old gentleman with wispy white hair dreams the impossible dream. He is Don Quixote de La Mancha, the knight-errant. Based on Cervantes’ work finished in 1615.
Star – A musical biography of British music hall and Broadway star Gertrude Lawrence, Star is a convincing and entertaining film, featuring an impressive score. The immensely talented Julie Andrews plays Lawrence, a beautiful, headstrong, and fiercely independent woman who will do anything for her career (including leaving her daughter and husband). Her early adventures in the music hall chorus and her later involvement in British high society are chronicled in this lush film that, though it received several Academy Award nominations, was not appreciated by the public until some 30 years after its original showing, when it was re-released. One of the most interesting, heart warming, and perhaps most famous aspects of Lawrence’s story was her lifelong friendship with playwright Noel Coward (Daniel Massey, the real-life grandson of Coward), which the film accurately portrays. Star also shows the lowlights of Lawrence’s life, including her strained relationship with her daughter Pamela (Jenny Agutter), her involvement with such men as American actor Charles Fraser (Robert Reed) and English nobleman Sir Anthony Spencer (Michael Craig), and the financial difficulties she amassed from her extravagant lifestyle.
Guys and Dolls – This CinemaScope treatment of Frank Loesser’s hit Broadway musical Guys and Dolls is a deeply rewarding visual and musical experience. Frank Sinatra turns in one of his best screen performances running a close second to Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons, looking adorable and singing sweetly. In essence this is a piece of photographed theatre mounted on a handsome scale. The striking set designs and a brilliantly executed soundtrack are courtesy of two Broadway craftsmen Oliver Smith and conductor Jay Blackton. Photographer Harry Stradling brings a meticulous eye for detail when his camera stationed on the auditorium side of the frame, peers into Miss Adelaide’s bathroom cupboard as she views the lines of medicine bottles in her celebrated “lament”. Sinatra, in his vocal prime, sings a new number to Adelaide (Vivian Blaine)–arranged by Nelson Riddle–and Brando and Simmons strike chords in all their scenes from their opening duet “I’ll Know” through to their evening out at a Havana bistro where she gets pie-eyed on a Bacardi milk-shake, tipsily wondering “If I were a Bell”. Stubby Kaye also from the Broadway cast recreates the show-stopping “Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat”. Michael Kidd’s choreography for “Luck Be a Lady” is razor-sharp and superbly captured in the CinemaScope format, though the formalised staging of the opening ought to have been rethought for this medium. The biggest pity is that Loesser amended some of his lyrics and replaced several tunes from his original score with inferior material.